It’s been a busy week with lots of podcasts, an article and a minor disagreement with Rand Fishkin. 🙂

Articles:
How Google Came to Dominate Local Reviews – Google owns the local review economy. It wasn’t always that way. I detail how it happened by documenting the review history of a large(wish) fast, casual chain. (Here is Rand’s criticism.)

Podcasts & Video:

The Near Memo, Episode 15

Available as podcast, video and transcript. As an experiment we have split the video into 3 secions:

Part 1 Shopify makes the case for local ecommerce

A report with a soup-to-nuts discussion of shopping and commerce trends, including online vs. offline, social commerce, retail experiences, payments and banking services. One interesting finding: retailers with local pickup/delivery options saw 13% – 19% higher online conversions. Apparently the Japanese are the least likely to support shopping locally

Part 2 Why do consumers desire to buy local but still buy at Amazon?
Most consumers say and often feel that they want to support local businesses. Yet their actions often belie that feeling as many continue, whether due to convenience or inertia, continue to spend with national chains and e-commerce

Part 3 How did Google win the review wars vs Yelp?

Rand Fishkin notes that he thinks it is due to Google’s abuse of their monopoly status. I argue that it is much more complicated than that with various market forces, consumer desires and legal standards playing a roll in addition to whatever Google might have done.

Last Week in Local for Week Ending May 10, 2021

In our 150th podcast/weekly local update Carrie, Mary and I discuss everything from the role of Posts possibly causing a ranking drop on Google to how to cope with Google’s broken review notification system if you have more than 100 locations. Plus a lot more.

As a reminder, the FeedBurner email feed of my posts is going away soon, very soon. If you want to follow my writing subscribe to the Near Media Newsletter where I am joining David Mihm and Greg Sterling to focus on local search, social and commerce.