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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.
Claire (00:00.234)
Hello friends and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update with me Claire Carlile
And with me, Darren Shaw, and today we're going to talk about what's been happening in local search last week, like we always do. So let's do it again.
For a change, just to mix it up a little bit. Shall, I think you should go first, Darren.
first thing I want talk about is a incredible post from the incredible Miriam Ellis. She publishes all over the place. She is the most prolific local search writer in the world. She is published on Search Engine Land, and it's a very interesting topic to me. How to beat proximity and expand your radius. This is the problem. It's like, hey, I got a pest control company, but I only rank around 10.
five miles around my business. So everyone wants to know how do I expand that radius and rank all over the world? So the way you do it, according to Mary Mallis, is I'll tell you the highlights. We should read her post. She wrote an excellent post. Go and read it for the details. But give the highlights. Number one, build entity strength to influence rank. She talks about that and explains more about what that means.
Darren (01:21.294)
Obviously get more reviews and if you can get the reviews to mention specific aspects of the business like location, menu items, services, that's helpful because it helps send those signals to Google. think reviews are pretty big one and I also question if like reviews coming from those areas you want to expand to might help you rank better in there. I don't know if Google's doing that. It's a little speculation on my part.
She says earn unstructured citations, local blog sponsorships. She does say schema markup will not help. So that's good to know. Schema markup. I'm struggling to find good uses for that. Localized website content. Obviously mention those areas you want to rank in. And I like this one quite a bit. She gives a great example of this.
Restaurant they don't rank very wide for their own area or for like restaurant Los Angeles. I can't remember exactly what the example is, but. Now if you say Cubano sandwich, it's like boom like green all over the whole damn state. And so what she talks about there is like you should lean into specializations, so you want to expand your radius than doing that. And she uses.
like this incredible tool. The White Spark local ranking grids, it looks so good in her article. I'm like, wow, if you want to show how to expand radius, she really picked a great tool. It looks so good. Thanks for the shout out for the local ranking grids. So that's a great piece. Good job, Miriam, as always.
Sounds like solid top tips. There is a little bug which you may or may not have seen, which is in the local finder. And I did see this myself the other day. I was searching for something, trying to take a screenshot of something for something. And I found that it was just giving me the first page in the local finder. And then when I clickety clicked,
Claire (03:32.556)
go to the second page, there were no results found. So if you are seeing that, do not worry. It is not your broken computer. It is actually a little buggy thing. Other people are seeing it and hopefully it will get fixed soon because at the moment you can't see beyond that first page.
What do they say? Do not adjust your TV set.
Don't do that. Don't start pressing lots of buttons. what does Mike Blumenthal say? Did he say go off, have a beer or non-alcoholic drink and then come back?
Take two beers and come back tomorrow.
Yeah, so, doesn't have to be a beer, but take something and then come back.
Darren (04:14.104)
So this is interesting. I thought I would test this bug. I just, like right now, I search plumbers. And the bug is still present on my screen. So at the very bottom, you don't get the pagination. And if you click the arrow, it just says no more results. So you get one page of local results. It does raise a question of whether or not it's a bug bug or if they're like, we think this is the way to do it. And that, because I think Google's data might show that
Yeah, people don't click past page two anyway, so I show them. That's interesting idea. And also, if we think about the change Google made to crawlers for num equals 100, is it possible that they're doing this on purpose? Scary times. I hope not. But no one else is crazy about this search result. And I'll take some screenshots so we can include this into the video version of the podcast.
three local sponsored results. I don't think I've ever seen three in a row in a local finder. So one, two, three, the top three are all sponsored. Then you get the rest. then there's like you click next and it says it looks like there are any more places matching this topic. So I don't know. I hope it's a bug, but it might not be.
We will find out what is next Darren. Just stay here holding your breath till we find the answer.
I want to talk about a post that Sam Knight made on LinkedIn. I love Sam Knight. Yeah, I needed another t-shirt for my Sam Knight fan club, but he has written. So he's talking about reviews and I've never seen this before. This usage of this. I've heard of this before. It's called the Ben Franklin effect. The Ben Franklin effect is the Ben had a grumpy.
