Local SEO in the AI Era: What’s Working, What’s Dying & What to Do Now - Joy Hawkins & Caleb Ulku

0:00We are here with two of the biggest people in local SEO. This is going to be such a cool episode. Both of you, I'm so grateful to have you both joining. Uh rejoining. Joy, this is your third time on. Caleb, this is your second time on and and I think you both said you've

0:18never actually met in person. Not to my knowledge. [laughter] Well, thank you so much. Let's just start meet people in person. I sort of uh hole up in my office and stay here. [snorts] I do that a lot. Actually, lately I've been getting recognized on the street like an off like a surprising amount. I was walking home last week at 2:30 in the morning and some guy walked by me and he's like, "Hey." And it's, you know, 2:30, so I was just like, "I'm keep on walking and and then I I keep walking." He goes, "Hey, I watch your videos." And I'm like, "What?" And there's like no one on the street except

0:57for this one guy. I had another I was going to the week before I was going to the supermarket and another and this guy is with his girlfriend and he stops and he goes he goes, "Oh my god, are you Edward Sturm?" [laughter] It's it's But yeah, I try to I I usually hold up. What's that, Kayla? I said that's never happened to me. Not yet. Has that

1:20happened to you, Joey? Uh it has. Uh usually it's like the places where you would expect people to recognize me. So like at the Google summits every year I've noticed uh last few years we get a lot of people from like Brazil will come up and ask for like pictures with me. I never used to get that before I started getting active on YouTube. So it's definitely a YouTube thing. Um and I think I had one person last year at Gen Con, this board game conference I go to come up and introduce themselves and you're like you're you're Joy Hawkins. That doesn't usually happen where it's just like a random person in

1:51a non-industry thing at the board game conference. Yeah. I was like, I should hire this girl. [laughter] Did And you did? No. That's awesome, though. Um, all right. I want to start with uh a cool question that everybody's talking about, which is, how are both of you thinking about local SEO for people using large language models to get their

2:12information? Caleb, we'll start with you. Yeah. Oh man, I was I was looking forward to Joy's response. She did all the uh research on this. Um but yeah, sure. So, um let's see. With large leg models, how do I think about local SEO? So, when we look at local SEO, we look at Google Analytics for uh real people, real users

2:39who are landing on clients websites. Typically, they don't spend very long before they decide whether or not to convert. Um, so a lot of our focus was on building up the entity relevance, the uh the entity trust, not nearly as much focused on all of the aspects that would make the user, an actual human, trust the business more because we found that the users weren't spending enough time on the website. They're not going to read the whole thing. Well, with an LLM who actually w I shouldn't say who, it's not a who. uh an LLM which will actually read most of the website uh fairly readily. Um historically we basically

3:21had four types of content that we built for local SEO. We've added a fifth type which is specifically designed to build trust with LLMs that are reading the local business's website. So things like, you know, if we had a a plumber in Gary, Indiana, we might publish an article that talks about how that plumber does pricing for a water heater replacement and all the aspects that feed into it, how one price might be different from another price and all of this. And because the LLMs seem like they favor local citations for local type queries, we found that if someone who lives in Gary asks, "Hey, how much

4:00does a water heater replacement cost?" then your plumber in Gary is more likely to be cited than like Angie's List if you have that type of content ready for citation. So that's the big adjustment that we've made just more of the content written for LLMs, not as much for humans, if that makes sense. I'm just going to be I'm just going to be a fly on the wall because I want to just see a conversation between between

4:29you two. Yeah. So, uh, things that we've been focusing more on, I'd say there's there's two big ones. Uh, awards are something that if you'd asked me a couple years ago, wouldn't cared about whatsoever. We are strongly pitching this to uh, lots of our clients. Um, one of the industries we work with in the law is legals. We have a lot of lawyer clients and, uh, it's kind of funny because best law firms uh, they're a site that basically uh, gives out awards to law firms, says, you know, here are the best law firms in Chicago and they list them, whatever. Uh well their activity on Google has just gone through

5:04the roof in the last year. Like if you put in their sites I think they've got multiple sites into like an AHRS tool or whatever like they are getting so much traffic. So what we were seeing is that like really niche sites that are doing awards and have like this user generated content or reviews on them are surging. the ones that are like crashing and burning are all the directory sites that were very generic uh and that don't have any type of userenerated content. And I think awards is interesting because it's not really user generated but it is different site to site right so if you

5:38win an award on one site that is enough difference to to make your directory do well. So, they're one that I've been paying attention to um and like getting clients listed on and it's crazy to see how many times the LLM will site, you know, awards that you've won from some of these other sites. Um the negative is that Best Law Firms has realized this and they just like tripled their prices. Uh which is nuts. So, I'm like, "Kill me now." Like, it's actually

6:05ridiculous how much they're charging. Um, so I'm now going back to like, okay, do I want like what's the [laughter] what's the minimum that you have to pay them to get the, you know, thing that you need in order for the LM to site you. But, um, that is definitely something that has changed in the last year due to like the AI local packs that we're seeing on Google, um, which are still not there consistently, but when

6:29they are, they they cite those things. This method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept using it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords landing page is only 415 words. Compact

7:04Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer said, "We spent nearly 18,000 in the last year and a half on marketing and SEO through different agencies locally, and that did nothing. We decided to take the leap on the compact keywords course. We're now getting about 6 to eight calls per day on a good day, which is just unheard of." Another customer said, "Give it to a junior employee. have them follow it exactly as Edwards laid out. You don't have to do anything and you're going to gain a six-f figureure SEO level employee just by having them go through this course. Compact Keywords is about

7:38setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. I was looking at best law firms on HRS. It is crazy. like you're saying. Um, how does So, how does it work? You pay for a citation on best law firms and then it looks like you are one of the best law firms just because

8:04you have a page on best law firms. Yeah. So, this is the thing that kills me. All right. So, I've been tracking like the whole self-promoting listical trend. Uh, so I've been following a lot of like what Lily Ray is seeing on that. And I I will say that if again, if you asked six months ago, I would have been sent this is like whatever. Just do whatever you need to. I am seeing sites get nailed for it. So, I'm seeing local businesses that had done too many of these get nailed, uh, you know, just constantly saying that they're the best, which is so frustrating because what is

8:32your alternative? To pay somebody else to say that you're the best, which is basically now what we're saying. And like in Google's perfect world where they just automatically know who's the best. Yeah, that doesn't that doesn't happen. Um, I understand how that's the ideal, but I just think it's so frustrating that now the option is like you got to go pay for it. So, I'm I'm sure they have scrutiny. Like, you can't just go win an award um by paying. They have like a process. But, I mean,

9:00really, it's the people that are paying. Like, let's be honest. [laughter] I'm I'm just like, wow, what a crazy business model for best law firms. You you like it because that can be done across any industry. Yeah. And I will say there there's criteria. I don't want to like I don't think they're scamming anybody in the sense that like I don't think they're you can win the award if you aren't like

