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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.
[Darren Shaw]
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update podcast with me, Darren Shaw.
[Claire Carlile]
And with me, Claire Carlile. And may I just say to us, happy podcastiversary because it is one year.
[Darren Shaw]
One year. We've been making this podcast for a year. As you know, I care a lot about anniversaries, so I'm very excited about this.
We've done this for a whole year and wow, good job to us.
[Claire Carlile]
I think it's important. All of those linky links shared and how nice to still be enjoying making a podcast at least as much as you did when you started. So anyway, even if you don't care, I do.
So well done us and that's it. We'll just move on.
[Darren Shaw]
That's a good point that it has been a one year of delight. It's been very fun recording with you. It's been great sharing.
It's been nice to see the growth of the podcast and shout out to all our listeners and watchers and thanks for following along. It's been great.
[Claire Carlile]
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Okay. So my first one is something that was forwarded to me by a WordPress developer earlier today, which is a vulnerability. If you run a WordPress site, you are quite likely using gravity forms.
[Darren Shaw]
It's a big one.
[Claire Carlile]
It was a naughty, naughty vulnerability where people could do naughty things. I didn't read beyond that apart from I don't want to get hacked and I don't want anyone doing naughty, naughty things. So you need to update your gravity form.
So if you haven't done that, then go and do it now. So no naughty things happen on your website unless you want them to, but don't.
[Darren Shaw]
I feel like we're in danger. I think like with the latest models of AI, everything's going to get hacked and it's like, we're screwed.
[Claire Carlile]
We are, but we'll carry on because we love podcasting and our podcast is going to get hacked.
[Darren Shaw]
Two other people are going to show up in here. They'll probably be wearing like masks and be like, we've taken over the podcast.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, I look forward to that day. Anyway, go and update it.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, go and update it. Okay. I'm going to tell you about Sochi.
They have published their third annual consumer survey called the Local Discovery Index. I think it used to be called the Consumer Behavior Index. And now this is the third year that they've done it.
And they survey a thousand people. They're like, hey, you randos, what do you think about this? And so they ask a bunch of questions.
And the big thing that came out of this year's is what they're calling the verification loop. It's very interesting because it represents a shift in consumer behavior. The way people used to maybe find a new roofing company, they're like, oh, we need to fix our roof, whatever.
They would go to Google roofing company, get the results, and then they would look at the local pack and then they would call somebody. That was a pretty steady path for many, many years. The path now is all over the freaking place.
They start on AI and then they look at the social media and then they look at the reviews on Google and they're like, well, what does Trustpilot say? And then they go, anyone on Yelp talking about this? Has anyone made a TikTok video about this business?
And so they're like verifying. The term the verification loop makes a lot of sense. And I think that is the way people are discovering businesses today.
And so it actually means a pretty significant shift for you in your approach. If all you cared about before was my local pack and my Google Maps, then well, no wonder your leads are slowing down because you got to be everywhere. You got to do all the things.
And so pretty interesting. The other thing that was noteworthy to me is that Yelp keeps getting mentioned. I guess some people look at Yelp and trust Yelp.
Surprising. Not me, but they like it. One of the things that they also highlight is that people just don't trust an AI answer.
And I actually think this is what's maybe the spark that caused the verification loop. It's like, I have asked AI, hey, who do you recommend for a roofing company in my city? And then AI will give you the results and you're like, you probably suck AI.
I don't trust your results. People don't trust AI because it's often some weird stuff. You hallucinate.
That's not even a real company. And so I think that AI is weird. And so people need to verify it and then they're going all down the rabbit hole.
This is interesting. AI usage for local business discovery has grown. So this is one of the questions like, hey, do you use AI for local business discovery?
So the first edition, 9% of people said, yep, I do. In the second edition, 19% of people said, yep, I do. And in the third, 52% of people said, yep, I do.
So that's a lot of yep, I do's. A lot of people, that's a new type of person, a yep, I do person. Millennials use AI for local search more than Gen Z.
Gen Z are like, hey, I don't like it. I'm going to use TikTok. And so I think the gap isn't huge.
63% of millennials use it. And 49% of Gen Zs. Gen X, that's us.
That's Claire and I. 48%. Less than the Gen Zs.
Interesting. And boomers, those guys, out of touch. They are 11%.
