Synup Office Hour #12 — Auf Wiedersehen Google Business Chat und Anrufliste

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Okay, we're good to go. Great, thanks so much. Hey, good morning everyone. 

I hope everyone is having a good start to the week. I believe some of us are off tomorrow, so I hope you take the day off and enjoy it with your family. So let's jump right into it. 

This is episode 12 of our office hour session. Some industry updates. Okay, I'm sure many of you are aware that Google Business profile, there are some changes happening. 

Google is getting rid of the business profile chat functionality along with their call history. I believe sometime in mid-July they are going to turn it off. I think for certain businesses, they may have already seen the options disabled.

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Call history information used to be wonky. They never used to be accurate anyway, so I don't really mind them taking off the call history feature because people can rely on third-party tools to achieve what they want to achieve with lead tracking, call tracking, etc. But Removing the business chat functionality completely, I know a ton of businesses who have started using it effectively in the last couple of years and I know more and more people are using it. 

Turning it off removes a direct channel of communication with customers, especially for businesses who used to spend the time and who could afford to spend the time. Why are they doing this? I don't know. Call history, I believe they realized not a lot of people were utilizing the feature or the data was bad. 

So instead of fixing the information, they decided to remove the feature completely. As for business profile chat, I believe they might bring it back at some time, at some point, because business chat is still a functionality within their workspace. They may reintroduce it in the future or like we have noticed in some parts of the world, they provide an option to integrate with an SMS service or a third-party provider like WhatsApp within the GDP dashboard. 

Well, if that comes in, that saves us some time and energy trying to set it up. But what does that mean for businesses and sign up? So we had a messenger integration that we are going to get rid of from our website and from a feature offering. We may reintroduce it once we build other integration capabilities with Facebook or Apple Business Chat, etc.

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For the time being, we are going to discontinue offering it. What can you do as a business? I don't know. It's not possible to integrate any third-party tools as a live chat feature within Google My Business at the moment. 

However, for call history, there are several options in the market. You can set up your own call tracking numbers for your customers. If you provide that kind of reporting facility, there are options like Call Rail, one of the most popular ones where you can buy local numbers for your clients based on their location.

There's Nimbata, N-I-M-B-A-T-A. That's another popular option that I've come across. So there's Nimbata software.

There's Call Rail that is fairly inexpensive that doesn't cost a fortune or an arm and a leg. Nimbata also has a monthly pricing option that you can offer easily. Nimbata also has this additional feature of integrating with your Google Analytics.

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That way, you can get those event information and conversion information. There are more advanced tools with advanced capabilities. For example, there are tools that I've seen that have automated voice calling options using AI where they provide you features such as after-hour appointment booking and phone answering capabilities.

A lot of them even provide transcripts that you can derive information from. So go check them out. If you find them useful, let me know what you find useful.

If you need additional suggestions, just feel free to reach out to us. A second update that I missed talking about last week while we were talking about voice chat, voice search optimization, and the capabilities. Google introduced something called a speakable schema markup.

It's a structured data markup that's available for free for everyone to use. It's still in the data version. I'm going to test it out.

I have a feeling this would help us get some more traction from people who are using Google Assistant on their phones. What've noticed personally with our own experiments is that structured data kind of helps Google understand your information better than we all know about, but it started helping with the generative experience as well, as you call it. It's AN overview.

It becomes easier for AI to scrape your data in a particular fashion and make sense out of it. So the links will be included in the deck for the speakable schema information. You can get the data from Google.

You can even go to schema.org to get the syntax and how to structure them on your website. Try it out. I personally feel that certain information like articles and organizations, even in generic websites that are not related to local SEO should be marking up their data if you can.

It's not going to give you a significant SEO boost, but it makes your content more accessible to search engines. Especially with AI looming and going mainstream, it's important for us to make sure that we make our information available to all different kinds of search engines, not just the typical search engines, but even AI search engines. Because I've seen an uptick in the amount of referral trapping we have started receiving from Black City and other AI tools.

Third update that we received, this was on last week, if there was, especially for people who are working with locksmiths, Google had suspended green statement requests for locksmith profiles. We just restarted it from July 7th, and they're still going through the backlog. So Google Is removing calls.

No, Google is not removing calls. Your number will still be visible. People can still click to call, but you're not going to get the call history data from your Google business profile dashboard anymore.

That's it. You still receive phone calls from them. You can still update your numbers.

You can update multiple numbers if you wish, but you're not going to get the data about the call history and how many people called, how many minutes you have spent, et cetera. Akshat has done a detailed post. We will distribute that along with the rest of the content about it from our blog.

So locksmith green statement requests started again on July 7th. If you have any green statement requests pending, and you've already raised the request, you do not need to raise it again because I'm certain that you're going to have a ton of backlog before they get to your request. Okay.

