Fake Reviews have plagued Google My Business for the past 10yrs and with the increasing amount of fake review networks being created (to sell fake reviews to businesses) the problem seems to be out of control. Google My Business tackles these both manually and algorithmically, but as any regular reader knows, I typically call out […]

Vulnerable addicts are being left at the mercy of increased Rehab Spam in the UK. This rehab spam comes in the form of lead gen rehab listings where the rehabilitation centre displayed is not an actual treatment centre, rather a referrer to a rehab clinic which may or may not be registered with the Care […]

For whatever reasons there has been an uptick in users asking, “Will it affect my rankings if I change my Google My Business page to a SAB (service area business) listing?”. My answer (under certain circumstances) is no, your rankings should not be affected and to show this I switched my local business page to […]

Yesterday (6th August 2019) some hotel categories available in Google My Business were removed. They had been restricting newly verified listings the ability to add old categories for the past month, yesterday they removed them all for currently verified listings. Google did say that removed categories would be replaced with new similar categories, however this […]

There are a few basic local SEO steps that businesses can take to improving their overall online visibility. These two local SEO steps involve: Google My Business – for local search and maps Optimise your Website – Optimising your website for organic search results   Google My Business – Local SEO Steps If your business […]

Between Google trying to become the new home page and stiff competition in search results, you want to make sure that your local business stands out from the crowd when you land on Page 1. I talked about these structured data opportunities in my recent #Optimisey talk (video below) and how local businesses can take […]

On the 30th May something changed in Google that has stripped all local businesses from organic search results for the term – “Airport Transfers” (there may be other queries out there!)     This is before the announced June core algo update.   Local Intent Removed from Search Results As Stephen Davies mentioned in a […]

Google Maps announced that you could now find Holiday Lets on Google Maps (they have been working on this since 2017). What is particularly scary about these revenue spam listings is that there is no way to police them, either through “Suggest Edit” or via the Google My Business Spam report.   So @googlemaps announces […]

People adapt search queries over time and the big change that we have seen is that things are no longer all about a location, but instead evolved to the point where it becomes about time and things.   Buying Signals Advertisers have especially taken advantage of some of the phrases that customers have used because […]