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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 โmust-readโ and โmust-watchโ 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.
[Claire Carlile]
And with me, Claire Carlile. And as you know, this is the podcast where we wear glasses and we talk to you about local SEO things and all the linky links that are exciting and that you need to read and listen to and watch, don't we?
[Darren Shaw]
Yes, we're trying really hard. Maybe this time you just have to wear enough glasses and Easy PC will finally sponsor our podcast. That's what we're going for here.
[Claire Carlile]
So anyway, Darren, you go first.
[Darren Shaw]
I'm gonna start with one of our favorite people to mention on this podcast. It's Claudia Tamina, everybody. Yay.
[Claire Carlile]
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.
[Darren Shaw]
Ring the Claudia Tamina bell. So she has posted three days ago on LinkedIn that TellMaps is live. You have heard about AskMaps.
Well, have you heard about TellMaps? Well, TellMaps is amazing because you can TellMaps things. You can be like, hey, this business offers this service.
You might not have known, hey, this business has great parking lot around the back. You might not have known that. Hey, this business is number one in my city for lobster rolls.
TellMaps is accepting your suggestions. That is an amazing update here, actually. So she shares some great screenshots of how it looks.
I just looked into my Google Maps app on mobile and it is not there, so I don't have it. Maybe you have it, I don't know. But it looks very interesting.
So as soon as you press it, it says, add a tip about a place. And it looks like Google will be like pulling tips into some, it looks like Google will be pulling tips into some kind of carousel. And so it's like, the examples are, the menu changes weekly, added by Amy L.
two days ago. Cozy atmosphere but can be cramped, added by Kevin K. four days ago.
So I don't know if this, yeah, this is an announcement. Google announced the feature. So I think the screenshot comes from the announcement.
But the other one that I think is really awesome is she says, modern art design studio does wedding invitations. That's kind of interesting from a local SEO perspective because maybe Google Maps doesn't know about something that you do in your business. Well, they made a new feature called tell maps, tell Google what you do.
And so could we spam this? Could I hire 1000 people on Mechanical Turk to tell maps that we are the very best for local SEO software? I don't know, maybe.
Interesting, interesting. Have you seen this?
[Claire Carlile]
No, no, haven't got it, haven't seen it. It looks good, it looks interesting. It's always, restaurants always get cool stuff if it comes to restaurants first.
[Darren Shaw]
I know, yeah, it's always restaurants. Oh, I will point out though, is that it does not appear to be a feature on a specific listing.
[Claire Carlile]
Okay.
[Darren Shaw]
It looks like what she has done is she's opened up the Google Maps app on her phone and then has clicked the contribute section. So if you go into the contribute section, then she's got this nice little box that says, tell maps, new. I don't have it.
And so I think that's where you'll do it. And then the little tool tip on the box says, add a tip, comma, it's walk-in only. So like they're giving you an example of what they're looking for.
So it's just to like give these little tips. And I think it's quite smart from Google's perspective. They already have the greatest database of local businesses in the world.
They have the biggest network of local guides and people that contribute to the maps. And so they're like, hey, we got this great resource, let's make it even better. And so this is pretty smart.
Abuse is interesting. Competitor sabotage is concerning, but we'll see how it goes, yeah.
[Claire Carlile]
Well, look out for that. So my first linky link is from Amy Toman on LinkedIn of all places.
[Darren Shaw]
Ring the bell, Amy Toman, ding, ding, ding.
[Claire Carlile]
Amy, Amy, Amy, yeah. She is talking about the uptick. It's always been a thing, but it is an uptick that we're seeing in businesses that get reinstated without all of their reviews.
Boo! Boo! I know, how sad is that?
So they're not necessarily like these super bad actors and maybe they've done something, they've had a suspension, they've been reinstated and businesses are being reinstated without their reviews and they are not coming back. It's something that I've seen for quite a while in the forum, but you usually say, just go away and come back again and I'm sure it will be fine, but they're not coming back. So thinking about what you need to do if you are that type of business that has been affected, you need, well, what do you need to do?
