Mubarik Ali, an SEO professional, succinctly encapsulates this by saying, “Local SEO ranking factors aren’t just about being online; they’re about being found. Proximity, relevance, and prominence are the keys to local search success.” This article delves into why these three factors matter and how businesses can harness their potential to dominate local search rankings and attract more customers.

Proximity: The Power of Being Close

The first and arguably most important factor in local search optimization is proximity—the distance between a potential customer and your business. Google’s algorithms prioritize businesses that are physically close to the user when generating local search results. This means that no matter how optimized your website is, if your business isn’t near the person conducting the search, it’s unlikely to appear at the top of the list.

“Proximity is about meeting customers where they are, quite literally,” explains Ali. “If a customer searches for ‘locksmith near me,’ Google will show them businesses that are geographically close, regardless of other factors.”

This proximity factor emphasizes the importance of maintaining up-to-date Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) listings, complete with accurate addresses, contact information, and hours of operation. Without these details, your business may not even be in the running for local searches.

“Keeping your location details precise is crucial,” says Monitha Jain, a freelance SEO content writer. “It’s the difference between showing up in searches and getting lost in the crowd.”

However, businesses should remember that proximity alone is not enough. A business might be right around the corner from a customer, but without the right relevance and prominence signals, it could still miss out on the opportunity to appear in local searches.

Relevance: Making the Right Match

While proximity focuses on the “where,” relevance tackles the “what.” It refers to how well your business matches a potential customer’s search intent. For example, if a user searches for “long doors central area,” Google will prioritize businesses whose profiles and websites use relevant keywords related to that specific search query. This is why optimizing your Google Business Profile and website content to reflect the products and services you offer is essential.

“Relevance ensures that your business is shown to customers searching for exactly what you provide,” says Ali. “If your profile doesn’t contain the right keywords, even if you’re close by, you won’t show up in search results.”

This factor emphasizes the importance of aligning your online presence with what your customers are actually looking for. Regularly updating your Google Business Profile with keywords tied to your services, along with adding detailed descriptions of your offerings, ensures your business is seen by the right people at the right time. Relevance also extends to categories—making sure your business is classified under the correct service categories on Google.

“Businesses that want to be discovered locally need to think like their customers,” says SEO consultant Malik Wahab. “What words are they using to search for your product? What are their pain points? If your business can address those issues in its online content, you’ve already won half the battle.”

Understanding your audience’s language and using it to frame your online content not only boosts your local ranking but also improves your overall SEO performance.

Prominence: Standing Out in a Crowded Market

The third pillar of local search success is prominence. It refers to how well-known and reputable your business is, both online and offline. This factor is heavily influenced by online reviews, backlinks, articles, and mentions of your business across the web. In essence, Google rewards businesses that have a strong and positive reputation by giving them more visibility in local searches.

“Prominence is all about how well you’re recognized,” explains Ali. “It’s not just about being close and relevant; it’s about being trusted.”

Positive reviews are one of the most impactful ways to build prominence. Studies show that 91% of consumers read online reviews before making a purchase, and businesses with higher review ratings often outperform their competitors. Google factors in both the quantity and quality of reviews when determining search rankings. Encouraging satisfied customers to leave reviews and responding to both positive and negative feedback shows that your business is engaged and attentive to its clientele.

“A single five-star review can do wonders for your local search ranking,” notes SEO specialist Numan Bashir. “It signals to Google that your business is not only relevant and nearby but also trusted by the community.”

In addition to reviews, backlinks from reputable sites, news coverage, and social media activity all contribute to a business’s prominence. The more your business is mentioned and linked to across the web, the more likely Google is to view it as authoritative, boosting its position in search results.

“Businesses that invest in building their online reputation are the ones that rise above the competition,” says Ali. “Prominence is a long-term strategy, but it’s essential for sustained local search success.”

The Intersection of Proximity, Relevance, and Prominence

The true power of local search optimization lies at the intersection of proximity, relevance, and prominence. While each factor plays a critical role individually, it’s the combination of all three that determines your local search ranking. Businesses that successfully optimize for these factors can expect to see significant improvements in their visibility and customer engagement.

“You can’t focus on just one aspect and expect results,” says Ali. “To dominate local search, you need to optimize for proximity, relevance, and prominence simultaneously. When these three factors align, your business becomes the go-to option for local customers.”

By addressing these three pillars, businesses can not only improve their local search rankings but also enhance their overall online presence. This strategic approach to SEO helps ensure that a business remains competitive in an increasingly crowded digital landscape.

