Understanding Google My Business & Local Search
Entries Published On July, 2014
Google MapMaker Nukes Custom Categories
Custom categories, long missing from Google Maps, had retained their presence in MapMaker. That distinction has now ended. MapMaker has announced the end of custom categories and that MapMaker would now use the standard 2500+ categories that have been available to My Business and Maps. Hello Mappers, Firstly, a BIG thanks for your continued support …
Google Adds Instant Listing Verification Via Webmaster Tools for Most Business Categories
Googler Jade has announced in the forums that they are now going to allow instant verification via webmaster tools for many businesses. From the announcement: Good news — starting today, if you’re verifying a page for your business, you may be instantly verified on Google My Business if you’ve already verified your business’s website with …
Google Pigeon Poo
With every update from Google we often get artifacts that are very annoying. With the Pigeon Local Update we have our share of Pigeon Poo. Barry Schwartz pointed out the inclusion of Expedia in the carousel. Stefano Romero, Mike Ehline, Casey Meraz and David Perez have all pointed out similar, equally bad examples of Pigeon Poo type …
Reviewer Demographics – Facebook has more Women, Yelp has more Men
We live in a big country. There are differences in behaviors between men and women, rural and urban and regionally. This is as true on line as it is offline. Those who leave reviews are not a uniform lot nor are their preferred review sites. In my recent research as to which sites US internet users …
Yelp Reports $0.00 per Share Earnings
Yelp has just released their June ending numbers. I wanted to lead with a realistic headline before the other pundits did. While profit has never been something that Yelp crows about there are some interesting numbers: Cumulative reviews grew 44% year over year to approximately 61 million and and approximately 40% of new reviews were …
Where Do Consumers Leave Local Reviews? Facebook Now #2
TL;dr: Amongst consumers that leave reviews more than once per year, which sites do consumers prefer for leaving reviews? The answer might surprise you. Google is number one overall but Facebook made a strong showing and outpaced Yelp for the number two spot as a preferred site to leave reviews. Reviews have two sides: Where do people read them? …
Factual No Longer Accepting Individual Updates
Nyagoslav Zhekov, who recently joined Whitespark, just sent this along: Factual stopped accepting individual manual contributions through their website (see here when you choose “Update/Add Business Data”). Instead, now they urge business owners to contact some of the “Trusted Data Contributors” to get the listings updated (obviously, in exchange of a small fee, which is not mentioned …
Moz Updates Local Query Set – Revised Data Show 23.4% Drop Post Pigeon Update
MozCast has now updated their query set to better reflect what searchers are seeing. Even though their methodology was different than that of Whitespark, the new results showing a decline in 7-packs due to the Google Local algo update are much the same: a 23.4% drop. It is interesting to note that one of their observations which …
Whitespark Reports a 24% Decline in Local Packs
Last week I reported that MozCast was showing a decline of over 60% in display of the Local Pack on Google after the recent local algo update. Moz was gracious enough to share their data and it was determined that their search queries had been obsoleted by the update. So while their data was internally …
Crap Google Results & Yelp
Yelp is obviously very, very good with their SEO. They apparently have the ability to sculpt their internal link values to highlight what appear to be the most popular local businesses in the Google local results. Apparently their ability to do that in their strongest markets is even greater than elsewhere. These results, first highlighted …
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