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: You’re living in the past You’ve hit a brick wall You can’t see the trees You’re stuck in one tree 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 Even if you’re not quite-so-literally stuck in the past, you may be operating on an outdated sense of who your competitors are.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 ...

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 ref...

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 m...

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...

Google Autocomplete (often referred to as Google Suggest) is one of the first Google search developments that appeared on SEOs’ radar. Many years ago, Google Suggest was what powered Google Instant results, making a huge impact on users’ searching journeys. SEOs have been using it as a free keyword research tool. Yet there’s much more to this search feature, especially after all the updates Google has introduced, turning Google Autocomplete into a smart and predictive platform of its own. What is Google Autocomplete? Google Autocomplete allows users to easily complete their query by suggesting possible extensions of what they are currently typing: Google’s suggestions are dynamic — they instantly change as you’re typing your query. Google is trying to predict what a user means to type. These predictions are likely to impact the searching behaviors as people may instinctively choose a suggestion they never meant to type. In other words, Google’s Autocomplete should be an SEO prio...