“Local SEO isn’t a quick fix,” adds Ali. “It’s a long-term commitment to building trust, staying relevant, and being visible in your community. But the results are worth the effort.”

Local SEO as a Growth Engine

Local search optimization has become an essential strategy for businesses looking to connect with nearby customers. Proximity, relevance, and prominence are the cornerstones of this approach, and when executed effectively, they can transform a business’s local presence. From increasing foot traffic to driving online conversions, local SEO offers tangible benefits that can directly impact a company’s bottom line.

For enterprise-level businesses with multiple locations or small businesses catering to a niche market, mastering these three factors can be the key to sustained growth. By consistently updating their online presence, encouraging customer reviews, and staying attuned to the needs of their audience, businesses can secure a top spot in local search rankings and build long-term customer loyalty.

“Local SEO is a game-changer,” says Ali. “By focusing on proximity, relevance, and prominence, businesses can turn their online presence into a powerful growth engine that drives real results.”

In the increasingly competitive local search landscape, these strategies can make all the difference in standing out and capturing the attention of customers searching for services and products in your area.

Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC?

With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly is more and more competitors entering the market in our brand space. Back in the day, it was there but you could just get them kicked off by Google or Bing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more difficult with all of the policy changes. What this actually means is that they are not only cannibalizing our traffic but they’re also pushing up our CPCs and our CPAs.

As a brand, you are always looking for ways to get people to your website and get them to convert more. It used to be just interest-based keywords on generics related to your own brand. Now you can cannibalize other peoples brands and get those incremental gains. The problem then is competitors coming into our brand space and pushing our ads down or increasing the CPCs on our ads. It’s not just direct competitors either, you have resellers, aggregators, etc. In the automotive space you have dealers and many automotive brands are having issues with trying to control how their dealers are bidding because dealers don’t have as much experience.

What we are seeing now is traffic is being lost from our brands’ brand-related search terms onto our main website and it’s going away.

This is even more important on mobile

As you know with mobile there’s a lot less space on the SERP, and usually with the size of the ads above the fold takes up most of the space and not many people are going to scroll down all the way to the bottom. Also, with mobile, it’s when people are actually looking for stuff at the moment and they’ve got less attention span, so it’s even more important that we actually pick up this traffic. Chances are that whatever they click on they are going to then stick with that. This is especially the case for retailers and automotive businesses who have local offerings and people looking for local specific information.

On mobile, the lower your ad position is the higher (negative) impact it has on your clickthrough rate.

On tablet and on desktop the actual CTR decrease as your ad position goes down isn’t as significant as it is on mobile. This goes to show that on mobile we need to make sure that our ad positions are up there at the top.

How valuable is your brand space?

Once you have the data and you know about your brand space it’s about analyzing the data and finding out how valuable is your brand space to you? Years ago you could just log into Google Analytics and look at the value per click of your organic brand and the value per click of your paid search brand. As long as the value was more than your cost per click it made it viable to bid on your brand. It was a pretty simple analysis.

Then seven years ago Google took away the ability to see organic keyword data and analytics have become harder. What we are seeing now is that’s it’s a lot more difficult to access this data and so people are having to think of different tests that they can come up with.

I like to use standard deviation to get the validity of the data in the beginning in order to measure the success of the ad test. The reason for this is that gives a much better data set to work with so once you actually have the data in you can use a range to look at the changes we see if we then turn the brand off. If it fits within this range then fine, we don’t need to work on brand PPC. If it’s outside of the range then we know that PPC needs to be turned on because it’s having a significant impact on our business.

Few wireless technologies have been as controversial as 5G. The next generation of wireless technology has been lauded as revolutionary, ushering in gigabit-class speeds that will redefine many industries.

At the same time, some scientists have warned of potential health dangers posed by the new technology. Some governments have even gone so far as to impose a moratorium on 5G rollouts until more research can be done. On the other hand, studies by government regulators and international watchdog agencies have found 5G to be safe. That hasn’t stopped conspiracy theories from multiplying, however, resulting in 5G towers being vandalized and social media companies taking steps to stem the misinformation.

To help prevent any unnecessary delays in 5G rollouts on the part of local governments, the FCC is clarifying the Spectrum Act of 2012 rules. Those rules ensure that local and state governments will approve requests to change wireless sites within 60 days, as long as those changes don’t “substantially change the physical dimensions of that structure.” The new rules make it harder for governments to take issue with changes to wireless sites, ensuring more of them are eligible for streamlined treatment.

The FCC’s decision was split along party lines, with the two dissenters pointing out what they believed to be “an unfair burden on the local governments” as they struggle with the effects of “a deadly virus, economic calamity, and civil unrest.” The two dissenting opinions also voiced concern that the “clarification” was poorly executed and only serves to create further confusion.

