Mastering Multi-Location SEO w/Steve Wiideman pt. 1

Madeleine

Hello. Welcome to the Syncast. I'm Madeline, the host & content and community manager. Today I'm talking with Steve Wiedeman about all things multi location business and how Google's new updates are going to impact everybody on that end of the business. Yes, I'm excited to talk to you today, Steve, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got started in the multilocation, SEO space?

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Steve

Excited to hang out with you and I'm ready to get nerdy. So I started 25 years ago as a freelance web designer. I just fell in love with it. I was in the army and you know, on the the few minutes of free time we had on the weekends, I just started to dive into things like Usenet and and go for servers and just really getting into the web and how it was, how it evolved while I was working at IBM, when I got back from the military, one of the jobs I had was migrating. What was. Print output for Xerox printers to the web profiling ID so that our client specific, our health systems, they're capitation and eligibility reports could go directly to doctor's offices and like, wow, they're moving nearly $1,000,000 of print to the web. I'll bet everybody's going to use this Internet thing at some point for their business. Not too far after I got a postcard from a college that said hey, would you like a, you know, a bachelor degree in business management. I'm like where do I sign up? And so I went back to school. I got a degree and I learned everything from server administration to database administration to web design. Well, I kind of taught a lot of the web design to some of my teachers to help project management come together with all the different aspects. What was funny in college though too is just kind of thinking back. My graphic design teacher said I would never have a career in digital marketing, which I thought was, you know, to me it was. I don't know if she was just challenging me or if she generally. And say your graphic design skills sucks so bad you're never going to be in marketing. And I'm not. I'm not a very good graphic designer, but I could certainly design some web pages and I can absolutely build a strategy for digital marketing. So now it's after my corporate time at Disney and IBM and another company called Paciolan, I did some agency work and decided that wasn't for me. 2010 I decided, you know what, I've got 2 little babies at home. Maybe I'll stay home and they're closest to home and. And just kind of do some freelance work and see if it works. So I hit the local neighborhood, I asked local businesses and car dealerships, hey, would you like some help with search and they went well. Do you have any experience? I like Disney, IBM and some other brands and like sure let me see what you can do. Next thing you know I'm, I'm an independent consultant working with clients like Skechers and we're working with youth storage and some really fun brands back in the early days 2015. Weedman Consulting Group opened up our offices here in La Mirada. We now have 10 people who recently brought in Will Pemble who was a co-founder of Web.com and he's really been driving our processes and improving how we're efficient, our expenses and really helping us to show our value to clients. So it's been an exciting run 25 years you know in digital and kind of seeing everything and hanging out with the in crowd and searching for quite a while now.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. You're definitely, definitely the expert who works with some great brands. I'm still learning, yeah. Nerd expert. Kind of synonymous.

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Steve

You know, you know, ten years ago I promised myself that I would not just be doing the same thing over and over again that I'd be teaching. So a few years back, I actually got invited to teach at Cal State Fullerton, followed by UC San Diego, followed by Fullerton Community College. So in my little bit of off time, I have. I've got 9 classes that I teach between three different colleges. And one thing I realized last year was that there's no curriculum other than one simple chapter and and. Digital marketing essentials. And like, that's not, that's not right. So I got together with Professor Scott Kelly from University of Michigan and we wrote a textbook called SEO Strategy and Skills. And now that textbook has been adopted by a belief 35 universities for their online marketing courses. So really exciting to see all of that, that junk in my brain be transcribed to something that other people can learn from. So not only do I get to teach, but I get to teach from my own textbook, which is really.

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Madeleine

Fun. That's incredible. Yeah. Congratulations on that. I had no idea. I'm definitely still learning myself, so I might have to check the textbook out. I'd love to hear about some of the success stories of your clients. Like what are the unique challenges of a multi location business? Like how do you go about tackling that? Obviously it can vary between verticals, but yeah, maybe give some examples.

