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 โmust-readโ and โmust-watchโ links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
[Claire Carlile]
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update Podcast with me, Darren Shaw.
[Darren Shaw]
And with me, Claire Carlile. And this is a podcast where we talk about local SEO, ting ting ting. And we have three links each.
And we talk about them and why they're important, and why you need to listen and watch them. And that's what we do.
[Claire Carlile]
I actually only have two links today. Two links because I've been away on vacation. And you know, I tried to limit my SEO reading.
[Darren Shaw]
So that is all good. So listeners and watchers and readers, you'll get an extra two minutes to go and have a cup of tea and really take the time to consume all of this amazing content. So, Darren, I'll go first because I've got three.
Shall I go?
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, go ahead.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay, I will do it. So the first linky link is our good friend Cyrus Shepherd on the Zippy blog. So I really like this.
It is these SEO strategies drive 90% of your AI visibility, why you should probably focus on these instead of a separate geo strategy. And the reason I like this is because I've got enough to do already without thinking that I need to do some side hustle for visibility. So this resonates with me.
And I trust Cyrus because he has done all of the analysis, he says. So he has researched how AI engines generate recommendations and site sources. And he said that he is very impressed by how traditional SEO practices support AI visibility.
But I think the caveat here, which we've touched on before, is you need to do proper good SEO, not like old fashioned, not very good SEO. So anyway, these are the things that he says. He says that you can achieve 90% of your AI visibility by adapting to modern SEO fundamentals, which actually is good marketing, and tweaking SEO tactics to target specific mechanisms for AI search.
So obviously, go away, read it, dive in. He also has a paid subscription where he really gives the secret sauce which you can sign up for. But he's talking about three AI visibility goals.
So he's talking about making sure that your content is AI eligible and can be seen by AIs. You want to win AI citations, and you want to get recommended by AI answers. So obviously, this piece goes into those three things.
And the bit that I really liked, which was the third piece, which was getting recommended by AI answers, and then he breaks it down into the SEO levers that you need to pull. And this is a really good one, because we talk about this quite a lot, which is nailing your brand position and facts. For example, brand is a product designed for audience, especially good for use case, because of differentiator.
And once you've nailed that, so who you are, what you do, who you do it for, and why you do it better than the competitors, you're ready to make sure that your website resonates with those facts. And everything, all of your content, all of your, you know, wherever you're sitting, your social channels, Reddit, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, very good piece, which is easily understandable.
It's not a, I built this secret AI hack. And this is how you can do it using something secret. I can never follow that stuff.
This for me, really resonates. And you should read it.
[Claire Carlile]
I will, on your direction. This looks really good. No mention of schema.
I've noticed here. He says you don't have to. Yeah, and I think that's true.
And nailing your brand position, that is really critical. And then being consistent about it. Yeah.
Is it that easy?
[Darren Shaw]
Is it that easy? No, because most businesses haven't even done that bit.
[Claire Carlile]
That's true.
[Darren Shaw]
Again, we're back to foundational stuff. Is it that easy? You have to go and understand the marketplace, your competitors, you actually have to speak to your customers.
And a lot of people don't want to do that.
[Claire Carlile]
So for decades, I've been telling people that SEO comes down to two things. One relevance, like what do you say about yourself? What are you relevant for what the person searched?
And then the second piece is, you know, prominence. So does anybody on the internet care? And AI SEO is exactly the same thing.
It's like, yes, we are relevant for this. And yes, lots of people are talking about us and suggesting us and mentioning us across the broader web. Okay, my link is Bill Rozek.
Oh, yes. That guy keeps pumping out. So I think he's written like 10,000 blog posts at this point, but he wrote a new one.
And it's called low effort leap in local SEO, target a second language on your site with a plugin. Okay, good idea. It used to be that it was a job, it was a pain in the ass, you have to hire translators, and they would translate your website.
And then you have to build all the new pages. And that was work. And if you didn't do it that way, then you would get laughable translations from Google Translate or whatever.
