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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 βmust-readβ and βmust-watchβ links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
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Welcome to another episode of the White Spark Local Update with me Darren Shaw. And with me Claire Collall. This is the podcast where people who love local SEO come and then they listen to us talk about the things about local SEO. Yeah, the things that happened. Man, some stuff happened. Things are happening. So much. I'll tell you something's happened. Something huge happened. uh it was, aha, it was Michelle Ali on LinkedIn wrote a post. she... What? Okay, so I'll tell you why I love this so much. I love it so much because typically on this podcast, we talk about Claudia Tamina. But today we're talking about Michelle, who is not an SEO. She is a business owner. She's a... This is the thing. We're always talking about these SEOs and uh this one is... written by a business owner. she owns a flooring store in Sawani, Georgia. I think it's like 25,000 people live in this store. but this is advanced level stuff. She's an avid listener of this podcast plus many others. She's super into this SEO stuff. And so I just love that this has come from a business owner. So anyways, she kept hearing about the concept of semantic triples on various podcasts. So that's like subject predicate object. rather than we sell floors, it's top floors installs pet friendly carpet in Soani. So she talks about that. And then she did this thing that I was like, what? This is really good work that everyone should do. You're a business owner. You're an agency working for business owners. She built this sort of customer research playbook with Claude using six data sources. Her Google reviews, so she fed Claude all the Google reviews. Competitors negative reviews. Inbound call transcripts smart from the most unfiltered source. Her customers on the phone. So these like call transcripts whenever they call in, hey, I'm looking for laminate flooring for my basement, whatever. That's me as a customer calling in. ah Then she used Claude code to auto transcribe all the calls. ah She used her point of sale transaction data to see who's actually generating the revenue versus who you think your best customer is and search console data and Google Analytics data. She combined all that into Claude to build like a customer research playbook. And then she has this prompt which basically tells her how she needs to write in her customers language. What? Give me, tell me another carpet laying company that is doing this level of SEO. So I was just so thrilled to see this article. She tagged, I think she tagged both of us in it because she listens to our podcast. So, well, Michelle, thank you for listening and thank you for sharing this article on LinkedIn because I actually think it's a super banger that uh basically anyone who's an SEO, you should go read this because there's some very smart stuff going on here. And she plans to kind of rerun this quarterly to kind of get new stuff, update her website, very smart, every three months update the content on your website. So anyways, that's the most next level flooring company SEO owner I've ever seen. Thank you, Michelle. That looks brilliant. That looks fab. That looks like something you can just go and read it and then and do something like that for your own business. I'm going to go and check that out for sure, for sure, for sure. So my first linky link is from the Google. It is a piece on, where does it live? It lives on support.google.com forward slash analytics. So that's where it lives. It's in that informational piece. Slash answer slash one six nine three Oh three four seven. That was the full URL everyone. I'm sorry. Good, good story bro. Thank you. uh What it is is so Google have done a thing where they have linked Google business profile to Google analytics. So that could be good news. eh could be good news. No. So I had a little look this morning. So you can go ahead and do this probably in most countries. So if you have the correct level of access in GA4 and you have the correct level of access in Google Business Profile and they're both the same email address, then you will see Google Business Profile showing in the admin section in GA4 in product links. Then you go ahead and you add one or more of your Google Business Profiles. Make sure you add the ones that are actually affiliated with that business. And then you'd think, oh my gosh. I I shouldn't be so negative. Maybe I should just be grateful. ah blah, whatever. So then you get the information. This isn't some sort of magic sprite that has been injected into GAO4 and then suddenly you can filter your useful data as in, it's none of those things. Basically, it shows you some data points, not all of the data points that you would be getting in insights. There is a slightly longer data window I'm seeing, I think a year in of certain metrics, certain metrics in GA4 versus the six months that you can get by the NMX. If you use the API, then you can take data forever and ever and ever and ever as long as it's been stored somewhere correctly. So what have we got? Six months. of performance in the NMX versus a year in GA4 versus forever and ever via the API. It buckets all of the metrics from multiple Google business profiles into one. So it's limiting how useful this data is for anyone. so it's completely siloed in terms of, of course, this isn't going to flow into the other data sets and metrics into GA4. You only are going to get that if you're UTM tagging your URLs and people come to your website. We know that. So it's very limited in terms of how useful it is. I guess a plus point might be that since there wasn't a native connector for Google business profile in Looker Studio, so at least now you can pull in a limited data set of metrics, but not know which profile it comes from. So it's useful if you're a single location business, but what single location businesses do we know that are using Looker Studio unless they've had something set up. one that flooring store in Sawani, Georgia. So anyway, what am I saying? I'm saying yes, it exists. Wouldn't it be