Office Hour #14 - SearchGPT releases it's beta version, Reddit blocks search, GMB updates and more

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Just a second. Yep, we're good to go. Great, thank you everyone and good morning everyone for joining us today.

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Office hour 14. So let's jump right into it. Updates from the industry.

I'm not sure if you guys have noticed but SirGPT just launched, sorry, OpenAI just launched SirGPT. It's a prototype for its own search tool basically in joining the bandwagon to compete with Google. It's a beta.

It's only for a handful of users that just launched it to collect feedback. It's going to be a while before this becomes anywhere near mainstream, and especially if they keep this option open just for paid users, then it's going to take a lot of time for people to adopt and for them to optimize. Most of the search queries that we run on SirGPT for analysis and stuff seems to be taking data from Google itself.

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So it's going to be a while, I think, before we need to start worrying about SirGPT. I think we get more traction by researching how your brand is doing when people are researching it on ChatGPT. For the time being, I should spend my time there.

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Another recent update was Reddit seems to have blocked all other search engines apart from Google. This makes sense because they get paid by Google who are using their information and data to train their machines. So it looks like if you're looking for any Reddit-related results on other search engines like Bing, etc., you're not going to be able to see them.

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Reddit has blocked them all. There's one thing that I keep a track of on a regular basis because of the nature of our work is the categories on Google My Business. They change frequently.

At times, they add new categories that were previously not available. That can help with optimizing profiles. That can help in optimizing for certain categories of business.

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So it's a good thing to keep a track of it. I use Sterling Sky. I do not have the patience to go through their API information every day, every week.

So I just found this link. The Sterling Sky has been doing a great job of keeping a track of them. So if you just go here, you'll be able to see the new categories added, the new ones, if anything that has been updated or removed.

Similarly, if you go back to me, you will find a lot of new categories that have been added, the ones that have been updated and that have been removed. How do you use this information? Find out if they are anywhere relevant to any of your customers and select the right category accordingly. If you see something that was previously not added, and it makes sense to have it as a primary category, please go ahead and change it.

What do we do at signup with this information? We have an entire team of people who keep track of these and keeps adding them to our system. So any time if you find something is missing, just let us know and we'll get that added. Another thing that we noticed recently is Google Business Profiles can now generate menus from your uploaded photos.

It's a good feature for people who are not adding menus, which I think is a ranking factor. But should you leave it up to Google to decide the names of the menu just by taking a look at your images? That could be tricky. We'll cover menu in detail in the next slides.

But for the time being, keep a track of your GPP profile, see if menus have started appearing automatically or not. If they're not appearing automatically, you're in good hands. Otherwise, this is what we noticed, what it looks like.

Basically, even an option in your GPP profile asking you to generate a menu from your uploaded photos. It will basically use AI learning based on the images that are already uploaded by the business owner to generate them. Yes, you can always skip it and add them manually if you want, which I think is a much better way of tackling menus.

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So let's jump right into the tips of the week. Optimizing menu items. I still see half the restaurants that I come across that don't have a proper optimized menu uploaded to Google.

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Many of them, just for the sake of it, take a picture of the printed menu and upload it as an image file. I think people still don't realize that menus are a huge ranking factor. The specific items on your menu can help you rank.

They rank and if you optimize them properly, they can rank much better. First things first, when you're doing a keyword research, try and find exact match queries that customers are searching for. Either if you're running a restaurant yourself or you're working with a business that owns a restaurant or a chain of restaurants, talk to them and take them into confidence to design the menu that you're going to upload to Google.

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Exact match queries, as I mentioned, they work best. So if someone is searching for a hamburger, they will basically need to list hamburger as a menu item. What also helps is having multiple entries in your menu, not duplicates but multiple alternatives.

So if you want to rank for burger, as an example, try to have different varieties of burger on your menu items. If you're trying to rank for sushi, have different kinds of sushi's with the name sushi on the menu items that you upload to Google. Don't use fancy terms.

Most people do not search by using fancy terms. Use generic keywords that people are searching for that you may come across easily during your research. You can even look for trends or even Google Ads information.

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Keywords in review are not a ranking factor directly as far as I've seen, but they do influence the menu highlights that show up in map search results. So what can you do to enhance them? Simple thing, when you're talking to a customer and you know he or she is very happy with your service or you're emailing them or messaging them, telling them, asking them to write a review or when they're in the store or you're on the phone with them, asking them for a review, just ask them to mention the things they like best at the restaurant. What food did they opt for? What did they enjoy eating there? And that is one way you can try and influence the menu highlights that show up on search results.

Menu highlights can influence people to do business with that restaurant in my opinion. Because if you see something familiar, you're bound to understand that there's something relevant that the business does and you're looking for a specific menu item, then that can also help boost your click-through rate. Menu items and menu names within the menu can boost your ranking for specific competitive menu terms.

What you can do is go take a, when you're running, when you're doing your keyword research and trying to track ranking, you do some competitive research as well. Go and look for terms that your competitors are ranking well in a particular region. Dig deep into that competitor.

Take a look at their menu items. Take a look at what content is showing up in the reviews. You can easily use to copy-paste content and review or create insights.

