Darren Shaw (00:00.086)
Welcome to another episode of the Whitespark Local Update with me Darren Shaw.
Claire Carlile (00:04.718)
I'm with me Claire Carlile and welcome back to your favourite Local SEO podcast where we look at the linky links that we have been enjoying from the week. Here it is.
Darren Shaw (00:14.85)
Yeah, always good stuff. I'm gonna lead with Aaron Wycki, our good friend, long time friend, Aaron Wycki. His latest post is on his lead Ferno blog is Google just elevated text messaging to a primary conversion action. So I think we might've talked about this. Joy had published a screenshot of.
search results on mobile where the text message button is really prominent. Now, they didn't have that before. Now there's text message. so Google is pushing this. And Aaron's article is talking all about that. He talks about the prominence of the new buttons. And then he actually did a dive into a number of different categories where he was like, yep, there's a button, there's a button, there's a button. Google is rolling this out. And so this is really prominent and it is an important
update that everyone needs to know about local search because texting is powerful and he He provides in his article some explanations about this like why is Google doing this? And the reason is is that customers often prefer texting they don't want to phone the business They just want to send a quick message Google has proven that messages are extremely valuable and a lot of people prefer that method
via the local services ads. The local service ads has kind of shown them that, yeah, this is a thing. Texting removes friction, so it just makes it easier to, yeah, and I think a lot of people like message multiple businesses, and Google wants to enable that functionality. And so then of course, he talks about how, well, speaking of texting, Leadferno is an incredible platform for managing this, and I agree. I actually think that it is,
Like if you're gonna turn this on for so many small businesses, Leadferno is quite amazing for this because if you, so what you do is you connect, so you get a phone number through Leadferno. I don't know if you can use your existing number, but all of your texts come into the Leadferno platform. And so that means that you've got an interface for managing them rather than just like trying to find text messages on your phone. like a searchable interface.
Darren Shaw (02:28.706)
You can have multiple users logging in and managing your things. You can set up auto responders because someone goes to Google, they send a text message. You're busy under the sink fixing someone's plumbing issue. You can't get back to them for two hours, but you can have the lead furnall system send an auto response. You can automatically tag messages and put them into categories and groups. So it just makes it's like like an inbox from managing all of this and managing it really well. And so he's got lots of great features. And I just think
It's good. Another thing, you can actually put it on your website. It's a little widget. instead of live chat, which is janky, you can have text messaging. And then you're actually in the person's phone. So it's a really good program with the advent of this button in Google featuring text messaging more prominently. do think you've got to think about text messages now. You should turn it on your profile. And I do think you should take a look.
at Lead Furno. Lead Furno also has a partner program for agencies that are listening.
Claire Carlile (03:29.89)
Thank you for your extensive walkthrough of the Leadverno platform.
Darren Shaw (03:38.336)
He didn't ask me to do that. Let's just be clear. Of course he did!
Claire Carlile (03:41.166)
I know it's a good product is a good service by a group of good people and that's fine. So my first linky link is from the wix.com website. So you might remember that when George Nguyen was running the SEO hub, was super duper good. There's still content going on there, but it's worth noting that Crystal Carter, our very lovely friend,
has started a new content hub. it's the AI Search Lab by Wix Studio. So it is all about AI LLMs. It's all about things like that. So it's very useful. And I went and had a little look at it. So I'm just going to tell you about one piece that I read on there, which was by our good friend, Amanda Jordan, super duper clever, very knowledgeable local SEO who is talking about...
local search in AI. So just a run through of her thoughts on the platform and what people need to do. I liked some of the little fresh recommendations that she had. So she's talking about how LLMs, they want to see the same thing over and over again. They will put up with people being very boringly repetitive, which is great. So she talks about
Well, the things that we know with a little bit of added extra. So being clear on your website, who you are, we've already said this, it's the semantic triple, but she's also talking about three to five hooks. So she's talking about really pushing your USPs and making sure that you talk about them consistently across your, where you're mentioned. And it's interesting to know, and she comes to this in a moment, when we talk about our USPs, it really should be the things that we have unlocked.
as insights from our actual customers, not things that we think are important to them. So that's where she comes to mining the data from reviews, which we've been talking about for ages. We know about ratings and rankings, so make sure that you get lots of good reviews and lots of reviews. Make sure that you are represented in the review platforms and the sites that are being cited by the LLMs. And then, I just love this, repeat yourself.
Claire Carlile (05:57.004)
Yeah. Just be consistent in how you describe yourself and the people that you serve. And that's it. Local SEO is about clarity, consistency and authority. So thank you, Amanda. It's definitely worth going and having a little read of that one just to make sure that you're covering all the bases that she recommends in terms of visibility for local businesses.
