Is Google going to kill Google Posts? 😱 Yesterday, @StefanSomborac shared a screenshot from an updated Google support doc, stating: "some businesses may find their social media posts surfaced on their Business Profile automatically." @krystal_taing posted a video on LinkedIn showing what this looks like 👇 Why would Google do this when they already have Google Posts? In his new article on the topic (in comments below), @mblumenthal shares some of my data on the declining use of Google Posts, and notes that Google recently added the ability to edit social profile links on your Google Business Profile. Also, last week, our SEO team at @whitespark noticed that the prominent Deals tag for Offer Posts no longer appears on mobile 😢 To me, all of this hints at the potential discontinuation of Google Posts. With most of their efforts and money going into AI, Google wants to cut costs. Google Posts will be one less feature to manage, support, and pay for 💸 Personally, I'll be sad to say goodbye to Google Posts because I have always felt they were an untapped opportunity for businesses. But perhaps there is a silver lining? Rather than duplicating your efforts on both your social channels AND your Google Business Profiles, you can just post once and get visibility for that content everywhere. I'll be watching this closely. #seo #localseo

Citation consistency has NOT mattered for SEO for over a decade. It used to matter a lot, but not anymore. So what changed? Well, in the early days of local search, Google had all the businesses in a standard database. In order to get the benefit of a citation, it was important for your primary name, address, and phone number to match perfectly with your business listing in that database. Otherwise, the citation was ignored and you would not get any SEO value. But in 2012, Google switched from a database of businesses to a KNOWLEDGE GRAPH of business entities. In this new model, Google has no problem with partially matching citations it finds online with your business entity in the knowledge graph. So, if you have a citation that has the correct name and phone number, but the address is different, Google still knows this is your business and associates the citation with your entity. If you want some proof, take a look at the citations of the top ranked lawyers in any city. You will find that their citations are an inconsistent mess, but they're still ranking like champions. Now, don't get me wrong. Citation *building* is still very important. You need to be listed on the places Google expects to find your business. If you're not, you'll have a hard time competing. And there are definitely still reasons to do citation cleanup. Here are two: 1️⃣ If your info on the most prominent sites is different than what's on your Google Business Profile, Google will frequently update your Profile with what they find online. That's annoying. You can stop this by updating those sites. 2️⃣ On sites that get actual human traffic and can drive real human leads, you want your name, phone, address, hours, and website URL to be accurate, because you want your potential customers to be able to identify and contact you. My recommendations for citations: 🔸 Do citation cleanup up on the prominent general and industry-specific sites 🔸 Get listed on the top 80 general citation sites 🔸 Get listed on as many industry-specific and city-specific sites you can find You do NOT need to worry about scouring the web to clean up every inconsistency out there. And you do NOT needs to worry about stupid tools (Yext) that try to scare you about your citations being inconsistent on obscure sites like myhuckleberry. Follow my recommendation above as a one-time task, and then mark citations as done. No need for ongoing work and no need to pay ongoing fees. #localseo #seo

You need to stop ignoring 3rd party review sites if you want to get more leads. Let me elaborate 🧵 Psst: @w2scott, you'll like this one. #localseo #seo