- Whitespark Local Insider
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- Newsletter #15
Newsletter #15
Whitespark Local Insider
Whitespark's Monthly Local Search Newsletter
Local Insider
March 2016
A few weeks ago, Darren presented at Mozcon Local on some citation research he's been doing. He tested what actually happens when you submit a brand new business to the primary data aggregators, Yext, Moz Local, and manual citation building. This is an ongoing study, but here are some of the observations and insights that may shock you:
Localeze, Acxiom, and Factual take longer than 4 months to distribute.
Citations ONLY (with no other SEO factors) won't have much of an impact on rankings. No surprise.
Rankings appeared within the first 6 weeks, then tapered off.
Building citations manually is more effect and half the cost of the 1st year of Yext
No Google listings have appeared for any of the business in the study.
Yellowpages.com is one of the first citations to appear in the Local Citation Finder and the first URLs to appear in Search Console.
Check out the study here and get Darren's citation building recommendations for new businesses. And just in case you missed the event or all of the fantastical Tweets. Here are a few of our favourite MozCon Local moments and presentations... We suggest you listen to the MozCon Local Playlist while diving into a few of the presentations. Dana DiTomaso (Kickpoint) & Justine Jordan (Litmus) had it tied for the best slide of the conference: Dana's HipsterJustine's Crying a River Presentations & Takeaways:
Cheers,Team Whitespark
New Rad ResourcesThe Best Citation Sources in the USA, CAN, UK & AU by Category & City In addition to Darren's Citation Study, he also re-ran the the research study of the Best Citations by Category and Best Citations by City. The Best Citation Sources by City or Category in all four countries were determined by running multiple search queries for local terms in hundreds of cities and combining the results to find the most frequently appearing sites within the organic results.If a site ranked well for the search terms within a specific industry or city it was considered relevant and authoritative for those terms. The "best" sites are listed based on their aggregate score which was determined by ranking position and number of occurrences in the SERPs.
Recent Blog Posts
You’re looking for publicity and for links, and reporters are looking for authorities to quote. Help a Reporter Out - also known as HARO - connects reporters and sources (like you) in a daily email.HARO’s an excellent way for a local business to earn links. But most people send in pitches that reporters aren’t interested in, conclude HARO won’t work for them, and never bother with it again. Meanwhile, someone else gets the exposure and the links.I’ve had some success with HARO. Here are my top 10 tips...
Around The Web
"Local SEO isn't some mysterious entity. It's a series of concerted steps." Miriam Ellis has put together the ultimate checklist to help tailor your local SEO efforts to your business model and ensure that you're ticking off all of the relevant boxes to get visible in the SERPs.
Miriam Ellis is on a roll and we couldn't miss sharing her cure for your "fear of local landing pages." Suffering from clammy hands, dry mouth, severe procrastination and inertia when it comes to creating a set of city landing pages for your local business clients? Worry no more, here is your prescription to overcoming all of your fears and making a fast recovery.
"Columnist Andrew Shotland discusses the impact Google Local Business Cards may have on local businesses and local SEO. Will they help, or will they hurt?"
"Google seems to be experimenting with a new enhancement of their Home Service Ads product which allows consumers to just call Google directly when searching for a plumber rather than searching for one and completing the transaction via the Home Services interface."
"Google has just released a new reviews feature that offers some extra visibility for local business owners. A picture is worth a thousand words, but what about a picture coupled with words? Now, when you share photos and reviews for the same place on Google Maps, you can see them combined in the Google Maps mobile app."
Don't lose site traffic because of outdated content. Check out Benjamin Brandall's step by step guide on updating an old post and relaunching it as an evergreen piece of content.
Want to enhance your marketing skills, but lack the budget to invest at the moment? Well, help is here (and it's FREE). Benjamin Beck has found you 9 awesome and free marketing courses to help you take your knowledge to the next level!
This free tool from Moz is great for multi-location businesses. "My Business Console works with your Google My Business account and lets you, as a Google My Business owner, audit, add, and remove managers in bulk. For brands, agencies, and franchises that have hundreds of locations and dozens of GMB Business Accounts, permission management either gets in the way of collaboration or potentially exposes capabilities to people who shouldn’t have them."
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