Synup Office Hour #5 - 9th April 2024 | Be On Top Of Local Search

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Okay, welcome back everyone to our weekly office hour session. I hope that you're enjoying or at least learning a few things from what we are sharing for the last few weeks. We keep getting questions forwarded by the CSMs and from the support team clients and reach out to them.

So anytime if you feel like that you're stuck with something or are not satisfied with a particular topic or finding it difficult to optimize something, just shoot us an email or reach out to us via your CSMs and I'll be happy to do a live session just with your team that can help you in your process with your clients or with your own website for that matter. There's not a lot happening in the industry, especially after the last quarter and the fiasco with helpful content updates and code algorithm updates. People are still recovering.

I have yet to see people who have been marked down by Google or have incurred manual penalties recovering from any sort of update. But what it tells me from what I see in search is Google still thinks that brand is paramount. So work towards building a brand.

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If you are running any type of content website without building a brand, then you might have most probably seen the damage that Google has caused. I specifically know at least 100 plus creators who have lost a lot in the past three months. Anyway, some of the updates that I've seen across the board in the industry and we are facing it with our clients as well, there's indexation.

Indexing pages on websites is getting more difficult by the day. There are a few reasons for it. One of the reasons that Google states this is because the content is not helpful.

It does not need to be there. And there are other reasons like Google is trying to save cost. They are trying to save on crawl budgets as the reason why they are trying to avoid doing this as frequently as they used to.

Now, most websites, and small business websites should not face this issue unless you're generating hundreds of pages with low-quality and low-intent content on them. But the primary businesses that I've seen getting affected by this are the multi-location businesses. If you're working with any national brand or international brand that has multiple locations, especially thousands of locations or branches across the board and you have deployed landing pages for each one of them.

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The landing pages are usually uniform. They're Very templated. You usually have the name, address, phone number on them, and maybe some services.

And the rest of the pages are usually filled with either social proof or boilerplate content. There's hardly anything unique for Google to consider to be indexed ranked and shown in search results. So if you're one of them, you probably saw the struggle getting them indexed.

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So we work with clients of various sizes. Some Of them have pages. We were recently working with my CS team on a client-side that had around 20,000 pages deployed overnight because they have that many locations.

And those are verifiable locations, not spam. So we found that around 1,300 or 1,200 odd category pages were indexed. The Rest of the location pages in the city-based pages are not getting indexed.

So what do you do? A few things you can do is make sure that the website structure is good. You have breadcrumbs implemented. The internal linking are good.

You have unique meta tags on these websites.Try and put some unique content, but producing unique content at scale for 20,000 pages locations, it's a daunting task. So the other thing that you can do is take the help of link indexers like linksindexer.com, GigaIndexer.

And one of my favorite tools is Omega Indexer,fairly reasonably priced. You can basically create a list of all your landing pages at one go and create a project in Omega Indexer. Let me show you.

Ishita, can you see the screen? Yep. Okay. Soit basically costs around $0.02 per link, which I think is a fair pricing unless you want to build your own tool using Google's index API.

If you're not going to do it, run a drip campaign, add your links to it. I have personally seen a 75% to 80% success rate with this. There are various ways you can use it, especially if you're providing services to the client that you can charge for.

You can help them get their pages indexed. You Can even use this to get some of your important citations indexed. Because if pages are facing problems, I'm sure major sites like Yellow Pages, city media websites, et cetera, they're also facing similar issues because it takes Google Really, really long time to discover links right now and index those pages.

And if your pages are not indexed, you're basically not going to show up in searches. If your citations are not indexed,Google won't be able to see them. They won't be able to consider them while evaluating your business and they're worthless to you.

We do have a managed service. If you want the citations or links getting indexed, I think we can assist you with them. So if you have problems, just reach out and we'll be more than happy to help.

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Another pattern that I've seen, I was auditing around seven or eight websites over the past week where I found that a lot of people are building links. I'm sure as an agency who provides local SEO and SEO services, digital marketing services to customers, you are building links. Be a little careful while building them.

If you're building, writing those guest posts, you're doing outreach, you're building social profile links, et cetera. Do not use commercial terms all the time to build backlinks. Because if all your architects or from your backlinks are the same and they are using commercial terms or your money keywords, as they say in the industry, it's very easy to detect them and you may incur a manual penalty.

So it's better to create a natural-looking link profile, mix and match. I would suggest that most of your links should be with the brand name rather than keywords. There are ways, means and methods of telling Google what page is relevant to a certain keyword.

You can do that by internal linking. We'llcome to that topic later on in the same session. Okay.

