Near Media is the go-to advisor for executives at multi-location brands and vertical agencies seeking to optimize their search strategy and tactics.
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We end the brand-building series with Greg walking through our original research: the "Choosing a Lawyer" study of the Atlanta personal lawyer market. Survey data, ad-creative testing, and a user-testing combine to show how prior brand awareness steers online behavior and the final hire.
We close the run of solo interviews with a working session on what "brand" means for a local business and which tactics move the needle now that answers are generated, not just ranked. Join Paula French, Joy Hawkins, Andrew Shotland, and Matt McGee to explore the tactics that helped the most
Cyrus Shepard joins us on the Near Memo to connect what the Google antitrust trial and API leak revealed about click data to the questions local operators care about: how Google decides a result was good, why brand search keeps correlating with rankings, and what AI Overviews do to that ecosystem .
Local Search Still Starts with Google According to our research, somewhere between 60% and 70% of AI users have used AI for local search. There are questions about frequency and trust. But regardless of what industry you're in, AI is probably somewhere in your customer's journey
Gyi Tsakalakis, of AttorneySync, joins us for Part 3 of our brand-building series — bringing the brand conversation down to earth in professional services, and specifically in legal, where a client hires once in a lifetime, can't judge quality, and every ad on the screen looks the same.
LSAs Now P-Max PPL Local Services Ads (LSAs) are merging into Google Ads and will run as Performance Max campaigns optimized for pay-per-lead goals. Google says, "This transition allows you to manage all your Google advertising in one unified platform while keeping the pay-per-lead
Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2 of the Near Memo brand-building series — this time on the technical side: how Google and AI systems actually model a brand, and what a local business can do about it.
We explore local branding with John Jantsch, examining how to build trust through offline distinctiveness, mine customer interviews to identify primary differentiators and leverage programmatic referral loops to thrive in this bold new world. All with an eye towards increasing profitability
Local Websites in a Sea of Slop People increasingly feel that the "open web" is over. The web is now dominated by a small number of powerful "gatekeepers." Beyond this, more paywalls are going up, less traffic is being delivered by Google and AI slop is
Discover why small business websites are shifting from growth engines to "trust artifacts" to battle AI search friction, click fraud, and generative slop.
