Office Hour #17 - Improving Local Business Visibility, Link Building and Image Optimization

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Yeah, good to go. Good morning, everyone. Nice to see everyone back. 

Sorry for the long gap. I was traveling plus had some injuries, so we couldn't arrange a session earlier. We tried to do one last week, but then we had to postpone because of the hurricane in Florida.

So here we go. So, I was expecting a lot of things to change in the industry in the past month, but there were a few hiccups. There was a few usual crying about how search is changing, which is changing every day.

So, we have collected the top ones I think we should all be aware of. Rather than breaking over our head on how algorithms are changing,let's think about how we can work around it, right? So, one primary thing that I noticed from our own analytics and some of the client analytics that have viewed in the past few weeks, AI overviews or AI overview showing up for a lot of how to and what is queries. Okay.

We had a dedicated how-to section on our website. It's been around for like years right now. There are like a couple of hundred or 300 odd articles over there and we track content and how much traffic we get through it.

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So particularly for how to and what is queries from manual checks, what people have determined is Tomek Trotsky did a study recently where he mentioned around 55% of the queries, he tested with they had AI overview showing up. Okay. Though the sample size was quite low.

I recommend it to test it for yourself. If you have a client or if you are doing such kind of content for your own agency website or your own website, it would be interesting to know the numbers. But if you are really interested in this subject, a search engine ranking, seranking.com, they did much deeper research about AI overviews.

And some of the highlights they mentioned in their content was ads often appearing within AI overviews when search volume is zero to 50and CPC is around zero to 0.50. I'll send you the links so no need to take notes right now. Akshita will be sending out the details along with the notesand the links for all the related articles to you by tomorrow. You should have it in your inbox by then.

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12.47% of keywords trigger AI overviews out of the total that they tested, which is like 5% higher than their previous research from back in July. So, AI overviews are growing. I've seen it in our industry as well when people are researching SAS tools or specific platforms for reputation management, listings management, social media management, etc.

These particular categories with the highest ratio of keywords that end up with AI overviews and ads simultaneously in SERP areprimarily pets. The pet care industry, the healthcare industry, and the fashion and beauty industry, they're all beyond 60% of their queries show up with AIoverviews. Similarly, shopping ads appear below AI overviews like 87% of the time and above AI overviews at 13% of the time.

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Why is ever AI overview good or bad? I'm not going to get into it, but from a traffic perspective, AI overviews are not really driving traffic. If you look at the kinds of the gray sling that appears as the source material on AI overview content, I doubt how many people are going to click onit and get to your website. So, if you have a website or you have a client who are dependent way too much on how to type content or what is type informational content, I think this time to diversify.

Don't delete your content. Don't try to over optimize anything, but diversify the traffic sources. There are a lot more coming.

AI is not going anywhere. I don't think we have seen even 1%of the capabilities of AI yet. We have seen the aggregation part.

We have not yet seen the notice the intelligence part. We were chatting about it within our team earlier this week. So, second update that I've seen that's important.

Google business profile will become the primary data source for local services ads. So, I think they have a cutoff date of November 21st,2024. So, Google business profile data and reviews will be the primary datasource for LSA.

So, people who are running local services ads earlier, they would create a separate profile. The reviews were coming from a different source and there were a lot of spam because the way local services ads work,review count and review rating became one of the primary ranking reasons for ads being ranked in a particular order. So that is not going to be the case.

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I think Google is integrating both LSA and with the GBPprofiles. So whatever native reviews a business has on the GBP profile will show up on their local services ads as well. If your GBP name or address information does not match your local services ads, the ads will be paused.

The same goes for unverified and suspended GBP listings. If you're running an ad, local services ads and your GBP profile for some reason becomes unverified or suspended, the ads will get paused. GBP will be the only source of reviews for local services ads.

(6:54 - 9:08)

I think that makes sense as verified reviews will port into GBP directly. Again, make a note of it, November 21st, 2024. If you know of a client or if you're helping clients with local services ads, make necessary changes if you need to.

