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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 “must-read” and “must-watch” links, including news, trends, and can't-miss resources.
Darren (00:00.098)
Hello and welcome to the White Spark Local Search Update with me, Darren Shaw.
with me Claire Carlile. In this episode we are going to share with you our carefully curated list of the latest must-reads and must-watch links in local search. We are excited for this so let's dive straight in.
All right, so let's do it. Let's talk about the latest in local search. What's your first link, Claire?
Okay, so the first thing that I wanted to talk about and share with people is the new AI search manual or newish on the iPall Rank website. So that is written by, you know, Mike King, Garrett Seussman, other iPall Rank people. They've got guest contributors as well. So the way that I have approached this is...
Okay, I'm a marketer, I'm an SEO. I really need to know as much as I can about how the landscape is changing, how customers are changing how they search. I need to understand a bit about the technology behind this a little bit more. So this for me, I mean only on chapter seven, has been a brilliant way for me to really upskill myself and understand a lot more about the processes.
Claire (01:19.83)
Obviously, I can't, you know, I'm only part way through. The thing that I like about it is it is written in these chunks. So you could do a chapter a day, you know, sit with it, think about what that could mean to you, to your customers, to your systems, to your processes, you know, to your life. And then you can come back. So they do a really good TLDR, which will tell you what's in that chapter and 20 chapters and they break it down into parts. So you've got the paradigm shift.
which is all about consumer behavior, which is a bit that I'm really passionate about is understanding how people are changing, how they search. And then they talk about systems and architecture, visibility and optimization. So that's the sort of strategy and tactics that we need to start using as marketers to understand that. Measurement, which obviously is super duper important. And then they talk about organizational strategy and the actual...
you know, how you would implement things and they talk about ethics, which is a part that I think is skimmed over, especially in sort of dialogue. It's just, you know, we take this at face value and we don't think about what does this actually mean and what could it mean? So basically a big thumbs up for taking the time to read that and then, you know, enjoy and then go and do all the things with your newfound knowledge.
That is huge. 20 chapters. Thank you for reading it. think I'll wait for your Coles Notes. So I hope you get that Coles Notes prepared and I will read your summary of the next steps. What do we have to do with this information? All right. That is a must read. And I think, didn't somebody do a nice TLDR on LinkedIn?
Yeah, so Aimee Jurenka, who is sort of quite a new person on my radar. I didn't know her before and I think she's at Rickety Roo now. So she's really switched on, very savvy. So yeah, she did a little TLDR, but that was before I found the TLDR actually on the iPaw Rank website. She was using an LLM basically to try and understand.
Darren (03:32.558)
She didn't even read it.
But then she added the human layer on top and talked about what it was bringing to her life and what she needed to learn and do next.
Well, we'll put her TLDR in the show notes as well. can check that out. All right, on to my first topic. Dan Petrovich wrote a really interesting piece. He talked about inside Chrome semantic engine, a technical analysis of history embedding. So what this is is he kind of went through the Chrome source code, dug through the code to determine exactly how does this system understand a page. So it like.
Well.
Darren (04:15.19)
It does the chunking and does the embedding, converts them to vectors, clustering, all that kind of stuff. And so it's really interesting read. I have a few notes about it. One is that a chunk, the way that it is written in the Chrome source code, can't be larger than 200 words. 200 words is actually pretty big. It's a pretty decent-sized thing. So I thought that was very interesting.
This was also quite interesting. He discovered in the code that there is a limit of 30 passages per page that can be extracted, 30 chunks. And so if you have a massively long page, if there's sort of more than 30 main things to take away from that content, then according to the Chrome code, the rest of it is just, yeah, we're gonna ignore the rest of it. Too much, too much content. So that was, I thought was quite interesting.
What it does is it pulls these passages, converts them into vectors for AI. You'll have to talk to Dan Petrovich to learn a little bit more about that vector stuff. It's on my list. Maybe if I read all of Mike's guide, then I would understand how this whole vectoring thing works. So maybe I should do it. I find this really interesting. I've been thinking a lot about this lately, the tree walking algorithm. So what it does is it goes through your semantic structure of your HTML.
We're talking about headings and then subheadings and then bullet points and all that kind of stuff. so some WordPress page builders, they just put everything into divs. That's a problem. And I really think you need to be thinking about your semantic HTML structure of your pages and making sure that whatever you're using to build your websites is laying it out in a very structured way. It really helps for the understanding of your content. So that's an important takeaway.
We always knew they did this, but it's just like further confirmation that that's the way they do it. So you have to think about that. And I did think it was noteworthy that there was no mention in this whole thing about schema. And I'm gonna roll into my other topic, is Dan also did a really cool thing on LinkedIn over the weekend. He did a test on ChatGPT. had two pages, exact same content. One had schema markup.
