Ethical SEO Blog

If you have been involved in local search over the past year, you may have noticed how confusing it has been. First, Google Places converted to Google Plus Local and some of these listings are still in limbo. However, if you are adding a new business, I am happy to report that Google Places for [...]

A few weeks back Casey posted a rant on the prevalence of low quality EMD websites in Google’s SERPs, and how they seem to be even more prevalent since Google’s supposed crack down on them last September. I decided to test just how easy it is to rank an EMD on the first page of [...]

Since I’ve been spending time honing my local SEO game recently,  I wanted to share a few actionable tips and tools you can use to help your local optimization efforts go faster and further. As some of you may know there are many factors to ranking locally. I’m going to focus these tips towards some [...]

In September 2012, Google launched an Exact Match Domain filter. According to Search Engine Land, the reason was to “prevent poor quality sites from ranking well simply because they had words that match search terms in their domain names.” Before this update, many websites could easily rank for a keyword by purchasing a domain with [...]

I was on Google the other day and I entered the words “Why does SEO” and the four most common searches that start with those words auto-filled in the drop-down. When I saw this I decided that maybe I need to take a little time to help people better answer these 4 questions that Google [...]

As a Local SEO fanatic it’s easy for me to breathe local SEO. Everyday I follow some of the major local blogs, forums, and news so that I can always be up to date on what’s changed. Although there are a lot of bits and pieces out there on the internet about how to optimize [...]

If you’re anything like me then you don’t like to click on generic short links that you find strewn across social media feeds. As I was thinking about why I don’t like to click on these type of links I realized it’s because just by looking at the link without any description I have no [...]

At Local U Advanced in March 2013, Mike Blumenthal gave a very interesting presentation on the importance of reviews. When shoppers are looking for information about your business they may be turning to sites such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, etc., and reading the reviews that others have posted about you. Sometimes people get too caught up [...]

One of our law firm clients recently approached us to find out the answer to a simple yet important question; where should we be placing our efforts when it comes to gaining reviews online? Do customers trust certain review sources over others? Inspired by this post from Mike Blumenthal, we headed over to Google Surveys and [...]

At Local U Advanced in Baltimore, Mary Bowling with Optimized! gave some great insight on local search for regional and national businesses. If you have any clients that run multiple locations you’ve probably experienced many different issues that traditional mom and pop shops don’t. Or you may have found that no work has been done [...]