Freshness & SEO: An Underrated Concept

During my time in search, there are certain ranking factors that I’ve changed my perspective on. For instance, after coming to Go Fish Digital and working on internal linking initiatives, I started to realize the power of internal links over time. By implementing internal links at scale, we were able to see consistent success.

Freshness is another one of these factors. After working with a news organization and testing the learnings gained from that work on other sites, I started to see the immense power that content refreshes could produce. As a result, I think the entire SEO community has underrated this concept for quite some time. Let’s dig into why.

Reviewing news sites

This all started when we began to work with a large news publisher who was having trouble getting in Google’s Top Stories for highly competitive keywords. They were consistently finding that their content wasn’t able to get inclusion in this feature, and wanted to know why.

Inclusion in “Top stories”

We began to perform a lot of research around news outlets that seemed quite adept at getting included in Top Stories. This immediately turned our attention to CNN, the site that is by far the most skilled in acquiring coveted Top Stories positions.

By diving into their strategies, one consistent trend we noticed was that they would always create a brand new URL the day they wanted to be included in the Top Stories carousel:

As an example, here you can see that they create a unique URL for their rolling coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war. Since they know that Google will show Top Stories results daily for queries around this, they create brand new URLs every single day:

• cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-16-22/index.html

• cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-21-22/index.html

• cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-05-23-22/index.html

This flies in the face of traditional SEO advice that indicates web owners need to keep consistent URLs in order to ensure equity isn’t diluted and keywords aren’t cannibalized. But to be eligible for Top Stories, Google needs a “fresh” URL to be indexed in order for the content to qualify.

After we started implementing the strategy of creating unique URLs every day, we saw much more consistent inclusion for this news outlet in Top Stories for their primary keywords.

However, the next question we wanted to address was not just how to get included in this feature, but also how to maintain strong ranking positions once there.

Ranking in “Top stories”

The next element that we looked at was how frequently competitors were updating their stories once in the Top Stories carousel, and were surprised at how frequently top news outlets refresh their content.

We found that competitors were aggressively updating their timestamps. For one query, when reviewing three articles over a four-hour period, we found the average time between updates for major outlets:

1. USA Today: Every 8 Minutes

2. New York Times: Every 27 minutes

3. CNN: Every 28 minutes

For this particular query, USA Today was literally updating their page every 8 minutes and maintaining the #1 ranking position for Top Stories. Clearly, they were putting a lot of effort into the freshness of their content.

But what about the rest of us?

Of course, it’s obvious how this would apply to news sites. There is certainly no other vertical where the concept of “freshness” is going to carry more weight to the algorithm. However, this got us thinking about how valuable this concept would be to the broader web. Are other sites doing this, and would it be possible to see SEO success by updating content more frequently?

Evergreen content

Fortunately, we were able to perform even more research in this area. Our news client also had many non-news specific sections of their site. These sections contain more “evergreen” articles where more traditional SEO norms and rules should apply. One section of their site contains more “reviews” type of content, where they find the best products for a given category.

When reviewing articles for these topics, we also noticed patterns around freshness. In general, high ranking articles in competitive product areas (electronics, bedding, appliances) would aggressively update their timestamps on a monthly (sometimes weekly) cadence.

For example, as of the date of this writing (May 25th, 2022), I can see that all of the top three articles for “best mattress” have been updated within the last 7 days.

Looking at the term “best robot vacuum”, it looks like all of the articles have been updated in the last month (as of May 2022):

Even though these articles are more “evergreen” and not tied to the news cycle, it’s obvious that these sites are placing a high emphasis on freshness with frequent article updates. This indicated to us that there might be more benefits to freshness than just news story results.

Performing a test

We decided to start testing the concept of freshness on our own blog to see what the impact of these updates could be. We had an article on automotive SEO that used to perform quite well for “automotive seo” queries. However, in recent years, this page lost a lot of organic traffic:

The article still contained evergreen information, but it hadn’t been updated since 2016:

It was the perfect candidate for our test. To perform this test, we made only three changes to the article:

1. Updated the content to ensure it was all current. This changed less than 5% of the text.

2. Added “2022” to the title tag.

3. Updated the timestamp.

Immediately, we saw rankings improve for the keyword “automotive seo”. We moved from ranking on the third page to the first page the day after we updated the content:

To verify these results, we tested this concept on another page. For this next article, we only updated the timestamp and title tag with no changes to the on-page content. While we normally wouldn’t recommend doing this, this was the only way we could isolate whether “freshness” was the driving change, and not the content adjustments.

However, after making these two updates, we could clearly see an immediate improvement to the traffic of the second page:

These two experiments combined with other tests we’ve performed are showing us that Google places value on the recency of content. This value extends beyond just articles tied to the news cycle.

Why does Google care?

E-A-T considerations

Thinking about this more holistically, Google utilizing the concept of freshness makes sense from their E-A-T initiatives. The whole concept of E-A-T is that Google wants to rank content that it can trust (written by experts, citing facts) above other search results. Google has a borderline public responsibility to ensure that the content it serves is accurate, so it’s in the search giant’s best interest to surface content that it thinks it can trust.

So how does freshness play into this? Well, if Google thinks content is outdated, how is it supposed to trust that the information is accurate? If the search engine sees that your article hasn’t been updated in five years while competitors have more recent content, that might be a signal that their content is more trustworthy than yours.

For example, for the term “best camera phones”, would you want to read an article last updated two years ago? For that matter, would you even want an article last updated six months ago?

As we can see, Google is only ranking pages that have been updated within the last one or two months. That’s because the technology changes so rapidly in this space that, unless you’re updating your articles every couple of months or so, you’re dramatically behind the curve.

Marketplace threats

The concept of freshness also makes sense from a competitive perspective. One of the biggest weaknesses of an indexation engine is that it’s inherently hard to serve real-time results. To find when content changes, a search engine needs time to recrawl and reindex content. When combined with the demands of crawling the web at scale, this becomes extremely difficult.

On the other hand, social media sites like Twitter don’t have this issue and are made to serve real-time content. The platform isn’t tasked with indexing results, and engagement metrics can help quickly surface content that’s gaining traction. As a result, Twitter does a much better job of surfacing trending content.

Thinking about the web from a platform based perspective, it makes sense that most users would choose Twitter over Google when looking for real-time information. This causes a big threat to Google, as it’s a reason for users to migrate off the ecosystem, thus presenting fewer opportunities to serve ads.

Recently in Top Stories, you now see a lot more “Live Blog Posts”. These articles utilize LiveBlogPosting structured data, which signals to Google that the content is getting updated in real-time. While looking for real-time URLs across the entire web is daunting, using this structured data type can help them better narrow in on content they need to be crawling and indexing more frequently.

Google seems to be aggressively pushing these live blogs in Top Stories as they often see strong visibility in Top Stories results:

This might be a strategic move to encourage publishers to create real-time content. The goal here could be increased adoption of content that’s updated in real-time with the end result of showcasing to users that they can get this type of content on Google, not just Twitter.