And then someone would go to your website and you would look worse, rather than better by targeting a separate language. But thanks to artificial intelligence, these have gotten much, much, much, much better. And there's another couple of plugins and Phil talks about how you could use them on your website.
There's one called deep L. And the one called we got and he says that you can just plug it on your website, they will translate all your pages, they build it all into a slash f, let's say you're doing English and French, a slash fr will be built. All those pages automatically click the click barber trick, you got a translated website in French does all the href lang and all the technical stuff.
And pretty good. And he also says, then you also get the multi language keyword research jackpot in search console. Now you can see because all these people would be coming into your, your French pages, and you can actually see what keywords they search.
And so that's like a whole new, like area where you could improve and target and tweak. And so that's pretty cool. And then he gives you the details how to set up the plugin and get launch these pages on your website, you know, similar search console and that stuff.
So I don't know, it's a good idea to get this on your website. And it's a good article from Phil and you should probably go read it.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, I'm really looking forward to when we translate all of our pages into Welsh.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, that's a hot language. Yeah, there's, yeah, it's gonna be a huge market that we're trying to break.
[Darren Shaw]
We'll look out for that. My second link is sorry, it feels like we're playing charades. It's a video.
And it's a blog post. It's also a play and a film. And it is by Exposure Ninja.
So that's Tim Cameron kitchen. There was different people Exposure Ninja, but I think he's the founder. It's how to get better quality leads through your website.
And this is a really, really practical video or guide or however you want to read it about getting more and better, not getting more getting better leads. What I also like about Exposure Ninja, so whether you're working in house, and you're promoting a local business, or might be multi location, or whether you're in an agency, you can really use all of the content on their website. They've got some great case studies.
And he always uses examples of clients. So one is service professionals, where you'll find the most motivated stand up plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians in New Jersey. But he also gives the example of an accessible bathroom provider in the UK.
So you don't look at this content and think, Oh, how am I going to apply this to my local business is always like completely on point. So he talks about how so much the sort of we use the word levers, levers are set up to generate. If marketing teams are measured on the amount of leads, rather than the conversion rate or the quality of the conversions, then what we're doing is we're just basically just trying to get leads, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And it is not a useful use of resources for our team that is actually converting those. So he talks about the problem with most websites and marketing is it inadvertently appeals to the low value leads rather than the high value ones. So he talks about how you can change that.
So he's talking about step one, attract the right traffic. So we know how we do this. We do it with high value, high intent keywords.
He talks about paid search, but you really need to know what you're doing and have a good feel for the numbers in terms, you know, you're spending money. So you need to know what your cost per acquisition and your cost per conversion is. He talks about audience specific landing pages.
So that is not being shy of making edge case landing pages for a high value potential conversion. And that might be a niche. And then he's talking about visibility in AI search.
Then he talks about step two, make your ideal customer recognize themselves. So that's where he talks about the ICP, your ideal customer profile and making sure that the assets you're producing all really resonate with that person. I'll say resonate for the thousandth time on this podcast.
So the photos that you're using, the examples that you're giving, the way that you speak, all of those things need to appeal to that person that you're trying to sell this thing to basically. And he says the last one is build trust before they inquire. They're going to be thinking, have you done this for someone like me before?
So you need to be giving the right evidence to demonstrate that you are the right choice, that they're in safe hands and that this is going to be a good bet for them. So he talks about relevant case studies, testimonials, client logos, results and ROI and awards and accreditations. Case studies is good too.
And the last one, and then I'll stop talking, is qualify the leads before they contact you. And now I think this is something that a lot of businesses don't do at all. They'll go straight to, well, here's the leads without pre-qualifying because they're scared of having a couple of fields on their website in the form that will pre-qualify that person.
