Episode 241 – Local SEO – A Deeper Dive

Ken

21% of consumers, according to Bright Local, are going online every day to find a local business.

Jeff

I can actually show you a screenshot. We're on the same screen. Meta is saying you're violating our terms and services. Your account is clean, you're good.

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

shift right now is for local businesses that I'm seeing is like nothing right now.

Paul

All right.

Jeff

Hello.

Paul

Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Marketing Guides for Small Business podcast. My name is Paul and I'm joined by Ken Tucker from changescape Web, Ian Canto from Outsource Marketing, Jeff Steck from Telerica Marketing Systems. So local search is more than just near me and geo qualified searches. So I just wanted to dive into this a little bit because there's a lot going on behind the scenes and may or may not be something people are interested in, but I think it's good information to, to know so you can kind of understand what's going on when you do these local searches. So, Ken, why is. Let's start at the very beginning because over the last several years, local search has become so much more important than it was previously. And why is that? And why has it evolved so much?

Ken

Yeah, well, so, I mean, first of all, local search would be something like, you know, Plumber, you know, in Rio Rancho, a nearby neighborhood or something like that, that I'm looking to hire somebody locally, you know, from either a local service area or a brick and mortar business where you, you're going to be going to that place of business. And so when people are doing those local searches, you know, which are, which are different. I mean, you know, there's, there are several different categories of types of searches. Right. And so the local searches right now haven't been majorly impacted by AI per se in terms of how you're showing up for those searches. But the reason that local search is so important is because of people's smartphones, mobile technologies everywhere. Google is optimized, you know, your website for mobile first for several years now. And a lot of people when they're looking for a local business, you know, they're, you know, if they've got their smartphone and they're doing that search, that way the phone GPS is telling the search engine where they're physically located. So unless they put another qualifier in, they just type in Plumber, it's going to bias the results based on, you know, if they have the GPS settings turned on on their phone, which about 90% of the people do. So the key is you, you know, you've, you've gotta realize just how important that is. It's not the same for every business, right? I mean, some businesses, you'll look at the Google Analytics and you'll see that they, they are still overwhelmingly being found from desktop searches. That's due to the nature of the types of customers that are looking for those businesses. So when we talk about strategy, first, here's a perfect example of why you want to do that. You need to think about who is your ideal customer, how are they searching, Are they using mobile devices? Are they using desktops? If your customer base is using mobile a lot, then it's extremely important. If they're still mainly desktop driven, local search is still extremely important. I think it's really this whole concept is just about finding businesses that are the most likely to be relevant to that searcher based on where they are at either as told to the search engines by their GPS settings on a mobile device, their IP address on a desktop, which may or may not be accurate. By the way, where I happen to live in Albuquerque, for whatever reason, my Internet service provider wants to say that I'm in, you know, like Scottsdale, Arizona. And so half the time when I just do a search, it, the results that I get are for, you know, Scottsdale, Arizona and it's, you know, but so then when you don't get the result that you want, you put a qualifier in. That qualifier is very frequently a location, a neighborhood, a suburb or a city to refine the search results so that you can find somebody local that you want to do business with. About 21% of consumers, according to Bright Local, are going online every day to find a local business. 77% each week and about 97% every month. So every small business out there that is doing business in a local market, not a national market or even a regional market, but I'm talking a local metropolitan, you know, suburban, small town market, whatever those are. Local search is absolutely critical for you.

Paul

That's interesting about what you said about your ISP thinking you're in Scottsdale, because usually these IP addresses are basically bought or these IP addresses are bought in blocks by the ISPs and it's usually pretty accurate because they'll assign this block to this area and this block to this area. Yeah, that's, that's kind of interesting.

Jeff

It's probably just got the parent company address on it, right?

Ian

Could be mine does that sometimes.

Ken

Yep.

Paul

So how. Ken touched on a few different things, but how is local search different from a normal search?

Ian

Yeah, I, I think Ken described It pretty well. I'll just give another analogy. You know, and I think the actual data that Ken, you pulled from the, the bright local report, I have a feeling that's probably bloated in some way and reason I think that, and I think you guys would probably agree with me on this, is that so many people like I, we don't store data in our contacts anymore in the same way we used to. So what I mean by that is, you know, I had to go to a walk in clinic because I, I had a problem. I thought I broke my finger, so I had to go in, get it x rayed, then I had to go back for a ultrasound. And between those days when they did those, I couldn't remember the phone number, right? And I had to confirm my, my meeting, my appointment. And so I just googled it each time. But in the eyes of the analytics that, that these reports pull, it's saying, hey, I was looking, I was searching for a local business. And yes, indeed, I was searching for a local business. But it's also because our human behavior now is just it, it's not lazy, it's resourceful, right? We just don't want to store the information anywhere else. Think that happens an awful lot for, you know, you name it. So, but as far as analogy of, of how local search works, I mean, especially when you're on your mobile phone, right, you're, you're driving through town, you get a flat tire, you're like, oh crap, like I need to get towed and I need my tire fixed and maybe the same place can do it. So you look for a tire shop in town, you, you Google it probably. Or if you're using Apple. You serious? Or, you know, whatever tool you're using, you use the tool at your disp. And, and we'll use Google because Google by far gets the most share of, of searches right now. You know, it's, it's 80 to 93%. It depends kind of what data you're looking for, even with A.I. you know, Gemini's part of that now. But you're, you're looking for a local mechanic, tire shop, whatever it is, you type that in. And what Google does is it throws up the, the results, right? It's, it's going to say, you know, hey, here's the ones that are close and it's going to show you star ratings. It's, you know, Google because, you know, as Ken was saying, unless you turn off your gps, your location service, Google knows exactly where you are and it knows the closest providers near you. So it's, it's essentially you're doing a, you know, tire shop near me search and that's the results you're going to see, which is fantastic. And without getting too technical, the proximity is super important when you're doing searches like that. Google knows where you are. It's trying to connect you with the most relevant results as close as possible to you. So it, it's pretty simple. We do it every day. I think we take it for granted of, of how well this works now, you know, these geo targeted searches, but you know, it's, it's different than kind of broader Google searching those geo, geospecific searches. Bring up the maps and we'll get more into detail of kind slicing and dicing what those look like the local finder looks like and that kind of stuff, or the local pack. But does that answer your question, Paul?