Darren (06:33.984)
in the top of it with a bunch of additional information and one of them didn't. So he had asked Chad GPT to query the pages and ask some questions about it that could only be answered from the schema and Chad GPT couldn't do it. So his conclusion here is that Chad GPT is not referencing the schema. Very interesting. There's a big debate in SEO right now about
Do the LLMs care about schema? It's currently accepted that they do not care about it in the training, like in the model training, but people say that they do care about it in what's called RAG, retrieval augmented generation or something, right? So in the part where they actually fetch your page and pull it back and then look at it, people are saying, well, that's where your schema can actually be helpful for LLMs. In Dan's test, at least on ChatGPT, it didn't show up. So I thought that was interesting.
Claire, what do you think?
Well, having not read that piece at all, it sounds like a very limited test. So like all these things, it's quite interesting to go around this little test. It's like we do when we do like big research, that's where the bigger tests come from. So you try something small, you say we run this, but it was only this tiny sample set. It was only one LLM. It was only one query.
So yes, it's interesting, but there's lots of LLMs. They probably change how they work every 10 minutes. So schema is something that I continue to talk about and implement on a basic level. And it's probably something that I should know more about, but you can't know about everything, can you? You can't be a specialist. So I'm just concentrating on.
Claire (08:25.846)
like trying to be a good marketer for my clients. And so where it fits in, I would use it. yeah, so interesting, but I wouldn't not use schema because in one example, an LLM didn't use it to rank a very, you know, it's personal, it ranks in a personal way for people as well, based on their previous searches.
LLMs with 0.5 % of the market share. you're going to dump schema just because Shodgy PT doesn't turn it on. That's I'm saying. I'm not suggesting that. But I did find it interesting that he did this test. So to your point, Bing has already said that they definitely use it in the RAG process, which means Copilot, Microsoft Copilot, I guess, is pulling it in and is considering schema. But there's lots of reasons to potentially use schema.
Of course, Joel Headley always says schema is very useful for the SERP features that it generates. And so that would be things like recipes, product schema. But I'm still trying to understand the value of it from a sort of overall site and helping both LLMs and traditional search engines understand your content. It does feel like that's the point of it. That's why they made the whole dang markup language. And so.
Does that help you get into the knowledge graph? Is that important for entity associations? There's lots of things that I'm trying to understand better about schema and maybe one day I'll make a video and write a post about it. But yeah, I'm still kind of trying to figure that out.
Yeah, and obviously there's loads of people that we could refer to like, it's Martha, Martha von Birkel, Schema App, clever clever clever, knows all the things, I'm sure she's written something about it so...
Darren (10:11.47)
I also wanted to chat with Jason Barnard, the brand SERP guy. He knows all about entities and that kind of stuff. I'm curious to hear his thoughts on schema. I don't know. We'll do some question and answer. Maybe we'll do another episode where we just invite those guys to talk about schema. Yeah. All right. What else you got, Claire?
So not necessarily super new news, but new to me because I looked at a couple of reports that weren't pulling in this data and it reminded me that obviously Google does this thing, Google Business Profile adds messaging, takes it away, changes the functionality or the channel or the system or the platform and then adds it back in. So now we have got the ability to add.
WhatsApp messaging and text messaging back into Google Business Profiles. So that was early 2025, but it wasn't until June 2025 that this data started showing again in Google Business Profile performance, the artists previously known as insights. So if you're not pulling that into your reports, and again, it's something
that you can use just to have an indication of are more actions being taken on my business profile. Again, a useful metric. again, it's something that is, you know, it's good. It's directional. Are we getting more than last year? Are we getting less? Obviously it's only just started, so you can't do year on year and they'll probably have changed it by the next time that we can compare it. But anyway, make sure that you'll pull that data into your reports.
That's fantastic. know, every once in a while, Google gives us a gift and I'll call this a gift and I like it and give us more data, please. You know what they gotta do though? Google, if you're listening, can we please get Google post data back? Like how many views, how many clicks? Why did you take that away from us? That was mean. Google, stop being mean. I want that Google post data back so we can see what's happening. You have any theories? Why do you think they took it away, Claire?
