Claire Carlile (00:00.098)
Hello, hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Whitespark Local Update with me Claire Carlile
Darren Shaw (00:07.31)
And with me, Darren Shaw.
Claire Carlile (00:09.905)
Hello, Darren.
Darren Shaw (00:11.8)
Hello.
Claire Carlile (00:13.422)
Today, we are going to talk about linky links and you're going to go first.
Darren Shaw (00:20.622)
OK, well, the first thing I want to talk about, this is a very interesting article from Rand Fishkin. As you know, he partners with Datos, a SEMrush company. They got some kind of desktop application that tracks people, spies on them. I think by consent. They clicked something in their terms and agreement that that we will allow you to watch MySearchHistory.
And so they track these people, which is useful because then you get to see where people are going on the internet. And there's a big enough data set that it seems significant. And so because of this data, Rand can make some inferences about how people search on the internet. And I will share with you now some of the interesting insights from Rand's excellent article, Search Happens Everywhere, An Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity. That's what we want to know.
OK, where are people searching for information? The first thing I wanted to say about it is that it's too bad it's desktop only. I wish they had the mobile data because that would show something different. Specifically, I think a lot of Gen Zs are doing their searches on TikTok. And because this is desktop only, we don't really get to see that data. I'd be curious to see that. That was one thing I was like, dang, I want the TikTok numbers.
But I think it's most important to note, one huge takeaway from this article is that Google's not 90 % of search market share. This is like a common stat that's thrown around. 90 % of search market share is owned by Google, like 93 % of some of the numbers. And that's because they look at four search engines. They look at Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Yahoo. And they're like, aha, Google's 93 % of the search volume on those sites. But this is interesting data because it shows, well, people are searching everywhere.
They're on Reddit, they're on YouTube, they're on TikTok, they're on Instagram. People are searching for information all over the place. And so in this data set, Google's only 73%, very interesting, not the 90%. And in relation to this is chat GPT, which only comes in at 2.8%. So people are obsessing about optimizing for chat GPT, but guess what, dudes, it's less than Bing and you've been ignoring Bing for two decades.
Darren Shaw (02:37.346)
Why are you so obsessed with chat GPT? You know, we spend our optimization time focused on sites that are driving search traffic, right? That's what we do as SEOs. I was sad to see Amazon come in as the number two most searched search engine, because you know what? Had enough of those billionaires. wish they would, people would stop.
buying stuff on Amazon, we're trying. We're trying our best in our household to do less Amazoning because Jeff Bezos does not need more money so that he can then influence elections and ruin the world. AI overviews are where the majority of AI results are happening, like a huge magnitude of AI-driven search results are happening in the AI overviews. And that's an interesting thing because a lot of people talking about AISCO and they're thinking about
Optimizing with Chow GPT and Gemini and maybe Clode, but like AI overviews is where like a massive amount of the actual AI generated results are. So that was another interesting takeaway is to focus on that. Anyways, that's Rand's article.
Claire Carlile (03:48.802)
Yeah, there's a lot of platforms, lot of searches doing, people are doing the searchy search in lots of places, aren't Google? Well, well, well, this is a little piece which very much resonated with me. It is from the Harvard Business Review and it's via local dialogue actually, which is another Greg Sterling's thingy things that he does. This really sort of resonated with me in the sense that
Darren Shaw (03:55.32)
What do you got?
Claire Carlile (04:17.998)
AI at the moment for most people in the workplace doesn't reduce work, intensifies it. the whole idea that we should be setting up all of these processes with AI to make our lives easier is actually pretty stressful because you have to go and learn, you have to learn all the things. So rather than what it's saying, it's the study they did suggests that artificial intelligence
intensifies workloads rather than reducing them. Employees are using the tools to expand their professional roles and multitask, which inadvertently erodes the boundaries between their personal and professional lives. Even apart from that, this idea that you'll be working for longer because you start using these AI tools, it's like, how am I supposed to know which AI tool to use? How am I supposed to know the prompt? How am I supposed to make sense of it? I just thought it was really interesting. If you're feeling like that,
like as a marketer, as a person that is supposed to be AI, it's supposed to be like making your life easier. You're not alone. It is doing people's hedging, basically.
Darren Shaw (05:26.574)
So our jobs are not at risk is basically
Claire Carlile (05:30.924)
don't know. They probably are at risk. Everything's at risk, isn't it? Because we live in such an upbeat and uplifting world. But yeah, I think this is just one of those chill if this is just giving you a nightmare because everyone is feeling the same. And I've got some top tips to help you in a minute, which will be one of my other links.