Ken

Yeah.

Paul

And the local finder, that's kind of a behind the scenes thing that most people don't realize, maybe not important, but I thought it was interesting to touch on because it does, it does kind of trigger a different algorithm.

Ian

Yeah.

Paul

So for sure.

Ian

And just a quick point, you know, even when we're talking about some of the AI engines now, most of them don't have their own map service either. So if you're, if you're looking for something hyper local, it's got its own algorithm, its own brain that's doing the results for that. But if you actually ask for map listings, they pull it in from other sources. So ChatGPT pulls in from Apple Maps, of course, Gemini pulls in from Google Maps. Some of the other ones pull in from different places, but they don't create their own map listings. It's too much, you know, data and information to try to create. They, they just, you know, I guess they, they have APIs or something that pulls it in.

Paul

Yeah, Google Maps is interesting because it's, it's related to local search. I think we're going to get into that later. But it maps as its own standalone thing with its own algorithm. So Jeff, people think that there's no difference between near me searches and geo targeted searches, but that's not really tr. What's the difference between the two and what makes a search local on Google?

Jeff

Yeah, I think we've hit on this a little bit. But again, just to be absolutely clear, a near me search is when you literally use the words near me in the search. So you know, I'm in the Austin area. If I say plumber near me, I'm actually not in Austin. I'm in a suburb. So I'm going to get plumbers that are near me, proximity wise, as determined by, I think Ken said, the GPS and the phone, assuming it's turned on, which they usually, usually are, the IP address of your computer. There's ways that I think WI fi can be dialed in. Of course it keys off the IP address, but you know, it can, it can zero down to the house in a neighborhood. So it's doing a little more than just the IP address, I think. But a near me search is going to use all of the technology it can to figure out exactly where you are and use that as the center of the search area and then start working outward from there. A proximity or a geotargeted search is when instead of saying near me, you give it a broader geographical area that you're interested in. So plumber in Austin, plumber in Albuquerque, you don't have to be in that geography. Now, I think if you are in that geography, you're probably going to get a little different results because it's going to factor multiple things into the algorithm. But when you use the keyword of plumber in Austin, it's, it's. Even if you're not in Austin, you're in a suburb, you may start to see fewer of the plumbers that are in your suburb and more broader plumbers in the Austin or Austin area. So again, it's a subtle distinction between using the technology to pinpoint exactly where you are and then, you know, kind of working around that general area or specific area versus doing a geo specified, if you will, a location specified search which may be removed from where you are, could even potentially be across the country. Although then you get into other factors like, you know, where you really are comes into play, your browser history comes into play, what other things you're looking for. So you know, if you truly are in New York and you want to, you know, look for Italian restaurant in California because you're going to be there, you know, next next week, then, then maybe go to a VPN and make your system look like it's in California. But again, subtle distinction between using technology and specifying a geographical area. But if you think about it from a local search point of view, as a provider of content, your website, you want to show up all the things you do to show up on local search. It means you're going to do a few different things. It's hard to naturally write content on your website that has the phrase near me in it. You know, Sounds very funny. You know, when you're looking for the best plumber near me, then you want to look for, you know, it's like, well, wait a minute. It's. It's all right. Whoever wrote that is trying to game the system for a near me search, and they don't understand how near me is really working. The flip side of that is it's really easy to write content. You know, if you're looking for a plumber in Austin or a plumber in Round Rock or a plumber in Cedar park, it's very easy to write pages of content that are geared for those search terms and be able to rank in those search terms. So how you set your content up, how you set your website up for search, you know, you got to think of both. You got to think of having a map on your site that can help with the near me, but you also got to think of having pages of content and your site that can help with different geographical locations. And they may be geo specified to towns, it may be geo specified to neighborhoods. It's going to depend a lot on the business. But that's kind of the key distinction. You know, there's. There's again, techniques that you want to go into and how you write your content, making sure that you fit for both. And I think we're going to get into AI in a little bit, too. That's yet another dimension to that, how you show up for near me searches and AI, because AI pulls information from different places. But in a nutshell, that's the difference in a couple of things to think about.

Paul

Yeah, the near me searches put more emphasis on proximity. Whereas if you put a GEO qualifier in there, I've done it just to play with it and to test it, and I get different results. If I put in near me as opposed to a GEO qualifier, I get different search results.

