A Close Reading: Mike Blumenthal’s Last Week in Local podcast
In the A Close Reading series, we examine and interpolate/expand on terrific content from the world of Local SEO & Digital Marketing
The primary indicator for ‘being good at SEO’ is being well-informed and up-to-date on what’s going on in the world of search engine marketing. One of the ways we do that at search/local is by consuming a LOT of high-quality Local SEO content.
Mike Blumenthal’s ‘Last Week in Local’ podcast is an essential industry resource, and today we’re going to hone in on the 12/10 episode. We highly recommend you listen to it, which you can do by clicking the link below, but we’ll cover many of the finer points right here in this article.
The ethics of over-SEO-ing your business’ name
Mary Bowling weighs in first with some recent news, delving into an article by Joe Youngblood regarding how copy entered as a business’ name affects local search ranking.
The debate involves to what extent businesses should be able to brand or add keywords (‘keyword stuffing’ is the contemptuous industry term for when someone is doing this too much) to business names: for instance, there is going to be a big difference between how a business named ‘Petrene Soames’ performs versus ‘Petrene Soames | Psychic, Medium, Healer & Guru’ performs for local searches involving ‘psychic’ or ‘medium.’ Petrene (a client of ours) is not definitively in violation of any Terms of Service stipulations with the latter name, and it is mathematically to her advantage to use the long-tail keywords in her business name.
But should she?
DUI Lawyers are mentioned in the podcast discussion, because a less-obvious instance of the same principle is ‘[Person’s Name] | [City] DUI Lawyer,’ and there is some question as to whether those keywords at the tail end are in the best interest of the search users or not. Ultimately, that’s what informs and drives all Google Developers decisions: will this change positively impact the quality and experience of search results for users?
Bowling and Blumenthal don’t make a definitive statement regarding what they consider to be the ideal outcome or what they consider best practices in regards to ‘spammy business names,’ and it seems to me like a judgment call. If your business is in a similar situation, for whatever reason, my advice would be to put yourself in Google’s shoes and consider ‘how does the change I’m considering making impact the search experience for Google users?’ If the answer is anything but ‘positively,’ maybe seek a second opinion or hold off before making those changes for SEO purposes. This seems like an area that Google will be investigating and optimizing against to best serve the users, so optimizing your business name with lots of keywords seems like a poor use of resources like energy and time.
Moz’s ‘Local Search Ranking Factors’ Survey
I actually crib from this Moz survey often; it’s a very useful, valuable way to visualize the concepts I’m trying to reinforce for my clients, but I usually don’t provide the full context, which Mike Blumenthal actually does do here on this show.
These data are NOT empirical — they are the result of a (really terrific) survey/poll of Local SEO experts and professionals. From aggregating the survey responses (and especially from comparing those data sets year-to-year), Moz can extrapolate or deduce the ranking of various local search signals.
The way I sometimes explain it to clients is like this: SEO is a lot like magic in George R. R. Martin’s @GeorgeRRA Song of Ice and Fire — it absolutely works, and it’s a powerful, observable force, but even the top experts don’t know exactly or precisely how it works because it’s much too big, complex, multivariate and ever-changing an area of knowledge.
SEO professionals often brand themselves things like ‘Google guru’ (I definitely have; without checking, it may literally be in the text of my Medium author bio right now) or ‘search engine experts.’ One SEO pro I really enjoy and have only ever had pleasant interactions with (Phil Rozek), uses ‘Local Search Consigliere’ as his Twitter bio. I like it, because it’s a tongue-in-cheek nod to the almost arcane quality of SEO strategy & execution. It’s hard to describe what exactly it is that we do(essentially: consume, retain and mentally index vast quantities of SEO information & knowledge + constantly test and experiment with new tools and optimize usage of familiar ones to discover new insights about their value + be able to synthesize and regurgitate that knowledge on command on a wide variety of platforms and media as needed, optimized to fit the specifics of the particular discussion = SEO guru) without sounding hopelessly arrogant or into yourself.
The beauty of it is that countless intrepid users, data scientists and other curious, determined minds have made so much of how this impossibly enormous system of interconnected platforms and data works into content you can study and learn and use.
All good SEO professionals I’m aware of have at least this one quality in common: they are deeply fascinated by search engine optimization, and are innately motivated to do things like research, experiment and discuss the topic, sometimes (often) for way longer than anyone wanted. If the person you’re considering hiring to handle or help with your business’ SEO doesn’t have that quality, that’s an enormous red flag to me.
The point of all this being that a poll of a significant fraction of the population of quality SEO professionals is an effective method for boiling down this really intensely complex, nuanced field of study to bullet points and easy-to-absorb nuggets of actionable info.
SEO pros are the boots on the ground. Firms like search/local HTX receive lots of direct feedback from our clients, plus an awesome, mostly-free education from our very collegial community of fellow SEO professionals who are doing the same thing with their clients and also happy to talk (endlessly) about it.
Google’s precise algorithmic methodology is an industry secret; I often liken it to the Coca-Cola ‘Secret Formula,’ and — just like Steven Levitt explains in this 2006 Freakonomics blog post about Coke’s secret formula — all parties are (in my opinion) better off not knowing, without total transparency… or with some opacity, as you will.
