Search Engine Land recently dug into a recent study showing how increases in review score and responses correlated to more conversions. This seems like a no brainer to those that have been following closely and understand that Google rewards interacting with your GMB page, but it is important in that any time we show true [...]
Just last week I talked to someone who explained how they did "Review Gating" for their company. This is a practice that was banned by Google back in the spring of 2018. This means you can get in trouble and in many cases lose all of your reviews if found to be "gating". What is [...]
I suggested almost exactly five years ago that reviews would be the links of the future. By that, I mean that their weight in the Google algorithm would increase to the point that they became the most important individual factor. Much like links have many individual factors beyond just total count, such as frequency, site [...]
The latest episode of You Can Be Found Anywhere is from my trip to Hollywood to visit one of my favorite shows. I popped in while at a search conference to visit comedy legend Conan O'Brien's show. While there I touched on how you can establish trust for searchers to show them that you are [...]
I had the absolute pleasure this morning to present to the Greater New York Chamber of Commerce about all things search, including SEO, Google Ads, GMB, and more. We had a nice group of around 50 pack into the networking room on 44th street in midtown Manhattan to walk through the important aspects of search. [...]
Joy Hawkins recently posted about a find from Dave DiGregorio that posts were beginning to show up in the standard 3-pack of GMB local search results. Once again, showing Google is paying attention and using them. Even more, it gives your listing more space in the results and stands out a bit over your competitors. [...]
After a conversation about a panel I will be participating on around review management, I thought it would be a good idea to go in more depth about review management, and also how and when to appropriately respond to reviews. While I had a busy day or two, the folks at GatherUp beat me to [...]
Online reviews have been growing in importance in recent years. Just looking back at some of my recent posts about review management and the importance or reviews show how they are growing in importance and popularity. Aside from that, business owners are now getting inundated with offers for review management tools. I have always been [...]
The Google My Business (GMB) page is becoming more and more important for not only just local businesses but every business trying to do business through Google, which is pretty much a required piece of your marketing strategy going into 2019. Earlier this year, I did video posts on how to claim your GMB listing [...]
I posted an article the other day showing a study that was done on the number of businesses with Google reviews and the average score of high ranking sites. To rank in Google, everything is relative so you typically just need to be better than the other sites you are competing with for certain search terms, [...]
