The Near Memo

Send us Fan Mail How different age groups think about reviews:  In a recent, large scale survey of attitudes and behaviors around reviews, Miriam Ellis uncovered some interesting facts about the different behaviors in different age groups  Evolution of Apple’s  Business Register - Why isn’t Apple targeting the Enterprise:  A great listing management interface particularly compared to Google’s new...

Send us Fan Mail How ChatGPT’s  breakthrough ability to create content will significantly impact local:  ChatGPT seems to provide a quantum leap in quality and speed AI generated content. How will this impact not just content, writers and thinkers in local but how it might actually, some day, provide a better local search experience. A deep dive look at factors in Google Local’s new AI based revie...

Send us Fan Mail 74.3% of link builders pay for links and 89.1% of link builders say nofollow links have an impact on rankings. David reviewed a new survey of ~800 link builders by Authority Hacker.  Regardless of what Google proclaims, buying links is a tried and tested way to gain site benefits in less than 6 months and it's here to stay.  Alexa pullback by Amazon points to difficulties wit...

Send us Fan Mail Google has finally admitted to the bug that caused local businesses to lose all of their reviews AND rank visibility. Google appears to have fixed many of those businesses reported over the weekend. But as is typical with Google it took public embarrassment to get them to acknowledge and fix this serious bug. It highlights both their PR strategy and their totally inadequate custom...

Send us Fan Mail Google has been on a review tear of late and many reviews are being nuked that the new filter “thinks” violates the TOS. But not all review take downs by Google are legit. And a new bug seems to be affecting Google Business Profiles: when Google pushes a Suggested edit update, the profile changes CID numbers and loses their reviews. Businesses that lose reviews need to be prepared...

Send us Fan Mail Marcus Tober, SVP of Enterprise Solutions for Semrush, joins Greg and David for this episode of the Near Memo. The trio discusses Semrush’s recent zero-click search study in depth. Conceived as a slightly more nuanced follow-up to Sparktoro/Rand Fishkin’s provocative original look at this concept, Marcus takes us through some of the important high-level findings. There’s of course...

Send us Fan Mail Description Shopify study shows much higher churn than WooCommerce, why & what are the implications? A recent study in the Mails & Globe explores retention over the past 3 years of the major e-commerce platforms. They concluded that Shopify's retention was one of the lowest particularly compared to Woo Commerce. Is this a failure on the part of Shopify or just a refle...

Send us Fan Mail Krystal Taing, Director of Pre-Sales Solutions for Uberall and Google Business Profile Platinum Product Expert, joins Greg and David for this episode of the Near Memo.  The trio discusses Google’s latest visually-significant ad update and implications for both paid and organic marketers. David then laments the rapid increase in GBP-related bugs and complaints over the course of th...

Send us Fan Mail Allie Margeson , Director of SEO Services for Whitespark, joins Greg and David for this episode of the Near Memo. She takes a deeper dive into the logic behind, and the mechanics of, Whitespark’s new three-tiered service offering which involves not just Google Business Profile optimization but website updates and linkbuilding. Allie and Whitespark have a unique perspective on serv...

Send us Fan Mail “Mike’s Excellent European Adventure” continues this week, so Nick Brackenbury, CEO of SaaS company NearSt joins Greg and David for a fast-moving conversation about his company’s growth curve alongside the explosion of “near me” searches and Google’s appetite for local inventory in search results since 2015. Nick takes listeners through how NearSt came to be, a major pivot in Near...

Send us Fan Mail This episode breaks from our typical Near Memo format in two big ways: 1) at 50 minutes, it’s roughly double the length of a typical episode, and 2) rather than a roundtable discussion, it’s a deep-dive interview with a single entrepreneur. Craig Mount, Co-Founder and CEO of peanut butter (and media) brand Nerdy Nuts takes us through the trajectory of his company – from starting u...

Send us Fan Mail Google doubles down on SMB deception to achieve political goals - Google recently sent out an email to its massive base of business clients asking them to Tell us what policy issues matter to you and your business. It directed businesses to a survey which told the real story of Google’s intent: Tell us which policy issues that are important to us are you willing to shill for us? G...