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Steve

Well, I think, I think one of the biggest challenges that Multi Location brands have is they don't really have a strategy. They're doing SEO like oh, we got some things we're going to do to address Google Page experience. We've got some content we're going to try to tweak to see if we can make it appear higher in search results. You know, our PR team knows to not use keywords and links to get us penalized but instead to build relationships that hopefully culminate into links. But there's never really a road map like here are all the things we need to do to address. Technical SEO prioritized by what is going to provide the longest term value. 

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Here's our entire content road map of branded and non branded queries that people are making that we can address through our own content strategy. Here's how we can restructure our site map to focus on some of those head terms by building what Google has been calling helpful content into silos that provide everything and anything you'd want to know about a particular topic so that we're not competing with one page, we're competing with a section of pages. Yeah. 

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Here's everything that our competitors are doing to earn links. Here are all the links that are coming to our website that are 404, both through our own all of our website and our internal links and other websites that are linking to us where it's going to a 404 page. Maybe we can make sure that those redirect to the best corresponding page and get back some of that link recovery. What are some of the creative things that we can come up with to get people to want to link to us like applebees.com. Who's that got this. Great. Have free meals for veterans every year. I mean they had 5000 links to 15 different veterans pages that were all 404. And within 24 hours we redirected all of them to a permanent URL and reclaimed all of that great link voting power that we had from Google. 

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So I think putting a strategy together is probably the most important thing and we're thinking about local business in particular. There are four areas I like to focus on and I'm going to take a breath because I've just been fire hosing. So number one is data accuracy. And I know, I know software like Synup can do an amazing job. And in fact you're one of the few platforms that actually have relationships with all four of the data aggregators, which is unusual. There's a lot that will say, oh, we only use the Data Axle or we only use locally. So you know, we only use Foursquare and they handle everything. You handle all of them, which is amazing. That's number one, making sure our data is accurate because nothing pisses off a customer more than trying to look for a location and getting inaccurate information. I used Yelp once to go into a Verizon store that was closed and the hours weren't accurate on Yelp, and I was furious because my time is valuable, right? Well, at least according to the team. So yeah, I was, I was really kind of bummed out. And so that's pivotal. And you know, Google is going to look at all of that to try to understand is this location information accurate enough for me to trust putting it at the top of my maps? Results to especially for multi location brands, our landing pages, those individual location pages that you have are so important. And I know before the podcast we were talking a bit about this study we did. If you go to weedman.com, WIDE man.com, the very first link in the navigation is a page where we actually put the results from that study. And we did it in a way that helps you SEO people so that when you're going to your boss and you're saying I need to put hyperlocal content on here and they say, well, why you say because we'll have 107% competitive advantage over our competition. OK, I need location images. Why? Because we'll have an 84% competitive advantage if we put local images on our local pages, not just our logo. So we put this study together and our amazing friends at now sourcing Brian Wallace put together this super cool infographic. So if you're not sure what that page should look like, check out that infographic because it gives an exact mock up of an example of. What should be on that local landing page? All the attributes that play a role in our keyword rankings 3 is going to be the visibility of our business information. The name, address, phone number, maybe even websites. And hopefully you're tracking your traffic from Google Maps separately using some UTM codes. If you're not sure what those are, just Google UTM builder and you get a neat little tool that will give you some parameters you add to each location URL so that you can go into your analytics and separate what came in from organic. Research and what came into organic maps results. So getting those business citations every month and showing Google a pattern of improvements. And we're not talking about just your merchant circles and hot frogs and get faves, because let's be honest, nobody goes to those websites. We're talking about your city Chamber of Commerce. We're talking about your city directory, your industry directory. If you're an attorney, maybe that's Avvo justia fine lawlawyers.com, right? Those are all industry directories that do great marketing and drive traffic. Your website, not just some generic directory no one will ever patronize. So that's 3 4. Probably the most important goes into the user behavior signal. If no one's clicking on your results, what's the search engine going to infer? Maybe that wasn't very helpful. And if no one's clicking on your result, because you've got three stars showing up and your competitor has 4.7. That's a problem. So we want to work on the quality, quantity and velocity of reviews that we're getting so that our map listings show up in a way that people are going to want to click on them. And if every month we're getting with our teams and we're saying, hey, we improved our data accuracy, our local landing pages, our business data visibility and our reputation, and we're holding ourselves accountable to being better than what the competition is doing month over month, within 6 to 12 months you're going to be at the top of the Google Maps results. Your local pages will be right below them and if you continue scrolling you might even see some image carousels and video carousels with the embedded content that you have on those local pages so that you get more saturation. So that's how we approach location based search and I think, I think the question was what are some cool case studies and things that you have one, one recent one was IHOP, IHOP, right you you think about them for breakfast, so you'd want to appear if your IHOP for queries like breakfast. Specials or during a pandemic when you're in lockdown, breakfast delivery, breakfast takeouts, maybe breakfast catering now that pandemic's over. So our job is to create what we call specialty pages or sub pages underneath those local landing pages. So as you get into multi location search, you start to use the term LLP quite a bit, right local landing page and under that local landing page. Now our local landing page should rank for what we do and where we are. So breakfast restaurant in La Mirada. IHOP should show up there, but what if I did restaurant delivery, restaurant takeout, restaurant catering? If a competitor wanted to be really aggressive, they could create individual landing pages for that. So at scale, what we do for the multi location brands is create a framework for that. And then you use dynamic content with that location information and maybe even do a little bit of data mining to find out what's unique about that particular location. And make the most helpful page we can for delivery, for takeout, for catering and when they're looking for new team members for restaurant jobs. All of those queries now were on page one for IHOP because we took the time to create that sub page content and a lot of brands won't do that. They only want just their local page or some of them just want a location Finder where the search result from that Finder isn't even indexable by search engines. So huge opportunity loss for brands that aren't willing to take time to create. Content.

