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π₯ Whitespark Local Ranking Grids
This week, Darren Shaw is joined by special guest Amy Toman to break down the local SEO stories you need to know, including:
This week, Darren Shaw is joined by special guest Amy Toman to break down the local SEO stories you need to know, including:
π Two Types of GBP Blocks (Amy Toman): article not yet published.
Creators and Guests
Guest
Amy Toman
Amy Toman specializes in Local SEO and Google Business Profile (GBP) management, helping businesses strengthen their visibility and attract more customers online. With over a decade of experience in digital marketing, she was the first woman to achieve βDiamondβ Product Expert status for Google Business Profiles in Googleβs Product Expert program, a recognition of her exceptional expertise in GBP maintenance, troubleshooting, and reinstatements.
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 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 Podcast with me, Darren Shaw. I'm back from vacation and I have a very special guest with me today. It is Amy Toman.
Welcome, Amy.
[Amy Toman]
Thank you, Darren. And it sounds like we both were traveling. You a bit more.
You were off doing lovely things in where? Europe?
[Darren Shaw]
France. Yeah, I went to France for three weeks as Claire has been filling in on the podcast for the past three weeks while me and the fam traveled around the and it was an amazing trip.
[Amy Toman]
I know I heard Claire make some comments about how you were out, you were out biking and baguettes.
[Darren Shaw]
I wasn't doing any of that. And then there was some comment about like having onions around my neck. I don't know.
Is that like a French thing? I don't even know. I don't know what she's talking about.
Yeah.
[Amy Toman]
I'm sure she spends time over there. So it was, you know, it's relevant to that. I was actually last week in Mexico City for the Google, the it was regional, but it was for all of the Americas.
Sometimes they don't include people in South America, but this time it was everybody from Canada down to, I don't know what the lowest depth, Argentina, Brazil. And that was really, that was really cool. That was really, it was a good time.
We learned a lot. We did a lot of networking and, you know, just kind of appreciating appreciation by Google and us appreciating each other, working together throughout the year.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. So if you don't know Amy Tillman, let me tell you a little something about Amy Tillman. She is a diamond Google Business Profile product experts.
One of the few diamonds is only, I don't know, 10 maybe max in the Google Business Profile forum. But to me, she's the diamond that shines the brightest. She works very hard in the forum.
She's such a great mentor. She really invests a lot into that forum. And she's one of the strongest voices and the biggest helper on the forum.
So it's great to have her on the podcast because she's going to bring amazing perspectives and really interesting topics that you maybe not might not hear otherwise.
[Amy Toman]
And I will say too, Darren, we have known each other for a while. We were trying to figure it out when Joy was there. We were trying to figure out when we all met, which was in local U in Santa Monica.
We were trying to remember if that was 2018 or 2017. And that was that was when I met you. And it just confirmed everything I always thought about you about how wonderful you are.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, thanks. Yeah. Well, it confirmed to me that you are also wonderful.
All right, let's talk about some links. Let's talk about what's been happening in local search. I will start the first one.
This could be big, everybody listen up. So Mika Lapisto on LinkedIn has a post that he posted. And it's basically talking about how you could move the map pin for a service area business.
What? That's pretty crazy. Because this has always been a big problem.
You can't move a service area business map and you get a lot of service area businesses where if you check on a ranking grid, you can see that they're ranking totally not where they're supposed to. But maybe if you can move pin you fix it. So anyways, the way it works is you go to the listing on maps, and you add this little code, you'll have to look it up in the show notes after but it's like exclamation 10 m to x, it's just like a chunk of code, you add that into the URL after data equals, and then press enter.
And you're going to get this new little panel that I've never seen before. That gives you these options you're gonna it's got wrong pin location or address missing place, add or fix a road also interesting, wrong information or your opinions about maps, you tell them what you think. So it's got those options.
And then if you do it on an SAB listing, you can actually drag the pin. So I noticed that it wouldn't work if I am doing it. If I go directly to a listing on maps, I have to be kind of in the search results and then just click listing and then I put that in there and it comes up.
But it's a suggestion edit like any other suggestion edit. So I may or may not get approved by Google when you submit it. But I do find that if you're a really high level local guy, you can often get your edits approved.
And the huge question for me is, could you use this to fix an SAB that is that currently has their pin in the wrong place? Common problem right now, the only fix for that is you got to create a brand new Google Business Profile, then you got to move your reviews from that one over over the new one. And then okay, finally, now you're an SAB ranking in the right place.
But maybe you could use this little hack to actually move the pin and then you don't have to go through all that trouble. Very interesting. What do you think of that, Amy?
[Amy Toman]
I worry, I worry like I worked at everything. Because what was it was it I think was a couple years ago, where we had the pins were moved too easily.
[Darren Shaw]
That is a concern for sure. There's like, I don't want to talk about it because I don't want the hackers to be like messing around.
