Where is Local Search going? How do you get there? Join us at LocalU Advanced where we will take a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of the bleeding edge of local search.

The upcoming LocalU Advanced takes place the night of October 20th and all day October 21st. To give you a sense of the topics we will be covering, we have interviewed some of the speakers that will be there, including Darren Shaw (Citations), Joy Hawkins (Google My Business Data Issues), David Deering (the ins and outs of schema for local) and most recently Cindy Krum..

Cindy Krum is CEO and Founder of MobileMoxie, a mobile SEO consulting firm. Cindy will be both keynoting and running a workshop where she will provide insights and compelling ways to understand and assess the mobile web of now, the mobile web of the future and how to prepare your company for the journey. She will show you what you need to know to improve your brand’s mobile representation in and out of map results — and how you can make the most of your brand’s presence there. Whether you are an agency or an enterprise SEO, you are guaranteed to learn a lot.

In this interview we discuss the emerging trends in local mobile search, Google’s approach to data and control, conversational- and text-based assistants and what leading edge technologies we should all be thinking about.

If you ever are thinking that there isn’t opportunity in Local Search Optimization just head over to the BBB and do a search for Google.

More opportunity than you can shake a stick at and with some very original names too!

You can’t fault Chris the Google Guy for trying but if it were me I would Make Google Fast Cash using The Google Backdoor to get on the Google First Page.

After I tired of Growing Rich With Google I would write a book on Google Secrets so that others could join the Google Revolution by selling my Google Home Business Kit.

I would suggest caution with this plan for Google Riches as clearly some of these ideas like Google Money Tree (aka “Google Pro” and “Google Treasure Chest”) were targeted by the Federal Trade Commission in 2012 and required to refund checks totaling nearly $2.3 million to consumers who allegedly were charged hidden fees tied to a bogus work-at-home product. So much for his (isn’t it always a he?) plan for Google Wealth International. 

Here is a partial list of names that have been already taken. I am partial to Money Grows on Trees with Google¹ :
Continue reading Money Grows on Trees with Google →

As a consumer I like and use Yelp. I don’t like their business practices but as a consumer it’s my goto restaurant resource these days when traveling. I also like messaging, particularly iMessage, as my way of communicating with the 15 or so people I love and work with and often travel to see. So I was baffled shocked flummoxed disappointed amazed dejected but in the end not surprised that Yelp had chosen to so mangle their iMessage App experience.

I am fascinated by the new capability of iMessage as a platform and an ecosystem. One   that can be upgraded with third party apps and now has its own App Store. Like every idiot American adult, I was initially attracted to the idea of doing silly stickers and gifs. Surprisingly they ultimately did offer a benefit. They greased the skids to discovery.

I soon started exploring the local app world and was surprised and delighted how useful, functional and seamless some of these apps were. I could identify, share¹ and purchase tickets to a movie with Fandango. To my children’s delight I could quickly and easily gift them $20 each from Square Cash or Venmo without exiting to the app.

OpenTable turned out to be an eye opening experience allowing me to easily search a location for spots to eat, identify several restaurants, share them, even allow myself and friends to vote on them and then book one of them all from within iMessage. And I don’t even have the app on my phone.

Easy peasy.  Until I got to Yelp. Continue reading Why is Yelp Failing at the iMessage App Game? Because They are Choosing To →

As many of you know 29 Prime has not been a favorite Local SEO of mine. They lied, dissembled, prevaricated and misled thousands of small business folks. They have now gone into Chapter 7 Bankruptcy.

I was alerted to their bankruptcy by Regina Martinez, with whom I had been corresponding over the past year about how badly she had been taken advantage of by 29 Prime and the status of her resulting lawsuit:

Hello Mike,

My name is Regina Martinez, I communicated a little over a year ago (as you can see from the email thread below) about 29 Prime.

I finally filed a lawsuit and after they delayed things for over a year they went and filed for bankruptcy. They are stating the company is worth $0 has $0 income and 0 employees. I’m just reaching out to my network of others who are familiar with their business practices hoping they can point me in a direction so that (and I’m being incredibly honest) I can stop this fraud of a bankruptcy because they should not get to skate away after everything they’ve done.

Kind Regards,
Regina A. Martinez

In early 2015 Regina had first contacted me to request permission to use my 29Prime – Would you Buy a Used Car From These Guys Let Alone SEO? article as an exhibit in her suit.

Apparently Regina’s suit was not the only as Leonard Law in Boston had also filed a class action suit regarding their abusive robo calling techniques that was winding its way to victory in a Massachusetts court (despite 29 Prime’s effort to try to get it moved to California).

We won’t whether it was the likelihood of failure against these lawsuits or the accumulated weight of their deception or just a desire to, as Regina thinks, hide their assets that caused their ultimate demise we won’t know.

