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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]
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
[Claire Carlile]
And with me, Claire Carlile. And we are here to share the exciting things that have happened in the world of local search and local visibility. And I'm going to start Darren, shall I do it?
[Darren Shaw]
Do it, yeah. What do you got?
[Claire Carlile]
Well, so my first linky link is Ben Fisher on LinkedIn, where Ben shares a screenshot of something that he saw in a Google verification workflow. So you might have seen this, lots of people have seen lots of different things. So submit a business photo alongside verify using a phone call and other things.
[Darren Shaw]
Hold up.
[Claire Carlile]
What?
[Darren Shaw]
Does this mean you don't have to make a video if you get this option?
[Claire Carlile]
Well, there's lots of options. That's the thing, Darren, is like we talk about video verification, how often that is the thing that happened. But if you have a Google account that is already in good standing, you already have your search console set up, your analytics, all the things that you would expect, the website that you link to, you're using an email, which is a workspace account, then you do have options that are, let's call them softer or slightly easier options.
So Ben is sort of showcasing this because he has also got the options verify using a phone number. Or an email address on that domain. And then there is something that says, submit a business photo.
And then another photo he shares, it says capture both requirements in one photo, show the business name printed on permanent fixtures, such as signboard, and show your entire storefront in a single frame. So that was quite interesting. And then I sort of trawled into the comments, which were basically quite a few people doing a Barry Schwartz on Ben.
It's like, this isn't you. It's like, okay, so this has been a thing in the EU for a bit, supposedly. So great.
It's another thing. And however it works, isn't it just nice to think that if whatever system Google has in place that is checking, what is the veracity of this business? Are there already other instances of a storefront photo on Google Maps?
If I'm looking out into the world, does it look like this is a bona fide location with a brand, with all the things I would expect to see? So anyway, is it a big deal? Well, not really.
But it could be nice if you do all of the hard work to get yourself ready for a verification. Wouldn't it be nice if your life was slightly easier? Because sometimes video verification can be tricky, although it shouldn't be, especially if you are a storefront location.
But anyway, so have a look at that. It's always interesting if you're managing lots and lots of different businesses, looking at the verification options that are available to those businesses. But anyway, interesting.
And wouldn't it be nice if life could be slightly easier? But not for the bad ease, only for the good ease.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, exactly. Don't make it easier for those scammers. Well, that's a good development.
Thank you, Google, for making it a little bit easier for businesses that do qualify for that. It's interesting to imagine how complicated their system is. It's like, this business gets the photo option, this business doesn't, this business doesn't have to do video.
I wish I understood exactly how that algorithm worked. But I don't know. They don't tell us everything.
My next link, or my only, my first link.
[Claire Carlile]
Your only link.
[Darren Shaw]
My first link is from Steve Toth. We love Steve Toth. This guy's freaking brilliant.
Anyways, he has a great post on LinkedIn, which is kind of a summary of his note. He does this like notebook stuff. But this is about information gain.
So you make a new content, you should put some information gain in there. So that it's not commodity content. How do you do it?
He gives you four steps in his post. He says, number one, add first party data, like original numbers from your own products, case studies, real screenshots, stuff that you have in house. Two, add expert perspective quotes from practitioners in your niche, you know, counterpoint, you know, that kind of stuff.
Three, target the questions nobody answered. So you know, you can look through support tickets, you can look through Reddit, you can look for, you know, questions that haven't really been answered before and going deeper on that stuff. And number four, mine primary source documents.
What does that mean? What does it mean? Primary source documents is like, you know, statistics and like the government's always running studies and in medical studies, and there's just like stats all over the place.
How do you find them? Well, that's this is why I wanted to bring this one up because he built a cloud project for this. And I tested it and I was like, absolutely blown away.
I was like, what? So he's got this cloud project that you can use. And so my prompt, I'm writing an article on how car accident rates in the Phoenix area have increased over the past 10 years.
Okay, great. I'm writing a blog post or I want to put this information on my landing page. So the thing churns and churns and churns, and it gathers all these stats, and it is 17 pages of statistic gold.
It's just packed with good stuff. So I was like, I can't believe how good it was. Like all of this data, I have so many things I could slap into my article, and I'll probably use Claude to help me, you know, figure out which ones are the most interesting to add to my article.
But anyways, the thing is amazing. Steve Toth is a genius, and you should check it out, and you will love it. And you will add information gain to your articles, and then you will rank number one on ChatGPT.
[Claire Carlile]
For everything. I'm always impressed that Steve just makes things so actionable.
[Darren Shaw]
I know. Yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
How nice. Thank you, Steve. Why are you so good and nice?
And why do you, you know, he's so unique in his content.
[Darren Shaw]
He's Canadian.
[Claire Carlile]
That would be it. That would be it. I need to show you something, but it's on my bookshelf.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, yeah. Exciting. Show and tell on the podcast.
It's time for a show and tell break.
[Claire Carlile]
For anyone that isn't watching the video of the podcast, which you should do, because it's really funny. I'm holding up a book in my hand up to the camera, because this is my second link. So this is a book in the olden days.