[Amy Toman]
Um, I think this is really cool. I think this is great as long as Google is then kind of backing the information up, you know, what what's been requested, what's been suggested, as long as they, they go in and they kind of verify that information, even going so far as to possibly request re-verification on that. Because I have had a lot of trouble with getting clarification as to how to actually move an SAB.
So I mean, if this exploit works, great. But it's hard to get Google to say this is the direct path. So until until I can get further afro to, you know, definitely say this is how you move an SAB.
You know, I'm open to anything if it works, if it doesn't violate the, you know, the terms of service. And just generally, if it works, this is great.
[Darren Shaw]
It is a concern that there may be a positive side where oh, we can finally fix the problem for SABs. But the dark side is the hackers and schemers might be messing with other profiles. So you got to keep an eye on it.
And I'm not here to plug my software, but you should probably have something that monitors your listings and lets you know when stuff happens. And the Whitespark local platform, it's only $1 a month and it'll allow you to like if someone moves your map in, you'll know so let me point out my friend, Darren, that when they started doing that, we I was working with your software.
[Amy Toman]
And I remember specifically saying, Do you have a function to move this to monitor this? And I believe within a day, maybe even 12 hours.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, yeah, we built it for you.
[Amy Toman]
You did. And I remember saying, This is amazing. And I went on and I talked about it because the whole idea that somebody can tell me that before a client contacts us and says, You know, hey, there's a problem.
I just, your software is really, really good for that. If anybody doesn't use it $1 a year, please, you know, just hook it up to every client you have, you get all these notifications. It's excellent.
[Darren Shaw]
It's basically free. You should just do it. Yeah.
All right. What do you got? What do you got to share with us?
[Amy Toman]
Well, I found kind of an interesting one. A business received an email that said we reviewed your business profile and confirm that it violates our policy on fake engagement. As a result, your profile will be restricted.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay. What's the difference between restricted and suspended? Is there a difference?
[Amy Toman]
Restricted means it stays online. But you cannot you cannot you will not receive any reviews, people will be told that they cannot enter a review. Or I guess if any, if any somehow get by, they will be published.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay.
[Amy Toman]
And you can't, you can't update any content, you can't add photos, you can't add you know, services, you can't reply to anything that's restricted. Suspended is where you basically do the same thing, except it's not seen.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, now you're not on the map at all.
[Amy Toman]
This in this case, they're not taking it offline, which I have seen them do sometimes they will say, Oh, you know, fake engagement. Let's go. This one.
It's pretty cool. They're just telling you they're putting a block on there. They're telling you the accounts restricted.
And what's really cool is that they say, here's a quick reminder of some important business profile policies. In other words, we're assuming that you didn't mean to do this, but you did. And so they have, you know, three different points about accepting all reviews, don't pay for reviews, and don't solicit positive reviews from employees.
I have a bunch of questions about this might be brought up. They don't say how long that lasts. My guess is based on prior experience that it's going to last 30 to 30 to 60 days, that block.
I also am curious as to whether the three points, again, I posted this on LinkedIn, the three points that they bring up don't pay for reviews, accept all reviews and don't solicit positive reviews from you know, people related to you. I'm wondering if those are specific to what Google found?
[Darren Shaw]
Well, sounds like it, right? It's like fake engagement. That sounds like we've detected that your reviews look suspiciously fake.
And then especially with those three being the policy things that they highlight. So like, hey, we noticed your reviews look suspicious, and we've restricted your profile and stop effing around. That's basically what that email says.
[Amy Toman]
That's really what it is. And I think, you know, I mean, it's a polite reminder. I also think it's, it's reasonable the way they phrase it.
You know, they're not like, you know, you're a horrible business, whatever. It's just like, this is what we noticed. This is what we've done.
We're going to give you some reminders. And that was the end of it. I don't know if there was also any way to appeal that.
And as I've said to people who've asked, and we can talk about different types of blocks. But I also don't think that these are going to, the time that it would take to go through the process of appealing this, I think by the time you get a response to that, the block would have worn off anyway.
[Darren Shaw]
Good job, Google, really. Like the fake review thing is such a massive problem. It's awful.
Businesses are manipulating reviews. And so I'd like to see them do something about it. Yep.
All right. My next thing to chat about is a massive, literally massive, correlation studies of LLM ranking factors. So this guy, Ben Wills, he did this study.
It's 10 different models across five providers, the providers being like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity. The whole data is like three petabytes of data. He analyzed 100 industries, 403,000 different prompts were run.
And then he was trying to correlate visibility with some of these signals. And so it's great. It's like a ranking signals report.
And really in-depth, massive stuff. And so I'm going to spill the beans and give you the number one thing across all industries was just being in the search results. If you are ranking in Google search results, that's the thing that's going to correlate best with visibility in the large language models.
