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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 (00:00.238)
Hello again and welcome to the White Spark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
And with me, Claire Carlisle. Today we're going to talk about what's been happening in our local search for the past week, as we will endeavor to do every single week. And so we've got all the latest news and happening for you. Claire, tell us what is the latest thing you want to talk about?
I'm going to start with a piece in Search Engine Land by our friend, lovely Elizabeth Ruhl. And this piece is all about Google verification if you have a service area business. So it's for pure service area business. It's not thinking about hybrids. So this is really for you if you are a proper full on service area.
business where you just serve your customers, either products or services, wherever they are. And this is a brilliant piece for a number of different reasons. One is she's got loads of experience in this area because she is product expert. So she is solving problems all over the forum all the time. And it does take not necessarily a certain mindset to solve these problems, but you do need to get all of your ducks in a row in terms of
knowing what you need, having that stuff ready and with you before you do your video because a lot of verification is video. So she gives you a full guide to all of those things. So this is going to be brilliant for anyone, whether or not they're verifying for the first time, whether they are re-verifying or whether they're dealing with a suspension. So she's very specific with regard to the guidelines and what people need. And it's a good focus here in this piece.
Claire (01:47.936)
on the website and we're going to come to some other things about the website in a moment, but making sure that before you do it, make sure that your website does actually have a page that reflects what your service areas are and that they match what we're saying in your Google business profile. So for me, just a stellar piece to bookmark, especially if you work with a service area businesses or you are a service area business, because this is going to save you a lot of time when you
undoubtedly have problems because there are so many, you know, it is harder to keep those verified if you're a bit sketchy, I would say.
just want to clarify something. Did you say that it's important to make sure that the service areas that you've set on your Google Business profile are a match with what you've put on your website? Like you should put it on your website, say we serve these areas and that should be on your website because that's the thing that they look at in the verification process?
Even if it wasn't a thing in the verification process and we don't have a tick list, wouldn't that make sense?
It makes perfect sense, but it's actually something I've never really thought of before or even heard as a tip, but of course it makes great sense,
Claire (02:56.056)
So yeah, it was like, what would people expect to see? What would your potential customers expect to see to make sure that everything looks joined up? And then, you know, just take it as read that that is quite likely going to be something which is on the list that whoever is checking, because often it is like a manual check from Google, spelled with a suspension, to my knowledge, in my experience. So yeah.
gonna be consistent, makes sense. All right, that looks great. All right, I got a piece to talk about. Big thanks to Miriam Ellis. She wrote an awesome piece on our blog about the review sites that Bing is referencing. if we, it's a bit of a mental leap that I personally made and then someone called me out on it and I was like, it wasn't Miriam's fault, it was my idea. So the idea of this post was like, hey, if you wanna rank in chat GPT,
then you should be getting reviews on a diverse set of site because ChadGBT uses Bing. And so as a result, what sites does Bing reference for reviews? Get more reviews on those, you've improved your sort of reputation on the sites that Bing slash ChadGBT cares about. That's the idea. It still is really good.
gives you really good direction on which sites you might wanna diversify your review requests on. A lot of businesses make the mistake of all they do is just focus on Google reviews, Google reviews, Google reviews. But I think there's great value in diversifying reviews. And so if you look at Bing, Bing will tell you where they're pulling your reviews from and that's cool. So that's the whole point of the post and the main.
One of course is Facebook. So we really see Facebook coming in. Yelp comes in a lot too, but you can't ask for reviews on Yelp, which is annoying. Yellow Pages is interesting. I just talked about Yellow Pages on my socials being like, it's a slept on citation source. But anyways, I thought Miriam did a great job of putting this data together. And it is interesting to look at if you are looking at where you should diversify your reviews. And that is the end of my, that's all I wanna say about that piece.
Claire (05:14.158)
Don't undersell it though, because it's got the list of like, these are actual sites that are, whether we call them, you know, they're citations in the, what we used to use in the traditional sense of citations, but they're also citations in LLMs in that they are where they're pulling that information from. you know, it's geography specific, it's niche specific, it's so many, you know, it's really important to make sure that you haven't.
We said it for ages, don't put all of your eggs in the Google basket. And we've actually had our world sort of semi rocked or a little bit rocked. It's like, people are actually starting their customer journeys somewhere other than Google.
It's a thing. Yeah, it's happening. you're once you're the the elderly population starts talking about chai gbt, you know, it's for real. Yeah. What do you mean? Like, I'm not like my mom. What is your next article to talk about?
You want that? Like me? Yeah.
Claire (06:10.37)
Well, well, well.
