Local Marketing Mixup Newsletter - May 3, 2023

Your Weekly Update Wednesday, May 3, 2023

I'm not crying; you're crying!

Certain SEO experts were surveyed recently to get their thoughts on what matters most for local rankings. (I guess our invite was lost in the mail like it was a Google verification postcard!)

Reading their report took all morning, so this newsletter may feel a bit rushed - because it was. Let's break down their thoughts on how the seven different ranking signals are trending in importance. THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU! Ok, not really, but here they are anyway, in perceived importance order:

1. Google Business Profile - still the most critical factor and way to get local customers. Beats a website, hands down.

2. Website Signals - professionals are starting to think that websites must be optimized for a Google profile to perform their best.

3. Reviews - yada yada yada...still very important. Get good ones. Get many of them. Get them often.

4. Link Signals - links from other low-quality sites are less important than ever.

5. Behavior Signals - customer actions on your profile (clicking, looking longer, calling, etc.) are believed to help more than they did last year. Google's recent reporting changes back this up.

6. Citation Signals - no change here - having accurate and consistent citations are just as important as they were last year.

7. Personalization - this had a significant increase year over year, most likely due to the wider adoption of Google Business Posts.

Our 2 Cents

Since you asked, we disagreed with a few of the group's theories based on our experience managing many Google Business Profiles across any industry you could think of. A common trend we picked up on was them saying the hard, time-consuming things that agencies don't like doing (because they're tough to do well) don't matter as much anymore. These tougher things include posting to Google regularly, responding to reviews, getting keywords in your reviews, and geo-tagging images. That didn't feel right to us - and we're pretty sure we're right.

We agree that behavior signals are more important than ever. This makes sense since we saw Google penalize profiles that were abusing this signal with fake traffic about a year ago. They'd likely only start to pay attention to this metric if they were planning to rely on it more.

Let us know what you think by getting in touch!

Did you know you're now one of the thousands of savvy marketers reading our weekly newsletter? Feel free to get in touch - it would be nice to meet more of you!

We officially launched ProfilePro today with our newest version! Our AI SEO Chrome Extension for optimizing your Google Business Profiles just got a major upgrade and fixed all the issues reported by our beta users these past few weeks. If you already installed it it should update automatically to our newest version (1.2.0) in the next 48 hours. We also just crossed 1,000 downloads! 🚀 We're going to keep enhancing ProfilePro to make life better for you, so if you have ideas feel free to let us know!

Download ProfilePro Chrome Extension

Over 90% of our clients made it to the top 3 in Google Maps in April. Want to talk about our services?

• Google Business Profile management services

• Listings management software

• Reviews management software

• Reputation management software

• Google Business Profile AI tool

• The best part? Everything can be 100% white-labeled

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Check out our guide on every possible ranking strategy for Google Business Profiles!

Google Updates You Should Know About

Google updates their algos regularly, and we check and then digest them for you. Here are the latest ones local marketers should know about:

• March 2023 - Core Algo Update

• December 2022 - Spam Link Update

• September 2022 - Product Reviews Update

You can find details on all algo updates here.