Should You Update Your Business Descriptions on your GBP and Local Citations in 2026?
A recent tip from Darren Shaw of Whitespark suggested something simple but interesting: Update your business descriptions across your local citations. Most businesses wrote those descriptions years ago. Most haven’t touched them since. And many of them are vague,...
How to Schedule Posts on Your Google Business Profile (and Why It Matters This Winter)
Google Business Profiles seem to be in a state of constant flux! In the past fortnight a small but very welcome update to the GBP interface in the UK, is the ability to schedule posts in advance. If you manage your own local marketing, this is one of those helpful...
Local Search Ranking Factors 2026: For Cumbria’s Businesses
A couple of days ago (in November 2025), Darren Shaw who is head honcho at Canadian Local SEO marketing agency, Whitespark, released the 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. It’s a comprehensive analysis of what gets businesses found in searches. Why does...
A Sideways Look at Marketing Strategy for Service Businesses in Cumbria
How to Attract High-Value Local Clients in the Borderlands Region Marketing strategy for service business in Cumbria should be relatively straight forward. Often we make it too complicated… or we don’t do a full strategy, but pick at some of the tactics...The Diversity Update – Nowt to Do With Orange Thing!
Here’s an update that will affect businesses with multiple locations in particular. One of the big American agencies, Sterling Sky, noticed a potentially useful change in the way Google shows Google Business Profiles and organic results on the same page for any...
Solving Google Business Profile Verification Problems for a 3PL Client in Kirkby Lonsdale
A new client who signed up with me in 2024 required some initial SEO work to improve the visibility of their website. Context and Background Copper Beech Trading are a small but very forward thinking order fulfilment and third party logistics business. They started...
Direct Messaging from Your Google Business Profile
Google has introduced or should I say reintroduced the ability to message your business directly from their Google Business Profile. This facility did exist previously, but the implementation was pretty hopeless. In the end it was removed from GBPS about six months or...
Perils of Content Duplication and Internal Search Spam in CMS and Ecommerce Platforms.
Preventing Google and Bing from Indexing Duplicate Content Sections and Search Spam When a website is first set up, one of the most important first hurdles to get past, is making sure that search engines find it, crawl all over it (via your structure and perfect...