Posts by Mary Bowling

Many small businesses can benefit considerably from Google AdWords advertising if their ads are seen by the right searchers.

The first thing to take into account is whether to set up a managed account or to use AdWords Express. Express used to be called Google Boost. I think of it as automatic AdWords.

AdWords Express

This product was a brilliant way for Google to get more small businesses to advertise online and gives SMBs a quick and easy way to participate in ppc advertising without having to learn how to use AdWords, which becomes more complex all the time. With Express, all of the advertising budget goes to ...

We start seeing the results of the Venice update settle in to the SERPs:

• Personalization is now baked right in unless you purposely take action to prevent it-not being signed into a Google account is not enough.
• More true Local businesses appear in the organic results and higher up in the results, even when a geographic term is not included in the query.
• Local directories seem to have been given a boost in the rankings
• Organic and Local results are less distinct to the average searcher and are woven together in the results.
• One Boxes are back- big time!
• Descriptions disappeared from the Local packs-at first this was thought to be a bug, but it ...

GroupM recently did a study that highlighted the lack of proper execution by national advertisers to achieve success at the local level. According to the survey, only 40% are actively managing local business listings like Google Places. You can see the full study here.

Anyone who has actually dealt with large, national retailers or service providers regarding local search is probably not surprised. I regularly see evidence of a crippling lack...

Bill Slawski analyzes a 2004 Google patent regarding geographic location that gives us more clues as to how to structure a website for local search. This talks about your rankings being help by having a location within a cluster of like businesses that's well worth reading.

There's an online uproar regarding Bruce Clay's Paid Inclusion announcement and quite a bit of speculation regarding what it was/is exactly. I think it was/is something akin to the Yext Power Listings, which seem to be enhanced local listings that are distributed to partner sites. We still don't know for sure, but here's Bruce ...

Navigating Google Places can make even the most sophisticated and patient SEO want to pull their hair out. Face it - it's confusing, slow moving and chock-full of contradictions.

With that in mind, we asked our local search expert Mary Bowling, to do a private recording of her recent SMX West presentation for our SearchEngineNews.com Pro members. Within this presentation Mary uses a real client as a case study to show how she navigates through the common pitfalls that every local search optimizer will run into at some point.

What Google has termed the Venice update quietly rolled out over the course of a month beginning in late January 2012. There was no one big change we saw happen on any specific date. Instead, we watched intermittent changes in rankings and in the way Local Search results were displayed over that time period. The SEO community attributed some of it to testing and some of it as signs that an update was eminent.

Then, on February 27, Google outlined 40 changes it had made in the past 30 days, including a Local Search update it had named Venice. Not much other information was given, just these two no...

Google announces plans to map the indoors and releases the capability in Google Maps 6.0 for Android. A person using this latest version of Maps on their mobile device can see detailed floor plans of some airports, malls, train stations, large stores and other public buildings. Building owners are encouraged to upload their own floor plans here. This is obviously an off shoot of the MapMaker projects and is yet another way to get users to create content for Google. Who know what evil ways spammers will be able to use it to harm their competitors, as being logged into a Google account seems to be the only requirement to create and submit floor p...