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…
At the time of writing this, there are 3,956 categories for businesses in the USA inside the Google My Business dashboard. Google adds, removes, and modifies categories each month and the list varies from country to country. But what if…
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. If you missed the event, the videos are available for purchase here. Darren Shaw has done some insightful research showing that category confusion is a real…
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. This is a question I see frequently in online forums and Facebook groups: …
We recently published an article that explained why a business's service area in Google My Business does not impact ranking. In fact, the ranking for a service area type business is based on the physical location of that business and…
This article is part 1 of 9 from my LocalU presentation from March 2020. If you missed the event, the videos are available for purchase here. The local filter has existed for a long time but became much more…