 All right, I want to start by telling you a story, and it's somewhat of an embarrassing story, and it has to do with the last time I was at MozCon, and speaking, and I was back in the speaker's room, and I was like prepping, I was going through my deck, and just really slamming it, and I have this cup of water in my hand, and I go to take a drink, and it just spills right on my crotch. And this is like 10 minutes before I go on stage. I mean, every speaker's worst nightmare, and I mean, this is why today I have like dark pants on, so if I spill these pants, I like sprayed them with like waterproof material. It just runs directly off. I have not eaten or drinking anything today since I've been here. The last time I drank something when I was naked in my hotel room, because it just rolls all over, doesn't matter what happens. I was just, that's how concerned I was about it. And so anyways, I'm gonna go back to this story. So here I am in the speaker's room, wet pants, and I'm like, okay, I've gotta be on stage in 10 minutes, and there's this bathroom. It's a wonderful bathroom if you're looking for a little bit of privacy. It's like back through this hall, and anyway. So I get into this bathroom, and I get some paper towels, and I find that if you start trying to dry the faster you go, the more friction there is, and the more it dries, right? So I'm just really trying to get it dry. And it's somewhat like this actually. I don't know if you've seen this before. And so I'm just in there, and I'm really starting to dry. And then, as I'm going, I look up, and there's some guy that just walks into the bathroom, and he's just staring at me. And I'm staring back at him. And I have to keep drying, so I just keep going. And it was so awkward. It was like the most awkward experience I've ever had. And so anyhow, luckily it was dry enough that I came back here and I got on stage. But I wanna talk about this awkward moment, this wonderfully awkward moment, this awkward thing. And I'm sure that person's in the audience. If you are, do not come find me. I don't wanna ever see you again in my entire life. But here's the thing about this awkwardness, right? We're in a state in local that's awkward. It's an awkward time. It's like puberty awkward. That's the thing. It's often, and here's why. Ultimately, you're not all local rock stars, okay? You're not all local rock stars because this is how you look at local. This is how you look at it. You look at it like it's a bowl full of organic stuff. Whatever organic goes into the local algorithm and it just has a dash of citations. Or you say something like, you know what? I don't do local. We have a guy in the back. It's Jerry and Jerry does all of our local. This is Jerry and Jerry will take care of it. And for some of us people who really focus a ton in local, we come out and we think we're just really hip and cool and we're just cutting edge and we look good. We're excited. But the rest of you look at us like this. This is us. And it's because we're so tight up in just Google my business. It's all we see and it's all we wanna function in and we're not looking at this bigger picture. And do you see the problem? Do you kinda see the problem with this? And it relates back to subjects that we've been talking about over this whole course of MozCon this year, which I was excited about and it's this right here. The idea of the T-shaped marketer. All right, where does local fall on this? You know what? This is where it showed. And this is how I think we treat local. And we have for a long time. But I've thought a lot about this and I've came to realize that we need to change the focus of this whole T-shaped web marketer. And it's more of like a capital I because small I wouldn't work, but a capital I shaped marketer does. And it's this. You still have the same focus or real deep knowledge in a specific area and multiple specific areas potentially and a wide breadth of information elsewhere. But your focus is one of about three things, local, national or international. And so much of you should be focusing more on local across all of these things. Every single one of these areas has different things that you need to do for local. And we're not, we're not thinking like that. We think Jerry's gonna handle it, you know? Because he's handling citations in the back and that's all that's local. Here's some examples, okay? Do a search, this is Seattle, right? So location set to Seattle, desktop, mobile, whatever. And do a search for SEO consultant, right? Should be national phrase and there's multiple phrases like this that will do this. So we do a search for SEO consultant and what do we see? We see a map. So Google and their infinite wisdom of the machine learning algorithm shows a map because clearly people have been clicking on results on search for agents like this and they want local intent. And beyond that, look at this. There's multiple what I call localized organic listings that show up as well for Seattle. So out of this top, out of the top about seven or eight spots, most of them, a high majority, five to six are localized results. So then let's look at ads, okay? We'll look at the top, what are all the ads? National, nobody has any focus on local when clearly people doing a search on this phrase and through Google showing us exactly what they're wanting but we're not taking that approach in paid. And then there's other people missing it or trying to rank for some of these national terms when ultimately it seems like search intent's showing that at least in the Seattle market, people are wanting local results. So here's an example of somebody doing it somewhat right. So a thing comes out recently and there's news all over Denver that lemonade stands are getting shut down, right? They're getting shut down because kids don't have business license. What type of world do we live in? All right, so no business license, no lemonade stand. Don't pay your fees to this other thing over here. Police are gonna come and cuff you, you five year old. And so this guy gets kind of upset and he starts building this map and he's like, here's all the