So go, if you're using some kind of a link-building tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush or Moz or any of these, go check your architect's profile on your external links and see how they update. Meta just made an announcement, I think this week, where they stated that starting in May, this basically next month, all AI-generated user content will feature made with AI labels to improve the transparency and provide additional context to the users. This is especially relevant for businesses and agencies who are doing a lot of social media content and advertising on Meta.

So the detection of AI-altered content will become the detection of industry-shared signals of AI images as per Meta. So they are going to use industry detection systems that are already in place that companies share with each other to identify AI-generated content. If you can mark them as AI-generated, you won't be penalized.

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They have not mentioned any penalization at the moment, but better to be careful. Users can self-disclose if the content is AI generated. If content seems to be created for manipulating or deceiving users, then they will have a more prominent level.

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What they are going to do in the future, I Don't know. But as per Meta, they mentioned that they are going to remove manipulative content, but will stop takedown starting in July. The two-month window for May to July, as per them, they're giving the timeline for self-disclosure to all businesses and users who are using AI-generated content.

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But Meta will still keep removing manipulative content if it violates their community standards, like bullying, harassment, inciting violence, etc. So just be a bit more careful if you're using a lot of AI content on your social media posts. Try and avoid the typical triggers that may get you into trouble.

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Okay, so that's for the industry updates. Tips For the week. So we spoke a lot in the previous sessions about optimizing your GBP profiles, your images, getting reviews to improve engagement, responding to reviews, getting hyperlocal links from Sprout and tools like that.

But how do you actually optimize websites for relevance? As you know, relevance is one of the distinguishing factors along with prominence for Google to rank your website or a local website. So there are several things you can do. We have a checklist that we will send across after the call, but usual elements that you should double-check, maybe during the deployment of any website that you build for your website or when you take on a new customer, make sure that the URL format is accurate for the landing pages, especially if you have a specific landing page for each location.

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And things to avoid if you have, say, more than one location, try to mix and match the signals. For example, do not put one location's information, especially the name, address, phone number on the other location, or have a site-wide footer with all the location links on the footer. It looks really spammy.

Make sure the page has a title tag, meta title tag that is optimized for with your keywords, as well as make it a little relevant to the page content. Check if you have the meta description written properly. I know a lot of people avoid meta descriptions nowadays because Google can, in essence, pick any random content for your website and display them in search results.

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Don't really need a meta description, but it's a good practice that you should follow. Of course, if Google doesn't get enough information, they will fall back on the meta description that you have provided. So optimize it for click-through rate rather than optimizing it with keywords.

Follow a standard site header pattern where you have a common header navigation across the board. Have a prominently displayed logo and call-to-action phone number that is prominently displayed so people can get in touch with you easily. Things like H1 tags with introductory content about the page, and lead generation forms.

If you don't want to build forms with a plugin, use services like Tally forms or Jot forms, external sources, and Embedder forms on the landing pages. Optimize the images. Get good-quality images.

If you're trying to use images for search, I cannot reiterate enough, create good quality images. If you do not have the in-house expertise, there are several design services. For example, we use one of them for our marketing team, using something called Design Pickle.

They give you unlimited design work or graphic design work or illustration work for a fixed amount every month, and they even share the file with you. Use them. Create good solid images, original images.

Make sure they are high quality. After Optimizing images, make sure you have the subheader structure in place, the H2 tags, the H3s, and the H4 tags for every page. Add services.

If you have sub-services, add pages for them as well. Link to each other. Add your social media proof, social proof, testimonials, widgets, and add your business information, name, address, and phone number.

Embedder maps work very well for local sites. Add your social profile links, and alternative fallback options for customers to follow you, and find out new information from you. Those are the things that they can fall back on.

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Add your schema and open graph tags, and more importantly, fix your internal links. If it's a small site, internal links are fairly easy. If you're managing a large site and you're lazy like me, then I would recommend using something like LinkBot or LinkStorm, or if your website is built on WordPress, I think Link Whisper as a plug-in for WordPress that can easily find relevant topics and fix your internal linking issues and provide suggestions and content as well.

We will add the links when selling out the notes to you. Internal linking and context optimization can really, really help your website. People ignore that.

A lot of people I've seen ignore that, thinking that backlinks count, but internal linkings don't. Internal linking can do magic for your website. One other thing I would like to add to these pages is typical hyperlocal content that is relevant to that location.

Maybe driving directions that the business owner will be aware of, or if you're a local person, you will know typical landmarks that can help you find the business correctly that identifies that business as a local business. Get them on the page. Additionally, what else can you do? Maybe if you have done any PR activity, local PR or hyperlocal PR activity for the business, add them to that page.