Darren Shaw (06:17.314)
Really good, super good. Gotta read that because we are working on our own AI optimization services at White Spark. We have a SEO service and so we're integrating a lot of that and so this is great for giving me some, know, just getting to the head space of things that we gotta do to update our service. I got another link and it is, surprise, surprise, it's from Claudia.
Claire Carlile (06:44.014)
What is it? What?
Darren Shaw (06:45.806)
Yes, Claudia Tamina again. I know this is a Claudia podcast. So she talks about how what people are saying in your reviews is getting surfaced in Ask Maps. And it's really interesting. like she talks about this example where what she said in her own review was being reflected back to her in the Ask Maps, which is very interesting. It's like a reason for her to return. And so
It's like, it's not retargeting. It's just pulling in these details from reviews. So the real takeaway here is review strategy has never been more important. And making sure that you are getting interesting content from your reviews is just absolutely critical. So it's a really good post by Claudia, again, on LinkedIn. So just a post about it.
And just to go and look at your Ask Map section, see what it's saying about you, and then thinking about working on your review strategy to make sure that you are getting good phrases in your reviews. Encouraging people to write long and encouraging people, and Google's encouraging this now too, and just encouraging people to talk about the service or the food or the specific thing, rather than, it was great. Darren.
You know, like that's not a very helpful review. And so you really want to work on making sure you're getting lots of content in your views. And that is the end of what I want to say about that.
Claire Carlile (08:20.206)
Okay, cool. That's good. I feel like I'm not really following totally what is happening in Ask Maps and these iterations of how Google is pushing information into maps. So that's a good one to look out for if in the absence of you actually looking yourself. My second link is a piece on the local search forum, is a forum and Stefan Somborak is just flagging
Um, some changes that he's, he's seeing. So you may or may not know that Google, I don't know if it does it. I guess it's all businesses in all countries. If, uh, one of your edits is rejected, you get an email from Google that says recent information edit was rejected. And then it appears that there are one of two ways to do something about that. So there are two different workflows and Stefan is flagging the fact that
one of the workflows now in Canada, trying to do something for a Canadian business, forwards him to the second workflow. So in my experience, what used to happen is you used to deal with that via the appeal edits workflow, which, I'm in the UK, and then it went into the general appeal workflow. And now I don't even know where it lives at all because
One of my workflows says there are appeals, that there are edits that I can appeal and one doesn't and I don't really understand and you've got two workflows that aren't talking to each other. What a surprise. If we can't work it out, how will normal merge
Darren Shaw (10:01.228)
my god. Yeah, mortal humans. Good luck to you. need these GPs. The product experts are confused. That's not good.
Claire Carlile (10:08.654)
Anyway, I will chat with Stefan about that and then we will write something up about it somewhere because it seems pretty important. Yeah, it seems really important. So watch this space and we'll tell you the thing and then it will change by the time you get around to
Darren Shaw (10:23.918)
You will fix it with your powers of.
Claire Carlile (10:26.744)
Stefan will fix it and I will claim I'll say that I did it and that's fine.
Darren Shaw (10:33.166)
Great. Breaking news again from Valentina Vasileva. She's the one that broke the news about the cool little thing where Google was pulling in a little snippet from your social media. Like today there's a special, tomorrow a little special. So she broke that news. She was the one, the first one to spot it. And thankfully she tags me on these things. While she did it again, she tagged me on a new interesting feature, which is in the Maps app.
in the latest update, they have built like, you know, like if I don't know if you use Instagram or TikTok to publish videos, but when you do you like upload a video, you get like a whole editing interface in there you can like crop it and play with it and add captions and do all kinds of stuff. Google has added that kind of functionality, the Google Maps app now. So when you upload a video to a business profile, you get a full little editor. It's not as like comprehensive as like a TikTok or Instagram.
video editor, but she provides a little demo video of showing how this thing works. And it's really cool. And so that's super fascinating, really, to think about Google continuing to invest and improve on the Maps product and the Maps experience. I think it tells us that the future looks bright for local SEO. The future is good. There's just so much you've got to stay on top of and continue working on.
It allows you to really improve your videos. And then I just noticed she's got a follow-up here. my recent finding about, I didn't see this, about video editing inside the Google Business Profile, you can now add captions to the photos directly while uploading them in the GBP dashboard. Okay. This is basically too late. I she tagged me on this and I didn't even see it. man. Right now I knew that you could add a caption to a photo.
when you upload it in the Maps app. But if you are in the GBP dashboard, the NMX, there was never a caption option, but she's showing here in a little demo that you can actually add captions. So anyways, video editing in the Maps app, adding captions to photos, two big updates happening on Google Business Profiles. You'll have links in the show notes and you can go and check it out and learn more about these features. Thank you, Valentina.
Claire Carlile (12:59.566)
and thank you for always tagging us in because then we know.
Darren Shaw (13:04.012)
And my apologies for not responding to your tags at any.
