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The Whitespark Local Update is the go-to podcast for Local SEOs and Marketers who want to stay ahead of the curve in local search and the local visibility space.
Join industry experts Claire Carlile and Darren Shaw for a lively, insightful roundup of their carefully curated selection of top โmust-readโ and โmust-watchโ links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, hello, lovely friends and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update with me, Claire Carlile.
[Darren Shaw]
And with me, Darren Shaw. This is the podcast where we tell you what's been happening in the world of local search and AI visibility seems to be a big one these days. And speaking of, we have a very special episode happening today.
Today is exciting because Claire Carlisle got access to the Google Business Profile Gemini connector and has been hacking around on it. And you can do some pretty cool stuff on it. And she's going to tell you all about it today.
[Claire Carlile]
So I do it. So I just do it. So we already covered.
I think it was probably last week when we said, oh, it is released to some people and it's going to be rolled out this month, I think to everyone. So hopefully more people will have access. So it's currently just for one location for the peoples.
And so I had a little play around because I just wanted to see what it could do and if it was going to be a good thing or a bad thing. And I was so excited to do this. So it was last night, actually, it was rather late here in the UK and I was just on my way and then I really, really enjoyed it.
I looked at the one business profile that I had access to, which is my favorite business ever in the Wales, which is Folly Farm Adventure Park and Zoo. And so I asked some really, well, I thought were quite interesting questions. So I started, I was just like, oh, what can I do?
What can I do? What can I ask? And I ran through a pretty huge list related to, well, what were the things that I would be doing if I was doing local SEO?
Unsurprisingly. Tell me about categories. Tell me about any services that I'm missing.
Tell me about how I can make sense of my reviews. Tell me about review velocity. Tell me about all of those things.
And I've got some absolutely brilliant stuff back. It looked at competitors. It made an assessment of what the business was and it made suggestions.
What it also did, I did have one, I really wanted to delve into some reviews. So I said, look at the reviews for 2025, 2026 so far, show me any themes that are emerging here. Give me a graph showing the acquisition of reviews each month and what the average review score was for the reviews given in that month, so 2025.
And it did a really, well, one, it gave me a really good graphic with all the things I would expect to see. And then it started talking about the seasonal footprint and how the type of review acquisition that we had would reflect the type of business in that category. It was all very intelligent is what I'm getting at.
And it took me down many paths in terms of, use your products this way. This is coming out of your reviews. You have these things that get a lot of feedback in reviews.
So the experiences, why aren't you using those in your products? Why aren't you doing this? Why don't you use this more in your services?
Why don't you pull these bits out? So that was the part where I got to where I said, well, that's all well and good. And that's all lovely.
Those are great ideas. But tell me how you feel about Google business products when you're adding them manually. I'm not seeing it appearing so much across surfaces and within the interface itself.
Is it worth me making those?
[Darren Shaw]
That was a great question.
[Claire Carlile]
Gemini was saying to me, well, you know, you don't have, because you're not a shop, you know, you don't have a feed. So Google is still, you know, and this is where you get to the point where you're like, okay, well, you know, I'm a marketer and I've been reading AI overviews and LLM responses for a while. So I understand about hallucinations.
And I also understand about LLMs being a sycophant and basically telling you what they want to hear, making stuff up. And then saying things like, you know, Google is really going to focus on products for businesses like yours because you're not going to have merchant center. And then I said to Google, but what about the, you know, the things to do and attractions and tickets?
Because this is the type of business that could also be leveraging that functionality. And then it was like, that's a really good point. You're like, yeah, it's a good point.
[Darren Shaw]
Didn't it say like Google really cares about those products and they're using them. And so then I was like, well, that kind of goes against what we know as local SEO.
[Claire Carlile]
No, I don't agree with that bit because Google was saying, so Gemini, this integration, the LLM that was chatting with me and giving me was saying it's really important for AI overviews because they really draw on Google business profile products. And whether or not that is, well, thank you, you know, what you giving me some secret source from the algorithm or whatever, it does reflect, it makes sense. And we have this conversation every week where we say, if the feature exists, that is a way of putting the information that you need Google to know about you into Google's understanding of your entity.