Utilizing these concepts moving forward

I think as an industry, sometimes there’s room for us to be more creative when thinking about our on-page optimizations. When looking at how to improve pages that have lost traffic and positions over time, we could take freshness into consideration. When looking at pages that have lost prominence over time, we might want to consider checking if that content is also outdated. Through testing and experimentation, you could see if updating the freshness of your content has noticeable positive impacts on ranking improvements.

Planning for a Post-Local-Pack Possibility

Local SEOs are accustomed to continuous change in the SERPs, but if S.2992, the American Innovation Online Choice Act, becomes law and prevents monopolies like Google from preferencing their own assets, we need to prepare for what could be the largest search overhaul we’ve ever seen. 

This could be bigger than the day we saw 7-packs become 3-packs. It could be bigger than any of the major updates like Possum or Vicinity. We’re talking about major potential change and new opportunity for local businesses. Just how big might it be? That’s exactly what we’ll be looking at today!

Stats and tests

Per Moz’s most recent study by Dr. Peter J. Meyers, when we ran 1,000 search phrases through MozCast, half or which were localized to particular cities, 33% percent of our queries returned a local pack like this one in the SERPs:

If S.2992 should become law, industry experts observe that local packs would likely be one of the widgets Google would be obliged to stop preferencing in their results. And, in April of this year, marketers began spotting a test of a very different layout that could signal what local SERPs might look like, post-S.2992. 

I haven’t been able to replicate the test myself, but Mike Blumenthal of Near Media kindly granted permission for me to share this screenshot from his excellent piece, A Look at Google’s Local Results without ‘Self-Preferencing’:

Instead of three local results grouped into a pack, this test shows a new widget we’re currently terming a “local card”, interleaved within the organic results. As Mike explains, when you click on the card, you’re taken straight to the Google Business Profile instead of to the long-established local finder. But perhaps of even more importance, the organic link to the website is now fully prominent, instead of totally absent as in some packs, or grey and easily-overlooked, as in the Google Business Profile. 

Rand Fishkin predicts that billions of clicks that were absorbed by Google’s widgets would become up-for-grabs by organic and paid advertisers. It’s this possible reality that’s really gotten me thinking about how local businesses could respond to what could be a tremendous opportunity.

Taking website inspiration from Google’s local playbook

Google takes a lot from businesses. They take business data and make money from aggregating and displaying it in their local packs, finders, and maps. They take publishers’ content — which is the result of innumerable hours of paid work by human beings — and republish it in zero-click SERPs. Most SEOs learn to work within this system, this “partnership” in which we try not to be overly stressed so long as Google’s operations don’t hinder conversions. In other words, we resolve not to worry whether a sale results from a click on a Google Business Profile or the Contact Us page of a website, so long as transactions keep rolling in.

However, at the same time, there has been an ongoing saga of industry complaints that Google throws its weight around too much without any consultation with the business owners and publishers on whose livelihoods its profits are based. Of late, there has been particular distaste over Google using search as a political tool to protect itself from anti-trust actions like S.2992, threatening SMBs with negative outcomes if Google’s monopoly is regulated. Depending on your perspective, it might feel like Google takes it upon themselves to build a business model on your identity and content, doesn’t offer adequate support when things invariably go wrong with how they represent you, and then insults your intelligence with see-through scare tactics. It’s really no wonder when business owners and marketers grumble.

However you feel about this scenario, though, there is one thing that every local SEO knows by heart: local SERPs exist in a state of constant experimental change geared to maximize public engagement with them for Google’s benefit. They have the data and the engineers to discover exactly what works and what doesn’t. Think of this as a gift to us that we might take in return for all we’ve given, because Google’s SERPs are actually telling us what we should be doing with our websites if local packs go away, local cards take their place, and tons of clicks end up back on our websites instead of the Google Business Profile.

Check out this quick mockup I did of a GBP-inspired website homepage and see how many of the elements you can spot that correspond directly with fields you’ve come to know so well on your Google listing:

Most important elements

Did you notice how my mockup emphasizes location and contact data, photos, and reviews? I believe that the ongoing iterations of Google’s packs and profiles indicate that these are the three listing elements that matter most to the public when choosing a local business. If more clicks should start going to the website, companies should organize the homepage so that visitors can instantly find the NAP, hours of operation (including whether the business is open right now plus its most and least popular time slots), see tons of relevant photos, and both read and leave reviews. You’ll notice I’ve also included some basic sentiment analysis of the reviews à la Google Place Topics.

Action-oriented elements

This mockup emphasizes all of the actions a visitor might be used to taking via Google Business Profiles. In addition to things like getting directions and interacting with reviews, the homepage should quickly facilitate whichever activities are most relevant to the model and customers, such as calling or texting the company, booking an appointment, asking questions, and, of course, shopping. If there is any actionable field on your GBP that you believe is connecting customers to the business, feature it or link to it on the homepage. This is basic website design of course, but think again about how Google organizes such features in their profiles to test what you should be emphasizing on sites.

Informational elements

Your website’s textual image and video-based content take the place of Google posts, business descriptions, categories, Q&A, and other informational media. Meanwhile, you can boost trust signals for Google’s quality raters and the public by displaying awards, accreditations, and associations. It’s great to think that, with a website, you have all the space you need to showcase a local brand’s community involvement, B2B relationships, customer-centric guarantees, environmental initiatives, and human rights policies. So, while you’re taking cues from GBPs on how to provide a ton of info at a glance for quick decision making, the joy of websites is that they support the architecture for telling a deeper story about why a business is truly the best bet in town for specific needs.

Your choice on UGC

Since the advent of Google Maps, Google has taken an open-source approach to local business data. Anyone, including bad actors, can suggest edits to your core business data, upload photos, leave reviews, and write questions and answers on your GBP. With your own website, the choice is yours on how much space you want to give to user generated content.

I’ve long been an advocate for featuring customers’ words and stories as central to business identity, and I would recommend that marketers and owners carefully plan how to present content like reviews, photos, and videos. There could be a temptation to show only flattering UGC, but be advised that activities like review gating can lead to litigation, and that businesses will already be facing something of a struggle in getting the public to trust website-based review content as much as they might trust the same content on a third-party platform. In seeking to emulate the successful layout of GBPs, do take your community into account, but also, take a breather knowing that S.2992 would return to local business owners some of the reputation and marketing control that they’ve lost to Google over the past 20 years.

Summing up, should the American Innovation Online Choice Act become law, sending more traffic directly to websites, owners and marketers should have a plan in place to revamp website homepages so that they are as informative and actionable as Google Business Profiles. In the case of multi-location brands, you may need to bring a GBP mindset to landing pages rather than homepages. Why not spend some time this week making a more beautiful and useful mockup than mine for some of the businesses you market? Maybe yours will feature bulleted list attributes, or key product and service menus, or direct message/live chat capabilities.

Would local cards and a less dominant Google be good for local businesses and marketers?

