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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.
Claire (00:00.194)
Well, hello and welcome to the Wipes Whitespark local update with me Claire Carlile
With me, Darren Shaw, and today we are speaking to you from remote locations, talking about the latest in local search, what's happened over the past week. Do you have anything exciting to talk about?
Well, I do! Let's start with my first exciting thing that I want to talk about. So, I can remember a couple of weeks ago getting the email about bringing Bing back big time and that there would be a new big Bing places and I can just sort of, I predicted what it would be like by the fact that they used three different fonts.
in the email and my predictions came true. yeah, my experience personally is that it's very underwhelming. So I logged in and none of my business profiles were showing there. I then clicked the button that says import from Google without thinking, hang on a minute, is this going to check whether or not this duplicates?
Does Bing have a way of checking whether or not a listing for this business actually already exists? So I didn't think to check any of those things. I just imported them all in. then since then, I've just realized that I've probably broken everything and I've got lots of duplicate listings and in terms of the process of where are they in verification, who knows? I don't know. And then I had a look on the local search forum.
Claire (01:49.358)
and it seems that, a lot of people had experienced the same thing. So lots of dashboards, not being populated, things disappearing, things being broken. So I'm not going to bring back big time. I'm going to keep ignoring it. No, I'm not. I am not going to keep ignoring it, but I just wish someone would make it good.
They probably have hundreds, maybe thousands of extremely well-paid software developers that work at Bing. And it's like, what's going on? Why can't you figure this out? It is so bad. Well, I wish them all the best. I wish them all the best. I hope that they can sort this out. I know what it's like to do a product launch, and this was a bad one. good luck. Hope you can figure it out.
I mean, I just lost the will to live after about five minutes of looking at it. So I don't think, who knows.
Let's get a major downgrade. Good job, Bing. Great job.
If any of our listeners know better, like which they probably do, if you've noticed that it's now amazing or there's new features then please fill us in, we would love to know.
Darren (03:05.038)
all right. got an article. Why local SEO is thriving in the AI search era by Rob Tindula. So Rob Tindula wrote this article for search engine land. And basically it kind of talks about some of the stuff that we've talked about that lots of people in local search talk about in that AI is not awesome for local results. ChatGBT, Gemini.
It's just not great. so Google Maps is still kicking ass. And so the article goes through all the different reasons why AI is not great and what you could be doing to improve your local SEO in an AI era and doubling down on some Google stuff and maximizing your local presence on AI. So I just thought we did a pretty good job of putting this together.
It's a good read for people in local search because, you know, that seems to be the thing that's on everyone's mind. How will AI change local SEO? What do I need to do differently? What's happening? All that kind of stuff. So anyways, good article. Bye, Rob. High five to you. Don't go look at the Bing dashboard. Just stay with Google and Chatting BT if you want to have a nice life. That's my article.
I love it. Traybian Rob, that sounds jolly good. It's a big thumbs up from us. What am I going to talk about? I'm going to tell you about Noah Lerner, who we all love Noah. You know Noah?
He's like one of the greatest humans. Love that guy.
Claire (04:51.018)
It's true. So it was a LinkedIn post from Noah. So Noah, who you may know, is a serial tinkerer, if I can describe him as that. So he likes building things, doing things. He's at Sterling Sky. He's also started the SEO community on Slack, which is a very, very worthwhile group. so Noah is always my go-to person.
to help me understand and think about data and using data. And he is speaking in this piece on LinkedIn, generally about search console and impressions and clicks and all the, you know, there's lots of different things happening with the data that we are seeing there. And one of the things that he's flagging is another drop in impressions because a lot of the search and ranking tools
aren't making impressions. So basically I do haven't really got my head into that part. I'm more sort of seeing it from a viewpoint of the more and more that the, the data in there is denigrated. That's a word, isn't it?
Yeah, damn you, Gray. That's a word.
Yeah. So the more, more of that, but, people in the know, know, or even not people in the know, but people that know that it is possible to export more data and have the full data that isn't, isn't being hobbled like a horse in Google. So it's just to remind you that you should be, getting the full corpus. So rather than just thinking about.