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You can generate content, and maybe do outreach for them. It's fairly easy to find local news nowadays. We are not a local business, but we used to use a service called Helper Reporter.

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I think they recently rebranded to something else. They've become a paid service. Connectively.us. If you are doing a lot of outreach, I found very, very good backlinking opportunities to this and genuine ones.

You create a piece of news, see if you can find local news agencies to pick up that news, or you can just do a typical Google search. For example, if you're working with an HVAC provider in Dallas, Texas, just search HVAC and see if you have the linking opportunities. ACHRNews has just featured somebody about the news.

So, surf through these news articles. If Something stands out, maybe find out the news agency or the reporter and try to do PR with them. These are really the best kind of links that you can build for a local business or even for your agency for that matter.

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Helpful tools. I have something interesting for you guys today. I'll go to the first one, plepper.com. I'm sure we have all used GMB Everywhere.

GMB Everywhere is great when you're trying to do a quick analysis. Plepper is another alternative that I use once in a while if I do not have enough time or I do not get a chance to do my homework with manual searches. So, I go there.

You can go to the Analyze GVP tab on the website and you get something like this. This is just a test case. Say, for example, I'm Working with Barbara Oliver Jolie and trying to see what more we can do.

Or maybe I'm working with one of their competitors. So, this gives you quick wins in a single window. You get to see what's their ratings, what is the review count, how many posts do they have, how many products they have listed, how many services they have listed, how many Q&As or FAQs they have associated with the listing, when was the first photo uploaded, what are the categories that are listed.

Based on this information, you can optimize your own profile or your client's profile. A quick tip, if you are aware of a prominent business that is ranking very well ahead of your customers or your clients, go search for their profiles with this tool. See what they're doing.

See the things that they can do. More often than not, you will find categories that you have not identified previously that you can add to your own client's profile or subcategories. But there are times you'll figure out that you might want to list a different category as a primary category and move the current primary category as a secondary category.

So, try and take a look. This is a fairly easy tool to use. They have monitoring services and stuff for Google if you're interested, but this is my go-to tool when I try to deep dive and audit a profile or their competition at a local level.

Now, the second tool, I'm sure most agencies are trying to find information from Google. For example, you use cases, right? You're trying to acquire new customers from Google, right? You're trying to identify, okay, let me see who I can target in my locality. If you're working with a specific category of business and say you want to work with doctors, you can basically go to Outscraper, sign up for the tool, it's fairly easy and simple, and just create a task.

They have ready-made tools to scrape almost everything that we do on a day-to-day basis. You can scrape reviews of capdata, you can scrape eBay, you can scrape Facebook pages, you can scrape Facebook reviews for information, you can scrape Glass 2 reviews, Indeed, etcetera. Basically, your own little scraping tool through which you can create formidable reporting and information that you can provide to your customers.

But for the purpose of this call, I'll stick to just a handful of use cases. First use case, I'm trying to acquire new clients in the locality. I want to go to Google and I want to scrape Google Maps data for doctors or restaurants.

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You can add parameters over here, what you want, if you want contact information, you can even make sure that this tool is only scraping, say, doctor profiles or restaurant profiles that have not been claimed. That's a huge opportunity in local search if you're trying to acquire clients. If somebody has a business that has not even claimed their Google business profile, go after that client.

Run this tool, and acquire that information, and you'll find the information within here. Basically, they have a marker over here, unverified owner data. You can even use their APIs, build a small little tool and figure out if there are businesses in your area that have not claimed their profile and go after them and pitch your services to them.

Another use case that we use them for is bulk audits. For example, if I'm trying to acquire clients, you're trying to pitch for a client and you want to see how they're doing in local search at the moment. Go search by their brand name, create a spreadsheet with their claim status, their review count, the review frequency, the categories, etc.

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Create a pivot table and present the data to your prospective customers. Additionally, you can also use this to do competitor research on behalf of your clients. Sell that as a service.

We'll give you a competitor analysis report of these many competitors in the region for that category of business or subcategory of businesses every quarter. That way, you get a bird's eye view of what your competitors are doing, what you can do better, where you can improve, or how your agency is doing a better job than many of the competitors in the region. You can scrape Google, you can scrape Yellow Pages, Yelp, etc.

Google is something that we use a lot. You can even scrape product listings, email content, contact finder, etc. We'll probably write up a quick article on this week with some possible use cases for your agencies and share it with you guys during our next call, or we'll just make it part of a newsletter.

But if you have questions, just reach out and we'll be happy to answer. That's all from me for today. Open to any questions that you might have.