instances in America with kids being shut down by police for lemonade stands. And so country time lemonade, the most non-local company on earth starts monitoring all of this local news in these local markets and they start a law firm called Legal Aid and they're gonna go out and they are gonna fight the fights and they're gonna give you the money to pay your business license or pay your citation fee so that you can sell your lemonade. Little five year old. So anyhow, here's a prime example. They looked at marketing from a local view and what did it do? It opened them up to a marketing opportunity that got coverage all over the states where these things were happening. Was it national news coverage? Eventually, but guess where it started, local. Okay, so the rest of this will be your nifty guide to local so that you can become better marketers and take advantage of new opportunities that may or may not present themselves to you in 2018 and beyond. For short though, we just call it the awkward state of local. It'll be a little bit like this. And so, and truthfully, there is a part that you just need to understand and my goal is to educate you a lot on what's happening in Google specifically on Google My Business with my Google, you know, my business glasses on because y'all need to know about it and we'll go beyond that as well but it's important because it's a world that we do play in. It's where things are happening and so we're gonna talk about some updates that have happened there. So, here's been the major updates over the last several years, right? We have the pigeon update, which is when organic ranking factors really tied in heavily with the local factors for both sides of rankings. It was like a combined algorithm. On August 7th, 2015, we went from seven listings, we went to three listings. In 2016, they added an ad in the map pack. September 1st, 2016, we had the possum update and this is where things started to shrink down as far as the localization was concerned but let's say you're an SEO consultant and you were in the same building as another SEO consultant, one of you would show up on the map, the other one might be filtered because they were giving kind of a look of diversity of location, right? They wanted to show a few more people other than everybody in the same building or people close together and they took it a little far. So, the hawk update that came next was basically eliminating that. It widened the range but it was still all of these moves were just moving thing to more localization. It fit very, very, very well with what Rob was talking about there and then this March, we had what we call the March update because we ran out of cool animals, I guess. It was really sad so I got a guy marching and that's where our non-geofraises became even more localized. So, that would just be a word like SEO consultant. And that seemed to happen both in maps and organically as well. So, in other words, everything's just gotten tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter and the room to compete has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. So, I feel like basically this is where I've been living the last several years. It's just getting harder, you know? It's like you're climbing the Mordor or something. So, where are we at now? This is what search looks like on desktop. Four paid ads, you have your three local, you have organic down below and sometimes you have an ad on desktop showing in this, sometimes you don't. On mobile, you have this, you know? You have your mobile results and organic. I don't even know where organic is anymore. It seems like on mobile. And I was speaking at a conference recently. It was a legal conference and we're a premier Google agency and so we have this like Googler that comes with us and he'll speak and he'll be like, oh yeah, you're super great. And they get up and they talk to everybody and they make you sound really, really good or whatever, but he said one thing that really, really threw me off because I'd never heard a Googler say it before. And he said, when he was talking about paid because they were trying to sell paid, he said 50% of clicks are going to paid ads. And I was like, what? I haven't heard them say that publicly. And afterwards I talked to him about it and he was like, yeah, yeah, 50% on mobile more and he wouldn't tell me exactly the percentage on mobile. But that was so mind blowing to me because when I started in this industry it was nowhere near that. Nowhere near that. So it just shows that it's shrunk. There's all of these different places that you need to be playing in and local. And while I would love, and I could spend a whole presentation talking about the paid side, we are going to focus on organic and maps. And so I want to talk about a study that we did. And this is a recent study. We looked at thousands of search phrases across the largest 50 cities in America in these industries. And we did, it's similar to Rob's in some way. We looked at geomodified words where we added the city. We did not use near me on this. We looked at ones that had the city included. And then we looked at ones like my initial result, the same phrases, the exact same phrases, but removing the city. So it would have just been the base phrase. And we've done this same study many years in a row. And so we can start comparing data and seeing what's happening in these various industries. And one of the most fascinating things from this that I've seen is this. 75%, this is back in 2016, 75% of those that ranked in the map pack at the top, the local pack, also had their listing ranking organically on the first page. They'd rank on the first page organic as well as in the map. 75% of those that were in top spots would do that. The number this year really, really blew my mind. It was 48%. That's a massive, massive, massive change. And I thought a lot about like, okay, well what happened? What's changed? Is it that the algorithms are getting a little more complex and separating a little more? Or what are some of these things? And I think it comes down to a couple of things here. So this is what