DesignRush has listed 50Bubbles among top 10 SEO Agencies in Ohio. DesignRush is a B2B Marketplace for Finding Agencies. We're happy to be recognized.

Happy New Year! Here's what to expect this year from Google and others relative to local marketing trends.

It's hard to know how you're doing relative to your competition. You probably have a pretty good idea where you rank in Google generally speaking but how does your business compare against industry average? A recent local business study looked at 11,000 businesses. Personally I think you need to aspire to way better than average but at least this will give you a relative benchmark to determine how you're business is doing.

We have the same beef you do. When a directory appears above your website for local products and services, it can be a little unnerving. We fair pretty well in said directory (first in the unpaid listings), why would Google give a non-business preference in a Google search for an actual business? The answer is in the search request.

Last September Google implemented an algorithm that tended to favor proximity over quality. In other words, how close the search was to the business had a huge impact on the result. Consequently, any sort of local SEO effort was met with very little improvement - if any. We saw results diminish no matter what we did as the results simply accumulated around the general vicinity of the searcher. That has changed!

Ok, that's a bit of a parody. I'm not really into self-aggrandizement but I do want to make a point. About I month ago I found a search term in Google webmaster tools that I should be ranking better for: "SEO Agency Dayton Ohio". This is the third blog after a little over a month of simple SEO / blogging and testing. Here is the final result.

I almost forgot about this! Toward the end of July I blogged about ranking for SEO Agency Dayton Ohio. I wasn't quite making it to the first page and wanted to fix that. I tell my clients all the time that blogging is the answer if done correctly. Did I have to eat my words? You be the judge!

Today, according to webmaster tools, I rank "almost" on the first page of Google for SEO Agency Dayton Ohio. This blog is a Walk-Your-Talk example of how to fix that!

Feeling left out lately?
You’re not alone. Your competition for placement on the first page of search results is getting stiffer. Your direct competitors are getting better at SEO. The local directories like BBB, Yellow Pages, Angie’s List, Thumbtack, Home Advisor are gaining more prominence. Ad space is increasing for both Adwords and now even in the Google MAPS Local listings.
It’s not going to get any easier! Here’s what you need to be doing.

Search engine placement is more about understanding the rules. You can outwit Google even on the simplest of searches just by being smarter than what ultimately is a dumb robot. Here's how you can out-rank competition for searches when you're farther away from the searcher than they are... optimize for "near me".