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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 Carlile]
Well, hello, hello 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 local search and AI search. We talk a lot about that.
And we're going to do that right now. Claire, what is happening? Do you have anything exciting to talk about today?
[Claire Carlile]
So many things. So my first linky link is a LinkedIn post from Vinay Toshniwal.
[Darren Shaw]
I put this on my list too, but then you stole it.
[Claire Carlile]
I know it was mine first. I decided in my mind, it was mine. You've always got so many links, Darren.
Okay, so it's mine now. Vinay, you are mine. This is my link.
And I'm going to talk about what you just said. So it was on LinkedIn. And I thought it was interesting talking about, and I see this a lot in the Google business profile community with service area businesses who are trying to get access to a service area business, a Google business profile.
So Vinay talks about how the workflow or how businesses do this has changed. And it has been for over a year. But as is often the case, it's a bit difficult to understand what you're supposed to do based on even what Google tells you in the work, in the pages in the community.
So he is talking about how you need to get in touch with support. So when you go to the pages in the support community, it tells you what you need to do if it's a regular bricks and mortar, which is nice and easy. You add it as a business, you request ownership or management or whatever, and that goes through.
You can't do that if it's a service area business. And Vinay is saying, as is the supporting documentation in the community, that you need to contact support. And so I just did that as a little test myself using exactly...
Yeah, I did. So it says that you should say, tell us what you need help with, enter transfer ownership of listing. And then you submit the request.
That is the point where you should get, you normally get a little email box that appears, which means that you get to open a support case with Google. Now, when I do it, all I can get, I don't get that option. I get a post in the community.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, wow.
[Claire Carlile]
Why for me is this skipping the actual layer of support that Google is telling you that you need, but it's going straight to a community post. So I'll do a little bit of research into that because I think it would be really useful to give people a really straightforward way that they can do this thing because at the moment it seems to be a little bit of a mess. So thank you for sharing your thoughts on that, Vinay.
And no fault of yours, but I am none the wiser. Hooray.
[Darren Shaw]
Thanks for nothing, Vinay.
[Claire Carlile]
No, Vinay, you rock. But it's more just like, oh, why can't everything be a little bit easier? But there we are.
[Darren Shaw]
Especially for the poor service area businesses trying to navigate Google Business Profiles. It is tough out there for an SAB. And this is more evidence of how tough it is for an SAB.
It's interesting to me that like, okay, you're like, okay, follow this step one. What are you messaging us about? Okay, post on the forum.
And it's like, oh, well, they can start directing all kinds of things to the forum. It's like, oh, instead of these people we have to pay, let's just direct you to the forum where our army of unpaid volunteers will answer your question.
[Claire Carlile]
And they also don't know the answer. Hooray.
[Darren Shaw]
No, they'll try their very best. Yeah, exactly. All right.
My first link is from someone just near and dear to our hearts on this podcast.
[Claire Carlile]
Who is it?
[Darren Shaw]
It's Claudia Tumina. Yeah, I know. Surprising.
But she wrote an article, Why Google Business Profile Address Changes Can Disrupt Local Rankings. I would title this the cluster F of dealing with addresses if you're a service area business. That's basically what the what's happening here.
Again, we're talking about those poor service area businesses. So basically, the piece is talking about the challenges you'll run into when you're changing your address. And this is particularly painful if you are a service area business.
There's a few notes that she has that I have extracted from the article. People need to know this detail. She says, your address and your map pin are not the same thing.
And that is true with Google Maps. And a lot of people do not know that. So you can set your address to this, but then your map pin where you're located could be somewhere else.
But your rankings are based on the pin, not the address. And this is an important detail that people need to know. She talks about how the address that was used to register the GBP is the one Google will use to set your pin if you have no address showing on your listing.
So this is a common scenario that happens to the poor service area business. They registered their business in Vermont, they moved to Pennsylvania. And this whole time, they've been showing their address, they didn't know they were supposed to hide their address.
I don't know, I'm just a business owner. And so they put their address in Vermont, they moved to Pennsylvania, and they're like, I'm just a business owner. And so they update their address.
And then somehow there's a sweep, Google says, hey, you're breaking our rules, you got to hide your address. And so then they hide their address. And you know what happens?
They no longer rank in Pennsylvania, they're back in Vermont. Do you know why? Because the address that Google uses to set your pin if you're a service area business is the address that was registered with.
And oh my god, it's so impossible. If you are a small business, you are like, I don't understand what's happening. Why is Google's system so broken?
And actually, even if you're a local SEO practitioner, that is your same response. I don't understand what's happening. Why is Google so great?
Even if you are a support person that works at Google, you will say those same things. If you are Sundar Pichai, you would also be confused and not understand why it is broken. I don't think anybody understands this.
