Monthly Industry Roundup: September 2017

Location3 News: It’s been an active and exciting month at Location3, highlighted by the official launch of  the LOCALACT platform. The full release comes after more than a year of testing, gathering feedback, and developing the applications and features needed to provide a complete digital marketing solution for franchise systems and multi-unit businesses. The result is a platform that unifies localized digital advertising with organic listing and search management to drive measurable results for brands with a large brick-and-mortar footprint.

For more news and information on the latest updates and releases, please visit LOCALACT.com.

Location3 was happy to announce the promotion of Alex Porter to Chief Executive Officer. Porter has been with the company for nearly 15 years and previously held the title of Chief Strategy Officer and President. Porter shared his thoughts on the promotion:

“A promotion to CEO at Location3 is an honor and responsibility that I take very seriously. We’ve worked tirelessly to become a premier digital marketing agency, and I look forward to further embracing my leadership role at a company that values high-quality work and fosters a culture of performance and positivity.”

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN LOCAL?

Google Algorithm Update is Local-Only

Local SEO guru Joy Hawkins reported that on August 22, 2017, a Google algorithm update was impacting local search results. The update did not come with an official announcement from Google and is based on analysis from Hawkins. The update seems to be a response to a 2016 update of the Possum algorithm.

In that 2016 update, Google adjusted a long-established filter that sought to reduce instances of multiple listings of the same business dominating the SERPs. The update, however, had an adverse effect on businesses that were located in close proximity to each other. Businesses that were located in the same building, for instance, may be filtered out of search results on the basis of proximity and not because they were the same business. Hawkins provides this example:

“Weber Orthodontics got filtered after the Possum algorithm update for the term “orthodontist wheaton il” due to the fact that they had a competitor down the street — 325 feet from where they were located. This competitor had a higher organic ranking and stronger relevance to that keyword, so they were included in the results, and Weber was filtered out.”

For more details, the full article can be read here.

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN SEO?

Bing: Future of Links from Impression.

Bing Staffer Says Links to Be Less Important

In an interview with Impression, Bing Product Marketing Manager James Murray says links are set to become less relevant in search rankings. This isn’t a huge development necessarily, but it does continue the trend of search professionals predicting a rise in personalization and context over links when it comes to serving relevant search results. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

“There’s good reason why links have served their purpose up until now and I think they will continue to do so. But what we’re going to see is that, as the amount of data that we are able to gather and understand about users – through things like their search history and their live data such as geolocation, or maybe social context of who they might be surrounding themselves with at a given time – we will have way more ability to personalize search and to use different signals which will be able to govern our decisions on what is most relevant to the user at that time.”

20 of Google’s Limits You May Not Know Exist

Patrick Stox of Search Engine Land compiled a straight-forward list of limits on some of Google’s most popular tools. Here’s a few to consider:

• 10 million hits per month per property in Google Analytics. Once you’ve reached this limit, you’ll either be sampled or have to upgrade.
• Google’s crawl limit per page is a couple hundred MBs. That is according to Google’s John Mueller and represents a significant jump from the 10MB limit in 2015.
• There is no limit to how many times a site can show on first page. That’s right, one domain can take the entire page if it’s relevant enough.

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN PPC?

Google Attribution a Win for Marketers?

Google announced in May the release of Google Attribution, a product designed to “measure the impact of marketing across devices and across channels.” It was a positive step for PPC marketers who have struggled to produce fully credible and accurate data for brands and clients, according to a recent column from Andrew Goodman on Search Engine Land.

Goodman argues that while it’s far from a perfect solution, Google’s effort to establish an industry consensus on matters of attribution should be recognized.

“Relying on a large monopolistic player to enforce “truth” on an industry is far from a perfect solution. You’d love it if industry bodies or even government regulators would provide some help in that direction. But in the absence of much leadership elsewhere, Google it is. ”

For more in-depth analysis, the full column can be read here.

 

WHAT’S HAPPENING IN CONTENT?

One Argument Against the Infographic

There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the infographic is losing relevance, so why are content marketers seemingly obsessed with producing them? Location3’s Kody Pedersen takes a light swing at the content marketing staple in this blog post. Pedersen expands on why infographics are failing and suggests a few visual content solutions to replace the “outdated” medium.

Have any questions or thoughts about these updates? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @Location3.