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Yeah, yeah. All kinds of problems there. Yeah. No, yeah. No, I love it. I love the Yammer. You're obviously, yeah. You have a ton of experience with this. It's great to hear about everything you've done. Yeah I've definitely heard of signing up. We see all the time these businesses, these prospective clients of ours who have these location Finder pages and then you'll go into the location Finder on their website and it'll be broken. There won't be pages for a lot of the different locations and. It's like they think that that's sufficient. They go, oh, there's a location Finder page, but if it's not working, that's frustrating for the customer. And the more friction you create, it's like how many customers are going to go to so much work just to find your business, just to contact your business. And yeah, like you said, like you have to really nail the basics of if a customer Goggles breakfast near me and they see IHOP, they go, that's great. And if they call up the restaurant, if they go there and the restaurants close, they're probably never going to. Try to go again. You know you or.

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Steve

Trust or trust Google search results.

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Madeleine

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, there's definitely been. I feel like there's been kind of an upheaval of this. Where are people searching? What are people searching? Some people are buzzing about people using TikTok instead of Google. Well, Google stays on top, so.

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Steve

At the same time, these brands are spending millions of dollars on paid search. Millions. You can't invest a couple $1000. Would improve your local pages or to make sure that all of your amenities and attributes that you have in your database are being pushed to the Google business profile and Bing local and to Yelp. Right. You won't take that that time to get all of those different fields in there so that you have really strong profiles across everywhere that people are are searching for a local business and and you're right, not everybody's using Google, some of them are using Yelp, some are even using TripAdvisor, if you can believe that so. I think there's a huge gap between the brands and knowing what the potential traffic could be. Because I can tell you that 51% of the traffic going to some of these restaurant chains comes specifically from the local pages. Google isn't displaying a, you know, a root URL when they're performing a local query, they're displaying the localized result, and the titles all have the city name right in them. So if you haven't really taken the time to go hyperlocal. And create content for each city that you have a location in. You're missing out on up to 51% of your organic traffic, so huge loss there.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, it's unfortunate, yeah 'cause I feel like with a lot of multi location businesses it can get tough to manage your marketing, especially if you don't have the right tools in place, the right processes in place. It gets really like it's a huge time suck even just if you want to update a simple thing across all your locations. So yeah, of course you wouldn't have localized pages.