Image credit: Jo Zimny

To be honest, you’ll have to come up with your own answer to this question based on your philosophy and hands-on experience, should Google become the subject of increased regulation. For my part as a big supporter of localism, I observe that monopolies have an unsustainable negative effect on human happiness and the planet, on innovation and diversification, on commerce and culture. I am personally in favor of very strong antitrust measures and believe they will deliver amazing benefits to independently-owned businesses, the communities they serve, and the environment on which we depend for life.

But as to how something like the local cards might impact us, I think it’s important to note that the test that’s been spotted is unlikely to be the ultimate format we’d see in the SERPs. I’ve seen several peers asserting that they feel the layout is a bit messy, and it would certainly cause some temporary confusion for Internet searchers who have gotten used to former displays. But, time and again, we’ve all adjusted to SERP modifications, and we would simply do so once more. For local search marketers, regulation would signal that it’s time to double down on your organic SEO skills if what emerges is an increased emphasis on organic SERPs.

For owners, customers will still find you, and the great thing would be that more of them would likely be spending more of their time at your house instead of at Google’s. The role of host, then, will be more on your shoulders. It will be your patio, your deck chairs, your BBQ pit, and ramada that welcome and shelter people. And, after all, that’s what you went into business to do: to take care of your own customers. You’ve spent years learning to do that, so don’t worry - with some fine tuning of your website to make it as good as and better than a Google Business Profile, you’ve got some good times ahead!

What Is Localism and How Does it Relate to Local SEO?

Local search marketing is a form of publicity unlike any other because of its potential for creating positive social change.

July 2022 is Independent Business Month and the perfect moment to reinvigorate our work as local SEOs by reflecting on the meaningful bigger picture to which we’re contributing. I’ve heard European social commentators say that you can’t publish books in America with the word “virtue” in their titles, but when an independent business owner opens their doors, it instigates a true virtuous cycle. When marketers have the honor of entering that cycle, we’re participating in something even more important than “traffic”, “conversions”, or “growth”; we’re contributing to the force for good known as localism. 

It can be an outcome of continual work with analytics and statistics to slip into viewing everything as a numbers game, but in local, each of those numbers is a real individual, a neighbor with a story, with needs. This month, we have the opportunity to re-center people, community, and environment by considering the definition of localism and seeing how our work in local SEO matters.

 A definition of economic localism

I can’t say it better than this:

“Localism is about building communities that are more healthy and sustainable – backed by local economies that are stronger and more resilient. It means we use regional resources to meet our needs – reconnecting eaters with farmers, investors with entrepreneurs, and business owners with the communities and natural places on which they depend. Economic success is measured less by production than by providing a decent standard of living for the most people while living in harmony with natural systems.” - Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BAILLE) 

In other words, instead of mere profits being the ultimate goal of this way of participating in civic life, localism strives to reduce suffering by building a community that actually functions well for everybody who lives in it - what the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. might have termed “a glorious and healthy place to inhabit”. 

The benefits of localism

Image credit: Civic Economics and LOCO BC

Local wealth for local needs 

The most immediate and obvious benefit of economic localism is that the money you spend keeps circulating amongst your neighbors. As illustrated above, you buy a bike and put money into the pocket of the local bike shop owner. On their lunch break, the bike shop owner cycles down the road for lunch and hands your money over to the local restaurateur. After work, the restaurateur takes your money to the local hardware store to pick up some locally-grown veggie starts for their home garden. The next morning, the hardware store owner is using your money to pay part of their electricity bill to the community-owned utility. A few weeks later, an engineer at the utility company is using your money to donate to a new bike path being made in your community so that there are safer places for cyclists like you to ride.

In sum, a community built on localism recycles its money so that it can be dedicated to local people’s needs and projects, but a community without this model becomes increasingly under-funded because its wealth is leaking away into the wallets of national, multi-national, and remote entities with no stake in local life. When your community needs a new fire engine, repairs to the town hall, or schoolbooks, the money is there within the city instead of lost forever to the coffers of Walmart or Amazon where the CEOs have no thoughts about your local needs. So, basic economic localism begins with ensuring that local wealth is recycled instead of extracted, but this is just the first of its benefits and we’ll look at a few more that deserve priority focus. 

Healthy, green communities

Image credit: Llandaff News

Environmental protections and localism go hand in hand, rooted in the acknowledgement that we have no life, no business, no anything without the Earth. Local delivery of your essential needs cuts carbon emissions in half vs. remote ecommerce shopping. Meanwhile, the central location of typical Main Streets means people can choose to walk, bike, or drive a much shorter distance to shop, while big box stores (which usually take up formerly-open or agricultural lands on the outskirts of cities) tripled pollution from driving between 1969 - 2009. George Washington University links two million annual new cases of pediatric asthma to driving our cars, meaning the less we use fossil fuel vehicles, the better our children can breathe. And as for formerly-green spaces acting as the healthy ecological lungs of your whole community, an economy driven by localism can defund big box sprawl and restore wetlands, waterways, and farmlands where megastores and asphalt used to be. 

Political will and power

Image credit: Sue Day

At the most hyperlocal level, towns and cities running on localism can shape their own economic landscapes. Communities have repeatedly demonstrated the power to keep big boxes out and diverse small businesses open so that shoppers have some very meaningful choices at their disposal. Buy Local associations and related groups also have real power to help sway local elections and policies which determine how towns and cities develop and grow, directly impacting life quality for all residents.

Zooming out on the map, these local actions can have national benefits. A dilemma facing conscientious consumers is when their need for everyday goods collides with the dominance of monopolies that fund undesirable politicians and policies. The distress is real when, for example, a shopper becomes aware that there have been some 500 shootings at US grocery stores since 2020 and discovers that the chain where they shop is funding candidates or legislation promoting the sale of assault weapons. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees “life, liberty and safety of person” for all people, but if a big brand doesn’t uphold these conventions, resulting in the deaths or terrorization of its customers, ethical people will not want to do business with that company. When one town refuses to let such a business operate in their community, it is one small victory; when multiple towns do the same, it can govern the behavior and fate of that brand at a national level.

Human well-being and enjoyment

Image credit: Becky Granger

The American Psychological Association finds that our chances of premature death are cut in half if we are protected from suffering loneliness and the Cambridge Journal of Regions proposes that there is a direct tie between local health and the proportion of small businesses in a community. When your local business owners, farmers, artisans, educators, and public servants know you by name, you experience the kind of quality social interactions that are a safeguard against isolation, despair, and untimely mortality. 

Localism can not only help you live longer, but it can make the savor of your years so much richer, with there being unique and interesting things to see and do in your town. Americans take 2.29 billion domestic trips every year, and when you think about the impulse to visit other places, it can’t be so that you can experience the exact same big boxes and fast food franchises in millions of cities! Rather, you want to walk and taste the real New Orleans, or San Francisco, or Seattle. If your town is host to a famous garlic festival, or apple fair, or chili cookoff, guard this regional richness from the kind of corporate homogeneity that would make colorless carbon copies out of vivid places to be alive. Localism can actually make the difference between human suffering and human joy.

