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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.
Darren Shaw (00:00.108)
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
Claire Carlile (00:04.405)
And with me Claire Carlile Hello!
Darren Shaw (00:07.256)
Hello, this is the podcast where we're going tell you what happened in local search over the past week-ish. And we also talk a lot about AI. maybe what happened in local search and AI and whatever Claudia Tomina and Dan Petrovich have posted about, will tell you about that.
Claire Carlile (00:25.422)
So you don't need to follow them.
Darren Shaw (00:28.974)
don't need to follow them. You just listen to our podcast and we'll tell you every time they publish anything.
Claire already got to talk about this week.
Claire Carlile (00:38.626)
All right, so let's kick off with Claudia. Not really, sorry, no Claudia links today, but actually nearly a Claudia link, just as a sort of segue. So one thing that did pop up probably via LinkedIn, I can't quite remember, but it is a piece of content, so it is a PDF called the AI Playbook for Restaurants, What to Do Right Now. So I...
Sure. Sure as hell. Can I say hell? Sure as hell. You know, I signed up.
Claire Carlile (01:16.686)
Okay. I, goodness gracious me, immediately gave away my email address and signed up for this. So I have downloaded it. The PDF is in my Google Drive. And so this is a playbook by a guy that I did not know because I don't really follow any restaurant influencers, but he is a solid hospitality type person that also has his own
Anyway, he's actually my twin brother because every photo of him, he also has his mouth open like this. So we're obviously related. But anyway, it is definitely worth the read because it again, breaks it down into, well, you know, how can we actually be using AI and how is it going to affect our customers? So if you're in the hospitality industry, so he talks about three things, you know, this is not a spoiler alert because you need to go away and you need to read it.
So he talks about AI driven local discovery. So how that is affecting the way people search. And then he talks about using AI as a thought partner for you as, you know, marketing your business. And then again, it's like, why am I saying it's the third wheel? Like it's a tricycle, but the third wheel is using AI to basically just become slicker and better within your own internal operations. So it's interesting.
anyway, because it's about actual real use of AI. But it will be particularly interesting if you're Claudia Tamina, or if you work in the hospitality industry.
Darren Shaw (02:50.734)
looks amazing. Yeah, this is phenomenal. my God. you know, one of the great things about doing this podcast is that I discover amazing things I need to read. So yeah, that looks really good. All right, my first link is from the absolutely wonderful and brilliant people over at Near Media. Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal did a whole panel discussion on local services ads.
They brought in Eric Levine, Matt Cassidy, Crystal Horton, and our favorite, Claudia Tamina. See, Claudia gets a shout out. So yeah, she was involved in this panel where they talked about local services ads. And there are some nuggets. There are some gold nuggets in local services ads. actually, the topic was, how should agencies build a business around Google local services ads? How do you do it?
Well, we're doing it at White Whitespark. like, you better get into this ads business because Google really is pushing those ads. So this was a great listen. I think a lot of agencies that listen to our podcast should definitely go and check that out. And if you're not subscribed to the Intermedia podcast, I think I've said this before, but what are you doing? I'm going to highlight a couple of things that I pulled out of this that I thought were like, ding. One, he talked about photos. He said that
Claire Carlile (03:47.234)
You
Darren Shaw (04:11.374)
What you really want to do with your photos is demonstrate the user journey with photos. Eric Levine used to work at Google. He was one of the founding people that built the local services ads system. He worked at Google for years and now he's running his own agency and he's sharing all the secrets. So you want to listen to this guy. And so he says that you want to focus on the order of the photos. And so like, for example, if you're a service area business, your first photo, she showed the truck in the driveway.
Then the second photo, someone at the door with a white polo t-shirt that has the logo. Then under the sink, then some other action shots, fixing your hot water tank. And then shaking hands with the customer at the completion of the job with a clipboard and going through what they did. And very last, and he says maybe not even needed at all, is the logo. And what a lot of people do is they put the logo first. So this is his suggestion for the photos.
He says that a lot of people are wasting time by like we're gonna upload two new photos every week. It's like He doesn't think that that is a thing that Google cares about he wants the photo should represent What a person's journey would be like if they hired your company and you think that's the best thing you should do I also liked his thoughts on the future of search. He was a future of LSAs in particularly He's like imagining a world that we're coming towards where you're like, I need to get my kitchen remodeled
And my chicken, I need to my chicken remodeled. you feel like an augmented reality thing. And then you show show you show that Google your kitchen and then say, Okay, I want to get this remodeled. This is my budget. You know, this is kind of the style I'm looking for. And then it's like this whole interactive journey. And then at the end of that Google says, Okay, I found you these seven practitioners who is so the ads will be very tailored.
