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Hi everyone, thanks for coming today.

Google is always tried to model the local search by looking at the real world,

and then applying what it sees there to it's online products and platforms.

There we go.

But for a long time the algorithm was really a lot of smoke and mirrors.

And it was very rudimentary when Google first started displaying Google

local results back in 2004.

And as local marketers, we ended up doing a lot of really artificial

things that had no place in the real world of marketing

businesses to the people around them that could actually become their customers.

And what a long, strange trip it's been.

These were the original local search results back in 2004.

And then in 2007, we got gold stars in the results.

In 2008, we got a ten pack.

And then, that shrunk to a seven pack in 2009,

when Google started designating local search results with a mapping.

In 2010, we got some of the richest local search results we've ever seen.

It took information from the web site, showed images,

we thought we were really cooking with local search.

But by 2012, Google had shrunk those back down to just the basics again.

In 2013, we were amazed and pretty much baffled by these local carousels.

And now in 2015, we have local packs that fly out into

business listings that we're referring to as local knowledge panels.

And we also have snack packs, and

there's a chance, that at least for the immediate future, these

might become the local search results that we're seeing across all devices.

But Google's really learned a lot since 2004, and

it's really improved its algorithm.

A lot of that smoke has cleared.

It's technology has also improved, and we, as local marketers have to adapt to this.

There's a lot of things that we've been doing for years and

years that were aimed at satisfying these flawed algorithms.

So now that the algorithm has actually improved and

is using a lot more, and more realistic signals,

we have to do things that are more like traditional offline marketing.

So that we can be part of this real world.

We've gotta get rid of the smoke and mirrors on our side of things, as well.

That's what I mean when I'm talking about going back

to the future with local search.

Through all of this, the local algorithm has pretty much stood with proximity,

relevance and prominence.

And with proximity, what Google's asking,

is this business close enough to the area of search for it to be considered.

And this has changed over time, and

Google has really learned a lot from searcher behavior.

It has a really good idea how far searchers are willing to

travel to patronize certain types of businesses.

It's also, considers the inventory that it

has to choose from when it's showing local results.

And that affects proximity, as well.

For relevance, Google is asking the question, does this business do or

sell what the searchers looking for?

And for prominence, it's saying

what businesses of this type stand out in this location?

So this is the three things the local algorithm has always been based on and

probably always will continue to be based on.

This is a chart I've made of the different components

that go into local search success in 2015.

I'm not gonna go into all of it, but if you follow this,

you'll build a really solid foundation for local search success.

And I'm gonna try to highlight some of the things that have changed

recently that are going to spur us more towards doing these

traditional offline marketing tactics than the artificial things

that we've been doing trying to satisfy flawed algorithms.

In 2004 when the search results first came out, the Centroid from

which Google determined proximity, was pretty much the center of town.

And the local Post Office served as the proxy for the center of town.

Then Google got a little more sophisticated and started realizing that

different types of businesses tended to cluster in different areas.

For example, there were a lot of law offices around the courthouse.

So Google started adjusting its Centroid for proximity from that.

But in 2014, just about a year ago with the Pigeon Update,

there's been a major shift.

And as David Mihm said in the latest local search ranking factor survey,

the searcher became the Centroid.

That's absolutely huge.

Google is now determining proximity from the searcher's location.

And, of course, this is made possible by it's vast improvements in its technology.

A lot of marketers don't know how to react to this.

We're used to being able to make a business rank in a location

just by using the right tactics, but now google's really changed the game on us.

So I suggest that you start by trying to absolutely dominate the area

around the business.

If you cannot show up in the search results for

the people that are closest to the business,

you really don't have very much chance of showing up for people further away.

So this is what you've gotta get right first.

Then, think about expanding realistically from the business location.

It makes a lot more sense for this business, for example, to expand it's

marketing footprint out into places like La Jolla and Rancho Santa Fe,

than it does to try to rank for people that are way down South in Chula Vista.

Because post offices were considered the Centroid

at one time, a lot of people used PO boxes.

Google made that impossible by making it impossible to

verify locations that were using a post office box.

But when that happened, a lot of businesses,

especially service area businesses, started using UPS Store type or

mailboxes, etc., type addresses.

And we refer to those as virtual offices, but

they're really fake offices, they're fake locations.

And Google is now changed the algorithms to make these

fake locations, as far as UPS Store type addresses.

It's changed the guidelines and says they are not acceptable anymore.

