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Advice Local’s 2020 Year in Review – What Did You Accomplish? | Advice Local

What are you doing in 2021 to better help your local business clients? We accomplished a lot at Advice Local in 2020 to make it easier for our agency & local marketing partners to help their clients get found in Google Maps and organic search.

Advice Local’s 2020 Year in Review

Today we would like to do a 2020 Year in Review with you.

1. Breakthrough Voice Profile Technology Is Now Available on Judy’s Book

Each business listed in Advice Local’s technology has all of the following applied to their business’ listing on Judy’s Book in real time – and it’s all done automatically.

  • Local Business Schema
  • Review Schema
  • FAQ Schema
  • Speakable Schema

2. First-Class Conversational Voice App Technology Is Now Available

For platform partners, this technology integration is available in your partner dashboard. You can create a voice app for any active business listing within our technology.

  • Using the business’ information in our technology, we’ll create a list of frequently asked questions and answers.
  • Features such as adding a Welcome Message, Help Message and Exit Message are options also.

Once finished completing the app information, you simply place the order. Get more details on our voice app technology here.

3. Add Markup That Voice Assistants Love to a Local Business Website

Within the Advice Local dashboard, for each business’ active listing, there is a section entitled Voice Search Data. Within this section a JSON-LD script is available for copying & adding to the business’ website. This enables voice assistants to answer frequently asked questions about the business in voice queries. And here’s more on adding Local Schema, FAQ Schema and Speakable Schema to your clients’ websites.

4. Winning With Voice Search – Tips & Tricks Download

Voice search is more important than ever. Statista estimates that more than 8 billion voice assistants will be in use by 2023. This download, Winning With Voice Search, walks you through how to make this information available to voice assistants – and in a format they can understand.

5. Google My Business Management Just Got Easier

Our Enhanced Google My Business tool makes it easier for you to manage multiple Google My Business listings from a single dashboard. Through our tool you can schedule GMB posts, upload images that include EXIF data to the GMB listing, add questions & answers, respond to reviews, access 18 months of historical insights data and more.

6. Google My Business Sync Keeps Your Client’s Listing Up-to-Date

Google My Business Sync (or GMB Sync) is available for all partners through the dashboard. We do not require the use of our GMB Claiming service to access this feature. You can easily update the GMB listing information through our dashboard or simply sync the data to our listing management solution to monitor it. GMB Sync makes it easy to keep your client’s Google My Business listing up-to-date.

7. Advice Local Introduces the Google Authority Score

Advice Local has developed an algorithm called the Google Authority Score (GAS) which is available to our partners exclusively. This score calculates how well a business’ Google My Business listing is performing in Google Maps. The score is calculated based on the usage of the features within a business’ GMB listing.

8. Get the Secrets to Increasing a Business’ Online Authority

Google’s E-A-T (expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness) is a component of how Google directs its Search Quality Raters to evaluate a website’s content. Our newest download, Applying E-A-T to a Google My Business Listing, walks the reader through how to apply E-A-T to a business’ Google My Business listing to help it appear more often in the Local Map Pack, also referred to as Google Maps.

But Wait, There’s More to What Advice Local Has Accomplished in 2020

Above, we’ve summarized the most impactful moments that are helping our partners to better serve their local business, service area businesses and brand clients. Some of our additional accomplishments include:

  • Welcoming new directories and data providers into our network
  • Upgrading our API connections so we can share a business’ attributes beyond the name, address & phone number (NAP)
  • Switching some directories from an API partner connection to a direct API connection

The future is bright for local businesses. It’s important that you have a partner that is providing best-in-class listing management & technology solutions.

#AdviceLocal’s 2020 Year in Review – What Did You Accomplish? by @BernieColeman #SEO
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We have a solid 2021 roadmap, and we’ll be continuing to roll out new features and improvements to our technology over the coming months. If you haven’t taken a tour of our technology recently, it’s time to act. Request a demo today – you’ll be pleasantly pleased with our listing management solutions.

 

The post Advice Local’s 2020 Year in Review – What Did You Accomplish? appeared first on Advice Local.

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Local Business Marketing in 2021

Do you remember back in October when I talked with you about planning seasonal marketing campaigns? How did it go? Were you able to help your local business clients get more business?

As a reminder, I suggested you call and email your clients to find out what they had planned – and if their answer was “nothing,” to help them make that plan! From there I wanted you to take action and implement any necessary changes to their Google My Business and other business listings.

I even gave you some tips and tools to make it easier, such as creating a timeline for the activities that needed to transpire, and to use the available scheduling tools to help them implement their marketing plan.

