What's New in Local Search for May 2016
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 May 2016.
Ads are tested in the Google Local Finder. Once again, they look just like the organic listings with the addition of the word Ad to them.
Google changes the types of ads it displays in Maps and the places where ads with location extensions will appear. If you're doing PPC for local clients, this is a big change that could significantly affect your campaigns.
There's a new ad format for nearby ads on mobile that makes them nearly indistinguishable from non-paid local results. They appear first and that section of the search result pages looks amazingly like a local pack followed by a map.
YP.com makes a bid for Yahoo. YP's sales force pitching Yahoo's ad platform could be good for both parties. Whatever fate holds in store for Yahoo, it's bound to be pretty complicated.
Darren Shaw explains why you need to discover ALL of the NAP variations for a business BEFORE you begin the clean up process. And he tells you how to do that. In my experience, there are way too many SEOs out there who make a cursory swipe at this but don't dig deep enough or pay enough attention to the details to a decent job of …
- discovering bad data
- Knowing what to fix, what to fix first and what you can let slide and
- Actually clea...
