It’s time for your info-packed SEO newsletter to kick off the weekend and keep you up to date on the latest news, SEO tactics, tests, and so much more.
We had an exciting week and you won’t want to miss a thing!
What Happened on the SEO Vault this Week
Deal of the week: 20% Cashback All DFY Accelerated and Monthly Services + 5 Guest Post Giveaway
SEO Mad Scientist: How well does having your “keyword” in your GMB name work?
To your success,
Chaz and the Entire Team
FROM THE VAULT – Episode 63
Don’t forget The SEO Vault airs live on the Web 20 Ranker Facebook every Thursday at 4 pm EST.
Custom signals added to DFY SEO, Traffic Link & Link Booster Monthly Campaigns
Google Search Ranking Algorithm Update November 17th & 18th?
Google Local Q&A Limited To 440 Characters From 1,000?
Google Launches Small Business Advisors
GMB Metrics Update: Your insights are moving
And so much more!
Watch the Latest SEO Vault Episode here
Missed last week’s episode? Catch up with all the previous Vault Episodes here
You Can Even Listen here: https://pod.co/theseovault
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5 Guest Post Giveaway
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Store credits will be applied to your account when the promotion ends
SEO Mad Scientist
One more week closer to the end of the year and we still have a TON of tests to go through
This week we are going to be reviewing some past test sites and talking about current ongoing tests.
But first
We wanted to take a look at something that gets talked about a lot.. having your “keyword” in your GMB name
We know it is a signal and often considered the “most powerful”, but how well does it really work (aside from the risk of a soft or hard suspension)? Assuming the name is updated without any issues, how big of an impact would it make?
Let’s take a look at a GMB that we recently updated using the GMB mobile app. There is always a risk with updating this info on a GMB listing but using the app, our update went through in just a few hours without any issues.
The first thing to note is that when searching the primary keyword with the geo modifier, the top-ranking GMB listings definitely seem to be leveraging the keyword in the GMB name to rank…
The truth is though… the second listing is ours
We previously updated a brand called “Go 2 Title Loans” to “Title Loans Miami” around November 10th. We already had the “title loans” term in the title but switched it to our exact match geo term.
At first, we were trying to test the limits of the GMB app by making updates so we figured this would be obvious spam and get denied or suspended, surprisingly it went through…
So the second thing we wanted to know was how it helped the rankings, as in the rankings locally for the target keyword “title loans” as well as target keywords with the geo modifier such as “Miami title loan” and “title loans in Miami”.
We assumed the Miami terms would most likely go up, but would it help the primary term “title loans”?
Let’s first take a look at the Miami Terms:
Not to our surprise, they all saw dramatic increases…
Now let’s take a look at our base terms while searching FROM Miami, Florida:
These rankings actually appear to go down slightly…
This did surprise us a bit. The only thing we can think of is that because of the change, the brand name now applied to some kind of EM algo that possibly lowered the listings prominence score…
An important thing to point out about this listing is that all it has is a website that it links to and has no other signals built to it as far as citations, PRs, or anything at all. So the rankings shown are 100% basic GMB optimization along with keyword targeting in the name…
But one big question is how “well” would this work if the listing did have citations as well as other signals built to it with the previous brand name and then it all of a sudden updated?
Would we see a negative result or possibly more likely to trigger a spam filter?
We are now building up signals to a partial brand match GMB and are going to switch the name after some time exactly like we did with this one. Once we have the results we will be sure to let you know as always…
Until then let us know what you think will happen in the Local SEO Community.
We are still waiting for pages to be reindexed for our local directory/local business intent properties that we discussed last week. Until we see a reindex of the pages any result we know is not due to the update.
Of course, the request indexing tool being down hasn’t helped so we must wait for Google to reindex on its own…
Until next week…
As always,
Happy Testing
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