This week I received a message out of the blue that made my summer.
Rewind to a year and a half ago. A friend was bringing her son to Atlanta to go compete in his first fencing tournament at GA Tech. We chatted and I told them to come by as I had some fencing gear and books which were collecting dust.
When they came by, I talked to him about fencing and his club and then I gave him some gear and books. Somewhere in there I think there was some advice thrown in.
To me, this was basic kindness. I had things to share and I offered up what I could to help a new fencer get started.
Fast-forward to today. I received a note thanking me for helping him along his path to discovering fencing. What got me was this: “I know it may not seem like you did a lot, but you were an essential part of my journey.”
That floored me.
I wasn’t trying to be an inspiration. I wasn’t looking for affirmation or any kind of emotional pay-back. I was just doing what was done for me when I was getting into fencing.
“you were an essential part of my journey”
There’s no better compliment than that.
Every day we have opportunities to be kind, share, and help others.
In work, at school, at the practice field we all have opportunities to share and teach others.
Take those opportunities and give of yourself. You never know which one of those interactions is going to come back months or years later as the source of inspiration for someone else’s journey.
One of the long standing analogies of SEO and SEM is that SEO is a marathon while SEM is a sprint.
If you let that get too ingrained, you are hurting your ability to make significant impacts with SEO.
That analogy is supposed to highlight that a solid SEO strategy can take time to develop and implement while a PPC campaign can start driving traffic as soon as you have a keyword list and a valid credit card.
Optimizing your web site is a long term activity with multiple short duration tasks.
That’s an unfortunate analogy that, when taken as dogma, can work to prevent SEO efforts as being too labor intensive. (In fact, I had to lobby aggressively for content changes for the holiday season because the marketing team felt that SEO would take too long. They referred to the “SEO is a marathon” analogy.)
The truth of the matter is that SEO needs a good foundation to work, but that SEO campaigns and tactical improvements often result in quick impacts for rankings, click through rates, and traffic.
The last time I was asked the “Is SEO a marathon or a sprint” question, I felt like it was a softball question with “SEO is a marathon with long term goals and planning” as the desired response. I pushed back saying that SEO is interval training: it’s a long term effort with multiple sprints. SEO work consists of bursts of intense activity with steady work in between.
For that I go back to experiences working SEO projects:
Title tag and content updates impact rankings in a matter of days.
When implementing content updates to existing pages, I’ve consistently seen ranking changes (and traffic increases) in a matter of days.
In this example, we saw ranking improvements very quickly after implementing title and metadata updates, and those gains reverted when a code release ended up rolling back our content changes. We regained those positions after relaunching the content changes.
Those gains are not always stable as we’re always working against a moving target: search intent, search engine algorithms and competitor sites are all in constant flux.
Visible for new search features days after implementation.
Going after featured snippets or rich results features is another example. Once a new rich result is seen in the wild, you can capture it as soon as you implement the proper code and get the page re-indexed.
When we’ve targeted rich results that were based on page code improvements, our pages were able to qualify for rich results in the days after Google re-crawled the targeted pages. This resulted in almost immediate impacts to CTR.
Those example of quickly gaining features, rankings, and the resulting traffic show the sprint nature of SEO. You can realize these gains quickly, but like a sprint, there is a slow down to the velocity.
In between the SEO sprints, there is foundational work to keep the site healthy, improve overall architecture, and understand what content across existing or new pages you need to meet your market’s needs and rank.
Marking SEO as a marathon is a good way to push that you don’t just “SEO” a page right before launch, but a good PPC campaign doesn’t just buy a list of keywords. For both there is a foundational approach to setting up the campaign and there are short and long term measurements.
For SEO campaigns, I report out on the short term wins but will also temper that with guidance that some of the immediate ranking improvements will revert back and that we do need to have long term reporting to ensure that any gains stabilize. What I try to avoid is the idea that we can’t measure SEO impact until 90-120 days out because we’re afraid that an algorithm update may wipe out our gains.
That holiday campaign? The SEO team jumped in mid-flight and lobbied for changes to the holiday sale page. We showed evidence of quick ranking changes for a prior campaign page as our proof of concept. Once involved, we were able to stage updates to the “SEO tags” (title, metadata) and then to content. With each SEO enhancement we realized increased rankings and traffic within days.
That SEO sprint is now documented and we’ll be using it to help us with future long-term enhancements as we train for the next campaigns.
This feature also looks to be similar to setting up a business profile on LinkedIn, so maybe Google is trying to encroach on LinkedIn’s emergence as the place to go and look up people you’ve met and want to work with.
Once this was released, SEOs were figuring out how to create their own People Cards from other regions. A few SEOs called out changing your search location but @Aussermayr provided his own step by step guide:
You want to use #PeopleCards, but live outside India? Try this:
1 Open Chrome & DevTools 2 Simulate a mobile device 3 Search [add me to search] 4 Scroll to footer 5 Settings > Search Settings – Region: India – Language: English 6 Save & search [add me to search] 7 Have fun đź’• pic.twitter.com/utqRACghpi
The process is pretty quick to go and create your own People Card.
Here’s what the “add me to search” looked like once followed steps 1-6:
Working on the profile card was intuitive. There are sections for where you work, where you’re from, education, social profiles, and more.
The predictive search was good for calling out where I work and my university. For my job title, there are none around to select but you can fill that in with custom text.
There are a few social media profiles you can add. I added my LinkedIn and Twitter accounts but didn’t add Facebook or Instagram. You can fill these out as much as you want.
Once I was done editing, here’s what my profile looks like:
Right now, this profile is only visible if you are searching from India. If you’re searching from anywhere else in the world, you’ll get a standard Google search results page.
Google has set up some guardrails around this feature. Each Google account can only set up one People Card, so you won’t be able to set up cards for you and various businesses or personas from a single email address.