People used to do this. They used to write content, and it was printed on paper. And so people used to take this off into the toilet, or sometimes they would read their coffee and drink their tea in bed in the morning, and they would read a book.
So I'm still a big fan of this old school content type. So this is a book by the very amazing and brilliant Crystal Carter. It is called The New Rules of AI Search.
SEO for visibility in chat, GPT, Google Gemini, and generative search. So if you don't know Crystal Carter already, you should. She is amazing.
She talks and obviously writes as well. And I have not read it. I pre-ordered it when I knew it was coming out.
So this is what I'm hoping I will get from this book. Practical ways to improve my visibility in AI search, how to create content that AI tools can better understand and recommend, simple frameworks for measuring and improving your AI visibility, and actual advice that you can use straight away. It's quite technical.
There's things that clever people would really enjoy in here. But I know that it will be actionable and very readable. So you should probably rush out and buy your copy immediately and no affiliate link.
I just love Crystal very much.
[Darren Shaw]
She is brilliant. So guaranteed, that's going to be a brilliant book that is full of great advice. She's one of the few proponents for the LLMs.txt. Okay. She's like, yeah, you should do it. And so I think other people are like, no, don't bother.
[Claire Carlile]
I don't know if I do it. But I really, I will enjoy the way that she explains how things actually work. Because my, my brain, my brain struggles with these things.
So I feel it will enrich my life in the morning with my coffee. While I'm propped up in bed, I'm going to do it.
[Darren Shaw]
Is that when you read books, not before bed?
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, both. Both. Both.
That's what happens. What's your link?
[Darren Shaw]
My next link is from Miriam Ellis, the wonderful Miriam Ellis. And she wrote this piece on the Whitespark blog. Thanks, Miriam, for your great content on Whitespark.
So how keywords in the business name currently impact Google local pack rank and AI search. Look at that. So we know that keywords in the business name impact rankings.
But you know, if you really want to know, you got to study 1.8 million Google business profiles.
[Claire Carlile]
We do.
[Darren Shaw]
And then you really know. So she dug into the data, looking at correlations between keywords in the business name and rank. And wouldn't you know it, she found that it correlates with higher rankings.
So she said that keywords in the name mean two to five times more top three rankings in every industry except real estate. Surprising. Travel and tourism saw the biggest lift 29.5% lift if you have keywords in the business name probably for competitive reasons. Most businesses are not optimized exact match, the least common variant, of course. And lots of businesses are just like not doing this. But you could rebrand and take advantage because it definitely correlates with higher rankings.
And I think I made a little video about this. And we talked about it when we promoted the article. But I think it's very interesting is that she discovered that the closer the keywords are to the front, the start of your name, the better you tend to rank.
So for example, a better rather than saying Andy's plumbing, okay, yeah, now you got the word plumbing in there. Plumbing by Andy apparently performs better. So anyways, great article goes into the deep dive.
If you were thinking about should I have keywords in my business name, then this will answer that question for you. And I provide some guidance on how to do as well.
[Claire Carlile]
And what I noticed when I read that is it also links to another brilliant guide that Miriam wrote about things to think about before you name your business. And I think that's a really, really good thing to dive into as well, because that's a really well written and well researched piece about what do I need to think about before I name my business? You know, am I going to stay you know, Andy's special taps?
[Darren Shaw]
Special taps.
[Claire Carlile]
Are good near me? Or will I want to like move beyond taps at some point?
[Darren Shaw]
Yes.
[Claire Carlile]
So my number three link is actually it is from a piece in a newsletter that came through. So it is the iPoorank newsletter that I subscribed to. And I think it is Heather that is your content marketing manager there.
And it's a really, it's a piece that really resonated with me. So it is about has excessive use of AI slop knocked us back to an anti digital age?
[Darren Shaw]
Yes, it has.
[Claire Carlile]
What they were describing is something that I was just thinking I was on Facebook because I'm of an age. And I was just looking at all the awful, awful posters that were generated for my local businesses, local events and stuff around by me. And it really just made me go, I'm not going to that.
It's terrible. I understand that you might be like poorly resourced, you might be creating this yourself, and you think you've done a super good job. But really, it is making me not want to come to the village dog show, even if my dog has got the waggiest tail where I live.
And so this piece is all about that. So it links to a couple of different things. But this is a good description of when you see this thing.
So it says once you notice a chat GBT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open. The art of the format is basically big, flashy, bright text on dark backgrounds and an AI generated or AI altered image. There is almost university, a little box of generic icons in a bulleted list vaguely tied to whatever event or business is advertising.
Lines coming off of the text to emphasize whatever it's saying and either bolded words or underlined text and tons of arrows and check marks haphazardly strewn throughout, which just gives me a breakdown just thinking about it. I hate, I hate these images. And so we think about that in the context of the small businesses and the big businesses that we work with.