If you do not have any reviews on Google business profiles and you are dependent on collecting reviews on the local services profile directly, choose that. Third thing that I saw related to our industry is Google's review appeal tool. I'm not sure if you're aware of this.

Basically, if you go to this profile and follow the steps,you get through the review appeal tool. And right now, earlier, what used to happen is if you get a bunch of fake reviews from people and you want to report them, and you get a review from a person who has never done business with you or never in long way, in no way associated with the business and you think it's fine, you can go and report it. But you have to do it one by one.

Right now, they have a multi-selection option that they have added that you can try out and makes life easier for agencies specifically who are working on it. Okay. So apart from the local SEO industry, marketing in general, I'm not too sure if you've noticed the news, Facebook is taking another stab at local.

I'm unsure how many stabs they are going to take at local,but with Facebook marketplace, which is full of spam, after that, they tried something with Waze, that went the other way. So, in a recent event in Austin,Facebook announced that a new local tab will aggregate content from marketplace, Facebook groups and Facebook events into one place. This feature is currently being tested in a few cities, including Austin, New York City, Los Angeles, Washington DC, etc.

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What is the purpose of local tab? Basically, offers to personalize local content based on user interest and data. Additionally, a new swappable section is going to be added to the main feed, which will highlight local content. Some of the key highlights I was going through the article that stuckout were aggregates, local content from marketplace, Facebook groups and events, basically will personalize local events based on your data.

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And success is uncertain given Facebook's past record with local and unable to make a platform that is in any way remotely spam proof, way too much spam on Facebook. But one thing that you guys should try out if you have not for your customers, and if you're as an agency or a consultant, if you're providing managed services to your customers, I would recommend giving ashot to Facebook ads. Try it out for your customers.

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We tried it out for ourselves for the B2B segment, we got a bunch of leads. And I think I don't know how it works with all the content thats hows up on my feed on Facebook, but people are somehow getting results from Facebook ads. And I'm not sorry to say that it works.

(10:54 - 12:08)

By the looks of it, it works better than Google ads at present. Okay, with the Department of Justice investigation going on with Google and this talks of splitting up Google properties, I don't know where it's going to land up. Okay.

Another thing that struck my attention was chat GPT has mentioned that they're going to launch search GPT by the end of 2024 to all users. And apparently, there are talks about monetizing it. It makes sense because the existing burn rate, the amount of money people are burning every year, by the end of 2024, they would be burning right around about $5 billion.

That's their loss for the year with a revenue of 3.7billion. So, I'm sure Sam Altman as for what he said earlier that he doesn'tlike ads, but I don't see any other way of monetizing it without ads.Interestingly, perplexity has already announced that their ad model.

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Yeah, I will send you the link, you can give it a read if you're interested. I think this kind of gives us a window to the future. Okay,running ads on Facebook, running ads on social, running ads on Google, running ads on chat GPT, perplexity, and all these other channels that are going to crop up over the next few years.

Interesting time. Maybe it's time for you to launch additional managed services for local businesses, just manage different kinds of ads other than just doing Google, AdWords, and PPC, stuff like that. Okay,tips of the week.

I'll go from the bottom to the top. Okay. If you or if you know somebody or an as an agency, if you guys are outsourcing a lot of content,the first thing that comes to mind a lot for a lot of people is the quality of the content and if it's being generated via AI.

So, I was one of them about a year ago I used to be dependent on AI-based content checkers to identify if it's an AI-generated content or not. But since the improved models start launching this year from different AI providers, these content checkers are virtually useless. Okay,they're horrible at detecting content.

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Just make changes to the headline. I don't know how they are still making money and fooling people into paying 50-60 dollars a month. Read the content yourself.

If it's worth a read, publish it. If you think it's too optimized or another human being can't make sense of it, don't publish it.That's the way I look at it.

If the content is useful, it does it add to my experience,then I use the content. Otherwise, just get rid of it. Don't use a content checking tool.