Darren Shaw (05:51.554)
Okay, sweet. Why don't you hit it now? Just say we're right into it. Yeah, do it.
Claire Carlile (05:55.712)
Are you sure? Breaking tradition. I'm not sure about this. Okay, I'll do it. I feel uncomfortable, right? But I'm just going to go ahead. guess who is one of my favorite people in the world that isn't Claudia Tamina and their initials are A, C.
Darren Shaw (06:17.166)
Uhhhh... AC?
Claire Carlile (06:20.992)
And the.
Darren Shaw (06:22.766)
Oh, Andy Cresatino, geez. Yes, that's correct. I was so slow on that. I was thinking of like AOC.
Claire Carlile (06:29.23)
So like we just we just said, God, I should be making my life easier. And it's not it's like, hello in walks, knock at the door, knock, knock, knock. Who is it? Hello, it's Andy Christina. And I'm here. And I'm to tell you what you need to do. And like, I love him for that. So this is really good. It is also segue into one of your links, the AI prompt that shows while you're why your contact page stings.
Darren Shaw (06:57.575)
sweet. Tell me about this.
Claire Carlile (06:59.414)
He's like, why do you put cheese on a broken mousetrap? Fix the mousetrap and then you can make more cheese. So basically Andy is saying, and I'm sure that you're going to touch on this. He goes through some of the things that you would expect to see on the contact page, including like trust and authority and stuff like that. So he lays that all out and he says, these are the best practices. So you do that, then you grab a screenshot and then you use Andy's prompt in your LLM of choice.
and you say, hey, you're a senior B2B brand strategist and you're focused on conversion. So I want you to order and improve this B2B page for clarity, trust, low friction and form completion. Here's a screenshot. And this is the button that brought the user here because contextually they need to know, you know, if you're, if you're, if the CTA was buy this thing now or whatever.
and then you get to the page and you've got different messaging. I think people forget this a lot, especially on their micro copy of their buttons between their thingies anyway. So he gives you that and then it says, you know, this is the type of feedback you could expect to see. And then bonus prompt, he also then gives you one for someone viewing on a mobile because I think so much of the time we forget to check on a mobile. And if he's not giving them the correct keyboard and the correct options for the form fill, they abandon the form fill.
How many times have we done that on mobiles? So anyway, Andy comes up trumps again by one, brilliant content and two, making our lives easier by actually telling us how to use AI to save ourselves time.
Darren Shaw (08:35.992)
I mean, this flies in the face of your previous link because I really think that this is actually reducing work. It's certainly reducing mental load, right? All the things.
Claire Carlile (08:46.926)
I think the problem is in a lot of organisations, is it's the individual person who is left to find their way in the AI world. Whereas if everyone had an Andy in their organisation...
Darren Shaw (09:00.268)
You do have an Andy. He's on YouTube. You can go and see him there. He's great. Well, speaking of contact pages, I can't believe last week I forgot to talk about my own article. I published an article on Search Engine Land, and I was like, what should I talk about on the podcast this week? And I totally forgot that I have published an excellent article on Search Engine Land.
about contact pages. And the thing that's interesting about contact pages that lot of small businesses and local SEO agencies are not thinking about is this interesting piece of information. Joel Headley, previous Google head of support dude, said that Google specifically crawls and ingests your contact pages. It's like one of these key pages of your website that Google is always looking for. And they're like,
Give me that contact page. They look for it and then they want to extract everything that they can from the page. And do know what most small business contact pages look like? It says, please contact us. And that's like the only content on the page. So my article is about like, Hey, stop doing that. Here's what you should do instead. And what you should do instead is make it deluxe. And actually it's amazing because Andy's prompt is saying,
the same thing. It's like these contact pages are a great opportunity. One, you need to close the deal. Someone's actually managed to your contact page. Remind them why they're there. Give them the trust signals. Give them all this information. Talk about this. Have photos of your team. Just close the deal. They've made it to the contact page. And so my article is all about the amazing content you can and should be adding to your contact page to elevate them to the next level because everyone's contact pages mostly suck.
But you, dear listener, can improve yours with this article. And Andy's prompt. What a one-two punch. Read the article. Take Andy's prompt. And in fact, maybe then take Andy's prompt and say, and edit it and be like, also include Darren's insights from this article. And now give me my content page.
Claire Carlile (11:10.082)
because obviously yours is very local focused, is, you know, it's very specific, isn't it? It's like the things that we need to include, like, you your embedded Google map and, you know, some photos of like the staff that you might see, what the front door looks like and all of that.
