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 “must-read” and “must-watch” links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
speaker-0 (00:00.738)
Hello and welcome to the White Spark local update with me, Claire Carlyle.
speaker-1 (00:07.528)
And me, Darren Shaw. This is the podcast where we will tell you about three cool links. Well, six in total, one three from me and three from Claire. About very interesting things that happened in local search marketing and AI marketing over the past weekish. So, Claire, what do you got? You got something interesting to talk about?
speaker-0 (00:28.094)
I always, Darren, have many exciting things that I feel that I need to share with you.
speaker-1 (00:34.094)
A great podcast host.
speaker-0 (00:36.386)
Need to share so many things with the world. I the first thing that I am going to share is something that was spotted by the eagle-eyed Haver who works at White Spark, and she saw something that was back that had disappeared. So if you use Google Business Profile, you've got products which are populated via product editor. You might have noticed that the links
Have fallen off or fell off a little while ago. So that's a bit sad, especially if you are UTM tagging those links and you see it might not be a massive amount of traffic coming through to your website, but it's some traffic. So I was in touch with Google Business Profiles Report and was told that the fact that the links had fallen off was working as intended, which normally means, which normally means this.
This is a planned feature. So I thought, well, there we are. We can, you know, we'll still use that opportunity to give Google information about our business. And then suddenly they popped, pop back up. So anyway, it's mildly interesting if you've taken the time to actually populate your Google Business Profile products. I think they're one of those things that people are like, these are gonna go soon. I don't think this is a useful feature. This is something that Google is definitely gonna retire. Well, you know, they haven't so far. And
like everything, just use it as a chance to give Google information about your business. so anyway, links are back. So if you'd lost a bit of traffic, you might hopefully get it back now. The end.
speaker-1 (02:15.616)
Yeah, there was lots of threats that they were gonna retire the product section. around when they were really emphasizing merchant center. They were like, Hey, small businesses, use merchant center. Don't use this janky thing that we built wa ages ago that barely works.
speaker-0 (02:32.526)
Yeah. And I I agree with that. Obviously, if you if you are a big eco if you know you have you sell online, you've got products with barcodes, of course, take advantage of having a product feed. But if you're not that type of product and you are the type of business that they say, one thing to remember is that your products it's funny when you you skip between platforms, so the guidelines of different platforms then start to affect your Google business profile.
So obviously your products need to adhere to the shopping ads policy. And my my favorite Folly Farm, we kept getting our products removed because they thought we were selling live lions. But we're we're we're we're not selling live lions. So that's another thing to keep an eye on. yeah. So don't don't sell don't sell elephants. It's it's not appropriate.
speaker-1 (03:28.952)
Do advise every business to fill out the product section. Even if you don't you know like, well, we don't really sell products. We we sell services like lawyers and that kind of stuff. You know, put your services as products in there, which is technically against the guidelines, but I've never heard of Google ever do anything about it. This is the first I've ever heard. So Google's fine with it as long as it's not lions. That's basically the takeaway here. I
speaker-0 (03:52.206)
I thought you were gonna say I always recommend that people populate their products with elephants but then you didn't
speaker-1 (03:58.378)
yeah, elephants are fine, lions definitely not. Don't do it. Okay, so my link is my first link to talk about. it's the one from Mary Mary Mellis on the White Spark blog. She's great. We pulled all this data for those review questions. You know, like if you go to Libra review for a restaurant, it asks you all these extra questions like, what did you eat? How much did you pay? The best way it asks. It's like interrogating you.
To find out more information about your experience at that place. And so it's interesting because the questions are well, what other categories get those questions? And what are the questions? And why does Google ask these ones and not those ones? So there's lots of like, hmm, that's interesting. And so we tried to answer all those questions. And well, Miriam mostly did. So we just gathered the data, gave it to Miriam, and she wrote up this amazing article. Only 25%.
Of the categories that we looked at have review questions. So chances are your business category might not have it. But if you're an agency, then lots of your clients will have these questions. the there's one of the questions which says, which services did you get? And I find it very interesting what services Google suggests. They're like, check off the ones that you got, right? And sometimes there's real weird, wacky stuff in there. What services did you get? And then it's like, I got yak shaving.
I got like, you know, just really bizarre things. And I was like, what? That's like and where is that coming from? That is interesting because do you know that if you go into your Google Business profile, you can go into the services section and it'll say, here's a bunch of suggestions for services you might want to add to your profile. And you can kind of look at there's like these little pills and you can check them off. Be yeah, I do offer that. and that yak shaping. No, I had that get in there. And so there's a bunch of these weird ones. And
You can now see those on competitors because Google pulls those into that question. So that's a very interesting kind of takeaway that it's like a secret way to see what are the suggested categories or competitors in the 25% case that they have these questions on their profile. So it is it is a competitor mining kind of thing, which is interesting. You kind of dig through and you just go to you go like write a review.
speaker-1 (06:22.112)
And then you'll see what services you get. You expand that and you'll see all the suggested category, suggested service. That was interesting. Miriam says it gives you insight about what Google wants to know. What are the questions that they're asking on their profile when they ask for review? That's the data that Google's desperate to have. They're asking everybody who's reviewing your business to give you that information. So ding. Apparently, that's important information to Google. So put it on your website, put it on your Google business profile, answer those questions.
As the business and just put it in places that Google will crawl and associate it with your business. I think that's a huge thing. So you want to know what are the questions. and then the other thing is mix up your review templates. So Miriam has a sort of tactical guide to don't always ask the same questions. Make a number of different review request templates and rotate through them. Just be you know, asking different variations. You want you want variation in your review data set. So
one way to get that is looping through your review requests and tweaking them a little bit and and asking different questions. Anyways, it's a great post. You should read it. It's very interesting about those kooky review questions Google's asking.
speaker-0 (07:33.326)
Yeah, super useful to see everything in one place because it's quite fascinating. We used to use the answer questions about this place feature and probably still do to understand what Google thought was important, which should lead us to think, well, that's what users would think is important. So it's nice to see all that all in one place so you can because otherwise you only see it when you're actually looking at the at reviews.
speaker-1 (07:59.574)
The whole data set is downloadable. So you just go to the go to that article, download the whole data set, search for your category and be like, look, these are the questions.
speaker-0 (08:07.958)
That's clever. my second link is from the Yelp blog, which I actually saw this on LinkedIn, it was Crystal Tang. It's really funny, all these different platforms that exist, and then we're like, this is super important, this isn't important, this is super important, this is important, and we flip-flop through this through the iterations of what Google uses through to you know what do LLMs use.
And so now this is another iteration of Yelp is actually quite important if you are in the type of industry that uses Yelp. So I'm in the UK. Yelp isn't such a big thing over here. but Yelp is a discovery and review platform for local brick and mortar and service-based businesses. So if you are in any of those, then it's going to be important to you. So what is happening is so Yelp and Chat GPT working together or anyway, ChatGPT is using
Yelp's data and functionality. And Crystal was saying, a few weeks ago, Yelp announced a partnership to license its review, photo, and request a quote content to ChatGPT. And I'm beginning to see this integration live in local search results. So a couple of people were chatting there in LinkedIn saying, you know, but are you seeing it here and are you seeing it here and are you seeing it here? And Crystal saying, well, it's coming out in more and more different verticals. So if you are not paying attention to Yelp,
Or you were and then you thought it doesn't matter anymore, then actually it might be again. So go and have a look. And you know, if Chat GPT is one of the touch points for your customers and your potential customers, then you'll want to look at it again. If it is not, then you might like to focus on whatever is important to your customers. Have you got some thoughts? Darren has thoughts.
speaker-1 (09:55.214)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (09:59.8)
Huge shout out to Ruben Stamper, one of our podcast listeners, who actually emailed me about this two days ago. Well, first he said, I love all the content you and Claire put out there. Thanks, Ruben. And then he also asked me the question. He's like, gosh, as you know, as a business owner, like, do I need to worry about Yelp now? I freaking hate Yelp. And I'm like, Yeah, me too. Yelp's annoying. So and it was interesting timing because I had just recorded a video.
speaker-0 (10:06.688)
thank you, Reuben.
speaker-1 (10:29.366)
Showing Chat GPT's market share shrinking. And so they've shrunk from 100% when they first launched the only chat bot, AI chat, down to about 47%. And who's taken most of that? It's Gemini, it's Google. And I'm my belief is that Google will continue to steal market share. And so if you are a small business owner,
In an industry where Yelp is already important, then yes, you might want to give it a little extra attention. But if you are in a country or industry where Yelp doesn't really seem to have a foothold, I would say don't worry about it. Yelp is annoying because you can't ask for reviews on Yelp. If you ask for reviews, Yelp is like, no, you are fired, you're out, you're in big trouble. You ask for a review, you we're calling the cops. That's the way Yelp is. They're just the worst.
speaker-0 (11:19.086)
Definitely. But like on that subject, if you do any say for example, you're asking people, how did you find out about us? So you're actually doing that rather than using analytics, you're actually saying to someone, if the first thing that they say is ChatGPT, then it's still important to that person in terms of the j the journey. And I still think that's why it comes down to what is important for your customers and what do they use.
If your customers are some of that tiny percentage of people that are using it heavily as part of their journey, then you should reconsider. It is
speaker-1 (11:52.938)
interesting because we do track that question how did you hear about us and it's number two for us on
speaker-0 (11:59.32)
Don't tell people the secret sauce, Darren.
speaker-1 (12:02.275)
Well I would I'm I'm not hiding anything on this podcast, basically.
speaker-0 (12:06.156)
That's true. Let's feature all of our direct competitors every week.
speaker-1 (12:11.314)
The number one source of our acquisition for local ranking grid software, which is awesome by the way, you should definitely use it, is web search. So people put web search as the option. Number two is freaking chat GPT.
speaker-0 (12:25.55)
Exactly. It's still top of mind.
speaker-1 (12:28.482)
Anyways, my next link is from Cyrus Shepard. I love that guy. And he publishes interesting and smart things all the time. So you should be following him on all the places. All the time. but this is a LinkedIn post. You need to nail your brand facts. You need to, or you're in big trouble. It's like a really like critical and easy AI optimization tip. you've got to define your positioning, who you are, what you do, whom you help.
speaker-0 (12:34.19)
sorry.
speaker-1 (12:58.328)
problems you solve and what you specialize in. He's giving you the roadmap right there. You need to define that very, very well. And once you do, you want to be consistent about that in on the pages of your website and and I don't think. And I left a comment and I said, yeah, every business should use this tip and they should update the descriptions on their citations. You got all these business directories floating around the the citation, the description on it is the thing that you wrote.
10 years ago when you started your business, you should follow his advice in this post to kind of create those brand facts, update your description, and then get all those citations updated. It's a really smart, easy A-I-S-E-O-Win. And yeah, I just thought it was a pretty good LinkedIn post and great job slicing up your content into smaller posts.
speaker-0 (13:52.366)
Love it. Masterclash repurposing content. Well done, Cyrus.
speaker-1 (13:59.096)
Yeah, Ross Simmons would be proud.
speaker-0 (14:01.102)
definitely. Right. My final linky link is Vinay again on LinkedIn, but he quite rightly also credits a different Google business profile product expert, who is called Jasek. I hope I've head said your name properly, who saw that well, Google has added, and I don't know exactly when this ha happened.
Google has added the feature or the functionality for you as someone that writes a review, so as a maps user, to report an owner response. Wow.
speaker-1 (14:42.894)
Reported for what? Being rude?
speaker-0 (14:45.442)
Being well, obviously going against the Google business profile, or isn't it? Maps. Yeah, this is, you know, I was just talking about all these different like we've got Google Maps, and then we had Google Ads, and we're talking about Google Business Profile, and we're talking about best practice and policy, which is, you know, you have to dip in and out of all these different guidelines, help centers, and policies, because it's not just one surface. So this, you know, it's not.
I was trying to find has Google written anything about this? So I looked at the Google Maps help pages. I looked at the Google Business Profile help pages. I can't see anything, but it must be some sort of new functionality because then I trawled through the help center and there were a number of people in Google Maps that were saying, someone wrote an incredibly awful response to my review. How do I report it? But it it wasn't possible. There wasn't the functionality. So I think this is really important to.
sort of give some sort of shall I say power back to the maps user because people sh everyone should be like operating within you know the the guidelines of being being a good person first of all but secondly actually Google's guidelines for maps users or for businesses anyway so you can report a response and the same way if you would report a review you so you right click
where it would say edit the review or delete the review. And now there is a third option that says report owner response or whatever it says. Anyway, you do that, and then you get a drop-down, you get a little pop-up that gives you the different reasons that you would report it. So you can report it. The next question is: what happens? Does anything ever get done? And I know that like businesses reporting reviews and not getting the outcome that they wish that they would.
get takes up, I don't know, a lot at least 50% of the Google Business Profile Community Help Center, as far as I can see. So I think the question is, what happens next? And the answer is loads more posts in the community saying Google hasn't removed the the the response that the business owner wrote. so you'll get both sides moaning in the two different platforms.
speaker-1 (16:47.566)
At least fifty percent yeah.
speaker-1 (17:05.398)
It's a it's a it's a new opportunity to moan to Google. That's what this is.
speaker-0 (17:10.753)
What's that image? Is it an image of a of a a snake going round biting its own tail? Yeah. That's where we are. anyway, that's it. Good.
speaker-1 (17:22.702)
I think it's really interesting. It's like it's so common where someone just leaves a negative review about a business, right? And they're like, Yeah, I thought the food was bad. And then the owner comes in with a response that is totally unhinged and is like, you know, calling them names and just being absolutely awful. Like until now, you'd have no way of like being like, Hey, that was not okay. Now you can say that was not okay by reporting the owner response. And hopefully.
Google will do something about it, but as you noted, probably not. So at least they gave us a button. Isn't that doesn't that feel great? Now you can press a button.
speaker-0 (18:00.686)
Yeah, you can press a button. And and be, you know, get very familiar with Google's guidelines about what, you know, what is against their guidelines and what is, because just saying I you know, I'm you know, you might think it's like, they shouldn't have said that and it's a one star review and they haven't been here, but you can't prove it and there's so many different, you know, and it will be the same the other way unless some anyway, blah, blah, blah. Go and read the guidelines because you need to familiarize yourself with them. Go and read them. Yeah.
speaker-1 (18:25.784)
Go and read him. I got a new, I got a link here. It's another LinkedIn post. This is from I don't know if he says Saganthan or Shoganthan. you know this guy he's an AI SEO superstar, and he's very interesting. The post is excellent, and it's like every client call I'm on ends with the exact same question: what should we actually do?
speaker-0 (18:40.59)
Yeah.
speaker-1 (18:55.16)
To win in large language models. And he says, here are the 15 tips I share with him. And I don't know if I've ever seen a better list of 15 tips. It's very succinct, it's very to the point. It is very exactly the like the do these things, and you are really gonna be crushing it in AI SEO. And so I'll give you a few.
Treat AI, SEO like a marathon. Models take time to retra retrain. So the work you do today might only show up months or even years from now, right? Different large language models operate on entirely different rules. If you apply a one size fits all strategy, you will completely miss the mark on most of them. And so that's interesting. And so I think a lot of people are like, AI, SEO, I'm gonna do these things. But it's actually pretty like you got to do it five different ways. So you gotta think about the differences there.
Engines fetch your page live while the user waits. They give up very quickly. So if your page speed is slow, you could not even be considered. so basically, there's 15 of these tips of things you need to think about for AI optimization. And I think it is worth sharing with our podcast listeners. And I think you should click the link in the show notes and read all of these tips because it was one of the better posts I've seen in a while.
speaker-0 (20:16.694)
Yeah, fair, very good. Yep. Do you yeah. That's it, you know. We're finished.
speaker-1 (20:23.382)
We did it. We did a whole podcast. And everybody, please go and sign up for Watspark software and services. We'd really appreciate that. And at least check us out. You know, it's good stuff in there. And then also, if you like the podcast, you can leave us a review on any of the places where you get your podcasts. And that my those are those are my main requests for everyone.
speaker-0 (20:47.212)
I think if you would like the full list of requests, then just comment.
speaker-1 (20:52.342)
Send me an email and I'll ask you to do more things.
speaker-0 (20:55.374)
Thank you. Goodbye.
speaker-1 (20:57.326)
Bye. Thanks. Bye everybody.