And what it was doing in some cases here was it was making me think of things that I hadn't necessarily thought of where it was saying, why don't you highlight that in your services, your custom services under your primary service, which is added because of your primary category. Do you know what I mean? You're adding those additional, so why don't you highlight that?
Whereas we'd be thinking, I'm not adding that, that's going to take bloody ages and it never appears on any surfaces. And it's saying, well, why don't you do that? Because it highlights the fact that you do it.
Yeah, of course. It did feel like I was having a marketer sat with me and, you know, thinking about things to do with my business. It's talking about seasonality.
It's thinking about, it was suggesting things about cross-selling between various things. So you can get this to give you so many, so many ideas and so many things. You know, you've got a list of 10 things, then you'll get an output, which is like this.
What are you going to do with it? What realistically are you going to be able to do? And I think that is one of the things that people get lost in.
It's like, wow, I can produce all of this stuff now using LLMs, but some of this stuff actually needs thinking about and implementing. And we should continue to use our brains to work out whether or not this is good advice and not just blindly follow this.
[Darren Shaw]
The way I saw your engagement with this, it made me think of it as it's like you have a consultant that you can brainstorm and workshop ideas with and improve things. So it was like, you know, please suggest any additional categories I could add to my profile. I'll give you that.
Please suggest any additional services I should consider adding to my profile. Please mind my reviews, go through them all and tell me some really interesting insights about where I should be focusing on improving my business. Look at the negative reviews.
Please also go through my reviews and tell me which reviews or what are some of the things that people always talk about that I should do a better job of highlighting in my Google posts and on my website. You know, there's all these things. It's like you have this little consultant that has full access.
It's like an MCP, if you know what that term is, an MCP for your Google business profile. That's exactly what it is. And so another query is like, hey, what are the top search queries my profile is appearing for, but I am not currently covering on my categories or services.
And so this is for me, the magic of this connection. The connection is like we have all this data, and then you're going to get advice, you're going to get a strategy. And then the whole thing, you can just ask all these questions and keep going back and forth in a single chat session.
And at the end of that session, please summarize this whole chat session into an action item to-do list that I will then go and execute on. That is the magic. And I'm like, when I saw the responses you were getting and how they were pretty freaking smart, I was like, man, these are good ideas.
Now at the end of it, I just like, okay, great. Give me my marching orders, give me my to-do list, and I'm going to go and implement all of these things. So that for me, blew my mind.
[Claire Carlile]
It was great. I'm just looking at one now, which I said, yeah, check the entire corpus, review corpus, and we're talking thousands and thousands of reviews here. I want to tell me about the emerging themes, but also tell me about themes that are receding.
So tell me about things that were, you were seeing a lot of maybe 10 years ago, but that you're not seeing now. I just wanted to see how it was. And it was a really, it was a really, really nice roundup.
And it gave me a good idea about, okay, well, you've highlighted or this technology has highlighted three things that often came up in a review that maybe could be seen as negative. And then it was saying, okay, we're seeing a shift away from this because we're seeing this move into a narrative around this thing instead. And that was lovely.
It was like, I mean, not just because it meant that everyone was doing a good job, but it was like when we think, because I can remember talking, doing talks about your review or text your review corpus, running it through an Ngram analyzer. Obviously, that was like, whoa, let's see some exact match Ngram. And that was like, I'm really making sense of this.
And now you have got the technology to actually- Just to ask the questions, whatever you want to know. Yeah. Yeah.
And see, so anyway, if, and when you do get access to it, play away, it gives you some ideas of the things that you could be asking, but basically just put your hat on, your marketing hat on and say, well, what are all the things that I'm trying to do in my day-to-day life in terms of, I will be looking to my data to tell me this thing and prepare to maybe explore things that you haven't explored before. And all the time do this with your, it's not a tinfoil hat, but do this with your hat on that understands that this is, well, this is what it is, isn't it?
It's a technology and you need to use your human brain on top of it to help you make sense of this and to make it actionable.
