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This week, Claire Carlile is joined by special guest Krystal Taing to break down the local SEO stories you need to know, including:
Creators and Guests
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 โmust-readโ and โmust-watchโ links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, hello, hello and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update, which is your amazing and favourite local SEO podcast where you come and you hear about the news and the linky links from the previous week. So I am Claire Calile and I am here today and for the eagle-eyed viewers amongst you, you might notice that Darren is not with us. He is eating croissant for three weeks and I have a very, very special guest, my lovely friend, Krystal.
Krystal, would you like to introduce yourself for anyone that is not familiar with your lovely face and how could that even be? Thank you, thank you so much. I'm Krystal Taing.
[Krystal Taing]
I am VP of solutions at Uberall. I am a Google business profile product expert. Thank you so much for having me.
It's always a joy to be here and talk with you. We will try to keep the laughing to a minimum.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, thank you so much for being my guest. I'm not going to go into how much I love you and how special you are and how clever you are and how I have, apart from loving you as a friend, admire you as a professional person and all the things that you know. So it's great to have you on to hear about the things that are, like, making you think and either challenging you or filling in any gaps that you have.
So I am going to ask you, Krystal, to tell us about your first linky link today.
[Krystal Taing]
Yes, so one of the things that I really wanted to share was an article that I read. I think it's probably a little bit more of a big piece. It's called the ROI Revolution and it's just a big article about all of the changes that happened in search in kind of all of the last month.
And one of the things it's just talking about is AI mode in general and how it's changing search behavior. And so one of the things that I like to think about is just the brains of searchers and kind of taking our, you know, a step back and taking, you know, basically our brains away from the little, the day-to-day. Because I think what we do is we think about, like, a feature of Google, a feature of Bing, a feature of Apple, and just say, let's be a searcher.
Let's be the person that is making the decision. And so this article was quite interesting. And it really wasn't just about like, you know, AI mode is changing.
It's really that people are searching differently, which is what we know. And so one of the things that they were saying is that voice mode is finally becoming meaningful. I don't know that I truly use voice mode, but I do know that I actually use it more than I ever thought I would.
And if you think about it, it's because the way that we search and the way that Google, LLMs, and chat have actually adapted, have made it so that the results have become so much more meaningful in the way that they can give you results that are more conversational. That is the only way that voice was ever going to become helpful. Because the way that we searched before, keyword, result, we were doing, you know, blue pants near me.
Voice was never going to work that way because that's not the way that humans spoke. We never were like, Claire, today, give me coffee. You want to get coffee today?
That's just not how people spoke. Coffee near me now? But that's why I think voice search is actually going to be working.
And so I think even now, like I think about at Uberall, we are seeing a lot of our apps are being used by our customers. We're getting a lot more usage from our customers using voice commands on our own apps. And I am blown away.
And if I accidentally voice text, I even did that, and I was like, oh, this is what old people do. But I will do it. And I'm like, oh, you know, I'm not mad at it like I would have been six months ago, 12 months ago, because the results aren't terrible.
And so that was one of the things that they're seeing is they're seeing a lot more adoption in voice and seeing a lot more natural language. So I think the local SEO kind of takeaway is that it's not just the keywords, it's the contextual keywords and content that voice is really, really getting a high adoption, voice, and then image. And I think that there's a lot of voice search that goes behind image.
And that's how Google is adapting it is it's putting a lot of those voice context keywords behind the images as well. And so they're seeing image search inputs as well. I see a lot of the times I accidentally click on an image, and it just starts searching the image.
It's like, I'll click on it accidentally. And it's like, do you want to search for these pans or this? And I'm like, no, it was an accident.
But I didn't realize how many people are searching images. And I think that's one of the changes in search today. There's this really, really interesting stat in this article that says one in six searches now involve voice or image searches.
And I was like, I had no idea. I think from a marketer's perspective, that is so important to realize for local businesses. Like that is huge.
And to realize that that's the context you need to be putting alongside your businesses is that, you know, incredibly deep context is that it's, you know, not just keywords, it is all that additional attributes, it's all that additional context, and then the images, the videos, that context.
