LocalU Advanced Agenda & Super Early Bird Pricing

LocalU Advanced is my favorite conference of the year. And you probably get tired of me saying this but this will be one of the best ones yet. The agenda has been released and it is chock full of great speakers: – Darren Shaw will be talking enterprise citation campaigns – Cindy Krum will discuss digital marketing in the age of …

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Comatose Google My Business Description Moved from Hospital to Long Term Care on Path to Burial & Replacement with Attributes

The business description that Google has been asking businesses to create forever and that has not been seen anyplace for about half that long has finally been removed from Google MyBusiness. (Thanks to Dan Leibson of Local SEO Guide for pointing this out). It is soon to be “replaced” with “attributes” that offer more granular characteristics …

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Local Search Ain’t What It Used to Be…

I have been involved in local search marketing and local seo for much of the last 16 years. I love local seo and would never declare it dead. It has lots of life. But it has never been harder, once you have nailed the basics, to get an appropriate ROI.  The many changes at Google …

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Google Local Image Photos – Let’s Link Anywhere but Your Site

Google invites image spam and pisses off business owners once again. Google, while ostensibly giving business owners control over which images show, has always usurped that role and done so without any guidelines or clear communication. Now though it has become possible for a third party with good web design to leverage a listing’s photos display …

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Google to Hotels: We Pick Your Profile Photo

Yesterday (first reported on Twitter by Craig Harkins, an SEO manager at InterContinental Hotels Group) Google switched virtually every hotel profile photo in their Hotel Local Pack results from an exterior to an interior shot. While Google ostensibly offers businesses the ability to set this profile photo for their own business, that appearance of “freedom” to a large …

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Google Hotel Local Packs Now Showing Paid Tag Promo

Remember back in 2010 when Google rolled out “Tags” to allow for paid enhancement of your local listing? Well, at least in the Hotel world, its deja vue all over again as these paid insertions into the free Local Pack seem to have made a comeback. The Local Pack which has been the last bastion of “free” placement …

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Google My Business Guidelines – MIA

Update: 5:00 PM Eastern They are once again online The Google My Business guidelines, the bible for what is and isn’t acceptable behavior when listing a business, seem to have come up missing from the Google My Business Help Files. (H/T to Helmut Geissler, Google Maps and Google My Business Top Contributor). The page URL …

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