The Whitespark Local Update

In this episode of The Whitespark Local Update, Claire Carlile chats with the brilliant Dana DiTomaso about how AI and LLMs are transforming search and what that means for local businesses. They share practical insights on staying visible, adapting to new platforms, and connecting with today’s consumers.

Follow Dana DiTomaso ❤️
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Resources mentioned in this episode:

📝 How to Track and Report on Traffic from AI Tools in GA4 (Dana DiTomaso)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlL5ZV8z3H4

🔥 Leadferno

Creators and Guests

Guest
Dana DiTomaso
Dana DiTomaso is a marketing professional with over 20 years of experience in digital marketing, training, and teaching. She offers remote and in-person training on a wide range of marketing topics — with a special focus on analytics and GA4. At Kick Point, her marketing agency, Dana leads a team of experts in SEO, PPC, content creation, web design and development, and branding.

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 “must-read” and “must-watch” links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.

Claire (00:01.048)
and welcome to the White Spark Local Update with me, Claire Carlile, and with my friend.

Dana DiTomaso.

Okay, you might spot something a little bit different here. So Darren and I had an absolutely super time at Brighton SEO and then poor Darren was not very well and isn't very well. And so I have invited the rather wonderful Dana to come on.

The compliments coming, thank you.

I've got so many, you're going to be bored of it by the end of this. I've invited Dana to come and have a little chitty chat. So a little bit of a different podcast in a way today, because we're not just covering the things that we've seen in local search over the prior week or so, but it is a very good segue into a lot of the different things that I've been reading and that you've been writing and producing recently.

Claire (01:06.466)
So just to follow up really on Brighton SEO, which was rather wonderful and there were lots of talks, but I don't know if you know, but the sky is falling down.

Oh yeah, no, it's the end times for SEO. SEO is dead or not dead. It's like Schroeder Jr.'s SEO. is the, yeah. I did not go to Brighton in the UK. I did go to Brighton in San Diego and it was very similar with like AI, all the things.

Mm hmm. So if you didn't have, I mean, there were some brilliant talks that didn't have AI in the title, I would just like to say there were some brilliant talks, but it did feel like there were a lot of talks about AI and LLMs and AIO and GEO and basically as many acronyms as you could possibly come up with. And there were a lot of

people selling their new tools to help you understand your visibility in the LLLMs. So I think anyone that might have been new to the industry early on in their career in terms of SEO might have just thought, what's happening here? What have I come to?

I can't imagine starting an SEO or geo or AIO. It's just SEO. It's just SEO right now because it would be so weird. It feels like, I don't know, I've been doing this a long time now. This is my 25th year working in this wonderful industry. And I remember the Google Florida update, which happened many, many, many years ago. And people were like, SEO is dead. I think that was what, 2004?

Dana (02:50.766)
2005, 2006, something like that, a long time ago. And guess what? SEO is not dead. SEO is still not dead. It's, as Ruth Burr Reedy said, people are going to continue to buy things on the internet that is not going away. So, it's call it what you want. But the reality is SEOs, your job is to make sure things show up when people search for stuff. And what is an LLM but a fancy search?

And also, if you're an SEO, but you also think of yourself as a marketer, it's just another thing. It's just another thing that you need to do to get visibility for your clients in the right, so they're in the right place at the right time. So what I really wanted to do with this chat, because when obviously we focus within this podcast a lot on local SEO. So I'm thinking about those businesses where

know, they have a local product or service that they are selling to a people within a specific geographic area. let's have a little talk for those marketers and business owners that operate within that context. Because what I would really like to do is by the end of this little chat, just give them a little bit of hope.

so they can not just get swept away in the, need GEO, AEO, I need all of those things.

So first tip, don't panic. This is like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy version of local SEO update is like, don't panic. Everything's fine. People still use Google. Yeah, that's a thing. And what I would recommend actually, what I would recommend, I'm sure you have GA4. You probably hate it, but.

Dana (04:42.766)
And we'll put this in the links for this episode. I have a guide on making a channel in GA4 for traffic to your website from AI tools. Set that up. Observe the tiny percentage of your overall traffic that comprises compared to Google. Remember the perspective of that. yeah, AI visits are usually higher converting than organic visits. AI visitors are more likely to come back because it's like a pre-vetting system.

They're great, super happy with AI visitors. For most of our clients, they make up anywhere from 1 to 10 % of their overall traffic. The 10 % are places like higher education institutions. If you're a small local business, we're seeing like 5 % or less. And that's okay. It's fine. I'm totally okay with that being a small percentage of traffic. And remember too that basically, chat GPT is Google in a trench coat, right? So if you are doing the things to show up well on Google, you're going to be okay with showing up on chat GPT.

