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Definitely a good addition, Alex!

Hi PrimeSource1!

Thanks for asking a good and important question. Because your business model is solely digital, you would not qualify for Google My Business optimization, with or without an office. Google's guidelines not only exclude the use of virtual offices, but they also prohibit participation by brands that don't meet face-to-face with their customers. So, in this case, it sounds like your funding will be better invested in organic SEO, PPC and Social rather than local SEO.

When a business does have face-to-face interactions with its customers, but doesn't have a dedicated physical address, two alternatives to explore are:

1. Using your home address for a single location (not using a bunch of home addresses for multiple locations, though)

2. In some cases, the use of co-working spaces.

But, with a digital-only model like yours, these aren't helpful. Rather, if you're hoping to gain a presence in particular regions of the country, you'll need to do so with content, linkbuilding, on-page optimization, social outreach, PR, and, likely, paid advertising. Hope this helps!

Thanks so much, Taylor! Do you have any predictions of your own to add?

Good Morning!

You might find this article of some use https://medium.com/@khusbu_machar/what-is-google-knowledge-graph-and-how-to-get-rid-of-wrong-data-on-knowledge-graph-c9dce02fd560 but from what I have seen, it can take Google time to sort out old references to a piece of data from more recent ones. Have you tried to retroactively edit old references to your former CEO where they exist on the top pages coming up for your branded search?

Andrew, thank you for sharing such thoughtful observations, especially in explaining what you've seen work best over the past year. Useful!

A Very Happy New Year to you, too! So glad my reply was helpful to you, and good luck with your publication.

Glad you found this interesting, Andrew! Thanks for stopping by. Do you have any predictions of your own to share?

Thanks for reading, Joe! Agree with you that Internet users are demonstrating an exceedingly high level of tolerance for Big Tech misbehavior. What's in front of us is a whole new year to see whether we see fundamental change at these brands or more and worse disasters that could bring us to a tipping point. I'm hoping for the former, but worried we may see the latter.

Good morning and Happy New Year!

Either way or both, with the internal links, is fine

Hi Luminatrix,

Yes, I recommend including your keywords, but not being quite so strict about order. You might enjoy this Whiteboard Friday from earlier this year: https://moz.com/blog/write-for-seo-2018

Hi Cherie!

Excellent discussion going on here. You're in the fortunate position of having only 10 pages to write and optimize, and I want to encourage you to simply give yourself a little more creative license in how you craft your H1 tags. Yes, it's a general best practice to include core keywords in your H1 title, but I'd encourage you not to be so very strict about exact word order. Let't take a couple of minutes to look at this together.

You have a Reviews page. Strictly speaking, you could write an H1 tag that reads:

Tasmania Holiday Rental Reviews

But that's pretty bland and doesn't convey much excitement to the human reader, who is your ultimate judge. So, what if instead of that, you wrote:

Tasmania Travelers Write Fun & Awesome Reviews of our Holiday Rental

Does this seem a bit more engaging and human to you?

You have an Amenities page. Instead of being strict in your wording, you could give it an H1 tag reading:

Which Amenities Will Matter to You Most Staying at Our Holiday Home in Tasmania?

And then go on to create the page in that vein, explaining why certain amenities are loved by particular types of guests (those who want to breakfast late, those who hate hot weather, those who love a hot tub after a hike in nature, etc.). Put yourself in the reader's shoes and try to engage their needs and desires.

Google is pretty good these days at understanding topics, so my overall advice is to honor your sense of creativity and write for the reader rather than focusing solely on keyword order, which, as you've so eloquently explained, ends up sounding robotic.

Hello There!

Earlier this year, we had a good discussion about Cornerstone Content (a term that is widely used by Yoast though not by everyone else) here on the forum. You might like to take a look: https://moz.com/community/q/are-core-pages-considered-cornerstones.

Yoast is a very respected company, and they've created some classic products. That being said, I personally question advice like this being given on their blog:

"You’ll need to write an article of at least 900 words."

_900 words _sounds to me more like a public school writing assignment than criteria for a professional writer or publisher. Let's talk about this.