good if it had uh had more useful functionality? Claire, I love your sober takes. It's like, you know, I see this news and I put a post out on LinkedIn and I'm like, breaking news. This is huge, everybody. this changes the game. You can connect your Google business profile data to Google Analytics. it's like, I'm hyping it up so much. And then on the podcast, you're like, this is a bit of a nothing burger. It's so great having a glass half empty your whole life really brings me so much joy. But you're right. Like it's like, you know, you've taken the the close look at it and it's like, well, okay, it's not that exciting. Anyway, but thank you Google, but maybe ask people what they want and what they need beforehand. Yeah, thanks for nothing Google. Okay, my next post is from the wonderful, magnificent, the acclaimed author and artist, Mary Malice, who also writes for White Spark. She wrote about how to rank in surrounding cities or towns. Every local lessee strategy you need to know. So here's the problem. You are the plumber in Denver and you want to rank in Aurora, Colorado too. Hey, you're like, yeah, we're just like on the edge of Denver. We'll service Aurora, Colorado. Forget it. Just give up. You can't do it unless you read Miriam's article. Miriam's article is going to give you some strategies. It's a very tricky thing. If you are outside of the city borders, it's a problem. But she wrote a great article covering this specific topic, the challenge, how to break it. The one true fix is to open another location in Aurora, of course. That's the best you could do. But she provides all the backup plans and how to do this. And she talks about how service areas and if you don't know this. Listen up, the service area section in your Google Business profile has zero impact on your rankings in those service areas. Go ahead, put Aurora in your Google Business profile. You will not rank in Aurora. So you put anything on there. It's like Google laughs at you. you put whatever you put in there, Google, in the back end, there's a whole uh laugh track that plays as soon as you press enter. So it's basically no value. It's a sad trombone. All right. Simmer down. We continue on this podcast. Basically, she provided a bunch of tips on how to break out of it. So go read the post because it's really good. Great job, Miriam. Yeah, it's really good. know, so many people like, I want to build an additional Google business profile for the service offering of my one existing business, which has got bricks and mortar. It's like, Okay. Why don't you? Yeah. These are all the things that you can do instead of that. Anyway. Good stuff. As always from Miriam. So my next piece is uh a piece from Michelle from GMBAPI.com. So this is interesting in many ways. I didn't know that much about this actually. So, uh, when you are a business owner and you're like, doing all the good things, clinky, clinky, clink on your keyboard. I must respond to these reviews, whether you are doing that like old school, using your brain and your hands and actually reading the review that somebody wrote and thinking carefully about how you might respond to it, or whether you're doing it via a tool and using AI to also generate your amazing replies. But so what Michelle is saying is that there has been a big uptick So from a business owner point of view, you write or a business manager anyway, who has a review responding to the reviews, you go ahead, do it and you think it's gone, but it hasn't because unless you're using the API and you are pulling in the status of that review response, you wouldn't know that it hadn't been posted unless you'd actually went in and had a look. So he is talking about a massive uptick in the. number of reviews that are rejected. He is talking about why they are rejected or why he feels they're rejected. Talking about a lot of the rejections are on five-star reviews. It might be that review responses are very uh enthusiastic and maybe they're overly whatever it is. em 67 % contain AI boilerplate. Phrases like, to hear your kind words. Isn't it funny? or not funny that this massive uptick all happened at the same time as all of the review response tools using AI to give you review. Anyway, so that's right. So Google's filter has built a model of what low quality automated replies look like. Your AI tool is probably generating them. So rejections going up, profanity filter being based more on exact match. So if your name is Dick, Um, then that being and saying, you know, best regards, Dick, then Dick being filtered out, even though that is obviously a really, well, you know, it's a very, it's a name, isn't it? He talks about, um, a cocktail bar referencing a porn star, Martini gets blocked and then exact duplicates, which could be seen as low quality. So if you're just saying, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone, then that's going to be. So he's talking about, right, so one, you're investing all this time and effort into, well, are you really, if you're using an AI into responding to reviews and then they're not going live, but like everything, and I don't like to say I told you so, but this whole thing about, oh, Google doesn't use that bit of data. It doesn't show anymore in the Google business profile. I've always said, if Google has a field for it, fill it in because it will be populating something somewhere. everything you do will inform Google about your entity. And so he's saying, if review replies are being used to build Google's understanding of what your business is, what it stands for and how it communicates, then a rejected reply isn't just invisible to customers, it's invisible to the AI, blah, blah, blah. So we should be thinking to ourselves, I want my review replies to be good. I want them to work for me. Anyway, so yes, well done, Michelle, good piece of content. Interesting, food for thought, et cetera, et Thank you for publishing it. ah I got a good one for you, Claire. Oh, man, you are going to love this one, Claire. No, am I? You are. It's all about your favorite topic, chunking. So, Doran Schaffo on LinkedIn, chunking your content for AI. 1956 call. They want their method back. Basically, Claire, you will love this because he says chunking is