Since this isn’t showing up for searches in the US yet, there’s no real benefit. At this point I’ve got the profile set up for if/when Google rolls this out more broadly.
Is this going to be a real thing, or is this another run around the “authorship” ideas that were promoted with Google+ a few years ago?
Steps to quickly create your own Google People Card (if you’re not in India):
Open Google Chrome and Chrome Dev Tools
Simulate a mobile device
Search [add me to search] on Google
Scroll to the footer
Click on Settings
Set search settings to Region: India. Keep language as English
Save settings and search [add me to search]
You should see the card and “Get Started” button. Have fun!
Back in March 2017 the closure of Google MapMaker was on the horizon and the Local SEO community was figuring out what to do next to help their clients in the local space (and to clean up map spam.)
Google was pushing edits over to the Google Local Guide program and, once MapMaker shut down, the Local Guides program was going to be the place to make all of the normal edits and suggestions for GoogleMyBusiness listings.
(You can still get edits and support for Google Maps but it’s a more difficult process now.)
In 2017 I was also expanding my SEO skillset to a more focused learning on local SEO, so I wanted to level up quickly in the Google Local Guides program – as I believed that the extra trust in a higher Local Guide level would help me in the long run with edits and corrections to my own listings.
The Google Local Guide program at the time had up to 5 levels. Each level was obtained by earning points for making contributions including photos, reviews, and place edits.
I decided to create a workflow around place edits as that was the easiest to scale for me to earn points quickly.
Starting on March 15th, I set myself a goal of achieving Level 5 status by the end of the month. (At that time, Level 5 was the highest level.)
Current status: 51 points. Points needed: 510 Gap: 459
Timeframe: 11 days Needed actions: 50 location edits per day to achieve goal.
I targeted a few large chains which looked like they were regularly breaking Google business naming requirements with extra keywords which were not part of their actual business names.
From Google’s documentation: “Your name should reflect your business’ real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. Accurately representing your business name helps customers find your business online.”
One chain had added cross-streets to a large number of their locations – (I’m removing the actual business names from this post.)
Good: [Chain Name] Bad: [Chain Name] at 11th and 49th
With those businesses, I found several hundred listings in one chain which I could edit. I also found examples in the brands that were given as explicit examples in Google’s documentation. (Some were finding Subway locations that had an ALL CAPS business name, or the registered trademark symbol.)
In all cases, I made edits which were explicitly part of Google’s guidelines and recommendations. I did this so that they would hold up to manual review and get approved. (Since you don’t earn points for edits which are not approved.)
How did the editing go? Here’s my log:
Workflow: 3/15: Submitted mapmaker and google maps edits. Question: Do mapmaker edits count?? 3/15 – MapMaker: 75 edits (I think these eventually counted, but not as quickly as GMB edits on Google Maps.) 3/15 – Maps: 118 edits (341 remaining)
3/16 – Maps: 46 edits (296 remaining) [Once these go in I should be a Level 4 Guide]
3/17 – 20 edits (When I logged in, I had 141 edits approved. 77 total points showing)
3/18: jamming on edits with morning coffee and iPhone. At least 100 edits in the AM before kids got up. (188 published by 9am)
3/19: 256 points – 443 points at 6pm. Another 70+ in pending.
3/20 – showing 389 accepted edits to date. (Need 60 more to hit level 5)
Found a class of business (fencing club) which a number are miscategorized. Fixing categorization was another 20+ edits. Categorization can be easy to replicate as Google keeps releasing more refined categories.
3/21 in the morning showing at 479.
Note: reviews add to points immediately where edits take 24-48 hours after accepted to add to total.
After earning some early points with normal reviews and photos, I concentrated on Place Edits to ramp up my Google Local Guide ranking quickly.
The Results: When did I see the points in my Google Local Guides profile?
3/15 – Started project. 51 points. 3/16 – Started the morning at 72 points from work approved overnight. 3/17 – Started the morning at 77 points. 141 total edits have been approved. Only showing points for 27 edits. May take 24-48 hours to show. Progress status – 28% (141/500) 3/18: Level 4 with 215 points. 3/19: 443 points. Need to get 57 more. 3/20: lots of updates pending in queue. Should push to level 5 tonight or tomorrow. 3/21: Didn’t want to wait on the last bits to update, so left a few reviews during lunch and was at 501 in the afternoon.
The end result was that I went from a Level 3 to a Level 5 Local Guide in 6 days. By targeting one or two large chains with questionable GMB naming setups, I was able to quickly boost my Local Guide level.
At the time I did this work, there were just over 6,000 Level 5 Local Guides worldwide. Since then Google has increased the Local Guide levels up to Level 10. I haven’t been actively working to boost my Local Guide level, so I’m creeping along but I’m aware there are other methods with Google’s new point system to quickly boost your level if you set up the right workflow.
Google’s program is currently set up to encourage sharing videos and longer reviews (200+ characters), but you can still rack up points verifying data on businesses, helping with business categorization, and correcting business errors.
What are the benefits of Local Guide status?
At the end of the day, did leveling up as a Local Guide provide any benefits?
I can’t definitively say that this happens, but it seems that my corrections for my own business listings go through faster for me now than when I started out the program. That may be Google just getting better at verifying data or it may be a level of trust my account has built up. There’s no official documentation to back that up, so take it as pure speculation on my part.
What the exercise did accomplish is to provide me with a deeper understanding of the Local Guide program and how edits on Google Maps work.
Seeing how easy it was to make edits to businesses also highlights the need for continual and active management of your GMB listings.
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About This Site
This is where I’m putting some of my own personal ramblings on a number of topics. I’ve just restarted blogging so I’m not sure what all will be here yet.
Expect a bit on Local SEO, youth sports, and more.