I would have traditionally called the pillars of local search. These were the areas that the algorithm was built on and that if you built plans around these four quadrants, these four pillars, then you would do well. You would rank well as long as your location wasn't messing you up. But this is kind of where I think we are now. And this local content circle that I start with on the bottom, this isn't just local content like on a website. You could also call it your local entity, your local knowledge graph, whatever Google knows about you and the content that they have about your business, your organization. And you control that somewhat as far as what they can find on the web and how they group that together. And you still have control over these other areas, but engagement and location have dramatically changed over the course of the years as far as how those play into things. And how, and ultimately, how the ranking algorithm ends up working for you. So we're gonna look at what you can do. And this is the first thing that you truly have control over and that you need to really be focused on. And that's fixing your major listings starting with Google My Business. So major listings, what do I mean by that? This is all of the local directories. We're not gonna spend a ton of time talking citations. When you look at this graphic, this is the new local ecosystem that's put together by Darren Shaw at Whitespark. And I think he does that in conjunction still with David Mim from Tidings. And so when you look at this, you'll notice that there's some that seem really big on this graphic. And these are the data aggregators. And then the search engines. And ultimately, nowadays, instead of local SEOs telling you that you just need to go out and get all of these citations, have consistency across every single place your business is listed. You know what? You need to just have it in the places that really, really, really matter. And that's where Google gets the data from. Google My Business. Info, Group USA. And Axiom, as far as some of these other direct ones that feed to these places. And does Moz Local hit most of those? Yes, as a matter of fact, they hit all of these that you can see here, I believe. And getting it right in Apple Maps through the Apple Connector, the website there. But what's interesting to me is in our study this year, as we looked at this, and this just showed me that as the local SEO industry has kind of moved a little further away from really preaching hardcore about the consistency of citations and going as deep as you can. In our study, we actually saw that the average person that was ranking in the top spots, their scores, their average Moz Local score had gone down. And it just, it showed me that. Like, get it right in the main places. You might have some things that you can't handle or that are too difficult to change in other places. But at the end of the day, nobody's using those directories. And so, why are you worrying about places where your customers aren't? So, beyond that, let's just dive right into Google My Business. So, you know, you have Google My Business. And that's the opening there. And when you log in, this is what it looks like. So, you're starting to be able to add all of this information. And you have the knowledge graph that can now accept, anyhow, you can claim parts of your knowledge graph. And we've always been able to do that with local knowledge graphs, right? And I really see this day coming where they're taking all of these tests and all of these things they've done in local, and they're starting to apply that into potentially everybody's websites, every knowledge graph that there is. So, there could be a day where all things kind of look like this. So, anyways, you can control this information about your title, business name, your hours of operation, all of this. But one thing's interesting in our study also, and this has affected rankings greatly in the past couple years, and that's the business name. Key words in the business name title will drive ranking higher. It's against their policy to not have your legitimate business name. But if I were to name it, you know, Seattle SEO Consulting or something like that, then I would have a higher chance of ranking, simply by making that one change. And what we found in our study that could help to correlate to why there was such a drop in the percentage of people who ranked organically and in the local listings was that 58% of the businesses in our study had either the location or the key phrase in their actual name, their business name. And a lot of those, not all of them, but a lot of those were spam. And so, looking at this result, this was one when I was in Ireland that I was speaking at a conference and I shared this one, it was plumbers and they were just really stuffing their titles. And so, I went in and I edited it. And you can just click on it and you can take out the spam, you just eliminate plumbers, Dublin plumbers, all of that, you know, like you would do. And instantly, when those edits were approved, those rankings dropped for those businesses and other places took their spot. So, rule from this is, you know, fighting spam in your markets could be the easiest way to move your ranking in the actual map between one and five spaces depending on the amount of spam there is. And it's as fast as you could possibly imagine if you can get the edits approved. And you simply just put the real business name there. Next, so you have a tracking phone number. It used to be that you had to have your local phone number and that was all you could use on your listing. Now, you can put your local phone number down below and put a tracking phone call number in the main spot. And what this will allow you to do, and we're even using a 1-800 number for Nifty on this, what this would allow you to do is track all the phone calls that are coming through Google My Business separately from your website potentially or separately from all these other things. So, you know, it's a great feature. The key is ensuring that your real legitimate number is added as the additional number