Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
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 βmust-readβ and βmust-watchβ 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 as you will know by now, this is the podcast where we talk about all the thingy things that are very useful and interesting for you to know if you work in local marketing, pretty much of any type.
[Darren Shaw]
Pretty much of any type, yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
Any type, any type.
[Darren Shaw]
Any variety of local marketing. We're the podcast for you. So I'm gonna talk about a couple things which are breaking news in local search.
If you are a Google business profile person, if you work in local search, there are two things. I'm packaging these as one link, even though they're two, because they're quick. They're quick.
So first news, which I am absolutely thrilled about. And I've been begging Google for this. Everyone has been.
But oh my God, it's happening, everybody. We finally get post view data back. There was a time when Google Posts would tell you how many people viewed your Google Posts.
And for some reason, Google took it away from us. We no longer have that data. It was a sad trombone.
But it's coming back. This dude, Muhammad Hussein, has posted yesterday, 16 hours ago, and he tagged me, Claudia, Barry Schwartz, and Joy Hawkins. Thanks for the tag, Muhammad.
But yeah, he has seen that in the NMX, it is now giving you data on how many people viewed your posts. Amazing data. As agencies, we love that.
We want to get that data, be able to report on that data. Sometimes the data is a little sad to see because you're like, oh no, only five people saw that Google Post I made. But anyways, it's good data to have.
And so I'm excited about that. I'll say no more. And then the other one is Claudia Tomina has published a Google Business Profile hackity hack, which I'm kind of excited about.
There's this section in your Google Business Profile called activities, but not every business gets them. Some businesses get them, some businesses don't. And so she uses a great example that if you're like, for example, restaurants don't get activities, but wine bars do.
So if you want activities on your profile, even if you're not technically a wine bar, just slap it in there as an additional category. And now you get activities. You now have activities on your profile, which is a nice thing to have.
And then it can just add a little bit more flexibility and functionality to your Google Business Profile. I thought that was a brilliant little hack. And so if you are an electrician or maybe a plumber in Denver, you could add wine bar as an additional category.
And then you could put activities on your Google Business Profile. Any brand, go ahead. And I actually think I'm curious your take on this, Claire, as a platinum Google Business Profile product expert.
Messing around with your primary category, that can often cause a little bit of suspension, re-verification risk. But I am of the belief that you can go hog wild on your additional categories without too much risk. Like if I was a plumber, I could throw a wine bar in there and it's pretty risk-free.
How do you feel about this?
[Claire Carlile]
I think it's a very, very bad idea.
[Darren Shaw]
Agreed. Yeah. I'm not saying do it.
I'm saying if you're the restaurant, the wine bar is not that much of a stretch. If you're the plumber, probably don't do it. But I'm just curious if you agree that the additional categories are less touchy.
You know what I mean?
[Claire Carlile]
I think it depends what you mean by touchy. Is your listing going to get wiped off of Google and never be seen again just for changing a secondary category? Probably not.
But is it going to mess with Google's understanding of your entity, how they show your information? Could that essentially affect you? Could it be one thing that breaks the straw on the camel's back if you are doing some other dodgy things in your Google business profile?
So probably not. I wouldn't do it. Activities is part of the Google things to do suite of functionality, which is available to attractions.
So I've got lots of businesses that I work with actually have it in real life. And it's very nice. I would say take advantage of the features and functionality that are made available to your Google business profile vertical type.
I can remember changing my agency to a restaurant at one point. So I had a menu and an ordering link.
[Darren Shaw]
Boy, I did that too.
[Claire Carlile]
Took me about four years to get it removed from my profile.
[Darren Shaw]
Right. Yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
So anyway, interesting, but no.
[Darren Shaw]
So listen to Claire, not me. That is the intelligent take. Hacks are fun.
We all love our little hacks.
[Claire Carlile]
The answer is listen to Claudia, because Claudia is doing this from a sort of restaurant viewpoint.
[Darren Shaw]
Which of course, that's the alignment that makes sense. Don't put it on your plumber profile. All right.
Great. An intelligent response.
[Claire Carlile]
So my first linky link is a near media webinar, which was exploring the strategy and tactics that search social and commerce through a local search lens, which is a very long title, which is a follow up for the one that they did. I think, is it John Jansch, the previous one that they did?
[Darren Shaw]
They did a few on branding. And this is like the crescendo of branding.
[Claire Carlile]
And on this, they had Paula French from Search Influence, which is a pretty cool agency. Joy Hawkins, that we all know. Andrew Shortland from Local SEO Guide.
