[Claire Carlile]
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me, Claire Carlyle.
[Darren Shaw]
And with me, Darren Shaw. Darren Shaw, that's me.
[Claire Carlile]
That is you!
[Darren Shaw]
And I had to look at my name tag this morning, but yes, that is me. What do we do? We talk about what's the latest happenings in local search and, you know, we talk a lot about AI search too.
So, my first link from local search is from the one, the only, the magnificent Miriam Ellis. Miriam Ellis, we are very blessed to have her writing for Whitespark. And so Miriam and I got together and did a cool research project.
Here's the theory. The theory is that, well, here's the annoyance. The annoyance is you have no control over the order that your photos show up on your Google business profile.
And we're like, dang you, Google. I don't want those stupid photos at the front of my carousel. And we're like, why are you putting them in that order?
Well, the theory is that Google puts them in the order that people seem to be engaging with. So it's like, everybody's looking. I know you want that photo, but everyone's looking at this one, dude.
So we're going to put that one at the front because people seem to like it. So I'm like, ding, ding, ding. I know what we could do.
We'll get a bunch of people to go and look at and click on and share a specific photo. Maybe that'll move it to the front. So we did it.
I put it on a mailing list, did some social posts. I was a little disappointed that with all the people that we asked, I only got 172 participants, but still 172 people on these like restaurant profiles. Come on.
You're looking at this image. That's significant. You would think that would maybe move the needle, but it didn't.
It was like, nothing happened. There was no change to the photo. So our experiment failed.
But now you know. So it's still valuable, right, to publish it. But that was my thought.
My thought was that Miriam is going to, okay, we did the research, Miriam's going to publish this thing. And it's way further. She took it to the next level.
And she said, Okay, well, what can you do? Well, good questions, Miriam. And so Miriam said, you should encourage photos with your review requests, because those ones have a tend to stick at the top of your profile in the review section.
Great. She just dove into photos, like all the things you should know about photos. You should add lots of different photos, because Google shows different photos that match the user intent.
So she used the example of Mike Blumenthal's client, Barbara Oliver, where if someone searches engagement rings, the photo that shows up is an engagement ring. If someone searches necklaces, the photo are necklaces. So having a full set of photos that represent all the different things you do and that you offer, that is very helpful to have on your profile.
We know that Google AI is understanding what's in your photos. She says that freshness is a thing. So make sure that you're updating.
Thanks for fixing that typo in my notes, Claire. That was really bugging me as well. And so mid podcast, Claire is like, Oh, Google is spelt wrong.
And she like, fixes that typo. Live. Wonderful.
Anyways, the article is awesome. Miriam's awesome. There's so much to learn a little about photos there, regardless of whether our study failed.
And so go read it.
[Claire Carlile]
You're testing. You can't like, if you do a test, you do a test. He's like, does this thing work?
It does or it doesn't, or it doesn't. It didn't in this text, in this context. So in this test, in this context.
So still valuable as always. So thank you. So I'm going to start with my first linky link, which is a chunky linky link.
And it's something that I really enjoyed reading. It is from our very lovely friend, Crystal Tang. So this was a talk at Women in Tech SEO at Philadelphia, which I would have loved to have gone to, but also it is now on the Women in Tech SEO Knowledge Hub, which is where I'm going to get all of the gems from and their newsletters.
So they've always got the best content and it is called AI picks the shortlist. Are you even showing up locally? So as we talk about every week, the way customers discover and choose businesses is changing.
I really liked the way that she contextualizes this, gives examples. So she is using the example, where should I take a client for dinner near Rittenhouse Square? Now I've got no idea where that is, but where could you take them?
But, you know, if you are, even if you're using Google and you are using AI mode or Gemini, instead of like getting, you know, here are the results, then you go in and evaluate it. Then basically we know that AI is making the recommendation. So it's all a question of how do I become the recommended answer here?
So like tying in with one of the Will Reynolds quotes that we talked about, I can't remember how many weeks ago, it's not, I don't want a visibility report. I want a recommended report. So how do we go ahead and how do we see who is being recommended, obviously is going to change every time there is an iteration of a search.
But she's talking about those things. She's talking specifically about multi-location and the issues that like a big organization has with managing all of the moving parts of things that need to be done to be recommended by LLMs. The problem is big multi-location. There isn't one person or one part of that organization that owns all of the bits that we need to pay attention to here.
