Update: The California Privacy Rights Act did pass on Tuesday. While most people are focused Tuesday on the U.S. presidential election, Californians are voting (or have voted) on ballot proposition 24, the California Privacy Rights Act of 2020 (CPRA). Known in some quarters as “CCPA 2.0,” CPRA was intended by its sponsors to expand and…
Want to learn how to keep returning customers engaged and convert new customers through your Google My Business listing? On October 28, I moderated a Search Engine Journal webinar sponsored by SEMrush and presented by Ross Tavendale, Managing Director at Type A Media. He walked through some simple workflows that small business owners can start…
Artificial intelligence-written articles and copy have been around for several years now, but GPT-3 promises to take AI-produced copy to the next level. GPT-3 is Open AI’s powerful autoregressive language model that is capable of generating human-like natural language. What makes GPT-3 so much better than its predecessors is the size of its training data. GPT-3…
When the COVID lockdowns began in March, Google local business profiles saw a massive drop-off in directions requests and a corresponding spike in local calls and website clicks (61% increase in calls). Since that time, call volumes fluctuated but, according to CallRail, have now stabilized at levels that are 27% higher than the pre-pandemic peak.…
Google Ads has rolled out a new look for Report Editor (located under Reports in the UI). I started seeing this new layout for setting up Custom reports in some accounts a few weeks ago when I was looking into the changes to Location reporting. With this update, Report Editor is set up more like…
COVID-19 has taken a disproportionately large toll on Tripadvisor’s two primary customer audiences, hotels and restaurants, which have seen double-digit revenue declines compared with 2019. The company has been trying to help these groups with a number of new products and services that meet perceived needs and generate new subscription revenue. Listings and menu syndication.…
It’s been 12 months since Google announced a new update called BERT in production search and there should be no surprise the recent Search On event, falling almost on the eve of production BERT’s first birthday, included so much talk of huge progress and breakthroughs using AI and BERT during the past year. A recap…
Microsoft Clarity, a free product to help site owners better understand visitor behavior so that they can improve their user experiences, is out of beta and now generally available, the company announced Wednesday. First launched as a closed beta in 2018, Microsoft Clarity provides site owners with visual heatmaps that illustrate user engagement, individual session…
Taken in totality, Google’s recent announcements on its expanding use of natural language understanding algorithms represent a major evolution in how it determines what content gets surfaced in the search results. In turn, these algorithms will impact how we approach content and optimization. Ranking passages in the search results. Google is rolling out passage-based indexing,…
In part one of my recent interview with Mike Blumenthal, local SEO expert and co-founder of customer experience management platform GatherUp, we spoke about the lack of resources Google allocates to addressing spam on Google Maps. Here, in part two, we talked about the importance of review attribution for local businesses on Google Maps. Reviews are…