They were sure a fun target for me though and I wrote several articles about them:

• 29Prime – Would you Buy a Used Car From These Guys Let Alone SEO?
• An Imagined Conversation with Google about Reviews, 29Prime & Sock Puppets
• A Prime Example of why a Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

Ah but life goes on. I guess I won’t have them to kick around any more. Although as the founder of 29 Prime has proven, he has more lives than the proverbial cat and I am sure that we will hear from him again.

Subtitled: Q: Mike, Oh Mike? Would you take out the recycling? A: As soon as I do a word count and proof this article.

I have been busy writing over the past week, sometimes on the weekend when you might not have seen the article and other times at other sites that you might not have in your feed.

Here is the rundown of articles since September 8th in case you are feeling a burning need to waste an hour or two or to get all geeky about local. Be sure to read these during your work day. Just tell your boss its worth the time.

9//8 Why A Business Needs Reviews Everywhere – Including Your Website (GetFiveStars)

9/9 Google Updates Schema Review Guidelines – Again (GetFiveStars)

9/10 Stoppleman to Google: “Delete It” – Yelp Reviews Gone from Knowledge Panel (here and with a great comment stream that are worth a read in their own right)

9/10 Google Updates Mobile Rich Snippet Display with Pricing Information (here)

9/11 Exploring Oddities of Reviews from the Web with Joy, Sergey & Priya (here)

9/11 Thoughts on the Recent Rollout of Aggregate Reviews, Snippets & Critic Reviews in Google SERPS (here)

9/12 Is Google Doubling Down on Local? Yes, Now What (here)

9/12 As Google Pushes for Users to Stay on Its Platform, What Are the Effects for Local Search (Streetlight with David Mihm)

9/12 Video: Local U Advanced Speaker Series – Darren Shaw on Enterprise Level Citations & Local Ranking (LocalU Video with Darren Shaw & Mike Ramsey)

 

Tl;dr

Has Google finally committed to Local? Has Local finally been elevated to the big leagues within Google as a starter instead of being relegated to filling the role of pinch hit competitive enhancer? Is Local receiving both the financial support and more importantly front page Google love that it needs to really succeed.

It would appear so. Will they succeed? Maybe, lets hope so.

Warning

This is an 1100 or so word piece. It takes roughly 6 minutes to read. Let me know if the time was well spent.

The Trigger that Got Me Thinking

Last week during the rollout of the Reviews from the web, Sergey Alakov pointed out that the editing of information via the Knowledge Panel by the business owner had been slightly enhanced. The feature has been around for awhile but it now allows feedback on a few additional fields.

Not a big deal in the scheme of things but it struck me that Google was in fact chewing gum and walking at the same time vis a vis their local product rollouts. And it appeared that the efforts were both within the GMB division and cross departmental with the organic search team.

The (sordid) History

Coming off of the old Google Places, when Marissa Mayer was demoted to head Google’s local effort, there was a bold and ambitious plan in place for accelerating feature development. There were goals of creating an SMB CRM solution with capabilities that stretched from pre-sale to post sale management.

GPlus came along and with it, the forced march to the integration of Local and Plus began and then Marissa was force marched to the door (or whatever). Development efforts were aimed at integration and feature recovery not moving forward.

In the middle of all of this, in moving local to the Knowledge Graph, Google totally restructured the architecture of local with new plumbing, pipes and processes.¹

In 2014, GPlus and Vic Gundotra were then marched to the door and all efforts seemed to be focused on dissolving the many links that had formed between Local and Plus and not focusing on moving forward. Most efforts seemed to go into things like creating a stand alone Local product.

For example in April of this year, Google made reviews finally work again without the multiple logins required by Plus. In early August, with the last nail, the GMB team put the tortured description field out to pasture and separated out Plus from an upgraded Local analytics.

The above five paragraphs sums up 5 years of lost local feature/benefit development. They were 5 years of patching and putzing with a few Local/GMB features coming (but mostly going). There was no sustained focus on developing useful features (other than web wide review monitoring) and more importantly no vision for making Local work better for the local business.

The Very Recent Past of the GMB

But this August and the early part of September have been busy months for Google My Business. During this time the number of product previews with the Top Contributor GMB group were numerous with inklings of more to come. Importantly, we saw a number of developments in the GMB:

9/1/2016 – Add multiple owners to individual locations or business accounts.
8/31/2016 – Use the new map view to see all of your locations plotted on the map.
Help Center
8/24/2016 – Accept or discard Google updates for individual fields in bulk.
8/19/2016 – Google Expanding SMB Test of “Write Directly to Search” Feature
8/9/2016 – New GMB Analytics Module created with expansion and additional features in mind

Google, has been reporting out a number of these developments in the GMB help area² and I was curious to see if the trend of product development I was noticing had any merit.  When looked at over time it’s impressive.

The Very Recent Past of  Changes in Local Search Results in the SERPS

But the pace of development isn’t just fast within the confines of the GMB, Google has clearly been working at integrating more aspects of local into the main search results. We have seen the introduction of Critic Reviews, Top 10 Lists, Reviews from web and enhanced review snippets. In the main search results Google is even testing allowing SMBs to “Write Directly to Search” with their new Posts feature.