Second one is homepage keyword relevance. So we're talking about SEO. Both of those are SEO.
SEO is not dead, you people. The third one is domain page rank. Again, we're talking about SEO.
And so domain page rank, I don't know what that data point is. Where do you get that from? This one is big.
Wikidata. So presence in Wikidata has a strong correlation with visibility in the large language models. Wikipedia, of course.
Yeah, that's a huge one. But one of the things I love about this is that he also does quite a few local search industries. He does cosmetic dentistry, he does legal services for businesses, auto glass repair, a whole bunch of others.
So you can actually dig into those specific industries and see, you can actually see differences. Different industries will have different correlations. So if you are a SaaS business, then Reddit might be more important than if you are a cosmetic dentist, for example.
So it's really cool to be able to dig into that. Of course, I got to say correlation is not causation. It's a correlation study.
But yeah, so if you look at the legal one, the number one strongest signal for visibility in AI was Wikidata. What? Wikidata.
Wikidata is so interesting to me. Anyone who's been doing SEO for a while has maybe tried to do a Wikipedia and they gave up because you can't get your bit, especially like a local business, forget it. Unless you are a noteworthy brand, you're not going to get a Wikipedia page.
Wikidata, on the other hand, is being referenced by all the large language models, and it is much more plausible to get into it. You can't add yourself. I started investigating this.
You can't just go and add your own. You got to get an editor to add you, but it's much more reasonable to get into Wikidata. So that's big.
Anyways, what are you going to do? You want to get according to this data, get listed on Wikidata, earn links from pages that are already ranking for your practice area terms. Get on Wikipedia if you can, or at least get cited.
Build a real Reddit presence. Publish your name on JDSupra, Lexology, and local business journals, so this is like for the legal one. Keep your entity consistent everywhere.
So I think actually this is a big thing, and I'll talk about this in my next link, citation consistency becoming more and more important. Do some link building, show up in results. Anyways, that's how you can do it, and then you'll rank number one in all AI chats.
What's your next thing to talk about?
[Amy Toman]
This is just something I saw last week. I'm sorry to push mine, but I've been dealing with a lot of review issues recently, and this was sent to me by a gentleman who somebody he knew entered a review and got an email back saying that the review violated policies.
[Darren Shaw]
Oh, is that new? They don't normally send those?
[Amy Toman]
They do not, and not only that, they said our automated system removed the content because it seems that the content may not follow our maps content policies. In this case, this is very cool because I've seen the review, and I don't know how this applied, but in this case, the specific policy involved is misrepresentation, and then they link to the policy, and then they say you can appeal. I do know that they submitted an appeal.
It didn't go down well. They went in, they re-edited it, and it was posted, but Google does not usually do this. They just don't post it, and it seems to be some kind of new step towards transparency, so it seems like it's just starting to roll out, and I think it's very cool because reviews are so problematic recently between reviews not showing on a large scale because of a bug and people just losing them overnight not because of a bug but because Google is applying filter after filter after filter.
So for somebody to enter what they consider a reasonable review and to be told that instead of just it not showing, now they're actually being told which policy they violated. That's really cool.
[Darren Shaw]
I mean, again, good job, Google.
[Amy Toman]
I think it's really, really a good thing on Google to be more transparent.
[Darren Shaw]
It's been a black box for decades. That's the thing, right? Okay, your listing got suspended?
Tell me why. Oh, my review got deleted? Why did it get deleted?
Oh, it's this policy? Great. Oh, yeah, I see what I said there, and you can edit it and fix it.
[Amy Toman]
You know what I want to point out, though, because a lot of people think that too, that they think that if Google's not showing a review, that it's been deleted. If Google is not like, all of a sudden, overnight, I lost 100 reviews, Google deleted them. You have to remember that Google doesn't delete them.
They hide them. Because they hide them, that's why you will hear people say, well, I disputed it, or I contacted support, or I went on the forum, and they brought them back. It's not that they brought them back, so much as they unclicked that button to say, instead, it's unpublished, it's now published.
So your reviews are there. It's just a question of, will Google publish them? And if they don't publish them, if you can dispute that decision.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay, you just gave a link. So my final one is from the great minds at Near Media. Near Media had Cyrus Shepard on their podcast.
So Mike Blumenthal, Greg Sterling had a nice chat with Cyrus Shepard. And Cyrus is, man, that guy, he's on fire lately. He's producing so much great content and research.
And he's really doing lots of stuff. So they wanted to talk to him about what local brand actually means to Google and I. So this whole episode is about talking about how do you become a local brand?
Cyrus gives four pillars. Distinctiveness, can Google tell you apart from a generic query? Relevance, what are you known for?
Reputation, what does third party say? And demand, how many people go looking for you specifically? That's kind of like branded search, right?