Claire Carlile (05:42.574)
You
Darren Shaw (06:07.086)
And so I that's a very interesting thing. Anyways, this is a must listen if you are thinking about getting into local services ads and there you go.
Claire Carlile (06:15.988)
want your chicken remodeled. Mine is so disappointing at the moment, my chicken. I definitely need to work on that. Another thing is a new branded query filter in Google Search Console. That did poppity pop up in my timeline and I have thought
Darren Shaw (06:18.638)
And remodeled.
Darren Shaw (06:39.498)
I'll link it to you.
Claire Carlile (06:41.774)
This probably popped up. So I went through, followed the linkily link and thought to myself, bah, humbug, why would you do this when you can just filter for your own queries anyway? That's just silly. You can use a regex and you can just filter. Why would you even do it? So obviously that post didn't tell me anything about these things, but so I leaned into, into Gemini. Who told me, thanks Gemini.
that they thought, obviously this is Gemini, but it sort of makes sense. So the difference is the Regex filter is going to be pattern matching, which is what Regex is basically. And the filter, the branded query filter is going to be AI driven within that. then it goes on to say, so this is going to be quite a thing if you've decided to call yourself.
best big burgers near me. It comes back to that sort of branding and primary keyword thing. Anyway, so what it was saying is the AI part is going to be leaning into two things probably. Well, lots of different things, but the knowledge graph. So what Google already knows about your entity and what Google can get from your website. So the idea that your Google search console will give access to the whole
domain rather than just a subfolder or a set of pages because that's a thing in Google Search Console. So yeah, that was it really. It was quite interesting to compare the two things. And it's another way to look at, what does Google think that it knows about me in terms of what branded and what non-branded is? If you're finding that you look at the data and you go, well, I want to filter that out and I want to do this and I want to do that, then you probably need to work on
Google's understanding of your entity or just use regex instead. So anyway, definitely worth having a little think about and playing around with that.
Darren Shaw (08:40.449)
I find that actually very interesting because if I think about a regex, I'm just going to put white spark in there, right? But then if I use this, I might see that Google thinks my brand is other things. Google might think my brand is local citation finder, might think our brand is local rank tracker. So that is actually quite fascinating to see what Google thinks my brand is based on the AI.
Claire Carlile (09:02.478)
Go and have a little loop.
Darren Shaw (09:04.28)
I am very interested in all this stuff because it really, for me, I think it does represent where we're headed in the future. So I am a little obsessed with learning what I can about it. And I came across this post, a real interesting case study through Kevin Indig's newsletter. So he talks about this case study. Metahan Yesilyurt has published a, he published a 60 page AI generated website.
60,000 pages, 60,000 pages of all statistics. Whole thing just AI generated, right? So he pushed the button, generated this massive website. And the thing that I found a few things really fascinating about this. Number one, for some reason, and I cannot figure out how, he doesn't say it in the article, Chad GPT's crawler was on the website minutes after hitting publish. Fascinating. How did it know that a bunch of pages just got published?
And then Gemini told me might have been related to CloudFlare, like because it got CloudFlare and the domain was registered and they were maybe polling the website to see if there's anything new on it. And ChadGBT's crawler absolutely hammered the site, accessing all the pages within 12 hours. And by contrast, Googlebot only made 11 requests. Googlebot was like, meh, I don't care about this crap. Has no domain authority, right? Brand new website. But what it says is that
ChatGPT is so hungry for training data. there is actually interesting stuff in this post where it talks about how there are two different crawlers. There is the standard ChatGPT crawler, which is used for grabbing data for training the models. And then there's the other crawler, which happens in the RAG process. So if you run a query on ChatGPT, then that crawler will grab pages and fetch requests. And so this was the RAG or this was the training model.
crawler. And it's also another interesting thing that I didn't really think too much about is that you would never see this traffic in Search Console or Google Analytics. There's no way to see this kind of bot traffic because all of these crawlers, don't execute JavaScript. So they hit your page. You've got to execute JavaScript for to show up in for Google Analytics to be fired. So you have to use log file analysis to see all this stuff, which is another thing of most
Darren Shaw (11:29.038)
SEOs and businesses are not thinking about it. It's like, what's happening? How many requests are actually happening on our website? so a lot of hosts will give you access to the error logs, but usually they only hold them, or to the crawl logs, but they usually hold them for 24 hours because it just gets massive, right? So it's just like this file, but you can set up things that will take your log file and push it over like every day. It'll push it to a server and then that server can give you like a whole analytics platform where you can see your log.
data. And that's interesting because you can learn a lot about how Googlebot and these other bots are accessing your website. So it's a really cool article, some interesting insights, and I liked it so I wanted to share.