Wordstream has been kind enough to cite Moz's Beginner's Guide to SEO as a good example of cornerstone content. I've contributed to that guide along with other staff here, and can attest that a specific number of words was nowhere in the plan for contributing. Instead, the plan is to cover the topic at hand thoroughly, and this is what all good writing, both on and off the web, does. Because of this, while I can appreciate that there is a desire to know if there's a word count that impresses Google, I don't think it's a good way to think about writing or publishing. If it takes 500 words to explain something, write them. If it takes 10,000 words, write them. The point is to explain a topic to a reader in a way that engages them and results in them feeling fully informed.

My best guess is that a company like Yoast is striving to offer some general guidelines for strong, lucrative publishing strategies, but when people start throwing set numbers around, it doesn't match my concept of building authority as a publication. I would rather that publishers focus on quality than word counts. The only time I can see the necessity of counting words is in offline publications that have limited paper space for an article. On the web, they sky's the limit, and the quality of what you publish is what wins readers.

Hi Scott,

Donna has offered some good advice. Something else you need to consider:

If you have a single location, then yes, most of your content should be mentioning your city. Your Herniated Disc Treatment page can talk about how you treat this problem in your office in San Diego, and that's completely natural to do so. However, if your practice expands to more than one location, then you'll have to revisit this strategy. If you have 2 offices, or 10, or 100, how much city-oriented optimization you can do of your service pages will have to be rethought, because you're not going to want to put a list of 10 cities on your service pages.

But, for now, if you've got just one location, a moderate mention of your city terms on your service pages (and other page like Home, About, etc.) is totally fine. Just don't overdo it.

Hello There!

Good questions you've asked here. My standard advice for multi-location business models is that you have:

1. A page for every location

2. A page for every service or product you offer

3. Links from #1 to #2

What you're describing here, of creating a whole set of city-optimized versions of each service you offer even though the service is identical across all locations, is an option I don't particularly advocate. You could go this route, but here are some problems I see with this approach:

1. I have 10 services and my business expands to 100 locations. What a mess it would be to have to create unique content for 1,000 city-optimized service pages that are all actually saying the same thing. It's just not going to be sustainable for most businesses to do this.

2. I can't really say to myself that I'm creating these page for people. I'd feel I was doing it all for search engines, and (like Google) I don't really feel comfortable with that approach to marketing. My customer can be served just fine if my landing page for city 1 links to my page for service 1. If the service is the same for all customers at all locations, the only reason I'd create thousands of iterations of combinations of service+city would be for search engines.

So, rather than take this approach, I'd invest the time/money in something else. I'd go with a page for every city and a page for every service and put my budget towards content development and link building for these pages. I'd focus on building the overall authority of my brand in relationship to my topics, because I feel this would result in better ROI than creating a sort of octopus of near-duplicate pages solely in hopes of rankings.

Hope these thoughts are helpful in creating strategy!

Thank you, John! Any predictions of your own to share?

Thank you for sharing your prediction, Donna! Agree with you that reputation management and link building (including linked unstructured citation building) will be recognized as competitive difference makers. I believe structured citations will remain table stakes in 2019 (something you have to have to get in the game).

As for major players, yes, I think there's a possibility we may see a change. I won't go so far as to name a particular brand, but there are several majors who appear to keep making the same mistakes to their own detriment as far as public sentiment is concerned. Unless we see learning and change from these mistakes, they could be in trouble. We'll see!

So glad you added your thoughts. Hope we'll see more community members join in. Wishing you a wonderful new year, Donna!

Pahahahaha! Thank you, Michael. That made my morning.

Ah! That's a good one, Michael, but I get why it's more of your wish than a firm prediction. David Mihm hopefully predicted Google would focus in on review spam in 2018 and was sorry to have to report it did not happen. Maybe 2019 will be the year - here's hoping!

Thanks for reading and for adding your smart take. I hope our community will keep this thread rolling with more good guesses!

Greetings to our great Moz Community!