The honor of working in local SEO

Image Credit: THRogers

I confess to getting very excited whenever I think or talk about this: local SEOs have the skills to help shape towns and countries they actually want to live in. All those years we put in studying search and local commerce have actually empowered us to directly promote the independent businesses which bring the multiple benefits of localism to life. In fact, we can think of our abilities as a toolkit for rebalancing the economy, society, and even the planet.

How does that work?

It’s quite simple: any time your work results in an independently-owned small business outranking a corporate one, you are making it easier for local shoppers to choose localism. 

It’s a struggle to compete against the endless marketing budgets of national brands, but your skills at performing deft competitive local audits and quickly seeing a path towards greater independent business visibility are actually a key contribution to helping the public discover and choose a more humane and habitable future. In fact, filling your client roster with an eye to localism aligns your work life with the dignity of immigrants who own about ¼ of small US businesses, with minority-owned US businesses which are 99.9% SMBs, and with a massive and necessary reduction in everybody’s carbon footprint. It’s estimated that Americans will spend about ⅓ of their total lives at work; it’s heartening to know we have an option to commit all those hours to public good.

Our opponents won’t quit any time soon. We can slide into feeling helpless when our Twitter feeds are comprised of news about Amazon greenwashing Earth Day while allegedly underreporting its unsustainable carbon emissions, Walmart paying its employees such low wages that the company has become the nation’s largest recipient of welfare, and Target union busting while Starbucks threatens to close a shop where workers managed to unionize. 

Local SEOs, happily, are not powerless, because we can choose to be sure that there are other highly visible places for people to buy food, books, clothes, housewares, and a cup of coffee. We can embrace the honor of using our substantial marketing skills to amplify the narrative of localism, in partnership with our clients, to address the societal heartaches that hurt us most and get busy on the must-do work of healing the planet. No small tasks, perhaps, but what a tantalizing offer life is presenting us with to resolve to market for the common good. 

Hey, These Aren’t My Competitors!

You know your competitors, and you’re not going to let some damned SEO tool tell you different!

Hey, I’ll give you the first part, but there are a lot of reasons that the results from a tool like True Competitor might not match your expectations, and that could be a good thing.

I’m going to dig into five of those reasons:

1. You’re living in the past

2. You’ve hit a brick wall

3. You can’t see the trees

4. You’re stuck in one tree

5. We’re just plain wrong
   

First, the toughest one to hear — the world is changing, and you’re not changing with it.

1. You’re living in the past

Look, I know Big Wally at Big Wally’s Widget World said your Grandma’s meatloaf was “just okay, I guess” at the church potluck in ‘87, but you need to move on. Even if you’re not quite-so-literally stuck in the past, you may be operating on an outdated sense of who your competitors are. Especially online, the competitive landscape can change quickly, and it’s worth re-evaluating from time to time.

2. You’ve hit a brick wall

Quite literally — you’ve run headlong into your own brick-and-mortar wall. As a business with physical locations, your competitors with physical locations are absolutely important, but from a search perspective, they may not represent who you’re actually competing with online.

Take, for example, McDonald’s — you might expect the competition to include Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, and other fast food chains with physical restaurants. Meanwhile, here are the second through fourth results from True Competitor:

While DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats don’t have traditional, physical locations, these are the places where McDonald’s online customers go to order, and they represent a significant amount of organic SERP real estate. From an SEO standpoint, this is reality.

3. You can’t see the trees

You can see the whole forest from where you’re standing, and that’s great, but are you missing the diversity and distinctiveness of the trees?

This is easier to show than tell. Let’s take a look at big box retailer, Target. True Competitor returns the following top three:

No big surprises here, and no one should be shocked that this list includes not only brick-and-mortar competitors, but online retail juggernauts like Amazon. Let’s take a deeper look, though (the following are competitors #8, #7, and #22 in our current data):

Target isn’t just up against the whole-forest, big box retailers — they also have to contend with niche competition. Their competitors in the video game space include not only brick-and-mortar retailers like GameStop, but competitor-partners like Sony and Nintendo (which both sell hardware and software directly online).

Not every grove of trees is going to have the same needs and growing conditions. Your competitive landscape could have dozens of ecosystems, and each of them requires unique research and likely a unique strategy.

4. You’re stuck in one tree

On the other hand, you could be stuck in just one tree. Let’s take Ford Motor Company as an example. Savvy marketers at Ford know they’re not just up against legacy automakers like Chevrolet and Toyota, but up-and-coming competitors like Tesla and Rivian.

That niche is incredibly important, but let’s take a look at what the SERPs are telling us:

These are Ford’s #1, #2, and #5 competitors, and they aren’t automakers — they’re automotive content producers. Does this mean that Chevy and Tesla aren’t Ford’s competitors? Of course not. It means that those automakers are infrequently appearing in SERPs alongside Ford. Ford is competing with mentions of their own products (makes and models) in leading online publications.

5. We’re just plain wrong

Hey, it happens — I’m not here to claim that we’re perfect. SERP-based competitive analysis has a couple of limitations. First, as discussed, SERP analysis doesn’t always reflect the brick-and-mortar world. From an SEO perspective, that’s fine (if they’re not ranking, we’re not competing with them for search share), but there are other essential pieces to the puzzle.

Second, our SERP-based analysis is based on national results and does not reflect regional or hyperlocal competition. Some regional businesses do have national competitors, and that’s worth knowing, but localized perspectives are important as well.

Maybe it’s a good thing…

What if a tool like True Competitor only returned information that you already knew? I guess you could pat yourself on the back and move on with life, but what did you learn? To me, the entire point of SERP-based competitive analysis is to challenge your expectations and your point of view. If the results don’t match what you expect, that mismatch represents opportunity.

More likely than not, it doesn’t mean you’re wrong (unless you’ve let vanity and personal history get the best of you) — it means that you’re missing a perspective or a niche that could be important. If you can see that missing perspective as money left on the table, then you’ve got a good chance to pick it up and walk away with a bit more in your pocket.

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SEO in Real Life: Harnessing Visual Search for Optimization Opportunities

The most exciting thing about visual search is that it’s becoming a highly accessible way for users to interpret the real world, in real time, as they see it. Rather than being a passive observer, camera phones are now a primary resource for knowledge and understanding in daily life.

Users are searching with their own, unique photos to discover content. This includes interactions with products, brand experiences, stores, and employees, and means that SEO can and should be taken into consideration for a number of real world situations, including:

• Sponsorship implementation

• Brand merchandising

• In-person brand experiences

Though SEOs have little control over which photos people take, we can optimize our brand presentation to ensure we are easily discoverable by visual search tools. By prioritizing the presence of high impact visual search elements and coordinating online SEO with offline branding, businesses of all sizes can see results.

What is visual search?

