The seasons changed in September—as did the world of local search. Find out how Google updated its algorithm, geared up for the holiday season, and got granular with review content. Here’s all the news you need to know. The September 2022 broad core update takes effect Following last month’s helpful content update, Google released a […]
It has been especially difficult for businesses to evaluate if they meet benchmarks for online reputation management over the past two years. Year-over-year analyses have relied on frustratingly imperfect information as industries dealt with not only the changing business landscape but the all-encompassing impact of COVID-19. As a result, it has been almost impossible to […]
Consumers have tipped the balance of power. They have instant access to almost everything there is to know about any business—and can make or break brands through the collective power of reviews, ratings, and user-generated content (UGC). In this new dynamic, it’s essential for businesses of all shapes and sizes to not only monitor but […]
If you manage your business’s local presence online, you know that content uploaded by users, or user-generated content (UGC), can cause headaches. Our clients often ask us about fundamental issues like users suggesting inaccurate edits, uploading photos that do not always portray the business well, and answering other users’ questions before the business itself has […]
As the undisputed heavyweight champion of the digital age, Google rarely attempts to hide its ambitions. In fact, in a thoroughly disrupted year that has dramatically accelerated digital uptake, the search giant has made huge, conspicuous leaps forward in both shopping and local. For the latter, Google has now enlisted two-time unified heavyweight world boxing […]
Google’s updates are not slowing down. As we grow accustomed to life with COVID-19 and how to do business amid social distancing practices, updates to the local search ecosystem have stopped becoming stopgaps and are now full-fledged long-term changes. To ensure marketers are making the most out of these trying times, it is crucial to […]
While COVID-19 dominated almost every news headline, the local search world kept on keeping on last month. There was plenty of coverage for the ways in which the pandemic is impacting online listings, but the non-COVID updates and changes continued. For all of our recommendations on how to best handle your Google listings during COVID-19, […]
You won’t be surprised to learn that Google is essentially a monopoly in local search, controlling up to 95% of search traffic in certain verticals. That makes the search giant a critically important source of revenue for local businesses and enterprise brands with distributed local footprints. But local search is more than Google My Business […]
While customers often visit a business for the business itself, there are many instances in which the customer is not invested in the brand but rather an individual working within it. For businesses like doctor’s offices and law firms, clients are largely the individual practitioner’s customer base rather than the office’s. While it may seem […]
Google doesn’t often make huge mistakes, but that’s exactly what happened this July. Hot on the heels of a suite of new features for Google My Business (GMB), early adopters of one such feature saw their listings suddenly suspended. If that wasn’t bad enough, Google also mass-deleted the reviews of many local listings in an […]