And Matt McGee, SEO savvy agent who is an old school, worldy, worldy local SEO from back in the day when the dinosaurs roamed the earth. So some really interesting viewpoints in there. But there are some absolute nuggets, I would say, in there.
Starts off with a discussion of brand and what is brand or what is an interpretation of brand through a local business lens. And then just some little bits, three bits that I liked. Talking about if you're using Google Analytics and you're trying to use that to say that LLM traffic or LLMs aren't important to you.
Obviously, Google Analytics is going to report on when someone visited your site via an LLM. But obviously, LLMs do a big job in the exploration stage and surfacing options. So it's going to lead to an increase in people knowing your brand and branded search.
And something that we talked about before was the idea that we need to get a little bit more used to fuzzy data. So having self-reporting and self-reporting attribution again and making sure that we say to our leads, oh, that's interesting. Where did you first or how did you go about looking for someone?
And can you remember what you searched or what you prompted or whatever? Have a little conversation with people or at least have some sort of field in your intake or whatever form that you've got. Because people discover in an LLM and then they validate on Google.
So that the click logs is going to come in probably as direct, which we'll get to in a moment. And then I really liked Andrew talking about local listings as a cheapest brand mention engine for AI. So it's just that idea that if you are doing this foundational piece, which is going ahead and doing your citations and your listings management, then why aren't you using that as an opportunity in the business description to make sure that you have that who you are, what you do, who you serve, why you serve better than your competitors.
That is obvious. And Matt then talks about a reusable fast expert mini bioscript where he gives the agents or basically these citations, two to three paragraph bio awards, career sales, blah, blah, blah. And then that will get picked up and moved into all the different places.
But basically just being a bit more aware that this is your chance to seed people and Google and the LLM's knowledge about your business with these citations. If only we sold a citations listing service, it would just... We do.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, we can help you with this. If you want to update your description on your citations, which is an excellent idea.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay.
[Claire Carlile]
And the last one, Joy talking about YouTube being their top lead source, but also the most AI-proof play. So she's talking about, it's not going to be a quick win and she invests massively, you know, like we do into this strategy, but it is going to be such a source for leads and for this brand presence, which isn't easily replicable. And then so Joy talks about that, which I think is pretty interesting.
The idea that you should have a, you know, a video content strategy, regardless of your business size. So lots of things in there about building brands for local businesses of all shapes and sizes. So you should watch it and listen to it.
[Darren Shaw]
And I think it's so critical. Like that's the thing. That's how you do SEO in 2027.
It's brand, brand, brand. How do you build your brand? And so this whole series from Near Media, it's kind of a must listen, must watch, must read.
You have to get your head around this. It's the way to move forward. All right.
My next link. This was a really good thing I came across on LinkedIn. I can't remember who shared it, but it's how AI text watermarking works.
You probably have heard all the news. If you haven't, I'll just tell you right now. Claude has announced their watermarking text.
They're putting in a secret code and then you could use that to identify that text was written by AI. And so it's fascinating how they've done it, because it's not just like a secret code word gets inserted into your paragraph. It is kind of tricky.
And this is the greatest article I have seen that explains it exactly how it works. And so you may have heard Radfishkin say that AI writing is spicy autocomplete. And so every, the way that AI will write a paragraph of text is every single word, it kind of rolls the dice about like, well, what are the most, let's say there's four possible words that could come next.
And the example in the article that explains how this works will say, the results of the study were quite, and so what's the next word? And it could be, the next word could be important. It could be significant.
It could be substantial. It could be notable. Those are four kind of options that the LLM is thinking about and could potentially use in there.
And they're all have different probabilities, like 40%, 30% based on what they have seen in past writing. And so what an LLM does is it just randomly picks one of those, rolls the dice. And so every time you roll the dice, you might get a different version of it, right?
And so that's actually how LLMs write content. And that's why every time you ask for a paragraph of text, you're going to get a different version of it. Every time you ask for some brainstorming ideas, you get a different version.
Every time you ask which businesses are the best for this specific thing, you get a different version of it. And that's because it's always rolling the dice on every freaking word. And so that's the way LLMs construct their responses, which is very interesting.
And if you know that, then you can know how the secret key works because the secret key assigns higher probability to specific words. And the key defines what those words are. So the key might be like, you never know exactly what the key is, but it's like every third, second word is going to take this fourth probability and give it a higher probability.
And then that key can be used to deconstruct. And then you can use it to look at a piece of text and then deconstruct whether or not it was written by AI if it's showing all the signals. And so this is a very interesting article that it really does a great job of explaining it.
So if you're interested in understanding that beyond what I just told you, this is a great article. And it's pretty short. And now I get it.