Now, when we look at the search results, we still see a lot of these types of

addresses, the businesses ranking in the local search packs.

But anybody that's using those needs to be aware that

Google is continually reverifying.

And going through all of the businesses and

flagging some of them with particular traits.

And these UPS Store type addresses are among the targets they're going after.

So if you're using a UPS Store as your virtual,

or fake office, you better start thinking about coming up with a plan B.

Google's changed its algorithm a little bit with the Regus type offices and

DaVinci Suites, in order to reflect reality a little bit better.

So if you are using one of these as a dedicated office,

this is a place where you report to work every day, and

conduct your business you really don't have anything to worry about.

But there are also a lot of businesses that just use these every once in

a while to meet with clients, or

pretend to use them every once in a while to meet with clients.

And if you are doing this, you should be putting, and

well, Google really wants to see is the hours and

the days that you are there at that location.

So think about that if you are only there one day a week, and

lets say you're legitimately there, this is an even a fake location,

you're legitimately there one day a week.

But if you have your hours set correctly,

searchers are only gonna see your business as open that one day a week.

So that might not be a really good investment of your resources.

So think about what Google is showing in the search results.

And the fact that if you rank,

it still might not bring you very many new customers.

And if you're only using this type of location to try to rank for places where

you don't have an office or a shop or a store, Goggle really is watching you.

And I think it's only a matter of time before they find a way to shut down most

of these types of businesses.

One thing that Google hasn't considered are co-working offices, or

shared office spaces.

It kind of has this idea that

a business is not legitimate unless it has a permanent, physical location.

And that's really not reality in 2015.

There are plenty of us that walk around with our businesses in our pockets or

our purses or

our backpacks and we can essentially do business no matter where we are.

But the fact is, it's so easy for spammers to use these

types of locations that they're probably never going to be a good choice for

a local business that wants to rank in the local search results.

As far as proximity, Google needs to know exactly where you are.

And it needs to trust the information that it has about you.

And the best way to establish this trusted location information

is through what we call citations.

And this is Moz's glossary definition of citations, a mention of

a business name in close proximity to its address, phone number, or both.

Used by the search engines to weigh both the accuracy and

popularity of businesses in their indexes.

For a long time, we were all creating as many citations as we could,

in just about any place that we could do it, just the way we were doing with links.

Now, you really only need about 25 to 50 good citations

of trusted sources for ranking purposes from Google.

We really wanna emphasize quality of citations over quantity.

Again, this theme is pretty much the same as we went through with Linx.

First it was quantity, but now it's quality.

So let's shift our thinking on citations and really think about, first,

getting into the data providers.

And then looking at places that actually have the potential to send

customers to local businesses.

You also need to have the same information in your Google listing.

And Google has really made some major changes in the guidelines recently.

Just at the beginning of this year, it made some changes where it said,

do not use descriptors in your business name anymore.

And descriptors were essentially keywords.

And by using them we were stuffing keywords into our business name.

So make sure you're using your real world business name in your Google listing.

And if you haven't checked out these guidelines lately,

there really have been some helpful and specific changes,

where Google's telling us what to do with big brand multi-location businesses.

Those are very messy places to be, and now Google is giving us very

clear direction about how it wants us to treat those.

And just last week, Google also added a bunch, this is just a snippet of it,

a bunch of new guidelines for what it's calling authorized representatives.

And that pretty much describes almost all of us in this room.

Anybody who's representing a business and with a Google business listing.

And if you read these, they're really interesting.

Things like never make false, misleading, or unrealistic claims.

Never use harassing, abusive, or untrustworthy tactics.

I mean, this is really a big change for Google.

And in local search, we have had a really big problem

with sleazy marketers robo-calling small businesses and

trying to scare them into things that involve their Google business listing.

So we don't know how Google plans to enforce this and

we don't have any way, yet, to report the offenders.

But at least google is now laying down the groundwork.

They're setting the rules out there so that they can start

hopefully doing something about some of these, what I call, sleazy marketers.

As far as relevance, categories are gonna reinforce your relevance,

the categories that you choose in your Google local business listing.

And we used to have a bunch of categories.

We could go in and we could create our own custom categories if we wanted to,

but now Google has a much smaller set of categories for us to choose from.

And it's telling us to be very specific with our categories.

If you are a computer consultant, for

example, you want to make sure that you're choosing that as

your primary category rather than the more general category of consultant.