Only time will tell if the FCC’s latest decision helps or hurts 5G deployment.

With adequate testing being hailed as one of the single most critical factors to combating the pandemic and reopening the economy, finding a facility that offers testing can still be a challenge. Google is working to address that by listing testing facilities in its search results.

At the same time, not all facilities will show up. According to a support page, Google is “working to make this information easily searchable on Google in a way that aligns with the local testing procedures and recommendations.” As a result, the company will only show facilities approved for publishing. Even so, according to The Verge, that still translates to over 2,000 facilities in 43 states. When searching for topics related to COVID-19, a “Testing” tab will appear on the left.

Google’s move is just the latest example of how tech companies are on the forefront of fighting the pandemic.

Google’s latest update, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), is one of the company’s most interesting to date. Last year Google “introduced and open-sourced a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP) pre-training,” or BERT.

The company is using BERT to better understand complex, natural language queries and return more relevant results.

“By applying BERT models to both ranking and featured snippets in Search, we’re able to do a much better job helping you find useful information,” wrote Pandu Nayak, Google Fellow and Vice President, Search in a company blog post. “In fact, when it comes to ranking results, BERT will help Search better understand one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English, and we’ll bring this to more languages and locales over time.

“Particularly for longer, more conversational queries, or searches where prepositions like ‘for’ and ‘to’ matter a lot to the meaning, Search will be able to understand the context of the words in your query. You can search in a way that feels natural for you.

“To launch these improvements, we did a lot of testing to ensure that the changes actually are more helpful. Here are some of the examples that showed up our evaluation process that demonstrate BERT’s ability to understand the intent behind your search.

“Here’s a search for ‘2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa.’ The word ‘to’ and its relationship to the other words in the query are particularly important to understanding the meaning. It’s about a Brazilian traveling to the U.S., and not the other way around. Previously, our algorithms wouldn’t understand the importance of this connection, and we returned results about U.S. citizens traveling to Brazil. With BERT, Search is able to grasp this nuance and know that the very common word “to” actually matters a lot here, and we can provide a much more relevant result for this query.”

Hikmet Ersek, President, CEO, Western Union, recently discussed the new partnership with Amazon, competition with Zelle and Vinmo, and the overall health of the business:

Western Union Digital Business is Growing Very Well

Our digital business is growing very well year over year. We are now in 50 countries with our digital business sending money to over 200 countries. We pretty much cover the world with digital. Our digital growth is very strong. Our retail money transfer business has been stable. In some countries, we have been a little bit slower like in the Middle East, but we had very strong growth in Europe and US outbound business. Our US domestic business has been a little bit slower than we thought. Generally, I would say that we had a very stable solid quarter and we are very excited about the future.

You Can’t Send Money From Your Mobile

US to Domestic there has been some competitive environment. Nothing changed like last quarter. We have certain customers that like to pick up cash immediately. Nobody can beat that. You can’t send (cash) money from your mobile. We pay out in cash immediately. There are also competitors like Zelle and Vinmo who have been capturing some market share there with their zero fee environment. That has definitely been US dominated but is only a small part of our business, seven percent of our revenues. We are more focused on the outbound business, global cross-border business. That has been growing very well.

Western Union is White Labeling Platform to Amazon

Amazon has engaged us, over the years we have been building a cross-border platform, which is unique. We are moving transactions in 132 currencies globally and we do about 32 transactions every second. We have a network of 550,000 locations. We are reaching out to about 4 billion accounts globally. This is a unique platform where today we serve our customers with this platform.

Companies like Amazon engaged us to use our platform to service their customers in a better way in order to give access to the millions of customers who don’t have an access today to buy online and pay. In the future, they will have the capability to buy globally and pay locally.

The Amazon partnership is for us very exciting because now suddenly we are opening our platform to new customer segments, white labeling to other organizations like Amazon. Today, we are serving our existing customers with our branded transactions. In the future, we will be able to serve huge organizations like Amazon, or Amazon will engage us with other organizations, to engage our platform and to use our platform to serve their customers.

Paying Amazon Has Been a Real Obstacle for Some

“There are people in the world who want greater access to Amazon’s huge product selection but paying for those purchases has been a real obstacle for many customers,” said Hikmet Ersek, president and CEO of Western Union. “We’re leveraging our money movement platform to make it easier to shop global and pay local. By facilitating the complex foreign exchange and settlement process, we’re opening up more consumer choices and access to online shopping for tens of millions of potential new Amazon customers.”