Claire Carlile (12:09.582)
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for sharing that.
Claire Carlile (12:17.74)
So this is a thingy thing that Harvard, who is at White Whitespark, who is amazing and works in local SEO services and is also a Google business profile product expert, Silver's working very hard and answering all the questions. And he's very clever and notices a lot of things, which is great because when you're in and out of like loads of Google business profiles every day, you get to see the things. So something that Harvard noticed.
which I thought was very interesting, which I've not read about anywhere because that's typical Google. Let's just push something live into Google business profile, but not tell anyone what it's for. So this strange enough lives in the attribute section. So it says, let customers know more about your business by showing attributes. So it's called place page attributes, which again, I love the naming convention. What is a place page? You know, this is what we, so it says,
primary chat and then there's these different chips. So it's got Facebook Messenger, KakaoTalk, Line, text message and WhatsApp. So now we think to ourselves, what has this actually got to do with messaging if it's an attribute? Is this something that Google is flagging in a business profile? So you can see they actually do other things, not just text and WhatsApp.
Or is this an indicator that they're going to add these additional integrations into their messaging API? I don't know. I didn't even know what KakaoTalk is, but it's the dominant messaging app in South Korea with a 93 % market share, while Line is the primary super app in Japan, Taiwan, and Thailand. Okay, so there we are.
Nobody knows that it even exists there. And if you're not in and out of your attribute section in your Google business profile, you probably wouldn't even know that it had been added. So it might mean nothing or it might mean something, but it's always fun to spot these weird things as they happen.
Darren Shaw (14:20.898)
Yeah, I hope that means that different messaging options will come into our actual chat feature.
Claire Carlile (14:26.156)
Yeah. I hope so because I'm all over cacao talk. can't get enough of it.
Darren Shaw (14:30.99)
My number one. I didn't use it when I was in Korea. So I did. Well, Kakao, they make a number of things like one was for like the transit. One was for I think it was the mapping app like Google Maps doesn't work in Korea. So we had to use Kakao Maps or something like that or never. Maybe it was never. It wasn't the mapping. Anyways, I use some Kakao thing. I was in Korea. I can't remember what it is.
Claire Carlile (14:55.598)
Yeah.
Darren Shaw (14:57.506)
Alright, well, I'm out of links. actually had two from today. So I want to, but I think you have an extra one.
Claire Carlile (15:04.662)
I've always got an extra six million links. So if you subscribe to, I can't remember what it is, Google SMB newsletter from our friend Lisa Landsman, there are five new Google business profile playbooks. I think there's a general one. There's one for food and drink businesses. There's one for service businesses. There's one for tours and attractions, and there's one which is a playbook for hotels.
So they are definitely worth having a look at. And I think we always say this, but when we look at things that are published by Google, we don't necessarily just look at them from the sense of, this is what small businesses and this is what businesses and this is what local businesses need to do. This is like, this is what Google wants us to do. This is what Google thinks works, but actually doesn't. So, yeah, have a look at them, have a read because even when you think.
Well, what am going to learn from this? You will be very surprised. Just like when they did the posts webinar, there is always a little new gay of something that you didn't know. So definitely worth a look at those. And again, you know, thank you for publishing stuff that is useful and will allow local businesses to make the best of their profiles.
Darren Shaw (16:27.31)
Google has really leveled up their content and I guess it's credit to Lisa Landsman for these but they are very, very good and I think that any business would get great value out of them. It's like at the level that I would want to publish a guide to best practices. It's really well done.
Claire Carlile (16:43.598)
We just want to say something about the Women in Tech SEO partnership.
Darren Shaw (16:47.406)
Hey, White Whitespark has now become an official partner with Women in Tech SEO, fantastic organization with most of the industry's most brilliant women are part of this and it's a very vibrant community, very active. People are publishing, speaking, they have their own conference. Claire is a very active member of the group.
Claire Carlile (17:10.465)
just because I love it. And I've been part of the community since the first time I ever spoke at Brighton SEO, was also a first time speaker and that was pre women in tech SEO. So then when women in tech SEO came about, it was like, it's a place that we can do things and learn stuff and it's the best event in the world basically. then combining my worky work, which is what I do.
with this amazing thing is, you know, that's a really bad description of why it's exciting, but it's brilliant and I'm excited. And if you are, you know, if you haven't joined and you have a chance to join, then you should definitely join Women in Tech SEO.
Darren Shaw (17:54.606)
All right, good. Well, that's podcast. We'll see you next time. Make sure you go and leave us a review on Apple.
Claire Carlile (18:01.166)
send us a letter. Okay. All right. No use to say bye. Bye.
Darren Shaw (18:04.078)
You say bye first.
Okay, bye.