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.
Darren (00:00.118)
Bonjour and welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Spark Local Update. Avec moi, Darren Shaw.
Bonjour Darren! avec moi, clack a l'ail! It's that time of the week again! Guess what we're going to talk about?
We're going to talk about the very latest happenings in local search from the past week and a bit. And we'll see what's happening and what is new and exciting things. You must know if you practice local search or you have any interest in local search or, you know, if you're just a human on this earth.
All right. I would love to hear what your first link is all about. Claire, what do you want to talk about today?
would like to talk about something that I watched and really liked, which was on Moz. Anyone that used to watch a lot of Moz things will remember Brittany Muller, who is super duper lovely and clever. And so she was always talking about SEO things and then she disappeared off because she was really into the AI thing. So,
Claire (01:20.238)
really like the way that Moz is revisiting some of their previous content on Whiteboard Friday and they're looking at then and now. I really like this interview so in this link that we'll give you there is a sort short version written up and then you can watch the whole thing. It's an hour long but it's jolly good. I really liked it because I...
Brittany knows so much about AI and I feel like we're all sort of flip-flopping around and thinking that LLMs are the only thing that is AI. So her point is there are lots of different technologies in AI. This is where we are at the moment. We're all talking about LLMs, da, da, da, da, da, but she speaks very intelligently and very excessively about what AI actually is and...
Also then, delves into some ideas about how marketers can learn a bit more and also use AI to help them with their processes. So it's another one of those pieces that is super accessible, but also very relevant to marketers who want to just try and get over the LLM hype of fluff of awfulness.
Nice. I like this. And I would always say listen to Brittany Mueller. How do you say her last name?
saying Muller and Brittany, we love you and please correct us if that's wrong.
Darren (02:50.178)
Yes, Brittany Muller. Muller. Well, I'm to get my Brittany Muller fan club t-shirt. Yes, but she's good.
I love how this podcast is just a conversation about who we think is really nice. I know.
Just gushing about our favorite people in search marketing.
So watch it and read it, you will like it.
I have a cool link. is Claudia Tomina. Again, she's talking on the LinkedIn about this crazy case. Business loses 800 reviews overnight. do know why? What was the violation? They were asking people for reviews at the register. What? Asking at the register? So there's a form where you can...
Darren (03:42.606)
report a business for, you know, report business conduct that's not good. And in the form, there is a, what's the concern? Pressuring people to leave reviews. And so Google has taken action on this and they have basically deleted all this business's reviews because they were apparently pressuring people by asking it to check out. So someone comes up and they like, hey, will you leave us a review? And now,
A lot of people in the comments are saying, what's wrong with that? Isn't that what you're supposed to do? Like that's the best time. Time of sale is when you should ask for a review. But if you dig in the comments, you'll see there's a little bit more nuance to this. This business was new in two months and they got like 1500 reviews. So there was some sketch looking stuff going on. So which is probably why Google took action, but still raises questions about that field, pressuring.
people to leave reviews. So I don't usually see Google take action on anything spammy, but they have in this case. And it's interesting to just be aware of how you do it. don't pressure people. What do you think?
I think it's interesting, it used to be a thing where we would say, don't get all your reviews from the same IP address. So sometimes you could have like a dedicated kiosk for reviews, or it might be that you asked, say you had 30 people that were with you for a service, like a tourism based thing, and you asked them all to leave a review at the same time. Then that used to be a thing that we used to avoid. And I'm wondering if any of that could have.
played in, a massive velocity of reviews all left in the same place.
Darren (05:30.222)
All like geo located because they did they Claudia says in the comments they were using a QR code and so I was like Will you leave us a review and then they just stare really hard at them before they give them the change and then they're like here here is a Card with a QR code and then they just stare them down until they leave it right now do it. So maybe that's what was happening
Yes, be careful, be careful.
Be careful out there everybody. It's scary out
There is a, I wanted to highlight the forum too, and I'm going to drop that in the show notes. If you see a business doing nefarious stuff, there is a report business conduct forum and it's mostly for reporting fake review generation. so there is that forum. So if you have a competitor that you do not like, then you can submit them on this forum and see if Google removes all their reviews.
Darren, so much nefarious advice from you on this podcast.