Those boomers, you know what they're doing? They're going straight to Facebook. They're asking people on Facebook.
Okay, anyways, Gemini. Sorry to any boomers that are listening. But I know my mom is a boomer and she's on the Facebook.
Gemini is closing the gap. I find this interesting. So what are they using?
Chad GBD still leading the pack as the most used AI assistant at 57%. But Gemini, 51%, right behind. I was actually surprised about this.
Copilot is 19%. Microsoft Copilot, 19%. And Cloud is 15%.
Apple's Siri. What? Anybody uses that?
It's useless. But anyways, the fact that Cloud was under Copilot surprised me. And I think that's my bias being in the marketing tech industry.
Like we love Cloud, but maybe the general public doesn't. And then I think one more takeaway, and then I'm going to shut up about this survey, is your Facebook page. Your Facebook, more consumers use, this is a quote, more consumers use Facebook to find local businesses than any other platform.
73%. With YouTube, close behind at 69%. Then Instagram, 67.
And TikTok, 50%. But this is because the world has been trained on these Facebook business pages. And so I think your takeaway here is don't forget about your Facebook business page.
Go and update it. Maybe ask a few people to leave a review and send them to that Facebook page. There is value in that Facebook page.
People are still seeking it especially those boomers. So make sure you are managing your Facebook page. And anyways, this survey is very packed with lots of takeaways and insights and you should check it out.
Good thing I only have two links. So I went pretty long on that one.
[Claire Carlile]
Definitely worth a read. So my link is from Elaida. So it's Crawling Monday.
So Elaida does a YouTube every month. I think, I don't know if it's a newsletter as well. Anyway, she has done a really good playlist, which is all about brand authority.
And so I ended up watching this most recent one, which is called How to Grow Your Brand Authority for AI Search. And in it, she interviews Emma Jane Stogdon, who is content manager at Wise in the UK, who I've met, who is wonderful, very clever, lots of thoughts on content. So it was great to hear her.
Dave Perris, who has been in the industry a million years in the digital PR space, and obviously Mark William Cook. So anyway, what they talk about is the general importance of brand and how some of the throwaway tactics for gaining short-term visibility in the LLMs like listicles and Reddit, et cetera, et cetera, can actually be quite damaging for your brand. If you don't care about your brand and you've got some throwaway business, then fine, whatever.
But if you're thinking about longevity and about trust for your brand, then you don't really want to do those things. I watched all of it, but I liked the bit at the end where Mark is talking about their own process within his agency for when they start working with clients on AI visibility. And so he gave a little checklist of the things, how they interview their clients, what do you think about yourself?
So you'll hear from the client about who you are, what you do, what are your USPs, how do you function differently to your competitors, all of the things which should be the source of truth, basically. And then Mark is talking about how they use their internal tooling or whatever, but he also gives the example of what the models are inferring about you. So that is such a great way to kick off any project if you're working with a client along those terms.
It's like, don't just go out and see what people are saying about them. First of all, find out what the client thinks people should be saying, because then you're probably going to find that, hang on a minute, that's lovely, but I've actually looked at your website and I can't really see. Why aren't you not talking about yourself in those terms?
Why aren't you illustrating those points? Why aren't you being consistent with those points? And then you go to the LLMs and you're like, yes, so none of that is reflected back in any of the understanding about your entity.
So I like that because I like the way that you set it out as a sort of kickoff activity for these types of, if you were doing that type of an engagement for a client or for your own organization, then I think that's a nice way to approach it.
[Darren Shaw]
That sounds brilliant. That's a good watch. I'm going to definitely check that one out.
I got another link. It is Steve Toth on LinkedIn. Here's the thing.
E-E-A-T. How do you do it? What do you do?
People talk about, I know what to do. Just put a bio on your webpage and then link that to a bio page and you have added E-E-A-T. I'm an expert and I have been doing this for 20 years and here are my credentials.
Is that E-E-A-T? No, it's not. Steve talks about how to actually do it and he gives a practical guide because I'm like, people are mystified.
How do I eat my article? I want to eat it. And so here's how he says you do it.
He says that it's about information gain and it's the hardest thing for your competitors to copy. So here's your checklist. Source studies.
