Office Hour #13 - Local AI overview rollout, optimizing GBP profiles & Synup's Grid Rank Tracker

(0:03 - 2:10)

Okay, welcome everybody, good morning to everyone. I think we skipped like three weeks of content and there's a bunch of things that have happened in local search in general, so let's get right to it. Industry updates, so we noticed that Google, we did notice about a couple of months ago that there's a lot of AI overview content rolling out in organic search results.

What we started noticing is Google being the largest, one of the largest repositories of local business information, they have started using their AI overview and started rolling it out for local results as well. You can only view them when you're logged in for certain queries, they are not available for all queries, but there are a few things that we have noticed. I have provided all the images and gifs and source images, source content that we present with the deck that Akshita will be distributing, so you can take a look at them later on.

So first of all, there's a lot of AI overview being used to summarize search results and for locales that we can see in searches for certain, it only gets triggered for certain types of searches at the moment. Then along with it, we are seeing a lot of AI being used to summarize information along with the reviews and images that you can see on the right side. So if you search for popular restaurants in the region, if you're looking for a particular category of lawyers or something, then you can trigger some of these results, but only from a logged in state, either from your mobile or from your desktop systems.

(2:12 - 2:53)

As I said, Google probably has the biggest repository of local business data and they've finally started making good use of it. Local search is showing more and more Google profile results and it clearly demonstrates increasing preferential treatment Google is giving to its own properties. Places topic review snippet content that is getting layered with semantically relevant images, that's something you can view when you go on, check out the review section on local search results or from app searches.

(2:55 - 7:14)

It kind of gives me a good indication as to why adding more images to Google is important, different types of images. For Example, images for teams, images for interiors, employees, individual employees at work, your specific popular products, and even services photos to your GPP profile. So look at this example, you can even search for this business sorting or employment exchange. I found that Google is kind of trying to tie down the images along with specific reviews and to give them a facelift as you want to call it.

Google will typically source the images from your clients and upload files to GPP. I've not seen indication as to whether they are sourcing these images from a website or any other sources for the time being. Another news that broke about a couple of weeks ago was a certain doctor being fined $5 million for fake reviews and stopping negative reviews being posted on their profile.

So they even used illegal NDAs on their patients. Some of the patients as I read, basically this is a plastic surgeon in Seattle who did this and they got caught, we fined heavily. They maintained 4.8 rating on Google during the pendency of the case for around 19 months, a very high rating on Yahoo, but Google for some reason did not address the fraud in any way and still hasn't despite this being a very public and high-profile case.

Reviews are typically the top decision maker or the top decision consideration for consumers choosing a local service provider, especially doctors, lawyers, even restaurants that we have seen in research and testing phases that people have published. The name of the business is I believe Aldi Or Aesthetics and its owner, Dr. Jarvis Tagger was convicted of violating the Consumer Research Fairness Act. They basically forced 21,000 clients to sign agreements preventing them from leaving honest reviews and engaging additional practices like paying for the removal of negative reviews and posting fake reviews.

So if you know any of your clients practicing these, I would recommend talking to them. I've provided the link in the video. Thomas, are you going to hear me at all at this moment? You're audible to most people.

I think Jane has a follow-up question though. I'll answer them once I get through this. Yeah, there are some people in the audience who are working.

Jane has a question. Define high reviews if it's reneging such as only post five stars on the website. If you read through Google's guidelines, Google provides guidelines.

They don't set the goal saying that you must not do it. They said you should not do this. Basically, if you read through the guidelines, what Google has to say is basically you do not give preferential treatment to customers.

If you want to ask for reviews, ask from everybody, all of your customers. Don't just categorically go and ask people who are happy to write you a review. Again, the review policy is very iffy when it comes to locales and the review policy is even worse when it comes to local search ads.

(7:15 - 7:57)

So I don't recommend doing reneging at all. I recommend that you provide an easy way for all your partners to write an honest review for you. But you can do the push internally by categorically making sure that you actually reach out to the ones who are happy to definitely write a review for you.

You know what I mean. But review gating internally, that's something that we stopped recommending for close to five years now, more than five years, I would say. The default setup when you ask for a signup review used to be gated content.

(7:58 - 8:52)

Basically, there will be an internal rating option where people rate you between one and five and based on that, you may or may not give them an option to write a review on one of the third party sites. I don't recommend doing that because Google is coming down heavy on it. The Next part of my slide addresses that.

If you notice the image over here, this is something relatively new. So there are consumer alerts that have started showing up on Google business profiles. Whenever Google detects any kind of suspicious review activity, basically a huge number of reviews, an entire deluge of reviews from locations that are not relevant to your business.

