Synup Office Hour #4 - 2nd April 2024 | Be On Top Of Local Search

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Let's give it a couple of more minutes. Sure. I think we can begin actually.

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Yeah, let's start. Okay, hello everyone. Welcome to office hour number four from Synup.

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It's not going to be, we won't need an entirehour today because there's not a lot that's been happening in the ecosystem. Sothe days when we don't have a lot to speak about, we will just restrictourselves to say 30 minutes to 40 minutes and cover the important aspects ofit, hints and tips, et cetera. But the longer sessions will happen when there'sa lot of things to talk about, when we have enough topics to cover.

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Anyway, I really appreciate everyone joiningin. So let's kick this off. Industry updates.

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So what's going on? Recently it was noticedthat phone numbers are missing from hotel listing searches. Traditional Googlebusiness profiles are working well. The phone numbers have, there's a callbutton.

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You can dial it. You can even record the phonenumber if you need to. But if you go and look for a hotel within your city andlook at the interface that shows up, you'll notice on the hotel finderapplication within Google, phone numbers are no longer showing up.

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We have not received any official word fromGoogle. This was noticed about a couple of weeks ago, but it could be a bug orit could be an interface change that Google is testing. So we don't know forsure.

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So if you have clients in the industry, youmay want to keep a tab, especially if you're working with hotels andrestaurants. A small bit of update, especially for people who use chatGPT a lotor want to try using it, chatGPT 3.5 is available without the need to log in atthe moment. So if you just go to chatGPT website, you should be able to accessit.

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They announced it earlier this week that it'sopen to all. So give it a shot. Try it out.

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See if you can come up with new topics thatyou can write about or any other creative ways you might be able to usegenerative AI responses. One major change that we noticed this week was the newphoto experience in Google that was rolled out. Let me give you an idea.

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So with the new Google interface, when theymoved on from the dashboard, moved everything to the search results page thatlooks like this, the photos interface was broken. There were a few issues withthat. It wouldn't let you see what images you have already.

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There were no clear demarcations between whatphotos are being used for what purposes, for example, what logo you have, whatcover image is being utilized, and all the rest of the categories that areusually associated with photos within Google were missing. So we startednoticing this in the last couple of days where the old photos interface is kindof back and looks like it's going to stay. So you have categorizations overhere for this is being used as the cover image.

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This is being used as the logo image, andthese are the rest of the images. You can go to view all photos and see all theimages associated with the business that has been uploaded by the owner or thatare available in the profile. Then the old categorizations are back.

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Okay, let me try and move this out. Forexample, you can see guest exterior images, interior images, living room home.This is an architect, so they have additional categories of images unlike mostother businesses.

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Then you have the images that were uploaded bythe owner, the street view and 360 degree images along with the videos images.I think this is a welcome change because there was a lot of issues trying tomanage images directly from the GVP dashboard. If you are used to managing themfrom a tool like Synup, then you don't need to be worried about it.

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But just in case you use the GVP dashboard alot, this feature is available in the new experience where you can go andmanage your photos and categorize them as needed. And if you have follow-upquestions about it, how to use them best, just shoot us an email or something.Because we'll delve right into images this week.

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We receive a lot of questions about how tooptimize photos for local such clients or local businesses. This is somethingthat is very misunderstood. There's a lot of bad information out there, peoplewasting time doing things that will probably not resolve a lot of existingissues or help them optimize images fruitfully.

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So how do you optimize images and why shouldyou care? As per Google's own documentation that you can read over here isinteract with customers. You can read and respond to reviews from yourcustomers. Post photos that show off what you do.

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Businesses that add photos to their businessprofiles receive 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps and 35% moreclicks through to their websites than businesses that don't. So there is clearindication that photos help with your CTR click-through rate on your Google MyBusiness profile in attracting new customers or attracting potential customers.So what should you do? There are some rules that you need to abide by.

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For example, Google has specific guidelinesrelated to photos and videos. It should be a JPG or a PNG file size between 10KB and 5 MB maximum. Recommended resolution for GVP or Google business profilephotos are 720 pixels by 720 pixels.