Jeff

Okay.

Paul

The other thing is, let's say I'm going to be in Orlando on vacation and I'm looking for a hotel. Well, I'm not going to say hotels near me. I'm going to put, you know, hotels, Orlando, Florida. And then it will show me results specific to Orlando, Florida.

Jeff

Right.

Paul

So it, it triggers different things in the, in the algorithms.

Jeff

The other thing I was going to add is that as an SEO, if you're doing the work to see how you show up, there are ways that you can, even if you're not like. Like, I don't live in Cedar Park. Cedar Park's a suburb of Austin. But if I wanted to do a search For a specific geographical location, a near me search for somebody who was in Cedar park, you can actually move the Pinda over in Google and run a search as if you were in that, you know, geospecified location, that, that near me location. And then some of the tools we use as marketers, you know, the so called heat maps, that's what they do. They take the, the pin dot and they virtually place it and they run the search and they look at all the results and they move it a half a mile over and they run the search and then they look at all the results and they move it a half mile over and you develop this heat map, either a circle or a square of how you're showing up. Are you number one, are you number five, are you number 10? So you get this color coded heat map for the areas you care about. And that's kind of one of the things I see a lot of business owners that, well, I did a search and I'm number one. It's like, well yeah, you search probably or you're on your website ten times a day. Of course you're showing up very well. You need to kind of act as a client and use some of the tools and techniques at your disposal to look at yourself both from a near me point of view, as if you were different places as well as a geo specified, you know, by town, by neighborhood point of view.

Paul

So Ken, maybe I should have started with this at the beginning. So let's backtrack a little bit and talk about Google Business Profile. How important is it and why is it so important?

Ken

Well, Google business profiles are extremely important for local businesses. Google, if you don't have one, you need to create one. Just go to google.com business and it'll walk you through the process. Make sure you follow the rules because it's pretty easy to do things and there are a lot of bad actors that are out there trying to game the system. And so when you're looking at a Google business profile, Google is trying to ratchet that down more and more and make you jump through extra hoops to prove that your business is actually physically located where you, where you say it is. But having said that, it's extremely important because 60 to 70% of all phone calls or clicks that happen in local searches go to the three businesses that show up on the Google Maps results. So how do you get on the Google Maps results, your Google Business profile? And so we talked, you know, I know Ian was talking about, and Paul, I think you mentioned proximity and how Important. That is Google flat out tells us there are three pillars, if you will, to help you get your Google Business Profile ranking, relevance, proximity, which we've already talked about, and prominence. And so what you need to do to address the relevance aspect and also the prominence aspect is you've got to optimize your Google Business Profile. Fill out your products, if you offer products, fill out your services, define your service areas. If you're a place of business that where are a business that goes to your customer instead of having them come to your place of business. Set your business up as a service area business. But the thing is Google is going to use for those proximity based searches the physical address that you give Google. Even if you decide that you don't want to publish that through your Google Business Profile. If you've got your business operating out of your home, for example, and no clients come to your home for meetings, you're probably and you should set yourself up as a service area business so that people aren't coming, they aren't trying to come to your place of business and walk in for an appointment. That's actually a violation of, of Google's terms on how you set up your Google Business Profile. Relevance comes into play with the information that Google can figure out about your business. And that's going to come from in part what you put on your Google Business Profile, but it's also going to come in part from your website, from directory listings that we talked about with your name, address, phone number information, a number of mentions about your business across the web. The signals, the inbound links that go to your website. Your website and your Google Business Profile are symbiotic. There's a very tight correlation between how you can get yourself to rank. If all you care about are proximity based searches, you may not have to have much SEO done on your website, but chances are you're only going to get customers from a one to two, maybe three mile radius. If you're a service area business where you're trying to, you're based in, you know, a suburb on the southeast part of town and your ideal customers happen to be on the northwest part of town. When you set up your Google Business Profile, you set it as your home address in the southeast part and you're trying to rank and get that Google three pack ranking, you know, where you're one of those three businesses showing up on the three pack. The only way you can do that is through aggressive SEO efforts by creating a lot of content and building a lot of relevance across the web and that starts on your website. So your Google business profile doesn't help you as much. For relevance based searches, prominence is where we talk about how reviews start to come into play. The currency of reviews, your overall composite rating, all of these things all kind of roll up into, into that prominence aspect. There are other things that go into that as well. But you know, getting a good steady stream of high quality reviews on your Google business profile, responding to each and every review that comes in, positive or negative. And you know, don't just set it and forget it. Don't do a blast out to, you know, your past customers, get a bunch of reviews over the course of two weeks and then never do it again. You're, you're not giving yourself the opportunity to build that prominence aspect. So. And currency of reviews is important. We know the Google reviews tend to degrade over time for some businesses much faster than others. So like restaurants or types of businesses where there are numerous reviews written each and every day about that business because they have a much higher transaction volume, currency of reviews is much more critical than somebody in a, in a business like all of ours where we may get one or two Google reviews a month or a quarter based on, because we, we're not high transaction volume type businesses. So you just have to keep all of that in mind. Google loves Google. So if you want to show up on Google search, if you want to be a part of that 60 to 70% opportunity when people show you or look at doing the search, you better show up on the Google three pack, ideally number one, because that's going to get the lion's share of those calls. But at least being in the three pack is going to give you a pretty fair shake. And hey, if your competitors that show up above you don't answer their phone, guess what? People are just going to keep coming and they're going to dial until they land on you. So if you're a third position, you cannot afford to miss a lead, period. They've already gone through number one and number two on the, on the search results. If they come to you and you, and you're giving them the opportunity to leave a voicemail message, which by the way, they won't. 80% of the time you've missed your opportunity. So all of the hard work you did to get into that position, you've just screwed yourself. That's why AI voice and AI chat bots are so absolutely critical. Make sure that you pick the right business category. Absolutely essential if you want to be. Look, you're going to have to pick and choose a lot of businesses, even a dentist has to make a choice about what is the primary business category that they're going to select. They could go with dentist, but they could go in your. You, you work with dental clients. So what's a, what's a good specialized category for a dentist? Like a orthodontist maybe?