Darren (06:36.942)
Everyone knows I'm joking.
dear, dear, I'm to talk about something that popped into my inbox that looked kind of interesting and I had to read it to try and understand it. But it is a blog on Google and it is places insights in BigQuery is now generally available. Uncover local real world insights for site selection, market research, location, performance evaluation and more.
So I read that and went, what does that mean? I don't really understand. And then I went and read it and basically the Places Insights data was being trialed in the States and now it's rolled out across the world. And so the context here is especially, I can't imagine if this would be that appropriate for a very small business, but for example, if you're a multi-location, you're a retail chain or you're
franchise or whatever it is, we talk a lot about selecting locations based on will I rank here? But I think we need to think a little bit more about selecting locations based on what other types of businesses are here. What, how many star ratings do they get? Does the infrastructure of points of interest support the type of business that I'm trying to offer?
So they take the example of vegan restaurants in Manhattan, New York, and they show they map them out in New York. You can see where they are, what the average rating is. And so as a business, you could start to look at what else exists nearby and what the ratings might be. And another use case they gave was for electric charging. So if you've got an electric charging point.
Claire (08:29.752)
then you'll want to make sure that there are places for people to have coffee, get their groceries, have their hair done, I don't know, get a massage or whatever it is. So it's how you get the interplay between these different services that can help you choose your next best location. So I was just quite interested in that. And the idea is that you can push that into BigQuery and then pull that down into however you want to process that data. And it looks interesting.
haven't used it but I thought it might be of interest to some people.
I like this. I got to explore this a little bit more. What's next? So apparently suspensions are on the rise. Suspensions on the rise. Barry Schwartz published this on September 29th and he says, people are saying there's a big spike in suspensions across multiple accounts I manage. And other people are saying, yeah, I'm seeing it too. And then Mike Blumenthal, who tracks this very closely, he says, yep, you're not wrong because look at my data. then so.
We can see that, suspensions are going up. So tying this to the other post from Claudia, is Google finally doing something about spammy businesses on Google Business Profiles? Tune in next week when we answer this question. But yeah, it's really nice to see this, really. I think it's such a mess, and it's so easy to manipulate.
We won't answer the
Darren (09:58.38)
I guess it's getting harder, but they're working on this. review spam is a nightmare for Google and fake listings is a nightmare for Google. And so they're cracking down. And so it's a double edged sword on one side. It's like, yep, great. Google take care of the spam, make it harder for people. But when they tweak those knobs and they make it harder for the spammers, they made it harder for the real businesses too. Yeah. So it's a bit of a problem. They're trying to balance it.
I think they need to go a little harder on the suspension side and just actually make things harder for business owners. But I do understand that it becomes a challenge for them because when they do it, then everyone's complaining and they're like, Google, you suck. And they're like, you hurt my feelings. They don't like getting told that they suck because it really increases. That's actually, if you look at Mike's chart, there's a chart of suspensions going up.
And it's an exact correlating chart of people saying Google sucks. So it's not ideal for them. But yeah, I don't know. You're a Google Business Profile product expert. Are you seeing a spike in suspension tickets in the forum?
don't know, but that's what I deal with. end up dealing with that mostly. So if you just go, and go through and half of the page is probably somewhere that is in either a state of trying to get verified or appeal a suspension or has a suspension. So, but a lot of them are rightly suspended. So I spend my time working through businesses that have done a naughty thing or done a wrong thing.
and then they learn and then they get back. So it's just like, yes, there might've been lots of suspensions, but in my experience, they needed to happen to bring them into adherence to the guidelines, which is not just silly rules. It's like, well, if you are going to have a listing, then you do need to actually have an offering which is locally focused for people in the geographic area, which a lot of people don't have.