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Steve

Created. You mentioned.

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Madeleine

Doing it manually.

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Steve

Oh, what a nightmare that would be. Hey, we need to log into 1600s individual Google business profile pages and 1600 Yelp Pages when we're done with that, and then 1600 TripAdvisor pages and Bing Local 1600 of those on Nokia here, you know, and MapQuest and all of those. Can you imagine doing that 1600 times for each destination? Thanks.

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Madeleine

God for platforms like yours.

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Steve

That makes that easy.

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Madeleine

I would not want that job.

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Steve

You know what's funny? We were on Slack earlier just talking about the challenges of some of these larger brands and kind of joking around a bit about how much money they put into advertising and how little they'll invest in simple little things that improve online visibility. And it was just, it was kind of a kind of a shock when you think about just how much budget is available and how much could be done something simple as native reviews. I mean if we rolled out native reviews across every single location. Page we had and we had even an intern during the moderation of it to make sure that nothing inappropriate gets published. Can you imagine the user generated content we could create on every location just by allowing first party reviews? Yet most brands won't take the time to do it. It's you know, it's unbelievable how easy it really is. And so here's where the paradigm came into play. Imagine an environment where we could text all of our location managers and say. We're going to be doing some marketing to drive more customers to your location to help us. Would you like to opt in to periodic yes or no questions on text, right, yes or no and let them see the yes or no little you know? Suggestions that you know Android will make. I don't know if the iPhone does or not because the iPhone just isn't as cool as Android anymore.

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Madeleine

Ohh little iPhone slander.

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Steve

A little, yeah, they think. But can you?

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Madeleine

Imagine. Yeah, yeah, I mean that would be so simple.

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Steve

And anyone who replies with no, I'm not interested. They need to be fired as a location manager. Anyone who says yes, I'd be totally interested in bringing more revenue to my location. Then you send them quick little yes or no answers yes. So here's yours. First question. Location manager. The infrequent questions we're gonna send you maybe once or twice a month. Here's question 1. Tell us about your accessibility. Are your restrooms and entrance wheelchair accessible? Yes or no? Yes. Boom. Go straight into the database. The database syncs with Synup or whatever platform you happen to be using, and then it gets pushed into the Google business profile and onto the local page. OK, location manager, tell us about specials. A lot of our locations differentiate in senior discounts. Do you offer a senior discount, yes or no? Yes. Do you offer the regular 10% or or something else, something else? Right and and so you just send these little infrequent text messages to the location manager maybe even with. Did you know you could submit location photos directly to Google business from your phone using one of our services we use. All you have to do is click this link. And then whenever you get the location and you want to take pictures, you can upload them directly to your Google business profile. And I just feel like there's a disconnect. So what we've done to mitigate that on some of these larger brands is we start with just a very, very simple CHEAT SHEET. And at the top of the CHEAT SHEET, it says, here's what corporate does for you and it breaks it into those four disciplines we talked about. We're submitting to all these databases for you, so you don't have to. We are working on your local landing pages to make them as amazing as we possibly can. We are putting your business data out on as many directories that make sense for you as we can. And we're giving you tools to help moderate and see the reviews and ratings that are coming in and some templates on how to respond to those reviews. So you don't have to worry about any of that. When Joe Schmo, local SEO Guy, comes in and says I can grow your business, you can say, well, what are you going to do, pull out that CHEAT SHEET and say, no, corporate already handles that for me. But then there's also in row 2 some things we don't want you to do, right? We don't want you creating rogue websites for yourself and rogue Facebook pages. We don't want you buying reviews. Or doing anything that could cause penalties in our keyword rankings. So if somebody comes in, they say, they say they're going to do some things for you. Look at that row. And if one of those things is on there, that's bad news. The third thing, and the largest part of this CHEAT SHEET is what you can do to help us, right? And part one is to have everybody who works here get directions when they come in and make sure those directions are accurate. And whether it's through Apple maps, whether it's MapQuest, whether it's through Google. Yep. Whatever they happen to be using, make sure of those. Directions are accurate and the pin is correct. And if it's not, let us know so that we can update them in the system and make those directions better. Two, let's make sure that we are encouraging team members to get reviews right and we don't have to ask for them. We can just say, hey, thanks for coming in and thanks in advance for sharing your experience with us online, whatever you happen to use Google or Yelp, right? The other thing that we can do, of course, is social media. So when you're talking to your customers and having a great time and they're laughing. Like, Oh my God, I wish you guys would share your current experience on social media, because if other people knew how much fun people like you have coming here, we would probably get more customers. So like, yeah, we do that. Where do you want us to share? Everywhere. Yeah, anywhere. You.

