Recent content by acharlton

Yes, I thought to check for that but found no evidence of it beforehand, but I did suspect it because their previous SEO company is shady as heck. It also doesn't necessarily show up in GSC or GBP insights, depending on how they do it and what tool they're using. Keep in mind that there are a...

GBP rankings and leads dropped off dramatically, yes, I'm sure. But to your point, the changes in reporting by Google have muddied the waters during the same period, making it difficult to see what happened.

Sorry I don't quite have the time to lay that case out! But I've mainly relied on stories from several of his current and former clients (I took his spot in a BNI chapter), the impossibility of ranking your GBP all over Phoenix for keywords not in your name or category, and weird patterns in the...

Geez! First of all it's just one client. There are plenty of fish in the sea. And second of all, I am far from giving up. Plenty of tricks in the bag of this 20-year marketer ;)

The owner noticed a massive drop in inbound calls. He starts doing searches for his business category. Can't find his business. He let me know and I did the analysis to quantify the ranking drops. The ranking drops were MASSIVE. I had already suspected that the previous SEO was using CTR...

Thanks for your response @JoyHawkins ! If anyone is still following, I did find out what tool they are using. Although they mainly use Local Viking for all their ranking grids, I found a ranking grid in their company Facebook profile that seemed very unfamiliar. I did some snooping and tied it...

I will explain again: The previous SEO was using a CTR manipulation tool. They shut it off when they lost the client. I gained the client and now the rankings are terrible 10 days later. I have proof of the manipulation from the ranking grids (current vs last report from the previous SEO) and...

There were no detectable changes to either. This happened immediately, before I could make any changes.

I didn't even touch their GBP yet. But, interestingly, their rankings tanked much harder for keywords that were (a) not in their name and (b) not in their primary category. They're a window & door replacement company and 'windows' is in their name & category but 'door' is not. They tanked harder...

In my case, the reviews were redundantly posted across several different yelp and google profiles and the original 7 implied her to be an ex-employee: "the owner uses people up and throws them away like garbage," etc. Both could be the reason for the removal. After they were removed the employee...

Thanks! The reviews were taken down. Eventually, the review management tool populated with the reviews I had flagged. I then appealed them, showing evidence that this person's previous reviews had been removed, the person was posting the same review everywhere and that they were a former...

Looks like the appeals tool started working. Just took a while (maybe a month?) to populate with the review removal requests so I could submit my appeal (even though they hadn't yet made a decision). Reviews can be stressful when you're just starting out!

Hi, thanks for the response! I did report them through the tool but got no response at all. Not sure how I can appeal it in that case?

Is there any way to get these ex-employee reviews removed? Her earlier 7 reviews implied that she was an employee so they were all removed by Google and Yelp but these 3 are stickier. Thoughts?

If you have a landing page where they choose a review site (Google, Yelp, etc.) you can prompt them. For example, for Away Clinic, we say "our favorite reviews say where they're going and what shots they got." Seems to work well so far. My main reason for using the landing page is that I'm...