And you really wanna use the data providers to

reinforce these categories at Google.

If you have to put yourself in some marginal category that you don't think

really describes your business very well, you have an opportunity to use

these data providers to give Google more and better clues about what you do.

And luckily for us, Moz created a category tool.

So this makes it really easy to go in and

identify which categories are available at which data providers.

I went a little too fast there.

If you're outside the US,

you might find Mike Blumenthal's category tool a little more useful.

We also want to use our websites to reinforce categories.

And I like to structure a website around categories and sub-categories.

A lot of local businesses that have older websites, they have very flat

architecture on their websites and most of them are optimized for exact match terms.

But now we want to theme our sites around these categories and

subcategories instead.

And I found that one of the best ways to do this is to build sections of the site

with pages talking about your services, your projects,

your people and your products.

And I really like using project or case study pages.

These give you an ongoing opportunity every time that you do your work,

to write it up on your website and put it up there for people to see.

The Urban Land Institute here in Seattle does a good job of

putting up case studies about its projects.

It allows it to rank for a lot of long-tail terms.

This one is a little garage builder in Minneapolis.

He writes his own project pages, he even does a little bit of keyword stuffing.

But, he ranks for a ton of terms that are related to building garages and

the whole Minneapolis and St. Paul area.

And he puts pictures up on here, and not only does he rank for things,

people click through to these pages.

And when they get to these pages, they spend a lot of time reading them and

looking around on this section of the site.

This is exactly the kind of information that you'd want to see if you were

thinking about building a garage.

So use projects and

case studies on your website and you will never run out of things to write about.

As far as reviews, they used to be a really significant ranking factor.

Google wanted a bunch of reviews so

that they could compete with other review sites.

So they made them count a lot in the algorithm.

But that's not true anymore.

In the latest local search ranking factors survey,

we think that they account for about 10% of the algorithm.

So stop talking to your boss or your clients about,

let's get more reviews so we can rank better.

That's not why we want more reviews anymore.

We want more reviews because they help to attract more new customers to

the business.

So that what you should be talking to your clients and bosses about is finding a way

to elicit feedback from your customers in an intelligent way.

And then listening to what they have to say about about you.

And you really want to talk to them about fixing

business problems that people tend to complain about.

This is the process that we wanna use.

And what's gonna happen is when you're listening to your customers,

when you're fixing the things they tend to complain about, you will get a larger and

larger body of good reviews over time.

And that's going to help you attract more new customers to the business and

help the business grow.

Lastly, I want to talk about having a good, link profile.

And this is kind of ironic because, with the Pidgeon Update, getting

good links became much more important for ranking well in local search.

And, at the same time, a lot of people are being scared away from

doing anything that even remotely looks like link building.

Because of all the penalties.

So in local search, this is very ironic, and

we want to talk about getting real with links.

And by a real link, I mean a link that's gonna take somebody from looking at

a screen on an electronic device to picking up a phone or

coming into the business and, hopefully, becoming a customer.

The stay at this hotel, for example, started with an online search,

and then links were followed until the room at the hotel was booked.

These are the kind of real links that we all wanna be concerned about getting.

And when you think about it, local links can be a lot easier to get than links for

a national or global business.

Local businesses, they already have relationships with businesses and

people in their town.

They're already active in their community, so real people in real places.

Our role in this is to help them understand why they want links,

which is to help them attract more new customers.

And our role is also to help facilitate this process, to guide them through it,

to find opportunities for them to get good links, and

then to coach them on how to ask for these types of links.

We wanna grow local barnacles.

And by a barnacle, I mean attaching your business information to a website

that either ranks for something you want to rank for, or

is used by a lot of people to look for the type of business like yours.

And for local barnacles, most of us can start with

local authority sites like a chamber of commerce or a Better Business Bureau or

a convention and visitors bureau.

We want to look for these sites that rank well for

what we wanna rank for, and get listed there.

And go hyper local.

And what I mean by hyper local is at a community or neighborhood level.

And a lot of these hyper local websites, they don't get very much traffic.

They have low domain authority.

This one looks very nice, but some of them are very ugly and out-dated and

have dancing GIFs all over them.

But the people in those communities use them.

And think about it, if you have a website

about the area around you, that is of a lot of interest to you.

So you can get some traffic and

some branding by being listed on hyper local websites.

You also wanna build good local karma.

And this is a very old-school, offline marketing tactic.

To build good local karma, you wanna try to build your brand in your community.

And it's not that hard to do it.

You wanna sponsor events, you wanna sponsor groups,

you wanna donate to local charities and events.

You want to be active in the community, you wanna volunteer your services.

And you wanna offer discounts to targeted groups, figure out who's your target

market, and where can I get a link by giving those folks a discount.

In this particular example, it's a college website in New Hampshire.

And you can see that Ben & Jerry's has got a link on there by giving a discount for

college students.

That's a match made in heaven, so look for those types of opportunities.

And then you wanna move referrals online.

Most of these businesses already have other businesses that are referring

customers to them.

So it's not that hard to ask them,

hey, can you use your website to refer customers to me, too?

And when you're doing that, don't be afraid to link back to them if it makes

sense for the visitors to your website.

And also use local media.

Use local media.

Do not use PRWeb for a small local business.

Local media actually cares about local news.

In fact, they're the only ones who probably

care about a lot of the news that a small, local business has to share.

And when you're doing it, make sure that you include images so

that your content is a little more attractive for

them to publish, and a little more attractive for other people to share.

This is an example of a website in rural Virginia where

a hoarder died and they're having an estate sale.

Now, this is not very big news in most places, but

in this particular location, it made it onto the website.

So keep in mind that news varies by location.

Something that would never get published in big city media might be just right for

a little hyper local website or a small town newspaper.

So when you're building your foundation for local search success,

think about how Google's algorithms have evolved.

Think about how Google is doing such a better job

of modeling the real world than they ever have in the past.

And then up your game, get real, and start modeling what you do.

Excuse me, start modeling what you do to match the evolving algorithms for local.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE] >> Lots of good information.

The Twitter was kind of blowing up on that.

>> [LAUGH] >> So thank you for that.

>> Thank you. >> Now some very specific questions.

Adam Koontz, what about these local independent consultants?

We have a lot of consultants here, one-man shows,

one-woman shows, and they don't want to use their home address.

How can they rank locally in situations like that?

>> That's a real tough one.

What you're gonna have to do is work more on the organic side of things.

And if you can get your organic rankings up high enough,

make sure you have some good links coming into your site that show

that you are really a part of that community.

Then that's your best chance because without showing your home address,

it's very hard to build that trusted location information.

>> You talked a little bit about reviews.

It's not as big a deal as some people think it is,

like 10% of the algorithm, that's your best guess.

>> Mm-Hm.

>> If they aren't focusing on that, what are the two or

three things that they should be, what are the big pieces of that pie?

>> The big pieces of that pie are your website optimization,

your on-site website optimization, and your incoming link profile.

>> Okay, so Rand had a question about that.

And in regular desktop national search,

we see a correlation between no followed links and rankings.

We don't know that they're helping that much,

but there seems to be a relationship.

Do you think no followed links help in local search?

>> Yes, I think they most definitely help in local search.

>> You didn't even hesitate there.

>> No. [LAUGH] >> So no help, that's awesome.

So Jared Carns asked, you said quality citations over quantity.

What in your eyes qualifies as a quality citation, and for example, is Yext.

Would that be considered a good citation?

>> Yext is not really a citation.

Yext is a platform that's going to try to create citations for you.

So, depending on the type of business you have, that may or

may not be a good platform to use.

But really trusted citations are gonna come from the major data providers and

from the secondary data providers.

And you'll see those in the Moz Local Category tool if you'll go to it.

And then also the authority sites within your community and

even, hyper local sites,

anything that identifies you as being a part of particular community.

>> There's a lot of apps right now that allow you check-ins.

Facebook does check-ins, all sorts.

Do you see those being used as a kind of citation?

Do you think there's a correlation between that real world activity and rankings?

>> Yes, I do because,

I mean, most of those platforms are set up that they know if you're there or not.

So, you're checking in, that kind of gives Google a bit of

trust that you really are a real business, and you have a real location.

>> So, an actionable point may be to encourage those sort of check-ins.

>> Yes. >> Apps, things like that.

>> Yeah. >> Mm-hm.

>> Awesome.

Mary, before you go,

we have a special gift for you. [LAUGH]

>> This is our special Roger bobble head.

Can we get a close up on that?

Bobble head.

>> Like, boom, boom, boom.

>> [LAUGH] >> All right, and

we hope to see you back again Mary.

>> Okay. Thank you so much.

Mary Bowling, everybody.

>> Thank you.