Forrester Research estimates that cross-border shopping will make up 20% of e-commerce by 2022, with sales reaching $630 billion. Choice, quality and cost are the main motivations for consumers to shop online from overseas, but there are challenges and concerns about the lack of payment options for consumers who prefer to pay in person or consumers who are not comfortable using online payment methods.

Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC?

With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly is more and more competitors entering the market in our brand space. Back in the day, it was there but you could just get them kicked off by Google or Bing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more difficult with all of the policy changes. What this actually means is that they are not only cannibalizing our traffic but they’re also pushing up our CPCs and our CPAs.

As a brand, you are always looking for ways to get people to your website and get them to convert more. It used to be just interest-based keywords on generics related to your own brand. Now you can cannibalize other peoples brands and get those incremental gains. The problem then is competitors coming into our brand space and pushing our ads down or increasing the CPCs on our ads. It’s not just direct competitors either, you have resellers, aggregators, etc. In the automotive space you have dealers and many automotive brands are having issues with trying to control how their dealers are bidding because dealers don’t have as much experience.

What we are seeing now is traffic is being lost from our brands’ brand-related search terms onto our main website and it’s going away.

This is even more important on mobile

As you know with mobile there’s a lot less space on the SERP, and usually with the size of the ads above the fold takes up most of the space and not many people are going to scroll down all the way to the bottom. Also, with mobile, it’s when people are actually looking for stuff at the moment and they’ve got less attention span, so it’s even more important that we actually pick up this traffic. Chances are that whatever they click on they are going to then stick with that. This is especially the case for retailers and automotive businesses who have local offerings and people looking for local specific information.

On mobile, the lower your ad position is the higher (negative) impact it has on your clickthrough rate.

On tablet and on desktop the actual CTR decrease as your ad position goes down isn’t as significant as it is on mobile. This goes to show that on mobile we need to make sure that our ad positions are up there at the top.

How valuable is your brand space?

Once you have the data and you know about your brand space it’s about analyzing the data and finding out how valuable is your brand space to you? Years ago you could just log into Google Analytics and look at the value per click of your organic brand and the value per click of your paid search brand. As long as the value was more than your cost per click it made it viable to bid on your brand. It was a pretty simple analysis.

Then seven years ago Google took away the ability to see organic keyword data and analytics have become harder. What we are seeing now is that’s it’s a lot more difficult to access this data and so people are having to think of different tests that they can come up with.

I like to use standard deviation to get the validity of the data in the beginning in order to measure the success of the ad test. The reason for this is that gives a much better data set to work with so once you actually have the data in you can use a range to look at the changes we see if we then turn the brand off. If it fits within this range then fine, we don’t need to work on brand PPC. If it’s outside of the range then we know that PPC needs to be turned on because it’s having a significant impact on our business.

Local marketing, or location-based marketing, is the process of optimizing your company’s website and online presence to drive traffic to localized areas. This is particularly useful now that Google’s algorithm utilizes location in its search results. People looking for goods and services online get results for nearby businesses relevant to their search request. This is a highly targeted, low-cost way for businesess—big and small—to reach customers.

7 Ways to Increase Your Revenue With Local Marketing

1. Optimize Your Website for Mobile

Small businesses need to capture the attention of mobile searchers. Increase the odds of converting these leads by optimizing your website for mobile so that whatever screen your site is accessed on, it will still be displayed seamlessly.

2. Get Your Business Listed

One of the first things you can do for your small business is to get listed on Google’s My Business or Facebook. Doing this will enable you to update and manage critical information like your business address, contact details, opening hours, and images.

3. Build Bridges With Local Businesses

Align yourself with an established shop in the area and come to a mutual marketing agreement. For instance, a consultancy group could offer a discount on one of its seminars to the top clients of a local accounting firm. Working with these businesses enhance your credibility and gives prospective clients a chance to learn more about your company.

4. Secure Testimonials

A lot of people rely on online reviews when they’re trying to assess whether a business is trustworthy. Try to secure a testimonial from a resident since it will carry more weight, especially if it’s from someone known in the area.

5. Use Social Media to Engage With the Locals

Social media has made connecting with people so easy. You can integrate platforms like Facebook or Instagram into your customer service and outreach efforts. For instance, you could use hyper-local keywords in your posts or hashtags to establish your current location or put the focus on local stores that you have partnered with.

6. Work With Local Publications

Work with local publications to engender more face time with the area’s residents. Find a publication that ties up with your product or business model. Check if they’re looking for ad placements or even guest blog writers. You can even ask them if they can do a write-up about your company.

