I did some Local SEO research on how to rank in the Local Pack across your entire city, not just from your office location. It was published on the AttorneySync blogĀ today. Here’s the gist of the study: Often a business will spot check their rankings in the Local Pack or organic to get an idea … Read more
Early last week, Jon Christian dropped a story about Jayson Demers promoting his own clients with links he dropped into Forbes, Entreprenuer, Inc and others. There was shock and horror from people outside of the digital marketing industry. Look at how a portion of the public (and our President) currently treats reporters and journalists. Add … Read more
ļ»æ via GIPHY (Hey look! A link) (Updated 7/9 with email examples) Linking Policies are Stupid Letās chat about the stupidity and inefficiency of newspapers linking policies. Recently, Iāve picked up a few new larger clients who tend to get a good amount of positive press. Hooray! Being the opportune link builder I am, I … Read more
Last week I had the awesome opportunity to attend Pubcon in Las Vegas. Iāve been in the industry long enough to know what Pubcon is about but had yet to make it out to a conference. I was very much looking forward to everything it had to offer. Below are what I found to be the pros and cons of this years Pubcon Las Vegas.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wanted to get some thoughts to paper, especially since I’m nowhere near my 1 post per month I anticipated doing at the beginning of the year.
I recently read 3 terrific articles ā oneĀ from Gyi, one from Andrew Shotland at SELĀ and another from Jon Henshaw on MediumĀ ā and they got my mind buzzing. Google has never really been one to give away free traffic and make things easy for SEOās. Back in the wild west of SEO, there were ways to game the system and rank a website, though G was always cutting down easy ways to rank, attempting to get people to buy Adwords and penalizing websites. The same continues today at an even more rapid pace, as easy loopholes get shutdown, more ads are placed and there is less real estate in the SERP.
Yesterday, Cori Shirk found the Google My Business goldmine. A few weeks back, I remember hearing Google was going to be adding more information and guides to their Google My Business help section. I was skeptical on how much āinformationā they would be providing. Turns out, itās a good deal of information, 7 sections in total.
Hereās a breakdown of each of the sections:
Report incorrect Street View imagery
View business info live
Cant Find business info
Info displayed on G+ pages
Place Labels on G Maps
Info in Knowledge Panel
Improve Local Ranking
Lets roll through a few of the more interesting sections:
It has been over 2 months since Google reduced the Local results from 7 down to 3. Since the change, Iāve been attempting to analyzeĀ various items in the Pack – picture sizes, who is ranking, why they are ranking and what factors are keeping the businesses in the Local Stack. Iāve writtenseveralposts on how terrible the results are and what a poor experience the Local Stack has been so far. I think Google is doing some things to better the user experience but it still has a ways to go.
I have been noticing more and more small business, āmom and popā shops, located in the Local Stack since the change and decided to test my theory that big Brands are being pushed out of the Local results.
As reported by Mike Blumenthal earlier this week, Google Local has shifted from theĀ 7 Pack to aĀ 3 pack. The shift was first reported as a possible test in various markets, is now rolled out to even more markets and should be nationwide soon.
The shift from a Local 7 Pack to a Local 3 Pack is a horrible user experience for several reasons.Ā Instead of seeing 5 or 7 local results, there are now only 3. Those three local results:
The Google Panda algorithm was first deployed in February of 2011 and effected up to 12% of search results, most notably for us ā our website. The algorithm targeted low quality websites with thin content, high ad to content ratios and other quality signals such as content farms. We got smoked by this algorithm and continued to get dinged each time a new version of Panda was released to the wild.
I’ve read others say that once you get hit by Panda once, you somewhat flatten out and it doesnāt keep hurting you. My perspective on that is different. Our website continually got hit and each time it took a good portion of our traffic ā anywhere from 5-20% of whatever the current level of traffic happened to be. Now, this was our own fault mind you. Some of it was because we were lackadaisical in changing our content from standard, un-unique, nearly duplicate content on nearly all of our city/state/zip code pages and some was because I was still pumping out guest blogs which were of the same, poor quality as our website content. I take full responsibility.
Its been a few weeks since my last post on Pigeon, though I want to give an update on some items of interest I’ve been seeing with the update.
Ive been researching Pigeon since the day it was announced in an attempt to figure out just what is going on with the awful results being displayed. Hereās a quick rundown of what we know so far: