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Parenting

Breast v bottle? Motherhood is messy enough without picking sides | Hadley Freeman

It’s one of life’s ironies that this debate will rage most loudly when a woman is at her most vulnerable

My experience with breastfeeding was as relaxed as it was completely atypical. I had a C-section, which meant I stayed in hospital a few nights to recover, which meant in turn I got to know one of the night nurses. Every night, she took the time to teach me the basics of breastfeeding, reassuring me that I was doing just marvellously.

When I got home, a friend who, like me, had twins, told me that if I wanted to retain my sanity I should get some help a couple of nights a week (our topic for today is feeding, but synchronising the sleep patterns of newborn twins will one day be my magnum opus). I was lucky enough to be able to afford this, which meant that someone regularly came to my home and, again, helped me breastfeed. When I told her I wanted to do mixed feeding – breast milk and formula – because my body needed a break, she unhesitatingly showed me how to make formula. As a result, I experienced none of the anguished emotions I’d seen so many friends go through about feeding. This is because I was blessed with luck (meeting the nurse) and privilege (being able to afford help), neither of which should be the determining factors about how a woman feeds her baby.

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Parenting

5 Reasons Your Child Won’t Play (What You Can Do About It)


5 Reasons Your Child Won’t Play (What You Can Do About It)

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Breaking up is hard to do – divorce reforms would make it easier

The institution of marriage shouldn’t look like a Victorian mental asylum, not built for modern life

I would like to be taught how to fight. Not boxing or karate or anything you need a costume for, just lessons in common basic argument, between people who love each other. New York magazine interviewed a collection of couples, asking what they wish their partner would say in a fight. “What I need him to say is: ‘Yes, [my family] are assholes and they are snobs and I can’t imagine how much it sucks to hang out with them when you’re not biologically obligated to, but please, I need you there with me, and I’ll buy you a huge thank-you present for it.’” I wanted a stream of these truths, hooked straight to a vein. “She said I was disempowering her in front of her children and taking her voice away. I wish she said: ‘Shit, you know what? You’re right. I took it too far. I’ll check myself next time.’” MORE. “I just snapped. I said, ‘If I miscarry, it’s because you didn’t take good care of me.’ He was, like, ‘You are awful. Listen to what you just said…’ I wanted him to say, ‘Jesus Christ, get off your feet right now. You’re not lifting a finger until we know this pregnancy is healthy. I forbid you from taking any risks because I love you and our future baby too much.’” Raw, irrational, so real they sting like menthol shower gel, and reason enough, if more reason was needed, to question why we tie ourselves together, and in knots, and forever.

The current iteration of divorce requires formally trash-talking the person you once loved

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Read more: theguardian.com

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Parenting

Be the Best Parent You Can Be // Join Present Play!!


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Hypocrisy without borders: the pomposity of Ivanka Trump’s trip to Africa | Arwa Mahdawi

The first daughter is visiting Ethiopia and Ivory Coast to promote women’s rights – yet she stays silent while her father’s administration stifles female empowerment

We don’t deserve Saint Ivanka, we really don’t. Nobody asked Donald Trump’s favourite child to devote her life to empowering women, she just knew it had to be done. Nobody elected her to serve in the US government, but she took a senior role in her father’s administration anyway. And not content with simply empowering the women of the US, the patron saint of nepotists, hypocrites and grifters has altruistically taken her talents on tour.

On Sunday, the first daughter and presidential adviser set off on a four-day trip to Ethiopia and Ivory Coast to promote the US government’s Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative (W-GDP), which aims to benefit 50 million women in developing countries by 2025. The programme was launched with a $50m (£38m) fund, which is less than the cost of the president’s trips to Mar-a-Lago (by one estimate, the president’s Florida sojourns have cost taxpayers at least $64.6m). Of course, that doesn’t factor in Ivanka’s time and expertise, which is priceless. Who knows how many Ethiopian women she has empowered already. I am sure she has taught Sahle-Work Zewde, a respected career diplomat and Ethiopia’s first female president, a thing or two.

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Parenting

The One-Hour Guide to SEO: Technical SEO – Whiteboard Friday

Posted by randfish

We’ve arrived at one of the meatiest SEO topics in our series: technical SEO. In this fifth part of the One-Hour Guide to SEO, Rand covers essential technical topics from crawlability to internal link structure to subfolders and far more. Watch on for a firmer grasp of technical SEO fundamentals!

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome back to our special One-Hour Guide to SEO Whiteboard Friday series. This is Part V – Technical SEO. I want to be totally upfront. Technical SEO is a vast and deep discipline like any of the things we’ve been talking about in this One-Hour Guide.

There is no way in the next 10 minutes that I can give you everything that you’ll ever need to know about technical SEO, but we can cover many of the big, important, structural fundamentals. So that’s what we’re going to tackle today. You will come out of this having at least a good idea of what you need to be thinking about, and then you can go explore more resources from Moz and many other wonderful websites in the SEO world that can help you along these paths.

1. Every page on the website is unique & uniquely valuable

First off, every page on a website should be two things — unique, unique from all the other pages on that website, and uniquely valuable, meaning it provides some value that a user, a searcher would actually desire and want. Sometimes the degree to which it’s uniquely valuable may not be enough, and we’ll need to do some intelligent things.

So, for example, if we’ve got a page about X, Y, and Z versus a page that’s sort of, “Oh, this is a little bit of a combination of X and Y that you can get through searching and then filtering this way.Oh, here’s another copy of that XY, but it’s a slightly different version.Here’s one with YZ. This is a page that has almost nothing on it, but we sort of need it to exist for this weird reason that has nothing to do, but no one would ever want to find it through search engines.”

Okay, when you encounter these types of pages as opposed to these unique and uniquely valuable ones, you want to think about: Should I be canonicalizing those, meaning point this one back to this one for search engine purposes? Maybe YZ just isn’t different enough from Z for it to be a separate page in Google’s eyes and in searchers’ eyes. So I’m going to use something called the rel=canonical tag to point this YZ page back to Z.

Maybe I want to remove these pages. Oh, this is totally non-valuable to anyone. 404 it. Get it out of here. Maybe I want to block bots from accessing this section of our site. Maybe these are search results that make sense if you’ve performed this query on our site, but they don’t make any sense to be indexed in Google. I’ll keep Google out of it using the robots.txt file or the meta robots or other things.

2. Pages are accessible to crawlers, load fast, and can be fully parsed in a text-based browser

Secondarily, pages are accessible to crawlers. They should be accessible to crawlers. They should load fast, as fast as you possibly can. There’s a ton of resources about optimizing images and optimizing server response times and optimizing first paint and first meaningful paint and all these different things that go into speed.

But speed is good not only because of technical SEO issues, meaning Google can crawl your pages faster, which oftentimes when people speed up the load speed of their pages, they find that Google crawls more from them and crawls them more frequently, which is a wonderful thing, but also because pages that load fast make users happier. When you make users happier, you make it more likely that they will link and amplify and share and come back and keep loading and not click the back button, all these positive things and avoiding all these negative things.

They should be able to be fully parsed in essentially a text browser, meaning that if you have a relatively unsophisticated browser that is not doing a great job of processing JavaScript or post-loading of script events or other types of content, Flash and stuff like that, it should be the case that a spider should be able to visit that page and still see all of the meaningful content in text form that you want to present.

Google still is not processing every image at the I’m going to analyze everything that’s in this image and extract out the text from it level, nor are they doing that with video, nor are they doing that with many kinds of JavaScript and other scripts. So I would urge you and I know many other SEOs, notably Barry Adams, a famous SEO who says that JavaScript is evil, which may be taking it a little bit far, but we catch his meaning, that you should be able to load everything into these pages in HTML in text.

3. Thin content, duplicate content, spider traps/infinite loops are eliminated

Thin content and duplicate content — thin content meaning content that doesn’t provide meaningfully useful, differentiated value, and duplicate content meaning it’s exactly the same as something else — spider traps and infinite loops, like calendaring systems, these should generally speaking be eliminated. If you have those duplicate versions and they exist for some reason, for example maybe you have a printer-friendly version of an article and the regular version of the article and the mobile version of the article, okay, there should probably be some canonicalization going on there, the rel=canonical tag being used to say this is the original version and here’s the mobile friendly version and those kinds of things.

If you have search results in the search results, Google generally prefers that you don’t do that. If you have slight variations, Google would prefer that you canonicalize those, especially if the filters on them are not meaningfully and usefully different for searchers. 

4. Pages with valuable content are accessible through a shallow, thorough internal links structure

Number four, pages with valuable content on them should be accessible through just a few clicks, in a shallow but thorough internal link structure.

Now this is an idealized version. You’re probably rarely going to encounter exactly this. But let’s say I’m on my homepage and my homepage has 100 links to unique pages on it. That gets me to 100 pages. One hundred more links per page gets me to 10,000 pages, and 100 more gets me to 1 million.

So that’s only three clicks from homepage to one million pages. You might say, “Well, Rand, that’s a little bit of a perfect pyramid structure. I agree. Fair enough. Still, three to four clicks to any page on any website of nearly any size, unless we’re talking about a site with hundreds of millions of pages or more, should be the general rule. I should be able to follow that through either a sitemap.

If you have a complex structure and you need to use a sitemap, that’s fine. Google is fine with you using an HTML page-level sitemap. Or alternatively, you can just have a good link structure internally that gets everyone easily, within a few clicks, to every page on your site. You don’t want to have these holes that require, “Oh, yeah, if you wanted to reach that page, you could, but you’d have to go to our blog and then you’d have to click back to result 9, and then you’d have to click to result 18 and then to result 27, and then you can find it.”

No, that’s not ideal. That’s too many clicks to force people to make to get to a page that’s just a little ways back in your structure. 

5. Pages should be optimized to display cleanly and clearly on any device, even at slow connection speeds

Five, I think this is obvious, but for many reasons, including the fact that Google considers mobile friendliness in its ranking systems, you want to have a page that loads clearly and cleanly on any device, even at slow connection speeds, optimized for both mobile and desktop, optimized for 4G and also optimized for 2G and no G.

6. Permanent redirects should use the 301 status code, dead pages the 404, temporarily unavailable the 503, and all okay should use the 200 status code

Permanent redirects. So this page was here. Now it’s over here. This old content, we’ve created a new version of it. Okay, old content, what do we do with you? Well, we might leave you there if we think you’re valuable, but we may redirect you. If you’re redirecting old stuff for any reason, it should generally use the 301 status code.

If you have a dead page, it should use the 404 status code. You could maybe sometimes use 410, permanently removed, as well. Temporarily unavailable, like we’re having some downtime this weekend while we do some maintenance, 503 is what you want. Everything is okay, everything is great, that’s a 200. All of your pages that have meaningful content on them should have a 200 code.

These status codes, anything else beyond these, and maybe the 410, generally speaking should be avoided. There are some very occasional, rare, edge use cases. But if you find status codes other than these, for example if you’re using Moz, which crawls your website and reports all this data to you and does this technical audit every week, if you see status codes other than these, Moz or other software like it, Screaming Frog or Ryte or DeepCrawl or these other kinds, they’ll say, “Hey, this looks problematic to us. You should probably do something about this.”

7. Use HTTPS (and make your site secure)

When you are building a website that you want to rank in search engines, it is very wise to use a security certificate and to have HTTPS rather than HTTP, the non-secure version. Those should also be canonicalized. There should never be a time when HTTP is the one that is loading preferably. Google also gives a small reward — I’m not even sure it’s that small anymore, it might be fairly significant at this point — to pages that use HTTPS or a penalty to those that don’t. 

8. One domain > several, subfolders > subdomains, relevant folders > long, hyphenated URLs

In general, well, I don’t even want to say in general. It is nearly universal, with a few edge cases — if you’re a very advanced SEO, you might be able to ignore a little bit of this — but it is generally the case that you want one domain, not several. Allmystuff.com, not allmyseattlestuff.com, allmyportlandstuff.com, and allmylastuff.com.

Allmystuff.com is preferable for many, many technical reasons and also because the challenge of ranking multiple websites is so significant compared to the challenge of ranking one. 

You want subfolders, not subdomains, meaning I want allmystuff.com/seattle, /la, and /portland, not seattle.allmystuff.com.

Why is this? Google’s representatives have sometimes said that it doesn’t really matter and I should do whatever is easy for me. I have so many cases over the years, case studies of folks who moved from a subdomain to a subfolder and saw their rankings increase overnight. Credit to Google’s reps.

I’m sure they’re getting their information from somewhere. But very frankly, in the real world, it just works all the time to put it in a subfolder. I have never seen a problem being in the subfolder versus the subdomain, where there are so many problems and there are so many issues that I would strongly, strongly urge you against it. I think 95% of professional SEOs, who have ever had a case like this, would do likewise.

Relevant folders should be used rather than long, hyphenated URLs. This is one where we agree with Google. Google generally says, hey, if you have allmystuff.com/seattle/ storagefacilities/top10places, that is far better than /seattle- storage-facilities-top-10-places. It’s just the case that Google is good at folder structure analysis and organization, and users like it as well and good breadcrumbs come from there.

There’s a bunch of benefits. Generally using this folder structure is preferred to very, very long URLs, especially if you have multiple pages in those folders. 

9. Use breadcrumbs wisely on larger/deeper-structured sites

Last, but not least, at least last that we’ll talk about in this technical SEO discussion is using breadcrumbs wisely. So breadcrumbs, actually both technical and on-page, it’s good for this.

Google generally learns some things from the structure of your website from using breadcrumbs. They also give you this nice benefit in the search results, where they show your URL in this friendly way, especially on mobile, mobile more so than desktop. They’ll show home > seattle > storage facilities. Great, looks beautiful. Works nicely for users. It helps Google as well.

So there are plenty more in-depth resources that we can go into on many of these topics and others around technical SEO, but this is a good starting point. From here, we will take you to Part VI, our last one, on link building next week. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

In case you missed them:

Check out the other episodes in the series so far:

The One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 1: SEO StrategyThe One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 2: Keyword ResearchThe One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 3: Searcher SatisfactionThe One-Hour Guide to SEO, Part 4: Keyword Targeting & On-Page Optimization

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Restaurant Local SEO: The Google Characteristics of America’s Top-Ranked Eateries

Posted by MiriamEllis

“A good chef has to be a manager, a businessman and a great cook. To marry all three together is sometimes difficult.” – Wolfgang Puck

I like this quote. It makes me hear phones ringing at your local search marketing agency, with aspiring chefs and restaurateurs on the other end of the line, ready to bring experts aboard in the “sometimes difficult” quest for online visibility.

Is your team ready for these clients? How comfortable do you feel talking restaurant Local SEO when such calls come in? When was the last time you took a broad survey of what’s really ranking in this specialized industry?

Allow me to be your prep cook today, and I’ll dice up “best restaurant” local packs for major cities in all 50 US states. We’ll julienne Google Posts usage, rough chop DA, make chiffonade of reviews, owner responses, categories, and a host of other ingredients to determine which characteristics are shared by establishments winning this most superlative of local search phrases.

The finished dish should make us conversant with what it takes these days to be deemed “best” by diners and by Google, empowering your agency to answer those phones with all the breezy confidence of Julia Child.

Methodology

I looked at the 3 businesses in the local pack for “best restaurants (city)” in a major city in each of the 50 states, examining 11 elements for each entry, yielding 4,950 data points. I set aside the food processor for this one and did everything manually. I wanted to avoid the influence of proximity, so I didn’t search for any city in which I was physically located. The results, then, are what a traveler would see when searching for top restaurants in destination cities.

Restaurant results

Now, let’s look at each of the 11 data points together and see what we learn. Take a seat at the table!

Categories prove no barrier to entry

Which restaurant categories make up the dominant percentage of local pack entries for our search?

You might think that a business trying to rank locally for “best restaurants” would want to choose just “restaurant” as their primary Google category as a close match. Or, you might think that since we’re looking at best restaurants, something like “fine dining restaurants” or the historically popular “French restaurants” might top the charts.

Instead, what we’ve discovered is that restaurants of every category can make it into the top 3. Fifty-one percent of the ranking restaurants hailed from highly diverse categories, including Pacific Northwest Restaurant, Pacific Rim Restaurant, Organic, Southern, Polish, Lebanese, Eclectic and just about every imaginable designation. American Restaurant is winning out in bulk with 26 percent of the take, and an additional 7 percent for New American Restaurant. I find this an interesting commentary on the nation’s present gustatory aesthetic as it may indicate a shift away from what might be deemed fancy fare to familiar, homier plates.

Overall, though, we see the celebrated American “melting pot” perfectly represented when searchers seek the best restaurant in any given city. Your client’s food niche, however specialized, should prove no barrier to entry in the local packs.

High prices don’t automatically equal “best”

Do Google’s picks for “best restaurants” share a pricing structure?

It will cost you more than $1000 per head to dine at Urasawa, the nation’s most expensive eatery, and one study estimates that the average cost of a restaurant meal in the US is $12.75. When we look at the price attribute on Google listings, we find that the designation “best” is most common for establishments with charges that fall somewhere in between the economical and the extravagant.

Fifty-eight percent of the top ranked restaurants for our search have the $$ designation and another 25 percent have the $$$. We don’t know Google’s exact monetary value behind these symbols, but for context, a Taco Bell with its $1–$2 entrees would typically be marked as $, while the fabled French Laundry gets $$$$ with its $400–$500 plates. In our study, the cheapest and the costliest restaurants make up only a small percentage of what gets deemed “best.”

There isn’t much information out there about Google’s pricing designations, but it’s generally believed that they stem at least in part from the attribute questions Google sends to searchers. So, this element of your clients’ listings is likely to be influenced by subjective public sentiment. For instance, Californians’ conceptions of priciness may be quite different from North Dakotans’. Nevertheless, on the national average, mid-priced restaurants are most likely to be deemed “best.”

Of anecdotal interest: The only locale in which all 3 top-ranked restaurants were designated at $$$$ was NYC, while in Trenton, NJ, the #1 spot in the local pack belongs to Rozmaryn, serving Polish cuisine at $ prices. It’s interesting to consider how regional economics may contribute to expectations, and your smartest restaurant clients will carefully study what their local market can bear. Meanwhile, 7 of the 150 restaurants we surveyed had no pricing information at all, indicating that Google’s lack of adequate information about this element doesn’t bar an establishment from ranking.