So this was a couple of months ago, but it's very timely because Dana DiTimaso did, she's, you know, the whole team is so good at repurposing their content. So they're bringing up again, a webinar that she did with Will Reynolds, which I watched a few months ago and I thought was brilliant. So Dana was talking about it on LinkedIn a couple of days ago saying, you know, this is definitely worth a rewatch because
you know, hopefully we're all working on reframing our perspective about our customers, customer journeys, our ideas around measurement, how we measure, how attribution is, cannot always be known. And I love all that stuff. And I watched, I watched, actually watched a webinar again today and made even more notes on it. So yeah, definitely have a look at the post because
It's summarized in there. Watch the webinar because there are total top tips of, know, this is what we can measure. This is probably what we can't measure. This is how to potentially be reframing how we think about how our customers search and how they find us. And I just think that both of them are super duper clever and we could learn a lot from them. Sometimes not the things that we thought we were going to learn. But I love that.
I agree these two are tops like will blew me away at Brighton San Diego with his keynote just talking about like the you know this this move from search optimization to answer optimization because people are seeking that answer all over the place and the friction he talked really a lot about friction there's a lot of friction on Google you run a search and you got to dig through results whereas like the AI is solving that right and so you know chat GBT did it
Darren (08:08.674)
first, kind of, and then Google's playing catch up, but Google's going there too. And so, you know, it's just going to be answer optimization, which is really cool. And of course, Dana thinks about how do we track all of this? And she's one of the best and the brightest for thinking about that big fan of both of them. You know, what's also interesting about this, and I've been thinking about this is that this is posted on LinkedIn pulse, LinkedIn. I keep thinking like, that's a strategy that I.
probably should be doing at White Spark when we publish content, we should probably be putting things on this LinkedIn poll. So I gotta ask Dana about that. like, Dana, tell me about your LinkedIn poll.
Yeah, you should ask her about that. But again, you can see it's repurposing the webinar was written. The words from the webinar are on the website. And then again, this is like a reworking of that. And then it sends people back to the website. I'm just loving it because what have I done? I've consumed the same content essentially four times because I'm really sad.
just keep over and over and over. All right, the next piece that I want to talk about was Celeste Gonzales. She's great. She did an excellent podcast episode on the Uberall marketing beat. And I really liked this because it was it was how to boost visibility and AI search through social. I thought that was very interesting angle. I'm sick of hearing about
query fan out and chunking and how you gotta do schema. And so this was a different angle of specifically making sure that you're feeding the social media platforms with real fine details about your business. And so she talked about an example of like, you offer sugar-free sweeteners in your cafe, but like people don't think to like mention that, but they could talk about that in their social posts that gets picked up by the search.
Darren (09:58.968)
traditional search and AI search. just kind of really thinking about those details because when people are searching on a platform like TikTok, they might search something like, I'm looking for a cafe nearby this area in this neighborhood that has seating for remote working and they have sugar-free sweeteners. It's like, are getting so specific with their searches now. They're not just be like cafe near me.
They're getting very specific. And so by giving that information, you're allowing yourself to be surfaced for those kinds of things. So I thought it was a really smart take on it. It's a great episode. Highly recommend you have a listen to that.
Love it. All right. My last one is, so last two days has been the two days of local SEO for good. So Bright Local, think it's been, I don't know if it's the third year, I think it might be the third year. So big local SEO conference, different parts of SEO, different parts of marketing. And it was Jolly Good and I've watched quite a few of them and I checked.
and even though the recordings aren't going to be made available, if you sign up on the landing page, the email you get will link you to the unlisted YouTube videos. It's worth remembering, apart from I'm going to say to you what was brilliant, but also it all raises money for the charities, for the speakers of choice. So don't forget, you're not buying a ticket, but do make sure that you give some money, which I'm sure you'll be prompted to just because brilliant charities that are obviously meaningful to all the speakers.
So two days, lots of speakers. I've watched and listened to quite a few of them. As always, I'll just be a Will Reynolds fan woman. So again, keynote first day, just definitely watch that. Keynote today or yesterday, whenever it was, Andy Jarvis, who I really like. again, Andy Jarvis is not an SEO.
Claire (12:08.342)
Anti-Javis is a marketer and we're, if ever going back to, you know, what is SEO, what's it called, is it answering, you know, why are you even thinking about that if you haven't been out and spoken to your potential customers to understand what they're looking for, what problem they're looking to solve, where they're looking for the solutions. So when, you know, as much as optimizing for answer engines or whatever it is and query fan out and chunking, I mean, it's all
fascinating, but without actually knowing who you're trying to market to, what they need and how you're going to meet their needs better than competitors. So I love that. And I love the way that Andy speaks because it reminds me of all of those things, but brilliant speakers, Melissa Popp, look at all of them. Andrew Shotlam was talking about Reddit. So if you're, you know, I need to diversify my strategy because I understand that people are starting their journeys and all of these different places. Like you're saying WhatsApp groups.
social media, generative engines, there's all these different places someone could be starting their journey or having part of their journey. anyway, go and look at that. I won't talk at length about all of the talks, but they were very, very good and obviously raising money for jolly good things. So that would be my third and final link.
