The Near Memo

Send us Fan Mail Amazon has been posting new job positions for “rare opportunity to join a start-up business within Amazon Ads and play a strategic role in building the future of Local Ads”. It is hard to know exactly what it is they are building but talk of building relationships with agencies, clients, and service providers to scope solutions, partnerships, and business opportunities that result...

Send us Fan Mail Rumors have surfaced that Apple will roll out a general purpose search engine at WWDC this week. Will it be browser based? Available on the desktop? Apple has historically favored “search as a feature” over the years as they have slowly built out Siri, Spotlight and Safari search. The UI/UX could use a refresh and it could become more obvious but will it be a Google replacement? P...

Send us Fan Mail Walmart announced that they were rolling out drone delivery in 6 states this week, offering upto 100,000 picked in the local store. Meanwhile Gorrila (Europe’s largest food delivery company announced massive layoffs and UberEats continued to struggle to find a profitable path forward. Walmart’s many rural & suburban stores gives them a unique advantage in driving their own, sa...

Send us Fan Mail Bill was instrumental in helping me understand Local search. Over the years he shared his knowledge willingly and unsparingly and he will be missed. My Ad Center - will people use it or is it just another data harvesting tool?  Shotland showed a radical increase in rankings for a particular page on a client's website that was talking about baby formula. Over the last X number...

Send us Fan Mail  SMB more successful with content, typical looks at SMBS often undercounts total  Google spent much of their I/O talking about their grand vision for integrating software and hardware as well as Local developments. Most of the hardware is about a future where they hope to compete while Local is moving clearly to a focus on a visual approach to local search. Many of these announcem...

Send us Fan Mail In three consumer surveys it became clear that a significant minority (~25%)  of the buying public thinks ill of companies that use Earth Day to sell things. But almost 33% noted that when Amazon engaged in Earth Day marketing to sell more products that they were less likely to do business with them.  Whether it’s a review rating or an NPS score, all too often businesses focus too...

Send us Fan Mail It is generally assumed that the ratings aspect of reviews is what drives conversions and thus they are typically emphasized. However it would appear that in many cases that the content of the “top 3” most visible reviews actually influence purchase decisions more than the star ratings. In a clever study design these researchers were able to disentangle the relative importance of...

Send us Fan Mail Amazon’s bold play to push Prime benefits across all of e-commerce is not only a direct threat to Shopify but UPS and FedEx as well. While it will bring trust and convenience to small and local websites,  which types of businesses will actually benefit from Buy Prime on their site? Google’s has stated that AI generated content is against their guidelines. But their guidelines are...

Send us Fan Mail According to the 2021 IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report, online ad revenue grew at the fastest pace since 2006, 35% year over year. In real dollar terms that translated into a $50 billion revenue increase from last year. Mobile revenues comprised roughly 71% of the $189 billion total, while the desktop contributed 28%. Paid search was the largest digital ad revenue category...

Send us Fan Mail Google’s Local help files have been updated to note that providing real time inventory via Merchant Center will result in increased rank. Anecdotally, we are seeing the 3- Pack populated with more real time inventory over the past several weeks. Google, often accused of self-preferencing, did so again by highlighting their own Point POS product as the only solution.  At LocalU’s l...

Send us Fan Mail Last week the European Parliament completed work on its Digital Markets Act. The legislation targets major US tech "gatekeepers" and prohibits app bundling, app store monopolies and so-called "self-preferencing," among other things. In the US, the American Competition and Innovation Act (ACIA) is similar and also seeks to prevent self-preferencing – think: Goog...

Send us Fan Mail Most featured snippets come from what would have been organic results 1 through 3. However 20% of featured snippets come from results 6-10 and while featured snippets do not offer the click through rate of a #1 organic result, if you can answer a question query well and jump from a position down the page, it can be a huge SEO win and a quick way to the top of the rankings.  Consum...

Send us Fan Mail Google, in competing with Amazon product search, has taken a local approach with their Shopping tool. While the approach makes sense strategically it isn’t clear whether it is enough to gain the traction in real time local inventory that Google needs to compete with Amazon.  In a 3 count complaint, the FTC has accused HomeAdvisor of charging more than promised, delivering crappy l...

