Digital marketing is an always-evolving field. And sometimes it might be hard to keep up with all of the changes/updates. We at Geojet do that by attending the most relevant conferences on such topics as Local SEO, Local Marketing, Google My Business, or anything related to online maps and online reviews.
We’re getting a lot of insights from these conferences that make our job easier and more productive and want to share some bids of this knowledge with you. However, here we’re going to share only personal impressions and if you would like to get more details on it we would highly recommend you to visit these conferences by yourself next time :) With that being said, the next conference that we would like to talk about is Whitespark Local Search Summit 2021.
This conference is mostly about Local SEO and Local Marketing. It took place on September 28th-September 30th and was held entirely online. During 3 days 36 speakers covered a variety of topics: from visual hacks on how to improve your on-page optimization (Nadya Khoja from Thisisnadya.com) and how to do content marketing with (Sam Oh from Ahrefs) to the Importance of Local Listing Management (Greg Sterling from Uberall) and How to build communities for small businesses (Diana Richardson from Semrush).
The top-tier insights are:
- The photos in GMB should clearly represent what you do as Google uses Machine-Learning algorithms to determine the relevance of your business to a search query. To get visual insights from your images you could use Vision AI by Google Cloud.
- The importance of GMB is on the rise. However, other directories are still needed to be considered in your digital strategy because of Google Prominence. Google Prominence is based on the information about business across the web, including various directories. That’s why it’s important to provide universal data across multiple directories. If you would like to dig deeper into this topic we recommend you to check Why Listings Management Still Matters and Do Citations Still Matter for Local SEO?
- Google will rank your business based on relevance, distance, and prominence. According to Google: “A combination of these factors helps us find the best match for your search. For example, our algorithms might decide that a business that's farther away from your location is more likely to have what you're looking for than a business that's closer, and therefore rank it higher in local results.” For more information check here.
- That’s necessary to fight fake reviews in GMB. Do it in the following order: flag the review for removal and seek help on the Google My Business Help Community. The removal of the reviews could take up to a few days and Google has specific criteria for review removal. More information here.
You could have attended this conference for free. However, if you would like to get a video recording for the conference you should have gotten a VIP Pass, which cost 199$.