So he talks about, if you're really not sure of the intent of the lead, maybe because it's come in on a search query that is lower down the funnel, make sure that you've got checklist guides and calculators so they can continue to qualify themselves before you give them the time later down. Downloadable guides, case studies and webinars at the mid-funnel and then book a call, get a quote and start consultation only on your high intent pages. Because otherwise, you're just going to spend a lot of time trying to convert a lead that is, one, probably never going to convert and two, it's not going to be worth enough money.
The end.
[Claire Carlile]
The end. It sounds like a lot of work. And I think the benefit of that is that if you do this, you will do the thing that most of your competition won't do.
And I think there's huge value in that, this competitive differentiator to invest in identifying all that and building all this out. Looks like a great article.
[Darren Shaw]
Very good.
[Claire Carlile]
I got another one. It's Rich Sanger. Is he Sanger?
Sanger?
[Darren Shaw]
Let's say Sanger today.
[Claire Carlile]
Sanger. Rich Sanger on Search Engine Land. Google's LLM patent suggests a new goal for SEO, teaching AI who you are.
And that makes all the sense. Think about that. So anyways, he deep dives into a patent that Google filed in 2023 called Data Extraction Using LLMs. Hey, well, that sounds something interesting that people want to know. What kind of patent are they trying to get? Well, the patent describes AI's attempt to build a deep holistic characterization of an entity from your website plus public data. Okay, that sounds like SEO.
The system forms conclusions about who you are. It doesn't just copy facts. So it, the patent says that it's like, we're trying to conclude this is what this brand is.
It kind of generates this. That's what the patent does. It pulls your services, your business age, your principles, your reputation, your social sentiment, and your relationships.
And it goes way beyond your site. It's getting data from maps, reviews, business listings, job postings, another one that people forget. One of the things that really stood out to me was principles.
It's actually in the patent. They want to know your principles. I think there's like about us page optimization that most businesses should be thinking about.
And that's like an area that certainly I think about WhiteSpark and I'm like, man, our about us page doesn't really doesn't do it. We got to do it. We got to improve that page.
You think Claire?
[Darren Shaw]
Well, another word for that is values, isn't it? So yeah, values is, is, yeah. So principles is value.
So when you do your, like your branding and your positioning, your, your values is something that you work on. So you would expect it to be clear.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, actually, that'd be interesting. What percentage of small businesses even describe their values, their principles on their website? Like they have a good about us page.
Anyways. No schema required. Doesn't even mention schema and patent.
Everyone's talking about schema for AISEO. I'm so sick of that. Anyways, second time I came up on this podcast.
Your web page become evidence about the entity, not just just not just pages targeting keywords. So that's, that's a mental shift, right? It's like, Oh, well, we want to rank for best plumber in Denver.
So put that keyword in all the right places on the page. Well, no, it's more about like evidence about the entity, thinking about that kind of stuff. Practically, that means consistency across all your sources, deciding what attributes you want associated with your brand.
This whole podcast is just the same old theme, like describing business properly, providing evidence and distributing that across the broader web. A good audit question from the article was if an AI system had to describe our company using information from our website, reviews, profiles, listings and third party mentions, what would it say? Like you could ask that question to all the different LLMs and see what it says would be very interesting.
But you know, patents, they don't mean that Google has actually rolled this out into their systems. They're just patents. So sometimes Google files patents, and they don't actually become real things.
And that is the end of my commentary on that article.
[Darren Shaw]
Very good. Thank you, Rich. So the last link for today, and my final link is a video on the YouTube is Talia Wolfe and Talia Wolfe is speaking to Jill Saskin-Gales.
So you might know who Jill is, if you have been in the business for a long time, because Jill used to be at Google. She's now a Google Ads coach. So she has worked in the, you know, the big infrastructure of ads at Google.
And now she is offering sort of training and coaching to smaller and medium sized businesses, right? So it's just very interesting. I always used to think, oh, maybe I should just do ads instead of SEO and everything else, because it seems like a smaller ecosystem with less moving parts.