Darren (06:04.462)
rival in his politics and he was always criticizing him and putting him down. And then he was like, hey, I know what I'll do. I'll ask him for a favor. Oh, can I borrow that very rare and exciting book you have in your library? Sent him a letter. The dude lends him the book and he's like, Ben is interested in rare books like me. so after this, they became good friends. He sent him a nice note. Thank you very much. And so.
all of the hostility stopped. so the theory, the psychological effect here is it's like when you do a favor for someone, they're like, well, if I've done this for that person, I must like that person. So it's like it like tricks their brain into like him. So if you have an enemy, then you can just ask them for a favor. But
He applies this concept to reviews and I think it's very interesting. So all those business owners that are like nervous are like, I don't want to ask for reviews. I feel awkward. In those cases, you should think of the Brandon Franklin effect because there are two huge benefits. If you ask that person for a review, number one, you're to get a review. Sweet. Everyone wants some more reviews. And two, you have now endeared that person to your business. They now like your business more.
That's helpful. Don't you want that? So another benefit to asking for reviews leverage the Ben Franklin effect. I love that he applied that concept to review requests. Anyways, good post. Check it out.
Will do. Thank you Sam, you are very nice. We like you very much.
Darren (07:44.002)
Yes, very nice.
it's just like super duper duper recent, but going on in the Google business profile community for a couple of months, I think I have seen a big uptick in merchants in businesses that are losing their reviews and they are reporting a much denigrated, is that a word, a much lesser review count than they had previously.
And now that can often happen if you have had a suspension and then sometimes it can take a little while for your reviews to kick back in. But these cases seem to be not necessarily to do with that. So there seem to be a lot of cases in the community. So it seems to be a known issue that is being worked on. So if you are experiencing that as a business, what you can do is go to the support form.
where you type in the little box type missing reviews because that will generate the chip that says missing reviews. So you need to click that. So go ahead, fill that in, get Google support to give you a hand ideally. And another thing that it does is if you haven't as part of your operating procedure and your processes for all of the clients that you work with or your own business, make sure that once a week or at least once a month,
you are downloading all of the reviews for that business so you have a record because it is very sad if you lose reviews and then Google gets in touch and says, do you have proof that you had these reviews and you don't have emails and you don't have screenshots? Actually, you download, so lots of different things you can do this with, but obviously we have something very good within the tool set.
Claire (09:37.614)
And I did that today. And the nice thing is that when you use local platform, you have to go in and you just say, send me that all of my reviews and it sends you the entire corpus. So you've got the text, you've got the review ID, you've got a little image of the person that left it. You've got when it was left, you've got what your response was when you left the response, but it's a really, really nice data set that you have got then. And you can do that once a week, once a month, but make sure that you do it because.
You put all of this time and effort into leaving these reviews. And we've got this thing where people are able to change their names to make it anonymous. So who knows what's going to happen at the moment. So do it now. If you haven't downloaded your reviews, download them now. Make sure that you have a record and that you keep a record. That is the end of my little sermon about that.
Yeah, it's only a dollar a month to get signed up for the White Spark local platform and you can download your reviews and related coming soon is our review management feature. So we're gonna pull in all your Google reviews, give you a nice interface. We're gonna send you alerts when you get new reviews, let you reply in the software with a nice little pre-populated AI suggested reply to make it really easy for you to work through your reviews.
And when we have that up and running, we'll also be like, hey, it looks like you lost some reviews. We'll send you a letter about that. So that's coming very, very soon. that is what the team is actively working on. Hooray. I hope it means that Google is getting better at filtering reviews because it's always like a double edged sword because sometimes then people are like, my real reviews got removed. But on the other hand, you're like, well.
fake review problem, they're doing something about it. It's like Google's always in this tough place where they want to get rid of the spammy reviews, the fake ones, but they also, there's always some collateral damage when they do that. Anyways, Claudia Tormina.
Claire (11:37.342)
dear, that's a surprise, I've never heard you talk about her before!
She's a person. She wrote a really clever thing. So in the local search ranking factors, everyone knows that setting your service areas is a stupid idea. Everyone, at least that contributes to local search ranking factors, knows that it doesn't impact ranking. All the local SEO hustle bros on TikTok still tell everyone, you want to rank across the whole state? There's a secret area in Google where you can set service areas.
my god. Nobody knows the secret trick of Google. So they make these videos. But the reality is that setting your service areas has no impact. And so, yeah, we've tested it. We've tried. No impact. OK. But Claudia, very, very smartly, she dug through the Google API leak and she found a thing about the service areas. It says, this proto represents the geographic area served by an establishment. then it caps. Warning.