Some big businesses obviously that are, you know, there's this backlash that I'm feeling very in my internal organs against seeing this type of content. And another thing that Heather brings to light is a recent study by Glassdoor found that reviews on its site that mentioned AI back in 2019 were 81% positive. But today that number dropped to 43% positive, 4% mixed and 53% negative.
And there was also a link to another piece in the NBC News, which was someone had gone out and had scribbled or drawn or done something to an external poster by a brand. It was like a food brand that had AI content on it. And is this just this thing where she's just like, no, this is horrible.
Please don't use this. So I think that's very much worth sharing with anyone that is tempted to produce content for their local businesses. Another one of the marketers that I pull rank, this is what they sort of think is coming.
So brands are betting that AI saturation is going to make their real world marketing experience stand out. So people are doing things that are maybe more weird and wonderful. So I think they took the example of someone that was like a hair salon, rolling a large ball of hair down the road or something.
But I remember how we used to talk about guerrilla marketing and doing the things that sort of stood out. Brands are hoping that by going analog, they differentiate more easily. And physical experiences are supposed to drive earned media, user generated social content and press coverage.
So the whole idea of like, be real, make things that are real, have relationships with real people, use real creatives, pay copywriters, pay artists, pay designers to produce stuff that is good and not AI generated, because ultimately, your customers are going to hate you if you do those things.
[Darren Shaw]
Like 100%. Like for me personally, I think that because we work in marketing, we're a little bit more, we have our AI radar, we can see it because we've seen so much of it. And so for me, I did a post not too long ago, I was like, I find myself 100% rejecting anything with the slightest hint of AI.
If I see any of these AI tells in the content, I'm not reading it. If I see an AI image in your content, you're dead to me. It's like, I can't handle it.
I'm like, and I really stick to this quote that I don't know where Nick Pierno got it. But Nick Pierno said this quote, and it's so stuck with me. Why should I bother to read something that you couldn't be bothered to write?
And that's, it's so salient to me. It's like, yeah, it's exactly it. I'm like, oh, okay.
AI slap. Why? I'm not going to read your LinkedIn post.
I'm not reading your article. I'm not reading your latest research, whatever. I hate it.
And I find that the world, that sentiment is growing beyond just marketing tech people into just the general population, especially with the younger generations. So yeah, I feel that. And yeah, and actually, Rand Fishkin, they launched a new website for SparkToro.
And it is wacky off the wall. He deliberately did that. He was like, I'm going to try and make the most realist, weirdest human looking thing that an AI could never generate.
He deliberately tried to rail against that. And I think that is the approach we're going to see a lot of marketers take. Yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
Good.
[Darren Shaw]
Good. Good. Yeah.
Down with AI. Up with humans. All right.
My next link is from, okay, everybody ring the bell. Claudia Termina. Ding, ding, ding.
So Claudia shared on LinkedIn, this email, does this look right to you? This is Google giving you a heads up when they're about to change something serious on your Google business profile. A user has suggested a big change, like marking your businesses permanently closed.
And Google will now send you an email. Does this look right? Hey, someone suggested this and you have four business days to respond.
You'd be like, yes, it's correct. Nope, that's incorrect. Don't do it, Google.
This is a massive improvement on their previous system, which was like, Bob Jones said your business is closed, so we're just going to do it. That's the way Google used to operate. And so now they are a little bit more careful with those types of edits.
And they will give you a heads up as the business owner. Very nice to see Google doing something about this. So I'm pretty pleased by it.
I don't think they're going to do it for everything. It's like, little things like service changes or attributes like wheelchair accessible. But Michael Snow says that they've been seeing this back as April 30th.
And Jean-Sebastien Girard, he says the earliest I can track for us is from August 11th. So this is happening. It's rolling out, which is good.
And this one guy, Iluka Bove, he says he's received notifications for opening hours, title changes and address changes. And then I think the example that Claudia shares is business being marked as closed. And so good.
Yeah, send it for those sensitive updates and give people a heads up.
[Claire Carlile]
Thank you, Google.
[Darren Shaw]
You're getting better all the time. Yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
[Darren Shaw]
In some ways. In some ways you suck, Google. Just being honest.
I mean, like, okay, good job on sending notifications to business owners, but bad job being evil with your ads and your corporate greed.
[Claire Carlile]
Oh, well done. Good. That's it.
Are we finished?
[Darren Shaw]
That's it. We've made a whole podcast. Again, one more podcast.
You know what? We didn't announce it, but we've done this for a whole year. Did we announce our podcast-diversary last week?
[Claire Carlile]
We already had that birthday last week. You're just trying to make it last.
[Darren Shaw]
I was sleeping. I slept right through the birthday.
[Claire Carlile]
You're like the queen.
[Darren Shaw]
All right. Well, it's podcast-diversary plus one. And we haven't hit 52 episodes because we missed a few.
Well, maybe we'll celebrate that one again. Anyways, go sign up for all the WhiteSpark software because it's really cool and good. And go and leave us a review on YouTube and Apple Podcasts because it's a great podcast.
And I'll see you next time.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, do it now. Goodbye.