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That's the minimum resolution. That's therecommended resolution minimum is 250 by 250. But my recommendation is wheneveryou are taking a photo or you have a client who is trying to take photos oftheir business, ask them to put their phone on the highest possible settings.

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Take the highest quality photo. If you need toedit it to make the file size smaller, there are any number of free tools thatyou can use to edit photos. But make sure you take photos with the highestresolution possible, highest quality photos, and then upload them.

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If a customer is at their business locationand using a phone to take photos, ask them to upload the photos directly fromthe phones. That way, there will be a little more weightage than you uploadingthem. Not significant, but it's better.

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Then Google will also associate the photo withthe images because they are tracking the phones anyway. The photos should be infocus, very well lit, and have no significant alterations or excessive use offilters. Do not try to photoshop the hell out of every photo that you upload.

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There are very strict guidelines. If you canupload print quality photos, that is very good. Try and avoid overtly optimizedphotos that have a lot of promotional elements and offers on them on differentlayers that have been created with different photo editing tools like photoshopor canva.

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Avoid those kind of photos. Try and uploadnatural photos that are relevant to that category. I recommend not using stockphotos at all.

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Especially in Google My Business, they don'thelp. You can go to Google in your city, go search on images of Google MyBusiness and see what images rank well. That will give you a fair idea of thekind of photos that do well in your region and for that kind of business.

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Try and mimic those. We do have a kind of achecklist of what we ask people to upload. For example, by the way, keep inmind when you're trying to optimize photos for a business or for a client orfor your own business for that matter.

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I do not recommend deleting existing photos.You are going to lose all the engagement and the metrics that come associatedwith them. Until and unless it's a really, really low quality photo that youdon't want people to see being associated with your business, then go ahead anddelete it.

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Otherwise, do not delete existing photos. Whatare the photos that you must have? One good quality cover image. Though Googleis going to pick a cover image from your existing photos, you cannot specifywhat image to use as a cover photo because Google usually auto-assigns it basedon click-through rate and engagement rate.

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Then pick the photo that is most suitable foryour business as per the data. Make sure you have a logo file, a good qualitylogo file. At least three to four photos of the interior premises of thebusiness.

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For example, for the lobby or front desk, ifyou have meeting rooms or any customer -facing rooms or amenities that theyhave at the location that you can take photos of. Do three to four exteriorphotos. If they have the images for the business, only if the budget permits.

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Otherwise, using a smartphone to take reallygood quality photos during a good time of the day works well. Street viewphotos, photos of the parking lot, exteriors of the building, the mainentrance. If there are multiple entrances whereby you have different businessnames associated with the same location, then you can do that.

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Three to four photos of the team. Maybe thefounder, the owner, or their customer -facing teams, or their doctors, or theirservice repair guys. Team photos work very well that they can show off,especially teams.

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If they are uniform, maybe have a photosession day where everybody comes in their uniform and take a few photos thatcan last a long time. Those are the basics that you should always strive toget. Apart from that, you can showcase photos of the products, really goodquality, not stock photos.

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Google will be quick to identify if you'reusing stock images. It doesn't matter how you use them. Showcase services.

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Highlight specific products or services thatthey're trying to push. Add personalization to the existing photos. Maybe useheadshots, or keep adding team photos, or people at work kind of photos.

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A car would get in service. Somebody'sappearing for a dentist appointment, or salesperson trying to sell something tothe customer, or they're finishing their transaction, making a payment. Thingslike that.

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Transactional photos can work well. But don'tjust stop there. The biggest problem I see with most profiles when I audit orreview, or on signup and elsewhere, is they upload a bunch of photos on Googlewhen they're setting up their account, and people think that that's the one-time thing.

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Just like reviews, photos are something thatmakes your profile more engaging. So consider adding one or two photos, maybeone once a week, or twice a week, or at least if you can, once or twice amonth. Freshen it up.