9:21I don't know what their criteria is. Do you win an award or do you just have a page on their like a profile page on their site that you pay for? I mean you get a badge, you can put it on your site, all this stuff, but and it literally just looks like but it looks like you are a best law firm, a best-in-class law firm, but really you just have a profile page on best law

9:41firms. Yeah, it's it's I don't [snorts] know. I don't know how they get around some of the the stuff with it. Certainly not an industry I want to get into. I've thought of some people have been like, "Oh, you should start your own site." And I'm like, "I don't know." Like, that's that's kind of gray territory when you're starting to recommend all your clients and like I don't know what the FTC would have to say about that. I don't want to find out. So, not an area I want to get into, but certainly there are sites like in Canada, there's a few uh we have a lawn care client that wins

10:07them every year, but he has to pay to get the badges. So, it's like he's a good company. He deserves to win, but it has a cost, right? And now those badges, my god, he is everywhere. Like this guy just dominates everything um all over LLMs like and all over Google. And it's, you know, he's he's going to be hard to contend with because he's got so many

10:28a lawn care client. Mhm. What is what is this what is this client doing so well that's working so well with LLMs? So he he wins a lot of these awards as well. He's just been doing it for like 10 years. So he wins like Consumer's Choice Award. Uh there's a company in Canada called Homestars, which is specifically a Homestars home service directory. Um and they have they're like Yelp. They have like a really big footprint here and they they do really

10:51well. So he wins their badge every year. And I think there's a third one. I can't remember what site it is, but there's a third award that he wins every year. So he's got like 10 years of winning all these awards. Uh and it's all about like the SEO part of it is always making sure that you put them on the site prominently so that the LMS can find them. So you're just winning the award alone is not enough. You have to promote it. You have to make sure it's like

11:11super easy like tell the world about it. Um that that's where I think marketing and SEO comes in because we take the like he wasn't anywhere before he started working with us but we took a good business that had all the stuff and made sure you know Google LLM's whatever can find it. So he's actually winning awards or he's getting listed on I'm trying to I'm trying to understand. I'm really

11:34confused. I mean go to Homestars. I don't want to speak on behalf of these sites. Go to best law firms. Go to Homestars. Go to consumer choice awards. like look up their methodology. Like I don't I don't want to misquote it cuz I've never really dug deep into it, but I will tell you all of them have fees. To get the badge, even the Better Business Bureau, to get their badge, you have to pay a

11:49fee. They do have a vetting process. They have to pay their staff. I get it. But also, I'm like, uh, like, yeah, I I have mixed feelings about it. I also want to know how I like I'm going to dig into this after because I want to know what Best Law Firms did to grow like this. They're they're at I think like Yeah. around 60,000 clicks a month and they've just been going up and up and up. I'm so curious what they've been

12:12doing. I don't know if you look. No, I think it's just the type of content Google's rewarding, right? The more niche you are uh they really do like awards. That is a pattern that we're seeing and like more than you know what it is because everyone's going to link to them. You get on best law firms and then you have to you put you have to put this on your site and then Yeah, reviews are an interesting one because I am starting to see that reviews were always the thing in the local pack that if you don't have reviews, you need volume, you need frequency, you need those two things. If

12:44you don't have those, you can't rank no matter what you do. Like I've seen businesses that have all the best SEO in the world, if they don't have those two things, they will not rank. That is not necessarily true with AI powered local packs. I am seeing lots of different businesses who are not the leaders when it comes to those two things. So, it is an interesting world. I I kind of like that it's not just that one single factor so heavily weighted. Um, but it's the first time where I think actually reviews have taken a hit um in

13:12importance. Caleb, what what are you seeing? Yeah. Um, so when we looked at at reviews, um, um, it's really a lot less of a focus, especially when we look at the LLMs, a lot less of a focus on the GBP specific reviews and more of a focus on diverse platforms, especially for some reason Yelp when when we're looking

13:40at the Gemini recommended businesses. Like Gemini just freaking loves Yelp. Like if you have good reviews on Yelp, like you're looking really good for Gemini. Um, and the re the LLMs are doing a much better job actually reading the reviews and matching what people are saying in reviews to what the searcher's request actually is, which is a big deal because most of the time when a business is asking for reviews, they just say, "Hey, were you happy? Can you leave a review?" And the most common review is

14:11five stars, great service or something. So for our clients, we've started coaching them to ask for more specific reviews. Obviously, Google says you can't ask for the person's name or for the actual service. So we just say like, hey, could um could you leave a review and tell about your experience and what the outcome was instead of just, hey, could you leave a review? Uh and whereas before, and I say before the Helion days of like 18 months ago, uh all of the requests were leave a GBP review, leave a GBP review, that was it. Now it's just like sometimes GBP, sometimes Yelp, sometimes Facebook, just trying to build

14:48that diversified portfolio. Yeah, cuz even like obviously ChatGpt, Claude, some of the other LLMs, this isn't a surprise that they don't just rely on GBP reviews, but it is kind of a surprise to me that Gemini doesn't just rely on GBP reviews. Yeah, I see Yelp everywhere in the AI local pack site citations. So like usually when there is a AI powered um local pack, it it displaces the general local pack. Um, and we see Yelp getting

15:19cited more than any other site. And ChatGpt, OpenAI, I guess, just signed some uh agreement with Yelp to better share data. So, I mean, I know a lot I've talked to a lot of local businesses and they often don't have amazing things to say about Yelp. Um, but regardless, uh, you know, it does seem that that's becoming a more

15:44important source for local businesses. Yeah, I think it's the same thing as Reddit. Yelp is one of the only places on the internet that has uh genuinely human content, right? So, I mean, I say that and Reddit is a cesspool, but uh historically speaking, Reddit is so strict and I mean, they are literally

16:01cracking down in the last few weeks. Like, it's insane how many accounts are getting banned. Um I moderate several subreddits and like the amount of posts where I'll go to click and the post is already gone, like Reddit already deleted it. So, they have a really really um big stance on fighting spam and fighting AI and fake content. And Yelp is in the same boat. Yelp is like they want their power users. They want people they trust. Their their systems are way harsher than Google's at

16:28detecting fake reviews and way better. Like you're very unlikely to see a fake review on Yelp. It is very hard to buy reviews on Yelp. And what's interesting about Yelp on top of that, right, is because there's such a focus on Google reviews for the past whatever couple decades, um, the not many business owners were actively seeking Yelp reviews. So if a business actually has a strong positive review profile because as we know like somebody with a negative experience is so much more likely to go and leave a negative review on every single platform they can find. So, if you have a good review portfolio on Yelp, I mean, you probably

17:11treat your customers really well because that's hard to do without constantly asking for reviews. The frustrating thing is it's against Yelp's terms of service to ask for reviews. I find that the stupidest thing ever. So, if they catch you, they actually have like a badge of shame. They'll give you if if it gets extreme where they think you're actually like paying or incentivizing for reviews, not only will they give you the badge of shame, they actually like uh knock your ranking. I've only ever talked to one business who had this happen, but like basically they didn't rank well in Yelp anymore because they got caught buying