[Darren Shaw]
Impressive is how I would describe it. If I was to give it one word so far, I'm like, oh, wait a minute. Whereas the GA4 integration- Nothing, nothing burger.
Yeah. Not too exciting. This, this is impressive.
There's stuff going on here that is very powerful. All right. Before we continue, I've been meaning for a long time to start telling you about WhiteSpark's awesome products on this podcast.
What? You know, you listen to their podcast and they use it as an opportunity to tell you about things. And I'm going to tell you about one right now.
I want to tell you about WhiteSpark's local ranking grids software. Tons of people are switching to it from Bright Local and Local Falcon. And the feedback we are getting from these people is they can't believe it.
They're like, what? This is so much better. Anyways, I'm overselling it, but it's true.
We track to 100 positions. All the other tools only track to 20. So the amount of data we're collecting is absolutely phenomenal.
You now get to see actually how you're growing over time as you move from lower positions. That's huge. Competitive analysis like you've never seen before in these tools.
You can put two grids side by side, you versus your competitor, compare all the data. You can also do that same thing with your past scans. You can see the before and after.
Very phenomenal. We just, we're about to launch what's called the Analyze tab, which does this insane deep dive into all of that data that we've been collecting. And you get to see a review analysis.
You get to see your performance analysis over time. You get to do a Google business profile comparative analysis. You can track when competitors are changing their business name.
And when it gets changed back, you can track all of that change and you can see all of the stuff that's happening. So it's really amazing. It's very well-priced, plans start at $10 a month, and you can try it for free at white spark.ca. And now we will continue with the podcast.
[Claire Carlile]
Do you know, Darren, tell us a thing.
[Darren Shaw]
I will tell you a thing. I want to talk about Celeste Gonzalez, who was recently on the podcast and she wrote an article on the Search Engine Journal blog, The Review Gap, Finding Client Opportunities and Competitor Feedback. We were just talking about that.
But this is not mining your own reviews for insights. This is mining your competitor reviews for insight. And she talks about how like, you know, people don't do this enough.
And she's not wrong. It's like kind of a sort of hidden gem strategy. And so she calls the GBP reviews a free, always up-to-date focus group.
It's like always being updated, this like focus group of like, hey, what care, what do people care about in your industry? And so she's got a three-step framework. You're going to export your competitor reviews.
You're going to run a sentiment analysis using AI. And then you're going to cluster into themes, quality, communication, pricing, speed, trust staff. And so one of the things that she's identified is that when you do this, you can actually reframe every negative review as a customer fear.
Negative reviews are a map of customer anxieties in that category. And then once you've figured out what those are, you get to speak to those exact anxieties in your content, which is huge. So a fear might be like, they never gave me a price upfront.
Like I needed to know that. And so then on your landing page, or even on your Google business profile, you say upfront pricing on every job, no surprises on your invoice. So it teaches you these like pain points and allows you to address them in advance, which will absolutely improve your conversions.
And also she talks about this little Chrome extension she built, which is pretty cool. It's called the GBP Review Sentiment Analyzer. So go check that out.
Also a cool tool, great article, Celeste.
[Claire Carlile]
Thank you very much. That's another thing that you could be like diving into Gemini with as well, isn't it? Is like, no, you won't be using the GBP, but that's just, I'll just smash that out now.
Tell me, give me all the complaints and reframe them as customer fears. It's just told me all the things. It's just so exciting.
I barely need to breathe or talk or eat or go to work. I mean, you know, why are we even here? That's the question.
Okay. My next linky link is from our friend Hiroko, who often sees things in Google business profile and writes about them on LinkedIn. I know we've mentioned them a couple of times.
So this is interesting. Google is apparently, I'm not saying this in the wild anywhere. Google has apparently added a new management feature, the collected info menu that allows business owners to review and delete or reject business information that Google automatically collects and updates.
So we're only guessing what that might mean or what it might look like or what we might be able to do with it. But the idea of it is great.
[Darren Shaw]
Great. Let's talk about this messaging thing, because this just came into my LinkedIn this morning. And I was like, what?
This is very interesting. Let's talk about it. So what do you got, Claire?