[Claire Carlile]
I could be here forever talking about like the actual consumer behavior change, because we do say it. It's like the most fundamental shift in search behaviors that we have seen in our lifetime. It feels like it happened really quickly.
I'm searching completely differently. Half the time, I'm not on Google, I'm using images, I'm using my voice. I mean, it's just like, it is.
Yeah, it's incredible how much things have changed. And it's just interesting, the people that are going out now and doing the, you know, everyone's doing their own consumer behavior surveys, looking at how people search, because we're in this time of massive change. So, I will definitely go and have a look at that.
Thank you for sharing. So, my first linky link is a webinar that was on, I think a couple of days ago, it was Lisa Lansman from Google, and they had Michael Nagy, who's product manager is doing Gemini and the GBP thing. And it was a chap called Vivek Chokshi, who's doing the notebook integration.
So, I always watch these. They're brilliant. They give you so many clues as to what's coming next.
And what I found particularly interesting, you know, last podcast, we covered the Google business profile and the Gemini integration. And we went through some of the things that, because I've had access that I've been looking at with that. So, that was really good.
I don't personally have the note, I'm in the UK. So, I don't have the notebook integration. So, I don't know anything about that at the moment.
So, anyway, definitely watch this, everyone, just as some clues, if you do have this available, how to use it. But what I thought was particularly interesting about this webinar is so often, as should be the case, because these webinars are very much like made for small businesses, is that they really did touch on, okay, well, at the moment, this is just for people in certain geographic areas, like not the UK, not the European Union. And it's for people that have single location, that's who it's been rolled out to at the moment.
But it was very interesting because they all addressed the fact that SEOs, agencies, bigger businesses, enterprise businesses are thinking, well, what's next for this? How will this change what I do? Will I be able to use this?
Will I not? So, it was nice to hear that focus and see that focus. And basically, Michael Nagy was saying, talking about the relevance for agencies, franchises, enterprise, there's much more to come as we expand to the medium, the larger businesses and the enterprise segments.
And it was quite interesting that he said, you know, so many agencies are paying for tools that use the API and this is going to also be using the API. And so, we don't know how it will be rolled out and in what format and how much it will cost, if it does cost anything, but it is interesting to hear that focus from them on that. So, I'd just be keen.
Why don't we get stuff in... Well, we know why we don't get stuff in the UK and the European Union. It is...
Yeah. So, give that a watch. It gives you some context on it and it tells you more about what might be coming next.
[Krystal Taing]
Yeah. That one's really exciting. I was actually able to test this as they were building it.
It's incredible how fast they were able to turn this around, some of the things you can do. I would definitely, I think a lot of the folks that have now have access to it. I think Andy Simpson actually on LinkedIn put a couple really exciting prompts out there of the things that you can do with it.
So, if you have access to it, definitely go out and try it. It's really, really cool.
[Claire Carlile]
Getting there and another thing that Mike Nagy is like, okay, it's going to change week by week, what you can do. So, go and have a play now, go and do stuff, but don't forget to keep coming back because it is going to change. I found it really powerful and very interesting.
So, if you do get a chance, get in there and have a look. Crystal, what have you got for us next?
[Krystal Taing]
The next one, again, a little bit different than kind of a pure update. This article that I read on Axios was quite interesting. I think the title was a little bit dramatic called the AI Search Collapse.
I think it's something that a few folks in our industry talk about. There's so much AI content that's coming out, AI blogs, AI information, that it's kind of hard to disseminate between what's pure and what's not. There's now AI summaries being written with AI ads.
Eventually, where is the original information left? But when it comes to local businesses that have an advantage, I think this is really optimistic for the things that can't be invented. So, thinking about customer experiences, reviews, photos, staff experiences, community involvement.
If you are thinking about the things that are coming out in GBP, I think there's now activities tab that we keep seeing, the inventory and those types of things, the valuable trust signals. We keep talking about the things that matter to LLMs. These are the points that I think really draw the needle for local businesses. The article goes in and it's like, there's just this collapse of information because it's all AI.
It talks about all of the information. It's not going to be, you know, you can't trust it because everyone's going through and they're just going to chat GPT to try and say like, you know, what is the answer for this? And they're just going and saying, okay, I need this research.