Claire (06:38.094)
Wix impressions, I'm talking about the full corpus when it comes to search queries. That's the bit that I'm particularly interested in. I want to see all of that data. So to make sure that you get that, Noah has written a piece and is building things and you can do all that alternatively. You can use something. I've always used Jepto, BigQuery. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to have any accounts myself. It is sort of
However you're going to do it, just make sure that you have your data, ideally into perpetuity, isn't it? You need to keep hold of that data so you can compare it. Anyway, I'm just flagging that for everyone, just to remind you to make sure and you go and get as much data as you can out of your search console, because how are we going to really track some of these changes if we don't have access to as much data as we can from the horse's mouth in that sense?
Yeah, I think, I don't know how much you get in search console is at 12 months, but then if you use the API, what he's talking about here, you can pull in 16 months. the trick is to just keep that going forever because then you get years and years and years. So the earlier you do this, sooner you're going to start keeping all your data.
It's not just a date range thing. It's also to do with the amount of rows that you can export at any one time. think it's topped at a thousand, is it, or something in natively in the, the, in the, once you're in the dash. whereas you're not throttled in that sense. yeah. So just do it and have that data. Just do it. That's the t-shirt. That's the strap line for today is listen to Noah.
Yeah, listen to Noah.
Darren (08:23.968)
Listen to Noah. Yeah, he knows what's up. We like him too.
Tell me your next thingy thing.
My next thingy thing is from Claudia Tomina. She did some very interesting research. And the thing I love about this research is that she used WhiteSpark's new local ranking grid software. was great. But the research itself was also excellent. She did some cool testing on just a couple of small changes by changing the primary category and by changing the title tag.
She made a grid go from very red, like we're talking about all the points on the grid ranking 50 plus to very green, like all ranking one through three, mostly, a couple fours in there. And so huge impact on rankings just from like a couple things. And I think a lot of people, they've skipped the basics. like, they don't realize how important the primary category is or just.
you know, getting that, that dang thing you want to write for in the title tag. And so it was just amazing to see the impact on this. You should check it out. She's using the LinkedIn newsletter thing, which is, think smart. think I should probably do that. But, yep. And honestly, these, these ranking grids from, from White Spark, they look so good in this post. Just very impressed with both Claudia and White Spark software development.
Claire (10:00.078)
And yourself and your team.
Yeah, not me. I just, I didn't do much. I gotta give all credit to the team.
I just work here.
I just basically make stupid videos. That's my job at Weissberg.
That's a great summary.
Darren (10:20.302)
Good job, Claudia. Thank you for producing excellent content for Local Search.
Thank you, Claudia. And I think we're going to do a little tally of the number of times you've said Claudia Tamina during our podcasts, because I think it's topping 10 at least.
Yeah, you just keep publishing great content, you're going to get mentioned on the podcast. That's what's going to happen.
He's a clever one. I'm going to talk about my final Linky Link, which is the SIA fan club again. Hooray. So a really good webinar this time. So there is a webinar and there is a slide deck from the webinar. And so the webinar was called Beyond the SEO is Dead Headlines.
advancing your SEO strategy for AIOs and the AI era of search. So I like this because it's just a really sort of sensible tackling of again, the sky is falling down. know, SEO is dead. We're all dead. LLMs are coming to take up children and our family and our horses and our belongings. I know exactly that.
Darren (11:32.462)
Leave my horse alone.
is my horse and stand down. So I like this. is, so it was Will, it was two members of staff from, of the team. So Elisa Schaaf and Teresa Lopez, who all spoke very convincingly and intelligently about basically getting beyond these headlines into, hang on a minute, let's.
You really need to dig into which parts of your content are delivering and could potentially deliver in the different places where you want to be seen. I like the way that, I think it was Alyssa, just broke it down in a very sort of marketing led simple way, which I always really enjoy at the start of anything when she spoke about,
Who am I trying to sell to and where are they? So, you know, we're local SEOs, but she doesn't mean geographically. She means where are they hanging out? And again, it was another mention of Spark Toro and personas and, you know, using AI to sometimes to help you with your personas because we, again, we have this, all of this data from calls, sales calls, lots of data. How can we use that to help us better?
work out who it is that we're trying to sell to, essentially. What are the bets I can make to win them over? And by that, they mean this is quite a new place for us to make these bets. And rather than going all in on Google, which is what a lot of people have done in the past, we need to start putting these small bets on in different places. then just saying three different things. She said, be seen.
