Q&A: Does Google’s Latest Product Mean Death by a Thousand Cuts for Brands
Google really left businesses hanging with the Q&A release, Mike BLumenthal tells David Mihm in their biweekly column: “We had enough engineering cycles that we could “step into the breach” of what is obviously a big brand problem. Whether it is long term or not depends on what Google can parse from the questions in terms of improving results. “
Google’s Product Bid for DIY Wallet Share
“Google has been on a tear this past month in the DIY realm,” notes Mike Blumenthal in his bi-monthly conversation with David Mihm. “Three major product rollouts in a 30-day span; Websites, Posts and now SMS messaging. And Google only needs uptake on one of them to get a chance to sell Adwords Express.”
Parsing Google Fred and Other Quality Updates: How to Prepare or Recover
If you are involved in any form of SEO, you know how daunting it can be to keep up with Google algorithm updates. From the Mobile First Index to the Owl update to Google Fred, the tide is always shifting. It is important to step back a moment and take a look at what Google is trying to do.
Making Sense of Posts in Google’s SMB Product Portfolio
“In local, most businesses do not have a transaction so Google wants to control the action,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “If they can sell an ad, great, and if not then they take credit for a click or a call, driving directions or response to a CTA (and gather the data of those activities).”
Charting Google’s Shifting Priorities in the New Local Search Survey
For many years, Physical Address in City of Search was the most important ranking factor, but it has now been overtaken by Proximity of Address to the Point of Search (Searcher-Business Distance). As such, the canonical local search use case has become a mobile user searching for a business nearby his or her current location.
The Current State of Google Maps — Fake News, Fake Reviews
“It’s incredible to me that given all of Google’s focus on new local products that they are still getting some of the basics wrong,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “People who rely on Google more and more to find local businesses need to know that the fundamental metric of the business quality, reviews, is fair and well policed.”
Constructing the Enterprise Priority List for Local Search
“I think some local managers in corporations are getting pushback as to why their local traffic is falling, and if it is why should they maintain local pages? What is hard to explain is that those pages DO feed Google,” Mike Blumenthal tells David Mihm. “But these locations need to be not just well structured, but easily found and crawled by Google, not hidden behind some opaque code.”
Building the Essential Digital Marketing Bundle for Local Businesses
“Last time we identified our essential digital bundle for small businesses,” says David Mihm to Mike Blumenthal. “This week I thought we might tackle how agencies and media companies might go about building and selling that bundle — and why there seem to be so few who are actually doing it.”
The Increasing Impact of Reviews and Google+ (?!) on Local SEO
Some new data has given us some “big time insight” into how Google is using authoritative local sites to inform local search rankings, says David Mihm. Mike Blumenthal agrees, saying that the prominence of local review pages and appears to be “transferring prominence directly to the local entity in a way that is totally independent of links.”
Brands, Meet the Data Amplifiers
Data amplifiers distribute and publish your data to a broader audience than you could ever do on your own — what I call the “network effect.” Your brand becomes more visible because your business data becomes more open and accessible to the influencers who are in a position to help customers find your business.
How Much Should We Still Care About Duplicate Content?
There has been a belief that duplicate content — although it is not cause for a penalty, unless it appears deceptive — hurts the overall quality of the website. Therefore, for years, duplicate content has been on a website audit checklist as an item to fix. But is that still the case?