But I don't think that's the case. I just used to have these little fantasies about it. The title is why you need to TikTokify your Google Ads.
And now I've read about like five headlines that are talking about TikTokifying people, things. And to me, that means, you know, making them short and for stupid people.
[Claire Carlile]
Basically, that's what I was thinking.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, that short form content, I just then I looked at Wikipedia, and it's like this rots your brain, you will never be able to focus ever again. And people that watch more than two hours of short form content are depressed and can't sleep. But anyway, we should take make everything like TikTok.
So the world continues to collapse around us. Anyway, on that uplifting note, I said, why is this important and interesting? There are lots of people that run ads and need to know more about the ads that they are running.
And she's talking about basically the big changes in the Google ecosystem. And this is something that I remember, which is like this, you know, we all used to be like, I want to do everything manually. And I don't want to set up any campaigns that run according to Google's understanding of what is performing and not performing.
And Jill was a bit like, those days are over, you need to basically give it up. You know, we're all learning how to use AI. And she comes back with exactly the same as everyone else has said, which is just like, the humans are the people that do the strategy.
And then you let the AI do the implementation. And you keep coming back to it. And you keep putting like, whatever it is the borders in place to stop it going wild.
And so she talks about how the ads playbook that work for years is becoming obsolete. And she's talking about how the rules have changed. So we need to work out how to make automation work for our businesses rather than fighting against using it and trying to control everything.
So she says, I've already said this, the human can do the strategy, the AI does the implementation, but she does talk about three things that you need to come back to. And I think that this, whether this is ads or whatever this is, this is still true. So she talks about the three C's that need to come from the human, which is conversion tracking.
And that isn't just necessarily the part where it's like, oh, this thing has happened. It's like, well, what are the things? What are the things?
What are the micro conversions? What are the bigger conversions? What are all the things that we need to measure along the way?
She says that conversion tracking is the foundation of the house, because without it, everything is going to fall down. And then she talks about customer data and creative and how those three things still need to be owned. And that the human being needs to strategize using those three things.
And then we let the AI do the other shizzle. But anyway, worth a watch if you are running ads, or you have an agency that is running ads on your behalf, so you can check in with what they're doing, and making sure that everything is working. The end.
[Claire Carlile]
The end. Yeah, those three C's that need to come from the human. That last one, creative.
Wow. Do not let AI make you creative for ads. I've seen such disasters.
[Darren Shaw]
Or for anything.
[Claire Carlile]
This is interesting. Very interesting to me, because WhiteSpark has never really done ads. But I have a meeting on Monday.
We're going to get started. We're going to start doing some ads. So this is useful for me to watch and get some ideas.
But it gives me a bonus link. I did actually catch another post from Amit Khabra. She's fantastic.
She does ads for lots of local businesses, small business advertisement. I saw a post of hers on Instagram, where she talked about exactly what this article that you're talking about, Claire, is talking about how you have to let AI create your campaigns and run your campaigns. But she was saying how you've got to be the person that controls the guardrails.
And so those days are over. You must let the AI build your campaigns, because Google's forcing it. But you can tweak these settings, and they have a massive impact.
And so burning money versus actually turning that money into leads. And so I'm going to drop a link to that, a little shout out. She just changed the regional settings and very specific targeting.
And you can tweak all those, and it has a massive impact. So it is important to still maintain your campaigns and monitor them and tweak them if they are AI driven, as most campaigns are today. And so I'll link to that as well as a little bonus link that is a companion link to your link.
[Darren Shaw]
Friends.
[Claire Carlile]
And that's it. We did another podcast. Thanks, everybody, for watching slash listening.
Please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Can you leave a review on Spotify?
[Darren Shaw]
I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can.
[Claire Carlile]
You can? All right. Please go do that.
[Darren Shaw]
You should.
[Claire Carlile]
You must. And then sign up for all of the software and services that Whitespark offers. We'd really appreciate that.
Okay. Thank you. Bye.
Thanks. Bye, everybody.