So she is saying that we need to think about, as we know, entity accuracy, consistency, reputation, content, and authority. But she says even when it's a small business, to be fair, lots of people are managing different parts. So listings are going to sit with one team, reviews with another, website content with another, social somewhere else, PR and third-party mentions barely intersect with local search at all.
So she is saying that these things obviously need to come together and we need to work with them in one if we want to see our businesses being recommended in these local results. She talks about research. She talks about the problem with research because everything is so new is that you say, oh, if you do these three things, this is definitely like a recommendation factor.
This is changing all the time. So the problem with saying if you do these things, you will be recommended is we're in the very early stages of understanding how this works. But she does dive into some pieces of research.
But then she finishes by saying, okay, let's try and make this actionable and achievable. So she talks about running 20 real customer prompts. So not these top-level ridiculous things that you might search for, but things that your actual potential customer would be searching for across the AI platforms on a regular basis and see who's getting recommended and named.
Fix your location data. We talk about that a lot. We talk about listings.
We talk about citations and we talk about how those are important again in the context of AI search. She says, because that's the boring stuff that matters. I disagree.
It's not that boring, but yes, it needs to be done. Set review targets per location, not just brand wide. Again, Miriam, treat photos as an ongoing job, not a one and done.
Publish something genuinely useful on a regular basis. So that might be video, FAQ, article, location, page update, or another format. She basically doesn't care what the content is, but it needs to be relevant and it needs to do something and answer a question of your real customers.
And then she's very kind at the end and she says, just pick two things and start from there. Don't have a huge list, which I love. Someone being kind to you and saying you can do this.
So anyway, great piece. Don't be overwhelmed. Go and read it because Crystal is the voice of reason.
[Darren Shaw]
Yep, she is. But yeah, that sounds like a very good list and a very good article. And Crystal is very smart.
So go read that one too. All right. My next piece is a webinar put on by Duda and it is the local customer journey.
What AI has and hasn't changed. And so the reason this is top must watch, must read, is that the panel, it's Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal, Claudia Tamina, and Geet Sakalakis. And so man, all four of those people are top tier, smart, smart people that have very good things to say.
And so you're going to want to watch this and hear what they have to say. I watch this on the plane. Normal people, they will watch movies or something on a plane.
I watch webinars about local search. So basically, they're like, does the hype match the reality? All this hype we're hearing about AI, does it really match the reality?
There's lots of practical takeaways in there. They talk about fan out queries. They talk about the directories and citations and Yelp and reviews and how to make non-commodity content.
One of the things I loved is that Greg starts it with a short little presentation with some stats. And he says that 53% of search is local. And that's true.
It's crazy. He comments on this, how there's this local SEO is this small little subset of SEO and AI visibility, but 53% of every search, the largest bucket of search is local. And of course it is.
Think of all the small businesses in the world and all the people searching for local related queries. And so everyone's looking for businesses, services. They talk about how attribution is a major mess.
So you should pair it with a, how did you hear about us question, which I will discuss in my last link. Um, citations really came up. Uh, he talks, he called it the revenge of the directories and directories had kind of faded away as, as being important.
They are back with a vengeance sites like, and he's, he works in legal. So sites like super lawyers and best lawyers, man, AI's love to mention those. Well, I recommended these businesses because they are prominently a position.
I have lots of reviews on these sites. Yelp has become much more important because of their partnership with Chachi PT. And, uh, they didn't say this, but White's Park has a fantastic listing service that I think anybody that needs to get their citations in order should definitely check out.
Um, photos came up again in this, uh, Claudia talks about an example where some people might run a query like, Hey, does this coffee shop have charging stations? That's a great, like you put a photo on your profile, then the AI's will be like, yes, they do. Look, here's a photo.
So that kind of stuff is smart. And so it goes back to what we talked about earlier. Um, yeah.
And then I'm just, I'll close it with like, Guy really got in a soap box about diversifying your marketing, which kind of speaks to what Crystal was saying, which is like, it's, it's, you just can't call, you can't just do SEO. He says, if you're doing SEO only, that's like doing day trading of cryptocurrency. I think that's a pretty good quote.
Like you've got to be doing offline marketing, email marketing, YouTube. You have to do everything now. So it's very annoying, but it is true.
He did not, he was not as kind. He said, you have to do everything. Crystal says just pick two.