Darren Shaw (11:27.694)
So the embedded Google map, since I realized that you could do a branded search and then get the knowledge panel on the right and then right click that directions button and get a link, I kind of like that better than the embedded Google map because then it goes straight to the get directions. That's really what you want people to do, right? So it goes straight to get directions. like get directions, our huge CTA, and then they click it and then those are ranking signals, which I like.
Claire Carlile (11:57.474)
both because I like am very drawn to the visual. like to see a map. just want to see a map. Go with both. Or test. A, test. I'm going to tell you about something else now and it is... Ooh, it is. Now there has been a little bit of a hoo-ha with the missing reviews.
Darren Shaw (12:04.77)
with you. Let's go with
Darren Shaw (12:22.764)
The case of the missing reviews.
Claire Carlile (12:25.038)
It's an Agatha Christie novel. It's one of one of our lesser known ones. But there's so many different reasons for the review county, county, county bits going up and down. One is, well, there's lots of different but like one of them is a lot of users accounts were removed. So you might find that, well, we've lost four or five or six. Yes, because those accounts don't exist anymore. And that's why your review count has changed.
That happens quite a lot. see that happening with my clients. It's like, oh, where did that go? Oh, well, it doesn't exist anymore. So it could have been taken off because there was a problem or Google sort of the algorithm decided there was a problem with the content. Could be because that user isn't there anymore. But something that was coming up in the community was some weirdness around the API and the figures that the API was giving.
I think we were talking about that. And then what popped up into my feed now is a bit of research or what is it research? Is it research or was it just a piece? Google review discrepancies, AI response, facts, missing reviews and API issues. Because supposedly another thing that people were saying is like, if you use AI to write your reviews or you're using third party software,
where it uses AI to help you write your review responses or reviews or whatever. don't know. I wasn't following that part of the conversation. But it is saying that businesses missing feedback on fluctuating review counts, the source clarifies that these issues, the source, I wonder if this is like the source, which can't be named somebody in Google, perhaps the source clarifies.
that these issues stem from Google's attempts to block unauthorized data scraping. Crucially, the document debunks rumors that using artificial intelligence to draft review replies leads to search engine penalties. It confirms that AI generated responses are fully compliant, says the tool set that uses them, with Google's guidelines as long as they remain high quality and authorized by the business. I think it's just saying
Claire Carlile (14:50.572)
the API is having a little bit of a meltdown.
Darren Shaw (14:53.39)
So we noticed this in our software. We noticed review counts being off. Like we would get them sometimes and not get them other times because we're doing the same thing. We're scraping, right? We're getting that review data and the business data in our rank tracking software. And so a lot of times we'd have no data on the reviews. And so we had to investigate this. Google wasn't returning it. And it was like an attempt to thwart scraping. Because I think, especially in the AI-driven world,
Google is under a new onslaught of bots hammering its servers, taking its data, costing resources. And they're trying to mitigate that. So reasonable, understandable. I did find the point that you made about user accounts disappearing interesting. I didn't know that Google did that. They just do a sweep of accounts sometimes and be like, yeah, that's not a real account. And they just delete it because they had no activity or something. It was like someone created an account, left a review, and then
Never use that Google account again, so like an inactive account.
Claire Carlile (15:54.614)
Yeah, reviews like if it's a Google Guide account, and they get rid of the account or the account no longer exists. I don't know. think I need that's you know, that's the content, wouldn't it is
Darren Shaw (16:10.028)
That is interesting to explore. What are the circumstances why Google will remove a Google account? I didn't know that was happening, actually.
Claire Carlile (16:18.734)
I've just made that up. Another thing is, say for example, say for example, you are a marketer that works with a range of different businesses locally and leaves reviews for those people. Go and have a little look to see if the reviews that you have written for that client, if you have access to their Google business profile, actually show or not.
Darren Shaw (16:41.902)
Yeah, like wait, if like as just a regular Joe Schmo reviewer on the internet, I got like I've written like 25 reviews.
Claire Carlile (16:48.462)
If you've got access to someone's Google business profile, should a review that you write for them actually show in their Google business profile or is that a flag to Google? Yeah, reviews are a thing, aren't they? They're complicated, I think.
Darren Shaw (17:00.514)
Well, that is interesting.
Darren Shaw (17:07.95)
They are a thing. Reviews are a thing. My final article is from the wonderful Lisa Landsman. She talks about Google Posts, one of my favorite topics. A lot of people at Google Posts, don't help with rankings. I'm not going to deal with them. And those people that say that are stupid people, because Google Posts are absolutely phenomenal.
They are a great opportunity to get your message in front of all those people searching on Google so we use them. so Lisa invites Michael Nagy is the Google product manager for Post. So this is the guy that's like designing the product and trying to make it better. And you can see it. He's like launching features all over the place. He can do bulk now. You can do scheduling. So, you know, great job for Google for improving the product.