17:44reviews or doing something with reviews. I don't know if they were buying them or just giving incentives for the customers. Um but we I wrote a whole piece about it on our blog and like yeah, it's they're harsh. So that's where I'm like I don't know. Even Google has started like I' I've seen it before when you leave a review on Google. They started to ask like were you incentivized to leave this review? I I can't imagine it would go well for the business if a bunch of people said yes

18:09to that question. Yeah, Google's a joke though. Like they they do have a badge, but it lasts for 30 days and then you're fine. Like ooh, like that's hardly a penalty. Uh I wish their algorithmic penalties were like that. God, like that would be awesome. Like when I think about the difference between the two, the the local pack has the most lenience for spam. Like it's

18:29insane. What do you think the biggest local Oh, sorry. What were we saying? No, no, I was going to say more about that. That sounds interesting. Spam. Oh my gosh. Like, you know, they gotten better with video verification, but even listening to like Edward, one of the podcasts you had on where the guy was talking about Yeah. sounds like I I had words, but like there are there's a network right now um in an industry that I work in a lot which is the garage door repair space and like they are creating fake listings like crazy. I have a client where they are literally creating listings using my client's

19:03name, business name, like this is illegal to be clear and sending it somewhere else. And I've seen this in the insurance industry as well. I've seen people do it to big brands like Progressive and All State and State Farm. I'm like you're insane. But I don't know how they haven't been sued to the nines, but people do this. And there is a big network right now. It's full of like fake listings, fake reviews. Google will take them down. They just put up 10

19:26more tomorrow. Like it's actually nuts. So, I do think that uh it's been pretty good for the last couple years in the sense of like less of that, but there's obviously new loopholes that people have discovered and they're working really well right now. And it's so frustrating for real businesses. And I'll just put this out there. I'm not a fan of the rank and rent model for local search because those are literally listings that outrank my clients and so we do everything we can to get rid of them when we find them. Like they're not supposed to be there and they I I have a really I have a really hard time

19:57wrapping my brain around the model where you are um paying for a listing that is competing with you and like you're like I don't know it's it's tough. Yeah. No. So, and you So, it is good with So, I remember back in the 10 years ago, we used to complain about how hard it was to get GBP listings verified. And now you look back and like what was I complaining about? Um, it it does feel that I don't know how how am I trying to phrase this? Google gives such bad advice to small businesses. Uh like the biggest one that I always come comes to mind like so the video verification is

20:41challenging for like a real local business owner like if they have an actual local business they have a license they're actually located there it can be quite challenging to get video verified uh I mean without knowing the right process without knowing the right steps and all of that but I think the the biggest issue that I have is if you go to create a business listing Google says like hey do you serve customers at this address and if you say no then Google says oh well you should create a service area business and then Google penalizes you for creating a service area business but you told me to create

21:15a service area business Google why are you then penalizing it like it's so frustrating that they penalize and they make real local business owners jump through hoops but then yeah a dozen rank and rent fake listings fake yeah I I agree Joy yeah this is the thing you can't trust Google to uh give you the best advice when it comes to ranking, right? I mean,

21:37they'll also tell you uh this is funny. They have like technically their guidelines on hours. You're supposed to have somebody available to go out to service at that exact hour. So, like we got some details on them like what is the exact rule? So, if I say I'm open at 2 a.m., let's just say I have to be able to dispatch, you know, an emergency plumber at 2 a.m. technically speaking

21:56to meet Google's guidelines. Okay? Nobody does that. Okay? Literally, nobody is going to dispatch a plumber at 2 a.m., but lots of plumbers list themselves as open 24/7 because they do have people answering the phones at 2 a.m., but technically that's not within Google's guidelines. Do you think Google can enforce that? Like, no. So, there's lots of things where they'll tell you, don't list yourself as 2 a.m., uh, but by the way, we also won't enforce this. Can't really enforce this, but you should listen to

22:24us. And then if you mark yourself as closed, you don't rank in the top three and you don't get the call. Exactly. So, what would you rather do? Yeah, I know. Like, you got to pick and choose because I'm always like when it comes to following Google's guidance, it's all about risk versus reward. And I think there's a lot of guidelines that they have on the organic side with traditional SEO where there are serious risks. And so, you ignore their guidelines, they will screw you, like if you get caught. So, I think that's definitely true. That's less true for Google business profiles. It's always been um probably great to be a spammer

22:55to be honest because they're pretty lenient and not the model I want to do, but I see that they win pretty easily. If you're fine with constantly creating new stuff and having your stuff taken down that that rat race chase, then like it can really work. But they have not made a ton of progress um on fake reviews um based on what I think they're

23:15capable of. I'm at least happy that they stopped letting competitors move your location pin. Yeah, that was that was a revelation when they stop that. Yeah, there's a lot they need to improve on, but like it's a it's a matter of like it's a business thing, right? They have to have they have to pay people and resources. So, it's like how does this make them money? When I think about fake reviews, how does removing fake reviews

23:39make Google money? What what loopholes with Google business profile are working just exceptionally well right now that you don't think will be working by the end of 2027? Oh man, I have to think about that one. Loopholes. So the hours thing um I think has worked a little less than it used to because everybody's doing it. So So for example, if you're the only insurance company that lists yourselves as open 24 hours, then you definitely have a huge boost because you will rank all the time when your competitors are closed and you have that preference. I think as more people have adapted their hours strategy, it's been less effective. Um,

24:19the other one that I I might and I put might this a big asterisk might work less is keyword stuffing your business name has always been like a massive say that yes that is so frustrating to me like why does that work? It's been working for 20 years. Like literally as long as I've been in the industry, it has worked. This is how I actually got started. Before there were even guidelines, I just used to throw every keyword possible in my client's business names and they would rank the next day. And this was like way before there was guidelines. So, and there was no penalties or no suspensions back

24:48then, like it was a, you know, brand new world. Um, but that's always worked. But what I'm noticing with some of the LLM listings, like the people that the AI overviews put in instead of the the three-pack, they're not the keyword-rich businesses. So, I am wondering with the LLM world if that is going to matter less. I don't know. I don't have hard data on it yet, but I'm just for some of the really competitive markets, especially for personal injury lawyers, where everyone's doing it, and all of a sudden the LLMs are showing different law firms, like ones that are not doing

25:22the whole keyword-rich business names. I'm like, "Oh, this is interesting." So, that could be a trend that could die if if AI local packs actually roll out, which they're still at like 10% of the search results in the United States, so they've not rolled out. Like, it's not everywhere. So, it's a big if.