Breath in, breath out. We're good. Okay. We can wrap up the episode now we're set.

You're all done. Chill out. think it's, what would be really useful is to have a little think about the language that people use when they are describing all of these different ways that people can start their informational search. Because one thing that we are seeing, even though that we have been involved in the industry for a million years and Google has been dead every year,

Every year. Sometimes several times a year.

Claire (06:11.736)
This does feel like one of the first times that consumer behavior and the way that people search is getting quite a radical shakeup. So I'm excited by it. But at the same time, we need to understand that this is something that has happened very recently and things will be changing all the time. We can't know exactly at this point how people are searching.

Yep. And I would agree too. And I would say too, especially if you're targeting a younger demographic, like not me, look at this gray hair, but what I'm saying is people use TikTok. And I recently was talking about this because I was saying if you're under 30, and this is generalization, I'm sure there's some people who don't use TikTok who under 30. There's probably a couple of them.

But the thing is, like, if you are a local business, you've probably already realized that you need to switch your focus to things like TikTok and what the youth are using to do these kinds of searches. You're probably on that boat. Stay on there. Don't go off of there. And if you are local business and you haven't considered getting on there yet, I think you have to because that is where people go to do a search, but they're still doing a search. They're still looking for recommendations. They still want to hear from their friends on where is a good place to go.

So none of that, existence of like people asking people, should I go for dinner? Or who's a good physiotherapist? Or my toilet is backing up, who should I call? None of that has changed. It's just the places in which they're gonna go for those recommendations has changed. And again, you just need to make sure that you're showing up there. So like LLMs, TikTok, Google, like it's all the same sort of idea. The trick is making sure to go where your audience is. And that has always been marketing, period.

that fundamental aspect of marketing has not changed and will not change no matter what the name of the platform is five years from now, 10 years from now.

Claire (08:08.738)
Yeah, I love that. It just sits within the context of, it's just another channel. It's like the same way that it was like SEO is dead, social media is where it's at.

Yeah. And like the tactics, so remember back when Facebook pages first came out and everybody had those banners on their Facebook pages, it was like, click here to like me. And they had those big arrows leading to the like buttons. You remember those, right? And it's like, that's gone now. And now we've all moved on to Instagram. Instagram's dead now. We've all moved on to TikTok. Like that is just a channel. The strategy should not change. The strategy is what gets applied to the channel and that's the tactic. So just keep that in mind. Like it's...

there's certainly stuff that you can do. I see lots of fun videos for places like there was a pancake place that came up that's in Illinois, I think, and she had a fantastic video. I'm not on TikTok. I just wait for the good TikToks to make it to Instagram. It was great. I saw it on Instagram. think Kylie Kelsey shared it, which is how I ended up seeing it. was like, I'm never going to go to this pancake place in Illinois, but good job in visibility. You could be that person.

or you could just be showing up in your local community on a regular basis and not necessarily, you know, go viral. And that is also totally a great way to exist in your business. So don't get too stressed out about that. If you're reaching your audience, if you're building your audience over time, if you're growing the number of people who come to your shop or whatever, or if you're like, I don't want to grow, I want to stay this size and you're reaching the same number of people, that's also totally fine. Nothing wrong with that.

I think about just trying to stay on top of how people search, how do people solve their problems? think one of the things that you've just highlighted is obviously it's easy when you are marketing to people that are just like us, because we look at our own consumer journeys. think, well, obviously I consume my TikTok content on Instagram. Darren and I have talked about this before, like any self-respecting 50-year-old woman.

Claire (10:03.488)
Exactly. But if in the absence of obviously being your target, what about going out and speaking to people about what they use to solve their problems? What are you sort of what are you keying into with regard to understanding the changing landscape with like consumer behavior generally? Yeah.

I do think that the consumer's behavior is getting more fragmented. think that people have their own local communities they go to. I'll use the example of Victoria, BC where I live. I live outside of Victoria. For example, there is a Discord for the South Island and there's different groups. There's a group for Souk, which is where I live. There's a group for Victoria, a group for Langford, et cetera. There's channels for different interests and stuff. People will go on there and be like, hey, I need a new dog groomer. Who do you recommend?