They're not going to Google and all these other sources. Well, you know, whenever you go and you ask humans and you ask reviewers, you're able to disseminate what is the unique information that's really going to stand out. So, it's quite a unique use case where originality becomes so much more valuable and not less.
So, the article talks about AI reducing the value of expertise, but really from a local standpoint, being able to pull out the most unique information, I think for local businesses, it's really easy to see that. So, whenever you're thinking about AI-generated content, the easiest way for unique information to stand out are those unique elements. That's why reviews, I think, are really taking the cake whenever it talks to like LLMs and why they're so prioritized.
It's because that is not AI-generated, you know, most of the time. Most of the time, they are unique experiences. That's why those attributes and the elements like activities, local events, these short-term details, those are why Google, Apple, all of these, you know, sites are prioritizing the things that are unique.
When you are a local business, that's the important thing that's going to help you show up and show up high in, you know, searches.
[Claire Carlile]
One of the things that has been so, like, refreshing and I'm loving is this sort of massive shift in, even though it's a bit tossy, let's say paradigm shift, with regard to how we're showing up, you know, being seen, being believed, being chosen. And it's coming back to, oh, this is like, can you remember marketing? Can you remember that thing called marketing where we did, like, think about your unique differentiators, think about your positioning, think about your messaging, think about your customers' jobs to be done.
And it's like, oh, can you remember all those things? Those are all the things that you need to do, because if we just use AI, everyone is just going to be exactly the same. So what we need to do is, like, lean into these actual real-life differentiators that are to do with our offering, how we engage with our customers, the feedback that we get.
So there's something that is, like, so refreshing about all of this.
[Krystal Taing]
Just be, like, a genuine, good, local business. Like, what do you mean?
[Claire Carlile]
Like, just care about your product, your service. Yeah. Don't do that.
Just write a listicle. Just write some listicles. That's all you need.
Publish FAQ. Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Right.
Where are we? Numero two of mine is a... I just want to cover this quickly.
It is something that Dana Lucio from Ansiv, who I'm a big fan of, has written something. It reminds me a little bit of my olden days, like being an SEO, if that's what I was in the olden days, how to safely implement high-impact technical SEO changes. So it was a bit of, like, a walk down memory lane, just in the sense of, I can just remember people, like, oh, I've done a technical audit of your website of your, you know, you're working with a client.
It's a medium-sized business. Someone has come in and done a tech SEO audit. And they're just like, these are all the things that you need to do.
And the client's like, oh, no. And so this piece is a really great piece about, and you might, you remember when Arij Abu-Ali from Women in Tech SEO used to write a lot about SEOs talking to developers and how, you know, it used to be SEOs fighting developers. You know, you need to implement all these things, developers fighting back saying, you know, that's going to take a massive amount of bandwidth.
It's going to break this. Do we really need to do that thing? I just thought this was a really nice roundup of what you do when you basically have had a tech SEO audit done or you've done it yourself and how to go about making sure that those things are prioritized according to the potential return.
And also knowing which bits could really, like, wreck your website if you go ahead and you blindly follow someone's, oh, if you blindly follow someone's advice. So I really like that from Dana. It's definitely worth visiting just to remind yourself on how to tackle all of those horrible things that can sometimes come out of a tech SEO audit.
[Krystal Taing]
Yes. Very, very important. Those ones, I think so many times, like if it just is sent to you, there's been so many times clients are just like, what do I do with this?
Or they're like, fix this now. And so we've gotten those plenty of times and they're like, this is all your fault or, you know, especially if you're working with an agency and, you know, you're the tech provider or vice versa, not always fun to get. Those are the days.
Crystal, what have you got for us next? So next, my study, it actually just came out recently. This is from Matt Southern from Search Engine Journal.
This is, I think, a quite controversial but timely study. It's on the AI overviews and click quality. So I think a lot of people have been seeing quite a reduction in traffic since AI overviews have been reduced or introduced.
They've been seeing a lot less clicks to their website. Obviously, Google is answering a lot more user questions directly in Google. And, you know, a lot of brands are quite concerned about that.
They're not getting a lot of citations or they're not getting a lot of, you know, kind of those users coming directly to their site. However, this study does claim that the clicks that are going to their site are higher quality. The research found that while the clicks are reduced, there wasn't strong evidence that the visitors who clicked were meaningfully more engaged or higher quality than before.