Sometimes referred to as search-what-you-see, in the context of SEO, visual search is the act of querying a search engine with a photo rather than with text. To surface results , search engines and digital platforms use AI and visual recognition technology to identify elements in the image and supply the user with relevant information.

Though Google’s visual search tools are getting a lot of attention at the moment, they aren’t the only tech team that’s working on visual search. Pinterest has been at the forefront of this space for many years, and today you can see visual search in action on:

• Google Lens & Search

• Bing Visual Search

• Pinterest Lens

• Ebay’s Find it on Ebay & Image Search

• Amazon StyleSnap

• Snapchat Scan

In the last year, Google has spoken extensively about their visual search capabilities, hinging a number of their search improvements on Google Lens and adding more and more functionality all the time. As a result, year on year usage of Google Lens has increased by three fold, with an estimated8 billion Google Lens searches taking place each month.

Though there are many lessons to be learned from the wide range of visual search tools, which each have their own data sets, for the purpose of this article we will be looking at visual search on Google Lens and Search.

Are visual search and image search SEO the same?

No, visual search optimization is not exactly the same as image search optimization. Image search optimization forms part of the visual search optimization process, but they’re not interchangeable.

Image search SEO

With Image Search you should prioritize helping images to surface when users enter text based queries. To do this, your images should be using image SEO best practices like:

• Modern file formats

• Alt text

• Alt tags

• Relevant file names

• Schema markup
  

All of this helps Google to return an image search result for a text based query, but one of the main challenges with this approach is that it requires the user to know which term to enter.

For instance, with the query dinosaur with horns, an image search will return a few different dinosaur topic filters and lots of different images. To find the best result, I would need to filter and refine the query significantly.

Visual search SEO

With visual search, the image is the query, meaning that I can take a photo of a toy dinosaur with horns, search with Google Lens, then Google refines the query based on what it can see from the image.

When you compare the two search results, the SERP for the visual search is a better match for the initial image query because there are visual cues within the image. So I am only seeing results for a dinosaur with horns, that is quadrupedal, and only has horns on the face, not the frill.

From a user perspective, this is great because I didn't have to type anything and I got a helpful result. And from Google's perspective, this is also more efficient because they can assess the photo and decide which element to filter for first in order to get to the best SERP.

The standard image optimizations form part of what Google considers in order to surface relevant results, but if you stop there, you don't get the full picture.

Which content elements are best interpreted in visual search

Visual search tools identify objects, text, and images, but certain elements are easier to identify than others. When users carry out a visual search, Google taps into multiple data sources to satisfy the query.

The knowledge graph,Vision AI, Google Maps, and other sources combine to surface search results, but in particular, Google's tools have a few priority elements. When these elements are present in a photo Google can sort, identify, and/or visually match similar content to return results:

• Landmarks are identified visually but are also connected to their physical location on Google Maps, meaning that local businesses or business owners should use imagery to demonstrate their location.

• Logos are interpreted in their entirety, rather than as single letters. So even without any text, Google can understand that that swoop means Nike. This data comes from the logos in knowledge panels, website structured data, Google Business Profile, Google Merchant, and other sources, so they should all align.

• Knowledge Graph Entities are used to tag and categorize images and have a significant impact on what SERP is displayed for a visual search. Google recognizes around 5 billion KGE, so it is worth considering which ones are most relevant to your brand and ensuring that they are visually represented on your site.

• Text is extracted from images via Optical Character Recognition, which has some limitations — not all languages are recognized, nor are backwards letters. So if your users regularly search photos of printed menus or other printed text, you should consider readability of the fonts (or handwriting on specials boards) you use.

• Faces are interpreted for sentiment, but the quantity of faces also comes into account, meaning that businesses that serve large groups of people — like event venues or cultural institutions — would do well to include images that demonstrate this.

Visual Search Element	Corresponding Online Activity	Priority Verticals
Landmarks	Website Images Google Maps Google Business Profile	Tourism Restaurants Cultural Institutions Local Businesses
Logo	Website Images Website Structured Data Google Merchant Google Business Profile Wikipedia Knowledge Panel	All
Knowledge Graph Entities	Website Images Image Structured Data Google Business Profile	Ecommerce Events Cultural Institutions
Text	Website copy Google Business Profile	All
Faces	Website images Google Business Profile	Events Tourism Cultural Institutions

How to optimize real world spaces for visual search

Just as standard SEO should be focused on meeting and anticipating customer needs, visual search SEO requires awareness of how customers interact with products and services in real world spaces. This means SEOs should apply the same attention to UCG that one would use for keyword research. To that end, I would argue we should also think about consciously applying optimizations to the potential content of these images.

Optimize sponsorship with unobstructed placements

This might seem like a no brainer, but in busy sponsorship spaces it can sometimes be a challenge. As an example, let's take this photo from a visit to the Staples Center a few years ago.

Like any sports arena, this is filled to the brim with sponsorship endorsements on the court, the basket, and around the venue.

But when I run a visual search assessment for logos, the only one that can clearly be identified is the Kia logo in the jumbotron.

This isn’t because their logo is so distinct or unique, since there is another Kia logo under the basketball hoop, rather this is because the jumbotron placement is clean in terms of composition, with lots of negative space around the logo and fewer identifiable entities in the immediate vicinity.

Within the wider arena, many of the other sponsorship placements are being read as text, including Kia’s logo below the hoop. This has some value for these brands, but since text recognition doesn’t always complete the word, the results can be inconsistent.

So what does any of this have to do with SEO?

Well, Google Image Search now includes results that are using visual recognition, independent of text cues. Meaning that for a Google Image Search for the query kia staples center, two of the top five results do not have the word kia in the copy, alt text, or alt tags of the web pages they are sourced from. So, visual search is impacting rankings here, and with Google Imagesaccounting for roughly 20% of online searches, this can have a significant impact on search visibility.

What steps should you take to SEO your sponsorships?

Whether it’s major league or the local bowling league, in order to get the most benefit from visual search, if you are sponsoring something which is likely to be photographed extensively, you should:

• Ensure that your real life sponsorship placement is in an unobscured location

• Use the same logo in real life that is in your schema, GBP, and knowledge panel

• Get a placement with good lighting and high contrast brand colors

• Don’t rely on “light up” logos or flags that have inconsistent visibility on camera phones

You should also ensure that you're aligning your real life presence with your digital activity. Include images of the sponsorship display on your website so that you can surface for relevant queries. If you dedicate a blog to the sponsorship activity that includes relevant images, image search optimizations, and copy, you increase your chances of outranking other content and bringing those clicks to your site.

Optimizing merch & uniforms for search

When creating merchandising and uniforms, visual discoverability for search should be a priority because users can search photos of promotional merch and images with team members in a number of ways and for an indefinite period of time.

Add text and/or logos

For instance, from my own camera roll, I have a few photos that can be categorized via theGoogle Photo machine-learning-powered image search with the query nasa. Two of these photos include the word “NASA” and the others include the logo.

Oddly enough, though, the photo of my Women of NASA LEGO set does not surface for this query. It shows for lego but not for nasa. Looking closely at the item itself, I can see that neither the NASA logo nor the text have been included in the design of the set.

