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: Custom Signal Service Launch Savings
- SEO Mad Scientist: GMB Test Results – Final Review
To your success,
Chaz and the Entire Team
FROM THE VAULT – Episode 84
Don’t forget The SEO Vault airs live on the Web 20 Ranker Facebook every Thursday at 4 pm EST.
Co-Host: Sophie Allen + Mike Milas
Special Guest: Neil Belliveau
Google Local Reviews Not Publishing
Upcoming Google Page Experience Update
Google made some change to how it detects soft 404s
Google My Business: Edit Your Profile, Hours, Photos & More From Web Search
Google Search Tweaks Knowledge Panel & Filter Design
– Watch the Latest SEO Vault Episode here
– Listen here: https://pod.co/theseovault
Interested in being a guest on the vault!? Sign up now
https://forms.gle/ae5Dh575BqYieDBEA
Limited time left to lock in savings for the life of your campaign!
Custom Signals Savings This Weekend Only
Customized Link Building And Off-Page Brand Promotion
4/16-4/18
Choose from 5 hours or 10 hours of custom link outreach and signal creation. We investigate and compile a list based on the top-ranking competitor’s backlink graph and then set about creating as many of the relevant links as we can acquire and outreaching to the rest.
https://web20ranker.com/custom-link-building/
Lock in our special launch pricing this weekend only
Prices guaranteed for the life of your new campaign!
Save $30 on 5 hours of Custom Signal Building Campaigns (Orig $109 today $79)
Save $40 on 10 hours of Custom Signal Building Campaigns (Orig $189 today $149)
By reverse-engineering your top-ranking competitor’s backlinks and brand mentions our custom signals team finds the relevant sites and link-building opportunities that propel sustained SERP rankings and increased performance.
SEO Mad Scientist 
Hey there scientists and welcome to another exciting week of test results. Today we’re actually going to be closing out a lot of different tests and going over some final data that we have so let’s jump right into it.
1) Emoji in the business name test
We’ve gone over the data quite a bit and over the previous weeks, we observed what appeared to be a slight ranking increase for some terms that related to the Emojis…
With that said after a few more weeks, we’ve seen some back and forth fluctuations and even some drops in our primary keyword leading us to believe that there’s a lot more going on here than just the Emojis and we’re going to have to call this test inconclusive at this point.
Note: Google does not explicitly say that emojis are not allowed in the business name although they do refer to special characters but don’t specifically state emojis. With that said your business name is supposed to reflect your legal business name in which case Google definitely has grounds to suspend and not reinstate your listing if you are using emojis. We have been using these to test their impact on possible rankings but have in no way implemented any emoji strategies on clients.
2) Address removal tests
Last week’s test was interesting in that we removed the address from the business but left a service area that was actually north of the verified City. The end result was that we saw a rankings drop closer to the city center but maintain rankings closer to the service area that was listed.
When reviewing the current results there seems to be a very strong correlation in a drop in rankings where the address was listed. Rankings are staying the same way the service area is however and in some cases even showing better possibly due to Google knowing exactly where this business services now.
3) Our first address removal test
The rankings appeared to explode which we believe was possibly an outlier but let’s take a final look at where the rankings stand currently.
After looking at the new snapshots it’s clear that whatever is going on is just fluctuations in the listing as we’ve lost a lot of our rankings that originally showed for “driveway repair”. We would say this test is inconclusive but most likely demonstrates that removing the address and listing the location in the service area doesn’t have an impact.
Moving on to the final test that we have been doing.
4) GMB reviews
We still have pretty inconclusive data as to if they’re actually causing any ranking fluctuations. Because of this we will hold off on doing a full report until next weekend and will also dig back into some of our previous image tests and some new ones that we have been working with.
Make sure to join us next week when we look at answering the question… do image uploads of any kind help with rankings? And, what type of impact do reviews have on your rankings for local maps organic?
Until next week…
Happy Testing!
Get Your Free Campaign Recommendations Today!
Not sure what would be the best route for your SEO campaign? No worries, we’ve got you covered!
Find Out Exactly What You Need to Rank
Quick and easy, yet powerful in results!
Get your recommendations here!
Want to earn a $50 store credit?
In order to receive a $50 store credit, the only thing we need from you is a short video (at least 30 seconds) explaining:
1) Who you are and what you do
2) What you bought and why you bought it
3) How the product worked for you and the pros of it!
That’s it! 3 simple topics and you could be on your way to $50 towards your next purchase!
You can send your videos to: [email protected]