down below so that they're still tying that together with your entity. Next, we have a description field that's been added. And this has came and gone and came and gone. Anyways, you can now fill out a much longer description about a business that can show up very prominently. And I was wondering if effective ranking. So, we tested putting in a bunch of random words that had nothing to do with our business in Burley because nothing, you know, Burley, it's not hard to rank on anything, so I wanted to see if adding certain words there would help us to boost. And nothing happened at all. So, I do not believe that there's any effective ranking in this description field. As of yet, they added another part where you can build out your services. And we did that. And they show up here on the menu tab, which I think they're gonna rename to services tab. And we also added country rap stars. And the reason we did this is because I wanted to see if I could rank for Burley country rap stars. And we'll make you a free country rap song or something like that, right? Yet again, it did not show up. By adding this type of phrase, it did not affect any type of ranking or add a category so that we'd be the only people to show up on a map with it. So, I don't believe that these will have any impact on ranking currently. Within this dashboard, you can add multiple, multiple pitchers of many, many different things inside, outside 360 views. And customers look at these pitchers. As a matter of fact, they'll send you a report showing how many times your pitchers have showed up. And I've been amazed at how poorly most businesses do on adding pitchers of the experience that you could have at these businesses. So ensure that if you have a business doing this, that they're adding the pitchers. They've also added a feature where you can do direct messaging with a business via text, right from the listing. Yet again, all these things could be coming, they're in local, but I look at their test in local as just things to come across the whole industry. So anyhow, this one's a great feature that you can instantly communicate. It goes directly to the business owner's phone or whatever number you want it to go to and then right back to the customer. And then, there's been posts. And I wanna spend a little bit of time talking about posts. They've added some new opportunities and posts. One is a product. So you can actually list a product for sale on your business listing, like was discussed yesterday about Target, but this is one for the average small business where you can choose it, you choose the URL it goes to. It doesn't have to be sold directly through there, but I see the day coming where this could potentially happen. In our study, we only found that 5% of people were actively using posts. That's so low for something that shows up so prominently on mobile. If you search for a brand on mobile and they have a local knowledge graph, a post is one of the very first things you'll see if you do it. So why not do something like this where you publish a picture of a client or a customer along with their testimonial that just makes you look like the five-star genius. Or this one from Joel Headley, who created a book and appointment button for his post, booked and then put this in and through their studies found that he got two times higher click-through rate and they moved the amount of appointments booked by double digits simply by doing this. It was very, very powerful. There's also a new Q and A feature that's coming out and that's been out. And what we found through the Q and A feature was this. 31% of people were using it or had questions on there. Only 8% were answered. Only 8%. And there's things like this all over the place. Absolutely horrible communication. Have not heard from an attorney for six months. I mean, it's just a bad review. It's not even a question. Or this one at Dollar General. Why is it so slow at Dollar General? Dirty, poor service, et cetera. Well, you're watched like you're stealing something but if you ask them for help finding something you might as well ask the damn wall. They look at you like you stupid. Not a good answer. Nobody's monitoring it. Like, I just know so few companies are looking at this or even caring. Get Five Stars does monitor. They can monitor for multi-location. Google will send you an individual email if you do get a question. But people just aren't taking advantage of this and it's so prominent on the homepage here. Mike Blumenthal has four points that he says about Google questions and answers that you need to keep in mind. Post your own questions and that's totally fine as of now. I'm sure Google will change that eventually. You'll go and post all your questions and then eventually it'll change the rule but for now it's fine. Monitor others' questions, respond to all questions and report violations. There's data that you can get out of Google My Business but yet I've always looked at this. Don't look at it as exact. I look at it as a trend line more than anything. But one of the things that's fascinating is over time we've seen that a lot of local sites are stagnating on traffic. Coming to their website. But they're not stagnating on phone calls and they're not stagnating on driving directions and they're not stagnating on these things because ultimately Google My Business is the new front page for a local business. This is the front page of their website and that's something that's been shared by many local SEOs coined by Mike Blumenthal. It is the new front page of their website. And so in this case for instance, more things happened or about an equal amount of things happened off of the website as far as contacting this business than traffic going to it when you add up the phone calls, driving directions and chats. That's crazy. And so Google really is controlling this and having things happen there and it's a good experience. People enjoy doing it. They enjoy the direct call function. So it's things to think about and even though the data's not perfect, you still have to at least look at this and help clients understand or for your