7. Sponsor a Community or Charity Event

Sponsoring an event is an effective way to utilize one of the most fundamental advertising tactics—putting your name on something. Consider sponsoring a neighborhood team or donating to a known charity in exchange for putting your brand’s name on the marquee or t-shirts from the event. You’ll be giving money to a good cause while ensuring that your company’s name is seen by a captive market.

A local marketing strategy can be an effective way to generate sales for your small business without spending too much. Get your brand noticed by interacting with the community, whether it’s through local influencer, partnering with an established shop, or sponsoring an event.

[Featured image via Pixabay]

The social media giant recently announced that its job search and application feature is being rolled out in more than 40 different countries, including Brazil, Spain, and the UK. The feature was initially only available in Canada and the US.

The job search feature allows users to search job openings and apply for them directly on the company’s site or mobile app. Meanwhile, improvements made to the feature allows companies with Facebook pages to post their job openings online easily, go through the applications and reach out to shortlisted candidates through Messenger. What’s more, job applicants can also subscribe to a company’s job listings.

Facebook expands jobs postings to 40 countries, taking on LinkedIn, Glassdoor: https://t.co/0xvNDxBa9t pic.twitter.com/CDBRk0AIGh

— Forbes Tech News (@ForbesTech) March 1, 2018

According to Alex Himel, VP of Local at Facebook, the company has seen “a lot of organic activity of businesses trying to hire.” He even cited a Morning Consult Poll that showed that one in four people in the US alone had either looked for or found a job on the platform. And with more than two billion users globally, Facebook is perfectly placed to connect job seekers with local enterprises who are looking to fill low to medium-skilled job vacancies.

The job search and application tool is a free feature. Companies and job seekers don’t have to pay anything to gain access. While companies can pay for Facebook ads in order to boost their job post to improve applications or target particular candidates, it’s not a requirement. Job postings can be seen on the user’s News Feed and on Facebook’s Marketplace and Pages.

Facebook users can narrow down their job search based on job category and type. It should be pointed out that the job creator only has access to information on the user’s account that’s publicly available. Applying for a job reportedly takes just a few steps and the user has complete control over what personal information will be shown in the application.

[Featured image via Facebook Newsroom]

What is Google Pigeon?

The moniker “Google Pigeon” was coined by the SEO experts over at Search Engine Land after Google revealed that the update didn’t have an official internal name. With the update, Google was aiming to produce new and improved results by aligning a local search algorithm with a conventional organic one. This would populate search engine results pages (SERPs)  that highlight local businesses that already had a solid organic presence.

The Pigeon algorithm was tweaked with enhanced distance ranking parameters to bring up more relevant local search results based on user proximity. The improved algorithm would use Google Map results and other conventional web searches to get the best query results. As always, Google remained mum about the update, but SEO experts speculate that hundreds of ranking signals for both Google Maps and Google Search were also implemented. 

Google Pigeon’s Impact on Local SERPs

The change in search engine results after the rollout of the Pigeon update actually became more noticeable to Google users a year after it went live. Local and small businesses felt the impact as well, although the results were a mix of good and bad. While the Pigeon algorithm was touted as the update that had the most impact since the Venice update of 2012, the company also went through the expected glitches and issues. Google reportedly launched a number of updates to correct these problems, but the company never gave a confirmation.

One clear result of the Pigeon was the number of businesses that appeared in the search results. Before the Pigeon was introduced, a “local pack” of seven or so businesses would appear in the search results, along with their addresses, business hours, and even star rating. But now, your local search will yield just three names in the pack with more details, like phone numbers, reviews and even product descriptions or menus posted by users.

Online directories like TripAdvisor, Urbanspoon, and Yelp were also featured more prominently. This was a clear deviation from previous algorithms when the search engine appeared to favor its own reviews and which led to Yelp complaining of mistreatment.

Users undoubtedly prefer being able to have all the key information without having to click through different links. However, companies and marketers could view the new results as a threat to their landing pages, conversion rates, and website traffic. After all, with Google already providing users with critical details (ex. phone numbers, business hours), they don’t have to go to the company’s official website anymore.

Google did eventually confirm that the aim of Pigeon was to get local search to look and behave more like traditional search. The search now allows users to find relevant results more quickly and with fewer steps.

Regardless of whether Google Pigeon had a positive or negative impact on a business, companies and their marketers still have to come up with new ways to drive traffic. This could mean maintaining or improving the quality of the content, posting more frequently, or keeping a more critical eye on user reviews.