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I would rather spend that amount of money on tools that actually helps me optimize content better from a topical relevance point of view. I believe Ahrefs recently launched another plugin through which you can optimize content. Give it a shot.

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I'm going to try it out this week and let you know how it goes. Second thing that came into discussion earlier this week during a client call was they're embarked on a link building journey. They're building a lot of backlinks.

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And they kept asking, every time I get on a call with a client, it's very difficult to explain to another local business what are backlinks and what can it do for you. Traditional knowledge dictates that I'm going to look at a third-party scoring system like a domain authority or domain rating to identify a value of a backlink. But is that enough? So, I don't do that anymore.

So, whenever we are building a link from a different source or we are trying to link out to somebody, there are a few things that we try and identify before we embark on it, if you want to approve that piece of content or we want to build a link from that source. Primary thing for me is traffic potential. It may not always be the case for a local business.

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You might not always get traffic from every link you build,but you don't again, for a local business, you don't need dozens or hundreds of thousands of links all the time to rank a website. The second thing that Icheck is the website that I'm linking from or I'm linking to. Is the content relevant to my audience and the topics we cover or we write about? A highly relevant website, a link from a highly relevant website that does not have a ton of traffic can do wonders for you as well.

Then I take a look at the organic reach of that website. If I'm linking to it or am I getting a backlink from, especially when I'm getting a backlink from a website. I'm sure all of you guys are using some kind of a tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush or other third-party tools where you can identify the organic reach of the website or just Google that website and see the number of pages that they have indexed or they're getting traffic from.

Next, I go and check some of the past content and see the way they are using analytics. If it's all full of typical money terms and not enough diversity and they are linking with anchor text that are not even relevant to the said website, I would avoid it. And last but not the least,indexation rate.

Are the pages indexed? Are the pages showing up on Google?The usual website structure. I will send you the checklist, take a look at it.If you want to add to it, please do let me know.

I'll be more than interested in understanding how others are doing it. Last but not the least, image optimization. We have covered this subject or topic a few times earlier, but this keeps coming up, especially from multi-location clients.

I'll give you a typical use case that we came across earlier this week, I think last week. One of my colleagues was speaking to this large client. They have like hundreds and thousands of branches.

They mentioned that, oh, I uploaded a bunch of photographs to my other branches. They were approved by Google. Then I go in and upload the same set of images to the rest of the branches and they got rejected.

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The first question I ask when I am uploading a photo,especially nowadays when Google is extremely arbitrary in nature, when they're rejecting stuff, they don't give you an actual reason. Is relevance, is this relevant, is this image relevant to that business? Secondly, is that image in any way going to enhance the user's experience? Your customer experience, are they going to learn anything from it? Are they going to gain anything from it?Are they able to identify with that image and associate that image with that business? Then I went back and looked at the profile of the other business that my colleague was asking about. I saw a bunch of marketing images.

You get those images where like 25% of the image is covered.Those are all stock images, human images. They're in the banking industry.

They have a bunch of stock images where they're trying to sell 10% loan or subprime loan or mortgage rates or excellent service, etc.None of them are photos of any of their employees. None there are photos of the actual branch or their facilities.

None of all of them are photos with 25 to 30% text overlay. So,if you have too much text on an image, Google will reject them. There are times, yes, they approve them, but more often than not, they are going to reject them.

Anything more than 10% overlay is going to be rejected. If It's way too much optimized with you're trying to Photoshop it into oblivion with layers and layers of information, then you're going to get rejected. None of the images that I saw on their profile were actually images of their facility or the business or any image that their users are going to find useful.

So, there are a few things we do. How does an image impact ranking and click-through rate? Your images show up in your feature snippets.Most of the feature snippets nowadays include an image, which is an indication that image can impact results.

That's the reason why it's being valued by Google. Then you have the three-pack, usual three-pack local results. They use images.

So, I'm sure Google is factoring the visual impact when they're ranking those. Image cruises is a strong indication of the importance of images, especially for certain kinds of industry like hotels and restaurants and automobile. You see a ton more images than others.

