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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.
[Darren Shaw]
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Darren Shaw.
[Claire Carlile]
And with me, Claire Carlile, and I'm back from France. And I am excited to be here for the Linky Links and all the local SEO ting.
[Darren Shaw]
What do you got for today? Anything new in local search that you would like to talk about?
[Claire Carlile]
So many new things, as always, in the local search. So my first Linky Link is two of my, who I've decided are now my favorite marketers in the world. So it's a YouTube video.
It's called, I know, why B2B is more emotional than B2C. And I have spoken about Talia Wolf before. And it is Amanda Natividad's podcast, which I love because she's so clever.
And so the two of them are talking about the happy relationship of the way two things work side by side. So Amanda Natividad, zero click marketing, Talia Wolf, emotional targeting. So basically, it's a good old chin wag about those two things.
But mostly, because it's Amanda's podcast, she's interviewing Talia. So Talia talks about emotional targeting. It is just relevant to anyone is doing the marketing.
So yes, it's relevant for local businesses, because you are trying to sell things to people and you need to know things about them, particularly the emotional buttons that need to be pressed. That made it sound really cheap and nasty and like it was just manipulation. But it isn't.
It's about understanding your customers and you should watch it. And because I like to always get in a sneaky additional link. I've also just bought the zero click marketing book that Amanda and Rand have written and I'm really looking forward to receiving it.
Although mine is digital, I think because they're not shipping to the UK because it costs 6 million pounds.
[Darren Shaw]
That's really expensive for a book, 6 million pounds.
[Claire Carlile]
I haven't the back of a hedgehog that has to basically just walk really slowly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[Darren Shaw]
Let's try FedEx.
[Claire Carlile]
I mean, yeah, just don't rely on hedgehogs for your postal service. I think that's the answer. But anyway, listen to it and read the book and do all the things because it's very good.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, emotional targeting. Sometimes I feel like in marketing, we're like sociopaths. How do we manipulate their emotions so that they will buy our stuff?
[Claire Carlile]
But some of the original, I can't even remember what they were because it's so long since I did my actual proper marketing qualification. The books which were about manipulation, that's what marketing was, wasn't it? It was like how to basically understand what people want but without real interest in them as people and let's sell them our stuff.
But that isn't what it is. But good.
[Darren Shaw]
All right. Well, my link has zero manipulation in it. It's about Chris Long.
Chris Long has reported on LinkedIn that Google Search Console is now reporting on AI overviews and AI mode impressions. What? So we actually thought we'd never get this.
Google's like, we're not going to give you that data. We're not even going to tell you. But they're telling us now.
And the only metric we can see right now is impressions. There's no query data. You can't see what keywords triggered these impressions.
And I think it's valid. He says, I think we can probably thank the team over at Bing for putting the pressure on Google to open up this data, because Bing did it. And I think the Google Search Console team was like, okay, fine, we'll do it too.
And so yeah, now we have impression data and what's coming from AI overviews and AI mode. So just a little announcement. And thanks for sharing that, Chris.
Everyone's sharing it, actually. I saw Brody Clark share it and lots of people are talking about this now. But it's good to have that data.
And so you can go and check your Search Console. I don't know if it's globally rolled out or if we saw just a test of it or something. But you can go check, see if you have it.
[Claire Carlile]
Cool. And then hopefully there'll be query data at some point.
[Darren Shaw]
Hopefully, yeah. I'd like to know what long queries were typed. That actually, isn't it interesting?
I thought he already shared something where he showed how you could get the AI overview query data.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, it was. You shared it as one of your interesting links, because I actually listened to the podcast and remember all of the links in my brain. And it was how to get these queries that were normally like eight or more.
It's like prompts, isn't it? We got to stop saying keywords. It needs to stop.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, it was like a reg x regular expression. Anyway, that's what we got to say about that. Well, what else you got to talk about?
[Claire Carlile]
Let me have a little look. Now, this is another little video that popped up today. I didn't know when it went live last week or something.
It was Brad Weatherall, who I like to call the man of many hats. Because one, in his videos, he's always got hats behind him. I don't know if you've noticed that, like little Google hats with a little spinny thing on the top.