First of all, you need to be making sure that you have a record of the reviews of your business by making sure that you download them from somewhere, which you can do in WhiteSpark. Other tools are available, but not as cheap or as great. And so you can do that, make sure you've got it, otherwise you're gonna be like, oh, have I got screenshots of them from when Google emailed me?
Make sure you download your reviews so you have the corpus of your reviews, do it once a week or whatever. Anyways, so what you need to do is you go to the Google support URL, or actually there's a little helpful pop-up and you can fill it in actually when you're logged in at business.google.com and when you fill in the form, you can't just like write a load of nonsense, click other as the lozenge. You do need to click the lozenge that describes the issue that you're having because then that will change the workflow that you get in the support.
We know this, don't we? Yes, so you'd say something like missing reviews, it asks you a particular question. So it's saying to you, has your profile recently be suspended or disabled?
Yes, no, I'm not sure. Does the profile belong to an elementary, secondary or high school? Yes, no, or I'm not sure because obviously those types of listings don't have reviews.
How many reviews are missing? Select one and there is no one for, uh, or I don't know. If you've got a teenager, you'll recognize, uh, means- They should add one for that, uh.
Yeah, uh. Are new reviews being published on the profile? And that's it, you just fill that in, describe your issue.
I mean, if you have got your reviews and you've got them in, um, like a Google sheet, you can link to that within the free form entry box and then you submit it. And then at least you have got a case ID that is going to come back from Google. And then if it carries on and you don't get them back and support can't help, at least you can go because you need your business profile ID and your case ID to go to the forum.
Anyway, that's a bit sad. It's a thing. There is an uptick.
You know, we say to businesses, it's really important. Reviews are so important. And then for them to lose all of these hard-earned reviews.
[Darren Shaw]
So this is a bug, right?
[Claire Carlile]
Well, we don't say bug. We don't say bug.
[Darren Shaw]
We say- You don't say bug?
[Claire Carlile]
It appears to be a known issue.
[Darren Shaw]
A known issue. Okay. Um, the most interesting thing to me about that segment was that you used the word lozenge.
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, a lozenge.
[Darren Shaw]
A lozenge. A lozenge is when you have a sore throat. You take a lozenge.
[Claire Carlile]
So that's the shape that it is when you have a lozenge, yeah? So it's like one of those, so it's a lozenge.
[Darren Shaw]
No, this is some UK-ism. I don't think people say lozenge in North America.
[Claire Carlile]
There are these little buttons.
[Darren Shaw]
You know what we call them? We call them pills. Little pills.
[Claire Carlile]
Oh yeah, because that's so normal, isn't it? That makes so much more sense.
[Darren Shaw]
It's more normal than lozenge.
[Claire Carlile]
Like a pill that you would take or a lozenge that you would take.
[Darren Shaw]
Anyways, I'm going to talk about something else and it's going to be- Good. There's been an incredible article published on Search Engine Land by Darren Shaw. Darren Shaw has analyzed 1.8 million Google business profiles. And so I have this massive dataset. So I crawled 1.8 million Google business profiles, pulled them into a database, and then I looked at them. And I said, what's happening?
What is the difference between these ones and which ones are ranking and why are they ranking? But this article, I was specifically looking at categories. So I'm trying to find patterns and interesting things in the categories.
And I'll tell you about some of the things that I found and you could read more in my article. But right now I'll tell you that this is going to be a huge surprise to everyone, but your primary category is quite important. What?
Yes, you want to get a good primary category. I've discovered that finally by looking at 1.8 million Google business profiles. So the tip that I always give, which has been reinforced by data now, is don't pick a stupid broad category like law firm.
Pick a more specific category like personal injury lawyer. And if you are an HVAC contractor who does plumbing, electrical, and furnace repair, now what do you do? Pick the one that you think is the most profitable.
I would say focus. Like HVAC contractor is not a great category. Furnace repair is probably your number one.
