The Whitespark Local Update

This week, Claire Carlile is joined by special guest Dayna Lucio to discuss the latest local SEO news and updates, including:

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Guest

Dayna Lucio

Dayna Lucio is Associate Director, SEO at Amsive. She has almost a decade’s experience executing and developing comprehensive strategies for multi-location and franchise brands. Lucio's experience in local SEO has spanned various industries, including health, beauty and spa, fitness, home improvement, and more.

What is The Whitespark Local Update?

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, lovely people, and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update, which is the local SEO podcast that you know and love, where usually Darren and I go through some links from the previous week. And again, Darren is on a baguette-eating tour. He's doing very well, eaten 64 baguettes so far.

And I am lucky enough to have the very wonderful Dayna Lucio joining me for the podcast recording today. Dana, would you introduce yourself, please?

[Dayna Lucio]
Yes. Hi, thanks for having me today, Claire. I'm very excited to talk all the things SEO with you.

I'm Dayna, Associate Director of SEO at Amesiv. I have probably over 10 years now of SEO experience, primarily focused on enterprise and local multi-location franchise clients.

[Claire Carlile]
I always welcome your amazing insight into the world of local SEO, because you are working with businesses of all shapes and sizes, local businesses, every day at Amesiv. So it's brilliant to get your practitioner know-how. So I am going to ask you, Dana, will you kick us off with your first link, please?

[Dayna Lucio]
Yes. So my first link is from Google Developers. It's the announcement of GSC finally kicking off the expansion beyond websites.

It seems like Google is very busy these days with GSC and starting to integrate a lot of the things that I think us SEOs have been asking for. So outside of the new AI performance report, they also announced earlier this week that they are going to be letting businesses see content from social channels. So think Instagram, TikTok, YouTube X.

And I think this is really beneficial because those are the platforms that we have been seeing in SERPs over and over again. I know I see a lot of TikToks, X, YouTube always in the actual search results on Google. And I think giving brands and businesses the ability to see that in GSC along with the rest of their content is going to help with not only cross-team collaboration, but really visibility into kind of what content, what themes are driving people from search and also what's relevant to their audiences.

[Claire Carlile]
For sure. Is that live? Is access to that live at the moment or is that still a work in progress?

Do you know?

[Dayna Lucio]
I haven't gotten the chance yet this week to go into our clients accounts and looks, but I have seen the announcement maybe a couple of days ago and I'm excited to start connecting, looking at the features.

[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, definitely. I'm excited to get access to that. Will that be across the board then social?

Or is it just going to be the properties that Google has access to? Does the announcement say all of the different social media channels?

[Dayna Lucio]
Yeah, they call out Instagram and TikTok and X specifically. So it's a lot of the channels that I think that I've seen like pop up in like the actual SERP results, which I think makes the most sense for them. But I do think that those are all channels that have discoverability like capabilities.

And, you know, I think it's just reinforcing this like atmosphere that search doesn't always have to happen on Google. It can happen on all of these other channels and then hopefully, you know, lead us back to Google and websites and all those touch points that we know and love.

[Claire Carlile]
Brilliant. So like a missing piece of data that we've been waiting for for ages. So excited to see that.

My first link is from the Guardian. So a newspaper that is worldwide, but it's the Guardian UK, which was quite fascinating. So it's about AI summaries of TripAdvisor hotel reviews downplaying serious complaints.

So this is an investigation by an organisation which is called WITCH here in the UK. I don't know if there's the equivalent in other countries, but it's like a consumer research body. And so they talk about in this piece, AI generated reviews appearing on the travel websites, hotel web pages on TripAdvisor itself.

And it's talking about how those AI summaries dumbed down the actual, you know, concerns from the bad reviews from people. So one was an AI summary describing a hotel as popular with spacious rooms, diverse restaurants that earn rave reviews and spotless cleanliness. Yet in the reviews themselves, the customers reported being served raw chicken, shared photographs of flies and birds on the buffet and reported dead little mice.