Claire (13:26.114)
be believed and be chosen. when she was talking about those things, it's like be seen is obviously wherever that place is that people are looking for, you need to have that visibility and you need to build that trust. And she was talking a lot about how organic social can do lots of different things to feed into this and then finally be chosen. So.
How do we, once we've got the visibility and how we're, you know, we're seen as thought leaders or we're producing the content which is getting picked up, which is putting us in that position, how do we be that person that is chosen, essentially? So all in all, another excellent piece of content from SIA that actually is actionable and strategic and you can work through it and then you can actually implement the things.
And that sounds good. It's like, it feels like marketing, SEO, we just have so much more work to do now.
No, we needed to do it before, but we were just attached to ridiculous metrics that were meaningless and we got away with it for a long time.
Sure, we should have been doing it before, but it was nice to just be like, all I care about is local pack rankings. It was just easier then. Yeah. Well, that sounds great. I'm to check it out. Here's a cool thing that came up in my LinkedIn feed recently. Matthew Forzan shared a real world experience with local SEO in the LLMs. He had the situation where he was organizing a meetup.
Darren (15:07.614)
between his office and a partner's office and asked Chachi BT to suggest a cafe halfway and the results were nuts. They were like, what? And the problem was that Chachi BT did not know the address of one of the locations. And so then he was digging deeper. He's like, where'd you get this address from? And I'm like, I found it on these totally bizarre websites. And it was like, well, thanks Chachi BT. So this is an interesting thing. I think that
As more people lean on running queries in places like JCPT or Gemini even gets it wrong, even though they got the Google's database. It makes you realize like, citation consistency maybe is more important than it used to be if people are getting the wrong data. So there was a couple of interesting takeaways for me from this that I was kind of excited about. And I started playing around and I was like,
I never thought of this. You could use chat GPT to find all the different addresses. So I've started with queries like for my client. I'd be like, show me all the addresses you're aware of for client name in city. And then it like came back with three. And I was like, what, what are these two? Cause they only have one address. And I was like, okay, tell me more about this one address. Where did you find that one? And it gave me a list back and I was like, okay, give me all the URLs.
for those, those sources. then there you go. Boom. went to all those sites and I'm like, sweet. Thank you for the citation audit, ChatGPT. So you can actually use this for all kinds of, kind of, you know, just finding these problems and then you can clean them up. so ChatGPT might think one of those addresses is the actual address because they don't have access to Google's database, which is where most business owners are keeping their data up to date.
But if the web is riddled with old addresses and old phone numbers, then that's getting into the LLMs. And the LLMs can help you fix it. You can just ask them, what are the addresses of phone numbers you're aware of? And show me where you're getting that data from. And then you can go and fix them. So I thought it was pretty cool. And I like this very much. I like it very much now. Citation consistency is back.
Claire (17:24.011)
very much.
Claire (17:27.83)
And what are we going to beg people to do now?
Now we will beg you to go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts and leave us a review. Because you know what, you probably listened to this whole thing and you thought, man, that is such a good podcast. I am such a lucky person in this world that I get to listen to Claire and Darren talk about local search and I'm just feeling inspired. And I'm going to go and just write really nice words on Apple or Spotify or both.
podcast and just tell the world about how good this is and why they should listen.
Another thing you might do is you might press subscribe because the thought of actually missing one of these podcasts like fresh, fresh off the press is just making you cry.
Yeah, absolutely. If you don't press that subscribe, you could potentially miss one of our upcoming episodes and that would be tough. That would be a real difficult thing for you. And so you don't want to miss them. If you hit the subscribe, it might even get like dings on your phone when we launch a new one, which would be great for you.
Claire (18:33.166)
Well, thank you. Thank you again, Darren.
Thank you again, Claire. Nice to see you. Enjoy your time in Ireland and hanging out with the wonderful Google Business Profile Product Expert. And we will see you next week for more local search news.
Bye friends, thank you!
Everybody.