Author: John Jantsch / Source: Duct Tape Marketing < All Articles Transcript provided by Verbatim Transcription Services Back to P
Transcript provided by Verbatim Transcription Services
Transcript
John: Hey if you’re not getting found in your town when people turn to search you might not even exist. We’re going to talk with Mike Blumenthal. Really the undisputed king of local SEO.
This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Thriveleads. This is a tool that we use on the Duct Tape Marketing website thoroughly for content upgrades, for slide-in boxes, actually, we even used the visual editor for all the pages and landing pages we designed. So go check it out at ducttapemarketing.com, we’ll have a special link in the show notes for today and check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, this is John [00:00:57] and my guest today is Mike Blumenthal. He is the undisputed king of all things local search, in fact, he started a blog back eons ago called understanding Google maps and local search. He was one of the founders of a conference called Local You and now is a co-founder of getfivestarts.com a review service that helps local businesses. So Mike, thanks for joining me.
Mike: Sure. I think of myself as more of a professor [00:01:25] at this point.
John: Well I could have gone on and on but… I just high-spotted it. So let’s start with [Google my business 1:33] what has Google got going there? What’s the intention there?
Mike: Well Google dominates the — [00:01:43] of the funnel. Always has and their plan I think is to continue their dominance. They’ve never been good at — because of their geeky culture and the technical way it took for businesses to you know, achieve success there they’ve never been good at communicating that dominance right. When I go in an analyse local business I see somewhere in the order of between 70 to 90% of their key performance indicators coming out of Google whether they know it or not. And I think Google gets that, and I think what you’ll see in the next three to four months is Google leveraging that in a constructive, [00:02:23] way. I think the tests we’re seeing with this post-product and the call to action attached to the knowledge panel, my sense in conversations with Google is that we’ll likely role out in a May timeframe and I think that will put a face on Google [00:02:41] so that people — so that business understand where they can go to ad information.
John: Yeah and they’ve got so much clean up to do because of what we had, places and then they tried to shove it into Google+ and so I think — there’s still a tremendous amount of confusion out there with all things to do with you know, how do I get my local listings.
Mike: Right and Google’s always had branding issues right? I mean look at the [00:03:09] they had with SMS and text and chat at the moment right? Who knows, hangouts this, hangouts that, I can’t keep it straight [00:03:18] but yeah they’ve had huge both branding issues in local as well as technical issues, certainly the first margin to [00:03:25] starting in 2011 set them back tremendously and then the force separation from where local made the decision to go its own route starting in 2014 and now pretty much complete. I mean now when you create a local business listing you no longer auto-create a plus page, so I think that separation is going to be pretty complete. You know there’s one minor dangling issue and local is its own thing, although as you said it doesn’t really have a strong branding presence yet. And I think that from a technical feature point of view this Google post will become the face of Google local. When you can post information as a small business directly to the front page of Google for a branded search result, that’s where I think they’ve always needed to be and where they will be in six months.
John: Can we say that there are the most important local ranking factors today for a local business? To me, the real estate has gotten so cluttered on page one that for that local business that if they’re not ranking there, they have very little chance of survival I think, or at least it’s going to be very expensive for them to survive.
Mike: Right. You know what I did an interest case study last fall that I’m just writing up now in a small retail business but third floor office with no store level present right so they only attract new business from advertising and SEO, I mean that’s it. And what they saw was that they got about 58% of their new business came from Google, or came from digital and the bulk of it, 90% of that 58% came from Google. But Google you know, part of the problem I think people have with Google is they look at you know, how do I rank for this keyword, and Google has gotten so much more sophisticated than that. You know a keyword ranking analysis is like a slice of bread and ranking is like a loaf. And as a person moves to the geography, the ranking changes until Google delivers a fair bit of leads to many businesses. So while it may seem cut throat on the real head terms, I think in the medium and long tail terms and as more people have moved over to mobile 60% of searches are now mobile, and as they move through their environment if you’re located in a good spot, you’re going to get your share of Google leads. And it’s very difficult to measure that and prove that pre-sale but you can prove it post-sale with good key performance indicators in place that you’re measuring that you can prove it. That being said you asked initially about ranking and can we identify ranking factors you know Google never through a ranking factor away right and early on in 2008/2009 identified three major attributes to their ranking algorithm. Proximity, prominence, and relevance. And as — and over time you can see these attributes in a broad way becoming more important or less important. So with the advent of mobile, proximity became infinitely more important as they [unclear] in the radius of the search around the searcher, or they’ve improved on the desktop, they’re understanding where my desktop is located, they’ve done the same thing right. So on a typical mobile search, you might see a search radius in a crowded industry of a quarter of a mile, that’s it. And so certainly prominence has come to the floor in the global world. But we’re also — I personally you know did a bunch of research about relevance and prominence. And it’s clear to me that I use to think that the website for business was what was ranking for local. But the website is just one authority signal amongst many. And the other types of authority signals could be for example a strong Google+ presence, or a strong Yelp presence, or a strong [health grade 7:30] presence. Those are authority signals that transfer the local entity much like website strength transfers to a local entity. And so — and much like a newspaper article in the New York Times about a business transfers to the local entity. I’m seeing evidence that Google is indexing every word and every newspaper and when they can associate it with an entity they do. And that confers relevance and some amount of authority to that entity. So Google is looking far and wide for ranking signals and it’s gone beyond is a link more important than a review, is it more important than proximity. The algorithm is, does this business have the relevance to the search query and do they have the prominence based on authority at these sites that Google trusts and so it’s difficult to deconstruct that into one or two searching algorithms which is my objection to many of these tests that we see.
John: Yeah will you just — I believe gave a huge boost to the idea of local PR then didn’t you?
Mike: Yes I did. I mean if you — here’s an interesting test, if you go into Google Maps and you pull up a portal and type in the United States, you view the United States and you type in the words “lion killer” up comes that [00:08:51] business location of the fella who killed Caesar the lion in 2015, now that has nothing to do with links right? That has everything to do with the fact that every newspaper in the world wrote about this Dennis from [00:09:09] who shot the lion and Google has associated all that and you can see that, and it’s a fascinating test and you can see it in other areas too, some are a little grimmer. Like if you go in and type in again United States, you type in “school shooting” up come a list of 10 or so schools and when you do the research you find that those are the schools that suffered from some sort of you know, attack. And that doesn’t come from links this comes from newspaper articles.
John: So let’s go back in and of course you were trying to get me off of this topic but I’m going to go back to it. Let’s say saint Louis is a community that has a really interesting local ranking issue. The city of saint Louis itself is not actually very big and it’s not actually where all the business is in a lot of ways, it’s out in all the suburbs. So if you are a business in Saint Louis and you are outside the city of Saint Louis you still want to rank for Saint Louis plumbers, Saint Louis tree service. So what — so obviously proximity in some ways comes off the table. So how does a business go about trying to rank for what is essentially a local search but not really their local?
Mike: Well… obviously there’s three opportunities — four opportunities on the front page of Google these days for business. One is the local pack, one is organic results, one is video results and one is ad words. So I mean you have to work in the realm of what’s possible and if Google isn’t going to deliver you a local pack result no way no how and you have to explore one of the other three, you know that’s one side of the story. The other side of the story though is that — so in the studies I was doing I was looking at the issue of relevance. How does Google ascertain a category for example right? So you know you can give Google a category and Google would sometimes — and Google categories don’t go deep enough or don’t go long tail enough, but what I’ve determined is that Google is scraping categories from the other major local sites right so if you, for example let’s take the example of [00:11:29] which I’m intimately familiar with not from a habit point of view but from a research point of view I assure you. If you [00:11:37]…
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