Less than 5 stars is no reason to despair

Is perfection a prerequisite for “best”?

Negative reviews are the stuff of indigestion for restaurateurs, and I’m sincerely hoping this study will provide some welcome relief. The average star rating of the 150 “best” restaurants we surveyed is 4.5. Read that again: 4.5. And the number of perfect 5-star joints in our study? Exactly zero. Time for your agency to spend a moment doing deep breathing with clients.

The highest rating for any restaurant in our data set is 4.8, and only three establishments rated so highly. The lowest is sitting at 4.1. Every other business falls somewhere in-between. These ratings stem from customer reviews, and the 4.5 average proves that perfection is simply not necessary to be “best.”

Breaking down a single dining spot with 73 reviews, a 4.6 star rating was achieved with fifty-six 5-star reviews, four 4-star reviews, three 3-star reviews, two 2-star reviews, and three 1-star reviews. 23 percent of diners in this small review set had a less-than-ideal experience, but the restaurant is still achieving top rankings. Practically speaking for your clients, the odd night when the pho was gummy and the paella was burnt can be tossed onto the compost heap of forgivable mistakes.

Review counts matter, but differ significantly

How many reviews do the best restaurants have?

It’s folk wisdom that any business looking to win local rankings needs to compete on native Google review counts. I agree with that, but was struck by the great variation in review counts across the nation and within given packs. Consider:

The greatest number of reviews in our study was earned by Hattie B’s Hot Chicken in Nashville, TN, coming in at a whopping 4,537! Meanwhile, Park Heights Restaurant in Tupelo, MS is managing a 3-pack ranking with just 72 reviews, the lowest in our data set.35 percent of “best”-ranked restaurants have between 100–499 reviews and another 31 percent have between 500–999 reviews. Taken together that’s 66 percent of contenders having yet to break 1,000 reviews.A restaurant with less than 100 reviews has only a 1 percent chance of ranking for this type of search.

Anecdotally, I don’t know how much data you would have to analyze to be able to find a truly reliable pattern regarding winning review counts. Consider the city of Dallas, where the #1 spot has 3,365 review, but spots #2 and #3 each have just over 300. Compare that to Tallahassee, where a business with 590 reviews is coming in at #1 above a competitor with twice that many. Everybody ranking in Boise has well over 1,000 reviews, but nobody in Bangor is even breaking into the 200s.

The takeaways from this data point is that the national average review count is 893 for our “best” search, but that there is no average magic threshold you can tell a restaurant client they need to cross to get into the pack. Totals vary so much from city to city that your best plan of action is to study the client’s market and strongly urge full review management without making any promise that hitting 1,000 reviews will ensure them beating out that mysterious competitor who is sweeping up with just 400 pieces of consumer sentiment. Remember, no local ranking factor stands in isolation.

Best restaurants aren’t best at owner responses

How many of America’s top chophouses have replied to reviews in the last 60 days?

With a hat tip to Jason Brown at the Local Search Forum for this example of a memorable owner response to a negative review, I’m sorry to say I have some disappointing news. Only 29 percent of the restaurants ranked best in all 50 states had responded to their reviews in the 60 days leading up to my study. There were tributes of lavish praise, cries for understanding, and seething remarks from diners, but less than one-third of owners appeared to be paying the slightest bit of attention.

On the one hand, this indicates that review responsiveness is not a prerequisite for ranking for our desirable search term, but let’s go a step further. In my view, whatever time restaurant owners may be gaining back via unresponsiveness is utterly offset by what they stand to lose if they make a habit of overlooking complaints. Review neglect has been cited as a possible cause of business closure. As my friends David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal always say:“Your brand is its reviews” and mastering the customer service ecosystem is your surest way to build a restaurant brand that lasts.

For your clients, I would look at any local pack with neglected reviews as representative of a weakness. Algorithmically, your client’s active management of the owner response function could become a strength others lack. But I’ll even go beyond that: Restaurants ignoring how large segments of customer service have moved onto the web are showing a deficit of commitment to the long haul. It’s true that some eateries are famous for thriving despite offhand treatment of patrons, but in the average city, a superior commitment to responsiveness could increase many restaurants’ repeat business, revenue and rankings.

Critic reviews nice but not essential

I’ve always wanted to investigate critic reviews for restaurants, as Google gives them a great deal of screen space in the listings:

How many times were critic reviews cited in the Google listings of America’s best restaurants and how does an establishment earn this type of publicity?