So maybe go with Chris, at least start somewhere. Right. So I thought that was a good article.
And I also wanted to tell you that White's Park, me and you, Claire are doing a webinar on local ranking grids. And so our local ranking grid software has had massive updates that people have not seen. And so we invite you to our webinar.
We'll be doing it on November 10th, and we will show you how awesome our MCP is. So our Claude, whatever, whatever AI you use, you can connect it now to our data. We have the most data because we track to a hundred, an insane amount of competitive analysis data.
And you can just query all that with MCP, which is awesome. We have a demographic overlay now. So if you could, you could see that, you know, what is the population in these areas?
What's the medium household income? And so that when you look at your grid, you actually have context about like what's behind it on the map, which is fantastic. We can now do circular grids.
You can change the map view to like a standard Google map instead of the dark map. We have so many awesome new features. We'll be showing them all on the webinar and you can ask questions.
And if you haven't tried our local ranking grid, you should go check it out. And I'm now done. What is your next link, Claire?
[Claire Carlile]
Save it. It is, let's have a little look. Now this is from our very lovely friend, Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable.
So we talked, I can't remember how many weeks ago about Ben Fisher spotting the submit a business photo option when it comes to verification. So this is another spot and it was made by Digital Jedi on the local search forum. So it's a screenshot and it says, submit an identity verification, upload a photo of your government ID.
Your ID is only used for verification and won't be shown publicly. Now I sort of think that this might be a mistake or it might be a test. I don't know if it needs to live there because I feel like there's going to be an option at some point, which says, tell me about the dream you had last night or submit a photo of your first born.
And we will, it's becoming very, yeah, it's just like whose ID, what? So I don't think that this is a thing, but it is quite funny. And it says, I can't remember.
It was, yeah, Barry wonders whether it's linked to verifying certain professions for local services ads. So maybe it shouldn't live there or maybe it lives in a workflow of someone else and it's only popped in because of something else. But anyway, um, I do like it when Barry does a little spot of something weird and shares it.
So that is that.
[Darren Shaw]
Upload your passport to verify your Google business profile.
[Claire Carlile]
Give me the three digits from the back of your, of your credit card.
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah. I identity theft game.
[Claire Carlile]
They're, they're trying to basically, uh, you know, they've already got all of our data, so they definitely don't need to put it in a screen like this.
[Darren Shaw]
They probably already have my passport. I've had to like scan it a couple of times and I'm sure Google's already grabbed it.
[Claire Carlile]
Probably. Yeah.
[Darren Shaw]
So my next link is blowing up on LinkedIn right now. Ran Fishkin poses the question, is AI visibility a scam? Very, you know, engagement bait question.
And he is getting engagement. Uh, a lot of it, a lot of people have comments and thoughts about this. So what he has done in this article is he's looking at three or what he's done in this, in this LinkedIn post and video he's made about it is that he's referencing three studies that came out in the past week that we're looking at referral traffic, traffic, uh, from AI sources of chat, GPT and Claude and others to websites.
So Marie Haynes published one called geo is a distraction. Uh, SEO works UK published one, how much traffic do AI assistants send? And then Kevin Indig was trying to look at direct traffic.
Um, so the idea would be like, okay, we're not seeing a lot of referral traffic because, um, one would think that when you go to chat, GPT, it doesn't give you a link, but then you then go and go direct to the website. Right. And so, okay.
So he didn't, none of these studies showed anything significant. Now it is worth saying that ran mentioned in his post text that this is excluding Google AI overviews, AI mode and Gemini. He thinks that's another matter, but he thinks that if you are worried about your position on chat, GPT, you're wasting your time.
You should, in fact, it drives such little value. You should be focusing more on duck, duck, go duck, duck, go. Actually it provides more traffic than chat, GPT.
But of course, everyone has very strong opinions about this. And so do I actually, because at white spark, we track, how did you hear about us? Guess what the number one source is for people signing up for our local rank in grid software.
It's chat GPT. Number one, it beats every other option in the list. When people say, choose, how did they hear about us?
And so then we get into the debate in the comments with, with Rand and he is very serious about thinking that data is also pure BS. He thinks people are confused. They're lying.
They, they deliberately mess up with the, with the responses. He thinks that you just can't trust that data because people don't remember like they're, they're not a good source of accurate information. And so he, he has some studies where he thinks about that, but I'm like, there's no way.