But anyways, the thing is, let's say you're a service area business. How do you update your address? How do you do it?
If you have this situation where you need to update your address, there is currently only one way and it is you make a brand new Google business profile. You're like, no, this one is now unusable. I'm gonna make a brand new one.
And then one thing she does in this article, which is why you need to go and bookmark it and look at it in case you're running this scenario. She shows you the steps to navigate the support, Google support, to get them to move your reviews from your old listing to your new one. And she kind of outlines that whole process very well in this article, which to me is a great reason to look at the article, save it, and keep that in your back pocket.
[Claire Carlile]
Or if you ever run into the situation, I sort of feel like Claudia should just rewrite all of the help documentation in the community pages. So my second link is from Steady Demand. So is written by Ben Fisher, who has been a Google business profile product expert person for about a gazillion years or something.
And this is a weighty guide that is a must read for anyone from, you know, someone that has a business that makes sure that the agencies and their employers that have access to their Google business profile, don't do the dirty on them. If you are running an agency, if you work in an agency, basically you need to use this as your Bible for how you should be setting up access to your Google business profile. So it's called Who Owns Your Google Business Profile?
The Complete Guide to Ownership, Security, Transfers and Recovery. And it does all of the things that you would expect it to do from that title. Go and read it because it tells you what the optimal setup is for lots of different scenarios.
But Ben also outlined some of the horror stories, which is just like, you know, the things that we live in fear of. So, compromised accounts used to change profile names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, categories, sometimes across every location in an account. Marketing companies actually removing profiles completely after a relationship ends.
And the practical lesson is simple. Ownership is governance, not housekeeping. And just another little thing that he reminds people of is this seven day limitation.
So if you've been given access as an owner or a manager, you can't do anything or you can't do much with that until you've run these seven days. And so his point is, you need to keep this in your mind if you're ever buying or selling a business. If you have a franchisee and franchisor relationship, make sure that you think of these things well before the handover time of the business being sold, because it's essentially, it's like one of the primary assets for a business and people just aren't taking it into account as such.
And then things aren't finalized before everything is handed over. And then chaos ensues and much sadness.
[Darren Shaw]
I think one of the things that you could take away from this for sure, is the monthly review of who has access to your profile. That is such a good piece to pull out of this. And he gives a nice checklist here.
Because people forget, they're like, oh man, that local SEO consultant we worked with seven years ago, who is now in jail still has access to our Google business profile. And someone is making malicious edits. They look like they're coming from Pennsylvania State Jail.
What is happening?
[Claire Carlile]
Who could it be?
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, you have to keep an eye on your access to your profile. And you should clean that up on the regular. Because honestly, an account level suspension, if someone who has access to get their whole account, then your listing could go down with it.
This is an important topic. You gotta pay attention to. Do it.
My next link. So Joy has shared something which is a little bit mind blowing. Ready to have your minds blown, everybody.
So she shared a local search result. An SSDI attorney in Oklahoma was the keyword search. And then so at the top of the page, what do we got at the top?
Well, local service ads, of course. And then what do you have under that? More ads, of course.
And then there is no local pack. What? It's just an AI overview.
And the AI overview has six businesses. It's the new AI driven six pack, everybody. Is this the future?
The results are quite different in the AI driven results versus traditional local pack results. So Greg Sterling left a comment on Joy's post. And he says, this is the future.
Greg Sterling says that and listen up, everybody. So anyways, I just think it's very interesting to see how this is going. And it could be a strong indication of where things might be heading for local search.
And so local search becomes AI search. So all the things that we talk about, about like, okay, how do you ensure that you're crawlable and visible and improve your visibility in AI systems? You may have been like tabling that, but this is an indicator that you got to be thinking about the minor adjustments.
One of the good things is that good AI SEO is often just good SEO, just being ranking and all the stuff that you've been doing is helpful. But there are some tweaks and some adjustments that you need to make. And so you should be thinking about those.
And that is the end of this segment.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, when you play bingo, maybe it's not bingo. Anyway, two of the same, there's another Joy. Another Joy link.
Because we didn't ring the Claudia Tamina bell.
[Darren Shaw]
We got to get a very special item. Like a gong. It's a Claudia post.
[Claire Carlile]
So this is more of a ping, ping, ping, ping, ping. Here is another Joy post. Sterling Sky doing a good job on their webinars.
And this is another webinar, which I really liked. Ah, you know, I don't know if I already told you, but I love Ross Simmons. And I love Ross Simmons.
Ding, ding, ding, ding. Anyway, so this is Ross and Joy. And it is a very good webinar.
It is AI is killing content, the only way to win with Ross Simmons. So a couple of people have talked about the intro, because I really love the intro, the way that's been put together. And Ross is like, really excited.
And he's saying, I think we actually have to do marketing again. I'm excited by this. Everyone's freaking out about AI overviews and how it's ruined the internet.
