Hi Joy!

Here's how you can change your PM settings:

1. Click on your avatar in the upper right hand corner of Moz.com (it could be your photo or just the first letter of your name)

2. Select "private messages" from the dropdown that will appear

3. Check the box for "accept private messages" and your done! Easy as pie

Our community manager would also recommend that you accept emails from Moz - they'll go to whatever email you've listed in your community profile. This can be helpful in communicating with other community members.

Hope this helps!

Nice of you to try to get advice from the horse's mouth on this one, Joy. Thank you. Very generous!

Good question, Nathan!

If the business model is changing from local (defined as serving customers face-to-face at your location or at theirs) to virtual (no face-to-face contact with customers anywhere) then it will no longer be eligible for a Google My Business listing. If this is the case then, yes, you'll need to act on this, and unfortunately, as you are not simply moving to a new location, you are likely to end up with the red 'permanently closed' label on the listing. I recommend reading Joy Hawkin's article from 2016 on this issue in case you see any nuances that might apply to your situation:

http://searchengineland.com/google-fixing-permanently-closed-problem-242364

And, I would further recommend contacting Google's support to ask if they have any further advice for you, as your situation is not the run-of-the-mill moving locations scenario, but represents a complete change of business model.

Hi MissThumann,

You've asked a good question, and I reached out to GetFiveStars' co-founder to be sure you were getting a good answer. Mike Blumenthal let me know that while you can add the GetFiveStars widget to the homepage, Google won't show the stars, and because of this, it's not really a recommended practice to use this widget on your homepage. That being said, you could definitely add it to any other page of the website.

He also let me know that the widget includes business/org details in addition to aggregate reviews and a link to the testimonial page, so your webmaster does need to make sure there is no conflicting schema on any page you might add the widget to.

It was very nice of Mike to get back to me so speedily, and I would encourage you to be sure you are making use of GetFiveStars' support options to be sure you're using their product to its maximum potential. Mike mentioned he has a draft manual he'd be happy to share with you if you reach out to the company's support.Hope this helps!

Hi There!

No, this would not be a recommended practice to markup your third-party reviews with Scheme. Google recently updated their guidelines specifically regarding this. For more on this, see: http://searchengineland.com/google-updates-local-reviews-schema-guidelines-257745

Hi Brett,

This might be of some help https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/eye-tracking-2016-how-searchers-interact-mobile-serps-desktop but I haven't seen one that focused only on the knowledge panel. I'd love to see one.

Hi Taylor,

When speaking of local businesses,  the term 'directories' typically refers to local business directories (like online Yellow Pages) rather than those old-school, low quality directories from days gone by. As a local business owner, you want to get your business listed on the major local business data platforms. Have you considered Moz Local for this, by any chance? Our product pushes out your correct location data to the majors and has become a popular choice for this type of work, as it saves a great deal of time. However, if you want to list your business manually, you'll want to be sure to get listed on Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, Factual, Yelp, Best of the Web, Infogroup, Citysearch, Superpages, YP, Acxiom and a handful of other major sources. These local business data platforms are applicable to all local business types, and so many local business owners these days use tools like Moz Local to get listed, instead of slogging through the work manually.

As for the older concept of low quality directory listings, yes, that's an antiquated SEO strategy from a decade ago and should not be pursued. Hope this helps. And, if you'd like to learn more about Moz Local, here's a handy list of features: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/local/features

Hi Brett!

Good question. The People Also Search For results are algorithmic, and like Ria, I've not seen a definitive study on this area of the knowledge graph. What you could do if a client is desirous of making it into that area of the display would be to do competitive analysis of the top businesses currently coming up in this type of result and see if you can find commonalities. For example:

• What are the local and local-organic rankings for those businesses?

• What is their proximity to you when you search?

• What is their proximity to the main business in the knowledge graph?

• What do their review and link profiles look like?

That's just a start, but it would be how you would need to begin exploring the results of a particular knowledge panel. How much effort you put into this should be dictated by how valuable it would actually be for the client to appear in this feature.