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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 “must-read” and “must-watch” links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
Claire (00:00.17)
Well hello, guten tag and welcome to the Whitespark local update with me Claire Carlile
And me, Darren Shaw, and today, like every day, well, not every day, every week, we're going to talk about the latest in local search, things that have happened that you need to know if you care about local search. Claire, what is on your list to talk about today? You must have something exciting. You must have something very cool to talk about.
Which you should.
Claire (00:28.332)
Always. Well, my list is brimming with exciting things to talk about. So let me tell you first of all, about one thing, just one thing. And that is on search engine round table. It's talking about a pair of shorts. Is that what you just said?
Yeah, Barry shorts.
I thought you just said a pair of...
You
Darren (01:07.15)
I have pair of shorts.
Darren (01:20.558)
No, Barry, Barry Schwartz. Barry Schwartz. That's right. He's always covering the latest in the world of court.
I love him. And it is new. it is actually Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Roundtable, talking about naughty, naughty, naughty scams. So in Google Business Profile, somebody sending you a message to say that you will continue to get these fake one-star reviews unless you pay some money.
or do something. So we're talking about extortion scams. So this is being flagged by lots of different people, but I am reading up on it now on the Search Engine Roundtable website. And they very helpfully link through to a new form on the Google Business Profile Community Forum Hub place. So.
There is a page that explains what you need to do, what evidence you're going to need to provide. So if you are a business that has been very sadly and horribly affected by this, and I'm seeing quite a few in the forum, you go ahead, read this page, make sure you've got all of the evidence, and then you go to the Merchant Extortion Report form. Fill it in, and then, you know, these are all going to be, I imagine, at this point, manually reviewed by someone on the team.
So I hope that's not happening to you, but if it is, then support is there in the form that there is this new form. So go ahead and fill that in and I hope it gets sorted.
Darren (02:58.99)
Yeah, this is such an annoying thing. It's like they're putting these like you'll get a flood of these one star reviews and then they'll be like, yeah, contact us if you want to remove these. I guess they're like, people are paying. You're like, oh, man. OK, I guess I've got to pay the ransom. But good for Google for making this form one more form. Wow. I have a list, actually, of all the GDP forms, and there are a lot.
And so I got to add this one to my list.
Mm-hmm. And publish it somewhere Darren, surely?
That is the eventual plan for this. I've had this list. I've been sitting on it for a long time. And I'm going to publish a piece about here are all the different forms. It has everything. There's so many cool forms. People don't even know that these exist. So I will publish this in the, well, first I'm going to publish the local social ranking factors and then this. And then my review research, review questions research, which is coming soon. And then I'll publish this. So it's coming.
Good, crack on. Darren, tell me about your linky link.
Darren (04:04.11)
Okay, I got a great link, you think? Also from a pair of shorts, he covered an awesome topic. Jason Hennessy shared this on Facebook and he said, hey, look at this screenshot. This screenshot really pissed me off because it's a local pack and the only business that has a call button, a big huge all the way across the local pack call button is the ad and then
all the other businesses on the list do not have a call button. And so you have to click it to then get over to the call button. And it's just kind of rude. That's rude, Google. So I shared this on LinkedIn and then Barry shared it in his post and he wrote it up. And now everybody is mad. Everybody in the world is mad at Google for doing this. So hopefully they, it's a bug.
It's possible that it's a bug. I hope it's a bug because it just seems wrong. It seems like antitrust problematically wrong. So I hope that they fix that. Anyways, that was the bug. And well, that was the thing. And we'll see if it sticks around. We'll see. I hope not.
Yeah, so make sure you're looking, you're monitoring that across, you know, devices and across platforms to see if that call button is showing up.
Shout out to Mobile Moxie
Claire (05:34.986)
Indeed, So yeah, make sure that you are looking. So my linky linky link is from Linky Din, which is Dana DiTomaso saying, it's a Friday before a long weekend. Something has broken in GA4 and everyone's like, So interesting that some people seeing a spike in organic traffic.
which is not matched with an organic spike in Search Console. So Dana talks about why that is happening and how to do a sort of workaround filter in GA4 in case you need to just smash that out for your reporting and your dashboards and stuff. So anyway, we'll link to that, have a look at it. It might not be affecting you. I had a look at a couple of clients and we have got a bit of a brrr. So if you need...