Adding relevant text and/or logos to this set would have optimized this merchandise for both brands.

Stick to relevant brand colors

And since Google’s visual search AI is also able to discern brand colors, you should also prioritize merchandise that is in keeping with your brand colors. T-shirts and merch that deviate from your core color scheme will be less likely to make Visual Matches when users search via Google Lens.

In the example above, event merchandise that was created outside of the core brand colors of red, black, and white were much less recognizable than stationary typical colors.

Focus on in-person brand experiences

Creating experiences with customers in store and at events can be a great way to build brand relationships. It’s possible to leverage these activities for search if you take an SEO-centric approach.

Reduce competition

Let’s consider this image from a promotional experience in Las Vegas for Lyft. As a user, I enjoyed this immensely, so much so that I took a photo.

Though the Viva Lyft Vegas event was created by the rideshare company, in terms of visual search, Pabst are genuinely taking the blue ribbon, as they are the main entity identified in this query. But why?

First, Pabst has claimed their knowledge panel while Lyft has not, meaning that Lyft is less recognizable as a visual entity because it is less defined as an entity.

Second, though it does not have a Google Maps entry, the Las Vegas PBR sign has had landmark-esque treatment since it was installed, with features in The Neon Museum and a UNLV Neon Survey. All of this to say that, in this context, Lyft is being upstaged.

So to create a more SEO-friendly promotional space, they could have laid the groundwork by claiming their knowledge panel and reduced visual search competitors from the viewable space to make sure all eyes were on them.

Encourage optimized use-generated content

Sticking to Las Vegas, here is a typical touristy photo of me with friends outside the Excalibur Hotel:

And when I say that it’s typical, that’s not conjecture. A quick visual search reveals many other social media posts and websites with similar images.

This is what I refer to as that picture. You know the kinds of high occurrence UGC photos: under the castle at the entrance to Disneyland or even thepink wall at Paul Smith’s on Melrose Ave. These are the photos that everyone takes.

Can you SEO these photos for visual search? Yes, I believe you can in two ways:

1. Encourage people to take photos in certain places that you know, or have designed to include relevant entities, text, logos, and/or landmarks in the viewline. You can do this by declaring an area a scenic viewpoint or creating a photo friendly, dare I say “Instagrammable”, area in your store or venue.

2. Ensure frequently photographed mobile brand representations (e.g. mascots and/or vehicles) are easily recognizable via visual search. Where applicable, you should also claim their knowledge panels.

Once you’ve taken these steps, create dedicated content on your website with images that can serve as a “visual match” to this high frequency UGC. Include relevant copy and image search optimizations to demonstrate authority and make the most of this visibility.

How does this change SEO?

The notion of bringing visual search considerations to real world spaces may seem initially daunting, but this is also an opportunity for businesses of all sizes to consolidate brand identities in an effective way. Those working in SEO should coordinate efforts with PR, branding, and sponsorship teams to capture visual search traffic for brand wins.

Link Relevance vs. Content Relevance in Link Building

Relevance is talked about a lot in the context of link building. In truth, it’s something that no one can really provide a concrete (or even close to concrete) answer to, because none of us knows exactly how Google measures relevance. Even having access to things like the Google Natural Language Processing API and seeing categories such as this doesn’t mean that we know how Google measures relevance themselves, because there will be so much more under the hood that isn't visible to the public.

Even if we did know exactly how Google measures relevance, the extent to which they reward or penalize what they find as they crawl the web is also up for debate — like any ranking signal. We know that they use page speed, but they are also free to turn the dial on this up and down however they want.

This, in part, is why SEO is so fascinating. We’re optimizing for something that we can’t completely see and testing and refining based on the results we get. We can speculate on what Google may do or what we observe them doing, then a peer may see the exact opposite, and both may be right.

When it comes to link building and, specifically, the part that relevance plays, the potential answers are a lot more complex than we think. This is because relevance isn’t binary. We can’t just say that a link is relevant or not. We can’t say that content is relevant or not. The answers are far more nuanced than this, and we need to split things out a lot more to even begin to comprehend how Google may look at things.

With that in mind, let’s start by splitting out link relevance and content relevance.

Link relevance

When we talk about link relevance, we’re referring to the topic of the page and domain where the link is placed. When building links, we often look for target websites to outreach to and generally, it’s a good idea to find “relevant” links, but “relevant” is actually quite tricky to define. Here are some examples why.

Domain relevance

If you get a link from Moz.com, then we’d say that the topics are things like SEO, digital marketing, content marketing, etc. These are a few of the broad topics that we’d classify Moz into. Whilst digital marketing in itself is a big topic, it’s not that complex or tricky to define the Moz domain and therefore, understand what is and isn’t relevant to it.

Page relevance

Things can get more complicated than this if you think about websites such as The New York Times which has dozens of categories and hundreds of subcategories. Broadly, they would be classified as a news website, but they have categories for pretty much every topic that you can think of.

Anchor text

Additionally, we can add other elements to link relevance such as anchor text. What if you get super relevant anchor text but the page where the link is placed is about a completely different topic that isn’t relevant? Does this make the link more or less relevant?

In many cases, you may not even control the anchor text that is being used which means that it can be completely random. We know that Google use anchor text for understanding a link, but to what extent do they use it?

And this is just touching the surface of what link relevance can include.

Content relevance

We then have content relevance which is more about the page on your website that you get links to. It could be an existing page or it could be a brand new page that you’ve created to help with link building.

The attributes of content that sits on your website are far more under your control, so if you create something that is designed to get links and starts to go off topic a little, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect Google to take a harsher view on this in holding you accountable.

Things get hard when you remember that as SEOs, we often have link targets that we want to meet in order to catch up, overtake, or stay ahead of our competition. We want to get as many quality links as possible in order to increase the amount of traffic that we get from organic search.

To get more links, you can go broader with the topics and themes that you produce content about. This naturally opens up more potential link targets which in turn, increases the chances of you getting more links.

What all of this comes down to is striking the balance between producing a piece of content that is relevant to your brand, whilst getting as many links as possible. It can look something like this:

As you can see, many agencies (and in-house teams!) sit toward the right and are prepared to go wider with topics and themes because it can lead to more links. Irrelevance is driven by the pressure to build large volumes of links, and our industry does a great job of showcasing link building campaigns that have gotten hundreds of links, so we believe that this is what all of us should be aiming for.

However, Google wants us more focused on relevant themes because ultimately, they want us to deserve any links that we get.

My take: link relevance matters a lot less than content relevance

Having talked about each one, my take is that content relevance matters a lot less than link relevance to Google and therefore, to your ability to rank in organic search. Here are a few reasons why.

Anyone can link to you

Literally anyone on the web can link to your website, it’s not something that you can actually control. This is party why link spam is so hard to deal with and why the disavow tool was invented.

Even putting spam to one side, anyone can link to you for any reason they want.