But I think it's good that marketers get to do marketing again, because we go back to the fundamentals, understanding our audiences, creating great stories, great content, which isn't intended to rank, but it's content that is intended to influence. Let's go. And that's why I love Ross.
[Darren Shaw]
Ooh, exciting.
[Claire Carlile]
I'm all about that. And so in this webinar, Joy and Ross take the example of, you know, how does this apply to local businesses? Well, it applies in lots of different ways.
So if we think about how lawyers, home services, basically anyone used to build out long form, whether it was commodity or non-commodity content, without AI in the olden days, when you used to have to pay someone to do research and to actually write your content for you. And then these pages did well in search and they drove traffic to the website. So we know this and this has been happening for a gazillion years.
Well, a long time. Google has become even more of a destination than before. You know, we don't have the blue links.
It's not about sending people to websites and that is not going to change. That is not going to change. We're not going to go back to that.
So we need to suck it up and we need to crack on. He is excited by the opportunity. We need to get real marketers working in businesses and people doing proper marketing.
How do businesses win today? And then he talks about, as we said, researching the audience, understanding the nuances of their pain. What problem are they actually looking to solve?
Understanding what sets us apart from our competitors as businesses with our products and our service offering. Developing our own tone of voice, which is different to our competitors. And then developing this compelling story through audio, video, text, and then we use that across all channels.
So we have a unique and interesting story that we put in the platforms everywhere, but especially where the people that we're actually trying to target live. So that sounds very, oh, well, that's very jolly. But what do you actually mean?
The rest of the webinar, he gives lots of examples. He does quite a deep focus on Reddit and using Reddit.
[Darren Shaw]
Using it properly.
[Claire Carlile]
For an insurance agency. I haven't watched all of the webinar. I'm about halfway through, but it is so worth a watch because Ross is the man, really.
[Darren Shaw]
It is no surprise to me that all of this messaging resonates with you, since you are pushing us at Weisbart to do exactly this. You're like, yes, this is what I'm talking about, Ross.
[Claire Carlile]
Everybody needs to do it. So it's great. I love it.
[Darren Shaw]
And you know, Ross, I started listening to his podcast. Man, he's good.
[Claire Carlile]
And he always wears nice sweaters, a bit like you, Darren.
[Darren Shaw]
He's also a nice, friendly Canadian. Although I gotta say, he once led me astray. I was going to Nova Scotia, going to Halifax, his hometown, and he said I should have Donair King.
This is King Donair. And it was the worst Donair I've ever had in my life.
[Claire Carlile]
That's terrible. Don't watch Ross's. Don't watch this webinar.
Ross, what have you done?
[Darren Shaw]
No, do watch his webinar, but just don't take his food recommendations. All right. So I got one more to talk about.
I found this one through Steve Toth's Notebook AI newsletter. He shares about Usman Akram, who describes this really cool process about how you can do keyword research with Reddit using Claude. Basically, this guy here, I didn't know about him before, but he ran SEO for Loom, Active Campaign and Adobe.
He's worked with lots of big companies. And so he's a serious SEO. And he says that Reddit is a goldmine of keyword insights that no other tool can surface for you.
And he's not wrong. Because most people are just going and they're going to like Google Keyword Planner and be like, which one has the most search volume? This one says 480.
This one says 270. So that must be better. And it's like, that old school way of doing keyword research.
Sure, there's some insights there. And it's useful to know that. But don't you want to know what people are buying?
What they are thinking when they're deciding which business to choose? What they eventually are typing? And nobody is researching this at that level.
And so Reddit is an absolute goldmine of that specific data. And so he provides a very detailed process in this YouTube video of how to do the extraction and analysis with Claude. Claude, Claude?
I don't know. I think it's Claude. Claude.
Claude, Claude. Useful, interesting, smart. Check it out.
[Claire Carlile]
That's it. We did it.
[Darren Shaw]
We did a whole podcast. And we talked about various things that are useful for you in your business or your agency. And I hope you enjoyed it.
And I hope that you go leave us a review on wherever you get your podcasts. And I also hope that you go and sign up for WhiteSpark software. That'd be great.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, do that. Yes, please. Thank you very much.
[Darren Shaw]
Check out Local Ranking Grids. It's really good. We just launched the Analyze tab.
Anyways, the software is great. You should check it out.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, do it.
[Darren Shaw]
Next week, I won't be here. But Claire, you're gonna record with a guest?
[Claire Carlile]
I am with a guest. With a guest. Obviously, we'll miss you terribly.
And it will be sad. But you'll be back soon. So I'm not too worried.
[Darren Shaw]
It's not that sad. It's always... Yeah, it'll be great.
Okay. Bye, everybody. See you next week.
[Claire Carlile]
Bye.