Google Maps is finally getting offline search and navigation features. Now, “Downloading maps is far simpler than the old convoluted process,” Engadget reports. “You either search by city, state, zip or select a point on the map, then click ‘Download.’” What’s more, “Unlike in the past, there's apparently no discernible difference between offline and online modes.”

Casey Meraz takes us through tactical strategies to increase a company's or business's local SEO presence. Since Google has been considering more organic signals in rankings, Meraz believes its time to review some of the basics in local SEO and think about more traditional organic ranking factors. He suggests the ones in which marketers should pay more attention.

Giving a boost to its image search engine, Yahoo has added a combination of Web results and images from its photo-sharing site Flickr. “Signed-in users will see desktop search results that offer a combination of Flickr’s top public photos, images from people you follow on Flickr, and a selection of your own images,” TechCrunch reports.

Rand Fishkin explores ways to access Google data that's not readily available from keyword data to link data to traffic data. Explaining why traffic goes up or down isn't easy, especially without data, so Fishkin digs in to help marketers find ways to compensate for the lack of information Google provides.

Marketers using Google Analytics, AdWords and social media continuously measure just how well campaigns perform. A tool called Wordsmith now automates the process of putting the data into reports. The API lets marketers slice the data by predefined dimensions weekly, monthly, and quarterly. Cole Faloon explains the details of this third-party tool.

The Web site for PSD2HTML, which does responsive Web site design, had been suffering from a manual penalty related to spam backlinks for more than one year. They tried everything to recover, but nothing worked, Anna Korolekh writes in a post. So they hired an outside consultant. Here's the solution in five steps.

Wired reports that the Chinese search engine Baidu is using artificial intelligence to identify malware. Andrew Ng, who also works as a professor of computer science at Stanford, is the brains behind the project of catch malicious code with AI. It learns through a neural network, a network of machines that approximate the Web of neurons in the human brain. Cade Metz explains.

Can't afford to run AdWords campaigns? No worries. Lending Club will lend you the money through its peer-to-peer network. Of course, it's a loan. The letter has gone out to a select number of Google AdWords clients, according to Lending Club and several forum posts.

Bing Ads plans to launch an educational resource for premium customers such as agencies, channel partners and tool providers. The Bing Ads Academy is designed for those selling Bing Ads and the account managers that work on campaigns. Training offered in online classrooms, on demand, as well as in-person training sessions, aim to give clients options.

Those in the United States can sign up to test Microsoft's virtual assistant, Cortana, on their iPhone, and can fill out a brief survey on the iPhone model they use, the version of iOS it runs, and how often they use Cortana in Windows 10. Microsoft says it will send a limited number of download links over email.