We usually populate review insights with our review plan for that purpose. You can understand how they are curating their menu, how they are putting together their menu, what keywords they're using within their menu. As I mentioned, having a variety of menu items from the same core menu base can help.

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For example, having different types of sushi on your menu can help. But make sure you just create the menu item manually on Google and do not just take photos and upload an image of your printed menu card. But while you are making these changes, also take a look at the primary categories that competitors are using or any additional categories they are using.

Keep in mind, primary categories can provide immense ranking boost. So until and unless you think it's necessary for the secondary category that you're using to be the primary category and you absolutely need to rank and compete for that term, don't just go ahead and change the primary category. Take a look at the menu items.

As I mentioned, check how they are curating the menu item, what are the specific menus they have added to their menu items, and also check reviews. Check the keywords that people are using on the reviews to understand if there is any correlation between what you're trying to rank for and what your competitor is ranking for. If you do find there's a correlation with the number of similar items on the menu and mentions in review content, you can try and mimic that strategy as well.

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Anyway, no need to take notes. Akshita will send out everything we are talking about here along with the links and slide decks to you by tomorrow. Second tip.

This is something that we came across in a forum. We do verification for service area business. So I know some of you work with or have clients who are a typical service area business.

Basically, they go to the client's premises to offer their services. It could be a garage door repair or HVAC. It could be anything related to services where they do not have a brick and mortar presence.

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How do you verify or what information does Google ask for when you're trying to do a video verification for Google for a service area business? So we came across this poster on a forum that I found is pertinent to local SEO and something that you guys should know. So we had this owner of a service area business try to do a video verification, but as usual, kept encountering technical issues with their phone. The consultant opened a support case and after a couple of days, the people at Google opened up a new option for live chat.

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So that to wait in the queue for a few minutes, then a live video chat was started between the owner and the person at Google. Google's support person asked for a list of information and the things that we need to do. Basically asked for a picture of the inside of the home office.

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They requested to show them a picture or show them a few business cards, which apparently this owner did not have. They requested a business license copy. Soft copy can work if you can pull it up on your computer or phone and show it to the rep.

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They asked them to log in to an invoicing system and open an invoice with his business information on it. So basically trying to verify if the name, address, phone number they are trying to use on the service area business listing is actually genuine or not. The owner had a branded vehicle which helped.

So basically they were asked to walk to the vehicle and take a video of the license plate front and side of the car along with the branding. Curiously enough, they asked the owner to get into his vehicle and start the vehicle while showing that the dashboard to ensure that it's indeed his vehicle and part of the business. So this is something that I've not come across before.

So I thought this is very interesting the way they are trying to verify or validate a service area business. The reason why I was looking for it because I saw a lot of forum threads in Google where Google has initiated a re-verification process for a ton of service area businesses. So keep this in mind.

Make sure any business that you're working with, they have this basic information ready with them and not necessarily a branded vehicle. But the rest of the information, I think it's mandatory for anyone to do a business. Third tip of the week.

So I was working with a customer recently and he or she wanted assistance with coming up with a list of service area pages that they should create. It's a single location, age-back business that I'm working with. So they kind of asked how do they pick which service areas they should target first.

That's a very good question. Most often than not, business owners come up with random locations that they think they should work with first. They should prioritize.

But you can do a bit of research with that. If you are running ads for a while, you get to know where their conversions are coming from. If they've been tracking their leads and phone calls on a spreadsheet or in a CRM system, then you know what locations are generating business for them.

If you do not have that information handy, the very basic things you can do is basically pull up a grid ranking tool like sign up, plug in your major keywords that the business is targeting or should rank for. Then in the grid, you can notice the areas where they're not ranking for at present. Those are the core business areas where they should be ranking organically.

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Based on that, you can prioritize the pages that you want to build first. As I mentioned earlier as well during some of our earlier sessions that do not try and build a service area page for every area that you're trying to target. Take it slow.

Make sure the content is genuine. Make sure the content is useful. If you're trying to create a template and trying to rank for all the service areas, it's futile.

You end up doing more harm than good for the website. So that's my tip for the week. There's another keyword tool that I came across last weekend that I absolutely love.

Topical map is something that I love working on. This is the first tool that I saw where you can actually plug in a competitor's URL and create a topical map. So if you have specific competitors that are trying to rank rank and you're trying to come up with topics that can help you rank better, you need a map of the core terms that you need to target and come up with articles that you need to write.

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I think this is a very good tool to come up with that information. I may take this up as a project for next month where we basically create a topical map for maybe the top 40 or 50 Google categories and share them on our website. You can use it as a resource and it will save you a bunch of time.

Give it a shot. Its pricing is fairly fair. I would say it's .g based on my experience.

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People charge a lot of money just to create a topical map on behalf of you. So that's it from me. I don't know if anyone has any questions today.

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Hi everyone, if you have any follow-up questions, now is the best time to ask. You can send in the chat or just directly to me. Looks like we don't have any questions.

Awesome, let's wait for a minute and then we can wrap it up. Again, thanks everyone for joining and you'll get the recording and the detailed notes for this session so you don't have to take any notes yourself. We'll be sharing all the tools and the resources we discussed today.

Cool, thanks everyone. Thanks for joining. We'll see you again in a couple of weeks.

Have a great rest of the week. Bye.

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