25:44Hey, that's an adorable dog. Look at us. He is. Thank you. What's what's the biggest local SEO opportunity that most businesses are missing right now where like I mean you guys interact with so both of you interact with so many local businesses all the time and there's probably a consistent thing that you see a lot of them just not doing that it's like the first thing that you

26:10that you implement. So I have two that are kind of neither of them would probably be classified as local SEO but they both really really matter. Uh, one is, uh, one thing that AI has done for us is make it super easy to update like the layout of your site. So, you can literally redo your entire

26:28homepage with Claude in under an hour. Like, if for me to do a facelift on a website uh, 5 years ago would have taken a lot of time and a lot of resources, more than most small businesses are willing to spend. But we've done this on lots of clients uh where we have like literally just changed their homepage, maybe not even the home the entire site and made it like way better from a conversion standpoint. So like make it pretty cuz most small business sites look like they were built in the '9s and they're they're ugly. Um so make it

26:56pretty, make it actually convert better. And what it's done to their conversion rates is quite outstanding. Like especially with ads where you can really measure the actual dollar amount, like it's wild. Um, so we did this for an electrician and I like their I think their return on ad spend like tripled. Like it was crazy the the return that they got within a short time frame. Um, so I'd say that's something that I think a lot of businesses are sleeping on because the barrier to that is not what it used to be. And then ads is another big one. Like I've never pushed ads so much in my life as I have in the last

27:27year because the search results on in local have strongly shifted towards paytoplay which is where I'm not sure how AI is going to fit into that because there's no ads in any of the AI features yet um that I've seen for any local SERs but provided the AI is not there. Um the features that the ads get they're huge they're noticeable they are like doing really well performance-wise. So, we've been like doing lots of testing on like the huge image carousels that Google has been um putting in there. Another thing where it's like businesses typically

27:58have terrible images. Well, guess what? Now we have AI. You can make their terrible images look good. So, I've made some of my cranky lawyer clients actually smile. And I'm like, imagine like that actually helps their ads perform better than when they're smiling. Like, but they never smile. So, that's an area where I think AI can really help. um like looking at some of

28:18those those five. So it looks so so you have a real image and all you do is you change it to a smile because Yeah. But it's and so it still looks like a real image because all you're really changing is one small part of it. 100%. Like you can make you can just do like little touch-ups. Again that would have taken hours with Photoshop, you know, years ago. Um you can easily do it like very fast and quickly and efficiently. And I mean people do it with my face all the time in our YouTube videos. Drives me nuts. Like I can tell you I half those faces I did not make in

28:46real life. So yeah, I was looking at your thumbnails the other day. But I do I do the same thing. I do the same thing. So I I've met people say, "Edward, why do you make the most cringed thumbnails ever?" They get That's what that's what works. They get clicks. Yeah. [laughter] Exactly. It's true for for photos and Google ads, too. I'll tell you. Like you got to do

29:05what gets clicked. A lot of people are wondering like how do they how do I use a AI content on my site? like how do I do AI images? How do I and and so you're I guess like a good question was like with those landing pages, what was the before and after like why was it so bad before? Why was it so good after? Yeah, just placement of the buttons, like making sure that the buttons are big, that the colors are are different, and um like it's it's wild how ugly a lot of sites look, but like literally just making buttons bigger, better colors, making coupons uh

29:41coupons shockingly work well, especially in like home services. So, making the coupon front and center. So, like nothing really new. This is all stuff that like has always been true, but it's been difficult to do for small businesses due to budget restraints. they usually don't want to redesign their whole site and they don't want to spend another 10 grand or whatever it

29:59costs to get a decent company to do it. Um, and this is something that you can do really easily. We're not doing web design projects. We're just doing it as a part of like their SEO retainer. It's just for the homepage. That's what we've been starting with. Um, because it's easy. Uh, again, doesn't it doesn't involve rebuilding the entire theme. Um, so you can again Claude can write you a whole new like page and it's code but it you can literally put it in and it'll look how

30:27you want it to look. So Claude is very good at HTML. Yeah. Mhm. So if it's WordPress, you'll just copy the code and and just like paste it in. So it's you're not actually Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. You're not rebuilding the entire theme. So like the the obviously the con to that is you just made the thing way harder to edit in the future. um you know, for somebody that likes a visual editor and um that's that's the negative. So, I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons right now. We're doing a lot of tests on this because it just worked so well for ads. Now, we're

30:58looking and we're trying this on like clients who don't have ads and we're like, "Okay, how much does this improve their conversion rate on their Google business profile? I'm hoping to have results from some of those tests in a few months, but um I expect that it's going to have pretty dramatic impacts on their conversion rates there as well as the ads from from an editing standpoint. Like literally, you can just take the HTML, give it to Claude, and then tell Claude what you want to edit, and then it gives you new HTML to paste in. So, I mean, yes, you don't have the visual editor, but it's still not a giant

31:29barrier. Exactly. This is what I'm saying. Like, it's it's not what it used to be. This is where I'm like AI is is great. Caleb, are you doing what to what level are you doing AI content? So, I can't remember the last time we posted human written content on a client's website like I mean I don't you know the AI written content, right? So, we started and I'm I'm sure you you you guys saw this also in May when Google started mass indexing all this AI slop. This was fabulous news. Like really excited about this. Um because right we I somebody asked me something like hey you know I'm

32:15going to my competitor's websites. I'm grabbing all their content. I'm giving it to ChatGpt and saying write this rewrite this content for me and it's not working. I mean of course it's not working. That shouldn't work. And we should be happy that that doesn't work unlike keyword stuffing your business name which actually does still work. But so using AI to write content what what I have seen in my experience would love to hear your thoughts on it Joy. But what I have seen that works is if we produce content that is different uh has more information that the other ranking sites don't have on there. So when we use AI,

32:53we can do just an insane amount of research that we just wouldn't be able to do uh with a human copywriter. So, we can pull Reddit data, we can pull US Census Bureau data, we can pull uh Facebook form information, and we can figure out what are people actually asking about in this micro neighborhood,

33:14micro area about this actual service. And then we can write content that addresses what people are actually asking about, what the demographics of that specific neighborhood are with the Census Bureau data. uh if we have search console data, we can see what attributes is Google indexing this website for in this specific area. We can work those attributes into the content. Like all of these things we could do without AI, but not legitimately at scale. Like so when we write AI content, we'll often I'll often start with one of my human copywriters and I'll just say, you know, write this article for me. uh write it as well as you can, take five hours,

33:57like make it as good as you possibly can, and then we'll use that to build the prompting sequence to try to get AI to be able to write something close to that level of quality, but in a series of prompts instead of 4 hours of somebody's time. So, we do it a little differently. We used to handwrite L content like years ago. So, we certainly don't do that anymore. We interview our clients, get it in a transcript, and then we feed that to a tool that I had my colleague Noah Learner build um that you built on Claude, but it uses what the client said and it summarizes that and puts it all

34:34into like a good format. Um, what I've found uh over the last two years is that content that your competitors have is the worst usual way to go about content because if Google already has it and they have 5,000 copies of it and you give them copy number 501, your copy is going to sometimes index, sometimes not, but it's not going to perform well. So, um, we've been really heavily, um, pushing like stories, uh, you know, like give me a client experience. Give me what happened in this case. Tell me all the details. The more details the

