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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 (00:00.066)
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
And with me Claire Carlile and we are going to tell you about some exciting things. Today we are.
Yes, we're going to talk about what's been happening in local search. I think for the past two weeks, because I don't think we recorded last week. So yeah, we've got a couple weeks worth of links, but we still always keep it to only six. Three links each to talk about interesting things that are going on. So Claire, what do you got? What's the first most interesting thing that you want to talk about?
Well, we will kick off with a little timely thing that happened this morning. So, well, it's morning my time, UK. Lots of people were saying, goodness gracious me, I am seeing a posting restriction on the front end of a Google business profile as displayed. And I think it was just in Chrome and just for people that were using a desktop.
So for anyone that doesn't know what that means, because a lot of people sort of think, I can still make Google posts because Google doesn't like to make anything super clear with their language. A posting restriction has got nothing to do with Google posts. It means that people shouldn't be able to leave reviews on your profile. So it's often done when people have been a bit naughty.
Claire (01:26.626)
So that was happening this morning. Lots of people in various slacks that I'm in and we've got a link here from Vinay who wrote something on LinkedIn. I you shared something with me as well, Darren, saying, my gosh, this guy, this is happening. And then quite quickly it was fixed. It doesn't appear to be a problem, but I think that Darren will say that this suggests that some knobs were being twiddled somewhere.
think Google's twiddling some knobs. When I see something like this, when it was so widespread, it did make me wonder if maybe this indicates a major shakeup. Why would they turn off posting? Is it so that you could, they could like, you know, a hosting company puts up, everything's under maintenance, you can't do anything right now because we are updating our whole system. That was my first thought. But I now rescind that thought because knowing that.
It's available on Google Maps and if you were using Safari. Knowing there was only Chrome, I don't think maybe that's it. Maybe it was just a bug. Probably just a bug. Google loves to make bugs, and so it's probably a bug. Yep, exactly. So I think there was more farting and less knob quiddling.
brain fart.
Claire (02:38.03)
no knobs were twiddled at all, probably. Apart from to fix it, maybe to fix it.
going to turn off some knobs to fix this problem. Speaking of Google Business Profiles, there's another crazy thing. This is new-ish. Deepa Gandhi has shared this, which is a new little section in your Google Business Profiles. It's called Insights. Ooh, I've got some insights for you. And this is different from the Performance section. And Google loves to be confusing, because I actually think the Performance section used to be called Insights.
Yeah
Amazing. Now they've got a new session called insights, which is not what the old insight section was. And this is meant to help you identify optimization opportunities kind of it's more like completing your profile. like, we have some insights for you, you could add more photos, you could respond to reviews, you could add these attributes, you should tell people about the parking, you could tell people about you know, whether you have a wheelchair accessible bathroom. So
It's kind of guiding it. What I think is happening here is that it's similar to what was actually hinted at when they deprecated the Google Business Profile API for Q &A. So the Q &A is going away. They're replacing it the ask maps. And I think Google is like, I want more information about this business. We want to put it in your face. Look, there's a whole new section called Insights. And that's a big red dot on it. And you click on it, and it's like, OK, give us more data. I actually went through all.
Darren (04:10.542)
500 of our Google business profiles that we manage looking for this. I only found one business. We don't actually manage it anymore, but we still have access to their account. And they were the only one that had the insight section. What does that tell me? It tells me that it's like, if your profile's actively managed, you might not see this because you've already responded to all your reviews. You keep adding photos. You have all the attributes turned on. So Google has enough information about your business. But if they don't have enough, then I think this might show up. But it's a new.
Cool thing.
It's interesting just because I hadn't read some of the micro copy underneath. So I was just thinking this is the same as where, so they use the NMX in different ways. You've got that little round circle that says your profile is nearly complete. So that's one of the ways they gamify, give me more information. Also, that's a bit broken and I don't think anybody uses that. They can get rid of that awful circle thing. I think that's a nonsense.
because you can only get it to a hundred percent if you like do Google ads and not everybody wants to do that. And then that keeping an eye on the little MNMX when there is a new call to action, like a new box, then it's normally a new thing or something that they want you to do. And now I've just realized the reason it's called insights, because I'm like, there are no insights here, but so where the insight is 20 plus businesses like you don't have fresh photos.