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Madeleine

Want to ask? Customers would love to type up your business. Yeah, no.

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Steve

Kidding. And all it takes is literally 10 seconds of you just mentioning it, but there's no knowledge transfer between the marketing teams and the corporate office. The individual location and those location teams. There's no once a month, 15 minute Pow wow on how the individual team members at that location can participate in digital marketing because corporate doesn't work like that. And we still live in the 1980s. So that would be my one wish for everybody who's listening is figure out a way, whether it's through Synup or somewhere else you know to, to have direct communications with those location managers so that they know exactly what you're doing, what they shouldn't be doing and what they can do to participate in helping you to move up their rankings.

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Madeleine

Right, right. And I feel like that's a problem when you get to be a larger business, not even with communicating with your local team on the ground, but also between departments, is that you end up getting siloed just because, you know, people work within their own department. They have their own thing they do. You're a manager at a store. You don't end up talking to a corporation. You're working in marketing, you don't end up talking to sales. It's like a common problem that, yeah, if there are just easier ways to just, yeah, just a monthly meeting just a little. However, as you say, just to get everything straightened out, it would be so, so much better for everyone and I feel like that's the whole sheet, yeah, yeah.

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Steve

The trackless KPIs we do, even with our largest accounts. We have a simple Google sheet that we start with and it has how many links we've earned in the last 30 days between Ahrefs and SEM rush. It has technical scores from what we get from SEM rush so we can see across the board how we handle security and privacy and accessibility and crawl errors. It has our share of voice for how we're ranking across those different content segments. Had mentioned delivery, take out, maybe pancakes, all of those are separate content segments that we want to track and see how we're performing and see how we're performing against our competition. Maybe our competition has 6% share of voice and we have five and our goal is by the end of the year to get up to 7 so that we can surpass them. Every month we get on that little 15 minute call and we check each other how are we doing within those KPI's and the bottom line that the stakeholders want to know is. Are we driving more online orders from people who are coming into our website than we were the month before or the year before, depending on seasonality or at this point sometimes how we're doing compared to 2019 thanks to the pandemic, because the pandemic really spiked a lot of the online activity and now it's kind of coming back down. So I hate measuring against 2020 and 21, I still like to measure against 2019 because that was normal for us, you know, anyway.

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Madeleine

Yeah, it definitely gets tricky. Just track them. Statistics. With all the volatility, yeah, why, why would you say that? Some companies seem so resistant to making these changes to be more local focused?