So if you need to get rid of that then read this piece from the lovely Dana and it will be fixed. Also she gives a big thank you to a pair of shorts in that as well.
pair of shorts is all over our update today.
Barry Schwartz, we love you. It's the Barry Schwartz fan club here today.
Darren (06:57.646)
We're going to have to start making these t-shirts and selling them. We need a merch shop for the podcast.
Do it.
So Mary Melas has published an awesome guide on the White Spark blog. Mary Melas, she is a great writer and she wrote an awesome post which is just so phenomenal. It answers the questions of can I have a Google business profile? I have a hand lotion kiosk in the mall. All I sell is hand lotions and can I have a Google business profile? I don't even have an address. I'm just a kiosk in the mall.
The answers in this post in this big, huge guide to GBP eligibility. Every type of weird business is covered. Multi-location, your multi-location service area business. What are the rules? What are the details? Nice big table resource that you can reference for knowing whether or not you are eligible for a Google business profile and the weird nuances of each of those different types because there are so many weird different types of businesses. And so Miriam has written the what I would call
the ultimate guide and you should check it out. It's very helpful and it's an excellent resource that should be bookmarked. And thanks again, Miriam, for helping the local search community with your excellent content.
Claire (08:19.182)
Fantastic. I love that piece. So really useful to understand what sort of model that you're operating in or if you're taking on a new client to understand where they should be set in terms of their model, as well as discussing some edge cases. That's always quite interesting. Can I actually have the Google Business Profile? Maybe you can.
Yeah, yeah, some good edge keys. How about a virtual kitchen? You're one of those ghost kitchens. How about them?
What about if it's just a purely pretend one that you just go into and you're like, here's my bread bowl, you know, would that qualify?
Exactly. What if you were just renting out your shed? Maybe you can have a Google business profile for your shed. People can store their tools. I don't know. All the answers are in this post.
I have one more. I've got two written down here, but I'm to have to choose. I'm going to pick. So I am going to talk about a piece of research from Yext, which is very long. And I like the way that they have organized this. So it looks very much like a piece of academic research. they have their introductions, key findings.
Claire (09:41.034)
the methodology, the limitations and future research and then a bit of a conclusion. It's nice to have a, set that like that within the context of what it was about. So what they did was they looked at 6.8 million source citations from 1.6 million responses generated by the three major AI models.
So it's highlighting the importance of the user's intent, location and memory conditions as key frameworks for understanding AI search visibility. Like any self-respecting marketer, obviously then I went and had a little look at what near media said about it because it's always nice because they will read the thing. Well, it's like AI, but in like Mike's brain or whoever's been doing this. Yeah, Greg, Mike.
Why am I forgetting David Mim? How could I forget David Mim? Anyway, our take. So this is a very good takeaway. Reddit is far less common as a citation source at the local level because what they're pointing out as well is that when you use like a third party tool to monitor these things, sometimes you only look at your brand. So it doesn't look at the context of location. It doesn't look at the context of searcher intent.
And because there were so many different types of industries and query types and three different platforms on this, was it three? Anyway, it's a much wider research. Google Business Profile is a clear visibility strategy for Chat GBT because of the latter's reliance on Google content. And we don't need to keep saying, it's really important to have Bing actually for Chat GBT, or it's really, you know, let's just get it right everywhere because they will flip-flop between their sources.
So instead, let's not keep focusing on what it's pulling in. Let's just think about the fact that it is going to keep changing. And again, a presence on key vertical directories is critical for both local SEO and AI. Barnacle SEO, per Will Scott is back, baby. So yeah, it's like, did we know this already? Yes. Is it nice to have a big study that puts it what we were thinking?
Claire (11:59.854)
into context and within the context of some actual research. Yeah, I it was interesting.