While the holidays are not yet over, hopefully your focus is also on how you are going to help your clients keep the momentum (or improve it) in the first quarter of 2021.

We all hoped COVID would be over by now, but it seems it’s going to follow us into 2021. In North Texas, occupancies are dropping back down to 50% capacity at restaurants and such. The trend of mandates and consumers being cautious about the businesses they frequent is continuing.

Answer These Local Marketing Questions

  • How can you help your local business clients continue to get new customers?
  • How can you help them build trust with consumers online?
  • How can you help them demonstrate their expertise?

Over the past several months, I’ve been sharing new strategies and available features with you. As we inch closer to 2021, the above questions remain extremely pertinent, so let’s revisit just how you can help your local business clients.

1. Google My Business Optimization

Make sure your clients’ Google My Business (GMB) listings are optimized to share what their COVID procedures are, and that the business’ website has a page discussing it. Utilize all the attributes features that Google has made available.

2. Leveraging E-A-T for Local Business Marketing

That’s right – expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) can help you better service your local business clients. While Google is referring to a business’ website content when they discuss E-A-T, this can and should be applied to a business’ online presence everywhere. Consider E-A-T as it relates to a client’s GMB listing, their social media presence and for Pete’s sake, the business’ directory listings!

3. Give There Local Marketing Some GAS

We developed the Google Authority Score – we call it GAS – to help you and your local business clients better understand how they are doing online, specifically as it relates to their Google My Business listing.

Setting Up Local Businesses for Success in 2021 by @BernieColeman #Marketing #Business
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Take a Peek at Our Local Business Marketing Solutions

A new year is almost here – in fact it’s right around the corner. At Advice Local, we’re dedicated to helping you. Have you given any of our new product features a test drive? Request a demo and start 2021 off big.

You’ll see how our listing management services, voice search app technology and our Google My Business tool can help you! These add-on services not only help you to better serve your clients, they make your work easier – and offer additional services you can up-sell to your clients.

 

The post Setting Up Local Businesses for Success in 2021 appeared first on Advice Local.

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It’s Time to Plan Seasonal Local Marketing Campaigns

The holiday season is right around the corner. If you haven’t already started planning seasonal local marketing campaigns for your clients you need to get busy. You can guarantee their competitors have already gotten to work.

And in response to this fact, today we’re going to give you some steps to get you started and help you outline a plan. Along the way, we share some tips and tools we use for our campaigns.

First Thing – Call/Email Your Clients

You need to know all the important information about their holiday campaigns.

  1. Are they changing their business hours for the holidays; which days will they be open and closed, etc.
  2. Find out what, if any seasonal offers and discounts they are going to have and when.
  3. If the client doesn’t have a campaign planned, this is the perfect opportunity for you to demonstrate your value to them by helping them create a plan.

Take Action

Once you gather the specifics about a client’s holiday campaign, you’ll need to create or gather quite a few resources.

  1. You need to make sure your client’s business listings are updated with the information about their holiday hours, etc.
  2. If you do the client’s social media, you’ll need to order graphics for use online within posts. Perhaps you need seasonal social media cover images created, or banners for the home page.
  3. If you manage their website content or Google My Business, you need to get content created for use online in the form of posts and/or videos.

Create the Timeline & Schedule the Activities

There are several holidays coming up so most likely, you can’t just put up a single image, post or offer and consider it completed. You’ll need to leverage some tools to make it easier.

  1. Update your client’s business information in your Advice Local dashboard. With a few clicks you can update their listing information and trust us to distribute it to the top directories and data sources.
  2. If you’re creating content for WordPress websites such as a blog post, schedule those in advance through the scheduler. Use tools such as Hootsuite and Facebook’s native scheduler for social media posts.
  3. Since you cannot schedule posts, offers & images in advance through the Google My Business dashboard, you’ll need a tool to complete this for you. Our Enhanced Google My Business tool enables you to schedule for a single location or multi-location brand with a few clicks. It’s super-easy to use, affordable – and so very powerful.

Consider Using a Voice App

When your clients have a special campaign going, what better time to introduce yet another way to help them get found online? You can update the custom Welcome Message within the voice app to include seasonal messaging. Once the voice app is live, edits are in real time, so you can change the message as the holidays change.

Creating a conversational voice app is simple to do with our technology. We pull the business’ information from the Edit Client section and populate the answers to the common questions automatically.

Creating a local marketing campaign for your clients is an absolute must. For instance, perhaps you manage only a few components of their online marketing. This could be your opportunity to introduce them to your other services, or provide support to your partners. Either way, now is the time to act, because you know their competitors already have – or are about to.