And this Discord is not, if you've never used Discord before, it's like a chat thing like Teams or like Slack. It's not indexed. It's not Google searchable. The only way you would see is if you're in there. And if you're a business owner, you'll think, well, I don't have time to stay on there, but I think it would be good to know. And this is where you can get to know from your customers. Like, where did you find out about me? somebody mentioned you on the Victoria Discord.

or somebody mentioned you on Reddit, which is how we found the company that we ended up getting to install our new heat pump. And they, just searched for heat pump, good heat pump company, Souq, and this company came up that we ended up using Sasquatch heat pumps and they were great. And it was, and I told them, like, I found you on Reddit. So if you are that kind of home services business, like get your employees to ask, ask people.

how did you hear about us? You will always get the right answer because people will only remember the very last thing. But sometimes you will get it. And if you get one person says to you, I found about you on Reddit, you better go on Reddit and do a search and see if you're in there. And what you don't wanna do, and I'm just gonna talk to you business owners right now, do not make an account and then get mad at people if they bad mouth your business, okay? Just, I know it's hard. I hate it when that happens, but don't do it. But you can respond to comments there.

Dana (12:15.5)
You don't want to necessarily be like, hey, check us out or anything like that. But you want to be there at least to respond to people who talk about your business and say, hey, thanks so much for recommending us or, you know, just, just be there, make an account in your name and just keep an eye on that stuff. And I think it's really valuable. There's actually a new tool that was launched, think just this past week. Is it cool? Alert mouse made by Rand Fishkin and friends. I've been using it for months as a beta tester. It pulls mentions from Reddit really, really well.

alert mouse

Dana (12:45.41)
So if you don't have a way to keep up on this stuff, go to alertmouse.com, sign up for an account, get your business name in there. It finds stuff that Google Alerts does not. So I do really recommend, and we have this set up for our clients as well. I strongly recommend setting that up. Just like it takes 10 minutes, just go ahead and do it.

Love it. know that Darren mentioned it on LinkedIn. I think he must've been a beta tester as well. So I only set mine up this morning because I used to love Google alerts. to use it for all of my... course they are. So I set mine up quickly just with my name because my free account, my one term, fantastic. 140 mentions. Like there were a hundred gray ones that are just, you know, boring old me posting somewhere on Facebook. And then there was my Reddit.

yeah, it was fantastic. So absolutely love that. Top tip.

Yeah, I find that AlertMouse is probably one of the best like brand monitoring tools and I have really missed, we used to use mention.com back in the day when Google alert started to suck but then mention got expensive and so there was really a space in the market for a mention monitoring tool. yeah, AlertMouse is fantastic and also it's cute.

Yeah, all of the cheese puns, very bad, but obviously we love it. Coming, what you said about where did you find us reminds me of something that I read, something that Joy Hawkins said the other day and there's something that another couple of people, you know, if you've got a form on your website, which is like, I don't know, maybe you're a services business, like you said, where did you find us?

Claire (14:18.37)
So some people will have a drop down menu that will have lots of things. I hate those because it's never how I found them and I just choose some random thing. So personally, I'd probably have a free form box on my website where someone could write Reddit or my auntie Theresa told me about you because I'd rather have that.

very qualitative data or nearer qualitative than the actual, you know, choose one of these six and then I'll say, 60 % of our leads came via. No, it didn't come via then. They just couldn't find how they found you on the drop down menu.

or they were picking the first one in the list, which is why if you do have a dropdown, make sure to change the order of the options around it for once a while just to make sure that they're not all picking the first option because they probably are. But I agree having a free form. And then to make the free form useful, at some point, a human being has to look at this lead when it comes in. It takes just to have your own categorization system of however many drop downs that make sense. And then in your CRM or whatever you use, could be a Google Sheet. I'm not going to judge you. I don't care.

have that drop down and then choose from your pre-selected options. So the person will be like, Aunt Teresa, okay, I'm gonna choose word of mouth as the option in our drop down system. And then that is really useful reporting. We do that for a few clients where they'll have their own internal system. So we'll know for example, that this lead came in via a Google branded search campaign and that usually is word of mouth. So people are searching for that specific brand. So yeah, technically it came in via paid, but it was actually a word of mouth lead.

And just like brand campaigns are cheap, that's fine. We can just keep that running. But I think that that gives you that extra insight that you would otherwise be missing as to, know, yeah, I came in via paid, but how did it really come in? it was a recommendation from Reddit, you know? Because again, like people aren't going to necessarily click on your website and then go there and then do the booking all in the same session. They do all kinds of weird stuff. And my, in my go-to examples, like we needed a new pest control person for our house because we have to spray for ants every year.