(8:54 - 9:11)

Because only someone with a Google account can write a review. It's very, very easy for Google to be able to, yes Jim, it is. They are coming down heavily on review gating too.

(9:13 - 10:30)

So this is very easy for Google to figure out if that person is actually in that region and has done business or had been to that business before writing a review. It's gone to a stage where genuine businesses are losing out to spammers. There's this kind of a cottage industry of people who are selling reviews everywhere.

So that's something that needs to be restricted. So a consumer alert banner will show up on the Google profile if Google detects any kind of suspicious behavior. There will be review posting restrictions and in certain cases reviews get removed.

I do understand it's not prone to spamming. I do understand there are times that genuine reviews are getting removed, which is the reason why we do keep a track of that. And we request that you get these reports automated on a weekly basis or a monthly basis and please keep a count of the number of reviews you have.

(10:31 - 11:55)

And that way you can track what was removed. If you want, we can automate it with the data that we capture. But this is something that Google had to do because FTC is coming down heavily on businesses and Google is going to get into trouble.

The consumer alert is something that was available or activated on Yelp several years ago. Yelp had this policy. But again, Yelp goes to the other extreme of saying that you should not ask for reviews at all.

It needs to be a natural phenomenon. If you don't ask for it, you're never going to receive it. So I say, treat carefully.

Make sure your customers are not buying reviews. If you are consulting for a customer that has been doing that practice in the past, ask them to stop immediately. You do not need to create a new profile to get rid of those spam reviews.

They're going to go or may stay depending on what Google decides to do with them. But stop reviewing it. Honestly.

Yeah, there are certain categories of businesses where there's more spam than the others. So I'm not going to comment on it yet. So yeah.

(11:57 - 13:00)

So another industry update and I think most of you are aware that Google does. Yes, please go ahead with your question. Okay.

Let me know when there's a question. Okay, there are two other pieces of information that we covered in the past. What are the odds of being reprimanded for fake reviews? Very unlikely.

The only problem is when you get caught, they make an example out of you. Okay. If a business is caught buying fake reviews, they might not catch 99 of them, or they might not catch 99,000 of them, or a million of them.

(13:00 - 15:40)

But if they find you out, if they decide to go off hard after a business, they are going to put all their efforts into closing down the business. You're basically going to lose everything. Not going to show up in search, your profile is going to be suspended or banned forever.

You won't find a way of getting a new profile. So that's the risk you run. Okay.

Like Google, if Google wants to, it can, but I don't think they want to pay so much attention yet. But every now and then you find a business here and there that gets caught in the net. Google can be very, including the FTC can be very heavy handed on their approach to counter spam or fake reviews.

Anyway, there are two other pieces of information I think we have covered in the past. I'm not sure if you guys have done anything about it, but Google business chat is going away. So if you have a chat transcript that you want to copy, download them now.

July 15th onwards, people have not been able to initiate new chat using the Google business profile interface. Secondly, the call records function is going away. So if you want to copy your data from the GDP dashboard, please do that now, because by the end of this month, it's all going to go away.

Akshita has done a post that you can read through with the alternative options. Right now, we don't have an alternative option for business chat. I think larger businesses will be fine.

And it will be usually smaller businesses who have been using it effectively will miss it. But I do have a feeling they're either going to provide a third party integration option like WhatsApp or other chat tools, or they might eventually bring it back with their business suite. We don't know what they're going to do yet.

Everything is conjectured at the moment. So tips of the week. I'm not sure if all of you are aware of or you've got a chance to go into the dashboard and check it out.

(15:41 - 16:37)

We launched our local grid ranking tool. That's something that customers have been requesting for a very, very long time. If you already have an account with signup, and if you're running a trial, you're most probably going to see it on your homepage.

This is what it looks like. You have to select a specific business location to go and basically run a report. So I go here, I select a location, I go to search grid rank tracker.

(16:44 - 17:06)

There are a few things you can do here. If You're inside a business already, it will select the business name and address automatically. There are certain keywords that are going to populate based on the category that they have selected.

(17:07 - 20:21)

You can add your own keywords. For example, you can select the grid radius. The credits are limited in all accounts.

You will receive communication related to the number of trades you receive. But each grid point on a grid rank report actually uses one credit. So you can define the radius that you want to select.

I usually keep it to five to 10 miles because if it's a local business, I think the majority of the business comes to a smaller radius depending on the size of the business or the type of business. So you just go type your keyword, select the grid radius, grid points. There Are three types of reports that you can run at the moment.