Claire (12:26.284)
Okay, so to your point, that's actually one of the things that I wanted to chat about was the new Google Post interface in what we'll, yeah, so wherever it is that you populate your Google Post, if you're doing that natively within the SERP, so whatever you're gonna call that, the user interface or the NMX or whatever you might choose to call it. So there is a clean, fresh interface.
where it's just easy, well, in my mind, it's just much easier to see what you're posting, choosing the type of posts that you're making, and also seeing your previous posts, because you couldn't see that before. They changed it again. But to your point, no, there aren't metrics, but, you know, I wasn't really ever a big fan of impressions data.
or anything that wasn't someone actually taking an action. So if you are using Google posts, obviously I am going to talk about UTM tagging. Don't forget to tag your Google business profile post because you should be choosing a call to action. It should be a reason for someone to come through to a relevant page on your website and then take an action there. So add your UTMs and then you can see what type of posts are sending.
visits to your website, what sort of content was there. What I would really like to see, and obviously, you can do this with tools and software and stuff, is it just seems such a pain to have to upload a new photo every time and not be choosing from a repository of photos. Wouldn't that be nice if you could just choose a photo from the photos that you've uploaded as a business? Yeah, right. Because you need to go and...
upload a new photo every time. And I think that when I can't remember when you upload a photo, whether it automatically adds it to your photos in Google Business Profile. So then you get duplicates.
Darren (14:28.686)
I can't remember that either. I always thought that it did, but then I think I tested it recently and it didn't. was like, oh, okay. It used to. It used to. Now it doesn't anymore. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that's the Google post thing. You know, it's just when there is a nice, you know, UX change, it does make a difference.
The thing I love about this feature release is that it tells me, because there was some like hints and some concern from my perspective that Google was gonna get rid of Google posts. I was like, the writing's on the wall. I they're gonna get rid of Google posts. And I didn't like that, because I like Google posts. I think they're really valuable. I think all businesses should do them. Go ahead and fight me in the comments. I love Google posts. I think they are fantastic.
And so this tells me that Google is investing into that feature. And I'm like, praise be. Because there was all these signs when they started integrating the social posts into the feed, right? And they're like, well, guess we don't need Google Posts anymore. We can just pull it from your Instagram, Facebook, whatever, right? And so the fact that they are investing in this feature is wonderful news for me because I love Google Posts I want them to stick around. So great.
Yay Google, we're the only two people in the world that like Google posts. Hooray!
Darren (15:48.684)
There's lots of people like Google posts and I will make more videos and I will convince people why they're awesome.
Well, I'm a big fan. They always work for me, all of my clients.
Yeah, totally. It's like free advertising on Google. Use your Google posts. know, people are like, they don't increase my rankings. I'm like, it's not about that. It's about do you want people to buy your services or do you want Google posts to increase your rankings? You want the buying. That is that is the ultimate goal. And Google posts directly lead to sales. If you make your Google posts the right way, don't do them like social posts. Do them like sales pitches, advertisements and
Take advantage of that opportunity. Anyways, off of Google post and onto my next topic, which is so exciting. For me, I wanted to say that the company White Spark has launched an awesome new software called White Spark's Local Ranking Grids. So we've been building this for like a year and we've been pretty serious about building the best. It is so damn beautiful. The reports look amazing.
Competitive analysis is better than anything that's out there. You can compare your listing side by side with any other competitor. Really great breakdown of all of the factors that are on the Google business profile. It's just a really amazing user interface. Like if you try to use something else and then you go to ours, it's just like a breath of fresh air. It's just like everything makes sense. You can click through, you don't have to go digging for things. It's just really well done. Super proud of the team for what they produced. Super thrilled about it.
Darren (17:28.713)
Having this software available for our team to use and for everyone else to use is just, this is really good. People have been asking us to build a grid ranking software for many, many years and we have finally done it and I'm really, really pleased with what we've produced. I think it's just heads and tails above anything else that's out there. So yeah, you should check it out. We have a free trial, 150 credits and yeah, try it out.
Try it, you'll like it.
It's just better than anything is out there in my it's not biased at all.
In my humble opinion
Very humble, unbiased opinion is It's the best! It's so good.
Claire (18:14.702)
So that's it Darren, we did it. That was our first podcast. How was it for you? Fingers crossed.
gonna be good? Fingers crossed. Alright, so that's it for this episode of White Sparks Local Update. I hope you enjoyed listening to it as much as we enjoyed putting it together. You're gonna find all the links to the pieces we mentioned in the show notes, so check those out to find out more about the things that we talked about today.
And if you found it useful, which we obviously really, really hope you did, don't forget to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast so you don't miss an episode. Share it with your friends in local search and don't forget to leave us a five star review on your podcast platform of choice because we really appreciate you.
Yes, and I'm going to reiterate the reviews. That would be really helpful for us if you found this episode useful. review, nothing has a bigger impact than just getting reviews on the different podcast hosting platforms. So I really appreciate your review. Thanks so much. All right, that's it. Bye. See you next time.
Try it, you'll like it.