If you have noticed the AI-organized local search results screen that Google is testing, it has a lot more images than traditional searchresults that you see. Then there's this argument between using real images versus stock images. Are real images going to help me rank better? Nobody can say for sure, but real images can help you in a bunch of ways.

It proves authenticity of business. You get better user engagement on real images as they grab more attention of users. Real images can be associated with your brand identity.

Search has slowly and surely over the last decade or so tried to give preferential treatment to brands, be it in organic or in local.All that we see right now, the way search is going, you have to start doing some brand building exercises for the local businesses that you're doing. It's a popularity contest out there.

You can use stock images, but when you overdo stock images,they are prone to removal or suspension. I would suggest that get authentic images. You cannot get them by the dozens all the time, but maybe create acalendar for your client, a shared calendar, a shared task for your customers where you can upload images on a regular basis.

By regular basis, I mean every time there's an event or there's a theme, do it on a monthly basis or at least on a bi-weekly basis.Encourage customers to upload images from your location of your business. May be start a competition or some kind of a thing.

As we mentioned earlier, relevance is far more important and if you want to test, I have brought this up before, you can test it with Google's Vision API. I will try and build a tool later, but there is a free tool that you guys can go here, upload an image over here and test how is Google identifying that image. You'll get some idea.

That way you can form a baseline of the kind of images that you want to create. I'll include the link in my notes and Akshita will send it out later today or tomorrow. Just try and test it out.

Do not in any circumstances just all of a sudden wake up and say I'm going to delete all images because I don't like them. Do not delete.Get a few new ones and test with them first.

All of a sudden if you delete a bunch of images from a client's profile, it can spike a drop in ranking which is not good. It's always better to test it out first and then see the kind of images that work better. Ithink if you're really running out of images from a customer, you're not going to get them on a regular basis.

You can use some stock photos, but don't overdo it with stock photos because profiles look really fake when you have a bunch of stock photos. Okay, last but not the least, I know most of the larger tools have built some kind of an AI overview tracker for keyword when you're trying to track your keyword ranking, but there's this small little tool that I came across today from Tom that you can try out. This is Ziptie.dev basically tracking AI overviews.

I think the pricing is pretty decent. If you want to analyse keywords and track them separately and if your existing tool doesn't do it, I think you can give it a shot. Otherwise, you can always fall back on something like href or SEMrush, but I think both those tools do a lot more than just dorank tracking.

So, this is a cheaper alternative. If you don't want to spend a couple of hundred dollars every month on a new tool, just try it out for a month and see how some of the keywords that you guys are optimizing for,how are they faring on Google, how is your overview impacting them. Try to correlate that information with the client's Google Search Console information.

That way you get a baseline and an idea of how it's impacting search. Is there a question? Is it possible to edit a business address on signup or does it have to be done logging into Google business profile? Yes, you can edit it from signup. However, please remember Arti thatGoogle may trigger a re-verification process if you're updating the address.

Do we have any other questions? You can change the business phone number. As I mentioned, any changes to primary information can trigger are-verification request from Google. If you change the address or a phone number or even a category, it may trigger a re-verification request from Google.

If you need help figuring out how, you can send us an email No, that notification will show up on your Google business dashboard. How long will it take? It usually takes for them, any edited content will take anything between 24 to 48 hours to take that. And if you need to re-verify, thenotification will show up on your Google console itself within that time span.

Just make sure that the phone number that you change is also mentioned on the website. If there is a mismatch, then there could be other issues. Okay, I'm open for questions if you guys have any other questions or suggestions.

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Right, I don't think we have any more questions. Like we said, you guys don't need to take any notes for this. Yes, we'll be sending out the recording and the event notes and the deck by tomorrow.

Yes, everyone, the recording will be sent out. If you have anyone else, just go to our website and sign up for this event. We send out the recordings along with all the notes, all third-party links, suggestions,everything after every event.

Yeah. Thanks, Andy. Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Take care. Thanks, everyone. Have a lovely day.

Bye-bye.