With the World Cup having already kicked off, Google is asking certain businesses—particularly bars and restaurants—if they will be showing World Cup games at their location. If listing owners add the “Showing the World Cup” attribute to their Google Business Profile (GBP), Google will display it prominently in both Google Maps and Google Search. Google […]
Search engine optimization may be one of digital’s most traditional and well-established disciplines, but change is afoot. In fact, few other aspects of digital are evolving as radically as SEO, and much of it is being driven by Google’s reinvention of the SERP (search engine results page) from simple directory to personalized portal. In the […]
When it comes to running a successful business, reputation is everything. But a good reputation doesn’t build itself. Every customer interaction, positive or negative, in person or online, can shift the needle, so it’s important to keep some best practices in mind for cultivating a reputation you can be proud of. Here are 10 things […]
For the last 10 years and particularly since the onset of the pandemic, Google has tried to compete with Amazon by offering its own unique online shopping experience. Unlike Amazon, which mails you everything you buy, Google instead connects its users with local retailers that have the item being searched for. The search giant’s unique […]
In the world of local search, some updates are more significant than others. This month, we saw Google tinker with some settings, retire some features, and threaten some serious consequences with its latest algorithm update. Let’s get to the details. Google’s new Pirate algorithm update obliterates traffic for offending sites In early February, Google launched […]
The holiday shopping season has arrived, and some shiny new updates from Google are already waiting under the tree. Read up on what’s new in local search this month, so you can stay up to date—and help keep your business on the “nice” list. Google My Business gets a new name Google is renaming Google […]
If you are anything like me, you watched The Queen’s Gambit and now fancy yourself a learned chess player and scholar. As such, Google’s announcement that responsive search ads, or RSAs, are now the default ad format in Google Ads reminds me of a very particular chess tactic: the quiet move. A quiet move is […]
When we last dived into the burgeoning promise of Google’s BERT AI, it was affecting only 10% of all English language searches. But Google always had ambitious plans for BERT’s expansion; plans that saw it roll out BERT across 70 languages in December 2019. So, here we are just over a year since BERT got […]
Google has announced that its latest and greatest search innovation—passage-based indexing—will affect an estimated 7% of search queries across all languages when fully rolled out across the world. It’s exciting news, for sure, but… what exactly is passage indexing? The search giant explains: Very specific searches can be the hardest to get right, since sometimes […]
They say rumors are usually more exciting than the truth. But right now we’re talking about a particularly intriguing piece of speculation—that Apple may be attempting to launch a search engine—that could have game-changing real-world consequences. And although it is currently little more than hearsay, it has a couple of compelling causes: Apple has posted […]