It’s Time to Plan Seasonal Local #Marketing Campaigns via @Advice_Local #Business
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We’re Here to Help

At Advice Local we are all about making local marketing easy for our partners. Request a demo today or drop an email to your account manager if you are already a partner.

We’re happy to demonstrate how our listing management services, Google My Business tool, or conversational voice app can help you to better help your clients get found online in desktop, mobile and voice search queries!

The post It’s Time to Plan Seasonal Local Marketing Campaigns appeared first on Advice Local.

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Winning with Voice Search – Tips & Tricks to Get More Voice Search Traffic

Voice search is more important than ever. Statista estimates that more than 8 billion voice assistants will be in use by 2023. Question – do your small business and brand clients have a voice presence?

At Advice Local, we take helping our agency and local marketing partners very seriously. What worked yesterday to help a local business or brand get found simply may not work today. This is why it’s important to have the best voice presence solutions available at your fingertips.

The Meaning of Voice Search Is Evolving

For a business to get found in voice search queries, you must have the business’ information and the most common frequently asked questions about the business available to the voice assistants. While this may seem simple, it’s definitely not.

Our newly released download, Winning With Voice Search, walks you through how to make this information available to voice assistants – and in a format they can understand.

In this how-to you will:

  • Explore what makes a business voice search-ready
  • Study the benefits of a conversational voice app
  • Get insights on the voice search generation
  • Dig into voice search habits
  • Discover why content is king in voice searches, too
  • Learn how to win more featured snippets

This voice search how-to is short, sweet and to-the-point. I guarantee you’ll be able to read it in 5 to 10 minutes. Once finished, you’ll be ready to start implementing and optimizing for voice search right away.

Winning in Voice Search Requires a Voice Presence

While we have many features available through our presence management solution to help you get a business found online, today I’m going to focus on our voice technology.

Advice Local Voice Technology Features

  • Submit enhanced data for a business to the Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
  • Technology that generates common frequently asked questions.
  • Submission of a local business’ data to key sources that voice assistants trust.
  • Voice Profile Judy’s Book listing.
  • Voice search data markup for each business’ location listed with us.
  • First-of-its-kind Voice Search Readiness Score within the reporting dashboard.
  • Voice Search Readiness Test that displays a “ready” or “not ready” status.

While Advice Local has been helping businesses get found in voice searches all along, today we can help you do it in an even bigger way.

How We Make Voice Search Data Available to Voice Assistants

Did you know that even if a searcher does not specify “near me” in their voice query, that voice assistants will still provide results based on proximity? And knowing that, ask yourself: Are the local businesses I represent getting found by voice assistants?

#Voice Presence Is a Must – We Have the Technology and the How-To by @BernieColeman #SEO
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Voice Search Optimization Help Is Available

A study by BrightLocal reveals that to show up in search results for voice searches, local businesses must meet criteria that include components like this:

  • How close the business is to the searcher
  • How the business interacts with reviews
  • Number of backlinks to the business’ website
  • The business activity level on social media
  • Business’ visibility on industry-specific and local directories

All of these features are built right into our solution. Request a demo of our local presence management solution to learn how we can help you today!

Have you grabbed our voice search tips & tricks download yet? Well, now’s the time!

 

The post Voice Presence Is a Must – We Have the Technology and the How-To appeared first on Advice Local.

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Google’s latest change to service areas within the Google My Business listing is causing concerns.

As you may or may not be aware, Google announced on November 5 that Google My Business (GMB) listings will now have a limit of 20 total service areas. This means any listings with more than 20 service areas specified will need to update their listings.

Within the announcement, Google stated, “Businesses with more than 20 service areas will receive suggested updates to their service areas to cover the same geographic area while only using 20 areas.”

At first glance, you may think, “Thanks, Google, for making these suggestions for us,” and if so, you’ll definitely want to think again. Keep reading to find out why.

The Google My Business Service Areas Goof-Up Is Causing Concern

The goof-up I am referring to above is tied to the service areas Google is suggesting. For one of the franchises we manage GMB listings for, Google has pushed out their suggestions and the service areas don’t make sense. Some are not even close to the businesses’ actual service areas. For one location, they are recommending a school district as the service area. This is a big goof-up and an even bigger concern.

So, What’s This Google My Business Service Area Change-Up Mean for Businesses?

  1. You need to audit the GMB listings for all the service-area businesses you represent right away.
  2. You should probably make sure your local business customers realize you are aware of the change and that you are on top of the issue.
  3. You need to put a plan in place to review all your clients’ GMB listings on the regular.