[Claire Carlile]
I think I've got a comment, but I think I misheard you a little bit in that you said that they're going to give a completely different result every time, but it's not a completely different result. It's a different wording each time. It's not like if you say to someone, give me the four best restaurants that I can eat noodles in, in somewhere or something like that.
So it's not that they're going to give you a totally different result every time. It's more that the way that they describe things and the words that they use will be different.
[Darren Shaw]
Well, it's the selection process. You might've heard people talk about the difference between deterministic and probabilistic. So this is a probabilistic response.
And it does actually randomize each word in its response as it gives it back. And so it even randomizes some of the thought. Imagine that to generate one specific response about like, okay, what are the best businesses for pad thai in my city?
There are 10,000 of these little branches of decision making that it makes before it constructs the final response. And so that's why it's always slightly different. That's why AI visibility tracking is such a, it's all over the place.
You get different responses all the time because it's just doing that. And so it's very randomized.
[Claire Carlile]
Very randomized, but there must be like higher probability based on 80% is going to pull from the same. It's going to make the same recommendations 80% of the time, but it will do it in a different way using different words.
[Darren Shaw]
Precisely. Yeah, there we are.
[Claire Carlile]
Okay. My second one is a sterling sky video, which is a joy Hawkins and Elizabeth role. I love this when they do like a live, I will take your site down and talk about how terrible your marketing is.
So it's just like a car crash TV, but in the webinar format, anyway, the bit that I, this is just from the start was joy showing an example, what she is calling AI local pack, which, you know, as you've just said about the whole thing about AI results is it's all a big work in progress at the moment. Nothing is fixed. It's, it's not trackable or knowable, although people will say that they can, because it does change all the time.
And I feel like things will settle at some point or become more known, but she takes the example of she was doing some sort of lawyer search and it brought up in the AI local pack, a list, which for anyone like looking at it would go, Oh, look, that's an eight pack of Google business profiles, but it was purely being populated by an awful listicle that had been written by one of the law firms. And so it looks like Google business profile is actually taken directly for the list. The list links back to the list rather than the business name that's mentioned from each of those links.
So basically it's just a crappy list that looks like local results. One of the examples, Google just created a phantom listing because it is a real business, but the name of the business in the listicle isn't the correct business name. So it just created something from the list rather than from Google's amazing database, which they spend a lot of money and effort to maintain.
So rather than pulling on that, they thought it was a great choice to go to some sort of self-serving listicle. Anyway, these will become fewer and far between as you know, everyone games things as they start, but this is not a sustainable strategy. But I just thought it was quite interesting.
And she said that she is seeing at the moment for those AI local packs that are only showing, I think, I don't know if it's on a mobile or on a desktop, or it's only in the States. Google's using listicles and citations like Yelp to populate those AI local packs. So it's just interesting to think like, you know, this will change week by week.
Where is Google going with these? Where are they rolling out to? What do they look like?
How will we ever know what they are? But at the moment, that's not what everyone is seeing. And we still use, you know, what we see in the local finder and in maps, which is actually based on robust data.
But anyway, I just thought it was just, it was an epic. Oh my gosh, what is this? This is terrible.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. As Lily Ray would put it, it works until it doesn't. And right now you can do this, but it'll hurt you later.
So just don't do it. That's not smart. Stick with the fundamentals.
[Claire Carlile]
Okay.
[Darren Shaw]
All right. My next link is this. I thought it was very interesting.
I don't know how old this article is. It was last updated in July 23rd, but I think it was published earlier. But it's from one of these agencies that focuses on local services ads.
I'm Mark Infotech, and it was written by this guy, Ishan Gupta. Google local services ads now pulls content straight from your website. So it's interesting to me because there's been a lot of thought.
If you are an agency or a small business that cares about local search, you're probably aware about local services ads and how valuable and important they are. And so Google, of course, is like, Hey, you know what, if we put more ads here, we can make more money. And they have done that with local services ads.
And so you kind of have to get into them and be aware of them for your clients or for your own business. And so for the longest time, we didn't think that your website really played much role in your local services ads. But this is a hint that it does.
What you have on your website can affect your performance in the ads. So everyone that's spending on ads will be like, Can you put me at the top? I don't want to be buried 10th.
It's almost like the new SEO is just how to optimize your ads. And it's not just how much you spend. It's not just a bidding thing.
There's many factors that go into it. And so one of the factors that this article is talking about... So remember justifications in local search?
Claire knows this. So justifications are website mentions that service. That's a common thing.
So we knew that in a local results, Google was looking at the website and be like, your website mentions you have that service and they pull this justification. That's what this is. So Google started adding these justifications where their snippets pulled from the website.
I thought that was like, Oh, that's interesting. And it pulls all kinds of service descriptions, offers and promos. Pricing information gets pulled off of your website, your service area, certifications and licenses, awards, all those kind of little trust signals, number of years in business, those are getting lifted right from your website and now displayed on your local services ads ads.
And so you have no control over this, but you kind of do. And so the takeaway is you should be thinking about if you care about local services ads, and this is easily transferable if you just care about local search in general. And so the optimization options for you are put your best offers in a visible crawlable HTML near the top of your homepage.
So same day estimate 10% off your first service. Don't bury that stuff at the bottom of your page because we know that crawlers get exhausted on a page and what you have at the very top is super critical. So those are the kinds of things that you should put front and center one from a conversion perspective, but also because Google and other crawlers are looking at that have a unique page for each service.
Like I've been preaching that for years, that's an obvious one. Include pricing on your website. We've talked about that many times on this podcast, it's very important that's getting pulled.
Be consistent with what you put on your web page to what you put on your Google business profile. Match your services is a common thing that people overlook. So this article is very interesting to think about from how you could control that stuff that's getting pulled into your local services ads.
And you can definitely translate the knowledge from this article to just local search in general. So it's a good read.
[Claire Carlile]
And for the thing, ads are the thing. My final linky link is from Andy Crestedina, who I love. Obviously our guy.
So just a pop, I had a little newsletter actually where I did click through to go, tell me about these things, Andy. I want to know all about your take on direct traffic in Google analytics. And this sort of fits in with the conversation that we're having about brand.
So he talks about direct traffic and I sort of remember this. It's where you used to sit down with a client and try and explain away direct traffic. And it was almost as if we wanted everything to come in via Google because we're search marketers and we want to get the credit for absolutely everything.
And never having worked in like the online PR space, I would never have direct as my metric that I was celebrating. And direct would have been like, this is just something that Google doesn't know how it got to. And it's probably come from organic really, but the tracking is broken.
So, but he was saying it's time to think about direct and how that actually reflects probably and possibly the good work that you're doing in brand. So traffic ends up in the direct bucket. In the past, I've never thought to myself, how do I increase direct traffic?
But as me now, as a local marketer, I'm like, I would like to see an increase in direct and indirect that converts and does all the types of things I want them to do on the website. Because that's probably as a result of LLMs and brand building. So he just reminds everyone what gets categorized as direct.
So it's when someone types a new URL, they're brand aware, or they have offline awareness or exposure. So they clicked a bookmark or selected your URL from browser history. So that's based on brand experience.
They clicked a link in a file like a PDF, a document, et cetera. So they engaged with content beyond your website, or they clicked a link in an app. So email, Slack, SMS, AI, which is a bit like recommendation or word of mouth, or they came in via any link where the attribution was lost.
So there was a tracking issue. So he's saying essentially, hooray, direct, let's see some more of that good direct traffic that converts. So again, it's like a masterclass from Andy in content, which is understandable, which is accessible, which is actionable, but which really is proper marketing that's going to move the needle for businesses of any sizes.
So it's a big hoorah to Andy Crestedina because he's the best.
[Darren Shaw]
If you want to measure branded performance, one of the metrics I think a lot of people sleep on, it's in your Google Business Profile insights data. So in the performance data, you can see the queries, and you can actually track how many of your queries are branded queries in that data set, which is quite interesting to look at because that's how many people are coming to your Google Business Profile because they search specifically for your business. And that's a really interesting piece of data that I don't think very many people look at.
But you can use it to measure your branded presence.
[Claire Carlile]
I think that's interesting, isn't it? Because we've always looked at a branded search perspective, which is, let's look at Google Search Console, let's segment by branded and non-branded. But we only see that because it comes in as organic, whereas I like this idea of going, actually, it's living there.
That's great. We can measure brand in our organic search. But also, let's not forget to attribute our SEO activities to direct because it's another that we can celebrate the excellent work that we do.
[Darren Shaw]
The good news is we can take credit for everything now.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, everything. It's paid.
[Darren Shaw]
If you got a lead from any source, you can thank your agency for that. We did it. It was all because of us.
All right, well, that's another podcast recorded. As always, we request you to go and review WhiteSpark's amazing software and services at whitespark.ca. So signing up for our software and services is definitely our number one ask. Our number two ask is to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
Wherever you can leave a review, anywhere.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, do a trial. Sign up for something free.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, we do have some cool free stuff. Go check that out. Anyways, thanks for listening and join us next week for more local SEO news.
Bye, everybody.
[Claire Carlile]
Okay. We love you. Bye.