Claire Carlile (13:07.858)
Now you've responded live. Could it get any better? I have got a link from The Verge, which I actually found via Lily Ray on LinkedIn. And Lily Ray was talking about the 2023 piece in The Verge, which was brilliant, which was the people who roamed the internet, which you probably remember.
Darren Shaw (13:11.662)
Great, thanks for sharing the news.
Claire Carlile (13:32.878)
Love that. So it is behind the paywall, but I think if you do it in an incognito window, you can read the content of this piece. But basically, The Verge always does like an expose in terms of, oh, it's ruined or, know, this is what people are doing. This is why it's awful. And then as you can imagine, when anyone highlights like this big awful things that are happening, you can always expect if they weren't already Google to do something about
it. And that's the thing about all of these AIs, LLMs, blah, blah, blah, is very early days. So thinking that you can reverse engineer and, and play them, it's only us doing SEO 15 years ago with white text. like, you know what I mean? It's like, it's not going to last forever. So can, can we stop like talking about listicles and
Darren Shaw (14:23.244)
Yeah, you can hurt yourself. Like all these things that you're trying to do to manipulate right now, it's like going back to the white text days, the buying like PBN links days, and then that ends up hurting you. So like Lily's smart to like caution people against this.
Claire Carlile (14:38.158)
Yeah, yeah. And anything like anything, Lily, I mean, I'll listen, you know, she's she's she's she's seen it all again. She's a worldy. And it was a nice little so there's a couple of quotes in here. Brittany Mueller. Sorry, Brittany, if I always say your name wrong. Hopefully you are listening. And Rand, I liked Rand's my personal spicy take on this is the concept of AI search and the focus on it is somewhere between 10 and 100 times more than the actual activity taking place.
So it just comes back to visibility in AIs and LLMs is a little bit similar to SEO. And yes, our tactics might be slightly different, but we should be going back to brand building, getting mentions, making sure that we're meeting and seeing people and being mentioned in a positive way in the places where our potential customers are and our stakeholders and whoever it is that we're trying to talk to. It's not rocket science, it's marketing.
Yeah. And so there were just some bits in there. It's like, you know, we used to think about backlinks all the time and we always used to go, it's an unlinked mention. You know, we've moved beyond this.
Darren Shaw (15:50.188)
Yeah, remember we used to debate that? We'd be like, is it worth anything if you don't get the link? And then you'd have whole teams of people trying to find the mentions and turning them into links. Hey, you mentioned us, but you didn't link to us. Could you please update that? Good thing we don't have to do that anymore.
Claire Carlile (16:03.662)
banging my head on the desk even back then. So we know what we need to do. We have to have our brand positively discussed on third party platforms like Reddit, TikTok, YouTube, local news, anywhere that is important for people. yeah, sit down, have a cup of tea and read. It's a long one, but I really like it when you get like big, you know, media actually discussing this stuff because it allows you to see it through the eyes of.
Darren Shaw (16:31.544)
How are they looking at it?
Claire Carlile (16:33.27)
Yeah, they aren't in our funny little world.
Darren Shaw (16:35.918)
I just have a little tip to add with the paywalled content. I use this thing called Speechify, which I really love. I listen to a lot of articles in Gwyneth Paltrow's voice. She reads me SEO articles while I'm driving. you can even get Snoop Dogg. You can get other people to read your articles. And so what I do when I get a paywall article is I click the button to add it to Speechify.
it becomes readable on the app. don't know why it just it gets it gets around those like paywall things. So many sales pitches in this episode. This episode is by Leadfro and Speechify.
Claire Carlile (17:16.558)
We've given up on easy-peasy. We're just gonna go with
Darren Shaw (17:20.012)
Easy easy you're Didn't even respond to us. I'm taking these glasses off right now. Like I got my, now, opulize. We love your glasses. I don't know why it's a local update. Please sponsor us. Okay, I think we did it. Go leave us.
Claire Carlile (17:40.738)
you done your final link? Did you do your final link? you know that. Now Darren, we do have a special message from someone that you know and love.
Darren Shaw (17:43.63)
I did three.
Darren Shaw (17:51.051)
yeah, we do? Great. Let's play the reel.
Claire Carlile (17:55.564)
Let's hear it. Let's hear it. Here it is. Hey, this is the of us, but come back.
Darren Shaw (17:57.932)
It's Claudia Tomino.
podcast next week to hear Darren Shaw talk about me again. She's not wrong. I'm probably going to talk about her again.
The trouble is she keeps publishing interesting things and I hear about them and then I'm like I guess I gotta talk about on the podcast So you only have yourself to blame Claudia
Claire Carlile (18:24.75)
Claudia said it. That's the end of the podcast. Thank you for listening. Bye. Bye.
Transcript source: Provided by creator in RSS feed: download file