[Featured image via Pixabay]

Google’s mainland app now lets you see trending searches & get instant answers https://t.co/49WLRYvPvm pic.twitter.com/DaJq0D1SmH

— iDownloadBlog (@iDownloadBlog) August 31, 2017

Trending Searches for iOS will have an opt-out feature

With their iOS Google app updated, users will know the searches currently trending around them. According to The Tech Bulletin,  merely clicking on the app’s search box will display a list of trending searches made by people near a user’s location. However, it still remains unclear just how localized the coverage of the Trending Searches feature is.

Thankfully, there is an opt-out option included in the iOS update. When Trending Searches was introduced on Android last year, it was met with criticisms with some users clamoring for Google to include an option for turning off the feature. While useful to some, there were users who found it annoying as it gave trending searches made by the masses instead of content specific to the user interests. Google relented by coming up with the opt-out option for people who wished to turn off the feature.

Google for iOS Gets Auto Complete Results as You Type, Trending Searches https://t.co/fntM8BXIHn pic.twitter.com/tRIma8H7c4

— iPhone in Canada (@iPhoneinCanada) August 31, 2017

Smarter Searches with Instant Answers

In addition, Google made some improvements to the search experience by introducing what is called Instant Answers. Basically, the app anticipates what the user is trying to type and, even before keying in the complete search phrase, the answer is displayed along with some suggestions below the search box. And that happens even before the user hits the search button.

According to Tech Crunch,  the answers come from Google’s facts database known as Knowledge Graph, which in turn, sources its data from CIA World Factbook and Wikipedia.

[Featured Image via Pixabay]

The paper’s authors are Ashish Shrivastava, a researcher in deep learning, Tomas Pfister, another deep learning scientist at Apple, Wenda Wang, Apple R&D engineer, Russ Webb, a Senior Research Engineer, Oncel Tuzel, Machine Learning Researcher and Joshua Susskind, who co-founded Emotient in 2012 and is a deep learning scientist.

The team describes their work on improving synthetic images to improve overall machine learning:

With recent progress in graphics, it has become more tractable to train models on synthetic images, potentially avoiding the need for expensive annotations. However, learning from synthetic images may not achieve the desired performance due to a gap between synthetic and real image distributions. To reduce this gap, we propose Simulated+Unsupervised (S+U) learning, where the task is to learn a model to improve the realism of a simulator’s output using unlabeled real data, while preserving the annotation information from the simulator.

We developed a method for S+U learning that uses an adversarial network similar to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), but with synthetic images as inputs instead of random vectors. We make several key modifications to the standard GAN algorithm to preserve annotations, avoid artifacts and stabilize training: (i) a ‘self-regularization’ term, (ii) a local adversarial loss, and (iii) updating the discriminator using a history of refined images. We show that this enables generation of highly realistic images, which we demonstrate both qualitatively and with a user study.

We quantitatively evaluate the generated images by training models for gaze estimation and hand pose estimation. We show a significant improvement over using synthetic images, and achieve state-of-the-art results on the MPIIGaze dataset without any labeled real data.

Conclusions and Future Work

“We have proposed Simulated+Unsupervised learning to refine a simulator’s output with unlabeled real data,” says the Apple AI Scientists. “S+U learning adds realism to the simulator and preserves the global structure and the annotations of the synthetic images. We described SimGAN, our method for S+U learning, that uses an adversarial network and demonstrated state-of-the-art results without any labeled real data.”

They added, “In future, we intend to explore modeling the noise distribution to generate more than one refined image for each synthetic image, and investigate refining videos rather than single images.”

View the research paper (PDF).

“When you write a Facebook post looking for advice on local places or services, you’ll have the option to turn on Recommendations for that post,” notes Facebook in their blog announcement. “If you turn on the feature, your friends can comment on your post with suggestions, and you’ll see all of them mapped out and saved in one place. You can also go to your Recommendations bookmark on Facebook to ask a new question or help your friends.”

The idea is that as people are sharing their experiences on Facebook they often ask for advice such as where to eat the best Chinese food or who knows a good accountant. Facebook’s Recommendations tool helps facilitate connections and organize answers from your friends. Basically, competing with Yelp and other local recommendation platforms.

“Whether traveling to a new place, looking for a hair salon, or searching for the perfect place to eat, people already turn to their friends, family, and local Groups on Facebook for advice,” says Facebook. “We’re rolling out a new tool that makes it easier to get and organize all those recommendations in one place.”

What Facebook is actually doing is taking the advice questions they are seeing by the millions each day and as friends answer, adding an additional widget of information about the business.

They will then map and categorize all of your friends recommendations:

“We’ll put all your friend’s recommendations on your own customized map so you can find everything easily,” says Facebook.