Tips for the week. So I was helping a friend last week about a weird issue. Now we all know that the ride-sharing apps and Waze, et cetera, all get real-time data from Waze.

 They get data from Google maps, not just Uber And Lyft, but along with other applications like Tesla maps, your Garmin Application, et cetera. But there was a weird issue where customers were being dropped at a different location when they selected to go to his office and the map markers on Uber and Lyft, and even on his Garmin were incorrect. So we first, as we all do, when we started troubleshooting, the first thing that we did was we went into his Google maps account and started looking at the information there.

The information was correct. We did not have any issues there. We checked the map, we dragged it out of place and dragged it back again after a few days.

No change. Then we decided we needed to take an alternative course and looked at the baseline information. So there's this application or ecosystem called OpenStreetMap.

I'm not sure how many of you are familiar with this, but a lot of these mapping applications have tie-ups with OpenStreetMap and they pick data from there. Okay. So when we looked at the information on OpenStreetMap, we found an error.

So rather than going into each of these mapping applications, going to Uber, going to Lyft, going to Apple, going to Garmin, going to sign up, going to whatever application or platform you're using, we thought that let's try and fixing the information on OpenStreetMap. So we've picked the information several days ago and the change started reflecting on Uber and Lyft applications. He specifically left his car at his work and started taking Uber and Lyft to and for from his office everywhere for a few days just to check if the data is correct.

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And then he checked back his Garmin Application as well and it was all correct. So if you're facing an issue like this, where you find that your client is complaining, you tend to find a business that is wrongly mapped on Uber or Lyft or any such application. So rather than everything is good on Google, I think the culprit might be OpenStreetMap.

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So go to OpenStreetMap, it's a free platform, open an account, search for your business and drag the pin marker accurately that truly represents where the business is. And it should fix the issue in a few days. It's not going to happen overnight.

It's going to take a few days because they have an update schedule. So be patient and update your information. In fact, OpenStreetMap is a good place to check larger businesses and when you're onboarding clients to make sure that the pin marker is accurately included and added to the map.

I usually use it in my checklist. So you can try doing the same. Second tip of the week.

We had a few clients over the last several months who were talking about opening up a new business or opening up a new store and they wanted advice on how they should get started with the listings. Should they wait for the stores to open or what should they do? So for your information, Google allows you to display your future open date as far as one year out. So you can start your profile, at least create the profile with your future open date. If it's at least 11 to 12 months away, you can do that.

Additionally, Google also allows you to add photos and other information 90 days before the opening date. So you can actually start optimizing your profile well in advance for the opening. Make Sure you talk to your clients, especially the ones who have multi-location businesses or even single location clients, smaller clients who are trying to open a new business.

You can start creating Google posts, you can start adding photos to your profile with information about your business. And I Believe it's a great opportunity to promote something that is going to open like 90 days in advance. Okay, try it out.

I was not able to add products and services photos to the profile. We could add photos, we could add posts, we could complete the profile. That's it.

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Okay, third thing that if I can't find a business on OpenStreetMap, no Google should be tried. Yes, if you do not find it on OpenStreetMap, add it. But add it only if you have an issue.

Don't just add it as a service. If the business is not on OpenStreetMap, I have not encountered a situation where the business is not on OpenStreetMap but on Google and has a pin marker error arising out of a different location. But it's a good practice to add your business to OpenStreetMap if you can.

Not service area businesses, physical stores businesses. Okay, they have very, very strict editorial policy against spam. And their interface is really, really outdated and looks a little jaded because they've been around for a long time and they've not made any significant changes to the UI in general.

Okay, future open data. Adding service pages. So keep this in mind, especially when you're working with multi-location businesses and you're trying to create services pages at scale.

Yes, services pages can work wonders for your clients and for a business when done accurately, done correctly. You cannot use just templated content and expect them to do well in search results and organic search results or local results or improve your map results with them. You cannot.

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But for certain categories of businesses, multi-location businesses as well, they can work wonders. I've seen them working wonders. Okay, I think we have covered the content part of it and how to optimize them.

If you cannot find it, we have our full episodes that you can listen into or we can send it over to you. But there are a few things that you need to check when you're trying to build service pages, especially when you're trying to build service pages at scale. You need to look at the search results.

Okay. Search for similar businesses in the area, not by brand name, but by category name. Okay.

So you pick a keyword or topic that you want to target, say dentist or dentist near me or dentist city. Run both organic rank tracker tools. Or if you want to search manually on Google, do that.

Search on both organic ranking and also on local path results. Track both of them. If you can run, if you have the ability to run grid ranking in advance to test it out, do that.

Okay. Basically, it will give you an idea of all the service areas that you want to target and how much competition you have in the area. Okay.

Now review the URLs that are ranking for this page. Okay. See what type of pages and what type of domain names are showing up.

