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Focusing too much or solely on organic will present long-term growth roadblocks as local organic real estate continues to disappear and become more volatile

A typical unified local SERP campaign will include: Optimized GMB listing

Online reputation strategy (responding to reviews is just as important as gaining new ones) Google Local Services Ads (if applicable) Geo-focused PPC strategy (see below – use PPC to supplement organic visibility) Retargeting (GDN, YouTube, social channels) Local link building (referral traffic is going to be the new DA) Aggregated reporting Citations and NAP consistency

there are a couple of tools that will actually let you see results based on geo coordinates, which is really cool and very accurate. Those tools include the Local Falcon, and there is a Chrome extension which is 100% free, that you can put in your browser, called GS Location Changer.

these two levels, depending on what industry you are working in, it's really important to know which level you need to be looking at. If you work with lawyers, for example, zip code level is usually good enough.

if you work with dentists or restaurants, let's say, you really need to be looking at geo coordinate levels. We have seen lots of cases where we will scan a specific keyword using these two tools, and depending on where in that zip code we are, we see completely different three-packs

I am in the medical sector with user generated content (seems to be evil for G). Some hospital, goverment and pharmacy pages rank me out for keywords they dont have on the site.

Affiliate sites that did not properly disclose their affiliate links may have been affected.Truly excellent content appears to have been rewarded.Several elements of trust, as outlined in the Quality Raters’ Guidelines (QRG) were possibly reassessed.

A lot of ultra-spammy content may have been deindexed.

we believe that if something is outlined in the QRG, it means that Google is either measuring this algorithmically, or they want to be able to measure it algorithmically.

it was easier for us to gain featured snippets from our blog or our glossary pages

“Is” seemed to be the big trigger word for winning featured snippets.

Our on-page copy would have the H2 with the keyword (e.g. What is Employee Orientation?) and then the paragraph copy would answer that question.

How to influence the organic product carouselIn Google’s blog post, they detailed three factors that are key inputs: Structured Data on your website, providing real-time product information via Merchant Center, along with providing additional information through Manufacturer Center.This section of the article will explore Google’s guidance, along with some commentary of what I’ve noticed based on my own experiences.

Make sure your product markup is validatedThe key here is to make sure Product Markup with Structured Data on your page adheres to Google’s guidelines and is validated.

Submit your product feed to Google via Merchant CenterThis is where it starts to get interesting. By using Google’s Merchant Center, U.S. product feeds are now given the option to submit data via a new destination.The difference here for Google is that retailers are able to provide more up-to-date information about their products, rather than waiting for Google to crawl your site (what happens in step 1).Checking the box for “Surfaces across Google” gives you the ability to grant access to your websites product feed, allowing your products to be eligible in areas such as Search and Google Images.For the purpose of this study we are most interested in Search, with the Organic Product Carousel in mind. “Relevance” of information is the deciding factor of this feature.Google states that in order for this feature of Search to operate, you are not required to have a Google Ads campaign. Just create an account, then upload a product data feed.Commentary by PPC Expert Kirk Williams:“Setting up a feed in Google Merchant Center has become even more simple over time since Google wants to guarantee that they have the right access, and that retailers can get products into ads! You do need to make sure you add all the business information and shipping/tax info at the account level, and then you can set up a feed fairly easily with your dev team, a third party provider like Feedonomics, or with Google Sheets. As I note in my “Beginner’s Guide to Shopping Ads”, be aware that the feed can take up to 72 hours to process, and even longer to begin showing in SERPs. Patience is the key here if just creating a new Merchant Center… and make sure to stay up on those disapprovals as Google prefers a clean GMC account and will apply more aggressive product disapproval filters to accounts with more disapprovals. ”– Kirk WilliamsFor a client I’m working with, completing this step resulted in several of their products being added to the top 10 of the PP carousel. 1 of which is in the top 5, being visible when the SERP first loads.This meant that, in this specific scenario, the product Structured Data that Google was regularly crawling and indexing in the US wasn’t enough on it’s own to be considered for the Organic Product Carousel.Note: the products that were added to the carousel were already considered “popular” but Google just hadn’t added them in. It is not guaranteed that your products will be added just because this step was completed. it really comes down to the prominence of your product and relevance to the query (same as any other page that ranks).

The service area does not currently impact ranking for SAB’s. This means that you need to get creative to grow your business with GMB outside of your physical city. Ranking factors are in a constant state of change so this all may change one day

If moving isn’t an option, I would focus on optimizing the website, and the GMB landing page in particular, for long-tail search terms. Onsite optimization has a direct impact on local pack/finder rankings and long-tail keywords, which are less competitive.