It's been a fascinating year in Local Search, and I thought it would be good to jot down a few of my personal predictions for the year ahead. I'd love you to add yours, as well, so that we can all think together about the local businesses we'll be marketing in the new year. Here we go:

1) Major player weaknesses could lead to a changing of the local guard

Whether it's Facebook's ethics scandals or Yelp's downward stock trends, loss of public confidence could mean a shift in a local search platform hierarchy that's been pretty well established for some years. These brands' ongoing challenges could spell out opportunity for newcomer brands, or could simply drive more people to Google. Google has had its own problems this year, but nevertheless...

2) Google will continue to dominate and monetize local search

For so many users, Google IS the Internet, and that's an advantage no competitor has been able to overcome. In 2019, I expect to see further monetization of local SERPs, including LSA, in-pack local ads, booking buttons, and other forms of lead gen. Local search marketing will become more spendy. For more on creating strategy in this environment, read: Why Local Businesses will Need Websites More Than Ever in 2019. And, for retailers...

3) Real-time Online Local Inventory will become a real "thing"

I'll have an article coming out on this in early 2019 on the Moz blog (Update: Now Published: https://moz.com/blog/taking-local-inventory-online), but in a nutshell, we're on course to cross a new threshold in search. You'll finally be able to search for local inventory and get accurate information about who near you stocks what in their stores. Google's See What's In Store feature will be part of this, but so will emerging third party technology. User behavior will change as a result of this, and just like we've all integrated online mapping/local search into our daily lives, we'll soon be familiar with using search to find local inventory. This is really great news for retailers of all sizes! Meanwhile...

4) The line between brands and people will blur further

2018 has been a fascinating study in what appears to be a rising consumer expectation that brands align with customers at a philosophical level. We saw Nike's stock go to a record high due to their deft read of the nation and company alignment with Colin Kaepernick, while other retailers lost millions over culturally-insensitive content. Big rewards and boycotts represent the two extreme ends of this spectrum in which your CEO isn't really a private person anymore, but rather, a member of the larger society with a voice that will be assessed for its empathy to causes, groups and events. This puts brand employees in unfamiliar territory, having some of their fate rise or fall based on the public stances of company leadership, and it puts a new premium on skillful awareness of societal trends. Because of this...

5) Smart local brands will speed up focus on sustainability

Political pundits are predicting that the 2020 US election may be referendum on Climate Change. This means that US customers will be inundated with messaging and news surrounding this over the next two years. We're already seeing big brands like Patagonia respond by saying that they're "in the business of saving the planet" and Salesforce co-CEO billionaire Mark Benioff promising that his company will be running on 100% renewable energy by 2022. I predict that a growing body of consumers will increasingly expect and reward sustainable brand practices. 2019 will be a very good year for the local businesses you market to do a green audit of their business model, implement change and then promote their Climate-friendly practices. Think big on this, because...

6) Reputation will be key

Everything a local business can do to please and retain customers should sit at the core of the business model. Whatever it is that gets your customers to leave positive reviews, return for repeat business, recommend you via WOM to their friends and family, and view you as a vital component of local commerce will have a serious impact on your reputation, rankings and revenue. Google recently stated that 27% of local searches have an intent of reading reviews about a specific business and our recent State of Local Industry Report here at Moz found that 91% of respondents agree that reviews impact rankings. Reputation, and the awareness of its role, will be very big in 2019.

7) Link building will become more deeply integrated into Local SEO

Local Search Ranking Factors 2018 cited links as the 6th most influential local pack factor. This means that smart local SEOs will double down on their organic skills and start pursuing relevant links for their clients with professional, organized strategies and good tools.  Any Local SEM package that leaves out link building will be incomplete.

All in all, I predict we're in for an exciting, challenging year in which clear vision and a dedication to service will be the keys to local business success.

**Now it's your turn! Where do you see us going in 2019 in the local search industry? Please, share your own predictions! **

Thank you for the kind comment, John! All credit goes to Darren Shaw who organizes this massive survey. It's such a big job and he did an especially great job this year to make it easier for the respondents to take the survey.