Darren (12:11.468)
Yeah. Do you think that the business owners, like what percentage do you think are people that are nefarious or like, yeah, I'm going to break the rules so I can benefit from this and versus people that are just clueless. They're like, I just don't understand this. I thought I was making a listing. I'm just trying to make a business on Google.
might be partly to do with my selection of who I want to reply to. Obviously I'm available for everyone, but some things seem more appropriate to tackle. But maybe 80 % is people who are just business owners that have, or marketers within that, or someone within that that just made a boo-boo. And then other ones could be potential bad actors or slightly dodged stuff. Yeah.
slightly dodge. All right, what else you got to talk about today?
would like to tell you about a piece by an agency here in the UK, this is where I find it, called Koozai that have been around a very, very, very long time because I can remember when I started work all of those years ago, I've had lots of people that I sort of know work
This is a really, really solid piece, which is called Search Everywhere, How Hospitality and Travel Brands Can Win in AI Driven Search. But don't let the AI driven search put you off because this seems to be a piece which is very much just a very good grounding in how people's search is changing. Here is a really good grounding to make sure, and they use the search everywhere, which is another thing that we like to say, which is just like,
Claire (13:55.51)
It doesn't matter. Okay, search everywhere. This is a really, really good piece. So when we talk about hospitality, we're talking about, you know, restaurants, lodging type services. But I like to extend that to anyone that has also got a business that serves people that are consuming their product and service as part of their tourism element. So it could be coffee shops as well, et cetera. And I like this because we have been talking about
Search queries and this whole, you know, hotel London, it's not how we search, it? We're using these quests, these like basically sentences. So this gives you a really good context about thinking about how people search, how to make sure that you have the right kind of content on your website, as you would expect. I just think this is really good tactical.
blog post or piece of content which will help you sort of rethink or your strategy basically if you work in hospitality just to make sure you're doing the right things. That's it. I love it. It's good.
It looks really good and I know why you love it because I just did a control F for both fan out and chunking and it was not mentioned once. Neither of those phrases were mentioned once in this piece. So this is definitely a good one.
I think there was one. I disagree there. I think there was a chunk, but...
Darren (15:24.994)
I know, just did a command F for
You sure? Alright.
Do you know who Phil Rosick is? He's one of the OGs of local SEO and the dude has been one of the most prolific writers in the space and he has written another piece to add. I think he has written 17,000 articles on local SEO at this point. And his latest is a simple template for self-auditing your AI local search visibility. And I love how this is very local focused.
And he provides a very nice little spreadsheet template and some guidance on like, here's what you need to be looking at. Run these queries, gather this information, stick it in the spreadsheet, do it for all the businesses, look at what's happening. And it just gives you this framework to think about what should I be doing differently now for optimizing for this AI local SEO. So people talk about AI SEO, AI local SEO. So really good.
piece, great, actionable as it always is from Phil Rosick. So highly recommend you give this a read and just follow his instructions. Cause the dude knows what he's talking about. He's one of the greatest and you should definitely read anything he ever publishes on his blog. He also, he links somewhere in here and I was like, look at this. I didn't even see this. Is he posted something like, like 2021?
Darren (16:55.23)
spin-off pages, a bazooka for your local SEO, is basically, like you got a service page about your plumbing services, break it down into all the sub-pages. And so he's talking about site architecture and he also has a great thing. Technically that makes this my fourth link, but I'm going with it because it's related to this article and it's also an excellent thing you should also read. You can actually just go to...
You could just like spin the wheel of Phil's blog and read any posts he's ever published. And you'd be like, that's pretty good. So yeah, highly recommend Phil Rosick. Good stuff.
Always. And we love a checklist. Checklist. Checklist. We love a template. We love them resources basically. We love them. Yeah. Very good.
So I think that's it. I think we did a whole podcast
We did it. Hooray. Again, another one. Best time of the week. Now, you might remember that last week, Darren, on pain of death for everybody, said that everyone must go and leave a review. So we've got some lovely reviews on Apple Podcasts. Thank you. So what have we got?
Claire (18:10.988)
Rosie Mayfly, these guys pack an unbelievable amount of information into a 20 minute podcast and they're both totally dynamic and engaging, especially Claire love her glasses. Didn't really say that bit. I'm in awe, would definitely recommend a listen. So if you would like to leave a review, we will be so happy on the Apple podcasts.
That's very nice. Such nice kind words. on the Canadian podcast, so Apple podcast will show you only reviews from your country. So we got five on the Canadian side. Thanks to all you Canadians for dropping a review. But yeah, again, you can never have enough reviews, as you know, if you're in local search. So if you want to leave another one on Apple podcast or on Spotify, we would be very pleased to receive such review. Thank you.
Just don't get 800 in one week.
No, Apple podcast will suspend your podcast. Yeah, and you'll be in big trouble. Yeah. Thank you. Bye everybody.
Thank