So he puts it under those four pillars. One of the things I liked from the episode is he talks about nap consistency, citation consistency, having a second life. AI systems need the same entity disambiguation that traditional local search used to need.
But a lot of people kind of let citation consistency lapse, assuming Google got smart enough to infer it. In a new AI world, I think you got to hold the robot's hand a little bit more. And you do need to worry a little bit about citation consistency.
Well, it worked out well for us because the citation business at Whitespark has never been better. Anyways, and I just wanted to close with like, if you like this podcast, you really should also be listening to the Near Media podcast. It is 100% the greatest podcast in local search and you must listen to it.
Anyways, what's your last link?
[Amy Toman]
My last link, I'm kind of cheating. It's something I have not written out yet, and I really need to do. Because I am seeing over the past about six months, blocks being placed on Google listings.
And there's two types of blocks. The one that everybody knows about is a review block. And we talked about this a little bit before.
I kind of define these two as punitive and preventative. Punitive is the one that most people see, which is we see that you have been doing this, incentivizing, paying for reviews, whatever. We see this activity.
And we're going to place a block on your listing. And you can't basically we're doing everything short of suspending you. You still have the visibility.
You can't touch it. You can't update it. You can't add anything.
[Darren Shaw]
You can't get new reviews either, right?
[Amy Toman]
No reviews, no. And even if like I said, even if somehow somebody managed to get a review or to input a review, it will not be shown. Google has is starting to tell people about those.
But that's a new thing. For months, they've been really amping these up. And they have not been telling people.
All of a sudden, people come to the forum and they're like, where's support? Like, why is this happening? And then they find out.
They usually last from 30. I think the minimum is 30. It may even be 60 days.
And I have not seen anyone get it lifted by contacting support or by appealing. I'm not saying you shouldn't try. But I'm just telling you, in my experience, they have not come off.
The other type of block is a preventative block. These may surprise people that Google does this. This happens when a listing gets review attacked.
It could be one person coming in had a bad experience. And all of a sudden, they just lose it. And they and their family and they go on social media.
And they get that. It could be any number of things. But basically, what happens is you are getting attacked nonstop.
I have seen a business go from I think it was like, I don't know, 4.2 to it was lower than two. It was like 1.4 or something.
[Darren Shaw]
Wow, just getting hammered.
[Amy Toman]
Google is a lot more aware with all their new efforts this year, I guess with AI, I'm not sure. They're a lot more aware of this activity. So they're much more inclined to place the block.
But what sometimes happens is it goes away, like melt slowly, because they you know, the block all of a sudden, you're getting the bad reviews again. If these are consistent over time, you're getting these what you perceive to be bad reviews, fake reviews, contact Google, they may already place a block. But if they don't, you contact Google customer service, you show them the reviews that are coming in, or you reference them, let them know, you don't know where these are coming from.
And or you tell them, I do know where it's coming from. And here's the source. If it's social media, you link to it, you tell them.
If they don't apply the block, then you go to the forum, you explain it, don't mention your business's name or location, but explain it. Say, look, I've already talked to support, they weren't helpful, go on there. But punitive and protective are the two types of blocks that we see most recently.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, I've seen this happen in like political situations, right? So someone, they take a political stance in their business. And it appeals to the people that align with their politics, but definitely does not appeal to other percentage of the population.
And then they just like someone says something, an influencer says something, and then a million negative reviews go on their profile.
[Amy Toman]
And because it almost makes you wonder, are they putting the block on because they just can't keep all the real fake ones out? Or, you know, if they strengthen them to keep all those out, will they even need to put a block on it? All sorts of things to consider that nobody has time for.
But anyway, I think Google in terms of preventative, I think they're doing an excellent job. They are helping the business and they're trying to protect their, you know, all that information that's contained in the reviews from being used publicly.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, that wraps it up. We did it. We did a whole podcast.
It was a pleasure to chat with you, Amy. For all of our listeners, please subscribe on YouTube and leave us a review and a comment on wherever you get your podcasts. We're now actually publishing video podcasts to both Apple and Spotify.
So you can watch the video on three different places, which is nice. Sometimes it's nice to watch the video because our excellent editor, Kevin, shout out to Kevin. He always adds fun little details.
So if you're listening and not watching, you might want to watch it sometimes. And I just quickly should tell everybody that we launched the new Analyze tab in the White Spark local ranking grids. And it is nuts.
If you haven't tried that tool in a while, go check it out and look at the Analyze tab. It's amazing. So much competitive data is pulled in there because we're the only grid tracker that tracks to 100.
So for every single point, we're tracking 100 competitors and you get this massive load of data and we figured out a great way to present that. So just go check it out. Thank you, Amy.
[Amy Toman]
Thank you. We did a great job. It was lovely to be here.
[Darren Shaw]
We did a great job. High five. Good job, us.
Okay. Bye, everybody.