35:06better. The more specific the better. Like, if you're doing a home um, remodel, like tell me what type of bathtub it was, like tell me the dimensions, tell me the cost, tell me the time, tell me everything. Um, the more numbers and details you can get, the better. Um but we are like we we used to use chat GBT to summarize transcripts and the tool that we use now um that we built is so much better. Chat

35:29it it outperformed chat GBT like crazy. Um so I do think it's one of those things that like the more detailed and the more information the better. Um but it certainly isn't like sit sitting down and writing as a human anymore. Um, so I agree with you there, but I I don't use AI to um like completely write from scratch. It always has to first come

35:50from like something somebody said. Yeah. And no, completely completely agree. Like that's the the big focus that we're doing now is building an interview tool uh for clients that will basically ask that cuz you know well obviously we would send clients onboarding forms and they would fill out the onboarding form and you know you send a client a 20page on onboarding form and you get like 500 words back cuz

36:14they just don't want to type it all out. But if you can get them on the phone and have a conversation with them, you can pull out so many more details, so much more nuance. And yeah, 100% that client conversation is one of the many data sources that we feed the AI on the

36:30research phase. Yeah, 100% agree. Yeah. The thing that we're seeing, go sorry. I was going to say the the word that I'm the caution that I'll give people that I'm seeing a lot of is like scaling using AI. So you have a pattern that works and so then you create 50 to 100 pages on that same pattern. That's a

36:52death trap. Don't do that. Yeah. We'll typically limit it to like 10 to 15 pages a month just because more like more content is not a competitive advantage in a world where right you can connect claude to WordPress and have a 100,000 pages overnight if that's what you wanted. for for unique content for a multilocation company. How much website content needs to be unique between

37:21locations? Why would it not be all of it? I mean, why why are you repeating content with AI able to write unique content? Oo, okay. So, I I would I would vote for not having unique content because it doesn't matter. um like if you're a multilocation pest control business, let's say for example, you're going to want all of your location pages to mention what types of bugs you deal with, right? So trying to reward that 500 times, what would end up happening is you'll actually end up getting rid of um all the semantic relevance because you'll be rewarding things to the point where Google doesn't actually understand

37:57it. So, we did some testing around this where we actually made them the same that we took [clears throat] pages that were literally rewritten for that reason, made them the same, and they performed better um because we kept the the words the same. The thing you don't want is you don't want um like it's different for locations where Google has foot traffic and address, reviews, photos, etc. There's enough that's different. And I think Google can tell the difference between a location page and a service area page. Service area pages are becoming more of a liability these days the more that you have. Um because I am starting to finally see

38:33Lily Ray said that she's been seeing sites get nailed for this for a couple years. I have not. I have this year or like citygate pages type content. Yep. I've seen some completely agree on that. Quite a few. I think about 25% of the the the businesses that we are getting lately for that are coming to us with um for audits are getting hit by some type of core update in the last

38:54year. Yeah. Which is consistent, right? Like last summer, Google rolled out the update and they basically came out and said citygate pages are spam. You shouldn't be doing them. Uh but yeah, so when we have a multilocation business and uh we we we have a concept we call it the core 30 where basically we build a page for every category and every service that's on the GBP and then we link them together that matches the same structure that the GBP has. We'll build that structure for every single location that they have. We'll just make the

39:25content unique to that location, right? So, you know, even if there's two locations in Chicago, one near the Willis Tower and one near, you know, Wrigley Field, Wrigleyville, we'll write them in such a way like why is this service different near the Willis Tower versus why is this different in Wrigleyville, so that it is hitting those local aspects of it. It's

39:49different, but unique to those areas. So, I have I have a unique take on what to do when you have multiple locations in the same city. I actually don't think you should have different location pages, which I've had to fight with a lot of big brands on this because they're like, "What? That's crazy." I'm like, "No, you're literally competing them all." So, let's say you are State Farm Insurance and you have 60 State Farm agents in Chicago. The two terms that you're going to be really caring about are State Farm Chicago and State Farm auto insurance, let's say, for example. Um, every single agent um will

40:20have exactly the same page. They're all competing for those exact same terms. People don't search neighborhoods, not for a lot of things. They do for certain categories, but for a lot of the service based businesses, they don't. So, you're all competing and what you end up is like one winner. Most of them get filtered out um maybe two winners depending on the search result, but I remember I used to track like the SERs for like State Farm and All State back when I used to work a lot with insurance agents um at my old agency and like it was wild to see how many of them

40:48actually got to rank and how many of them didn't. So what we what we tried a couple years ago with one of our clients was actually combining them all into one page. So having one Chicago page where it lists all your locations in Chicago, that page ranked way better um organically and there was no negative impact at all to

41:05their local back rankings. [snorts] Yeah. Interesting. You're always doing a lot of awesome tests. when the first time you came in the show, you were talking about uh you were doing a bunch of tests with press releases and [clears throat] do actually do you remember the results from that advice on that has changed in the last year too. It's actually that's one of the things I was talking um to a few different SEOs about this recently cuz I was like are you guys seeing press releases not work as well? And I I kind of predicted that this was going to happen. I don't know if I said it on

41:36your show but like like these are way too easy. Like there's no way this is going to work this well forever. I told my staff that in a meeting. I'm like this is stupid. like especially how well they influenced LLMs. We would like put send out a press release and like within a week all of a sudden like things in the press release would be getting quoted in the LMS and like you know you could send out a press release saying Edward Storm's the best uh SEO on the planet and I could get that cited on

41:59Google you know and you'd rank for that. That doesn't work anymore. Like as of the last like 6 months I'd have to say like press releases have gone downhill quite a bit. Um, and I don't I can't pinpoint when something like I don't know which core update it it um happened with, but like definitely not seeing the results I saw last year. And I'm not

42:19surprised at all. Yeah. I mean, similar to the hours that we talked about before, right? When everyone starts doing it, it starts to become less impactful. Yeah. And I don't know if everybody started doing it. I think it's more like Google's hitting the networks. That's my current theory. Like I think that Google realizes that these networks, the sites and places that they're posted are just marketing companies and they're not really great content. So that's what I believe is happening. Um, but I haven't looked into it enough to know. Like you could tell I could do a deep dive into like all the sites to see if they're

42:51getting uh slammed. But uh definitely that that has changed quite a bit in the last year since I came on Edward because I think when we came on we were we were like, "Holy crap, this is working way better than we anticipated. I didn't expect this." It was like kind of surprising. [laughter] And I'm not surprised it didn't last, but yeah, it's definitely not what it

43:07was a year ago. Yeah. And the last time you were on the show, you you said that exact match anchor text is getting hit and it's just like it it Google's way less lenient now with exact match anchor text. I don't know if that's still the case. 100%. Yeah, they are ridiculously strict. Um it to the point where I'm like I think somebody laughed at me and in the comments of your video because I was like, we don't even do I I don't