But anyway, also, he does this, he does that. He's GMB experts. He's like Esquire Digital and he's Brad too.
And he's got really pointy hair. So he looks like a sort of superhero. So maybe that's another thing.
Anyway, there's a bit of a start, which you don't quite understand where he selects. So basically, this is a video walkthrough of doing a video verification for a bricks and mortar business. And I like this content type, because a lot of the time people, they want to see what does the screen look like when I start doing this thing, because they want to make sure that they're on the right path.
So I think this is like really powerful in terms of content. It's really useful. So he talks through the verification, shows us what it actually looks like on Google, talks through what Google will expect to see.
Anyway, for me, the most interesting thing was, and then he says, then you submit it and it takes ages to upload, and then you get this screen, and this is what this screen should say. Because I think that, especially in the community, people that are struggling with videos, they're just like, I've tried it four times and it won't go through. So if I'm trying to answer that, I'm like, well, when you say it won't go through, does it not upload?
Or do you not see the next screen? Or are you actually telling me that you weren't verified? So I think because Google doesn't produce any content, which is this specific, someone needs to produce it.
So all these small businesses can actually see what the process should look like.
[Darren Shaw]
Nice job. Nice job, Brad. And actually, I did see Amy post about that.
She said, this is the best video I've seen on this process.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, she would say that. But yeah, it's good.
[Darren Shaw]
She would. But I believe her. I believe her.
[Claire Carlile]
I believe her. She's the voice of truth, always.
[Darren Shaw]
And I'm an extra believer because you've backed up the claim saying it's so good, you want to mention it on the podcast. So there we go.
[Claire Carlile]
That's right. So it's like a triple threat video. Go and watch it.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. Brad, everybody loves your video. Great job.
[Claire Carlile]
And your hair and your hat.
[Darren Shaw]
And your hair. Your superhero hair. Yeah.
All right. Next up, I want to talk about Schema. What is it?
Does it help your SEO? Well, Jake Hundley has done a pretty good deep dive on this. He did a peer-reviewed, 10-week controlled study evaluating the statistical impact of local business schema on organic rankings, maps, and LLM recommendations.
He basically took 29 lawn care landscaping businesses and split them into controls and tests. He stripped all the schema for a five-week reset. Then he waited.
Okay, none of these have schema. Then he added local business schema to a test group of only half of them for five weeks. What did he find?
Did it have any positive impact? Well, no. Not in search results.
Not in maps. Just basically in traditional SEO stuff. Schema has no impact.
So people saying, oh, you need to add local business schema if you want to rank. He's calling that snake oil. And I would agree.
I always felt that. It never really was a ranking factor in my opinion. But here's the shocker.
Schema did have a noticeable impact on ChatGPT. Kind of surprising. He says that 92% confidence, it lifted ChatGPT positions by 3.3 spots. 91% confidence, it boosted how ChatGPT mentions you. So roughly plus 10 percentage points. And this was only in ChatGPT.
He was checking other LLMs too, Gemini, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Grok, none of them. But ChatGPT definitely saw a noticeable lift. Basically the takeaway is, just freaking add it.
Why not? It's no big deal. It's really easy.
Throw the schema on your website. It takes you five minutes. And you just put it on there and then you have it.
And so, okay, maybe it helps your ChatGPT. And then I guess future thinking. Maybe the other LLMs will start caring about it.
I don't know. The big unresolved question is, why does it seem that ChatGPT cares about it when Google's own AI doesn't? Mystery.
Nobody knows.
[Claire Carlile]
So you could implement the local business schema, which would take you five minutes, and avoid having to have any conversations like this about tests, about whether or not it works. Just do it.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, I don't think that would be the end of the conversations. I think SEOs will debate this until the year 3500.
[Claire Carlile]
And yes, okey-dokey. My third link is something on the SEER website. You will be familiar with SEER.
It's really nice. I like this. So it's the first episode, so it's from May, of their brand new, whether or not you call it webinar or whatever it is.