Ian

Yeah, orthodontist. Pediatric dentist. Yeah, yeah, there's, there's lots of them in there.

Ken

Yeah. And you know, if you're, if you're a remodeler, you know, are you construction, kitchen remodeling? Are you bathroom remodeling? Are you a general contractor? You're going to have to pick. And whatever you pick is that primary business category and that's the one that's going to give you the best opportunity to be found through your Google business profile. And again, those secondary categories are really important, but if you want to get business in those secondary categories, you're going to have to make an investment on your website to make that happen. Your Google business profile is only going to do so much for you. So take advantage of it. You know, develop a strategy to actively manage and update and push out content through your Google business profile. It's just critical in local search.

Paul

Yeah, those are some good points. And you know, you had mentioned about the voice AI and voice chatbots. AI chatbots and a little bit off the subject, but I'm going to say, look, you service area businesses have a problem. It's called not responding. And you know, you mentioned that and, and it is a problem. I had, I've had the pleasure of trying to get some contractors out to my house to do a few things. And I'm not talking about the storm damage. Just recently I noticed that, you know, in the gables of the louvers where the air goes into the attic event. Freaking bird built a damn nest in there. So I call like three different companies and two of them took like three days to get back to me. And it's like I've already gotten that taken care of. You know, you took too damn long. I already had someone out here and remove the nest before you even got back to me. So I think something on Google Business Profile it's. And you talked about it and I just wanted to expand on a little bit is proximity. If, if you're in a densely populated area and there's like 50 businesses between you and where you want to rank, good luck. I mean it's because if someone does a search for a local business, Google by default is going to Put in the three packs the businesses that are, that are closest to them. That's, that's just how it works. I'm not saying it's impossible, but I'm going to, I'm saying it's going to take a lot of time and effort to make that happen.

Ken

Yeah. And if you want to make that happen, you need to ethically and responsibly create an address in that service area that you want to support. And you can't just make up an address. You can't use an address of an employee who happens to live in that neighborhood. You can't get a UPS store, you probably can't even get a CO working space that's going to be able to pass the criteria for the long haul. Maybe you can in the short run. There are all kinds of people who game the system. They're going to try every aspect possible to get that address in that lucrative market that you want to serve. There are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways to do it. And that's part of the reason why every law abiding citizen who has a Google business profile who gets irresponsibly whacked by Google just pisses me off. Because Google is basically saying you're guilty until you prove yourself innocent. Because there are so many bad actors. We had a client recently and this is just the reality of the world you deal with right now. Google business profile, absolutely critical for if you do business in a local area. But you're going to have to deal with a lot of BS that's coming down now. This person, they're an attorney, they had somebody who was putting AI generated nasty images on their Google profile because they lost and they were making claims about money grubbing, blah, blah, blah, I won't go into it. And so we encourage them to follow the proper procedure to turn that into Google. What did that trigger? It triggered Google saying, oh what? Your profile is suspended just because you took an action to do something to remove very inflammatory and completely inaccurate information? Just because somebody lost a case, you have no recourse. You're trying to follow the rules by Google. But Google's algorithms are. If you take certain steps to do certain things, ooh, it's going to flag you. And now you're screwed for three weeks while you deal with Google to try to get that resolved. It's not fun. This world has become a pain in the ass because of so many bad actors. That doesn't mean you want to be one of them, but it does mean that you're going to have to work with a quality marketing company who's going to have to help you navigate this. And you're going to have to be prepared that you're going to have to buck up and pay for some extra cost because AI is one of the downsides to AI reviewing from Facebook and Google in particular is they're going to flag businesses and say, oh, you're in violation whether you are or not and you're going to have to prove yourself innocent to them. And it's a pain in the ass.

Jeff

I can actually show you talking about AI reviews of go down that rabbit hole for a second. I can actually show you a screenshot. We're on the same screen. Meta is saying, you're violating our terms and services. Your account is clean, you're good.

Ken

Yeah.

Jeff

And good luck. I, I, I appealed it and said, hey, how is this violating it? I don't see anything that's violating it based on the information you provided. And they didn't answer. But good luck getting any support. Same thing with, with, you know, Google business profiles getting an address change. Good luck with that if you have to get it verified. You know. Sundar Pachay, if you're listening, there's some work that needs to happen around the Google business profiles. But you know, I do want to bring up one more thing relative to Google business profiles. And, and Paul, make sure you're not drinking when I say this because I don't want you to do a spit take. But it's not only Google, right? Bing. Microsoft has business profiles too. And I'll talk about why they're becoming more important in a minute. But you need to have your business profile set up on Bing as well. And here's the good news. Bing will actually let you synchronize it from Google. So there's no reason not to have your Microsoft business profile set up and you absolutely got to do it. And I'll leave that as a little teaser for the question down the road.

