What's Old is New

In case it wasn’t clear already, links dominated the quantitative analysis of local SEO ranking factors. When it comes to Local SEO in 2016, if you are not invested in links and your website, and instead focus predominantly on traditional Local SEO areas like Google My Business and citations then you are going to be at a competitive disadvantage. This may seem obvious to many Local SEOs, but when trying to justify large budgets the anecdotal evidence of a Local SEO practitioner won’t always get the check cut. We have been there, and so likely have you.

Now don’t misunderstand, in markets and verticals with less competition you can likely do fine with just the basics… For now. However, given this study it seems like Google is working on expanding the scope of what it takes to rank in local search.

More Words = More Local Rankings?

Several website signals showed a strong likelihood of influencing Google My Business performance. Keyword Usage and Words on Page, very traditional organic ranking signals, show that, despite claims that Google is moving to new and more sophisticated ranking methods, keyword usage and user engagement still matter. While we’ll always recommend relevant, well-written location pages, it may be that just piling on more words could be enough to push you up. Size matters…

Optimizing Voice Search

Apple has Siri, Microsoft has Cortana… and soon, Google will have Google Home. Voice search is here… and it’s here to stay. Already, 60% of consumers are using voice search, according to the Local Search Association. The challenge for national brands that market locally is to adapt your SEO strategies to capture the unique intent behind voice searches. The words and phrases spoken by consumers are different than the keywords they type. And it’s up to local search marketers to ensure that their location data is clean, optimized, and accessible to these new search engine technologies.

Google+ Review

mark stahl

a week ago

Fantastic Philosophy to cultivating understanding and implementing this "must have" piece of your business in today's virtual marketplace. I found Marshall to be an excellent source of experiential knowledge and willingness to coach not to mention his attention to detail and follow thru to completion. The team of mentors dedicated to your marketing cause is not short of working working with superheros each with their unique and powerful skill set dedicated to you and your business goals. They are beyond recommendation !!!

Why PR and Content Marketing is More Effective

People are turning to digital media options more and more each day. Also, with ad blockers in almost all of our devices, banners and other ad assets are not being seen. PR is received as editorial - seen as a newsworthy way to inform readers of new products in the industry. So, when you’re deciding where to allocate your marketing budget this year, steer clear of the stuff that ad blockers target, and start thinking content and PR. You can make sales by adding valuable information to your audience, informing prospects of new products, and selling – and your customers will love you for being less annoying than those other guys.

Mutliple Locations and Local SEO

One pattern we often see is that larger and seemingly more authoritative businesses do not perform as well in local search as they should. And having multiple locations amplifies the need for solid local SEO foundations. A common issue we come across is the lack of a well-optimized and well-performing landing page for local businesses. We must tick our SEO boxes here, but we must also maximize the leads generated from these pages — to do this, we have to look at the intersection of lead generation and local SEO.

New Local SEO Rules from Google

At first glance the new Google update seems to make life only harder for local businesses, in reality there may now be MORE exposure opportunity for MORE businesses. The top-3 local results are in rotation — depending on the searcher's physical location. In the in-house test lately for the past few days compared local results for "Plumbers in Seattle", each time browsing Google using 10 different Seattle IP addresses.  In each of the locations we were getting at least slightly different results, which showed that 2 searchers standing just several miles away from each other will probably see different local packs in Google.