43:29suggest going after like more than five. Like I don't know what the threshold is or the limit is. I just it keeps getting lower and lower and I can't I can't like sleep knowing that like something I did caused a penalty. So [laughter] like I just I don't know. There's so many other things you can do that don't have that risk attached to it that I'm of the in the camp that's like just do those things. Like you don't have to do link building at especially at scale. It's

43:54becoming such a liability. Actually, I wanted to ask both of you for your favorite link building tactics. Like what? Yeah. You know what? What's not working anymore? What are businesses wasting time on? And then and then what should they be doing? So for local businesses, link building, the biggest thing that we've seen work really well is to find like local organizations that need support and then support them like uh youth sports leagues, uh charities, events that are looking for sponsorships. They're usually a few hundred bucks. You get a link back to your business website thanking you. Maybe you get a plaque in your waiting room or something like

44:39that. Those work really well to build local authority for local businesses. So, I would have to say uh what I said earlier, award sites, right? Like every local uh place usually has them. So, you know, you want to be the best and you want to be on the best of Chicago lists. You want to be on all those sites. If you're in Chicago, you want to be in the best of Illinois lists if there's, you know, or if if you're a lawyer, you want to be on best law firms. Just maybe don't pay $15,000 a year. So, it's like trying to get on all of those. Uh, and

45:08there's lots of them out there. That's probably the number one that I would say right now. And the one that I would completely not do at all if you're still doing it is guest posting, which there are still a lot of SEO agencies that are doing this, but oh my god, those sites just continue to get nailed. Yeah. And those those links, Joy, those

45:27are do follows. Mhm. You're talking about the award links or the guest posts? The award links, I believe. So, um I don't even think it matters though. Again, like for a lot of what we're seeing them um get used for, again, it's like you get the award, then you want to blast it out that you got the award. Like, put it everywhere. And like that associates your brand with all the words like, oh, you know, you're the best. You're you're the the one to go for. That's what you're going for. I think it matters a lot more than the links. So, it's a little different than

45:55our traditional way of like looking at the link, seeing if it's followed, seeing if there's anchor text, which all for the record still work. It's just the moment you start overdoing it, um, it's now a negative signal, not a positive signal. What level are is link building even like overdone for local businesses? I had, uh, Jake Hundley on the podcast the first time. He's been on many times now, but the first time he was on, he's like he's like, "We don't even build links for for our clients and our clients are ranking for their target terms." He's like, "All we do is submit them to Google Search Console." I'm like,

46:26"Really? That like that's it?" He's like, "That's it." Oh, in lawn care you don't you don't need So I will say it varies based on the industry. If you're a lawyer, you you you have to have links, but I think uh like the the latest site I looked at that got hit with the June core update. Um they weren't getting a stupid amount. Like I think their SEO agency wasn't even

46:46building more than like five a month. Like they weren't getting a high high volume. Um and so it's it's hard to say that the exact number because it keeps lowering. like I think what you used to be able to get away with years ago. Um it's hard to put a number on it, but uh I wouldn't do any type of regular um link building, especially if it's like uh guest posting sites is is the number one that um I wouldn't do at all

47:11anymore. Yeah. You know what I bet it is? I bet like it's it it it's all relative to like to the just the amount of like links that are natural for any website and that's going to change with time especially especially that like less people have niche blogs now more people have Instagrams and YouTubes so so if if someone is is building links like it's 10 years ago that's going to seem unnatural relative to how any other

47:45website receives natural backlinks. And it's it's it's likely that that websites require as many links as they used to. And I think that like Google's just gotten smarter also at knowing what types of sites like are what. So like a lot of these guest posting sites, like I look at them and I'm like just look at the sites they're linking to. They're like casinos and like you know drugs and things. like there's no way that uh you as a a you know home service business should be listed on this site. Like it's [laughter] not it's not a good site. But these are the the the biggest reason why

48:19SEO companies do these is because you can sell them at scale, right? You can you can get somebody five links a month when you just post them on these sites that exist for SEO purposes and it'll work like magic at first. That's the other reason why people do it because my goodness, you get a bunch of like anchored like links or even if they're not anchored, you get like a whole bunch of them, you will skyrocket and the highs are wonderful. It's just a like cliff effect. It's not something I would

48:45suggest. How often do you do both of you have uh people come to you and and they're like um they want to work with you because they were getting a ton of organic traffic before and things just have slowly gotten worse and worse and worse. I mean that's most sites, right? I I would say almost every site's organic

49:09traffic is down compared to years ago. there's like any type offormational um blogs, things like that, like they're they're not getting the traffic that they were getting two years ago. So, when when these clients come to you, what what are the first things that you look at? Yeah. So, I'm a big fan of the way that you, you know, approach keywords like uh going afterformational keywords is way harder than it used to be. So, we definitely see that. I think um like the devil's in the details. So, you know, if you I I I work with I work on a lot of lawyer accounts, so it's I keep coming

49:43back to lawyer examples, but I can't get over like how many specific keywords and things people search on like their injuries. Like, it's actually wild how many different surgeries there are. Let me tell you, I'm like terrified to drive after working on all these uh personal injury sites because it's like the number of things that can happen to you, the number of bones that can break, the number the number of muscle sprains that

50:04I didn't even know was like a thing. like um but all those details people search right so it's like well I have a case with this this this and this or I got hit by you know a car and this this this and this happened and um those types of content do really well. So, it's just a matter of making sure that like the content that you are putting out there um is actually one that you stand a shot of ranking for doesn't have

50:30a million copies of the like it's hard. The formula is hard. I don't think it's easy. Like you can't just go um open up a keyword tool, type in personal injury lawyer and expect that you're going to get any good ideas cuz you will not. So, I do think that like coming up with a content plan is harder than it used to be. And I would say as an SEO, we get more confident with it the more we work with a particular industry. So that is a huge plus. If you're working on a single site, you only have your site to look at and then the tools online. But if you

50:59have like hundreds of websites or thousands of websites, that's a much better data set um to make better decisions when it comes to like what to write about. We usually start by looking at the local rank map. like what what does their local rank map look like and we use that as a guide for what do they need to build that local relevance topical relevance the worst case scenario and this is generally you know Joey you keep mentioning attorneys generally we only see this with attorneys where they'll come to us and they'll have like 800 pages indexed by Google and they'll be ranked 20 plus in their lobby for their

51:39primary category um that is usually a sign that Google just hates their website that it's full of issues, spam for lack of a better word. So, for a client like that, we'll usually uh burn a lot of it down and and try to start over and and rebuild. Uh you know, audit what they have, remove things, especially if Google is calling it crawl not indexed. Uh those get deleted, uh removed. uh we try to repurpose existing content, merge, prune, try to build something like the core 30 structure and then build supporting content for topical relevance on specific topics that they're trying to rank for. Um a