So it sounds absolutely terrible. So I guess the point is here that so TripAdvisor is, you know, using its own AI, however that works to produce those summaries that has been surfaced by people, by WITCH, by this report. TripAdvisor says this is working as intended, but I bet they are tweaking lots of little knobs in the background.

And it said that the AI generated summaries did not replace travellers reviews and that customers have the common sense to check any AI advice against the billion plus reviews and contributions it has gathered. So that remains to be seen, doesn't it? Because people are generally using AI and the summaries in many ways to stop themselves for having to do all of those things in the digging.

So again, it's another warning to consumers, I guess, that do not trust something that is being generated by AI at face value and make sure that you do your actual research to see if there are going to be roasted mice or whatever it is in the buffet. I thought that was quite an interesting piece, especially when stuff about AI, you know, is very, very mainstream. It's in like a mainstream newspaper.

It's quite interesting that that sort of enters the popular consciousness in terms of how people search and how we make decisions. Do you fancy that hotel, Dana? Should we go on holiday?

[Dayna Lucio]
Yeah, I mean, I read the, I looked at the article and it, you know, kind of pointed out, I think sometimes we run into like AI is sometimes too polite. And with that you get, you know, those kind of overzealous, I guess, summaries. And it's just another case of, we've seen it when I think AI overuse first kind of like entered the scene.

We saw a lot of, you know, posts about them giving bad advice and things like that. So I think it's just a continuation that we're probably going to continue to see as people roll out different AI features, but definitely worth the chuckle this morning.

[Claire Carlile]
What's your next link?

[Dayna Lucio]
Yeah, so my next link is a Search Engine Land article around why TikTok deserves kind of to be a part of your SEO strategy. It's by Celeste Gonzalez, who I read a lot of her articles and really like her take on kind of different avenues of like local SEO and really how there's been like little pieces that have rolled out around like local discovery. So really like looking into, there's a feed, it's not like super new, but there is a feed on the platform that is just like a local feed where I know if I go in there, you see a lot of like, for here in Nashville, you see a lot of like restaurants, events, tourists, like people coming through and, you know, highlighting places.

But I do think it's beneficial because, you know, people are on platforms like TikTok and Instagram, you know, leisurely, they're getting content and being surfaced, you know, even organically is beneficial to businesses because, you know, somebody is going to maybe see that, you know, you see the best coffee shop being talked about by multiple people so many times, eventually, you're going to want to go to Google, look up that shop, probably read some reviews.

And like, hopefully, you know, what you read, you know, matches what you saw. And eventually, you are, you know, going to the website, checking out the menu, going to the coffee shop, etc., maybe throwing it on your travel itinerary. And I think it just really goes to show again, you know, like discovery can happen everywhere.

I think that marketing is holistic, and it just shows how other channels can really influence that search journey. It's a good lens into like how people actually search. I think sometimes as like SEOs, we need to take a step back and be like, how do I actually search and like, look for things.

And I think that's like, a really good example.

[Claire Carlile]
I love that I'm going to, I'm going to do my third link now, just because it's such it's a really, I think it's a good segue from what you said. And we have to like ring the little Celeste Gonzalez bell because I'm going to mention Celeste Gonzalez for the second time. This does happen in the podcast sometimes.

This is a piece from it's actually a little, a little bit older, it's a few months old, and it came up because I subscribed to the Kickpoint newsletter. And Dana DiTomasso was just flagging the content as really useful and interesting. And it is a piece that Aleda Solis wrote on her own website.

So it's about AI traffic versus AI citations, what clicks and cited pages show about the AI search journey. So Aleda, as she is want to do, took a massive set of data and analyze it. So she analyzed some SEMrush data across 40 sites, four verticals.

And she's working on a distinction between, a lot of people are making this distinction between AI traffic and the pages that are visited via AI traffic. And our AI citations that are actually influencing people and giving us this visibility in the AI, let's not say SERP in the AI results, are two completely different pieces of content. And we're partly forgetting the part of the search journey that includes all those other pieces of content.

If we're only measuring the traffic that comes to our website via AI, it's going to be different pages that are influencing the actual customer journey part. So go ahead, everyone, and go and read all that. But a little summation of what she found there is, yes, of course, AI search traffic is only tiny compared to our organic search traffic.

We know that. But what we do not know, unless we are monitoring our citations and doing all of our query fanouts and understanding all the different parts of how people search, is the user journey has changed completely, which I did mention Celeste Gonzalez's LinkedIn post where she talked about finding address on Instagram, and then her search journey that took in all of these different points and went back and forth. It's not a linear journey. And one thing about that is she didn't include something that's a real huge part of my search journey now, which is using my LLM of choice, Claude, which is great because I've been investigating putting together a bicycle for bike packing.

So Claude has got a project. It knows exactly my frame, my wheel sizes, all these other things. So I am getting all of this information and suggestions and advice, what bike rack shall I get?

And I'm going in and out, up and down of websites and using Google and using the LLMs. So the point is here that I think, you know, you've already touched on this and said, this isn't how we search. And I've just said, that's not how I search. And so if businesses aren't already thinking about just creating some sort of map of a purchase journey and all these different touch points that now include, you know, LLMs, as well as the social channels that you were mentioning, then you need to do it for some of the most important products and services or whatever it is that your local business does.

And then the actual point of Elayda's piece is you need to measure those two different things, the pages that are appearing in the AI results with the citations, as well as the pages that people land on from your website via AI. I just thought that was really interesting. What is your next link, please?

[Dayna Lucio]
We have like a theme of this, but staying on theme, I have an article about building a brand worth finding. And it's really talking about, again, discoverability. It's from Beth Neunington on Search Engine Land.

And it really like mirrors, I think, it's not very like local SEO focused, but it very much mirrors the way that I think about local SEO. It really like hones in on signals that are fueling discoverability. And it's a lot around brand reputation, consistency, you know, third party like validation almost.

And really just like telling the same story across different, you know, channels, avenues, websites, social channels. And I think that having all of that like consistent information really helps with, you know, AI Search LLMs understanding businesses and brands as like a true entity. And I think it reinforces a lot of the things, you know, that we're telling our clients where, you know, is your brand message consistent?

Is your about content consistent? Are those things, you know, consistent across different channels, different sources that we know that, you know, AI Search LLMs are pulling from because otherwise they can lose, you know, kind of the plot almost. They'll lose, you know, some of the information.

And that's when I think you start seeing some like hallucinations, things like that. Also, we know just by looking at AI results that they're pulling in, you know, all of them, chat GBT, perplexity, everything is pulling in third party like websites to kind of validate what your website maybe is saying. Reputation has always been, you know, important top of mind, but I think it's getting almost like a reemergence as people are starting to really think about what people are saying online about their brands and, you know, trying to figure out how to address users' concerns and also understand maybe themselves a little bit better.

But I think this article really touches on a lot of that and then really touches on, again, that consistent information, citations, listings, PR news, you know, messages, all of those things, I think kind of tie together pretty nicely to really build a brand in general. I think small businesses and large businesses all can learn from that.

[Claire Carlile]
That sounds like a really good one to use to share with clients as well. That sort of roundup piece, that seems to be joining up a lot of the dots when you try and explain this to people. It's nice to have it in one place.

Let's have a look. My final link is a webinar, it's a presentation that Amanda Jordan did the other day. I love Amanda, don't see enough of Amanda.

And this was brilliant, as you would expect. So this presentation is about AI workflows for local SEO. So immediately I saw that and my sort of ears pricked up because I was like, oh, okay, that's interesting.

Because I think a lot of the time, and she does actually, she talks about this, we sort of get lost in that place of like, you know, I should be using automation, I should be AI, and my life should be so much easier. Because, you know, I should be really automating things and getting stuff done with AI. But then, you know, sometimes that doesn't happen, because you know, you haven't got the systems in place, you're not sure what you should be using it for.

And then you have the deep crisis of, you know, am I just going to be replaced, basically, as a human being? By an AI? Does anyone need me anymore?

So I really like, this is a long presentation, it's like 70 slides or something. And she talks about, she puts it in context about how a lot of local SEO teams are actually just choosing the wrong tasks. So they're going ahead, and they are putting together and using AI workflows for the parts that actually require the strategist, and they require that insight.

And she talks about how getting it wrong and making the wrong decisions is wasting money, because obviously, you burn credits, you know, AI, as well as burning the world, we're also burning money when we use AI. And it also produces bad SEO, it could be bad SEO, it could be an absolutely terrible outcome for a client if something goes horribly wrong. So she's talking about finding the balance where we work out what we need different things to do.

So she talks about automation, AI or strategist, and then she puts it in the context of automation for mundane and repetitive tasks. I don't know if you do any of those, I seem to they seem to creep into my workflow quite often. And then she talks about the AI, the agent.

And that's where you need pattern recognition. And, you know, you're generating something from a structured input. So it's us as the strategist that are coming up with structured input.

And then she talks about guardrails, and I'll come to guardrails in a minute. But her examples are things like in there could be a million and one examples, depending on what you're trying to do. It's a Google business profile content using, you know, manual content from somewhere, if it's connected to a social account, category data, review response drafts, competitor category pattern analysis.

So it could be that you're using like a local SEO tool, we're all very familiar with those that could be using elements of AI and doing this very well. Or it might be that you're building something unique, that doesn't already exist in a tool set that you're using. So that's when she talks about, you know, using those AI systems for that.

And then she's goes on to, obviously, this is a bit that I love, because it means there's still a place for strategists, and people with actual human experience. So the strategist, she calls the thinking part. So you use that when you require holding context across many factors, you know, we are steeped in information about an industry, about competitors, about the marketplace.

And although you can set all of that context within your AI, it's a lot of information to go in at one point. And the outcome is going to depend on business specific knowledge that we have internally. She gives some examples of that, like strategy, roadmaps, and deciding, you know, on location buildings, when to consolidate, when to build, etc, etc.

And talks about why AI can't replace a strategist. So this is a really useful presentation that one, gives the context for using and designing these workflows. And two, is a bit of a warning about what to make sure that you get right.

And I think one of the biggest things, and we know this, because we're sort of learning as we go along, not necessarily as practitioners, but also as people that are searching and using, you know, AI workflows to solve our own problems, is what you get out is only as big going to be as good as what you put in. So making sure that your prompts are excellent, that you put guardrails in place. So you're saying to the AI, don't just go ahead and do this thing.

If you find this, you need to check, you know, but basically, finally on it, another thing that she said is, once you've got something working, and it's producing, you know, what she's saying, like up 80% or more as good as you would do as a strategist, don't forget to keep going back in and checking it. Because if it's worked okay, for six weeks doesn't suddenly mean that it's going to work okay for week seven and week eight, which I thought was a really interesting angle, because we sort of think that, oh, well, it's working fine. But what if it then starts pulling in third party data or parts of a data set that you haven't asked it to pull in after that, because you'll need to check because this could go pretty much horribly wrong if you're running some sort of process and then allowing that to run wild and free with either your website or Google business profiles.

So I really enjoyed that. So we'll link then to the presentation there. So you can go and have a little look at that.

I think that might be it. We have done six of the linky links. Go ahead, bookmark them, make sure that you read them, watch them, consume them.

I don't know, get them tattooed onto your forearms, all of those things. So Dana, I want to say a big thank you to you. Thank you.

[Dayna Lucio]
Yes, thanks, Claire. Thanks for having me.

[Claire Carlile]
Just remains to say thank you to you, our lovely watchers, listeners, like, subscribe, write a letter and we hope you enjoyed it and come back soon. Thank you very much.

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