This proto is not meant to be used directly. That is the language from the API. What does that mean? it's not meant to be used for anything other than displaying the area, which is how we know it works. And so it is cool to see some kind of documentation from Google. The leak was showing a lot of stuff about how their algorithm works and how their whole system works. And so warning, it's not meant to be used directly. And so it's like, yeah, it doesn't get used directly. So all you hustle bros, you can
Shut up now. That's what Claudia had to say. Nice one, Claudia. Thank you.
Claire (13:18.072)
Keep on hustling. Lovely. let me see. Now, this is a thing. We knew about this. Again, lovely Lisa Landsman. The whole thingy thing with Google posts where adding a little bit of functionality in the NMX, if we'll call it that, this week.
where when you are adding your posts natively, you can schedule and then the idea is that you can also then cross post to other Google business profiles. So I was adding a Google post earlier and I checked it out and yes, you can schedule. So yes, that is helpful. But the idea of cross posting that, so I wanted to check whether or not
What would it allow me to cross post to? So I did my post and then basically it gave me the option to post to every single Google business profile, not just in that location group, but in that whole account. So that was interesting. So, you know, there's 40 different or 50 or however many, yeah, this is actually a post for a business that is totally unrelated. He's not a chain. And another thing is that if you are as you should be adding.
UTM tags to your Google post so you can actually see traffic in your Google business profile. That's not very helpful because you will just be adding the same UTM that you added that is hopefully personalized for that other business. yeah, it's just one of those things that yes, well, it's nice that they've added that functionality, but if you are actually using some sort of measurement implementation along the lines of UTM tags, it's not very helpful.
Oh, that's interesting. Well, we're to have to get your feedback on our latest designs for the Google Post scheduling functionality coming to the Westberg Local Platform. It's funny to look at Google stuff sometimes because you're like, thank you for the new feature. But it's like, could have tried a bit harder.
Claire (15:31.778)
Well, I guess that the idea is that they very much cater for the small business. And for a small business, they probably wouldn't be implementing UTM tags. But then this whole idea that, if you're catering for a small business, but you're adding functionality to make it multi-location. So I guess that they think that anyone that is enterprise or bigger would be using some sort of software. Anyway, yeah, it's just another example of thank you for that thing. I wish it works better.
I think we did it. We covered all of our links. I wanted to give a huge shout out to John Junction 21 chauffeur 51 on YouTube. He left a very nice comment. He said on YouTube, I just want to say a huge thank you to Darren Shaw, Claire Carlile and the White Spark team. I've been following your guidance for over a year and it has completely transformed our business. Junction 21 chauffeurs has grown from just one local service area to 34 locations.
with most ranking number one organically in traditional search. He says, your podcasts are not only brilliant, but genuinely business changing.
Aww, that's nice.
Thanks for comment and I'm so glad that we've been able to give you the information you need to have a very positive impact on your business. And if you also love our podcast, then please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. That would be wonderful. Thank you very much.
Claire (17:02.062)
Before we go Darren, we were talking about what we like to think of one of the USPs of our podcast, especially for people that watch it, is how wonderful our glasses are and that they match.
They, you know, everyone loves our matching glasses. They love it so much.
So what we thought that we'd put out there into the universe was, you know, this isn't a sponsored podcast. This is all, you know, it's just for fun. easy peasy, easy peasy. If you're out there and you're looking for OMG, easy peasy.
Easy peasy. Look at us. We are basically top level influencers and we want to offer you the opportunity to sponsor us with as many easy peasies as we can possibly get hold of. if you know anyone, nothing, nothing. We just love your easy peasy. So if you've got any listeners that know any easy peasy people, then feel free to reach out to them.
Yeah, if you give us a whole whack of different glasses, we will match our glasses and wear a different style every podcast episode and you will get to see your glasses on display because everyone loves that we have the same glasses. They think it's great.
Claire (18:24.782)
Yeah. And we love easy peasy. anyway. Thanks.
Everybody see you next week and we love you. Bye.
Au revoir!