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Get better photos. Everybody has a smartphonenow, so it shouldn't be a big problem. Another issue that we keep noticing withthe image optimization is you just stop your photo image optimization atGoogle.

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So there are two parts to every business. Youhave your Google business profile, you have your third-party listings likeFacebook, Foursquare, Yellow Pages, etc. Try and upload photos to thoseplatforms as well if they're allowing you, on a regular basis.

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Ask the customers to send them photos, orprovide them access to the dashboard so that they can upload photos on theirown. Basically, we will distribute the images to multiple platforms that allowmultiple photos. Then don't just stop with the profiles.

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Start doing the same with your website. Justkeep in mind a few things because the aspects on the website are a little bitdifferent than what kind of photos you need on GBP. When you are using imageson the website, you need to take care of a few things.

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For example, make sure the photos are ofreally high quality. If you are trying to get them to rank and show up onsearch results, especially in image searches, your photos need to be at least1024 pixels wide. Make sure the file names are optimized based on the page.

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If you are building a building a page for autorepair, make sure the images are named as auto repair. If it's a dentist'swebsite and the page is about any particular treatment, make sure the photosare named accordingly. File names matter, image title matters, and image alttag matters.

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Make sure you categorize the pagesaccordingly. Add images that are relevant to that page only. Do not use thesame image on multiple pages.

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It's not going to work. I know there are a lotof people who are still selling geotagging services, basically trying to figureout a way to geotag photos with a lack of their business and optimizing them.It's a waste of time.

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Instead of trying to geotag images, what we dowith the photos on our website, on our client's website, at times we usesomething called open graph tags. There are free tools through which you cancreate OG tags to set up a featured image for a specific page. For example, ifyou're writing an article and there's a featured image on that, you canspecify, or if you have multiple images on a page, you can specify through opengraph tags what should be used as a featured image for when they get shared onsocial media.

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When you share a specific page on socialmedia, there is usually a certain image gets associated with that article onthe blog or the content that you're sharing. You can specify that in opengraph. You can even specify logos, etc.

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within your schema as well. There are tools todo it. I'll share some of the links of tools that we find useful.

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Additionally, if you have the budget, Googlehas an API called visual API. It's one of the features is it categorizes andlabels images on the fly. Basically, if you can build up a tool, or we'll tryto see if we can build up an easy to use tool, you can upload an image to itand see how Google views that particular image.

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For example, if you are working with a dentistor a hospital and then upload an image, is Google labeling it accordingly? Thenyou know it's a good quality image and there are chances that it's going to getassociated with your business and it will do better in search results. You cantry using that. I think there's something called... Yeah, this is it.

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It's a cloud platform that you can try using.I think they have API version as well. You can get a demo.

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I'm sure there are smarter people associatedwith us who can use simple Python script and AI to build up a small tool. Tryit. Let me know if it works.

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In fact, if you end up building it, I wouldlove to test it out. So that's it for photos for today. Tools of the week.

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The first one is Lumen5 that we started usingourselves. I think we started using it last month. We created a bunch ofexplainer type videos for our website, our product, as well as we repurposedsome of our articles that were doing well for our YouTube channel.

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What I found it useful for was creating shortform video content. If you're getting short form videos from your customersthat you need updated on their GVP profile, maybe you can run them throughLumen5 and make them more interactive. It works well for explainer videos whenyou're trying to explain something complicated in simple words to people in avery short span of time.

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As I mentioned, you can also use it tooptimize existing videos, maybe recreate and repurpose some of the content thatyou have created for your clients. Another tool that I'm aware of is anotherplatform that I've known these guys for a while now. I've used them andrecommended them to certain clients who are big on link building.

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Everyone needs it. Everyone does it, but thereare other means and methods of doing it. So what Zipsprout does is basically,it's a platform through which you can find hyper-local link buildingopportunities in the form of events.

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You can sponsor hyper-local nonprofits. Thisis a platform that helps you find them. So if you are trying to Synup for abrand or for one of your businesses, you can just go and click on this andbecome a sponsor.