[Claire Carlile]
So just on the subject of lots of new things actually happening, new exciting things in Google business profiles, we've got Hiroko and then a member of the SEO services team at Whitespot, Denny, posted something earlier about seeing a change in the NMX where messaging, the little icon had changed in the NMX. And I was like, oh, maybe it's just maybe, you know, Google loves changing its logos every 10 minutes. But it wasn't that.
It actually took me through on my desktop and then also on my mobile when I checked. So you've got messages. It's a slight icon change.
And then you click on it and it takes you to a page, which in the URL, it says inbox. So it's business.google.com forward slash inbox forward slash lots of numbers. So you remember, obviously, messaging has had more costume changes than Celine Dion.
It's been everything, hasn't it? You know, it's like we do it via the API and then we're going to do it via a desktop messaging service. And then we're going to do it by carrier pigeon.
And now it's going to be WhatsApp. And now it's going to be anyway. So this appears to be a new iteration that is coming that is going to include something with agents that will potentially answer messages on your behalf is my understanding.
So you do a clicky click. It's four tabs along the top. You've got messages, insight, settings, and promote.
So messages at the moment, there's nothing in there. So it needs your attention. And then a nought because no one is able to message me via this at the moment because it's not live.
And then there's another thing under underneath that says handled by your AI agent.
[Darren Shaw]
That's interesting. So this is like, does it have information of your business? Someone messages your Google business profile.
Hey, what are you open on Saturday? You don't need to answer that. The AI just looks at your hours and says, yes, we're open.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah. So there's nothing in the insights tab. And then you get to settings and it gives you your welcome message.
And you might remember that you used to be able to set that before. You used to have a welcome message that would manage expectations, particularly regarding timeframe of response. That's how I used to use it.
Conversation starters, help customers to get started with up to three conversation starters.
[Darren Shaw]
They used to have that, I think.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, logo. And then there's a toggle which says customer handoff, which says get notified when your agent needs you to join the conversation. Turn this off to stop receiving notifications during busy periods.
Hopefully your agent can be there answering questions on your behalf. And then there's another little bit that says customer view, scan the QR code with your phone and chat with your agent as a customer to test responses and review your branding. So that's a broken QR code at the moment.
And the link also on the mobile is broken. The link also to the help pages is broken. So this, is it weird where they just push stuff live without like- It is so weird.
[Darren Shaw]
I also feel like it may have been a mistake, like they accidentally push this live. But I'm going to highlight another very interesting thing in the screenshot. It says, to update your settings, please email rbmpilot-external at google.com.
So RBM, what does that stand for?
[Claire Carlile]
What is RBM?
[Darren Shaw]
Everybody send an email to rbmpilot-external at google.com and say, tell me more. What is this? This is big news, huge news.
[Claire Carlile]
Yes, exciting. Be fun to play with this, I think.
[Darren Shaw]
So insights pulled from chat, basically. Very fascinating. So it'll be, as your chat grows, your history grows, you're going to get all kinds of interesting insights in here.
And then I do find this promote thing very interesting too. Launch ads in a few clicks so customers can message you directly from Google search results. So wait, you're going to do an ad that's connected to your Google Business Profile messaging feature.
That's fascinating. It just kind of tells us about the direction that Google is going. Basically AI and everything.
[Claire Carlile]
Ads in everything.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, and ads in everything for sure. We already knew that.
[Claire Carlile]
What a time to be alive.
[Darren Shaw]
What a time, yeah. So I think we did it. We did a whole podcast.
Thanks everybody for listening. Please go and try out the Whitespark Local Ranking Grids. And also leave us a review on all the places where you get your podcasts.
Oh, and we're going to be pushing video podcasts to Apple now. We got all connected with that. So our video, I think this episode might actually be published in video.
So if you like to watch us, not just listen to us, then make sure you check that out. Oh, and a little bit of news. I won't be here for the next three episodes.
Claire is going to bring in some very special guests and you will continue to get to listen to the Whitespark Local Update. But sans me, because je going to France.
[Claire Carlile]
I'm going to go on a little holiday.
[Darren Shaw]
And so we'll see y'all in like three weeks. And thanks for listening. Bye.