It might be hard to believe, but Google My Business (GMB) spam listings have been affecting search rankings for well over a decade. While some business owners make a few honest mistakes on their GMB profiles, many unscrupulous individuals and marketers are inventing completely fake businesses or editing legitimate business listings as a way to
Over the past year, we’ve seen first-hand from our own client data the dramatic and long-lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of these changes are due to drastic shifts in consumer behavior and consumer needs evolving beyond shopping at traditional brick-and-mortar locations. To more narrowly define the true impact of the pandemic on the
“Best Practices for Selecting Your Google My Business Category for Your Business Type” is a guest post by Sherry Bonelli, and is the second post in a two-blog post series on Google My Business category selection. You may view the first blog post in this series here. This post is a continuation of a previous
It’s been a busy year for local marketers, as consumers become more comfortable with in-person shopping and industries across the board begin to see a recovery across all their local metrics. As consumer needs continue to shift given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent vaccine rollout, so too does search technology and user interface improvements.
Given that the vast majority of consumers read online reviews before purchasing goods or services, third-party review sites are an important place for brands to build and maintain a strong local presence. And, when it comes to the places local customers search for the social validation of reviews, Yelp is one of the most trusted and popular.
“Google My Business Categories: How to Pick the Best Categories for Your GMB Listing” is a guest post by Sherry Bonelli, and is the first post in a two-blog post series on Google My Business category selection. Picking the right Google My Business (GMB) categories for your GMB listing is a particularly important step to
Chances are, your enterprise brand does one thing really well — but it’s not all you do. Often, brands offer a diverse selection of products and services. And although it may be possible to mention them all on a local landing page, only one set of meta tags, schema, and block copy can optimize these
With many states currently in the process of reopening for business as vaccines roll out to combat the COVID-19 pandemic, local businesses are likely to encounter unprecedented new challenges. The road to our new normal is looking to be an uncertain one, with businesses temporarily closing and reopening as local conditions require. Specific reopening strategies
The Coronavirus pandemic brought with it sweeping, wide-ranging, and impactful local marketing disruptions for all brands, with hospitality one of the hardest hit. In November, while tracking local search metrics in GMB for over 200,000 locations each month to better bring to light the impact of the pandemic, we found that hospitality brands’ metrics were
This month, our analysis of local search trends across over 200,000 U.S. business locations’ Google My Business accounts shows marked increases in search interest in every vertical over February. While there is certainly some seasonality at play, the larger trends of vaccination rollout and economic recovery are driving the strong results you’ll see below. In