Around this time each year, I publish a year in review post. This is to help me reflect on what has happened and what I’ve learned. It’s also to help me look back and see what progress I’ve made. If you want to track the progress over time, check out the years in review for […]
2019 Year in Review
High Impressions, Low Clicks and Few Leads: How To Fix It?
What if you have a page on your website getting a ton of impressions in Google Search Console, but you aren’t getting much business from that page? A question we recently came across deals with this dilemma. The page is focused on business objectives, (like a services page), and the page receive more impressions than […]
Google BERT Update: Understanding Search Queries More Effectively
Updated March 11th, 2021
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Google announced on October 25th, 2019 that they are rolling out a new update to their algorithm, named BERT. BERT is an acronym for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. The “transformers” are words that change the context or a sentence or search query. The “encoder representations” are subtle concepts and meanings in natural language that […]
Did Your Keyword Rankings Drop? Rethinking The Ranking Algorithm
Updated March 11th, 2021
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When your rankings suddenly drop in Google, do you immediately think it was an algorithm change? Or that you got a Google penalty? The reality is, Google is starting to figure out what the majority of people want to find when they type in a given search query. This is why the Google representatives say […]
How Does Google Know Users Are Satisfied With a Web Page?
How does the Google ranking algorithm know if users are happy with a web page? You probably think that the algorithm uses data from Google Analytics to measure if a page deserves to go up or down in rankings. What if I told you that Google Analytics is there for webmasters, and not for Google […]
Getting Social Icons in Google’s Knowledge Graph
A reader asks, “How do I get my company social profiles in the Knowledge Graph and Google Maps?” They go on to say, “Our competitors have their social links in Google Maps, and I’m curious why our company’s social links don’t show up?” “Is there a way to make Google show our social links on […]
Star Ratings for LocalBusiness Schema Disappearing From SERPs?
Updated March 11th, 2021
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Google announced on September 16th, 2019 that they would be making major changes to how they display review rich results. These are ratings stars that show in organic search results for pages with certain types of Schema markup. The biggest changes, that are still rolling out, affect rich snippet star ratings for the LocalBusiness and […]
Is a Location Page or Home Page Better for Your GMB URL?
Here’s a question about local SEO that I recently received. The question was about what is the best pages to use from your website as the Website link in Google My Business, when you have multiple locations. This operates under the presumption that you have two or more locations, and each location has it’s own […]
Setting Your Service Area on Google My Business
If you have a physically located business, you should undoubtedly have a Google My Business page for your company. Google My Business is an important piece of local SEO. Your Google My Business page is where customers leave you Google reviews, and you can add various information, like your phone number, hours of operation, and […]
Create Great Content and You’ll Get Links: Truth or Fiction?
A phrase you’ll hear a lot: Create great content, and you’ll get links naturally. You may have found it’s much harder than that. Even when you create “skyscraper content” it can be difficult to acquire links. So how do you get back links in the real world?