For Local business listings to truly “become all they can be” they need the front page. They need the front page for the exposure and retention of users and they need the front page so that business owners can see its benefit and be funneled into a more comprehensive relationship with Google.  And all of that needs to be obvious and apparent to the SMB (like KP editing and Posts).

Since the early days of Local those in the industry have wondered why Google didn’t use this incredible front page “bully pulpit”  power to bolster Local. We asked it about Places and we asked it about Plus.³ But for many of us, Local within Google was always a day late and a dollar short of meeting expectations.

The Bottom Line

These recent activities and trends imply an incredible (and perhaps increasing) amount of coordination between the search and local groups at Google. It implies an increase in resources allocated to local. Programming is hard, making changes to a big product like Google Local search with numerous system wide dependencies and hooks in and out to all parts of Google takes commitment. Adding new features and capabilities takes planning and coordination.

This amount of effort and human power does not come without it being prioritized within the organization and paid for with real dollars and opportunity costs. This sort of aggressive development support can only be coming from the very core of Google.

The Tea Leaves⁴

If this new found commitment to Local at Google  persists and the  development keeps apace, it should make for fun times.

Google has long sent most SMBs the bulk of their traffic. All too often these very same SMBs weren’t aware of it or if they did know it, found Google to frikken’ hard to figure out. But Google, like no other, can have an amazing influence on local business marketing if they can make Local accessible on top of being useful.

And that’s a big if as over the years Google has, despite numerous half hearted attempts, not really grown the SMB dashboard beyond the basics. In that time, they have given up a great deal of SMB mindshare to Facebook,

They have been demonstrating that they can finally walk and chew gum in Local at the same time. They have demonstrated over the past 6 months that they can execute tactically and do development along multiple paths simultaneously. That’s the good news.

Can they take the long view? Google manages to shift folks in and out of departments and local like clock work. Christ, I am a component of their institutional memory for local. They certainly need continuity.

And they need easier to use, more intuitive and more helpful SMB products, they need consistency (oh god do they need consistency), they need a solid vision and they need long term persistence.

Do they have the chops internally to plot a path to a successful SMB future, I think so. If Google has finally taken off the gloves and made the commitment to local maybe we can stop asking when Local will get the love it deserves.

^{1- The transition of Local Search results from a web indexed result to a database driven result is one of the all time impressive big data feats. Google, managing somewhere on the order of 125 million business listings, switched out the way that information was gathered, stored, updated and displayed, all of the pipelines into and out of the data, the assorted relationships of that data with all of its other products like Mapmaker, Maps & Plus all the while continuing to provide some semblance of normality on the Search results pages and within Maps. It’s akin to replacing the engines and tires and painting the bus while its moving down the road and maintaining the speed limit. With no one falling off the bus…. ok so a few fell off the bus but thats a small price to pay, no?}

^{2- Just the fact that Google is reporting these developments, publicly tracking them and even making an RSS feed available for newly announced features is a sign from on high that at least there IS something happening}

^{3- Why Plus never got the love it needed on the front pages of Google is an interesting question. Its fate may well have been different. In the end search engineers seem to still “rule the roost” and without their support and active engagement most Google products will stay in a small(ish) niche.}  

^{4- I love teas leaves. I mean its the future so I CAN’T be wrong or if I am no one notices except David Mihm who, if you bet him a beer, will remember something like this for years!}

Conversations with Joy Hawkins, Priya Chandra and Sergey Alakov surfaced some odd behaviors with the new “Reviews from the web” Knowledge Graph feature. These 3rd party reviews were sometimes appearing and other times not when the Knowledge Panel was displaying.

After some testing, I determined that the specific query and its degree of relatedness to the actual entity seems to dictate whether the 3rd party reviews show in the Knowledge Panel.

For example “Dive Bar Olean” surfaces the 3rd Base Knowledge Panel but no reviews from the web while the search “3rd Base Olean” does surface the reviews. In a similar case a search for “Juliana’s Cafe Coburg Au” shows the Knowledge Panel but no reviews while the more specific search “Juliana’s Cafe Coburg Vic” does show them.

It appears that there is some degree of certainty dictated by the general relevance of an entity. I would postulate that if an entity has better relevance across more variations of its name it would be more likely to get the reviews with less accurate searches.

In other words for businesses that have a very low web presence and very few varieties of their names used in articles and links around the web, the less sure that Google is of the presentation. Thus a solid, on-going SEO campaign is likely to create a situation where these reviews show up more of the time with your Knowledge Panel.

Here are the searches and the resultant Knowledge Panels. On the left are the less precise searches that don’t show the Reviews from the web and on the right are the more precise searches which do show them. :

Search: Dive Bar Olean	Search: 3rd Base Olean
Search: Pogue allstate olean	Search: Mark Pogue allstate olean
Search: juliana’s cafe coburg au	Search: juliana’s cafe coburg vic