State of local search overview

[James Watt]

Casey's article last week was a great one, and now Moz just published one more rough 'state of the union' address that's worth checking out.

The running theme with all these changes seems to be the following three things: Google is taking local seriously, Google wants to get more local data through its crawler, and Google really, really wants more reviews. But let?s not jump ahead of ourselves. First, let?s review some of the major changes that have occurred over the last few months.

read the full article here.

There's an overview on the new Google Insights dashboard, some bulk changes, some back end changes (you can apparently respond to reviews with the API now, so reviews are definitely becoming more important) and more.

The big takeaways in the author's view at least: schema is becoming more important, keep your citations accurate, get a good review strategy in place, and keep pushing for backlinks.

Any surprises? Things you're going to add, or keep doing? Things you disagree with?

 

[Linda Buquet]

Great share. Thanks James!

I have not had time to read either yet, but I could bet that anyone newer to the game, could read both and get a pretty good education!