The three by three grid, the five by five grid, and the seven by seven grid. Future enhancements will include additional options and more bells and whistles will come along. Hit tab, save the keyword and just generate the report.

Usually it takes around 20 to 30 seconds for the report to get generated and it will show up under the analytics menu. Thanks, Jane. So yeah, you get a report.

You can download a PDF. Initial release did not include a PDF option, so you can download a PDF. When I'm prospecting a customer, a business that I'm going to send a proposal to, this is what I do.

Okay. You need not generally run a report under one of your client's accounts. You can basically add your own agency.

So I will basically go to signup. That's my fake agency that I've set up. So I'll go into analytics.

I'll go to the local grid run. I'll go to create a report. And instead of selecting signup, which is also selected, I'll just remove signup.

I'll select and type out the name of the business that I am prospecting. Say, for example, Starbucks Reserve Roastery. The address is auto-selected.

(20:33 - 23:55)

Coffee Roastery near me and run the report there. Okay. If you want, you can run multiple reports at a time.

You can add multiple keywords, just segregate them by tab. For example, I'm going after Starbucks Reserve Grocery at a prospect. That's one of my prospects that I'm working with and trying to give them a bird's eye view of how the listings are doing.

And I send them, I have a copy of the listing scan tool that I've run using your white label scan tool that's provided by sign up. That's one of the reports. Then I want to create another report where I Add the top keywords, top two to four keywords that I want to run reports on.

I run the reports for both the keywords. Once they complete, I basically create a new Google Doc. I take screenshots of both the keywords and put them on the doc and send it out to my prospective clients with my business logo showing them that this is your current situation.

These are the keywords that I tried searching for you. And this is where you rank. And that way I send them a bird's eye view of the listings as well as the online visibility together instead of just downloading one PDF and sending it over to them.

That makes no sense. I would add some content to it so that it makes more sense to them. And what am I trying to pitch? Reports, credits, they replenish every month based on your plan.

So there are a certain number of credits that are assigned to you for a location. In the future, we will add the option of buying more credits on your own as an add-on. But in the meantime, if you're doing a large amount of prospecting for customers or for your sales team to reach out, just let us know.

We can add more credits under one or more locations if you're using them for prospecting. Just reach out to your sales team or just shoot us an email to support. And we welcome any feedback that you can provide.

It will only help us improve the report and provide you with better information. So yes, I was doing some work for a couple of customers over the last couple of weeks where they were trying to find out or get a report about their backlinks. And I started digging further and started looking at more and more customers.

(23:56 - 25:13)

What are people doing with their anchor text and trying to find unnatural patterns of anchor text during link building? So when you're building backlinks, it's okay to use the exact match keywords like lawyers or dentists or orthodontists or garage repair, tree services, based on the nature of the business. They're okay.

They're completely natural. But when you start using anchor text like best dentist in Chicago, best lawyer in Boston, or best tree service provider in San Jose, auto repair in Franklin, Tennessee. And they start getting into that unnatural realm because honestly, no one in their right mind would link to another website in that manner.

They just don't look natural. Okay. So if you're doing that, I would recommend looking at your existing anchor text and see if you're diversified enough, or if you try to avoid any kind of pattern that can easily be detected.

(25:13 - 29:59)

If you have already done them, that's okay. If they had a previous provider who had done that, it's okay. You do not need to sit and disavow until and unless your site is in trouble or you see a manual penalty.

But just keep in mind not to do that. Avoid Any kind of unnatural patterns that can be easily detected and the site can get penalized for it on the fault of theirs. Okay.

And now there has been some chatter about Google business profile ranking factors. Again, someone ran a test about menu items being a factor, popular times, opening times being a factor to make sure that businesses are open up during that time. Keywords and reviews, if adding up now and again, I thought it would be good to do a recap of what works and what does not work.

So I created one deck, listed down the actual fields that impact ranking in Google. Some of them are well-established facts right now. Some of them are in the EFE category.

So business name, yes. Business title or business name is a huge ranking factor. I would say it's one of the most important ranking factors.

If you can register a business with the main keyword in the business name, nothing like it. Okay. They continue to have a huge impact globally in every local search.

Address, as we know, local search is all about location. So yes, if you want to rank in a region or you rank in a city, the closer you can get or if you can get an office in the city, you can optimize the hell out of it. It is definitely a huge ranking factor.

Categories, primary categories, secondary categories are both ranking factors. So select your primary categories correctly because it has a little more impact than a secondary category in Google. I think you can select up to 10 at the moment, primary and secondary included.

