Dan Leibson (@DanLeibson) is the VP of Search at Local SEO Guide. He started in SEO in around 2007 with e-commerce and did some “review manipulation” before it was a cool thing to do. In 2012 he got into local search and he has a pretty good name in local SEO now.
He said it started around when not provided with Google Analytics came out and organic SEO started to get a bit more complex. He said he liked the wild west days of SEO, so local SEO was just starting out like that, and he wanted more of the wild west feeling. He then joined Local SEO Guide. He was commenting a lot of local SEO blogs, and met Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide at a conference and he joined forces with Andrew. Dan and Andrew grew the company from just the two of them to about 15 people right now.
Google now uses neural matching in local search. He first said it was interesting that Danny Sullivan talked about that. Meaning, local and organic search normally do not cross channels. Generally, Google local and organic search have nothing to do with each other. But we had Danny Sullivan from Google’s web search team confirm a local update.
Google said local search now uses neural matching to match the query to the business listing. Dan said Google took technology from the Google search team and used it for local search. He said his clients were not impacted by this change back in November. Local search is complicated because there are different factors than organic search, Dan said. Proximity is important and sometimes there ins’t enough inventory there.
Google My Business does not give you an account representative for multi-location big brands. Bulk problems are hard to take care of, smaller one-location problems are sometimes easier to get action on. Google My Business is by far not a priority to Google compared to the main search services. The biggest complaint, even internally at Google, is that they do not have the resources available to take care of business owners. That team is small within a massive corporation and the company had so many brand changes around local search.
He wishes the company would talk more about the good things coming out of Google My Business, not just the bad stuff coming out of Google Maps.
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