This was spotted by local search watcher Mike Blumenthal. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable has the old version saved here. According to him, the document has been tripled in size.

There’s a section about “prominence” that has some new language in it, and that seems to be the most significant change. Here’s what the section says now:

Prominence refers to how well-known a business is. Some places are more prominent in the offline world, and search results try to reflect this in local ranking. For example, famous museums, landmark hotels, or well-known store brands that are familiar to many people are also likely to be prominent in local search results.

Prominence is also based on information that Google has about a business from across the web (like links, articles, and directories). Google review count and score are factored into local search ranking: more reviews and positive ratings will probably improve a business’s local ranking. Your position in web results is also a factor, so SEO best practices also apply to local search optimization.

The key part to take note of here is the one about Google using links, articles, and directories from across the web for prominence.

Back in November from the State of Search conference, Search Engine Roundtable reported that Google had indicated this feature was on the horizon.

Now local search guy Mike Blumenthal points to a Google+ post from Prya Chandra showing the feature in action. Chandra writes:

Looks like Google is trialling a new way of getting feedback on incorrect business details.

This new screen is available from the Knowledge Panel as well as the Local Finder, but when doing a regular Maps search the old screen pops up still.

The following screenshots are from Chandra’s post:

As reported last month, Google has documentation for local business info structured markup. When utilized, this enables users who search for a business to see a Knowledge Panel with details about the business.

Images via Google, Google+

Businesses can use the API to set special holiday hours, for example, and update them across all locations. The special hours feature was added to Google My business last month.

Developers can also use the API to create locations with names, addresses, phone numbers, categories, business hours, etc. They can also mark a business location as permanently closed, manage business photos, list/invite/remove managers on locations and business accounts, read listing state to identify Google update, duplicate and suspended locations, search/filter locations by name/category/label, and set the service area for a business by specifying a point and radius or Place ID.

To work with the API, you’ll need to have a basic knowledge of RESTful APIs.

Documentation for the API is here.

Search Engine Land points to a Google help document in which it talks about a way to provide local business information via structured data markup. When utilized, uses who search for a business may see a Knowledge Panel card with details about the business.

Google says, “We are currently piloting this feature with a restricted set of initial data providers. We hope to soon open up the feature so any provider who implements spec-compliant markup is eligible to participate.”

“Use markup on your official website to provide Google with information about local business locations,” it says. “These attributes appear on the card and elsewhere throughout Google Search and Maps. For instance, a restaurant’s menu URL appears prominently on the card, letting users click through to see what kind of food and drink is available.”

More about adding the markup here.

Images via Google

Google announced on Tuesday that it will begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google search beginning early next year. They didn’t give a specific date, but said they intend to share “more concrete specifics on timing very soon.” Stay tuned for that. It remains to be seen whether or not these pages will get a ranking boost by default, but given Google’s emphasis on the mobile experience, it seems very likely that AMPs will benefit.

Are you planning to implement Accelerated Mobile Pages? Let us know in the comments.

“We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously,” Google explained when the project was announced. “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using.”

The program utilizes a new open framework called AMP HTML, which is built on existing web technologies, and is aimed at letting websites build light-weight pages.

As far as ranking goes, Danny Sullivan said in a tweet last month that AMP pages won’t rank better because they’re AMP, but noted that Google already rewards speedy pages, so they can still benefit.

Google has already made mobile-friendliness a ranking signal, and the whole point of AMPs is to make for a better mobile experience. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which AMPs aren’t benefiting in rankings.

“Thousands of publishers have expressed interest in AMP since the preview launched with the likes of the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more,” write David Besbris (Vice President of Engineering, Google Search) and Richard Gingras (Head of News, Google) in a blog post. “Since then, many others have committed their support to the project, including R7.com and NZN Group in Brazil; CBS Interactive, AOL, Thrillist, Slate, International Business Times/Newsweek, Al Jazeera America and The Next Web in the US; El Universal and Milenio in Mexico; The Globe and Mail and Postmedia in Canada, as well as many more across the globe. The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of 70+ media companies collectively representing 1,600 local newspapers and television stations, has also voiced their support.”

The two also announced that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleCLick, and AdSense are working within the project’s framework to improve the ad experience for users, publishers, and advertisers. More information on this will come in the near future, they say.

“Ensuring that traffic to AMP articles is counted just like current web articles is also a major focus of the project,” they write. “comScore, Adobe Analytics, Parse.ly and Chartbeat have all stated that they intend to provide analytics for AMP pages within their tools. They have since been joined by many others: Nielsen, ClickTale and Google Analytics. This development is significant for the AMP Project because publishers developing for AMP will not skip a beat in terms of analytics and measurement — analytics for AMP are real time and will work within your existing provider.”