Dana (16:19.374)
doesn't get cold enough here. Not everything dies like the rest of Canada. And so what we have to do is our pest control guy died. I Googled around for a new one. I found a person. I texted the link to my wife and said, hey, can you book the appointment? Cause I was going to be out of town. And so she clicked on the link in the text message and then booked. so of course the actual conversion came in via direct. I found them via Google business profiles because they have fantastic reviews. So if they had asked at any point, we would have put Google business profile in there. They didn't ask.

Totally forgot to tell them, but they're great. And so at some point I'll be like, hey, by the way, just make sure that our, your lifetime value for us is like attributed to SEO so your SEO person can have a happy day, you know? But it's just, you have to recognize that that is, you're going to have one place where it's coming in that says in GA4 or whatever use for analytics that is direct or a paid branded campaign or whatever it is. But the reality of how they actually found you will be something totally different.

And I think it's important to have both of those factors when you're considering acquisition.

you one more thing about analytics. feel like maybe a couple of years ago, a lot of local businesses or I'm just thinking about the types of businesses that I would have worked with or have worked with. It's that reliance on all of your data, all of your reporting data and all of the important stuff can come from Google Analytics and we can trust it.

But I feel a little bit more now like, not that we could then, but there really does need to be, it is likely that there are some other data sources that you are going to need to pull in to present something along the terms of what is important to you as a business. And, you know, that's why we always used to talk about, obviously, it's not just Google Analytics, because as a local person, we're looking at Google Business Profile insights.

Claire (18:20.684)
we might be using search console data. Which are not accurate. And nothing is accurate.

No, is accurate, but they're really not accurate. They're just like wrong.

Okay, so yeah, that's one place we might be pulling in call tracking. There could be some other data source from within the business, whether or that is coming from, I don't know, somebody filled in this piece of paper when they came in or whoever is my customer service person. You know, do we need to just stop being so obsessed about one, everything being measurable and two,

everything coming via the website and just using our Google Analytics data.

Yes and yes. So I would say for sure like I don't care how somebody got in touch with you and if it was measurable I don't care if they saw your Magnet stuck to your neighbor's fridge and then they called you from the magnet like hey Maybe you have a call tracking number in there great if you do totally okay if you don't I don't really care I just care that they call you that's it or they email you or they fill out your form. I don't care

Dana (19:31.34)
So first off, you need to make it as easy as possible for people to get in touch with you in the method in which they wanna get in touch with you with. So I'm gonna say here, Leadferno, for example, I'm sure a friend of the White Spark podcast, a tool that we use as well, and this is where you can have someone text you through your website. Every single website we've added Leadferno to has seen an increase in lead volume. It has never been a net negative. It is another way for people to get in touch with you, which brings me to,

Stop making people do the thing that you want them to do. So if you love talking to people on the phone, good for you. Other people don't like talking on the phone. Let them text you, let them email you, let them fill out a form. Just give people as many options as possible to get in touch with you. And I think that as a small business owner, as an owner of franchises, wherever situation you're in, if you aren't giving any barrier at all to getting people in touch with you, you are giving business away.

I love it. There we go. That's okay. My little ranty rant is over.

Dana (20:39.022)
I mean, I've worked with so many businesses over the last 25 years. And like the ones that do well are the ones that listen to their customers and make it easy for people to get in touch with them. That's it. And aren't jerks. Like not being a jerk is also really important too, just FYI. you know.

Thank you. We are coming up to time and I am thinking, what would you give as your final pearl of wisdom to the local business, people that work in local basically, the SEOs and the marketers, because of the sky is falling down situation?

Yeah, so take the five minutes it takes to set up that custom channel that I talked about in GA4 or Looker Studio or whatever tool you use to see how much AI traffic you're getting. Look at that very tiny number. Remember, ultimately it is just SEO. We're just doing marketing. The tactics are gonna change. It's gonna be new LLM next year. That'll probably be like everyone's favorite new toy. It's okay, it's just SEO. It's just marketing. Just keep doing it.

has been absolutely lovely. feel sort of like I can rest easy, carry on doing like good work for the businesses that I work with. Thank you for joining me today and being our very, very first special guest on the podcast.

I feel so honored. Thank you so much for having me. And yeah, it's always great to chat with you. And I hope Darren feels better soon.

Claire (22:03.766)
Yeah, we love you, Darren. Get better soon. And a million gazillion thank yous to Dana and to our lovely listeners and I was going to say readers, maybe. Lovely listeners and watchers. Come along again next week. know, like, subscribe, review, do all the things for the podcast because, you know, we want to see you again soon. So it's a goodbye from me.

Bye.

Thank you!