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Steve

Means more work for them and they're, unfortunately the digital marketing managers sometimes are handling everything, email marketing, affiliate marketing, media buying, and they're working with different agencies who are handling all those things. So they only have maybe 510% of their bandwidth available to support you and they don't have a dedicated IT person who's. Make it adjust to SEO they're working on on fixes. So on the technical side, you don't get dedicated support to help you through those things and it ends up in a martech queue that ends up in a backlog and it just never gets done. On the content side, you know, they're working with these big content agencies like hey. A restaurant chain a, not to call anybody out restaurant chain A, We found a really big non brand content opportunity. All we have to do is get this one page up with these contents and these keywords used in these places and we forecast that in a year from now you'll be getting an additional 200,000 visits to the website. They hand that off to their content agency and the content agency says yeah, $20,000 and like, yeah, that's not in my budget and it just gets wiped out. That's where some of the challenges are. Corporate is working with big companies that when they say our SEO team says we should do this, they say, well that's out of scope of our current retainer and we're going to charge you 20 grand. And like well, I don't have a way to just approve a $20,000 thing because I approved all of my contracts in December for the next two years. So I don't have an incremental budget I could use to do that kind of stuff. So the way that the corporate finance structure sets it up is, it's basically set up for failure for ad hoc opportunities. Which is a bummer.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, it does.

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Steve

That's a technical term. Bummer, right?

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Madeleine

It's a major bummer. It is a technical term I heard, I hear often. So yeah, yeah, I have. I have to know. Talking about another potential bummer. What are your thoughts about the new updates from Google? I saw a lot of outrage on the perhaps defunct Twitter about scary people like the yeah I know. Yeah, about the new dashboard switching over from the Google business profile dashboard to this new kind of. Embedded.

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Steve

It's in line.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah.

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Steve

I haven't seen any problems. I see people complaining because they don't like change, but I haven't seen any problems with being able to make updates. And if you're a multi location and franchise, you're using bulk feeds anyway. You don't and that won't affect you whatsoever. If you're using a company like Synup, all of that stuff is done automatically through the API. You don't have to log into Google and go to each location within the search results and make updates if you're in a single location. Yeah, it takes you what, 2 minutes to go in and make that change. I love it. If I have a single location business I can just go to Google, search for my business name and make my updates right there and be done. I don't have to log into an interface, I think it's fantastic. But for multi location brands, as long as you're using a a platform and your CRM is syncing with that platform, you never have to even think about it. So I don't think that's the problem at all. I think. I think if you're having trouble with it or if it's bothering you, talk to me because I'd love to see why you're having. Trouble because I think there might be something you're missing and being able to streamline what you're doing to keep that business information correct. As far as Twitter goes, I hate to say it, this sounds like such a CEO. Stupid thing to say, but to be honest with you, they're not going to have a problem finding new help. There's so many other social networks that have laid off thousands of people. Shopping engines and other sites have laid off thousands of tech folks. They are there. There is a lot of amazing talent out there that believes. In this work hard play hard mentality which I've always loved and lived and believed in. I'm not a huge Elon Musk fan but I get it. It's like hey you know we've got to stay up to date or TikTok and other platforms are going to crush us. So I'm counting on you, my team, my people that believe in this platform. You know to kick some ass right. And like we're not going to be tyrants and blah blah blah and we're out. Bye here's new talent come on in let's kick some ass together and they're all going to do great so I. I have a feeling and it's kind of sad right now because it's shorter. It is making this big shift in the people who are currently working with them. But I have a feeling they're going to pull in some amazing talent and they're going to kick it into gear. And those people that want to leave, there's probably a reason beyond just tyrants that they've been wanting to leave to begin with. So I don't know. I feel like it's going to be OK, you know. But it was, it was a little sad to see that whole news post.

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Madeleine

Yeah. I feel like there's just like a lot of volatility in general with those. Types of companies like Meta just laid off a ton of people too. So yeah, it'll be. It's a little bit sad and weird, but it's I feel weird saying I'm excited to see where it'll go, but I don't know, I feel like there are big changes coming because yeah, obviously a lot of the social media platforms with all the even with all the changes that they make, they kind of tend to stay the course. Nothing too dramatic happened. So it's kind of exciting to see these kinds of things widespread.