You could do the switchy thing where you change your primary in seasons, right? Sometimes you might have to re-verify, which is annoying. But anyways, here's another thing I thought was quite interesting.
This is actually maybe new. You haven't heard this before, which is the specific additional categories that you connect with your primary does seem to correlate with better rankings. Correlation is not causation.
We all know this. But which ones you match seems to have an impact. And I did notice a pattern that if you put this one, it seems to drag your profile down.
Service establishment. So the special category, there is a category called service establishment. It's like, are you a service establishment?
Yes. That is about the stupidest category I've ever seen. So like, has anyone ever gone to Google and be like, what kind of business am I looking for?
I'm looking for a service establishment. No one has ever typed that into Google. So it's a useless category.
Don't even put it on your profile. It actually did correlate with lower rankings. So any business that has service establishment, lower rankings.
Anyways, that's the article. You can go check it out if you're interested in reading about those things.
[Claire Carlile]
Okie dokie. So my...
[Darren Shaw]
You're like, wow, great article, Darren. My article that I want to talk about next.
[Claire Carlile]
That was really boring. That sounds great. So my second link is from another two of our favorite marketers is Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad.
So at SparkToro, and it is a persona generation tool, which is now live on their site. So I found that and I was like, whoa, that's good. We need to do some stuff with that.
And then I was like, well, who is gonna do me something that's gonna be really cool and good and is already a marketer that I trust and really like. And so obviously SparkToro is all about audience data. So they take data from three sets.
So demographic data from LinkedIn profiles. So they've got a database of hundreds of millions of LinkedIn profiles. Web crawl, so websites that are visited, including those by search and AI tools.
And that comes from their clickstream provider. And so that's data on millions of devices in the US, UK and Canada. And then they say crawl data from podcasts and YouTube channels and subreddits and social networks to deliver the rest.
So lovely, not hallucinated real data. So whatever, obviously you put your persona idea in. So I was like, this is a person and they are doing marketing and they are very tired and they want everyone to think they're great and blah, blah, blah, all those other things.
Obviously garbage in, garbage out. So you want at least a good idea of who this person is that you are hoping to build out a persona for. So you pop that in and then it uses all of the magic things and spits out this suggested persona, which you can save.
And the nice thing is this is completely editable. So if there's parts of it that you don't agree with and you want to add something else because you could be using this in a presentation or a pitch, or you could be using it internally, obviously you're going to want to update your personas, you know, semi-regularly. So I really liked, so say for example, if I was building out a persona myself, I did a little sort of template for this the other day and it had everything and more that was in mind.
So pain points and goals, search behavior, buying behavior, content preferences, common user journeys, values and mindset, professional background, responsibilities and tech savviness, messaging in their words, which was a good one that I added to mine. So I was like, oh, I did that in mine. That's really good.
LinkedIn bio keywords, demographics, how to reach this persona, media habits, brands and influences and platform behavior. So I'm a bit like take my money, a yes, please.
[Darren Shaw]
Take my money, this is amazing. I didn't realize, so like, you can basically, it's like, this is my target market. You put in a brief description of kind of like the person you're targeting and then you get this massive like, here's everything you need to know about that person and where they shop and what their LinkedIn bio say and their values and their common user, that's incredible.
[Claire Carlile]
And I think they also suggest, and I haven't used it yet, so they will, if yours isn't completely on point, I'm sure that they will make suggestions based around, actually, we find some sort of co-whatever between this persona and this. Anyway, it looks great to me. If, you should give it a spin.
They do like, obviously, it's, you can get a free trial where you see some information, but it seems to be like, it's really low cost. It seems very affordable. So any type of business, in-house, small business, agency, you should definitely give it a spin.
[Darren Shaw]
That feature alone, like, we signed up for it, right? Like, we need this for Whitespark. Did we do this?
[Claire Carlile]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's on our meeting list, yes.
[Darren Shaw]
Okay, great, good job, us, because, well, good job, you, because we need this 100%, that's awesome.
