/loc/ - Local SEO

been seeing this everywhere lately. someone's talking about how traffic is climbing but gbp actions are actually dropping because the context gets lost when you automate everything. it's like using ai to rewrite a slack message, you just end up with something totally sanitized and useless. they mentioned watching for declines at 28, 56, or 84 days to catch it happening in real time. honestly, i'm pretty skeptical about how easy that is to track across a massive portfolio without drowning in data. sounds like a nightmare if you don't have some crazy custom dashboard setup. anyone actually using these specific day markers for their audits?

article: https://moz.com/blog/local-seo-actually-works

been checking on a few dental clients and noticed some are showing massive service areas that clearly overlap with competitors way too much. it's like google is just letting them claim entire counties when they only have one van. i don't think the boundary tool even works right anymore if you can just stretch it to cover half the state without any flags. anyone else seeing these ridiculous radii lately?

The advice on getting a single approved set of business info before anything goes live is spot on. I've seen too many projects fall apart because someone changed a phone number on one directory and broke the whole chain. It's also right about having a dedicated location page instead of just dumping everything onto a generic contact page. Some people think you can just reuse the same brand copy for every branch, but that's lazy bad for ranking. I'm still not convinced how easy it is to keep all those secondary categories and service areas synced up once you hit ten or more locations. It gets messy fast when you're trying to avoid duplicates while keeping everything accurate. it's a full time job alone

link: https://www.advicelocal.com/blog/how-build-local-visibility-new-business-location/

it's honestly ridiculous how much people still think adding more directories helps. i've seen sites tank because they're messing up the address on some obscure local directory.
>just add more listings to boost authority
that's straight up nonsense and just creates more data conflicts for the crawler. it's actually a nightmare

anyone else seeing map drops after a massive citation cleanup?

google's playing favorites with the eea again lol. saw they updated the aggregator and supplier units to actually include things like dining and beauty salons instead of just hotels and flights. it's pretty wild that they're basically replacing existing units for these searches without saying much about what happens to the old local pack.
>The aggregator unit replaces existing units
if this actually kills the standard map pack visibility for small shops, we're in trouble. aggregators have to send a whole point of interest feed with addresses and ratings just to get in the game, which sounds like a nightmare for anyone not running a massive directory. businesses themselves don't need to do anything special yet, but if you want to actually look good, you've got to leverage feeds. i'm skeptical about how much this helps the little guys when the top-ranked provider gets expanded by default anyway. sounds like another way to funnel all the traffic into a few massive players. might be great a disaster for local visibility if the supplier unit only shows up when an aggregator is present.

article: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-adds-local-businesses-to-eea-search-result-units/589955/

lowkey just noticed semrush totally rebuilt the seoquake chrome extension. it makes doing those `quick page-level checks` way smoother since you dont have to leave your tab. it feels much faster than the old version but has anyone tried testing its impact on local audits yet?

full read: https://www.semrush.com/blog/seoquake-relaunch/

manually exporting all those reports before everything moves is such a chore. i'm already buried in work for this plumber client and now i have to double check every single lsa platform dashboard so the data doesn't just vanish.
>historical local service ad performance reporting does not transfer

really great. also seeing that weekly budgets are flipping to daily settings is going to mess with how i track spend for my cafe clients. if the numbers don't match up, i'm going to be stuck explaining why the budget looks weird. and god, checking all those callrail tracking numbers. hope they actually carry over like they say. i really don't have time to audit every single static number right now.

more here: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-services-ads-to-performance-max-what-to-audit-before-migration-recap/588906/

saw something interesting about establishing listings before even making the profile. apparently they had a case where they did all the distribution first and the profile got instant verification like two weeks later. i've been struggling with the dentist client's verification for ages so this sounds great in theory. it basically says google looks at yelp, bing places, and apple maps to verify what we put in the gbp dashboard. if the info is already scattered around everywhere else it makes the entity signal way stronger. honestly it just sounds like more manual labor for me when i'm already busy with the plumber's site updates. keeping everything consistent across every single directory whenever a client moves is such a nightmare. still wondering if this actually works for established shops or if it only helps new businesses with no footprint. seems like a lot of prep work just to avoid a verification loop.

found this here: https://www.advicelocal.com/blog/how-citations-help-google-validate-business-information/

google's new 'collected info' tab is actually kind of a mess. i was looking at a cafe profile earlier and some random text or whatsapp message must have updated their hours without me knowing. it's annoying because deleting the record doesn't even fix the actual listing if the data already synced to other fields. you still have to manually go in and fix everything else through the usual editor. i'm curious how much of this is actually live for us yet though since they're being vague about regions. me explain to my plumber why his profile looks weird, but honestly it just feels like more work to clean up after their automated assistant. probably gonna be another headache for client calls

more here: https://searchenginewatch.com/google-business-profile-now-lets-you-review-and-delete-collected-info/

use this json-ld snippet to define ur service area by adding specific coordinates to the

geoShape

property. it helps search engines understand exactly which neighborhoods u cover instead of relying on vague text **which prevents ranking in adjacent suburbs