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Steve

Changes are going to be interesting. Now my hope is that he does what we do right. We work hard, play hard, and do a lot of US work, sometimes 12 hours a day. We're now consulting for about 33% of the largest restaurant chains in the country. Which is ridiculous when you think about the fact that our team is only 12 people. I was just going to say. So. It's pretty exciting. But at the same time last week we brought in an influencer, so tick tock influencer from Brazil who does roller coasters and we hung out at Disneyland for a day and then we we treated them to some adventures that Knotts Berry Farm and Six Flags Magic Mountain and we learned about what's working for him in TikTok and. And we had fun together as a team. Every year we do a beer tour of all the breweries of Orange County and we celebrate and we give rewards and we do a white elephant thing. We spend a whole day at Disneyland as a team and take our team photo on the guardians of the Galaxy ride that drops you down. We work hard, play hard, and the mentality isn't, you know, clock in at 6:00, o'clock and clock out at 6:00 PM. It's to show our clients what we're made of and holding each other accountable to our success. Hey, Steve. I don't know if you've noticed this, but this particular client seems to be declining in ranking for this segment. What do we do? I don't know, let's all brainstorm. Let's look at the competitive landscape and figure out what the competition's up to. Oh, I see what they're doing. Some shady stuff. Let's report them. Right. So it's all of us being on that same page in the same wavelength following the same blogs, some search engine land and search engine journal and you know and and just staying on the same page with our passion for what we do. Digital marketing. And it doesn't feel like work because when you love what you do it's not work. You know it's something that we're passionate for but you need that work life balance and we also need that that that plague components. My hope for Elon is that if these new people who are going to be coming in do what he hopes they do and really kick ass that he rewards them not just with great salaries but with really fun benefits and and and in a rewarding way that makes them feel like a part of something bigger. That's my hope for them. But we'll see how it pans out. I know so far my team has spent most of the team with me for the good part of seven years now we have a very, very low churn rate on employees. Work hard, play hard.

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Madeleine

Yeah, Elon, if you're listening to this podcast, take notes. Yeah, kind of on the social media front, I'm curious about your take on, I know that there's kind of been some Google Gossip brewing about a more diverse search experience for when someone searches something kind of they would see an article, a dictionary definition, a video, a, you know like a kind of a mix of a content. What's your take on that and where do you think that is going and how will it impact the way that you do SEO and ranking for your clients going forward?

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Steve

And what people want by what they ended up searching and clicking on. If you go to page two or three to find what you're looking for or perform a second search and include a word like Twitter, like Facebook, like LinkedIn, that tells the search engine that a percentage of folks are looking for that type of content and where they can, they're going to put in a carousel like you see the Twitter carousel back. Thank God Twitter and Google are playing well again because now we can see social media content, which gives us some fresh things to look at, not just, you know, old pages that have been out there for months and months and months. And Bing has even tried putting social media into their algorithm in the past. The problem is a lot of that type of. Presence can be manipulated, and they can. Basically game search results by using social media as an angle. To do that you hear about the term Barnacle SEO where we're hey since we can't beat Yelp, let's just pull links and do what we can to get our Yelp page to rank right? So I think social media from our study played a role in how users care about what's happening right now with the business. We notice some people actually clicking on Facebook and Foursquare very rarely and the Yelp profile buttons in the local landing pages. To see, you know what's happening in those spaces where they participate depending on where they have been to spend their time. So I think the social component gives them a voice to be able to say something in a public space about a brand, right? And it gives that brand some vulnerability and hopefully some awareness that they can't just bury. More experiences that they're going to happen on social media and they need to pay attention to it. So I'm glad if there is talk about how Google wants to integrate and incorporate more search or sorry more social into their search results. I think that's great. I think I think it would be helpful and it's going to, it's going to hold businesses accountable to real time engagement that they're having with customers and they can't put it into the you know sweep it under the carpet. They have to be aware of it and participate and that gives you a real place to. Um, to interact with a brand where you can't really do that on their local page. So the fact that you can just click on their Facebook button, go to their page and say I had a really poor experience and within a few minutes the manager gets the thing and says, oh, I'm so sorry, come back in, we'll make it right. You know, I think it's amazing. I hope they do. I really hope to see more social media in search results, whether it's a ranking signal or not. I don't know. I don't, I don't. All the links that come from social networks have a no follow attribute. So Google is not passing page rank to them, but that doesn't mean that. You can't use social media as a way to share some of those short summaries and checklists on things like your upper funnel content and use that as a way to get some of those featured answers and position zero. I think social media is a great medium to be able to syndicate some of those short answers so that you earn that featured answer or position 0 for upper funnel queries to how, what, why, where answer to the public kind of stuff. But yeah, I don't, I don't think that'll ever be a significant ranking signal. Or organic search beyond just that position. Zero content syndication. I hope it doesn't.