52:20lot of you know what Joy was talking about finding those right topics. You know, 3 years ago it was super easy. You could just use all the people also ask questions on Google and you'd be you'd be set. That's all you ever had to worry about. uh that doesn't work anymore the same way. So we have to be a lot more diligent at trying to find like what are those attributes? What are specifically people searching for? Uh, one of our favorite sources for established websites is the search console because we can get an idea of, you know, what, you know, I I don't care if their rank

52:56position is 50 or 80, but I want to see like, hey, what attributes is Google already indexing this URL, this website for, and then we can write more content about those attributes, what makes those interesting, different, etc. But yeah, it's it is more complex than it than it than it was. Um, yeah, back when all you had to do was write content answering all the people also ask questions and you were golden. You're going to rank on

53:23top. Yeah, I have a lot of people coming to me too with this issue, which is why I asked you like um in fact I make a lot of money from people just like paying for my uh the the calendar that I have on my site and and and it's a lot of a lot of it is people who were doing really well and they were doing really well 5 years ago and things have just slowly gone down and down and down. And one of the most common things that I see is if you look at like if you look at their organic traffic graph, it looks a

53:57lot like maybe WP Beginner or it'll look a lot like HubSpot. And it it's either it's like they are they've expanded way outside their topical authority or uh they have just completely missed search intent as Google's figured out what searchers are looking for more. don't like they had like these crazy skyscraper technique articles with a ton of fluff and like searchers don't want that and searchers are coming to these pages and then they're they're like this isn't what I want and and then when they finally get their answer on the pages it's like a thin answer and they go back to the results and like these techniques

54:39used to work really well I think a lot of it is like techniques that work that worked really well a couple years ago that shouldn't have worked like these techniques shouldn't have worked. Searchers didn't want it, but it was working and people people went hard with it. And like that's something. Yeah, I see that. I see that all the time. We were talking about that earlier on in the podcast with these like loopholes that people are doing and then they're and then they're going to come to you guys saying like they're going to come to you guys in in in a year and a half because

55:11like things have completely fallen off a cliff with their local businesses cuz they were going way too hard with these loopholes when they should have been doing like the white hat optimizations. It's funny, Joy, you talked about optimizing the GBP landing page, and that's obviously one of the first things we look at with a business, and you know, the first content uh that a local business has on their GBP landing page, like 80% of the time, it's a short history lesson on their own business, when it was founded, where their grandfather came from. And it's just like look, when somebody is typing plumber Houston into Google, they're not

55:50typing that in because they're interested in the history of local plumbers, right? So it has to be matching searcher intent. You need to talk about what makes, you know, your USP, why you, why now, what what makes you the plumber to call. And it's not because you have a hundredyear history and your grandfather was a pipe fitter

56:09in Italy or something like that, right? Uh but yeah like that type of content used to work like it used to build trust but like it just yeah don't start with a history lesson. The question is did it did it even like is it that it worked or was it that just like it it worked but like was it even ideal when it was working and I would even say that it wasn't ideal because that's not going to match search intent

56:30like to your point. Yeah. What actually um yeah, with Google Business Profile, what are the most lowhanging fruit optimizations that people should be making? Well, to to kind of add on to what Caleb is saying, like you're whatever page you send um people to your GBP landing page, like the Google business profile links to that page, you need to make sure that page has everything relevant that you want to rank for. Um and that's often something that a lot of people don't have. like they'll have a couple of their services listed, but they don't list them all. And then, you know, each of those services need to link to the to

57:06the page or whatever about that service. So, that is one thing that really can move the needle quickly um is just get this the things all listed there um on whatever page it is and then experiment with what pages to send people to because that's another thing that I think it's a a not very commonly known thing is there is a diversity filter. I I don't know what to call it. We called it diversity update when it when I first kind of noticed it happening a couple years ago. But Google will basically um push your organic ranking down if you rank well in the local pack. Um and they

57:37do it on a page level. So if you are linking to your homepage on your Google business profile and your homepage also ranks organically, if you were to swap the page on your Google business profile to let's say like one of your service pages, your homepage and the organic results should move up. So that is um something we watch for like crazy as well. um that I I think it's it's a weird concept that a lot of people don't

57:58realize is even happening. What are what are some tactics that are getting a lot of attention in the in the local SEO world and you look at you're just like my gosh why are people obsessing about this? They like yeah citations I don't know man I don't get it. Like I'm like yes you need to be on some of the sites but like there's not very many. So, the sites you should care about are the ones that actually rank and show up. And there's usually not that many. Um, again, some industries are more than others. There's a lot in legal. Um, there's a lot of very

58:34specific lawyer sites that you want to be on. There's not many in insurance. So, if you're an insurance agent, like there's not very many specific niche sites that you need to be on. So, I don't understand. Like, everyone's like, "Oh, like uh it's a rebirth of citations with LLMs because LM are referencing them." And I'm like, "Okay, yes, Chat GBT did reference Map Quest when it first came out. Do you really think it's going to continue to reference Map Quest?" No. Like, not a chance. That's

59:01going to die. Yeah, we certainly don't do the 2017 style hire a VA to type in your business details on every directory on the interwebs anymore. That just Yeah, there's like Yeah, there's a handful of citations. The ones that require more verification, the better. uh the more of a pain it is to get verified, the more

59:24you want to be on that site. 100%. Yeah. Um like I've seen a lot of people talking about uh CTR manipulation and Joyy's grinning. Um so the problem with it in my experience, maybe your viewers have a better experience or maybe Joy has a great experience with it, but Google knows what is realistic and what isn't realistic. So, if you're ranked in the 20th spot and then suddenly you have 20 people a day asking for directions to your business, that's not a realistic signal. So, even if you try to do CTR manipulation, and it's expensive to do correctly because you need to mask everything and use the VPN and all this

1:00:08jazz, you just can't. You have to be already ranking to be able to send enough signals for it to be reasonable. But if you're already ranking, then what are you doing? you're already ranking and you're like doing black hat stuff to to try to like what's the reward that we're going after? Yeah, we did an AMA with Ian Evan Evans I think is his last Agency Assassins his uh site and he does he sells a CTR manipulation tool. One of the smartest people I've talked to like he this guy

1:00:37knows so much about the algorithms. That's why I'm like he is fascinating. That being said, I won't touch CTR manipulation with a 10-ft pole. Like I do not like tactics that undo themselves when you stop doing them. So my fear is, you know, we get a client, we do a bunch of CTR manipulation, it works. I have no doubt it works. I've seen enough to again from other people and showing me um it works if you have the right parameters, but every single one of them tell me that if you stop those rankings

1:01:02reverse. Yeah. And I'm like, so what what I want a bunch of angry clients if they leave they tank. And what do you think that's going to do to my company's reputation? Like I do not want their reputation. So, I have looked at companies that have heavily utilized this and um I think it's dangerous because I again I don't know how AI deals with it, but I've heard from people who do it that it's not as important for AI and I'm like, "Oh, if that's your sole tactic, say goodbye to it." Um, but I don't like it because it undoes itself. I just I don't