‘Don’t be evil’ was literally Google’s official-unofficial* corporate motto for years, and it’s because everyone in leadership (but especially Paul Buchheit) were forward-thinking enough to realize the power they intended to wield. ‘Don’t be evil’ was funny, but it wasn’t irony. In that way things are said to be, ‘it’s funny because it’s true.’ It’s a grim, gallows-humor acknowledgement of the world-shaping giant they set out to be, and it’s a bit too on-the-nose and puckish to fit Google as we know it today. By necessity, they take themselves a bit more seriously; they’re also not an upstart disruptor, and haven’t been for quite some time. It makes sense to reassess the elements of one’s own narrative over time, and by that token, I would bet money that the narrative/trend/cool cycle comes around a bit further, and they lean way back into it.
*it was definitively part of their corporate code of conduct, per Wikipedia; they’re a bit equivocal about it these days. I think the company Google has grown to be (especially post-Alphabet restructuring) has grown, matured and evolved to the point it’s probably embarrassing to have been so earnest, naive and wide-eyèdly transparent in their corporate identity, so they kind of deflect direct questions about ‘don’t be evil’ and haven’t internally agreed to embrace it as part of their public-facing identity, but that is pure speculation on my part.
What’s my point, though?
My employees and independent contractors in my employ are free to voice their thoughts and opinions, so I’ve been told (often) that I write very rambly, meditative, professorial (not-in-a-good-way) posts when I’m not writing content directly on behalf of a client. They’re not bloody wrong, are they?
Surprise: ‘Don’t be evil’ is my point.
Act in good faith. Google is trying its absolute darndest to craft a system that forces us to operate in good-faith ways, but designing perfect systems is hard, and Google is also comprised only of human beings, ultimately — imperfect, flawed, upjumped animals that have only their own experiences and what they’ve managed to learn from others to draw from in crafting these intensely-complex systems that shape our lives.
Part of the identity and ethos I’m trying to create at search/local HTX, and which I hope will live on in the clients and employees that I model that philosophy to, regardless of my company’s eventual fate, is that it is in everyone’s best interest to act in good faith in everything we do professionally. I often tell clients (some would say too often) that while no one at search/local HTX is a former Boy Scout (yet), we’re real boy scouts about following Google’s various termses of service (like the Guidelines for representing your business on Google) and the spirit of the law and intentions that underlie them, if you follow.
I applaud watchdogs and critics who fairly critique Google — one of the voices on this very podcast episode, Mike Blumenthal, is a frequent, vociferous critic of Google’s, to the point I believe he originated (popularized, certainly) the usage of #ShameOnGoogle, which is admirably bold, and a stance he’s earned the opportunity to take.
For the rank-and-file, ham-and-egg, pants-donned-single-leg-sequential SEO dude like me [remember: be relatable, so put something relatable here, and don’t forget to edit out your bracketed notes-to-self before you publish] acting in good faith — with earnest, collaborative, community-minded and positive intentions — is the industrial lubricant that makes the machines that need industrial lubricant work [definitely look up what the heck machines need with lube; i’m certain they do, though].
Google is generally trying its best to make the world a better place, I believe. If that sounds like self-serving bullshit I would have to say, it does and it is, but if this helps put it in perspective, I believe pretty much the opposite to be true of Facebook. It’s literally a necessary evil for most of my clients, and I contextualize it as exactly such. ‘We’re about to pour your hard-earned, honest revenue into this awful, evil machine, but only because we have to.’ I am pretty sure I’ve said literally exactly that, on at least one occasion.
I sincerely don’t feel that way about Google, and to bolster my argument, the bad press, acrimony and equivocation that are telltale signals for malicious or negligent intent. Look up Facebook, Monsanto, Uber, etc., and compare the quality and quantity of those negative signals in public, indexable forums.
It wouldn’t be crazy to use Bing or DuckDuckGo since it’s Google we’re researching — shoutout to DuckDuckGo, very active here on Medium and other publishing platforms and who have very worthwhile, interesting things to say about the ethics of search — but I believe Google does a good job of managing those kinds of potential conflicts and gameplanning against them, and fundamentally, their commitment is to serving the user the most satisfactory results possible (at any cost, some would argue). Scheming against their users’ best interests for PR purposes, potentially at the cost of their enormous market share seems… small potatoes? Beneath them?
Maybe I’m wrong or misinformed, but I know with absolute certainty that I’m happy to help my clients optimize for Google and pretty upbeat and positive about what they put into the world, and dealing with Facebook marketing is always like ‘[take your pick of GIFs I searched for the occasion].’
Okay, my employees do have a point. I’m a bit rambly, and could probably do with an editor. We’ll explore the context and implications behind the rest of that ‘Last Week in Local’ episode at a later date.
To be fair, I didn’t pick the series title A Close Reading out of a hat or by accident, and I intend to delve, meander and — yes — at times, even ‘huckleberry,’ as someone once probably said in a play I read in college. So mission accomplished, I suppose.
Click on the image below to jump to search/local HTX’s Alignable page, where you can research and/or contact me and my team of aspiring boy scouts directly with questions about how any of this specifically impacts or affects your small business.