[Claire Carlile]
Okay, cool.
[Darren Shaw]
Let's look at my next link. Near Media, they do this amazing thing that I don't think anyone else does, but they do this user testing. So they give the person a task and then the person has to record their screen and narrate their experience about like what they would do.
So the task would be like, you've been injured in an accident. You need to find a personal injury lawyer. Here are the details of your case, go.
And so then they see them go to Google. They get to track what keyword they searched. And then the person's narrating their decision-making process.
And then they collect that data for like hundreds or thousands of people. And then they synthesize it and you really get incredible insights that only Near Media can do. So they call it their legal marketing research.
And so he gives an example of something that they see all the time. They run the keyword like personal injury lawyer Atlanta, and then they're like, oh, I recognize that brand. I've seen them before.
And then they're like, okay, well, they look at the reviews and then they keep coming back to that one that they have recognized, that they have seen before. And so this is coming from TV ads, billboards, bus stops, buses, like all of the stuff that you typically see personal injury lawyers do. It's amazing to watch that work translate into the digital world.
And he talks about how it is very difficult for the digital only marketer to overcome that. And I see it in my data too. I work pretty closely with personal injury lawyer and we really see it.
It's like those, the billboard lawyers are, and the TV lawyers, they have a leg up because of their brand that they have built. It's fascinating to watch how impactful that is and to see their process for how a user does it. So really good.
And even give some suggestions for like what you could do if you are in this case, like how do you overcome it? How do you compete with the market incumbents that have really established their brand over the last 20 years? And some of the things that you need to start doing to establish your own brand.
So if you're not following near media and watching and listening to everything they do, you should probably start. And you should start with this article. It's very good.
[Claire Carlile]
Hooray. My next one is another persona-based one and it is a big piece of content as it always is from iPoorank. So it's the comprehensive guide to marketing personas.
So if you are thinking, oh, personas are a thing, blah, blah, blah, from the previous one, this is, you need to go and read this. One of the things that I was thinking about in this, so they're talking about built for humans interpreted by AI. And one of the things is in the olden days of the 10 blue links and Google telling us we don't personalize, personalization is mostly done at a location level.
So we were interested in that, weren't we? As local marketers, you know, your results will be different depending on where you are. We didn't, you know, in the really olden days, results were personalized.
If you've been to a website, a lot of times it might appear higher up, but then Google said, you know, we don't personalize generally beyond that. You know, we know now that there are various factors that will have influenced rankings, but it was the job of the website and the content on there to understand the persona. So that was the job before, wasn't it?
It was our job as marketers to understand the persona. What will have they have been searching for and what do we need to have on that page for us to convert them? But now it's almost like such a different system, AI, LLMs, whether it's Gemini, whatever it is, the way that they find information, interpret data and the level of personalization is just immense.
What emails have we received? What photos have we taken? Think about that infrastructure.
Anyway, so that is why personas are more and more important and it keeps coming back to really knowing your potential customers inside and out. And this I pull rank piece really breaks that down into, well, where did personas come from? What was the original marketing paradigm?
Where did it come from? And now why are they more important than ever? Because it's not just a question of, well, we have to write our content based around personas.
It's like the AI will be using an understanding of your target market to make the recommendations and to service the content. Oh my gosh. Wow.
Anyway, read it and then you'll go, oh, my brain hurts.
[Darren Shaw]
Personas, messaging, speaking to your audience. This is all important stuff we have to do as marketers.
[Claire Carlile]
Who knew?
[Darren Shaw]
Who knew?
[Claire Carlile]
Okay, yeah, that's it.
[Darren Shaw]
That's it. We did a whole podcast. Please go and check out WhiteSpark's software and services.
They're very good. And please like and subscribe and leave us a review on places where you review podcasts. I hope you're enjoying the podcast.
We love making it. It is very fun to chat with all of you and we'll see you next time.
[Claire Carlile]
The end. Goodbye. Thank you.
[Darren Shaw]
Bye everybody.