Send us Fan Mail  Restaurants sue Google for adding  Order buttons through 3rd  parties to their Business Profile. In 2019, Google automatically added DoorDash/GrubHub order buttons to the Google Business Profile for thousands of US based restaurants. Now the company is being sued over "order online" in federal court, in a potential class action. The plaintiff, Lime Fresh Mexican Grill,...

Send us Fan Mail The consumer review paradox. More than three-fourths (77%) of consumers now "always" or "regularly" read local business reviews, according to a recent BrightLocal survey. That's up from 60% in 2020.  At the same time, more of them (62%) believe they've encountered fake reviews. Where will this lead? Despite surprise, Amazon’s closure of non-grocery bu...

Send us Fan Mail Yelp Elite reviews for sale According to a local NBC affiliate investigation , brokers are paying a subset of Yelp elites to post fake reviews: "one former Yelp Elite told us he was part of an invitation-only online chat that included a few thousand Yelp Elite members who are paid $25 to $50 per fake review." It would appear that despite Yelp’s claim of better reviews, t...

Send us Fan Mail Segment 1: Will Google’s Increasingly good ability to summarize  with AI make SEO superfluous?  Marie Haynes highlighted a new Google Docs feature that summarizes your document using Google’s AI/ML. This ability may provide SEO's with insight into how Google "understands" your page and helps content writes create better copy.  Google’s capabilities in this arena and...

Send us Fan Mail Obviously feeling nervous, Google is intensifying its anti-antitrust campaign, lobbying SMBs to "take action" and automating their emails to their representatives in the House and the Senate.  Amazon disclosed the value of its ad business for the first time. The company made $9.7 billion in ad revenue in Q4 and $31.2 billion in 2021. As GeekWire points out , "Amazon...

Send us Fan Mail We discuss the reasons behind Meta’s terrible 4th quarter and stock fall. Was it really Apple’s fault? Will people in the universe buy into their universe? Yelp and Google both try to establish their review narrative with virtue signaling while the FTC sends letter to 10 companies that skirt the review guidelines The Near Memo is a weekly conversation about Search, Social, and Com...

Send us Fan Mail After a brief discussion of Google My Business losing control of their previous FB page, we cover how Google, in formally abandoning their FLOC replacement for cookies. is attempting to implement a new API, Topics, that provides websites with 3 weeks of user interests for targeting advertising. Clearly the world is moving toward contextual advertising and away from behavioral targ...

Send us Fan Mail This bill, largely in response to the growing sentiment that large digital companies are spying on every day Americans for profit, is unlikely to pass but is indicative of growing discontent with the impact of current ad tech. It foreshadows the likely move away from personal targeting towards contextual advertising. 96% of respondents had implemented new tools in the past year. B...

Send us Fan Mail Vendasta, which provides an app store for agencies, has acquired PPC pioneer MatchCraft. The acquisition will fill out Vendasta core marketing offerings with paid ad campaigns and allow more traditional media companies to transition more easily from an ad model to a full service digital marketing model.  D espite Supreme Court refusal to require businesses to vaccinate their emplo...

Send us Fan Mail Using a traditional golf course model with an NFT twist, over $10 million was raised in 48 hours. The project got lots of media coverage even though no golf course has yet been purchased or even identified. However this type of activity might point the way towards crowdfunding other start up ventures.  Google, by degrading the user experience and being unwilling to get into the ni...

Send us Fan Mail Last week, Google released a new, more horizontal Local Map Pack with more white space, a bigger, squarer map and bigger images. How will this impact ads and ranking? New Yelp consumer survey indicates that over 90% prefer written reviews over just ratings. This survey is ostensibly aimed at Google and their lower review and rating standards but in some ways might also be targeted...

Send us Fan Mail In this interview with Darren Shaw we take a deep dive into the Local Search Ranking Factors. We look at the key take aways, the strengths and weaknesses of the survey and areas that Local SEO’s should focus on. In this interview with Darren Shaw we take a deep dive look at the results of the recently released Local Search Ranking Factor survey and explore the key takeaways to goo...