Nobody else is citing. I'm not going to give you how to do each step because he does give you the full breakdown. I'm just going to give you the top level and then you got to read the post.
Show firsthand experience. Prove author expertise. So you got to prove it.
How? Well, he tells you in the post. You got to build authority off page and maximize trust.
So yeah, anyway, Steve Toth, he's got good ideas. He's a smart guy. He's got a good conference coming up in Toronto that if you're on the East Coast, you might want to check it out.
SEOIRL. He invited me and I would have gone for sure, but I can't this October, but hopefully next year.
[Claire Carlile]
We like actionable things. I'm going to tell you about something I saw on the LinkedIn, which is Andy Crestedina, obviously, but it's not Andy Crestedina, ding, ding, ding, ding, because it is another chap. It is Bill Widmer.
So it's Bill Widmer's thoughts and he's masquerading as Andy Crestedina because Andy's off doing some massive bit of research, whatever the bit of content is that he does every year, he's off fiddling around with that. So I like this. It is called We Tracked 13,184, I love that, AI citations across four LLMs and here's what we learned.
So essentially, what he was talking about was the difference between mentions and citations. He talks about the different models. He talks about the relevance of those two things.
He does some exciting graphs and everybody loves a graph. So he has four takeaways. So he's saying, yes, all of the models work differently, but you do not need four different strategies.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay, good.
[Claire Carlile]
You need one comprehensive one. The whole piece is about this divergence of data and the fact that it's different across all of these different, it's obviously across a wide dataset. You're not just measuring this thing one time because it changes all the time.
Okay. So the points that he makes from this are, so he's not giving you a per engine playbook. He's just making general statements that should serve you well across all of these different models.
I love this. I think the answer is creating a single comprehensive marketing strategy. My belief is that AEO, GEO is not just SEO, it's plain old good marketing.
Hooray.
[Darren Shaw]
Agreed.
[Claire Carlile]
This is his four step playbook. So rather than going, oh, I don't know where to get my AI prompts from. Let me just make them up.
What is the best software for someone who wears a hat and likes cycling a bicycle? Don't use SEO tools and other nonsense to get your prompts. Why aren't you actually mining the real data that exists within your organization?
Like questions from sales calls and support conversations. So that's the first one is make a list of real life questions. Don't rely on a third party tools to help you come up with your prompts.
And then he says, find your categories gatekeepers in the citation data. So rather than just going from one example of, oh, we looked at these prompts and it's always this citation, it's this citation that comes back. It changes every time.
So what you need to do is take a corpus of data and then take the ones that keep coming up again and again and again, rather than basing it on like three lots of prompt data that you have. Judge trends on three plus weeks of data. So you've got this massive churn between the weeks.
So make sure that you have a good corpus of data before you start saying, I need to get this citation or I need to appear here. And then he says, keep doing the fundamentals. The engines disagree on URLs, but they all reward the same underlying things.
Real expertise, consistent entity information across the web and third party validation. There you go. That's why one strategy can serve for disagreeing machines.
[Darren Shaw]
There's a couple of things in this article that I'm like, what do we do? There is very little agreement across the different models. And then he says, oh, you only need one strategy.
But then I'm like, as an SEO, veteran SEO, I'm like, but what if I want to be number one on all the surfaces, right? So it's tough.
[Claire Carlile]
There is no number one, Darren. There is no number one.
[Darren Shaw]
The models don't agree with Google either. This is in contradiction to what Cyrus has discovered in his research. Cyrus says, oh, if you're ranking on like page one, actually it was maybe Ben Wills.
Ben Wills did some like AI, talked about on podcasts before, it's like an AI ranking factors. And he said that if you rank in Google, you're going to show up in AI search. And this is saying the opposite, saying ranking on page one is neither necessary nor sufficient for getting cited by AI.
[Claire Carlile]
This is going to change all of the time as the models change, the way that people interact with the models change. But if we don't worry about that bit and we come back to the good marketing and the consistent messaging. Just market, just do your marketing.
[Darren Shaw]
Anyways. Yeah. Did we do it?
Is that a whole podcast? Yeah. Thanks, everybody.
Nice to chat with you, Claire. And happy podcast-versary to us and to all of our listeners. And we'll see you next time.
Bye.
[Claire Carlile]
See you soon. Thank you. Bye.