According to Google, there are over 4,500 developers expressing interest in AMP with over 250 contributions of new code, samples, and documentation having been made. Discussions are also underway related to analytics and template features.

With Google Search the mobile experience has been they key narrative throughout 2015, and it looks like that will continue throughout next year, largely driven by AMP.

Has this development been on your radar thus far? What do you think of the project? Discuss.

Image via Google/AMPProject.org

Now local businesses will be able to represent themselves on the social network in a manner that shows that they’re the real deal and not impostors, which is something that will become increasingly important and people engage in more monetary transactions on Facebook.

According to Marketing Land, the verified badges have already started rolling out to businesses in the aforementioned countries. The publication has confirmation from Facebook, and shares some comments from the company:

The badges will help people “find the right and authentic accounts” for local merchants, Kirsten Bury, a Facebook product marketing manager for Pages, told Marketing Land. Verified Pages will also show up higher in search results.

“At scale there will inevitably be duplicates and multiple entries for the same business,” said Bury, noting that there are 45 million business Pages on Facebook. “So this is one way businesses can make it easier for people to make sure that they are finding and communicating with the right Page.”

So there’s some Facebook SEO value here, and businesses won’t definitely won’t want to skip getting verified if they’re eligible. If the feature is available to you, you should be able to go to the Page settings and use your business phone number to get a verification.

Following this roll-out, Facebook will verify local business pages in other countries. According to Marketing Land, Facebook also intends to roll the feature out to all business Pages eventually.

Historically, it’s only been available to celebrities, sports teams, public figures, and media outlets.

Image via Facebook

BrightLocal recently released results from a survey (via Search Engine Land) finding that local search drives more clicks and calls than any other marketing channel as well as greater ROI than any other digital marketing channel.

The firm polled local business owners in August in order to understand which marketing channels drive the most traffic, calls, and offline visits to local businesses. It covered “all types” of businesses including plumbers, accountants, dentists, etc. 477 people who optimized for 8,200 locations in the past year responded to the survey.

It found that local search and organic search deliver the highest quality leads and that 34% would choose local search over any other channel. It also found that social media, display ads and Bing Ads deliver the lowest ROI.

Here’s a look at how much time respondents dedicated o various channels:

And here’s how they rated effectiveness of each channel:

Businesses consider phone calls to be the most valued success metric compared to web traffic, search rankings, and significantly over customers actually walking through the door or inquiring via website. With that in mind, here’s what BrightLocal’s respondents reported about calls generated by various channels:

Be sure to take a look at the full report, which provides a great deal of analysis and additional finding.

Images via Thinkstock, BrightLocal

The families of the two missing Florida boys started a GoFundMe webpage that has already raised close to $375,000. The families will use this money to fund private searches, and they are appealing to pilots in or near the Carolinas to come to their aid. They are seeking both airplane and helicopter pilots to search off the coasts of both North and South Carolina for the missing Florida boys.

On 7th day of searches, families of missing Florida boys hope for a miracle http://t.co/77q8gA6GBz pic.twitter.com/4Mjss84w04

— CBS News (@CBSNews) July 30, 2015

The two 14-year-old boys went missing on July 24th, when they headed out from the Jupiter Inlet into the Atlantic Ocean on their 19-foot boat. The Coast Guard searched for several days, and covered almost 50,000 square nautical miles–ranging from Jupiter to the Carolinas–before suspending the search on Friday.

Businesses local to Tequesta, where the missing Florida boys families live, are ramping up efforts to help in the search. Some are donating a percentage of their earnings for Saturday to the search effort.

The GoFundMe page for Austin and Perry is still actively seeking donations, as it is uncertain how much money the families will need to continue with their search. If you want to donate to helping the search for these missing Florida boys, simply click on the link.

Some pilots have already joined the search effort. 19-year-old Andrew Register is co-piloting one search plane.

“I haven’t talked to the family,” Register said. “We’re just doing this out of the goodness of our hearts, trying to find these boys and bring them home to their family, because if I was in the same situation, I would want somebody to come look for me. You know? Treat others the way you want to be treated in life.”

Cocoa Beach vigil gathers for missing Florida boys. http://t.co/NGjFUPMprq #FindAustinandPerry pic.twitter.com/90mqbG1Cky

— 10 News (@WTSP10News) July 31, 2015

If you know of pilots of any type of aircraft in or near the Carolinas who might be willing to help search for these missing Florida boys, please contact those in charge of the search at (561) 261-3400.