SEO Updates January 08, 2021

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: Spend $500+ this weekend secure a spot to the 2021 State of SEO Webby

SEO Mad Scientist: GMB Short Links: Do They Help SEO?

To your success,

Chaz and the Entire Team

FROM THE VAULT – Episode 70

Don’t forget The SEO Vault airs live on the Web 20 Ranker Facebook every Thursday at 4 pm EST.

🔹 Google Employees Start A Union: The Alphabet Workers Union
🔹 Google Maps Calling Out Square Ad Pins As Ads
🔹 Beware: Yocale May Be Added To Your Google Local Listing
🔹 Google Claims Search Updates Don’t Take Company Revenue into Considerations
🔹 Google Data Studio Can Pull Search Console News Queries
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

The Weekend Deal is Back!
1/8-1/10

We’re kicking 2021 off with an exciting weekend deal

The deal of the week is back and we’re offering a deal you could only previously get by spending $1,500 during the Year-End SEO sale

When you spend $500 or more today 1/8- through 1/10 you will have the chance to can secure your spot and attend the 2021 State of SEO webinar

A deal like no other with an opportunity you can not afford to pass up!

Stock up on services and lock in your seat now >> https://web20ranker.com/

SEO Mad Scientist

Hello Scientists!

It’s been a busy week of testing so let’s dive right into it. As you know we have been looking into GMB listing optimization tests to determine what listing signals carry weight, and how much.

In a recent description test, we added “bathroom remodeling” to a listing ranking well for plumbing terms in a small city. We did some additional terms as well to test to possibilities of ranking impact on related terms and terms that were somewhat ranking. At that point the we saw no movement from the description. This is also a listing we decided to test services again on shortly after for the “bathroom remodeling” terms. As if ending last year, still no movement from the description of service updates.

With all that, we still see our rankings holding steady, but no bathroom remodeling terms ranking. So we tested the GMB custom URL and decided to set our service/city as the URL.

As you can see we still have gained no relevance for this term.

We will continue to see if there is any movement and if none has occurred we are going to do an off-page linking test by adding a relevant URL to the GMB.

We have another GMB website test running also which we will have a full report next week.

We asked the question, “If we added a brand new service to our company that our GMB didn’t show for at all, what optimization would be required to get initial rankings?”

So far as we can see, adding it to the description and services has essentially no impact. Adding it as a category will impact rankings, but only if the category use the term itself. In our case “telemarketing service”.

See you next week with a full report on that test and an update from this week’s test.

Until then,

Happy Testing