Alright, third and final. Alright, let me get into my third and final. Google updated their guidelines. They talked about specifically around links, which I thought was interesting. So there's a great article on SEO roundtable. I suspect Barry Shorst wrote it up.
But just three key things with the links on your Google Business Profile. One, they need to go to dedicated landing pages. So if you are a multi-location business, you should be sending your link on your Google Business Profile to the location page. They're specifically asking for that rather than a generic general page. They don't want you to send them to a service page or whatever. So they're being very clear about that in their documentation now.
Darren (14:17.294)
Links gotta go where they say they're gonna go. So this is for like, if you have like a booking link, it needs to go to the booking page. If you have a message us link or contact us, you should go to your contact page. So they're saying specific about that and the links have to be crawlable. So we already knew this, links should always be crawlable, but they've just gotten very explicit about it in their documentation. And this is a gotcha that a lot of people got messed up with. Like if they couldn't verify their profile.
They were getting all kinds of problems because they were blocking Google and robots.txt or something like that And sometimes they don't know they like people will check the robots.txt but within WordPress like the the non crawlable is set as like a meta tag that no index no No crawl. I don't remember right now, but basically that and so basically this was an update Google's getting very explicit in their documentation and so yeah, you should know about that
Yeah. I'm interested to know one, yes, please. Thank you very much. That's great. That's what I would like to see. All of these like multi-location businesses with like 200 locations that all link into their homepage. Makes me want to smash my head against the wall. And I would love it if, you know, Google is saying this is a guideline. This is what you need to do. I would really like it if they, if they really mean it.
I know. Yeah. Big game for some of this stuff,
And think of the people that say, you know, don't need a business website, you don't need a website, or you can just link to your Facebook page. There are so many Google business profiles that do link to a sub-media. So I'm interested to know how heavily, you know, how this will affect existing Google business profiles that aren't following these guidelines.
Darren (16:09.536)
Yep, me too. I think they will probably say some stuff but not enforce it as they typically do. So we'll see. I got a few real quick ones. Someone, Shelby Blackley shared on LinkedIn a really crazy scroll, like screen share of her trying, she searched IKEA, but she could not find IKEA's website and the results. It's just like this whole zero click search. Unbelievable how Google.
has done this, so I thought that was kind of crazy. Another quick one is from Amsiv. Does LLM traffic convert better than organic new data back study? Everyone says this, they're like, oh yeah, well, chat GBT, if you get any of these from chat GBT, they're way higher likely to convert. According to this research, he studied 50 websites, looked at all the traffic and said, no, it's not true. So I thought that was good to know. He said, you know, based on his
data-backed research, you didn't see a significant difference between conversions from traditional search versus AI. I thought that was very useful to bust that myth. You disagree. Why do you disagree?
I disagree!
Because that's the findings from someone's small sample of research.
Darren (17:24.523)
I did think that, it's only 50 sites, but 50 sites for me is quite a bit. That's actually a decent amount of sites.
We're all involved with our own, like customers and clients. And unless we look at our own use case scenarios, I don't think that we can.
This is kind of the first person to say it, but honestly people float ideas and then they just reshare those ideas. I want to see more data and that's what this is and so I'm glad that this is out there. and my final thing is that there is a new category on Google Business Profiles for Insurance Agent and I can't believe that category didn't exist before, but it does now and this is always an opportunity when Google launches a new category.
Yeah. Okay.
Darren (18:08.64)
All your competition has no idea. And so you just throw that on your profile and you get the quick wins because you're one of the very few people that has that category. So insurance agent is a good one. Every once in a while, these good new ones come up. So put that on your profile if you are an insurance agent.
Thank you Darren for sharing your six links when I was only allowed three. That was
There was three links and three just quick mentions. know, we're setting the standard here today. Everyone gets three plus three.
So let's finish then. I'm going to say a big thank you from me, Darren Shaw.
And a big thank you from me, Claire Carlisle.
Claire (18:47.442)
okay. Well, it was lovely to spend time with you, Claire. And we want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Really enjoying making a podcast here for it every week. Lovely, lovely, lovely. Everyone, thank you for listening. Thank you for watching. Please subscribe, like, comment, share it with a friend, rate us, review us, do all those things, because we would super duper appreciate it. And we will see you very soon.
Bye everybody.