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Then work through the database to find out ifthere are opportunities locally through which you can sponsor an event or on annonprofit organization and get a link back. Additionally, if you're an agency,you can reach out to them and work out ways so that they can support youragency at scale. I think their pricing starts at around $250.

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I'm in the sponsorships. The range is fromanywhere between $250 to $2,200 plus. So depending on your clients, the kind ofcustomers, the kind of links they need, you can give them a look.

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I found them useful, so I thought I'd share.Anyway, that's all from me. I'm open to any questions you guys might havetoday.

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Thanks, Neil. Very good session. I lovedseeing Lumen5 in the tools.

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Our product team absolutely loves it. Theydon't have to come to us now for smaller tasks. So very good.

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Yeah, you should try it out. There might beother alternatives as well that will come in handy for sure. So yeah, and we dohave some questions, Neil.

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Okay, I think I'll read them out. The firstone is, for the very first thing, we spoke about hotel listings, quite asurprise actually. I wasn't aware of it as well until now.

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So the question is, is it for all hotellistings or location specific? What can we do? No, it is happening. I didmultiple searches across cities. Google keeps messing with local listings a lotso that the hotel finder option that you see.

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I'm primarily seeing it for the US region.I've not seen this problem in other countries, especially we did a search inIndia, that problem did not pop up. But I've done searches across at least 20different states, across the United States, and I've seen the same problem.

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We don't know for sure if it's a bug. We don'tknow for sure if the bug will turn into a feature, but something that we'llkeep our eye on. All right.

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There was a second part to this question wherethey asked, what can we do with phone calls or a KPI for us to track for theclients at this point? Hotel industry? Yeah. I don't think you can do anythingmuch to circumvent that apart from your messaging on the listings itself. Wehave to test it out.

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Apologies, but there's no easy answer for usat the moment. All right. The second question is, does Google consider howfrequently we update photos as a ranking signal? I do not have enoughinformation to state that it's a ranking signal, but I'm sure it's one of thosesmall signals that Google associates with how much active a profile is.

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Okay. Review recency wasn't a ranking factor awhile ago. All of a sudden, we are seeing that for the last 15 months, recencyof reviews matters.

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Customer interaction matters. CTR,click-through rates is a ranking signal, apparently. I'm sure if photos thatcan improve CTR could potentially improve your ranking.

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If not directly, I'm sure it's going to affectchange. Makes sense. The last question is, it's related to Google Photos.

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Is text on photos okay? Can Google read thetext? Okay. Yeah. Google can read everything.

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Text on photos is okay, but I don't recommendit. As I said, do not try to Photoshop images before uploading to Googlebusiness profiles. One or two promotional image with event-specific offering isgood, but if you are uploading a photo, make sure the subject of the photoremains undisturbed.

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Okay. This is not Instagram. You upload photosto Google for a different reason.

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You upload photos on Google so that they arecategorizing them properly and it helps you in search. So let's play byGoogle's rules. All right.

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If someone has any follow-up questions to whatwe just discussed, I think we can take that or any new questions that you mighthave. Let's wait for a minute. You can send it to me directly or just send iton the group.

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Meanwhile, like we discussed in the beginning,you can see the email on the deck as well, but if you want to suggest anythingthat we should discuss in these office hours every week, you can easily emailus at helloatsinem.com. I'm sharing the email on the chat as well. Looks likethere's no questions today. No further questions.

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Great. Great. Thank you everyone for joiningus.

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Thanks everyone. Bye-bye. Have a lovelyweekend.

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I have a question. Just a second. Yes,Matthew, the recordings are available.

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We will be sending them out to allparticipants and they will be updated on our YouTube channel. Yeah. I'm goingto share it with you right now where you can access all the recordings.

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Just a second. Just reach out to us if youhave any follow-up questions about that. All our videos are available on ourwebsite as well as on our YouTube channel.

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But if you have any follow-up questions afterlistening to the videos later on, just shoot us an email. We'll be more thanhappy to get on a call with you. Okay.

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Thank you everyone. Thanks. Bye-bye.