It's interesting to me that like, you know, as we see the AIs.
grow in prominence that your own website is just such a key source. And I think it's always been that way, obviously, for ranking in Google. But the LLMs really are leaning on your own website. So it's like there's so much opportunity on your website to give it all the data. You've just got to get everything about your business into your web.
Interesting. Darren, number three.
Number three, so Ian Lurie, he wrote a pretty fantastic guide, a how to build a content audit assistant with Screaming Frog and AI. So there are many pieces of this system that he has built. So he's got, you got Screaming Frog, which you then connect to your search console. So it crawls your site.
Darren (13:04.526)
plus gets the traffic data for every single page because of the Search Console connection, then that gets connected via Zapier MCP into the AI. And then you can prompt it and understand a whole bunch of information about your content. And so what it's doing is pages that used to do really well but are starting to fall off in traffic.
That's something that it gets pulled out. And then you can query the AI with all kinds of things, like show me my top opportunities. And it'll return your top 10 content optimization, content refresh opportunities. So this is really good. Good job, Ian. It's pretty powerful. I have yet to test it, but I did carefully read the whole article. It hurt my brain a little bit. But I'm going to invest some time and run this on some clients.
And I also think it's interesting to run on some competitor clients, even though you can't connect to search console, but do the same kind of thing just to see like where are their content opportunities. It might give me some insight about things I might want to do on my own client sites. this was impressive and it's a
pretty good system that can help you really improve your on-site content. Why make new pages when you have all these awesome pages of your website that you're not updating? We need to run this on the White Spark website. The White Star website's full of that kind of stuff. Just like, oh yeah, that post that we wrote in 2021 that was a major banger now is like non-existent. Why don't we give it an update? Because people loved it back then. They might love it again. True.
that. so yeah, Barry Schwartz was not involved in this piece, but I'm sure if you saw it, he'd have something good to
Claire (14:50.786)
Definitely, pair of shorts. Darren, now, is anything special happening in the next couple of weeks or so? Yes.
I'm very excited because next week we will be in person, IRL, we will at Brighton SEO and we're gonna record our next episode in person. So that should be very fun. I'm really looking forward to Brighton SEO, hanging out with you, seeing all the talks about AI mostly and going to the lunches and the dinners and the after parties and just connecting with the UK and European SEO.
So that should be fun.
Yes, yes, I am very, there is much excitement. So we will, we will meet in the real life. We will drink the coffee. We will chat about the SEO and other exciting things. We'll walk up the pier. We'll play on that machine where you put two pence pieces in and it pushes it along and then the money comes out. All those things and more will happen.
Exciting.
Claire (16:02.168)
I have, what have I got coming up? It is the Women in Tech SEO. If you are a member of that group, I am doing an AMA on the slacks. So look out for that. I can't remember the date, but we will put it in the podcast notes. And that will be good. I'm looking forward to connecting with lots of people who might have Google Business Profile questions that I can answer. Are you doing any of the things, Darren?
Yeah, so have the AMA on the Sterling Sky Reddit subreddit. They have their own subreddit slash local search and that's on November 3rd. And apparently I'm just supposed to be there all day long answering any questions people have. So if you have questions, you could ask me that. And then also I'm emceeing a local you event on January 28th. So they're doing their their virtual event. They call it local you global.
You can buy tickets in advance before they publish the agenda for a cheap, cheap price of $99. And I say, yeah, January 28th, I'll be there all day to introducing the speakers and emceeing the event. So that should be exciting.
will be very lovely. So we will put a linky link as well to the tickets for that because I think they're live now.
Yeah, you can buy tickets now for $99.
Claire (17:25.23)
$99. I think that's it for today.
I think that's it. We did it. We covered the latest in local search. So can't wait to see you next week, Claire, in person. Should be very fun. It'll be fun to record our episode. And so stay tuned, everybody. We'll see you then.
Thank you very much. Good.
Oh, and leave us a review. Don't forget. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, our Google Business Profile, and our Yelp. Leave us a Yelp review for the podcast. Thanks very much. Okay, bye everybody.
Do it now. Bye.