So Google has been doing some analysis of Google business profiles that maybe sit adjacent to you, what they see as your competitors, maybe the first 20 results. So 20 plus businesses like you haven't posted recently. So what they're doing is putting your performance in terms of, it's not really performance, it's how often you're interacting with your profile against what your competitors are doing. So it's a little, there are actually insights here.
Darren (06:01.486)
They're like optimization insights a little bit, Like here's how you can get better performance out of your Google Business Profile. All right, yeah, I'll take the insights world word a bit more seriously. That's a great, great point, Claire.
Thank you. Good point. Well made by me. Bravo. Big pat on the back. Right. I am going to tell you about what I am currently nearly finished watching, which is webinar on YouTube with Mike and Greg from Near Media with a very, very, very, very wonderful Crystal Carter. yeah. So this is, yeah.
Excellent job.
Claire (06:40.896)
It's called AI isn't replacing local search, but it's rewiring how people choose with Crystal Carter. So all in all, I think it is a brilliant conversation where I've learned loads of things. Just about, well, so many things. Agentic search, where Google sits within Google's infrastructure and what it can already offer and how it can compete.
with other LLMs and AIs and agentic things that we're going to be using, pointing to the fact that there really has been a massive consumer change in how we do things. I would say watch all of this. They cover things like how AI is sort of complementing search rather than replacing search. Crystal does a really great bit where she talks about, know that the user journey and the funnel
is a nonsense and people don't actually action like that. But she does a really good job of pointing out, about how agentic search works is, you you've got your prompt, you pop it in, and then all of that messy middle part where you used to go and do the research and compare things and you used to do your consideration and evaluation. Crystal's point is a lot of that is going to be done with agentic search. And then it comes to us then to make the validation of
Do I think that's a good answer? I'm going to actually check that it's open, check that it works, check that it has what I want, and then you go ahead and you make the purchase. I think that is a really useful way of thinking about how AI is changing and has changed the customer journey.
I think it is so needed. I don't know if you've ever shopped for a mattress online, but it is very painful. It's like, yeah, you're have to take a sabbatical of three months to do all the research, figure out, try and sort through the different opinions that are online. So if I could offload all of that to an AI agent, I would be happy to do so. Just like let them know my criteria. But then you're always still like.
Darren (08:50.286)
I don't know if I trust your answer, AI. I gotta buy this mattress. I hope it doesn't hurt my back. Anyways, we're gonna shed extra love to near media guys today because I've got a link about near media too. Here's the thing about near media. So as you were saying this, I was thinking, well, it's such a great combination because Crystal Carter, fantastic person. You wanna hear her thoughts on AI, very brilliant person. But you combine that with two of the greatest interviewers.
Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal, they're have just really clever, insightful questions, because they're just great. And so, speaking of them, they did another podcast episode with this guy, Eric Levine. Eric Levine used to work at Google in the local services ads. He was one of the very first local services ads employees. So, he's got a little bit of insight. So, I'm just gonna highlight a couple things from this that I thought were quite interesting. One of the first things that he mentioned was...
In local services ads, there's a new button for request multiple quotes, request quotes from multiple providers. And all the businesses are annoyed by this. like, ugh, I gotta still pay full price for this lead, but the consumer just presses this button and it sends it to the top four most highly rated, most responsive people. So that's how you get included in one of those message leads.
And it was like, well, it's kind of annoying. But his point was valid. And he's like, well, Google just built a feature that mimics what all the people are doing anyways. That's exactly what people do. They have their template message. They copy and paste it. They were probably messaging 10 people. But Google will just be like, we'll send it to four for you. So actually, it's maybe a good thing. So I thought it was very interesting. And then he really talked about
how do you rank better in the local services ads? And so I'll just dump the tips. He talked about the three Rs, which is radius, reviews, and responsiveness. This is for sure the key things. He says Google's always experimenting. So it's not just one algorithm. There's a whole series of different things that they're doing. Some of the more minor things that they're looking at are potentially behavioral signals, potentially looking at whether a
Darren (11:11.252)
Ad has been clicked on a lot, whether or not they have really good photos. The photo actually can help compel more clicks, which can drive better LSA rankings. Responsiveness on both phone and message leads. So this is where some businesses fall apart because they might answer the phone and have a 24-hour call service, but then a message lead comes in at 2 a.m. and it doesn't get answered until the morning. That's an issue. So just being really responsive. But.
