What Is Review Gating? All businesses want great reviews but unfortunately, the reality is at some point in time you're likely to receive a negative review. Review-gating is the process of filtering candidates before asking them to leave your business…
If you manage more than 100 listings inside your Google My Business dashboard, Google stops sending you email alerts when you get new reviews. What you select as your settings has no influence on this. Since we manage over 100…
Recently I have seen more and more discussions around coworking spaces and how Google My Business deals with them. We actually use co-working spaces here at Sterling Sky for meet-ups regularly and love the flexibility they provide. But are you…
In the local search space, rebranding is something that happens quite often. This is a checklist of all the places a local business needs to update online when they are changing their business name. Update website first. The logo needs to reflect…
We have a big study on Google My Business posts that I'm presenting at LocalU on April 7th. While doing that study, there were several things we learned about Google Posts. Clicks in Google My Business Insights Don't Match Clicks…
There are several reputable companies that offer services with an annual fee that are designed to keep your online local directory listings up-to-date. One way of doing this is to focus specifically on the major local data aggregators that push…
Updated March 4, 2021 There are many questions that often come up about how to properly interpret Google My Business Insights. I'm going to break down the different sections and explain what they mean. For an overview of the new…
Google has a long way to go to solve the problem with fake reviews but every now and then we see a business that loses a huge chunk of reviews because they did something to violate Google's policies. In this case,…
It's pretty common to see threads at the Local Search Forum like this one where a business owner is wondering how they can rank higher on Google. The challenge I see most often is that a lot of business owners…
Updated February 12, 2021 What Is A CID Number On Google? It's important to understand that every Google Business Profile has a unique CID number that helps Google identify its listing quickly. Which might leave you wondering - what is…
I have been tracking changes to the list of Google My Business categories since 2017, and we just recently launched the list of category changes on our website. In the last year, we have noticed that Google adds new categories,…
Keyword research in Local Search can be hard. When you're working with small businesses you are often working with small sites with very limited data. Many of the popular keyword research tools show zero data or won't allow you to…