Ken

Yeah, good point.

Ian

The, the other things to consider too is I don't know if you guys run into this. I certainly do all the time. And that businesses set it and forget it for, for their Google business profile. They think, hey, I, I set it up once. It's a directory listing. I don't need to worry about that. I think we've all seen where Google or people can actually provide information for updates to your Google business profile. And if you don't respond within a certain period, it, Google can actually roll those over automatically. The other Thing is, is that there Ken, you talked about categories, services, products, that kind of stuff. Google also like if you were to maximize your use of your Google business profile, you're doing questions and answers, you're including a booking link. If you do bookings or appointments, you're updating your photos regularly, you're, you're providing updates or events or news. Google wants all of that kind of stuff in. So like if you want to maximize and send all the right signals to Google that you're the most relevant search result and you're doing all the other stuff you said Ken, like review velocity and all of that kind of stuff, then you absolutely need to have that as a high priority in your local business for sure.

Ken

Yeah Ian, that's such a great point because Google look, the low hanging fruit of any evaluation criteria is are you doing something that is giving somebody a reason to doubt you? You know I go back to my proposal writing days when I was writing contracts for multi million dollar federal IT projects. The fastest way to get thrown out is to not follow the rules or to leave out a key piece of information that they ask for. And so Google has this profile that it asks you to fill out. The more thorough you are in filling it out the better because that gives Google maximum information and it feels like okay, this person spent the time and energy or this company or whatever to build out this profile and give me the information that I've requested. Likewise on your website, if you are sloppy in your website and you don't have meta descriptions and you don't do title tags and you aren't doing alt tags for every picture, you know and missing out just the low hanging fruit stuff. On this concept of on page SEO there are, you know, probably seven to 10 or 12 different things that you want to make sure you do on each and every page. That just gives Google an opportunity to say sure, I trust that company because they didn't do the simplest thing I asked them to do. So you don't want to do that. You want to maximize the opportunity. If Google is asking you for a piece of information on its for your Google business profile, you may not have it now, but go get it and circle back if it's asking you do you have in your physical brick and mortar type of business do you offer parking? Provide an answer, just do it.

Ian

And you know like if you're not in there all the time, you might not even know that Google wants you to re verify your business. And this, I'm seeing this more and more with my clients Google Business Profiles, even my own, has come up where Google wants you to re verify your business. They're trying to get rid of the crap out of there. Right. And so they want you to go through this video verification process, which as you said, is a real pain. But if you're not in your Google Business Profile constantly or paying attention to the emails they'll send you, maybe it's going to an email address you don't even pay attention to, then you're going to miss out. And because if you're, if your Google Business Profile isn't verified, they stop sending you the same amount and quality of traffic or showing you in those local searches. And that's to your own detriment for sure.

Paul

Yeah, there's. 15 years ago, Google Business Profile might have been little more than a directory, but now it's critical to ranking locally.

Ken

Well, it's also the closest thing that Google has to a social media platform, Google per se. Now YouTube is owned by Google, but it's also managed as a separate entity. But when you do Google posts, that's your opportunity to do the equivalent of a Facebook post. When you add pictures, that's the equivalent of you doing a status update on Facebook where you're posting a picture. So take advantage of those things. Google wants to see the currency of your information. And if you're not doing anything, you're giving Google and your prospective searchers an opportunity to say that information doesn't look very current. I wonder how active this business really is. Do people really even care about this business? If you have no reviews or if you don't have any reviews that have been written for four or five months or a year, people are going to look at that and say, why is nobody writing a review about this business? You don't want to let that gap be filled in by conjecture that other people might have. You may have valid reasons for it, but chances are the reasons for it is because you just haven't been asking people to go right, wrong reviews.

Ian

And, and we say it a lot on this podcast, but don't forget you, your business does not exist in a bubble. Right. Like you're just, just because you're thinking about this now and, and maybe you've been a little lax. Lax about updating your Google Business profile. If your competition isn't, if they're highly focused on this, you're going to lose. Right. You need to, you need to remind yourself that this is an important part of your business and that you need to invest some time or, or pay for Somebody to do it.

Paul

Yeah, yeah. So, Ian, this is some of the technical stuff that I tried not to get too technical about, but some things that happen behind the scenes when people actually perform a search. So can you talk a little bit about maps, the local pack and the local finder?

Ian

Yeah, I mean, the, probably the easiest way for people to really understand what's happening is, is just to do a local search. I mean, go to your desktop. That's probably the easiest because you can navigate it a little bit than on your phone, but you can try it on your phone as well and just do a local search and see what the, the results are. Right. The, the usual formula. Although Google, you know, does lots of tests all the time. The usual formula is ads are going to pop up first, map listings are going to pop up second, and then organic results are going to pop up third.

Paul

And, and all this AI generated stuff.