With 57 appearances, Lonely Planet is the leading source of professional reviews for our search term, with Zagat and 10Best making strong showings, too. It’s worth noting that 70/150 businesses I investigated surfaced no critic reviews at all. They’re clearly not a requirement for being considered “best”, but most restaurants will benefit from the press. Unfortunately, there are few options for prompting a professional review. To wit:

Lonely Planet — Founded in 1972, Lonely Planet is a travel guide publisher headquartered in Australia. Critic reviews like this one are written for their website and guidebooks simultaneously. You can submit a business for review consideration via this form, but the company makes no guarantees about inclusion.

Zagat — Founded in 1979, Zagat began as a vehicle for aggregating diner reviews. It was purchased by Google in 2011 and sold off to The Infatuation in 2018. Restaurants can’t request Zagat reviews. Instead, the company conducts its own surveys and selects businesses to be rated and reviewed, like this.

10Best — Owned by USA Today Travel Media Group, 10Best employs local writers/travelers to review restaurants and other destinations. Restaurants cannot request a review.

The Infatuation — Founded in 2009 and headquartered in NY, The Infatuation employs diner-writers to create reviews like this one based on multiple anonymous dining experiences that are then published via their app. The also have a SMS-based restaurant recommendation system. They do not accept request from restaurants hoping to be reviewed.

AFAR — Founded in 2009, AFAR is a travel publication with a website, magazine, and app which publishes reviews like this one. There is no form for requesting a review.

Michelin — Founded as a tire company in 1889 in France, Michelin’s subsidiary ViaMichelin is a digital mapping service that houses the reviews Google is pulling. In my study, Chicago, NYC and San Francisco were the only three cities that yielded Michelin reviews like this one and one article states that only 165 US restaurants have qualified for a coveted star rating. The company offers this guide to dining establishments.

As you can see, the surest way to earn a professional review is to become notable enough on the dining scene to gain the unsolicited notice of a critic. 

Google Posts hardly get a seat at best restaurant tables

How many picks for best restaurants are using the Google Posts microblogging feature?

As it turns out, only a meager 16 percent of America’s “best” restaurants in my survey have made any use of Google Posts. In fact, most of the usage I saw wasn’t even current. I had to click the “view previous posts on Google” link to surface past efforts. This statistic is much worse than what Ben Fisher found when he took a broader look at Google Posts utilization and found that 42 percent of local businesses had at least experimented with the feature at some point.

For whatever reason, the eateries in my study are largely neglecting this influential feature, and this knowledge could encompass a competitive advantage for your restaurant clients.

Do you have a restaurateur who is trying to move up the ranks? There is some evidence that devoting a few minutes a week to this form of microblogging could help them get a leg up on lazier competitors.

Google Posts are a natural match for restaurants because they always have something to tout, some appetizing food shot to share, some new menu item to celebrate. As the local SEO on the job, you should be recommending an embrace of this element for its valuable screen real estate in the Google Business Profile, local finder, and maybe even in local packs.

Waiter, there’s some Q&A in my soup

What is the average number of questions top restaurants are receiving on their Google Business Profiles?

Commander’s Palace in New Orleans is absolutely stealing the show in my survey with 56 questions asked via the Q&A feature of the Google Business Profile. Only four restaurants had zero questions. The average number of questions across the board was eight.

As I began looking at the data, I decided not to re-do this earlier study of mine to find out how many questions were actually receiving responses from owners, because I was winding up with the same story. Time and again, answers were being left up to the public, resulting in consumer relations like these:

Takeaway: As I mentioned in a previous post, Greg Gifford found that 40 percent of his clients’ Google Questions were leads. To leave those leads up to the vagaries of the public, including a variety of wags and jokesters, is to leave money on the table. If a potential guest is asking about dietary restrictions, dress codes, gift cards, average prices, parking availability, or ADA compliance, can your restaurant clients really afford to allow a public “maybe” to be the only answer given?

I’d suggest that a dedication to answering questions promptly could increase bookings, cumulatively build the kind of reputation that builds rankings, and possibly even directly impact rankings as a result of being a signal of activity.

A moderate PA & DA gets you into the game

What is the average Page Authority and Domain Authority of restaurants ranking as “best’?

Looking at both the landing page that Google listings are pointing to and the overall authority of each restaurant’s domain, I found that:

The average PA is 36, with a high of 56 and a low of zero being represented by one restaurant with no website link and one restaurant appearing to have no website at all.The average DA is 41, with a high of 88, one business lacking a website link while actually having a DA of 56 and another one having no apparent website at all. The lowest linked DA I saw was 6.PA/DA do not = rankings. Within the 50 local packs I surveyed, 32 of them exhibited the #1 restaurant having a lower DA than the establishments sitting at #2 or #3. In one extreme case, a restaurant with a DA of 7 was outranking a website with a DA of 32, and there were the two businesses with the missing website link or missing website. But, for the most part, knowing the range of PA/DA in a pack you are targeting will help you create a baseline for competing.