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Madeleine

Exist. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I feel like they're the spam bots that would be all over that for sure. Trying to game the system a little bit, yeah. But it is a great component, sorry. And having social media there definitely does. I feel like it makes more brands more reputable for sure if you see a brand is engaged. I know we have signed up. We do like review management. So we see all the time how much better companies end up doing when they really focus on managing their reviews or applying to. Reviews actually like implementing the advice from the reviews, which is an important step people often forget to do.

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Steve

If you could aggregate all of that sentiment, Can you imagine? So if you take, if you take 1000 people talking about you on social media and you pull all of those words into a database and you start to build sort of a virtual pivot table of a frequency of what words people are using to describe or to discuss your business. And then you take those words and apply them to your branding and to your marketing. In one way or another, or take them as learning lessons if they're negative. Like if everybody's saying that Bacon's too crispy or something like, wow, it looks like, let the sentiment that people are sharing about our business is that we need to work on some of our products. If you can do that at scale thanks to SAS systems and platforms like yours then you can change your whole business. But the business has to be open to hearing from the digital marketing people and a lot of times in corporate they're siloed, you know, they don't have any say in getting us to be able to communicate with customer service as the multi location brands are franchised brands. There's a huge wall like hey you know all that great input you're getting from askrestaurant.com or whatever site you happen to be using. Is going into your database and not being used to help our marketing efforts is a huge waste. And being able to to detect sentiment and and use some of the positive things people are saying as meta descriptions and and use them in our title tags to get our click through rates up is a huge waste of of really good knowledge that you have that you're not willing to share and customer service is going to be like that. Sometimes they don't want to share, they're scared for their jobs. So thinking you're going to try to automate something and all you want to do is extrapolate words that can help. You know, improve search behavior signals or improve content, you know? Yeah, anyway.

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Madeleine

Yeah, definitely.

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Steve

I'll come to my whiny world of multiplication.

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Madeleine

It's not whiny, it's prolific.

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Steve

There you go. I got to write that down.

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Madeleine

Yeah, yeah, I definitely agree with you. I I'm hoping to see some like great maybe AI based tools that will kind of crawl for a sentiment across social media because yeah, I feel like customers always posting, especially if you have a brand that I don't know is easily postable like say a restaurant or maybe a grocery chain, maybe something like that where people post about it and yeah, so like some ability to comprehensively track everything that's being said about your business because. Yeah, obviously reviews are great, but I feel like reviews have been waning a little bit. People like to put their thoughts just wherever the most people will see them. So if that's your Instagram story, that's where it's going. Awesome. OK. Well, yeah. Thank you so much for all your advice. This was incredible. I learned so much and I hope I know that our listeners did too. Thank you so much, Steven. 

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Steve

Thanks everyone. Thanks for my line.

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Madeleine

Beautiful, yeah. Thank you.

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