The proof is in the pudding, and Google is proving once again that while they think they know what is best, this isn’t always the case.

Are You Taking Full Advantage of Google My Business?

If you answered Yes to all these questions, great job. If not, be sure to click the linked text above. We have a how-to on each at the ready for you!

Is Google’s Service Area Goof-Up Impacting Your Clients’ #Google My Business Listings? asks @BernieColeman #SEO #GMB
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We Have More Than Advice — We’ve Got Solutions, Too

 At Advice Local, we’re all about helping our local marketing and agency partners to help local businesses get found online! Our listing management services is one of the partner solutions that could be perfect for you. Request a demo today to learn more.

The post Is Google’s Latest Service Area Goof-Up Impacting Your Clients’ Google My Business Listings? appeared first on Advice Local.

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Build legal and healthcare niche citations with listing management.

As you know, I’m all about helping local businesses get found online. While I would love to tell you ‘list it and forget it’ works like a charm, this is truly not the case.

Building Trust Starts With a Solid Listing Management Foundation

To build trust amongst search engines and consumers, you must have a few basic elements to get started.

  1. NAP (name, address and phone number) data related to the business is accurate and consistent.
  2. The business is listed on quality directories sites — more is not always better.
  3. Customers talking about the business have positive things to say on review sites.

Now that you know just a little about the basics, I want to explore the power of building niche citations on sites like RateMDs and FindLaw.

Niche Citations Help Doctors and Lawyers Get Found

Did you know…

  • Businesses that are categorically relevant to searchers have a much greater chance of being found.
  • Niche citation submissions ensure business categories, such as lawyers and doctors, populate in organic search results.
  • When a business is listed in a category-specific directory, it adds authority for the business in search.

At Advice Local, we help our agency and local marketing partners like you build authoritative citations that search engines and consumers trust with our legal and/or healthcare vertical product.

We Know, You Know

The proof is in the numbers — so here is some important data about vertical directories to consider:

  • The directory sites within our legal vertical get more than 5 million hits each month and have over 3.3 million keywords they rank for within the first 10 pages of keyword-relevant searches.
  • The directory sites within our healthcare vertical get almost 1 million hits each month and have over 1.5 million keywords they rank for within the first 10 pages of keyword-relevant searches.

While we would like to tell you that all directories are created equal and all links are good links, this isn’t the case. Quality directories exhibit specific characteristics — here’s a how-to on choosing the best directories.

Did you know being listed in low-quality directories can damage a business’ ranking in search results? No business can afford to take risks like this.

For our current partners, you can order this product add-on day or night from your partner dashboard.

For those of you that are not partners yet, request a demo to learn more about our listing management solution and how you too can utilize this product for your healthcare and legal clients.

The post Niche Citations Build Trust Amongst Search Engines and Consumers appeared first on Advice Local.

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You’re Invited to Kgo Design’s First Annual Great Gatsby Art Gala

Kgo Designs is proud to announce our First Annual Kgo Art Gala to be held on September 24, 2016 from 6 PM to 1 AM. The Great Gatsby themed gala will be held at the award-winning venue, event1013, in historic downtown Plano, Texas. If you’re a supporter of the arts, this event is for you! We’ll have live entertainment, local cuisine, and over 100 pieces of art, all from local artists in the DFW area. Roaring 20’s costumes are encouraged, so all you flappers and mobsters, come dressed to impress!

Eventgoers will celebrate the Jazz Age with live music, a catered dinner, a cash bar, and casino tables. We’ll cap off the night with a raffle of items donated by local businesses. It’s an event art lovers are sure to enjoy!

Tickets are on sale now for $25. Register early for exclusive access to the gala and preview the art before the doors open to the public. Kgo Designs is dedicated to supporting the North Texas arts scene so a portion of proceeds will benefit a local charity.

Purchase your tickets online at www.kgogala.com.

About Kgo Designs

Kgo Designs is an art company run by renowned local artist, Kelly Gottuso. Kgo Designs can be commissioned to paint murals, canvas paintings and personal art collections as well as host Arty Parties, a unique paint and play experience. www.kgodesigns.com

About Event1013

Event1013 is a premier local event space located at E 15th Street and K Avenue in downtown Plano. Event1013 can be used for weddings, corporate parties, or any other social event or gathering. www.event1013.com 

Contact

To learn more about the First Annual Kgo Art Gala, visit us online at www.kgogala.com.

Kelly Gottuso

214-935-8891

Support@kgodesigns.com