Ian

Oh, sorry. And Gemini at the top. You're absolutely right. I forgot about that. And, and oftentimes now the AI generate generated stuff is really good too. It just depends on the search. Sometimes you get crap, sometimes you don't. You gotta, you gotta use your mind a little bit or do a little research. But as far as like the number of clicks that go through there, I don't have the stats right in front of me, but I do know for sure, like the, the organic clicks get the most out of everything. Like the number one to three position, the math maps get the next amount and then the ads get the, the trailing ones. And so if you want to dominate, you have to dominate all those areas. Right? You have to show up. But the three pack, like just looking at the maps, we already talked about relevancy, proximity, and what was the other one, Ken? Prominence. Thank you. Thank you. So to show up in that three pack, it's called the three pack or the local pack. That's the top three businesses in the map listings. Plus usually there's one sponsored ad as well that you can show up in. And so that's really powerful because those get a lot of clicks, especially if you're looking for a local business. So it behooves you to show up in those. And I think we've talked about what is involved in showing up in those. Certainly your website plays a part, but your Google business profile for those map listings is the most powerful signal that you're sending to Google. And so you want to show up in those for sure. I loved it that Jeff, you talked about the local grid reports that we can run as agencies through Some of the really intelligent software we use. So powerful. Right. Because you can start to see how you're competing in those map listings and how quickly you trail off and who your key competitors are in a geographic manner. What else am I not covering? I mean, some of the other things that go into it are your hours of operation. Right. Google's going to try to serve up the, the local results of businesses that are actually open. When you're searching, they're going to show top ratings. So those reviews play a super amount of power in that. If you're looking for restaurants. Right. What type of restaurants? So that goes back to the category that Ken was talking about and your description of your, your restaurant as well. But all of those things are super important. I don't know if that covered exactly what you were looking for, Paul. So jump in if you have some more. I mean, I, I was doing it at a high level. You might have a more technical aspect you wanted to share.

Jeff

I just want to, before you throw back to Paul, I just want to of emphasize again the questions and answers that you can put in. That's an opportunity also to slip in some extra keywords that you know, that people might be searching for. And if you've got the question that answers it. Because really, I mean, Google is a question and answer machine. Right. So people are asking questions, that's their queries. And if you've got that question on your Google Business Profile and you're serving up the answer, then that just is one more thing that Google has to choose from to pick you as, you know, the search result.

Ken

Yeah.

Ian

And to that point, Jeff, like your FAQs, the things you're answering every single day, you should be pre populating those in your, your questions and answers in your Google Business profile.

Ken

For sure. Yeah. We talked about the importance of FAQs, you know, probably six or eight episodes ago in our podcast. You know how critical they are in driving content, but also in helping your Google Business profile as well and improving findability.

Paul

Yeah. So Ian, back to what you were asking. The local pack is heavily influenced by your Google Business Profile. These things are all intertwined, but they're different types of searches within Google. And so if you go to Maps, you can do a search directly within Maps and that will give you map results, which is less influenced by your Google Business Profile. I'm not saying it's not at all influenced by it, but it's less influenced by it. But then when you click on something within that local pack or within Google Maps, that triggers something And I'm not going to go into the technical aspects of it. That triggers something called the local finder within Google, which is something again, intertwined but different. So that's kind of what I was getting at the beginning of this, is that there's a lot of things here that are intertwined, but they're different as well. And I think it's important to understand that because a lot of times people say, well, why, why am I showing up here and not here? Well, there could be a million reasons for that because it's, it's not just as simple as typing. In plumber my city, there's a lot of things going on, so I won't get too technical on that, but I think that kind of covers it. Jeff can't really talk about local search without talking about LLMs. So can you, can you talk, what are LLMs? And can you explain a little bit about that?

Jeff

Yeah, yeah. So LLMs, large language models. AI. Right. You know, the most common one that everyone thinks of, if you say name an AI, they're going to say ChatGPT. Of course, Google has Gemini and Gemini is their AI that's driving their AI overviews, their search results. And that's, as we mentioned a minute ago, the prime real estate at the top of the page. So all of a sudden the showing up in AI results in large language models is important. Now the large language model is trained on data. So all of the companies that are developing them, developing them, Google with Gemini, OpenAI with Chat GPT, Anthropic with Claude, Xai with Grok, I mean, they're all training their AIs on data. They all use a lot of common data. They use some differences in their data. But if you want to show up in people that are now using the large language models for search, because there is a significant number of people that don't even go to Google anymore, they go to ChatGPT and they ask the question in there and they're looking for their answers through ChatGPT. So you absolutely want to show up in, in the AI searches, not just the AI overview that Google will build from your website data, but the large language models themselves. You want to be in that model. And it's, it's treated a little differently because, you know, OpenAI is, is probably, they're not a website crawler. They're not going to, I mean, they can crawl websites, you can ask them to analyze the page, but they're not out there doing, you know, page crawl after page crawl after page crawl like Google is and then indexing the results. Now they're going to pull data to figure out how to train for. We'll get to that in a second. But the large language models are a place you want to be. They're not a place that you're necessarily going to be by everything else you're doing anyway without a little extra effort. And they are a source that people are going to, to ask queries. And if you don't believe me, go look at your Google Analytics. You may not see them yet, but if you look at enough websites, enough analytics, you're going to start seeing some of them that are showing searches coming from chat GPT and other models. So it's where we're going, it's the future. So that whole, you know, get on the train or you get run over by it kind of thing applies. The AI models are a lot better at semantic understanding. They're a lot better at figuring out what you're doing, probably asking for or what you really are asking for. They're a lot better at natural language queries, you know, and they can even be conversational. People forget that the chat and chat GPT, you know, means converse with it, it means interact back and forth. So it kind of is changing the way things are done. You want to be showing up in, in those models, they're multimodal in the sense that they can process different data types, text images. Again, different models are better at different things. Google's got a good image analyzer, can analyze the image and tell you what it's about. But you want to be feeding these models so that you're showing up as they pull their information from different sources. So here's one of the things I said earlier that just doing all the things you normally do for SEO doesn't guarantee you're going to show up in a large language model you want to, you know, do. There's a few places you can go to submit your site to to be crawled. I think Open Crawl, I remember off the top of my head, is one of them. If you can get listed in these crawl indexes, then the large language models are going to be trained from those that increases your likelihood. But also again, Paul, I hope you're not drinking anything because you'll do a spit Take Microsoft in Bing data. Microsoft has a tight relationship with OpenAI. They provided some of the early funding for OpenAI. I think they've since kind of backed away from a little bit. But there absolutely is tight linkage between Microsoft's data and OpenAI. Oh, yeah, so that, that showing up in Bing, even though people aren't using Bing for search anymore, they are using ChatGPT. So showing up in Bing because it will help you show up in the large language models is becoming important.

