Core Web Vitals Shakeup: FID Out; INP In

Hey, everybody. Sorry the newsletter’s late. It’s hard to fit into our schedule these days. We’re working on a solution. A surprising number of you asked us for recommendations when we mentioned the fact that we’d gone down a deep rabbit hole in search of a comfortable ergonomic chair. Our obsessive quest to improve the…

Google March 2024 Core Update | Women’s Day

Greetings, everyone. We know that most of you are enjoying a relaxing vacation day. We’re working. International Women’s Day is not a holiday in the United States. We’re in good company though: Laos, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Mongolia, and Uganda do not officially observe IWD either. The host of Google Search Central’s new How Search Works series…

The Rushed Blog Post

How’s everyone doing today? Story time. There was a Friday in late 2020 when we had to quickly exit a Taco Bell and drive home after receiving a text message from one of our colleagues. He asked why the blog post hadn’t been published yet. We got lucky in that case because we had an…

Gemini 1.5 and Sora Announced Yesterday

Hey folks. We really try not to focus on news about the latest AI models. Despite the fact that these tools are ridiculously useful for marketers (Local Viking’s OpenAI invoice for January was just north of $3,500), the fact that our usage gets periodically slowed down by people and teams working on things like materials…

Local Search Acting Strange

We’re making a public service announcement. Local search results are all kinds of messed up today. This isn’t a Local Viking or Local Brand Manager issue. Google itself is the cause of everyone’s woes. Something’s going haywire on the mothership. We’re not even sure we know the full extent of the issues, but we aren’t…

Super Bowl LVIII | Apple’s First AI Model

Happy Friday, everybody. Wild times, huh? There are world leaders giving interviews on X (with ~140 million views at the time of this writing, less than 24 hours after the interview first aired) and conspiracy theories plaguing mankind’s most beautiful form of competition (iykyk). The upside for this newsletter is that the Super Bowl is…

Amazing New GeoGrids | Prime Video $3 Hike

Greetings, everyone. Today is the first day you can buy an Apple Vision Pro. It looks like an exceptionally cool piece of hardware, but we’ve been working on a way to let you guys fly around the world through your web browsers on the off chance that some of you aren’t yet prepared to pay…

ChatGPT for Teams | No More Free GBP Sites

Hey, everyone. We need to rush through today’s blog post because of a Zoom call that turned into three Zoom calls.   First things first. We want everyone to know about a feature that the Local Viking and Local Brand Manager image galleries have. You can easily select numerous pictures by clicking on a picture,…

Ignore 404 Errors | Your Job’s Still Safe

Hello, everyone who made it to 2024. We originally planned to recap last year in today’s newsletter. The more we thought about it though, the clearer 2023’s overall uneventfulness became, at least in terms of SEO, marketing, and advertising. The stories about OpenAI’s surprisingly public power struggle will likely have some staying power, but generative…

NYT Suing Microsoft and OpenAI

Hello, readers. We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Hell, we hope you had a wonderful 2023. Local Viking and Local Brand Manager users certainly did. We added a ton of bussin’ features and improvements this year, but the two things we put the most time and effort into are the keyword/location audits we released…

Google Pwn3d by Spam | Best SEO vid ever

Merry Christmas, everyone. We’ll be at a large, multigenerational family gathering by the time you read this. The kind movie characters always dread. We’ve never been able to figure out why every Hollywood production portrays Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners as tense, confrontational powder kegs, but we can confidently state that our holiday experiences are always…

Shareable Audits & A Holiday Scam to Avoid

Hey, folks. There’s only one more newsletter between now and Christmas. Don’t wait until the last minute to get your shopping done unless your idea of fun is digging through Circle K’s remaining gift cards at 10 PM on Christmas Eve (like one of us did in 2022). It would be worse to do that…

Google Gemini Fakery | OpenAI Update

Hey, everybody. We came across several interesting news items this week. Venezuela is dredging up 19th century treaties to justify the Florida-sized bite that it wants to take out of Guyana, its oil-rich next door neighbor. DeepMind, a Google subsidiary, announced Gemini, a family of multimodal models (the high end of which is more capable…

Google Drive Gone Nuts | GeoBooster Update

Good day, everyone. Did any of you take advantage of the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals over the past week? We got a 92” tripod, a fancy aluminum razor, and the bougiest shaving accessories we could find (like a kit with a badger hair brush and obnoxiously expensive French shaving cream). We can’t foresee our first…

Ad-Free Facebook Subscriptions Coming to EU

Greetings, everyone. Happy November. Please accept our apologies for being a day late. Call it vanity if you must, but we couldn’t bring ourselves to post the crap we had ready yesterday. We couldn’t think clearly at all and it was awful. Our best guess is that the Propofol we’d been administered on Wednesday and…

Revamped Google Maps Announced Yesterday

Hey, folks. While tons of newsworthy things are happening, especially in a New Jersey-sized country in the Middle East, the good news for us is that we barely needed to spend any time researching what to write about today because a major Google Maps update was announced yesterday. The reason that’s good news for us…

Google Gets Anti-Search Exposé Taken Down

Hey folks. Well, last week’s newsletter didn’t stand the test of time. It was anchored to a Wired op-ed piece that accused Google of fabricating costly search terms to bilk its advertising customers out of their campaign budgets. After withstanding attacks and takedown requests from Google’s legal team that began as soon as the column…

Google Is An Unreliable Advertising Partner

Hello, everybody. If this were most weeks, we’d focus on a spam detection update that Google announced on Wednesday. This isn’t most weeks and there’s a bigger fish to fry, but it’s still pretty relevant. We’ll give you a rundown after we publicize a new Local Viking help article. We get a lot of questions…

DALL-E 3 & New GBP Bulk Insights Reporting

Hello, everybody. We’re squeezed for time as usual and Google isn’t doing us any favors today. What we mean by that is a best-case scenario for writing this newsletter is a week when the Google Maps blog has a new post. We have no such luck right now. The most recent Maps post is over…

New Bard Feature | Microsoft Messed Up

Hey folks. Microsoft pulled a pretty spectacular own goal a few days ago when it accidentally leaked gigabytes of documents that shed light on the way it makes several varieties of sausage. If you want to see outlines of the next Xbox console or communications between Microsoft executives who are plotting a hostile takeover of…