Send us Fan Mail On October 16th, hearing aids for folks with low to moderate hearing loss will now be sold over the counter, no longer requiring testing, visits to the audiologists or a prescription. The influx of major brands like Apple, Bose and probably Amazon (hey Alexa, what did they say?) on the low end portend a major shift in how many of these devices are purchased. Local audiologists, ma...

Send us Fan Mail  Google is testing a new label associated with content that is quick to read on both mobile and desktop. The label appears with either the text ‘Quick Read’ or ‘< 5 Min Read’, with several different combinations of each. Is this test, so close to the Helpful Content Update, a way to signal busy readers and garner their attention or is it a useful way to segment content so that...

Send us Fan Mail  Shopify Cretes an Influencer Marketplace -  Of all of the networks that have attempted to create a way for businesses to easily connect with influencers to help market their products, Shopify’s newest effort, Collabs, seems like the most logical fit and the easiest to use Google’s Human Content Update; Why now?  Google’s language in announcing the Human Content Update, that is ro...

Send us Fan Mail Yelp has recently publicized their newest revenue stream; selling merchant data to marketers. It seems sleazy and is likely just a money grab by Yelp Day in and day out, small businesses are flocking into the Google Business Profile forum to complain about their legit reviews being nuked by Google’s effort to limit review spam.  Tik-Tok is still not being heavily used by brands. B...

Send us Fan Mail After dozens of failed messaging starts, Google has been on a campaign to get Apple to integrate with their telco favored RCS messaging service. It's not clear why Apple would want to do that and the campaign by Google is almost laughable. Local growth highlighted in Axiosacquisition by Cox for $585 million.  With the ascendance of Google and Facebook advertising, local newsp...

Send us Fan Mail Segment 1: Shopify’s investment in Klaviyo improves Shopify’s enterprise cred & may signal acquisition In a move to protect and enhance their core product with enterprise, Shopify’s strategic investment in Klaviyo indicates a  Segment 2: The golden era of hyper detailed location data intelligence is coming to an end The marketplace for highly granular location data, fed by sma...

Send us Fan Mail  Instagram evolves (?) to target Gen Z but leaves others behind  Instagram and Facebook are attempting to cater to the consumption patterns of Gen Z but in doing so are alienating their traditional users. Might these apps be better served by bifurcating their products and developing more focused apps.  Google prevents reviews on listings that offer reproductive services Google has...

Send us Fan Mail Amazon AND Google both try to demonstrate their anti fake review bonafides. Both fail to do their job and offer little in the way of substantive reform to prevent review abuses.  The American Data Privacy and Protection Act (.pdf) looks like it will make it out of committee, a watershed moment and a step toward a floor vote. This moment is a byproduct of significant compromises an...

Send us Fan Mail In the past year somewhere on the order of 300 independent bookstores have opened. The need for discovery, serendipity, community and increased opportunities are all likely factors in this resurgence  Amazon is illegally sharing Ring data with police while ICE is accumulating dossiers on 3 out of 4 Americans with no oversight.   Google’s disclosure that 40% of Gen Z’ers prefer Tik...

Send us Fan Mail The Digital Markets Act attempts to create a new framework for understanding and regulating digital monopolies to improve competitiveness and create opportunities for smaller online businesses. Amongst its targets: self preferencing, access to alternative payment systems and messaging services interoperability. The fines for non-compliance are a non-trivial 10% of annual sales.  D...

Send us Fan Mail Time to stop lamenting “zero click” search and to embrace the “messy middle” of Google’s entity search and barnacle SEO. Understanding how Google has remade all of search from inventory to brands into entity search as a way to help consumers make a decision is key to building out a successful search optimization strategy.  Google is leveraging ever more granular product entities a...

Send us Fan Mail There's a growing perception that Google is in decline or dying. In an article in the Atlantic, Charlie Warzel interviews Marie Haynes, Dannie Sullivan and Rand Fishkin to try to understand his growing dissatisfaction with Google’s results. Is it too commercial, too corporate or too sanitized? He is not sure but he does know its not what it used to be. What would Google local...

Send us Fan Mail  Chewy’s provides great CX and it goes viral: When a dog owner’s pet died and they asked Chewy to refund their unused food, the company went above and beyond. In doing so, they demonstrated the incredible viral value of great customer service. A simple customer service act provides bountiful returns.  A look at the top 1000 Google queries on the desktop and what it says about loca...