There's no way that that many people are fabricating chat GPT. Why are there so many people choosing that? So I actually think we don't have the solution here.
I think that a lot of leads are coming from chat GPT. I think they're coming from these LLMs. Claude, chat GPT are the, are the two incumbents for sure. And I just think like there's more research required here.
And if you just look at traffic, yeah, of course, because they're not driving direct traffic. So I kind of do away with all those studies and I'm look at our self-reported data. Is chat GPT the first option in our dropdown?
If it is, that's interesting to me. Like maybe my, our data is skewed. People are lazy.
There's like, I don't know, just submit, right? Like you do have to choose one. And so maybe they just choose the first one because they're like, I'm not telling you anything.
And so they're, they are like fabricating the data, but it's very interesting. I don't agree with Rand that it's just a tiny fraction of leads. I think that chat GPT is driving a lot more, but it is very difficult to get visibility in it.
And you certainly can't see it in Google analytics, but it's a very interesting debate. You can go and check out, read all the comments and see what people are saying.
[Claire Carlile]
Will do. Right. My third link, it would be a Barry Schwartz sandwich, but it isn't because it started with crystal and then it had Barry and then it had Barry.
So if that's not a sandwich, what is that?
[Darren Shaw]
Yeah, no, I don't know. It's a, it's an open face Berry sandwich with, with two, two layers of Berry.
[Claire Carlile]
Just on the side.
[Darren Shaw]
The side of Berry.
[Claire Carlile]
The main dish is crystal. And then there's two like bits of Barry just, and then you decide how you want to build your sandwich anyway. So, um, it is another link from Barry Schwartz, where it is, he's talking about how Google business profile review appeals are delayed again.
So not the, if you have a suspension and you do an appeal. So this is if you're making a review appeal. Um, so he talks about Dan and his surname Bogoslavsky, uh, from the Google team posted in the help community, that there's a high volume of review of appeal.
So processing is taking longer and then Google is working diligently to process all cases, but it can't give a timeframe. So nobody knows super duper. Um, this has happened before many times that what happens, I don't know what happens.
I don't work at Google and I don't see these things, but I imagine there's a massive backlog, something's broken or something happens or they've changed their infrastructure or their systems or their team somewhere. And this happens. So I don't know how long it's going to take, but what I don't generally touch anything to do with reviews when I'm in the community, because I think there needs to be quite a big bit of an education piece, especially for small business owners to understand that if you don't like a review, it doesn't mean that you should just report it and that it's going to get taken down.
I mean, the focus needs to be on really working hard and learning how to craft a really good response, how to make sense of that review and make sure that there's some sort of operational level learning that you can get from your bad reviews where you stop those things happening again. Um, and so I think setting expectations with stakeholders and clients, um, and that they need to basically move on from if they have a bad review, uh, and get new and positive reviews rather than focusing on the negative anyway. So it's a thing is happening.
So there's a lot of people in the forum at the moment saying, you know, I reported these reviews. I flagged them. I did nothing is happening.
I've, it's just like one move on anyway, because you probably reported something where you're saying this is from someone that wasn't a customer. You can never prove that you just need to crack on. And two, there is this backlog.
So anyway, you just need to know that one, this is happening. And two, again, it's just a little wake up call for if you're working with an agency, you're working in an agency, you have a lot of clients, there is a piece where you need to educate your clients and set their expectations.
[Darren Shaw]
I partly wonder if the, there's just so many agencies submitting these now that Google's systems are overloaded. Uh, there's just so many people that are submitting these requests. And they're just getting Google can't handle them all because agencies I think are seeing success one with getting like bad reviews removed, and two with getting missing reviews reinstated.
So I've all these review appeals, I think, you know, Google's just like, No, stop. I don't know if they just got to get their AIs doing doing better. So I think that's it.
That's a podcast.
[Claire Carlile]
Those are the links. We've done them. Thank you.
[Darren Shaw]
Thanks for coming. November 10. We're doing the local ranking grids webinar.
If you are on our mailing list, you will be invited. If you're not on our mailing list, you should be on our mailing list. And yeah, so we'll see you next week.
Go leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify and say that you love listening to the podcast. That's always very helpful for us. And yeah, we'll see you next time.
Bye, everybody. Thanks for listening. Bye.