Ken

Important.

Jeff

But again, I think fundamentally it represents a shift in the way people are doing searches. And you know, my wife gets on me all the time. She goes, don't use Google anymore, just go to Chat GPT. Just ask Chat GPT. Because you will get I think a richer search result and you can ask it to do some of the analysis for you even. But the point being it's where things are going and you gotta get out in front of that curve, which is, which means do. Yeah, like everything. It's a little more added effort. Right. But the payoff, especially as things shift is going to be huge. If you make the extra effort now, you'll be set for the longer term. If you don't make the extra effort now, it's that, you know, you get on the train or get run over by it, you're going to get run over by it when you're just not showing up in the places that people, people are using anymore. So absolutely think about the large language models and the extra things you need to do to be, be indexed or show up in the, in their models.

Ken

What's, what's also interesting though is you know, stuff that was really important 5, 6, 10 years ago, the white hat SEO stuff, I'm not talking about anything black hat, but just directory listings, you know, mentions in press releases. Now making sure schema markup on your website to describe each and every page just makes it makes AI's job even that much easier when it sees that. And those things that we've all been doing for the last 10, however long years we've been, you know, I mean I've been in business 20 years, I don't know how long you guys have been around, but this is stuff we've all been doing forever and it still works. And, and it's actually becoming even more important now. Today there are a few extra things like you mentioned, Jeff, you know, Bing is important because of its relationship with OpenAI. I believe it's perplexity. I'm not 100% sure. I think one of the large language models actually gives you the ability to go create a business listing for your business and get it registered with them. You know, Yelp is still important because it's a very important directory to feed search engines that aren't Google, including Bing, Yahoo voice searches from Apple and Amazon devices. All of those things are just going to increase your visibility. There are other directory listings that are out there that are critical as well, especially niche directories that might be very important based on if you're a doctor or dentist or you know, a restaurant or a hotel, different sets of directories come into play there. But the key is good. Omnichannel total online presence SEO strategies still help you win in the game. In the, in the shift toward AI you have, we have to do extra stuff, we have to do different stuff. You better be taking advantage of AI gains and crunching information to help you see how are you ranking, you know, where, what inbound links are you getting, how are your competitors doing what you need to stack up. AI is fantastic at giving us diagnostics and recommendations and in some cases even doing certain tasks. But yeah, what's been going on for the last decade in terms of SEO is actually still working really pretty darn well.

Jeff

And if you, you can actually use the AI. Yeah, yeah, go ahead, actually use the AI to ask how you can show up better in AI.

Ian

And you know what it says? It says keep doing all of the things you've been doing for SEO that you should have been doing, plus a few additional things. And I think that's such an important point that you're, you guys have brought up is that like the, the investment. So the marketing investment in search, period. So whether that's search on search engines or search on AI, LLMs, it, it, it's more vital than ever and it's gotten more complex. So the investment should be even bigger, right? If you want, if you're a business and you want to show up on any of the search results, period, regardless of where they're coming from, you need to invest in this. You need to invest time, energy, money, you need to make it work.

Jeff

So it's an extension of Omni Channel, right? The additional avenues for showing up the way people are searching. I mean, it used to be there was a, you know, Google and what was Yellow Pages? No, there was, I mean Yahoo was started out as a search engine. It was Google, Yahoo and Ask Jeeves. I know there was a small number, you know, text driven things and, and then I used to love search engine, right? YouTube is a search engine. So all of the things that. It's part of the omnichannel, it's part of being everywhere. That's like that old credit card. Be everywhere that you want to be or whatever, you got to be everywhere your clients are. And in the large language models in AI because it's not going away because it is the future and you're seeing more and more behavior shift to it. Yep. That's important now. Now I don't know that you necessarily, I think it varies by industry. You necessarily need to invest even more. But it may mean there's a shift. It means that if you're on autopilot and you're doing, you know, traditional Google Ads. Well, I'm not saying you don't, but I'm saying that at the very least you need to look at a shift. If you're doing, for instance, traditional Google Ads and those types of searches are not showing up anymore because AI overviews are dominating, then you need to stop doing those kind of ads and shift the money into showing up in the large language models. Yeah, it probably does, but it means.

