What's New in Local Search
Once a month our in-house local expert, Mary Bowling, hands us her take on what's changed in the local search industry over the last 30 days. Let's jump straight in and see "What's New in Local Search" for August 2016.
BrightLocal conducts a consumer survey on the new local pack ads. They concluded that many consumers don't mind them as long as they are relevant to their search. What struck me most was that 47% of the respondents chose a listing because it had positive review stars showing in the pack.
AngiesList removes its paywall and now we can all see its verified reviews. Read this article to learn what that might mean for SMBs and SEOs. Later in the month, Garret Sussman gives us his take on the changes at Angie's List and lets us know that Angie is not (yet) marking up reviews and aggregate ratings with schema and the business listing content differs depending on whether you're logged in or not. So even though membership is free, people still need to create accounts and log in to see all of the content. Google, of course, is not going to log in.
Gib Olander explains what it takes to manage the data of big brands with many locations and multiple departments at each location (think SuperWalmart). It's not easy, but his solid advice lays out typical issues for you.
Google promotes its API for it artificial intelligence, Google Cloud Prediction, which it says " ...can help analyze your data to add various features to your applications, such as customer sentiment analysis, spam detection, recommendation systems, and more." It may already be informing things like the...