So they're calling it, it's the Signal. So I'm watching the May replay now. So it's going to be monthly.
So there's many parts of why I like this. One is you know that it is going to be brilliant content because it is Will Reynolds and Elisa Scharf. You know it's going to be good because it's content that they're interested in and they'll put it in context for their own agency and the people that they work with.
And the other thing, I really like the way that they've shared the content. So I don't know if it's podcast as well. I haven't looked on YouTube.
So the video sits on the page. It's not YouTube. Then they also...
You can download the transcript. You can also view the slides. And then you can play the webinar audio.
So they've really attacked this from... Let's not say attack. Let's say they've really approached this from all angles in terms of let's make the most of this content.
And then a really good bit at the bottom where they say the Q&A doesn't stop when the webinar does. So Elisa answered every question we couldn't get to live. Here's what she had to say.
And then there's some really useful Q&A actually on the page. It's stuff that wasn't covered within the webinar. And normally people don't bother with that.
They say send us questions we might answer. If we get a chance to, we'll answer them. But in this case, they've really made this valuable.
Valuable to the readers. Valuable to the page. Valuable to everyone's knowledge of the SEER entity by having this absolutely brilliant content on this page.
This is going to make me much more cleverer, I think. If I watch this every month, I'll know the things.
[Darren Shaw]
I mean, you're already peak clever. So you're going to get even cleverer.
[Claire Carlile]
Not if it's, yeah, just more cleverer. Yeah, more cleverer. So anyway, that's my third and final link.
And everyone should go and listen to that immediately.
[Darren Shaw]
I think it's really interesting to look at it like, oh, here's how you do it properly from setting up your page so that you're going to get the most value. Because the whole FAQ stuff is really smart. To pull your webinar stuff, put that on the page.
I bet you they marked it up in schema too.
[Claire Carlile]
Interesting.
[Darren Shaw]
Speaking of schema, my next article is about schema. I actually deliberately put these both in here because they're interesting. So Mark Williams Cook, I talked about this before.
He did the duck t-shirt thing where he made fake schema and he put it on the page. And I talked about that on the podcast before. And he got so much pushback on that, that he has finally, just recently, published an actual article on his sub stack where he explains, okay, you dummies, let me lay it out for you really clearly, which is what he has done.
So a lot of people were saying like, aha, the LLMs did pick up the schema. So you've disproven your point that schema doesn't matter. He's like, no, no, no.
What he's trying to explain is that the schema was garbage and they read it anyway because to them, it's just text on the page. If they were really parsing in a schema, the non-set types would have been rejected. That's his point.
He's like, it's not real schema. It wasn't on the page content. It was only in the schema.
And it got pulled because it was just nonsense. So anyways, the evidence crowd of Geo saying that the LLM returned info that was only in schema, that falls apart because the info is almost always on the page too. So anyways, basically he says that LLMs do not use schema.
He is very convinced of this. His article explains it in more detail than his LinkedIn post that I covered before. And why I wanted to raise it is because they both came out in the last week, is that Jake's article is showing, he believes it's showing, it's having a positive impact on chat GPT.
This presence of the schema. Mark Williams Cook is saying, LLMs don't care about schema. So I think this is, I put the challenge out for these two guys to get into a cage match and figure out what's happening here.
So I do think it's really interesting to talk about both of these cases because the question still remains very outstanding. We have some evidence showing that schema has some positive impact on large language models. And then we have Mark Williams Cook, who I have so much confidence in.
I love that guy. He's very smart, very thorough. He's saying, nope, nope.
So I'm very curious to hear Mark's take on that. Anyways, it's the schema episode of the White Space.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, thank you. Thank you very much for sharing the things.
[Darren Shaw]
Thank you for sharing the things. I hope that you all had a great lesson and we wish you all the best. And if you want to go comment on YouTube and if you want to go and leave us a review on the Apple and Spotify, that'd be real cool.
We'd appreciate it. And we'll see you next time. We'll have more links, more stuff to talk about.
[Claire Carlile]
Thank you. Goodbye.
[Darren Shaw]
Bye, everybody.