Those of us who work with local businesses know that strategies often always center around the business’ location. Our goal as marketers is to drive more customers into their stores, and those customers generally live within a small proximity around…
September 24, 2020 Update The following was just added as well under the address section of the main guidelines: They added back in the fact that separate office locations must be staffed by your business staff.  This came up on the…
When I came up with the first template for our monthly SEO reports for Sterling Sky, I made a very firm decision that I didn't want to have rank tracking as a part of them. We use 4 different rank…
Over the last few years, I've been a bit obsessed with these ads in the local pack and have spent a lot of time testing and researching how they work. The 3-pack: That coveted spot desired by businesses everywhere, positioned…
TL;DR, The 4,000 Label Limit: Google currently offers ~4,000 categories, but if none fit your niche (e.g., "Self-Service Dog Wash"), you must manually lobby for a new one. Forum Advocacy: The most effective path is starting a thread on the…
When I was working on a project recently, I realized that the filename you use on an image that is uploaded to Google My Business stays in-tact. Meaning, when you download the image from the listing on Google, it keeps…
This article is part 4 of 9 from my LocalU presentation from March 2020. If you missed the event, the videos are available for purchase here.  Duplicate listings are a problem that has always existed in the local search…
This article is part 2 of 9 from our LocalU presentation from March 2020.  Darren Shaw has done some insightful research showing that category confusion is a real thing. Darren Shaw did a test in January 2019 to see if adding completely different…
This is a question that we get asked from time to time. "Does having keyword-rich questions & answers on your Google My Business listing help ranking?" We often see the Q&A feature utilized on listings with high rankings. For example,…
Back in November 2019, we noticed some extremely volatile local rankings for businesses all over the USA and Canada. Rankings were so choppy that we decided to label it as an algorithm update and called it Bedlam. We noticed the…
This article is part 3 of 9 from my LocalU presentation from March 2020. If you missed the event, the videos are available for purchase here.  TLDR: Building backlinks to Google My Business (GMB) listings was tested in three…
TL;DR Map vs. Mail: Google ignores your USPS mailing city and uses its own internal municipal boundaries. If you are one foot outside the line, you won't rank for that city. Proximity is King: Rankings are determined by the exact…