Website, authority of the website, the quality of the website, is a ranking factor in local searches. Hours, yes. If your business is open from nine to five and people are looking for a category of businesses at eight in the morning or seven in the morning, they're more likely to find the businesses that are actually open during those hours than other businesses that open later on.

Ranking in local packs or in maps fluctuate based on opening hours. Reviews is a huge ranking factor, not necessarily the count of reviews, but the quality of the rating. And that does not mean a business has, if a business has 100 reviews cannot outrank a business that has1500 reviews.

Then other factors come into being review count on its own does not have that great of an influence on ranking, but there has been some chatter about keywords in reviews being a ranking factor again. So I have to do a lot more testing before we can confirm it still is the case. Services, yes.

Adding services to your GDP profile does help. It can help you rank when people are looking for specific services. Same with products.

We do recommend adding products to your Google My Business profiles so that people looking for them can find them and your profile shows up prominently for those product related searches. While adding services, do two things. First, go into the GDP profile and see the auto-suggested services.

I think they have a bigger impact than customer service. So you do have the option of selecting Google suggested services based on your category. If they're the right one, select the right one.

Don't just be random.

‍

(29:59 - 30:4)

Select everything that they have to offer and you do have an option of adding custom categories that you can even add from the sign up platform okay uh same with products uh showcase your uh well established products are the most uh requested products then additional attributes also pay an important role for example if someone is specifically looking for an Asian own business or disabled own business or a Latino own business the additional attributes that uh you can add uh uh otherwise you'll Overlook some.

‍

(30:4 - 30:43) 

Some some of the facts that like small business attributes can be of real benefit from a Searchers perspective but there are two Fields I would recommend that you uh if you're not offering it all the time for example there's a field for offers online appointments and estimates and on-site Services uh there are a bunch of feature bugs with both of those features so avoid using them if you can but rest of the attributes if they're true if they're related to your business go ahead and select them uh uh menu items yes uh especially for restaurants and service type businesses.

If you have clearly Dem marketed menu items along with pricing when people looking for specific items on the menu your businesses can show up uh another pattern that people have noticed and started reporting over the last uh last few weeks is popular times uh every business gets to see that information when you're are in a logged in State uh you can see popular times for a business uh I would recommend go to your comparative profiles and see what are the popular times and see if.

‍

(30:42 - 32:06) 

You can ask your client if he make sure the business is open young know those hours are even go beyond that uh I usually ask people to see take the top five competitors in the region and look at their hours of operation and then ask the business is there a possibility that they can extend their business hours beyond what the competitors uh offer at the moment okay those are the tips for the week and helpful tools so I'm a big on to content clustering tool all the time so there are two tools that I came across recently that made my life easier one was a topical map that AI uh I'm always on the lookout for easy to use tools this is one I found fairly reasonably price that helps uh create uh topical map structures uh for your content clusters easily and there's another tool that I came across from Daniel Foley that was SEO stack. this is basically a Google search console based tool you have to connect your Google search console and it can make good solid recommendations based on your CLI and lab analysis uh and auditing your content uh this I just started using so I have some more feedback in maybe a month's time fairly reasonably priced for agencies I think 99 bucks if you 99 pounds if you have five websites that you're trying to that includes uh NLP briefs for the content Etc.

Go take a look let me know if you find better use of them or if you find other tools that can uh do the work I really like this because it is based on search console data which I trust more than Google analytics data at the moment to be honest uh there there's some good solid content on their website that can help

‍

‍(32:05 - 34:20)

you learn from it so go take a look and let me know uh what you think okay I'm open for any additional questions that might that you may have hi everyone we can take questions now you can send it on the chat or just directly to me also no need to take any notes or anything we always share the recording of all the sessions along with detailed notes and the event deck with all of you after the event you'll get it within 24 to 48 hours at Max.

Thanks for joining James a pleasure as always okay so if you have any specific topic that you would like to cover for example uh sharing from team comes up with this great use cases from customers that they want us to cover so we go off we cover them offline with directly with customers if you're trying to present something to your stakeholders or you have a specific issue just just shoot us an email at hello sign up we monitor that you can even email a or me uh directly uh if you want or you can just reach out to your CFM and ask them to connect with us we'll be more than happy to jump on a call with you and look at any specific instances or data needs or want a presentation for to make make sense of everything you're doing to your boss. Send them our way we're more than happy to take a look that's that's all from us for today and probably see you again next week.

Thanks everyone thanks you bye-bye

‍