Author: andrewsho

I was having an interesting conversation with an agency client this weekend about why mobile traffic had been flat/down to their retailer clients’ location pages since the end of 2015. My initial response touched on part of the answer: “I suspect they are experiencing a change in traffic to their site as a result of the anchoring of the Local 3-pack in SERPs that occurred in Fall 2015. Here’s a post I did on this phenomenon at the time:

Pretty crazy. Not much to say other than thank you to all of our fantastic clients and to our fantastic team – Dan, Ashley, Jessica, Amber, Steven, Christa & Jill – who collectively have made the past few years quite an experience. We’re honored to be included with all these amazing businesses. There are a number of other great search marketing companies on the list too.  Seems like there might be something to this SEO thing after all. Check it…

That’s what a retailer client asked me a few days ago. It was odd because before last week, their home page traffic was killing it. But a quick look at the home page traffic in Google Search Analytics looked like a text-book case of “softness”: Besides the double-black-diamond slope, what was really troubling about this graph was that the majority of the traffic to this client’s home page was for brand queries. So either people had stopped searching for their…

UPDATE: I AM AN IDIOT. APPARENTLY TWITTER FIXED THE PERIOD PROBLEM LAST YEAR AND I DID NOT GET THE MEMO. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GROW UP WITH UHF. Wherever you see “period”, please substitute threaded conversations with multiple people, bots, nazis, lists, and anything else you want to complain about Growing up, we had a TV that got UHF, sort of. You had to find a channel that seemed to have reception and then hold the round antennae…

via GIPHY I just discovered this morning that an e-commerce client had changed its privacy policy URL (thanks SEORadar!) but had not bothered to redirect their old privacy policy URL to the new one. I guarantee my in-house client had no idea this change was happening (we do have a lot in common). I imagine the Legal department decided they had to update the privacy policy “immediately!”, sent it to the developers and it got pushed live.

Last night I attended a gathering of mostly in-house SEOs in San Francisco, many from brands we all know. One of the goals of the event was to provide an open forum to share some of our current SEO challenges to get feedback from each other. It was amazing, or perhaps not, how remarkably consistent the sentiment was in almost every conversation I had: “The C-suite doesn’t (want to) understand SEO” “Design doesn’t want to accommodate SEO” (AKA “Steve Jobs…

One of the more common questions we have received since launching Locadium, our new GMB monitoring service, is how it differs from Yext and similar services that monitor NAP consistency. The answer is pretty simple – Locadium monitors GMB changes and alerts you when it detects a change or a dupe listing that has been published. Yext also has a GMB change alert system that monitors the GMB API and alerts you when the API alerts Yext that there is…

Ben Thompson’s post this week on Microsoft’s Monopoly Hangover touched a nerve. Thompson’s thesis is that companies that are monopolies tend to face considerable problems once the monopoly ends. He boils these problems down to: Nature “The great thing about a monopoly is that a company can do anything, because there is no competition; the bad thing is that when the monopoly is finished the company is still capable of doing anything at a mediocre level, but nothing at a high…

It’s a bit awkward to write about a company we have an investment in without sounding like a total salesman, but I am going to give it a try. Even if we had no interest in SEO Radar (full disclosure: we do), I’d like to think I’d still be writing this. Cause it saved my ass today. A few years ago Mark Munroe showed me a prototype of a tool he was building that would crawl websites and report on…

We are working with a mattress retailer who would like to show up higher for mattress brand queries like “Tempurpedic mattress”.  So I thought it might be helpful to see what types of pages currently rank for that query. Here are the top ranking URLs. Check out result #4: Here’s a link to the query so you can see yourself. If you look at the Mattress Firm URL, check out the not very visible copy block below the hero image: