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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 (00:00.078)
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
with me Claire Carlile and we are here with a linky linky linky links for you.
We have links. got exciting things because we missed last week. Neither of us could record the podcast, but it's OK because you know what? That's just the way it goes. And now we have two weeks worth of goodness to share with you. I've got some cool things to talk about and I'm sure you do, Claire. What is the first cool thing you want to talk about?
Let me tell you all about a lovely thing that Lisa Landsman, one of my absolute favorite googly people, put on the LinkedIn. I always follow her because she tells me things. And she told me in this LinkedIn post that was for everyone and not just me, but I felt like it was just for me, that there was a new video.
on the YouTube from the Google business profiling people. And it was actually jolly good, which was surprising in many ways. The audio quality, meanwhile, was not good, although it was lovely to hear a British accent. So well done, Google. That was lovely. So this video on YouTube, which we will link to, was very good. And it runs through
Claire (01:27.67)
It's not just a throwaway piece of fluffy content. It's actually really good. And it talks you through various scenarios for getting support from Google Business Profile. And one of the things that I wanted to say, because another link that I've got is actually from the horse's mouth and from Google. There are many reasons that I like to actually sign up to the newsletters for small businesses and Google Business Profile, because one, you actually can learn things.
But it is very useful to see how they are positioning elements of the product and the service. So there are many layers of the importance of following the newsletters and watching these videos. But anyway, it's a super useful video. Go and watch it. Pass it on to your clients or whoever is servicing your clients when it comes to getting support, because I am sure they will find it useful.
Big thanks to Lisa Landsman. I feel like there was like a dark period in Google Business Profile and Google My Business where there just wasn't a lot of sort of support and direction coming from Google. There was some for sure, but it feels like they've really leveled it up. And Lisa's a real key to that. Like Lisa's out there, she's speaking at events, she's publishing stuff on LinkedIn.
I'm not sure when she took on this role, but it's been very nice to have you, Lisa. Welcome to the local search community. I know you've been here for a while, but it's just really nice to have such a lovely person within Google advocating for small businesses and driving the feature development and the support and all of the great stuff with Google Business Pro. It's really nice to see Google.
investing resources and growing Google Business Profiles. Somebody asked me a question on the white spark, asked me anything about the local search ranking factors. They're like, with AI search, does this mean Google Business Profiles are dying and we don't need them anymore? I was like, no, it's exactly the opposite. Google knows how much power there is and how much value there is in their massive Google Business Profile database.
Darren (03:37.644)
and they are investing resources. You can see it. New features are coming out. Great new support stuff is coming out. So it's a great time to be in local search.
What a day for us all. Now Darren, share your linky linky linky link with us.
This is mega huge. Google has announced on a blog post yesterday that coming soon to Google reviews, the ability to leave a review anonymously. is like what? So Google has never given us his power before, but it is coming. It's rolling out right now. So they say in the blog post that this will be rolling out over the course globally over the course of this month.
And it will allow you to, so in the Google Maps app or on desktop, you'd be able to click edit profile. And then there's a little thing that says use custom name and profile pick for posting. And you can see it in the animated GIF that's in the blog post, like how it's gonna work. I tried, I updated my Google Maps app. I went in there, I don't have it yet. It's still rolling out globally. But this is pretty significant. And I think it raises concerns about review fraud on.
you know, being able to hide your identity. It also, I was thinking about this, there is this sort of response that you see to negative reviews on Google. You'll see people say, we checked our records and we have no record of you being a customer of our business, so we know that you're a liar.
Darren (05:13.55)
You'll see people say that kind of stuff in their review response. But you won't be able to do that anymore because instead of it being a customer name, it's like Fluffy Rabbit 329. And so that is interesting. And it'll be very interesting to see how this rolls out. There's a positive side for sure. And that is some people, they're like, don't want to publicly leave a review online, especially in sort of like sensitive industries. So let's say you are
getting a review for your therapist, your psychotherapist, right? Your couples therapist. People don't want to be talking about that stuff with their actual name, so it might be helpful in some industries where it might help you get more reviews. And that, think, is why Google's doing it, because they realize, like I said earlier, the value of their review database, their Google Business Profile database, and I think that it makes it a little bit easier for some people to leave reviews. So I think it's a really cool feature.
It'll be interesting to see the impact on fake reviews when that rolls out. But yeah, interesting. In the back end, they still know that that review is connected to a Google account. So Google will still have the ability to identify fake reviews. I do think they are trying to improve that system. yeah.
Interesting. Yeah. And one of the things that you won't be able to do is if you had clicked through to the person that had left it and saw that they left 25 one-star reviews for vacuum cleaner repair in countries all over Europe. You can't see that, can you? So you don't get the chance to highlight that it looks spammy.
I think you could still click on the profile. It would just be like all those reviews were left by Fluffy Rabbit.
Claire (07:04.44)
Fluffy Bunny. okay. well, we'll see, won't we?
Yeah, that's a good one. think that's gonna make mine when I when I update my nickname on my Google business. It's definitely going to be fluffy bunny.
So if you see that in your reviews, is AKA GARANGE.
It's me leaving fake reviews all over the internet.
So my second link, like I said, is bit of a looking at the Google-y link. So another thing that I was invited to, but not really, because it was just something that was in a newsletter, was a little, not really a webinar. It was two people from Google talking about optimizing your Google business profile if you are a bar, a nightclub, or a restaurant with a beverage program.
Claire (07:52.846)
So I've sort of skipped, skipped through it a little bit just to see if there was anything new and interesting. I don't think there was like massively. Uh, I haven't finished watching it, but if you do have clients in any of those niches or you are in that niche, then then go and give it a watch and listen just again, because I think it is worth understanding what Google's messaging is, what they want you to use. And maybe they'll flag up some new stuff.
You can always listen to it on 1.5 and then it won't take you so long to watch. I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into communications from the Google at the moment.
Yeah, nightclubs, restaurants and beverage programs like Google is very focused on those and they tend to roll out features to those industries first just because they're so active. And so it's a great area to watch. So I bet you there's some interesting insights in that. My next link is via the magnificent Greg Sterling on LinkedIn. So he shares that Google is
Hmm.
Darren (09:02.286)
doing cool stuff with local product inventory. So this is like, you know, if you do a search for like product near me, so I'm looking for a specific television near me, Google will show a let Google call button that will collect information from the user and then it will call all the local stores and be like, hi, do you have this TV? And it's like Google's robots will call and find out and then you get the thing back.
So Google's rolling out some of these really cool things. And that's an interesting thing for any retail locations that care about local. So you may be getting a phone call from Google. I find that quite interesting. And then all the retail locations will have robots on their end tied to their inventory. So all the robots will talk to each other and help us, our useless humans, as we float around in our chairs.
drinking our protein shakes. When I read this, was like, want check it out. So I ran some tests, some searches in Google Shopping. And I didn't know this was true until yesterday. But if you search for a specific product model, I did like Bose headphones, I did a Samsung TV with a specific product code, don't know, called their identifier. And then Put Near Me.
It shows a local pack in the shopping results. I've never seen that before. It's like in the shopping results you get a local pack of three businesses with that and then they're using the justification like website mentions that specific product on our website. So it's really interesting to see Google doing that and putting the local pack in there. And then you can also there's an option in the shopping where you can just click nearby and then you also basically get the same thing. Like if you put near me in the cute.
query or you don't put near me in the query and you just click nearby, you get this local pack. And I've never seen that before. And it just made me think about that whole integration across Google's Google business profile ecosystem and how valuable and important that stuff is for Google, especially for the future of search as all this gets more automated and improved via AI.
Claire (11:19.694)
Yeah, it's nice. It's like that agentic AI piece because I just want to press a button and can you find out if there's availability for it and then you can pay for it using my Google wallet and thank you. I don't want to touch any buttons or do anything.
Yeah, I know.
Darren (11:37.198)
I know. It's like, hey Google, I want this TV. Please find the best price and have it delivered to my house. Thank you.
then watch the programs on it. You know, I don't want to do that. Just, just give me an AI overview about what that program was about. I don't have to do anything. It's great. What a time to be alive.
yeah.
Oh, right. Okay. My last one. And now this was a bit tricky because there were about 6 million links of Lily Ray basically saying the same thing, which I loved. Lily Ray did, we will include all the links in the podcast notes, but Lily Ray did a really good video on the YouTube, which was her doing her talk from Mozcon or something. Anyway, that, and then she did a a webinar with Dana.
was really good. And then finally, so the bit that I'm actually going to talk about is the rather wonderful Elizabeth Linder from Kickpoint writing up a piece on the Kickpoint website, SEO imposter syndrome in an AI era, you're not on your own. I think where I've got to in my mind at the moment is can we just stop talking about it?
Claire (13:00.108)
So I promise I won't do any more links about let's stop talking about it, but can we just stop talking about it? Because if someone says to me, my God, what about AI and LLMs and my traffic? And I'm like, okay, have you actually got Google analytics on your website? Do you know where your traffic is coming from? Who are your customers? Why would they choose you over another? If you haven't done all of those foundational marketing things and you're not doing proper marketing, please don't keep telling me the sky is falling down with LLMs. Okay. Just do all the.
that you need to do. this is a really good piece, which is like, it's just SEO. It's just SEO. But apart from saying it's just SEO and all of those things and don't worry about it and chill out, some really good actionable points about, okay, this is how you can actually learn how to use AI for some useful things at the end. Okay. But a lot of it was just like, read this, stop crying into your cornflakes in the morning.
Just carry on with what you were doing before, but keep an eye to the future, but just stop going on about it. And I promise I'm not going to do any more posts like this, but this is a really good one.
This is a really good one. It's a really good one. I've been actually engaging on the social medias lately and when people post the whole thing where they're like, AI SEO is not SEO. You guys need to stop saying this. Then I ask them, what are the things that you see differently? Or what are the things that you would do differently that you have to do differently that we weren't doing before? And then they give the list and then I'm like, okay.
Well, good SEOs were doing this stuff before. And I do think there is this thing where we're a little bit more aware of things that we should have been doing before that we weren't doing before. But foundationally, it's like, this is all stuff. Like, this is not new. We've been talking about this for 10 years. And the best SEOs in the world were certainly thinking about these things and doing these things. But I have yet to see something that is 1000 % like new, new, new that we never did at all. No SEO in the world had ever done this before. I haven't found that yet.
Darren (15:09.568)
I'm looking, I'm looking, but I think that this post is very interesting and much respect for Liz Linder. She is fantastic. And so I will give this a read. I got one more thing to talk about and it is a dude from Google in Ireland, Anthony Kepton. I probably said his name awfully wrong, but he.
Shit.
Darren (15:32.992)
He published a cool thing and I was like, look at this stuff coming from Google. So he said, you can mine your competitor reviews, like they're negative reviews and they can be a gold mine for your marketing. And I agree. And so the strategy is this, you gather all your competitors, negative reviews. And he gives the example of like, if you were in a SaaS, you would get them from G2, Captera, Trustpilot, but you could definitely do this for local businesses too. So you get all their negative reviews and then you ask,
Gemini, he's suggesting you use Gemini for this and I would too because it's from, my opinion, the best LLM, especially since it just launched Gemini 3, which is awesome. And then you say, analyze these negative customer reviews for X product, identify the three recurring pain points for each pain point, write a compelling headline for a new product that solves that specific problem. And I'm like, this is very smart. And then you extract this gold, the LLM will give you really good
language that unhappy customers really want to hear. So I thought it was very cool. I revised the prompt for the locals. I said, analyze these negative customer reviews, identify the top three recurring pain points. For each pain point, write a compelling headline about how our service addresses that specific problem. So it's really smart. There are plugins or Chrome extensions you can use. You can go to your competitor profile. It'll extract all their reviews, sort by negative first, have it extract the reviews, and then
You could take all the reviews, put them in a Google Doc, upload the doc and say, you know, that prompt, analyze these negative reviews, identify the top three recurring pain points, and then write these headlines for me, which will address how our service addresses those pain points. I thought I was very smart and I think businesses should do that. And it would be helpful to drive more conversions from their websites.
And in the olden days, used to use our eyes to read the reviews and then we would chunk, chunk the themes just in our head.
Darren (17:40.194)
Back when I was a kid, we used-
Darren (17:49.016)
Basically.
Darren (17:56.77)
We it. We talked about six very interesting things that you need to know. You need to know. So make sure you listen to every episode. Make sure you run straight to Apple Podcasts and write words of praise and glowing review for us about how awesome this podcast is. And that will help us very much and we will love you forever. So thank you for going to do that.
Before anyone goes, I would just like to do a shouty shouty out for Billy James, who sent me a little message on the LinkedIn. So Billy James is in the, in the Canada, in the Alberta, but he's from the UK. he said, I've been listening to the white spark local update. Thank you for the great content. Do you know what, Billy, you are welcome. Thank you for being a listener.
Thank you for consuming our little bit of happy content on the interwebs. We appreciate you. To get a special shout out, all you need to do is just send us a message with some glowing words of praise.
Yeah, sure. We'll give you a special. I think we should do that every time. Who left us review last from the last episode and we give him a shout out. So thanks, Willie Jane. High five to you, fellow Albertan. Yeah, if you're in Edmonton, maybe maybe one time we could get a coffee.
Thank you! That's
Darren (19:24.27)
That's it. Okay. Bye everybody. I hope you have a great week and we'll see you next week.
We will. Thank you very much.