For example, I can link from right here on the Moz blog to one of my favorite content pieces of all time. Neither website is related to each other in terms of the business they do and this is a blog post about link building that links to content about movies. But no one would see this as spammy.

What if your personal blog about SEO gets a link from NASA? I’m sure you wouldn’t be complaining about it!

The point being, it seems a stretch to think that Google would have a problem with links like these and therefore, shouldn’t be anything to worry about.

But, do they have value? Does the link above from Moz to a piece of content about movies hold as much value as a link from say, IMDB? This leads us onto my next point and why I think link relevance matters less than content relevance.

Authority and trust probably overrides link relevance

I do believe that Google cares a lot about how much they can trust a certain website and the links from that website. I’d venture a strong guess that Moz is a trusted domain and that it has the ability to pass value to the websites that it links to. We know that they have the ability to effectively “turn off” the ability for a website to pass PageRank to another and that they now have the ability to interpret the use of the nofollow tag so that they can decide whether it can be used for indexing and ranking purposes.

With that in mind, it would make sense for Google to make an assessment of the website giving the link and using this as a strong indicator to help decide how much value to pass across the link.

This would allow them to still pass value even when topical relevance isn’t there but they trust the website giving the link - which, as we can see, can easily happen.

The content we create is a stronger signal to Google

In contrast to the idea that anyone can link to you, you are far more in control of the content that you create. Even if you have a website that has a lot of user generated content, you still have overall editorial control over the processes for publishing that content. Essentially, you can be held accountable for the content that you create.

If you run an online pet store and you create a piece of content about personal finance, few would argue that this isn’t relevant. But the key difference when compare to getting a random link from a personal finance website is that you are accountable for the content because it sits on the website that you run. Google can hold you to a higher standard because of this.

So, even if that piece of content gets 100 links, Google could easily say that they’re not going to value those links very highly because they can’t see any topical relevance.

Does Google really want to reward irrelevant content campaigns

This one is key for me and let’s bring this all back around to link building.

Let’s imagine that you create a bunch of content-led link building campaigns for your online pet store but the topical relevance is very questionable. The quality of the content is great, it’s nicely designed and unique and even cites some expert input. This content has generated hundreds of links as a result of how good it is.

Does Google really want to reward you by valuing these links very highly and as a consequence, giving your organic search visibility a boost?

No, they don’t.

The truth is that in situations like this, it’s pretty obvious that the content has been created for the purposes of generating links. This in itself isn’t necessarily a problem, but if you do it over and over again, whilst the content clearly serves no other purpose, it’s not exactly a signal that your website is truly link worthy.

And remember, when it comes to links, Google will look for evidence that you truly deserve the links that you get and if the majority of links that you get come from off-topic campaigns, there is a strong argument to say that you don’t.

When does Google start to care about irrelevant content?

This is the big question for me and one that I can’t give you a complete answer to.

Launching some content pieces that are completely off topic and gets some links isn’t likely to get you into trouble. After all, everyone does random stuff from time to time and sometimes, a brand may decide to create some content or launch a campaign that is just a bit of fun.

If I were Google, I’d look for evidence that content is being created just for links. So I may look at a few signals such as the following.

Ratio of links to off-topic content vs. the rest of the website

If the majority of links pointing at a domain are to pages of content that is topically irrelevant when compared to the rest of the domain, I’d probably want to take a closer look at why. They may not impose a penalty or filter, but I may flag the domain for a Googler to take a look manually and see what’s going on.

The content being a little bit orphaned in terms of internal links

With many content-led link building campaigns, they are published somewhere on a website that is a little hidden away from the result of the pages. This can be for a bunch of reasons but essentially means that the architecture ends up looking like this with the orange page being your campaign:

The campaign isn’t integrated with the rest of the domain and kind of sits on its own.

Now, imagine that lots of incoming links start to appear that point to this page which is isolated, wouldn’t that look a little strange?

As an exception, this isn’t likely to mean much. But if it happens over and over again, it starts to look unnatural.

The content not linking to other pages to continue the user journey

If a piece of content isn’t relevant to the rest of the website, then it’s quite hard to add internal links or calls to action that make sense. So a clear signal for irrelevant content is a lack of links from the content to other pages.

Essentially, not only is a piece of content isolated in terms of site architecture, it’s also isolated in terms of linking back into that architecture.

This can also be common because if a piece of content is created just for the purpose of generating links, there is no incentive for the creator to link to product or category pages - that’s not what the content is meant to help with.

How to ensure more content relevance

We should accept that content relevance is important and something that Google can (rightly) hold us accountable for. So, how can we ensure that relevance plays a part in producing ideas for link building campaigns and that we don’t get sucked into just going after high volumes of links?

Start with your customers

More specifically, start with the journey that they take when finding your product or service.

When we come up with content ideas, we can fall into the trap of thinking too much about who we’re trying to get links from — bloggers, journalists, writers, etc. We trick ourselves into thinking that if we are a travel brand, then working with a travel blogger will mean that we’re getting in front of our target audience.

Unfortunately, this may not necessarily be the case.

So, we should instead look at the customer journey. There are various ways to model this funnel but here is one that we use all the time at Aira and an example for a B2B company:

This also shows that the journey isn’t always linear. Customers may move backwards in their journey as well as forwards and it may take a lot of steps before they commit to a decision. Google calls this the messy middle and is basically the stage when customers ponder their choices and are deliberating what to do next.

If you want to produce relevant content ideas for your link building campaigns, you need to start by understanding and mapping out the customer journey.

Use keyword research to inform idea generation

When we produce content ideas for link building, we often don’t think about keywords because the goal of the content isn’t to rank, it’s to get links. So we’re not really incentivized or motivated to do extra research for something that we’re not being measured on.

However, doing this can be a great way to increase relevance because target keywords for your brand are going to be closely aligned with the pain points that customers have, alongside the solutions that the brand offers to those pain points. By integrating these keywords into your ideation process, you can’t help but produce ideas that are close to the target customers.

Reduce focus on link volumes

If you have a lofty link target to hit, you are much more likely to produce content ideas that aren’t relevant to your brand. This is because in order to hit link targets, you know that you need a good level of link prospects to outreach to. Even if you have a very good link conversion rate of say, 25%, that would mean that you still need 100 link prospects for every 25 links that you want to build.

How do you get more link prospects? By widening topics so that you can target different sectors of bloggers and journalists.

Instead, the focus needs to be on link prospects that are closely aligned with your own products, services and customers.

This will naturally limit the link volumes that you’re likely to achieve, but you can be more sure that you’ll produce a piece of content that is highly relevant to because you’re moving the pressure to get high link volumes.

In summary

To summarize, try to avoid thinking of relevance as something that is binary. There are far more layers to it than this and as we’ve seen, we’ve only really scratched the surface here on what Google is likely to be doing.

When you do think about relevance, focus more of your attention on content relevance and ensure that content that you produce is unquestionably relevant to your customers and your brand.

