Richard Beverly's Blog

Advance Your Agency is a BrightLocal series designed to equip you with the skills, knowledge, and advice necessary to take your agency operations to the next level.� Before you get to work understanding your client’s problems to be solved, you’ll first need to educate them on local SEO. To appreciate the value that your agency is going to provide, the client must understand the ins and outs of local SEO, and how you deliver that will vary greatly based on their knowledge level, learning style, and resources. In this month’s Advance Your Agency guide, I’ll talk you through how best to educate clients on local SEO, so you can get to work on improving your client’s prospects and showing value. Contents Why is education important? Getting to know your client Understand their knowledge level Uncover their learning style Educating your client Know your stuff Don’t just rely on one format Keep clients in the loop Take off your marketing blinders Dos and Donâ€

Ben Fisher is a Platinum Product Expert for Google My Business. He’s a master of the spam redressal form, is always on top of the latest news, and loves to share his knowledge with others. Here, he explains the new ‘Direct Edit’ feature in Google My Business, or, as he’s calling it, the Transparent Merchant Experience. In 2017, Google My Business (GMB) launched the ability to update your business information, make posts, upload photos, see how many views you have received, and more, within SERPs. The blog post they released was then titled ‘ Manage your business listing without leaving Google Search .’ Now fast forward to 2020, and they have upgraded the experience in a blog post titled ‘ Update your Business Profile on Google Maps and Search ‘. See the difference there? The main change is how Google says what a knowledge panel is now. As of 2020, it is no longer a business “listing”, it is a business “profile”. What is the goal of GMB Direct Edit? The goal is to meet merchants’

Many small local businesseses have a hard time optimizing their site for speed. Why is that? Well, site speed optimizations tend to require web development skills which most small business owners don’t have, and developers can be quite expensive. What can you do if you don’t have the skills or budget, but still need to improve your site’s speed? In this article, I’ll explain how you can make improvements to your site speed even if you don’t have access to a developer. Why improve site speed? User experience and conversion rates can be negatively affected if your site is slow. It’s very common that your potential customers browse their phones for local services while they are watching TV or while they are running errands. So mobile speed is super important for local business websites. Mobile searches surpassed desktop searches in 2016. According to one study, 56% of mobile searches done on the go have local intent . And I’m sure that today, that number is much higher. Compared to de

With so many changes happening in the world of local marketing, it can be a big job to keep on top of what’s new. Each month, we pore over all of the local SEO press to pull out the most important insights and changes, and create a quick and handy quiz to help local marketers feel sure they’re on top of the news. Answer the 10 11 questions below to see how you score on September’s stories. If there are any you’ve missed, you can brush up on your news knowledge so you feel confident you know what’s happening in local SEO. How did you fare? Share your score with us on Twitter using #LocalQuizness . To catch up on any of the news stories covered in the quiz, peruse the complete reading list below: Whitespark – 2020 Local Search Ranking Factors Presentation BrightLocal – Local Search Ranking Factors 2020: What Affects Local Rankings? Search Engine Roundtable – Google My Business Adds Health & Safety Attributes Sterling Sky – Google My Business Updates the Guidelines for Servic

At the end of August, Apple revealed it would be launching its very own ratings solutions within Apple Maps. Talk of “Apple reviews” flew around the Twitterverse and, as usual, there was a lot of conjecture about what this new feature might mean. Apple Maps ratings (yep, that’s right — ratings not reviews, though they may be on the way) has been in beta testing in iOS 14 and will soon roll out globally. The update was first spotted by Twitter user, Beau Giles. Source: 9to5mac Currently, Apple Maps relies on review data from third-party solutions such as Yelp, Foursquare, and Tripadvisor.� The news of Apple ratings comes after Apple Maps introduced a host of new features back in February, including favorite locations and indoor maps. With so much noise surrounding the announcement, we wanted to clear up what’s new, pose some potential questions and outcomes, and explore what this new feature might mean for local SEOs. Contents What’s New? Question Time! What do Apple