While pack DA/PA differs significantly from city to city, the average numbers we’ve discovered shouldn’t be out-of-reach for established businesses. If your client’s restaurant is brand new, it’s going to take some serious work to get up market averages, of course.

Local Search Ranking Factors 2019 found that DA was the 9th most important local pack ranking signal, with PA sitting at factor #20. Once you’ve established a range of DA/PA for a local SERP you are trying to move a client up into, your best bet for making improvements will include improving content so that it earns links and powering up your outreach for local links and linktations.

Google’s Local Finder “web results” show where to focus management

Which websites does Google trust enough to cite as references for restaurants?

As it turns out, that trust is limited to a handful of sources:

As the above pie chart shows:

The restaurant’s website was listed as a reference for 99 percent of the candidates in our survey. More proof that you still need a website in 2019, for the very good reason that it feeds data to Google.Yelp is highly trusted at 76 percent and TripAdvisor is going strong at 43 percent. Your client is likely already aware of the need to manage their reviews on these two platforms. Be sure you’re also checking them for basic data accuracy.OpenTable and Facebook are each getting a small slice of Google trust, too.

Not shown in the above chart are 13 restaurants that had a web reference from a one-off source, like the Des Moines Register or Dallas Eater. A few very famous establishments, like Brennan’s in New Orleans, surfaced their Wikipedia page, although they didn’t do so consistently. I noticed Wikipedia pages appearing one day as a reference and then disappearing the next day. I was left wondering why.

For me, the core takeaway from this factor is that if Google is highlighting your client’s listing on a given platform as a trusted web result, your agency should go over those pages with a fine-toothed comb, checking for accuracy, activity, and completeness. These are citations Google is telling you are of vital importance.

A few other random ingredients

As I was undertaking this study, there were a few things I noted down but didn’t formally analyze, so consider this as mixed tapas:

Menu implementation is all over the place. While many restaurants are linking directly to their own website via Google’s offered menu link, some are using other services like Single Platform, and far too many have no menu link at all.Reservation platforms like Open Table are making a strong showing, but many restaurants are drawing a blank on this Google listing field, too. Many, but far from all, of the restaurants designated “best” feature Google’s “reserve a table” function which stems from partnerships with platforms like Open Table and RESY. Order links are pointing to multiple sources including DoorDash, Postmates, GrubHub, Seamless, and in some cases, the restaurant’s own website (smart!). But, in many cases, no use is being made of this function. Photos were present for every single best-ranked restaurant. Their quality varied, but they are clearly a “given” in this industry.Independently-owned restaurants are the clear winners for my search term. With the notable exception of an Olive Garden branch in Parkersburg, WV, and a Cracker Barrel in Bismarck, ND, the top competitors were either single-location or small multi-location brands. For the most part, neither Google nor the dining public associate large chains with “best”.Honorable mentions go to Bida Manda Laotian Bar & Grill for what looks like a gorgeous and unusual restaurant ranking #1 in Raleigh, NC and to Kermit’s Outlaw Kitchen of Tupelo, MS for the most memorable name in my data set. You can get a lot of creative inspiration from just spending time with restaurant data.
A final garnish to our understanding of this data

I want to note two things as we near the end of our study:

Local rankings emerge from the dynamic scenario of Google’s opinionated algorithms + public opinion and behavior. Doing Local SEO for restaurants means managing a ton of different ingredients: website SEO, link building, review management, GBP signals, etc. We can’t offer clients a generic “formula” for winning across the board. This study has helped us understand national averages so that we can walk into the restaurant space feeling conversant with the industry. In practice, we’ll need to discover the true competitors in each market to shape our strategy for each unique client. And that brings us to some good news.As I mentioned at the outset of this survey, I specifically avoided proximity as an influence by searching as a traveler to other destinations would. I investigated one local pack for each major city I “visited”. The glad tidings are that, for many of your restaurant clients, there is going to be more than one chance to rank for a search like “best restaurants (city)”. Unless the eatery is in a very small town, Google is going to whip up a variety of local packs based on the searcher’s location. So, that’s something hopeful to share.
What have we learned about restaurant local SEO?

