There are some changes happening now and in the next few months that are going to affect your search marketing, web presence, and may even be undoing some of the hard work you’ve done. Want know what you should be keeping an eye on this summer? Read on.

1. Google Maps — We all know that the local map listings are getting more and more important for brick and mortar businesses. What you may not know is that Google has started requiring verification for bulk uploads. This applies to information that you’ve already uploaded. If you’ve spent the time to get your listings corrected, populated, and up to date, make sure that you go do some searching to check them and make sure the information is the way you left it.

2. Yahoo/Bing — Remember that merger and the kerfluffle around it? The merging is about to start affecting all of us search marketers. You might have gotten emails from the search engines telling you about upcoming changes, but we’re starting to see them already. The results being reported back from spidering are inconsistent, but manual searches to give a visual check will let you know if your rankings are rock steady. Some flux is always to be expected when big changes are made, so keep that in mind if you check your metrics and see some things that don’t make sense. Generally, things settle down in a month or two, so stay cool!

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 24th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under seo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.