I wanted to talk about some of the really interesting insights from this webinar that did it. Let me also just say thank you, Google, for producing this kind of content. Thank you for putting someone wonderful like Lisa Landsman in place to do this kind of work and educate people. It's really cool to have Google investing in this area. So anyways, great webinar. You should definitely watch it. And I'll give you my highlights. One of the ones that I kind of knew this, but I wanted to highlight it, is that
On mobile map, the Google mobile maps app, so you got Google maps on your phone. In the photo carousel, it pulls in these special updates from customers, so that gives your Google post extra visibility. So the photo gets shown, it's a little snippet and you can click on it and it goes into the Google post. That's another place where Google posts are getting shown to people and a lot of people are searching on mobile. So great visibility there.
Events in the food and drink category, so bakeries, cafes, restaurants, anyone in those categories, if you make event or offer posts and you use the magical keywords today or tomorrow, or even put dates on them, they will get special highlight and pulled into this new special thing that you can see on mobile. So that's a good reason to use Google Post, especially if you're in those categories.
Darren Shaw (19:26.51)
I didn't know this. makes sense, of course. But on mobile, Google only show 80 to 100 characters of your text. And so Lisa suggests you've got to lead with the value. Don't blabity, blah, blah, in your first few characters. You've got to hit them with the main value proposition right out of the gates. Lisa says that the call to action option, you can do like learn more, call now. Call now is the gold standard for service area businesses. And that, of course, makes all the sense. You should do that.
Someone asked about impressions. Man, how many people are looking at these posts? And Google did take those stats away from us. But I didn't know this. If anyone clicks on a Call Now button or a Learn More link in a Google post, that actually gets rolled up into the overall performance metrics in Google Business Profile. So that's counted as a call or counted as a link. They don't differentiate them, but I thought that was interesting. I didn't even know that.
Claire Carlile (20:23.32)
Did they say that? I missed that bit.
Darren Shaw (20:25.014)
Yeah, they, so okay, you know when you go to the performance measure, you'd be like, how many people called your business?
Claire Carlile (20:30.6)
website clicks is a click website
Darren Shaw (20:32.686)
and calls, right? So you think that's coming from the call button on mobile or from anyone that clicked the website. And that's true for the most part. But if anyone clicks that a link on your Google post or they click the call button on a call now on a Google post, those also get counted.
Darren Shaw (20:53.782)
I love this quote from Lisa about keeping your videos under 30 seconds. She says, people want a vibe check, not a documentary. I thought that was a really good quote and very true. Post once a week rule and then also whenever you have specials, offers and events, definitely do that. And I love this, top reasons posts get rejected. Number one, phone numbers in the post text don't ever do that straight to jail.
Stock photos, do not use stock photos straight to jail. Don't use all caps, don't use exclamation points, and don't use hashtags. Straight to jail, use hashtags in your Google post, you look like a dumb idiot, and you gotta go straight to jail. So.
Claire Carlile (21:41.262)
That's difficult with the stock images. Like if you've got a salad bar and you've only got like women eating salad and laughing, which is my favorite.
Darren Shaw (21:50.306)
I'm so stuck on four.
Yeah, yeah, they should let those ones pass. They should have a special exception for women eating salad and laughing. and in this webinar, they revealed a new feature coming soon for Google Post. And I'm going to spoil it for everyone right now. A repeat feature. So when you create a Google Post, you can set it to repeat. You can say repeat this post weekly, repeat this post.
I think they offer daily and maybe monthly and then you can even say repeat it on Tuesdays and this is this is the use case We do happy hour on Thursday night at 3 p.m. Every damn week. I'm gonna make a post for that. I want to repeat Isn't that nice so now I could just repeat every Thursday. You don't have to make it It's just automatically pops back up a very cool new feature coming for Google posts
Claire Carlile (22:42.798)
Now we just need UTM tagging out of the box.
Darren Shaw (22:47.81)
Yes, yes, that would be very nice. Well speaking of don't tell Google our great ideas, but the white spark Google posts Functionality that is in development is going to have such functionality for sure
Claire Carlile (23:02.05)
Very good. Well, that's very lovely. We did another podcast. That's it.
Darren Shaw (23:06.914)
Yes, we did another podcast. was delightful chatting with you again, Claire. Thanks everybody for listening. Of course, go leave us a review on Apple podcasts and leave us likes and comments and subscribes on YouTube as well. That'd be great. Thanks a lot, everybody.
Claire Carlile (23:23.31)
Au revoir!
Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file