And that's an important distinction. So less traffic but better traffic, that may not actually be true, which is what Google has claimed. And so really where the industry needs to evolve is kind of saying, instead of asking how many clicks did I get, we should be asking, you know, was my brand recommended?
Was I cited? Did I make the short list? You know, did users search for my brand afterward?
Did assistant conversions increase? These types of things. You know, what we're doing, I think, at Uberall are some of these kind of integrations with MCPs.
We're doing some of these, like, you know, integrations with shopping. And I think there's a little bit of development there. But this study is quite interesting that, you know, while one person might click, there's value in getting the visibility, but the traditional analytics are not measuring, you know, the clicks in the same way.
So I think there's still a lot to be studied about the people that are landing. But it is quite controversial with what Google is stating that you are getting higher quality people actually landing on there. And like we all know, you can't actually trust what Google is saying.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, we just really need to move forward with, like, measurement, isn't it? Measurement and our expectations of what we used to think that, you know, just purely GA4 could do is, you know, we just need to have a very different mindset about how we think about those things. My last one is from Bing.
So I read something on our YouTube comments, where someone had written, why do you talk about AI all the time? Bing is more relevant. And I was like, fair play.
We do talk about AI a lot of the time, but then it is radically reshaping the user experience, the search experience, the buying experience, every single experience in our lives. But anyway, we'll bring a Bing back big time. And I'm going to talk about Bing, because Bing has done a thing.
And I like the thing that Bing has done, because this is what Google needs to do. So the link is, yeah, on the Bing, we'll obviously include the link, new AI incense intense topics, citation shares and compare. So I have had a little look at this for any of the sites where I have access with Bing webmaster tools, which you should be doing and having a look at.
So in the piece from Bing, they talk about AI measurement and what they're doing here. So the AI performance tab is reflecting grounding and citation activity across the following supported AI services. So anything to do with Bing, obviously, usually it's a much smaller amount of our customers and visitors are coming via Bing, but it's looking at Microsoft Copilot, AI generated summaries in Bing and select partner AI integrations.
So you have a list of URLs. So you've got the pages that are cited in AI answers. And then you also see the grounding queries, you see the queries that people make that give your citation, obviously, your citation is appearing within that.
So I'm looking at that myself for Folly Farm. So I can see all of the pages that are getting visibility in those places and across those services. So it gives me the grounding query, it buckets it by intent.
So it comes up with an intent for that informational, local, I imagine commercial, it's got media, learn and solve. Then it gives me the topic area, it gives me the number of citations, and then it gives me citation share. So I haven't really like dug in a million percent into all of those different metrics.
But at the moment, I'm not, I'm just like, wow, I am grateful for some actual data. This is very interesting. So which of my pages are proving most popular when it comes to my citation share?
And interestingly enough, the sites I'm looking at, it's not the homepage. So, you know, it's these sort of deep informational pages that we have on some of the websites I work with. So go in, you know, you should have access to Bing Webmaster.
If you haven't, then really get it because you can see a lot of stuff in there, but have a play around, have a look. How nice, look at these long queries and these ridiculous searches or prompts or whatever we're calling them that people are making. It's like, yeah, this is how I search now.
65 words, one thing to know about penguins and where you can where you can feed them and all of that stuff. So, yeah, go and have a look at it. That is my that's my last link.
Have we done all of our links, Crystal? I believe we have. I could go on forever, but but I could go on forever, but I won't because I'd get into trouble.
I want to say to you, thank you very, very much for being my guest today, for being another person that loves sharing ridiculously long and meaty links. And because Darren's always like, why are you so long? And you have to actually read them.
I'm like, because I'm a nerd and that's what I want to consume. So that's we're obviously nerdy twins. And I love that for us.
Thank you for having me. Always. Please come again anytime.
That is it for today for the White Spot Local Update. Please go ahead, like, subscribe, get a T-shirt with Crystal's face on it and my face on it. Write us a letter, make us a song, do all of those things, but definitely enjoy the podcast and come back next week.
Thank you very much. It's goodbye from me. This is where you wave, Crystal, and say goodbye for you.
Goodbye from me.