— The Editorial Index
The SEO Cover
A curated hub of SEO articles, videos, tools, and people — organized by topic.
Topic
58 resources
Local SEO is the work of making a business discoverable to customers searching for what you offer within a geographic area—and it hinges almost entirely on Google Business Profile. Whether you're running a dental practice in Portland or managing twenty franchises across three states, your visibility in local search, the Local Pack, and map results depends on how Google understands and trusts your business data. It's not about ranking a homepage; it's about owning real estate in the places where intent and location collide.
The field right now is caught between two currents. Google is tightening enforcement—suspending profiles for policy violations, moderating reviews more aggressively, and rolling out new educational resources like GBP Playbooks to push businesses toward better practices. Simultaneously, the barrier to entry for bad actors remains low: spam attacks on reviews, aggressive city-page farms, and review manipulation are still common problems practitioners have to defend against. AI is quietly reshaping the execution—not through magic, but through faster, smarter ways to handle bulk tasks like location page creation, review monitoring, and profile optimization across multiple listings. The review ecosystem itself is fracturing slightly, with platforms like Yelp doubling down on their own policies while Google moderates its own. Meanwhile, real estate agents and chain businesses are learning the hard way that Google Business Profile isn't a free-for-all.
Focus on the basics: keep your GBP complete and honest, monitor reviews for both attacks and moderation errors, and treat AI as a tool for scaling competent work, not replacing judgment.
Whitespark
The busiest season of the year for most local businesses is about to kick off. Take time today to read through the major developments that happened in the past quarter to be sure you see opportunities for promoting your brand over the next few months. I’ve got original case studi
Whitespark
💡 Key takeaways:– Citations are back: AI tools increasingly rely on third-party sources to give local business recommendations. – Both structured and unstructured citations matter: Directories, review sites, industry platforms, news, blogs, and other brand mentions can all influ
Whitespark
How you name your company or organization is one of the most important business decisions you will ever make. The presence of either exact or partial-match keywords in your Google Business Profile business title field has a demonstrable correlation with local pack rankings. White
Phil Rozek
No matter what kind of business yours is, but especially if you’re part of a law firm, this interview I did with the great Jared Correia on the Legal Late Night podcast has at least a few minutes in it that can help your local SEO effort. We keep it pretty light, yet focused on
Sterling Sky
A few weeks ago, an SEO named Schieler De’Land messaged me and said he was seeing something very odd. He found people searching the exact same keyword at the same time were seeing different results on Google. A thread over at the Local Search Forum shared something similar. The u
Phil Rozek
We SEOs are quick to declare things dead. Links are dead, citations are dead, websites are dead, Google is dead, SEO is dead. None of those has assumed room temperature yet. Some of us are also quick to ignore things that often have demonstrable value: a page on a niche topic, a
BrightLocal
Kick Point founder Dana DiTomaso’s answer to how she uses AI comes down to one idea, repeated across her whole conversation with BrightLocal co-founder Myles Anderson. AI isn’t there to finish the work. AI is there to help you get unstuck or serve as a kick point (sorry) at the b
BrightLocal
Meaningful SEO takes time. Time for review management, time to audit your Google Business Profile, and time to build citations. But truthfully, some of that could just be busy time. Whether you’re a small business owner targeting local traffic in your hometown or a local SEO agen
Sterling Sky
Businesses move all the time, and updating the Google Business Profile to the new address is essential for ranking in the new area. In the case when a business moves to a new state, unfortuantly Google does not have a good process to handle a move so far. There is a loophole to m
Whitespark
💡 Key findings and takeaways: • Only 25% of GBP primary categories have review questions at all, and questions fall into two main templates: a richer “hospitality” set (restaurants, bars, cafes) and a shallower “service” set (contractors, medical practices). • Restaurants top th
Phil Rozek
At least some of your potential customers probably speak another language. They may form a huge chunk of your customer base, or a sliver. You may know for a fact they’re out there, or maybe it’s just a maybe. Whatever the case, it’s easy to find out how big the opportunity is, be
Sterling Sky
BrightLocal
We sit down with Sterling Sky's Noah Learner to find out how he's using AI to deliver better local SEO work for his clients.
Whitespark
Has your website got a historic Google indexing problem that no one has been able to troubleshoot or solve? You and I are in the same boat. And there’s something I recently realized that’s made the frustration of this serious issue a little bit easier to live with. When I launche
Phil Rozek
There’s a good chance your site is on WordPress. If so, priority #1 is to keep it above the earthworms. Keeping your site up and functional is critical for business, partly because it’s critical for your local SEO. For a WordPress site, plugins giveth and taketh away. They’re hal
Whitespark
Honestly, my friends, so much happened in local SEO in the second quarter of 2026 that I had trouble pruning my list down to a mere 23 especially noteworthy entries. And I’d bet anything that this means you missed at least some of these very important developments in our sector.
Phil Rozek
For many years now, people who know just enough about local SEO to be dangerous have blasted out “city” or “location” pages like they’re the Funyuns factory. Sometimes those pages are effective, and produce both visibility and customers, but usually they flop. Now, with AI on the
Sterling Sky
We are hearing lots of stories where Google is suspending Google Business Profiles for real estate agents working for eXp Realty. In this Google support thread, this individual was told by Google that “our guidelines currently restrict us from working with cloud-based brokerage m
Whitespark
TL;DR: • Google Business Profile reviews usually go missing for 3 reasons: business policy violations, spam attacks, or Google moderation errors.• Common triggers include sudden review spikes, incentivized reviews, review kiosks/shared IPs, fake engagement tactics, and reviews fr
Sterling Sky
![How to choose the right local SEO services for your business [+free downloadable checklist]](https://brightlocal-corp-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/brightlocal-corp-2026/wp/uploads/2026/05/Screenshot-2026-04-30-at-09.50.33.png)
BrightLocal
You’ve probably seen the Local Pack—that box at the top of Google with three local businesses and a map. For a small business, being in that box is the difference between a busy Tuesday and a very quiet one. Showing up in the Local Pack requires a dedicated strategy known as loca
Whitespark
If the millions of businesses with Google Business Profiles all clapped at once for Google’s new educational outreach in the form of GBP Playbooks, that would be some thunderous applause! While the Guidelines for representing your business on Google still remains square one for u
Phil Rozek
Sometimes I think Yelp might have matured, mellowed out a little, and eased up on longstanding policies that make no sense and don’t help anyone. But then Yelp just doubles down. Case in point: Yelp has started asking reviewers whether you asked them for a review. As you probably
Whitespark
Happy 2026 to all the local business owners and marketers riding the rough seas of this first quarter. I can’t recall another start to a new year with quite this much disruption to keep pace with. If you’ve been finding it challenging to take in all the latest local SEO developme
Google's free business listing service that displays company information, reviews, and posts across Search, Maps, and Google. Full definition →
Online mentions of a business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on third-party websites, directories, or platforms. Full definition →
Google's map-based search result showing 3 local businesses ranked by relevance and proximity to the searcher's location. Full definition →
Name, Address, and Phone number — the core business identity data used by search engines and directories to verify and rank local businesses. Full definition →