stupid. He says it's a deep dive. So this article is a deep dive on this whole idea of breaking your content into 100 to 300 word chunks for AI. He talks about where did that advice come from? This is where the 1956 comes from. He talks about why this is stupid advice that you don't need to worry about. So chunking comes from George Miller's 1956 memory research through BERT and RAG pipelines and Google's passage ranking. So basically the 100 figure that everyone quotes is actually from Wikipedia. Wikipedia has some kind of processing paper. Danny Sullivan is on record saying, we don't want you to do chunking. That's stupid, I talked to the engineers, they said, we don't want you to do that, please don't. ah The reason why chunking became a topic in SEO is because you want each passage to stand on its own. So if you just reworded chunking to each passage to stand on its own, then you're okay. But get rid of the idea of a chunk of text. Let's get rid of that. We're gonna replace it now with the idea that in your content, each passage should stand on its own. And actually this is connected to the concept of semantic triples. So if you write, ah know, Acme Plumbing provides drain cleaning services in Denver. Denver. Then you describe your drain cleaning service. That passage can stand on its own. Whereas if you wrote, we are drain cleaning experts. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, it doesn't really stand on its own. It's floating. It's missing the context. And so that's chunking. Let's just stop using the word chunking. That's making your content stand on its own. We need a new word to describe that instead of chunking. Because chunking actually kind of doesn't describe what you're supposed to be doing properly. And that's what this article is all about. He's saying, stop being stupid, start being smart, and listen to Claire. That's what he's saying. I love Doran. That sounds very funny. Oh, go and read that. It's a bit like I can remember being like this is about 6,000 years ago at some SEO meetup and some guy standing up and going, Google loves long form content. I was just like, that was me. I freaking did that. I actually owned a brand SEO when we first met and you're probably thinking of me. I think it was you. It wasn't you. It wasn't you. But it's just like, there isn't like one thing that people like. There isn't one thing that Google's like. It's just like, anyway, let's let, and this has turned into me moaning about things. I love that. What a lovely post. So Mike Nagy, who is the product manager at Google, who is a dude and is nice and does build things and is very lovely. So he is the guy that has been responsible for the Google Business Profile Gemini integration thing. So he's been working on that. So this is a blog. So it's more of a like a press releasey thing. So save time and grow your business with new Gemini tools. And so what it talks about is this integration between Gemini and Google Business Profiles. So em being rolled out slowly across the world. So what do they talk about using Gemini to get it to do things? So turn insights into action. How did my business do this month? And Gemma and I can analyze your actual search impressions, direction requests, call data and customer engagement. So again, we will find out what that means once we see the integration, see what the metric set is that they're pulling from because yeah, there isn't like uh a panacea for all ills. It depends what data set it's looking at, but it owns both. Maybe it will talk to itself and do some useful things. Seamless review management. So help me respond to my latest review. So it will write your review response in your brand's voice. So I guess taking all of your previous textual corpus of all of your other review responses, real time profile updates. So if you want to say to Gemini, hey Gemini, I got a dentist appointment. Can you close the store for the next hour? Can you just like, so you're going to be able to just say that into Gemini. And it's going to supposedly, uh Update your operating hours, seasonal updates or identify gaps in your profile. And you know what? It's going to do all this seamlessly. No seams. No seams. So it'll be really, really fun for everyone to have a play with that. So as much as I am, obviously, like we said, glass half empty that what Lovely. Let's have a play around. Thank you, Michael, for doing that. Let's see what it does. And I imagine that that will be very useful, especially for small business owners who will be able to do things quickly and easily via the paid for Gemini interface. Maybe, probably paid for. That's it. I'm finished. Well, Google's putting AI in everything these days. So I guess you're going to use AI for your Google Business Profile. um I just wonder if it's going to start messing things up. You ask it to update your hours and instead it pushes your hours into your services or something. You don't know how AI is, Well, Google's been updating our services with crap over that it's scraped from who knows where for the past however many years. So I don't think we need to worry too much about Google accidentally turning on Gemini while you're having a conversation. with a plumber in Denver, and then it accidentally changes your primary category. Yeah, right. I do find the insights interesting. Like, oh, you could ask it to mind your reviews. It kind of goes back to what Michelle was doing. ah So once you connect it, you kind of have this data source that you can be like, yeah, tell me about my reviews. Yeah. And someone can write a really great guide to how to use this to extract data and come up with some idea, some prompts. We should do that. I would have tried, but I don't have access to it. I actually looked yesterday, was like, do I have access to this? And I tried really hard to get access, but I'm waiting for the day so that I can investigate this and write a data-backed, first-party, original thought, information gain article about this. So anyways, that's the podcast. We did it. We did it. Yeah. to it. Watch it. Review it. Share it with your friends. get a t-shirt with the name of the podcast on it, get a tattoo. think tattoos would be greatly appreciated. See you next time. Bye. Okay, bye.