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Oh, I forgot one thing. Cheryl just forwarded a couple of emails asking questions. One of the questions was related to Google Analytics and GA4 versus Universal Analytics.

Universal Analytics was discontinued last year, in July. They stopped processing data by September or October. If you don't see any data after that in Universal Analytics, that means there's a problem.

So upgrade to GA4. There's an easy-to-use tool on Google. Check your client side, check your own websites, and make sure you have upgraded to GA4.

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Another information that was requested by the team was, how do you pitch your platform against manual citation building companies? I cannot name the companies right now, but we'll send you some information later this week as well about it. So most of the manual citation building services, they say, oh, you don't need to pay for citations around the year. You just build them and forget about them.

We know that is not true. If you build your citation, you need to keep them updated. If your data is stale and jaded, they won't rank well.

Additionally, on an average, what we have seen, we have built a few million citations in the last 10 years of signup. Soon on average, a location on signup is edited at least five to six times a year. Now imagine you have 50 citations for a client and you go build it manually with some service, they charge you $2 per citation and say that,forget about it now.

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You have to update information, you have to add offers, you have to add, you have new images that you need to take, you're acquiring reviews. You might want to add subcategories, you might want to add your services and products to them. Some of them do allow them.

So that means that at least four, five to six times a year, you need to pay them again for each of the citations just to update them. So the cost-benefit factor that people talk about manual services is not really there in reality. And then unless you're one of those agencies who do not want to deal with citations all the time, you just want to build it one time, you can do that.

As I mentioned, I think last week that we have a managed service program as well for niche directory citations, etc. For Industry-specific directories. Those are also managed services and you canoffer them, maintain them for you. But we will send you information on how to pitch your product, how to, if you could let us know the companies that you're losing business to, then maybe we can provide you better battle cards and Decksthat can help you pitch your product better or explain your product better or service letter to your customers or prospective clients. That's it!

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Thanks, Neil. If anyone has any questions regarding our managed services, feel free to reach out to our support team. They'll assist you with any information you need, including pricing. And yeah, thank you Neil, for a great session today.

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A couple of tools I love knowing about, which we mentioned within the session itself. Uh, apart from that, I have them in my notes. I'll share them with yep, yep, yep, so we'll share that with everyone, okay? If you have any questions, you can simply send them to me or over the chat.

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Couple of questions that I got, Neil, I think I'm going to read them out. The first question is related to the indexation issues, so on location pages, can you usually appeal it with Google? I think they're asking, there's no appeal with Google. So, there are two parts to it, right? Google crawls your pages, if it finds it valuable, it's going to index it or decide not to index it. There's no appeal with Google, there's no easy way around it, okay? You can resubmit, you can keep on resubmitting, but it's a lot of manual labour work, the Search Console and everything. So, I find it easier if I'm working with hundreds and thousands of pages across multiple clients, and using a tool to do that job saves time.

Okay, as I mentioned, I've seen a 75 to 80%success rate in the recent past as well, so I think it works, and makes sense. And I think this one is just for Meta AI disclosure. Do we expect Google to do something similar with respect to Google's already doing it, content? They're already telling you that do not create content just for search, do not create, you can create AI content, but AI content at scale that has not been edited by a human is going to land you in trouble. We have seen websites with millions of visitors go to zero within days, and we should learn from it, okay?

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Meta is also contemplating launching a DEgenerative search experience with generative AI, but it's expensive. All this, all this, uh, what should I say, the excitement around AI is going to, at the end of the day, come down to cost, cannot keep on burning money. So they're contemplating that G will be included in their paid packages. So I remember a few years ago, I was discussing this with somebody, and somebody just blew me off saying, "Oh, this is never possible." I said, "Uh, and there will be a future when searching like Google or YouTube does, they give you an ad-free experience. When you're a paid subscriber, Google might give you that or give you more, provide you more bells and whistles because generative experience is expensive, plus they lose on that revenue if they do that. Yeah, makes sense. Those are some great insights. Do we have any other questions? We can wait for a minute or so.

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Again, you don't have to take notes for these sessions. We will be sharing the session deck as well as all the event notes with you. They'll be published on our website as well. If you want to go look at any of the previous office hour content, you can simply visit our video section. I can drop the link here. Don't see any questions. Wait, yep, I think we can wrap it up. Okay, thanks, everyone. We'll probably talk to you again next week and have a great rest of the week. Okay, there's something that popped out. Oh, okay, that's your link. Sorry, okay, thanks, everyone. Have a nice week ahead. All right, have a good week. Bye. Thanks, everyone.