Posts

How to Get Bard to Show Your Local Business: Advice from the Source

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We’re all Bard beginners right now, and so there are no foolish questions. Unsurprisingly, I’ve started out with Bard by asking it local business questions. As I chatted, I learned some useful things from and about Google’s nascent AI chat that you’ll need to know if this technology becomes part of your customers’ lives. My main goal was to learn three things: How much is Bard like Google search in a local use case? Would I be able to get any tips for local business inclusion in Bard? Do local SEOs need to change tactics to adjust for Bard? Advisory: Bard’s own system warns you to take its statements with a grain of salt, so to speak, so do bear that in mind. Because it was lunchtime and I was hungry, I began by asking about tacos. When I asked Bard for the “best tacos near me”, it had no idea where I was, beyond apparently recognizing that I’m in the state of California. It showed me tacos in San Francisco (which is sort of near me) and tacos in Los Angeles (which would...

6 Money-Making Content Formats SaaS Companies Should Prioritize — Whiteboard Friday

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In today’s Whiteboard Friday episode, expert content strategist Chima Mmeje talks you through the six top content formats SaaS brand can focus on to drive revenue. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, my name is Chima Mmeje, and I am a SaaS content strategist at zenithcopy.com. I write long-form content, and I also use topic clusters as a form of content strategy for SaaS companies. Today, I'm talking to you about six moneymaking content formats to prioritize for SaaS companies. Now, before I get into all of this, I just want to start by saying that when building clusters or when doing research or when creating content, you should always start from the bottom to increase your chances of ranking and then make your way to the top. The reason being that at the top of the funnel, the keywords are extremely competitive, it has tons of search volume, and the likelihood of a small business or of a small webs...

Apple is Taking Their Maps More Seriously and Local Businesses Should, Too

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For the past 20 years , local business owners and their marketers have had to live and work with Google as the “great house”, owning all the good real estate. The dominant role Google’s local and organic results play in bringing nearby customers to our doors has had the effect of making every other source of business listings feel like a bit of a granny unit — tiny and somewhere at the back of the weedy yard. Owners frequently ask whether they should even bother paying for local listings development , what with Google Business Profiles looming so large on the landscape. But with spring comes change, and Apple has just tidied up the garden and put out a welcome mat via their new Apple Business Connect interface that’s designed to make it easier for small businesses to get listed on Apple Maps. If your last real look at Apple Maps was a decade ago when the platform was going through a very awkward stage , take note of what Near Media co-founder David Mihm is saying about the launch of...

AI for SEO and Content Marketing: A Friend, Not a Foe (for Now, at Least)

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Artificial Intelligence is nothing new. It has been running behind the scenes of many marketing tools for several years now. But the key here is that it was running behind the scenes. We didn’t see it in action, and if it was making some of our tools smarter, we were not really paying much attention. Later last year everything suddenly changed, with the launch of ChatGPT, which is able to complete all kinds of writing tasks instantly, including full articles and even code. Now anyone can login and talk to the tool for hours, challenging it with all sorts of prompts and marveling at its ability to understand any task and complete it promptly. There came an endless flurry of articles sharing screenshots of amazing stuff the tool was capable of. And while it is fun to play with, the rise of ChatGPT was a phenomenon that raised quite a few scary questions: Is it threatening any human professions? And how fast? Is it going to kill human content and overwhelm the web with AI-gener...

Identifying and Filling Your SEO Skill Gaps — Whiteboard Friday

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In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Helen shows you how to find and address gaps in your SEO skills so you can continue evolving and developing your best SEO self. Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hi, I'm Helen, Head of SEO at Car & Classic, and I am here today to share some top tips on how to identify your SEO skills gaps and how to fill them.  Now that sounds a bit rude, doesn't it, suggesting you have skills gaps? I don't know you. You might be an excellent SEO, and we're sure you are. But you know that thing that we tell our clients and our bosses that SEO is really difficult and it's always changing, and the algorithms, oh, no, they've developed again. Turns out that stuff that we tell our bosses and our clients to keep our jobs, it's actually true, and because of that, we have to keep our skill set evolving and developing to keep up with all the stuff that's changing in...

Google Bard vs. the New Bing

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This week I’ve been fortunate enough to get access to both Google Bard and the New Bing, so a day later, I’m here to share my first impressions. What is the new Bing? “The new Bing” is the product of Microsoft’s unholy alliance with OpenAI, makers of the now infamous ChatGPT. This development promises to have seismic effects on the search ecosystem, with Microsoft’s CEO saying they’re happy to accept “demonetization” of search in their pursuit of market share, and Google extremely concerned about the threat ChatGPT technology poses as an alternative to their core search business. Of course, by now we’ve all also seen various viral posts and tweets showing just how dangerous it can be to use chat AI as a search engine , but that’s a topic for another day. For now, the point is that Bing is making moves. When I perform a search on “old bing” now, I can see this box inviting me to try the new one. You’ll notice a key detail here: it’s only available in Microsoft Edge . Yikes. Big ...

13 Local Search Developments You Need to Know About from Q1 2023

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Can you believe we’ve already sped through the first quarter of the new year? So much has happened, and on the strength of the warm reception this nascent local search quarterly review received in 2022, I’m going to continue the series this year. Thank you for being a reader. Let’s dive right into the most interesting new things we’ve seen in the first three months of 2023! A new local search ranking factor! Joy Hawkins and her Sterling Sky squad discovered something truly new this February: selecting pre-defined Google Business Profiles services from the list that Google offers some categories of business can have a tremendous positive impact on local pack rankings . Joy’s dream team is working to see whether custom-written services have a similar effect. For now, if Google shows you a choice of ready-made services (not to be confused with service areas) in your NMX interface and they relate to your business, definitely add them! By my count this brings us up to 5 GBP factors we ...