Ian

You were talking earlier, Jeff, about, about the shift. Like I, I'm looking at analytics for my clients all the time and the shift right now is for local businesses that I'm seeing is like nothing right now. It's like 6, it's 6%. Yeah, so, so I, because the reason I, I mention that is there's so much buzz right now that SEO is dead. But again, to me, SEO is just what you said, Jeff. Showing up where people are searching for you, if we want to call it.

Jeff

It's just changing.

Ian

But, but again, put your money where, where you're going to get results.

Jeff

Right.

Ian

And right now you should, you should definitely be looking at how to show up in LLMs and other search models. But don't ignore traditional SEO right now or you're just throwing money away or leaving money on the table and that's foolish for sure.

Jeff

Yeah. And I wouldn't ignore SEO. If anything, I would maybe look at ad spends and how they're working.

Ken

Yeah, we had Rand Fishkin on a few months ago and we talked about zero click search and that really is not impacting local businesses very much right now with these local searches. I mean you're still getting the map results. AI overviews probably aren't very prominent yet. Maybe won't ever become very prominent because Google already has some really good solutions in place and it's using, look, it's still using AI. It just doesn't need to use an AI overview because it's not an informational query. It's actually people are saying, I want some businesses that can solve this problem for me. Here's what I've asked for and Google's returning that list of businesses. The AI overview is not going to replace that anytime soon. In my mind, how you get there, AI is a massive advantage. If you're taking advantage of it, you know, to show up in local search, but it's not, it, it's not being eliminated through the AI overviews like so many other segments of search are being impacted. Local search is not going to be now or for the foreseeable future.

Jeff

Yeah, I think because you hit the nail on that. Local search is not as much informational. It's more, you know, buying intent driven. Yeah, yeah. What we're seeing with the AI overviews is definitely the informational and as, as, you know, we're talking about with Rand Pishkin, you know, if the informational searches stop driving traffic to your website, but you're getting just as much, if not more transactional intent searches and you're closing the business, is that a bad thing? You're not getting the traffic that's not benefiting you.

Ken

So.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah, but, yeah, absolutely. SEO itself, you got to keep doing it. And I, I think if there's an opportunity to shift money, it's probably more from the hate search, the Google Ads and, and such.

Ken

Well, and, and what I would say is, you know, I. A good, solid SEO program is still going to cost about the same as it's been costing AI tools make your SEOs who are smart enough to use them properly more efficient, but they have to do more because AI is demanding more. Like you said, there are more omnichannel elements that you have to factor in. So you do have to be more. And so, you know, there's. Don't be surprised if your SEO costs aren't coming down because there's a heck of a lot more that has to be done because of the omnichannel requirements and the other opportunities that you need to be taking advantage of and making sure that you're visible, you know, to the LLMs as necessary.

Ian

I think it's going to go up.

Ken

Up.

Ian

I think that, I think right now some of the tools are pretty cheap, but, you know, some of that cost is, is just being incorporated because of, you know, they're, they're trying to capture market share in that kind of, that kind of stuff.

Jeff

But I think, yeah, yeah, I think.

Ian

It'S going to go up.

Ken

Yeah, I think it will go up too, because also the information and the volume of content that's going to be required to keep up with the pace of volume, volume of content that's being created from everybody else is going to demand even more effort to stay so if you've, if you've set your SEO budget and you're kind of in that set it and forget it mode, you've done your Google business profile, you've walked away. Oh, I'm all good. I did what I'm supposed to do. That's not enough. I mean, if you're in a small town of maybe 10,000 people, maybe that's enough where you've got one other competitor. But you know, for most businesses it's, the reality is that's not going to be enough.

Ian

And we should always be looking at how to reinvest. Like if we're, if we're getting great results and we're, our revenue is growing because of the, the investment we're putting into marketing, we should be taking some of that. This is just general, right? This is Business Consulting 101. You should be taking some of that and you should be reinvesting that into your marketing to take it to the next level and the next level and the next level. That's, that's kind of that, that growth engine that happens. If you are smart with your, your investment, when you have it, at the time of it, you, you get it. Because if you leave it, you might run into problems sometime. There might be economic pressures like some people are feeling right now, others aren't. You know, invest it when you have the chance. For sure.

Paul

Yeah. You know what's interesting about Chat GPT and I don't know if anyone is tried to verify that, is they claim that the data doesn't modify the algorithm, they don't use retrieved data to train the algorithm, whereas Google does, which leads to sometimes, or should I say always biased results. So that's, that's going to be interesting to see how those two things evolve. But unless anyone has any other thoughts on this topic, I think it's a good place to wrap up. Thanks everyone for sharing your insights on this.

Jeff

Yeah, good topic, Paul.

Ken

Thanks.

Jeff

Yeah.

Paul

And Ian, you want to take us out?

Ian

Sure. If, if you love what you hear, hit that smash. No, smash the subscribe button and the like button and smash all the buttons. Just keep smashing those buttons and share it with your friends, family, colleagues, your pets, the raccoon outside, whatever it is, just, just share, share the information with other beings that will find it helpful. And until next week, folks, keep calm. And Margadon.