own business understand maybe that's why you have flat traffic but it seems like everything else sells, calls or something are continuing to rise. They're just not coming to your site. So if you're having issue with that at all go ahead and reach out. There's a lot of areas where you can get support on Google. There's a good support team. They do get overwhelmed but they try their best. You can reach out to them on Facebook, Twitter. I believe they just shut down the chat and phone functionality. So you might not be able to do that but the other two spots will work. Which is funny that the way you get ahold of them is through Facebook and Twitter but anyhow. There's also new features constantly coming out. This is a new type of design on mobile for how to sort listings and I think we'll continue to see a lot of this. So step two, make reviews part of your customer experience. Basically in our study we found that the average amount of reviews across those industries was 39 reviews and that was up 30% from 2016. I'm not gonna spend any more time talking about reviews because D-Loco Shaw is spending his whole presentation talking about it so watch that tomorrow. Step three, you gotta get your website in order and this graphic you can go ahead and you'll be able to take a look at this but there's a couple things I wanna pull out on it. So basically local scheme is something that I think everybody got a ton of excitement about and we were all really jazzed to get into our websites and start going and one day I was with Joel Headley who used to be in house at Google and was largely the communicator over local and he basically told me something. He said, you know what? We get all the information we're needing from Google My Business when it comes to local schema so the only things that you really need to worry about with local schema are things that actually show up in SERP results like star ratings on reviews. He's like, mark up your business, your business information, your NAP information, well if you've provided that in Google My Business it's already there, we already have it, we already know. So the knowledge graph, the local knowledge graph, they're already like their way of getting schema. It's an easier way for businesses who aren't technical. I'm not saying don't do it. His whole point was just don't waste your time on things that don't have SERP features which I thought was good advice. So if you want that infographic that shows all of the data points from our study you can grab that at this link. Step four, get local or industry links. A lot of them like loads and you know, I get this question a lot. Do links still matter in local? And we've been asking this for a lot of years. This was a recent study, Sam Rush's recent study, there's been multiple studies over the past several years by every major player in the SEO space and the tool space. Every one of them comes back saying of course links still matter. And yeah, is there a day where it's gonna change and continually change to the point where we might totally stop caring as much about the way we go about links? Sure, but I still have tons and tons of situations like this every day where we have clients where over a course of time if this might be the one area we're focusing with them with is links and as they get more referring domains their ranking goes up. And in a study we did about lawyers this past year, 37% rise in links for the average law firm in the top spot compared to the 2016. And so how do you get those links? I think local content strategy is a wonderful way to frame it initially. And I have a whole thing on that that I don't have time to go over. But if you go to that link, you can walk through the local content strategy side of it. But ultimately for like small business these are the four areas. The main four areas is providing content, sponsorship, scholarship and local and industry directories. And I don't even consider this an area because it's largely lucky for small businesses and that's just those natural links. And it's because they're small and people don't care about them. And so to think that you can just go out and publish content and news and all of these other things are going to link to you naturally as a small business. It's not very relevant. You have to work hard. And we've had some wonderful case studies and successes of that but they are by far the exception compared to just getting in the trenches and doing the dirty hard little piece of the time going to your chamber, getting a link, paying for a sponsorship that gets your link here. I mean, that's the stuff that works in local. And I can go up against anybody on that and generally find that we win because we do. So if you want a ton of examples of just little tactics for link building we have a massive local link list of opportunities that you can take on for businesses that are largely on the smaller medium side. And we've done real big building projects for national brands as well. And I found the difference is just immense. Like it is so much easier when I'm working with a multi-location national brand for link building than I am on that smaller side. And so I hope that a post like this can show some things that you can do for just the real small-mon pause. So here's the steps all in order. You can grab this when you grab the deck and just last, definitely not least, the world is local and the internet is just trying to catch up. I truly believe this. We're all here in Seattle. We're all having this experience, this conference though it represents a complete national and international event. It's taking place in local. The relationships are made locally. Everything's happening that way. And I just find that companies are not focused enough on the fact that a person lives in a location whether they're buying nationally or not. And that location matters for how they act, how they think, what they do, what they feel, the type of people that influence them. And the more you think about location, the better you'll do whether you're doing local marketing, national marketing, or international marketing. Thank you.