A brief TL;DR you can share easily with your clients:

While the US shows a predictable leaning towards American restaurants, any category can be a contender. So, be bold!Mid-priced restaurants are considered “best” to a greater degree than the cheapest or most expensive options. Price for your market. While you’ll likely need at least 100 native Google reviews to break into these packs, well over half of competitors have yet to break the 1,000 mark.An average 71 percent of competitors are revealing a glaring weakness by neglecting to respond to reviews – so get in there and start embracing customer service to distinguish your restaurant!A little over half of your competitors have earned critic reviews. If you don’t yet have any, there’s little you can do to earn them beyond becoming well enough known for anonymous professional reviewers to visit you. In the meantime, don’t sweat it.About three-quarters of your competitors are completely ignoring Google Posts; gain the advantage by getting active.Potential guests are asking nearly every competitor questions, and so many restaurants are leaving leads on the table by allowing random people to answer. Embrace fast responses to Q&A to stand out from the crowd.With few exceptions, devotion to authentic link earning efforts can build up your PA/DA to competitive levels.Pay attention to any platform Google is citing as a resource to be sure the information published there is a complete and accurate.The current management of other Google Business Profile features like Menus, Reservations and Ordering paints a veritable smorgasbord of providers and a picture of prevalent neglect. If you need to improve visibility, explore every profile field that Google is giving you.

A question for you: Do you market restaurants? Would you be willing to share a cool local SEO tactic with our community? We’d love to hear about your special sauce in the comments below.

Wishing you bon appétit for working in the restaurant local SEO space, with delicious wins ahead!

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Parenting

Gifts for parents: Great gift ideas for your mom and dad

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Buying gifts for your parents can be tough. What do you get the two people who gave you life, the people who raised you into the responsible adult you’ve grown up to be? 

Try to think outside the box and consider their hobbies: Do they travel? Are they into neat gadgets? Do they like doing couple-y things

You’ll want to get them something they’ll love and use, but also hopefully something that will help them connect with you (their kid) as well. 

SEE ALSO: Gift ideas for your in-laws so you don’t have to get them a gift card (again)

If you’re totally stumped, then don’t worry — that’s what we’re here for. We took some of the guesswork out of buying a present for your mom and dad and rounded up the best gifts, whether they spend most of their time at home or on-the-go traveling. These gifts are guaranteed to make your parents (even more) proud of you, as they brag to their family and friends that they have such an amazing kid.  Read more…

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Parenting

Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pizza rustica | A kitchen in Rome

At this time of year in Rome, it’s traditional to pair the first broad beans with pecorino

Our rental agreement came with all the usual clauses, but also a verbal one: take care of the tortoise on the terrace. This unexpected role has brought me joy. I had no idea how fast a tortoise could move in the presence of watermelon, or that the movement would be a lolloping scamper. However, it has also caused great anxiety. At least once a day, I can’t find the tortoise (on our 5m x 5m terrace) or need to scare off a seagull with the wingspan of a lamp-post.

This anxiety peaked during hibernation, which began in early November and seemed never to end. And I’m clearly not the only one: start typing “tortoise hibernating” into Google, and before you hit the letter “o”, the words “or dead” appear. I spent the whole of February and half of March worrying that the tortoise, named Secret Agent by my son, was no longer with us in body, only shell. Then, one day, he strolled to the middle of the terrace, stopping to sunbathe as if nothing had happened. Relief was soon displaced by further anxiety when he showed no interest in eating, ignoring every leaf or slice of green apple.

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Read more: theguardian.com

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Parenting

Anna Wintour: a rare face-to-face with the most important woman in fashion

The editor-in-chief of American Vogue talks to Jess Cartner-Morley about Michelle Obama, fake news and only spending 20 minutes at parties.

Portraits by Tyler Mitchell

• Read more from the spring/summer 2019 edition of The Fashion, our biannual fashion supplement

One morning last August, Anna Wintour was playing tennis with her coach in the 40-acre grounds of her Long Island summerhouse. She noticed he seemed a little distracted: “But his wife was about to have a baby, so I thought he was nervous about that.” Then it struck her that they had attracted an unusual number of spectators. The house was brimful with family, but it was earlier than most people get up on a weekend. (“I’m a morning person,” says Wintour, for whom anything later than 5am constitutes a lie-in.) As she prepared to serve, she heard a car pull up. “I am pretty OCD about guests and where they are sleeping. I thought, I’m not expecting anyone else, I don’t have any more rooms. Who is this? And then I thought – that looks like Roger [Federer, with whom Wintour is good friends]. And that looks like [his wife] Mirka. And that looks like their twins.” Wintour’s daughter Bee Shaffer, it transpired, had arranged for a Federer-Wintour family tennis tournament, “which was the best gift a daughter could give a tennis-mad mother. I got to play doubles with Roger for the first time in our very long friendship, against my two nephews.” Twenty-five floors above Manhattan, behind the ebonised mahogany Alan Buchsbaum desk from which she has ruled the fashion world for three decades, she leans back in her chair and smiles at the memory. “We won, of course.”

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