By taking this route, you need to acknowledge that it may lead to fewer links, but is also more likely to put you in a position where you’re not worried about Google updates that may target relevancy in link building, as well as manual reviews by Googlers!

The ultimate added bonus here is that you’ll be creating content that isn’t just for links — it will be far more useful to regular customers, too, adding to the value of your work.

9 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q2 2022

Just as you were absorbing all the Q1 local search excitement, Q2 came marching along with a bundle of new happenings and surprises. Don’t worry if you missed out on any of the key announcements and observations — I’ve got a little list for you here:

1. Novel stats on persistent reviewers

Curtis Boyd included some statistics that I’ve never seen compiled before in his presentation at a LocalU conference. As captured in the above tweet from Joy Hawkins, 8% of unhappy customers or spammers whose first review is removed will come back and write another one. 60% of them will simply republish their initial review or one that’s quite similar, but 40% will make their second go even worse.

The takeaway here is that you’ve got to monitor reviews constantly, and the relief of removal can be short-lived unless you’re watchdogging your profiles and working to get anything removed that violates Google’s content guidelines.

2. Both Google and Yelp promote eco features

Yelp reports that searches for “plant-based” have seen a 56% average increase each year for three years running, and that searches for “EV charging” are seeing a 41% average annual increase. In response to growing global demand for more planet-friendly services, Yelp has debuted a set of new searchable attributes, including “EV charging station available,” “plastic-free packaging,” “provides reusable tableware,” “bring your own container allowed,” and “compostable containers available.” These are in addition to existing filters, like “vegan” and “bike parking”.

Meanwhile, Google is encouraging its local guides to focus in on local eco-friendly businesses and services. For example, Google suggests including sustainability details in reviews, mapping recycling centers, and adding recycling attributes to listings. Google reports that the top five most searched-for recycling needs are metal, electronic, cardboard, battery, and cans.

Take these signals from Yelp and Google as signs that the time has come for all local businesses to discover, develop, and promote the greenest possible practices they can implement. Sustainability is essential.

3. Major review takedowns follow on the heels of FTC warnings

We began 2022 with a new warning from the FTC that review platforms will be held accountable for the fake reviews they publish. Perhaps it’s a coincidence, but Google seems to have kicked into high gear with review takedowns. As reported by Near Media, the local SEO industry has seen a dramatic rise in complaints of review loss which began in Q1 and has continued through Q2.

Unfortunately, Google’s takedowns have been too broad and legitimate reviews are being tossed out with the spam. If local businesses you market have been caught up in Google’s new-found zeal for spam fighting, and are aware that legitimate reviews are missing, you can contact Google, but there are no guarantees that the reviews will be restored, and you may be better off simply keeping going with your strategy for continuous review acquisition.

4. Google declares products a local search visibility factor

Damian Rollison spotted a major update to Google’s document on how to improve local search rankings, in that they have newly-listed adding products to your GBP as a visibility factor. To regular readers of my column here at Moz, it will come as no surprise that Google is doing all it can to promote its shopping capabilities in its quest to compete with Amazon. As we’ve covered in the past, localness is Google’s one big advantage over Amazon, and given the massive carbon reduction in local vs. remote delivery, it will be better for all of us if more shopping is facilitated via Google’s localized product features than by any service based on long-distance shipping. Now is a great time to seize a visibility boost by filling out profiles with as many core products as are offered by the local businesses you market.

5. Google’s trusted store badge goes live

Speaking of shopping, and as reported by Search Engine Roundtable, Google is now rewarding certain merchants with the highly visible trusted store badge, as seen in the above screenshot of the Google Shopping interface. Remember that Google Shopping has filters so that customers can find local businesses. For a local business to earn this badge, Barry Schwartz suggests:

“...the badge is available to merchants who provide excellent shipping and returns services. Merchants receive a Trusted Store badge based on their performance across metrics relative to other merchants, including but not limited to shipping speeds, shipping and return costs, and return windows.”

Google has stated that such badges are appearing to deliver “stronger traffic to lesser known merchants”, and I would read this to mean that even a smaller local brand could find that the trust imbued by the badge could boost sales resulting from increased traffic.

6. Google testing “At This Place” feature

Saad AK spotted a test that will be of interest to local businesses located inside larger venues. Here, we see a listing for a roller coaster nested within a listing for a larger attraction. I have not been able to replicate this test, but it is a notable example of the increasing granularity with which Google continues to map local communities.

7. Business redressal complaint form finally gets much-needed new label

At long last, you can finally tell Google that “this business doesn’t exist” via the Business Redressal Complaint Form. As reported at Search Engine Land, this new option matters because it clarifies that what you’re trying to report to Google is, in fact, a non-existent business rather than simply complaining that a legitimate business has incorrect information.

When Google acts on reports of fake listings, it can clear away the debris that is standing between your client and higher visibility. When successful, spam fighting can produce some of the easiest local search rankings you’ll ever earn.

8. Adios Google My Business mobile app

I extend my condolences to all local SEOs who, like Claire Carlile, are bidding a teary adieu to the Google My Business mobile app and are being prompted to switch to updating listings via search and Maps, instead.

A lesson new local SEOs will quickly learn is one of self-protective detachment from any particular Google product or feature. They go away, they get rebranded, they dry up and blow away like autumn leaves. It’s always good to try new Google features when they roll out, but never tie your entire local search marketing strategy to them, because they are, by nature, experimental and can disappear at any time.

9. Place topic thumbs expand at-a-glance sentiment communications

Mike Blumenthal noticed this praiseworthy effort on Google’s part to further qualify the topics that people often mention in reviews. When you think about it, it’s not actually very helpful to know that people often mention something like “accessibility” relating to a hotel without any further context. Are reviewers saying that the accessibility is good or bad?

Thanks to that little thumb icon, this test lets us see at-a-glance that people are dissatisfied with the accessibility of this business. It’s amazing to think of how shortcuts like icons can convey so much within a few pixels of screen space. This is one experiment I hope we’ll see roll out more widely!

Onward to Q3

With the sunny days of summer stretching out before us, local businesses and their marketers should be keeping an eye on one major developing story: the outcomes of S.2992, the American Choice and Innovation Online Act. You may already have received frantic emails or other messaging from Google or Amazon urging you to believe that regulation of monopolies like theirs will hurt small businesses like yours.

Like many of my peers, I’ve been offended on behalf of local business owners. Their intelligence is insulted when told to be scared of powerful businesses not having the ability to preference their own products — to the detriment of diversity and innovation. In fact, I think most local business owners would be delighted if this bill became law and it resulted in more direct traffic to their own websites instead of to Google’s widgets, or a more diversified review landscape, perhaps even highlighting review platforms that might do a better job of handling review spam or communicating with SMBs.

Big tech is shelling out millions of the dollars society has helped them accrue in hopes of lobbying this bill into the trash can, but if their efforts fail, local businesses could be witnessing the start of a handoff that could actually place the ball back in our court — the court of local community, creativity, and choice. Sunny days, indeed.