The whole thing is very interesting to hear from someone who has inside knowledge of local services ads. And as we know, local services ads, they just have such prominent placement that if you have them in your industry, they're really taking clicks from the local pack. And so you're almost forced to use them. So listen to that. It's a fantastic listen from two of the greatest interviewers in the space.
My third and final link, which you might know that Darren gets a bit cross when I put more than three links in because I used to get a cross with him. Then, what I do is I do a special thing where I get two links and then they sit next to each other because they work with each other. That's what I've done here. Two pieces which I read with interest, which were one from Marie Haynes who, if
know, Marie Haynes was the original person when it came to EAT back in the day, so knowledgeable and Marie got into AI early on, like a long time ago. I had no idea what she was talking about. Obviously she's great. She speaks brilliantly, but my brain wasn't ready for it. So taking Marie Haynes, a piece that she's written, which is talking about user satisfaction in LLMs and elsewhere and a
a piece by Mike at iPaul rank which is about chunking.
Darren (13:05.272)
You love junking?
I love it. Moving from a Google-shaped web to an agent-shaped web, a refutation of misinformation about chunking. rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? I like this because, as you know, I am now a big fan of chunking. It's just breaking up stuff on the page. Two sides of the coin, both of them are saying AI is important.
The way that AI works is vector space models and vector embeddings and all those things. Whereas Marie is just coming back to the thing which is like, but at the end of the day, we're serving users. If you don't know your user inside out, then thinking about cosine similarity and programmatic legibility, for me, it hit the nail on the head, which was I'm happy to think about those things.
But everyone is jumping into those things with a bit that was missing before, which is like, I'm not saying personas are the end all of all marketing, but if you don't have a deep insight into the customers that you're trying to reach, what their needs are, how you're going to meet those needs better than your competitors, why are we even talking about all of these things? so those two things were brilliant and I loved both of them and
I think one is right and one is wrong. I'm happy to have a foot in both camps there. But this is just saying, please go away and do the foundational work of understanding your marketplace before you start worrying about vector space models and embeddings, chunking or cosine similarity.
Darren (14:51.938)
Yep, or LLM.TXT.
for example, segue.
No, I'm not talking about it. It's like it was something else. So what I'm talking about is schema. Does schema help with AI visibility? Do the large language models, the LLMs use schema? People have tested this and they have proven, yes, look, I put a weird word only in my schema and the chat GPT picked it up. So that proves.
you
You
Darren (15:24.974)
ChadGBT is reading my schema. Mark Williams Cook, one of the smartest guys around, he did a very good little test about this. He was like, okay, yeah, all right, we've seen it. We now believe that it is being picked up. But what he did, which was really clever, is he made his own schema. Total BS schema, was like duck schema. It was like, you know, all these fake.
types of schema and he put it on the page. And so his conclusion is that yes, they will look at the schema, but they just treat it like any other text on the page. They're not using structured data. They don't care. They strip everything away, all the HTML, all the stuff. What are the actual words remaining on this page once you strip all the code out? And so that's what he has shown with this really great study showing that, yeah, okay, they are.
picking up content in this schema, but they are not actually using schema. You going to all this trouble of marking up all of your pages in schema is totally not necessary for AI visibility. Put the words on your page, you're good to go. If so, if the word is already in your content, you don't need to use schema. So this is very interesting because a lot of people will tell you that schema is very important for AI visibility. This study is excellent.
And he even drew a really cool picture of a duck with MS Paint. So another reason to check it out. But yeah, Mark, love this.
He is skilled and who needs all of these like AIs to make your art for you because Mark is available, I believe.
Darren (17:08.238)
Taking commissions, yes.
If you need any original artwork.
Yeah, that's right. That was really fun. So read that, check it out. I kind of gave it all to you right now, you know, don't check out his post anyways. schema, probably not important for AI visibility. And with that, I believe we did it. We did a whole podcast.
We're done, that's it.
Yeah, I remind you all, please leave us a review on the Apple Podcast. We always very much appreciate that.
Darren (17:45.902)
Oh yeah, and actually one more thing, if you're still listening, you probably left already, but if you're still there, I'm trying to remind myself that I should use this podcast to promote our awesome software. We have our new White Spark Local Ranking Grids and it is the greatest. It's the only one that tracks to 100. The design is insane. Every agency is switching to us because we are the very best and you should do that too. So there you go. I gave a little promo. Okay, bye everybody. See you next week.
Thank you very much.