Google said in September 2018 that neural matching impacts about 30 percent of all queries. We asked Google if that has increased, but have not received an update.What is RankBrain? Isn’t it similar? Google told us in 2016 that RankBrain (see our RankBrain FAQ) is also an AI, machine learning-based system that helps Google understand queries.Google said a good way to think about RankBrain is as an AI-based system it began using in 2016 primarily to understand how words are related to concepts.So what’s the difference between Neural matching and RankBrain? Google put it this way:RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.Neural matching helps Google better relate words to searches

Why it matters. The truth is, there isn’t much a search marketer can do to better optimize for RankBrain, as we said in 2016. The same seems to apply for neural matching, there doesn’t seem like you can do anything special to do better here. This is more about Google understanding queries and content on a page better than it currently does right now.That said, it seems to indicate that search marketers need to worry a bit less about making sure specific keywords are on their pages because Google is getting smarter at figuring out the words you use naturally on your pages and matching them to queries.We asked Google if it has additional recommendations around neural matching and RankBrain and were told its advice has not changed: Simply “create useful, high quality content.”

Google’s neural matching versus RankBrain: How Google uses each in searchNeural matching helps Google better relate words to searches, while RankBrain helps Google better relate pages to concepts.

If the competitor bidding on your brand name is of similar size to you or smaller, it’s potentially not worth getting involved in a war here – you’ll likely struggle with ever-rising CPC’s and CPA’s and not be able to make this run profitably.

if you’re the smaller brand you’re likely in really good stead to start bidding on the competition and pulling in some cheap traffic with little to no downside.

If you’re a bigger brand or are looking at going against a brand that’s more evenly matched with you in terms of size, it can be a very expensive game and will not always lead to profit. If you’re still opting to run with competitor bidding, make sure to keep on top of your cost per acquisition and profitability metrics within the business to make sure you’re not burning cash on competitor keywords in an unprofitable pursuit!

If a query contains more than one word, Google will try to return search results that consist of all the pages that contain the union of all of the words found in a query.

a page with a query term in a more important place on the page, such as the page title, may rank higher than if the query term was in paragraph-based content on the page.

Another Google patent tells us about a different inverted index of the web for complete and meaningful phrases used with phrase-based indexing. This means that Google keeps track of frequently co-occurring phrases on pages of the web (unlike LSI Keywords).

Posting about a single topic looks much better than having a long post that lists all your services.

we have not found that the content used in the Google Post has any impact on ranking, (for example: posting about “dog bites” doesn’t make you rank higher for “dog bite lawyer) so I would suggest focusing your posts on keywords you’re already ranking for that could use a boost in click-through-rate.

Meanwhile, in China – which is home to the world’s largest internet population – the inverse is taking place as web search engines fall steadily out of favour due to a vastly different internet landscape and differing search habits.

Mobile searches for “best” increased more than 80% in two years, while searches for “where to buy” grew by 85%

When analysing the top 20 ranked search results for any given query, BrightEdge found that 47% differed between mobile and desktop. And 32% of the time, the first page that ranked for a domain on any given query differed between desktop and mobile.

Google uses proximity to deliver local results and does not use zip codes. All searches are affected by the proximity factor, but businesses with more dense competition will be affected the most. Organic results are affected by proximity but much less than Google Maps rankings. Checking rankings by zip code center does not always provide a complete or meaningful picture to base optimization decisions on.

Google could care less about what zip code you are in when performing a search, it only cares about distances when it comes to local businesses.

In order to deal with this distance factor, rank trackers have adapted and are now scanning with many points instead of one. A grid is laid out according to distance and each point reflects a different result.This gives a much better picture of what the rankings look like around a business as it takes into account the granularity that the algorithm actually produces.

If you use WordPress, if you use Yoast plugin, you can actually have your title tags update automatically year-to-year or even month-to-month leveraging that. It's not right for all circumstances, but for certain keyword queries it works pretty well.

80% of the answers delivered by Google’s voice assistant came from the three top results in search engine results pages.Even more, 60% of the results came from featured snippets and 70% overall came from SERP features.

If you think of optimizing the paragraph for the intent of voice, make sure it’s around 42 words,

SEMrush found schema was indeed in use in the vast majority of results, but 36% of the answers given by the Google Home devices contained no Schema at all.

Target question-based keywords. Check if there is a featured snippet on the SERP and what type it is (paragraph, list, table etc) using a tool like Ahrefs. Keep your paragraph and sentences fairly short. Answer the query as directly as possible. Structure your content with logical subheadings (H2, H3, H4 etc). Use tables to display any data. Include the question within the answer if possible. Include a summary at the start or end of the content.

consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description. For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse. Page-specific data is a good candidate for programmatic generation. Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don't give users a clear idea of the page's content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

Small ranking changes consistently happen when your re-run ranking reports in competitive industries.

like many of the Google My Business features, we found that the services menu has no impact on ranking.  Wondering which fields do have an impact?  See our articles on categories, the business name, reviews, & the website field.

While Google is more likely to rewrite meta descriptions for long-tail keywords, it’s only by a small margin.

Surprisingly, it seems that keeping your meta descriptions within limits doesn’t change the probability of Google rewriting them much.

Relevant and compelling meta descriptions entice clicks, so they’re still worth writing—even though they’re only shown only 37% of the time, on average.That said, if your site is huge, it pays to prioritize pages that:Already get organic trafficWere created to rank in GoogleAre likely to get shared on social media (where the meta description will be used for the social snippet description in the absence of OG tags)