Okay. Put the data in a spreadsheet or whatever application that you're using. If you're doing it across a lot of queries, it makes sense to use a spreadsheet or a Lucas Studio report.

Then try out the percentage of URLs in the top positions that are currently targeted local service pages. Okay. Filter out any major directory results that are showing up.

If you're multi-location businesses, specifically for multi-location businesses, you want to get an idea of how these pages could perform for you or for your client. Okay. Go to your favorite tool, plug in the information and see the amount of Google traffic to all those pages.

Okay. Do not spam the internet thinking that, oh, my client has like 15 or 20 or 60 or 70 locations or 500 locations. I am going to do 20 city pages for them, service area pages for them each, and just spawn 2000 pages and launch them at one go.

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Don't do that. You're not going to get benefit out of it. You'll have major issues getting them indexed if you're using the same content template for all of them.

So first track, create a report and look at the data, what's ranking in this area. If you see this prevalence of service pages in those areas, the local ranking, organic ranking in the locality, start targeting those cities. And build a handful of them, test it out and do a handful of them week after week or month after month.

Build up a schedule in advance, send out a report to the client and see how they perform. If you just try to spawn like a few hundred pages on the go, they don't work anyway. There is a detailed guide on this.

I think Andrew Shortland wrote it out a few months ago. I can find the link and send it across along with the notes. Take a look at it.

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Okay. Helpful tools for the week. So I don't have a new tool as such, but we were going through our SEMrush account.

We use a combination of tools and SEMrush has been something that I really love using. Unlike Ahref, who has changed the pricing and complications to the billing, I avoid using it too much, but I do use it. I have a personal account, but this is something that we use for our work.

I noticed something new. It was a keyword strategy builder. So traditionally what we end up doing is we go to our old Google AdWords account to the keyword planner, plug in a keyword, look at what other variations it is throwing up, or we start using third-party tools or we use Google search and create the information and look at it.

So I found this interesting over here. Apparently, it's very good. I will include the sample link that they provided.

Basically, you can search for a topic and it can tell you, it can bring the topic into subtopics as well. And it can also show you what should be your pillar content versus what you should be the subtopics that can tremendously help in your content planning efforts. So I can just click on marketing bikes.

This can be our pillar topic. And each of the sub-pages can be a big ripper or a seafarer or fat ripper, etc. Similarly, on the bike chart side, if I pick it as a pillar topic, these are the sub-pages that I can build.

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Now, what can you do with this information? Fairly easy. You can just export this information and create your content plan and make it part of your offering and content calendar, rather than using 10 other different tools. We usually do not use SEMrush to optimize our content.

We use other tools to build up our narrative and write down the content briefs. There are a couple of other tools we use, but this is some research that you can do. Again, this is one number that you should ignore.

Completely ignore keyword density. Keyword Density within a content piece does not matter. If your content reads like keyword, keyword, keyword, at the beginning, at the end, at the middle, and you think that I need a 13%, 16%, 38% keyword density, it's not going to work well.

You might end up writing content that's purely made for search engines and readers are not even going to read it. Okay, so download the information, then plan on your pillar and subtopic pages on them and make sure once you build them out, you interlink them properly. Without interlinking, whatever pillar or hub and spoken content that you're building, they're completely useless.

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Sie werden nicht den vollen Nutzen aus dem Aufwand ziehen, den Sie für das Schreiben und Planen all dieser Tausenden von Wörtern an Inhalten aufgewendet haben. Geh und sieh es dir an. Ich schicke es über den Link.

Wenn Sie ein SEMrush-Abonnement haben, sollten Sie bereits Zugriff darauf haben. Wenn Sie dies nicht tun, empfehle ich dieses Tool persönlich SEOs sehr. Es hilft uns, eine Reihe von Dingen zu verfolgen und eine Reihe von Dingen zu analysieren.

Andernfalls könnte so etwas ohne ein Tool wie SEMrush viel Zeit und Mühe kosten. Benutze dafür nicht das Listing-Management-Buch, sondern uns. Entschuldigung, ich bin für heute fertig.

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Ich bin offen für Fragen, falls Sie welche haben. Danke, Neel. Wenn jemand Fragen hat, schick sie bitte im Chat rüber.

Du kannst es mir auch direkt schicken. Okay, wir warten ein paar Minuten. In Ordnung.

Danke, dass du zu uns gekommen bist, Jane. Hab eine gute Woche. Okay, ich glaube nicht, dass heute noch jemand weitere Fragen hat.

Es ist großartig. Danke, alle zusammen. Wie üblich wird Lakshita die Informationen per E-Mail an Sie weiterleiten.

Sie müssen sich keine Notizen machen. Wir sehen uns in ein paar Wochen wieder. Hab einen schönen Rest der Woche.
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Tschüss.

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