1:01:36know. Well, how could it work? I I guess it would only work for AI if AI really cared where your GBP was ranked because obviously the AI the AI doesn't have access to be able to see that the CTR manipulation is happening. Yeah. I don't I don't know what the disconnect is. I haven't thought that far through it but um [clears throat] I I just it's something that I'm just like won't touch. And I've also heard if you overdo it, you can actually have penalties from it too. So that's uh Ben Fischer told me a story when I interviewed him on our YouTube channel about a company that uh was paying

1:02:08somebody and then um was going to cancel and they told him he had to pay some crazy cancellation fee and so they didn't and so they dialed up the CTR manipulation and this the GBPs all got suspended um which I was like holy crazy story but um it's I just I don't want to

1:02:25mess with this stuff. It's not my thing. You know what always goes viral when I make content on it? It's the driving directions. Yeah, because it works. Manipulation. To be clear, it works. I saw a business do it. I watched a business. So does fake reviews. If you go buy a bunch of reviews, your rankings will surge. I've I've tracked enough businesses doing this to know that it works. Uh but the the buying reviews one was funny. There was a law firm that I literally told them they would never rank because of how small they were and how big of an area that they were targeting. they were

1:02:54competing against firms that had thousands of reviews and they're massive firms that are just naturally going to get that volume. I'm like, "You can't rank for that term yet. You're just not like important enough. I don't know how to say this." Like they I tried to word it diplomatically. But um and then of course like I actually canceled them. I was like this is not a good fit. Like we

1:03:10we really shouldn't be working together. And then three or four months later I started seeing that the reviews start piling in like and they're clearly fake. And I was like holy crap. And I watched their rankings and lo and behold they started ranking for the term. I told them that they would never rank [laughter] for and I'm like, okay, in fairness, I didn't think about like going and buying 100 fake reviews, but yeah, they lost all the reviews. So, they lost all their rankings. So, it's like I I don't know. This is not the

1:03:35game that I want to play. Buying fake reviews for a law firm just makes me so like shuddering. You could lose your license. Like, I'm just like these people. I don't know. I don't get it. How can you How do you tell that uh that a review profile is manipulated? Oh my god. You look at enough of them, it becomes so obvious. Um they usually I'll tell you some big This is where I'm like, how much do I share? I'm like I don't really want to give like hat tips to people that are trying to like circumvent the the system. But um so a lot of the the they will block the

1:04:12reviews most of them. That's one of the biggest trends. I think I'll leave it at that because there are like a lot of ones that I don't really necessarily want to give out. Uh because I don't want people to get better at faking their reviews. Um but the biggest one that I see is usually they will block their profiles. Uh set them to private so you can't see all the different places they've reviewed. People do this on Reddit too for the record. They'll block the Reddit profile so you can't see where other places they comment and posted. One of the biggest red flags for mods. If you block your content, I

1:04:38automatically don't trust you. Have you seen people reporting bad reviews for defamation? Yes. Which is which is very common. It's very common in uh in Europe. I was going to say, do you know all that stuff [snorts] in Germany? Do you know about all that? That's what that's what I was talking about. Yeah. It's kind of funny. So that actually we want to release a video on this because what Google has started doing now is in Germany because there's this law basically if you have a negative review you can get it taken down. like literally anybody. So anybody that knows about this and exploits this can get all their negative reviews

1:05:15removed. So what Google started doing now is on profiles in Germany they show and I'm like oh my god. So look up locksmiths in Germany and look up personal injury lawyers in Germany and look at how many reviews they've gotten removed. I'm like I would never hire any of these people because I'm like you're

1:05:28sketchy. Yeah, super sketchy. I I want to like the tand effect or something. [snorts] What is it? Isn't that called the the striand effect when you try to bury something and it becomes more popular? Yeah, that's what it is. I want to I want to ask both of you how you approach website structure and it'd be interesting to hear what what you do different and what what you are both like doing the same. Yeah. So like what you're how you're thinking about subfolders, how you're thinking about

1:06:00internal linking. Uh so internal linking Oh, sorry. You want to start with Caleb? Oh, yeah. I was going to start with Caleb. Oh, okay. I was going to let Joe That's fine. Yeah. Um, okay. Well, [clears throat] now I'm really nervous because what if I say a bunch of things that Joey disagrees with. Okay. Well, that's that's going to make a more interesting podcast and every you know, the truth is like like everyone has a different way of

1:06:25doing SEO that that gets results. If it works, it works. It's going to be slightly different. Yeah. Um, so you asked about subfolders, URLs. uh we pay almost no attention to URLs. Uh it's the internal linking that we find is very important for how Google builds a structure of the of the website and understands the website. And it's we're basically we try to recreate the GBP structure on the website. So all of the services that live under the category, we're going to link those services to that category. Secondary categories linked to the primary category. So we end up building a mirror of the GBP on the website. And then when

1:07:05we look at rank maps, if we need more topical or geographical relevance for a given service entity or category, we're just going to build those pages and then link them to the page that we're trying to support. So I definitely care about URLs. Uh they keyword in the URL is a pretty big ranking factor for local pack rankings.

1:07:27Oh, fair. like the keyword the URL slug. Yes, we want the keywords and the URL slug. Agreed. Yeah. So, I've actually like uh I I don't want to get too egregious with it, but I've definitely like, you know, pushed the line or boundary on how many I can get in there. [laughter] Um because again, with the the local pack rankings, a lot of it does have to do with the page that you're sending your traffic to. So, I I had a employee of mine who I told her to to put more in and she put a lot in and I was like, "Oh my god, that URL is way too long." But

1:07:53then I was like shocked at seeing just how well their local pack ratings increased and I was like okay maybe this isn't a bad thing. On the organic side however changing URLs is somewhat risky because you usually see a ranking drop um within like 2 weeks and then sometimes it recovers and sometimes it doesn't. So I've seen both cases where uh you change the URL and Google's like okay fine you're you're good in two weeks. And in other cases uh you don't go back to where you were. Oh, it looks like cut out. You cut out, but

1:08:24I think we're we're I think we're good. It says your internet connection is good. Yeah. Okay. Uh the other thing with internal links is I think uh the actually the biggest um miss I see is for people we actually categorize pages. We have like a spreadsheet that we put pages on and I'll categorize them as like money pages or we have this term called source pages. Source pages are pages that get a lot of traffic that have a lot of power, right? So for those pages, you actually want as few internal links as possible on them because it's a math equation. If you link to 500 sites, you're splitting

1:08:56your page rank between 500 pages uh versus 10 or three. So we have a very low limit for those. Um and then for same thing for your navigation. Most businesses when we first start working with them, they they list like 50 pages in their top nav and we usually try to cut this to as few as possible. uh we want to keep the main core ones but like you know uh using the personal injury lawyer case you do not need 50 different types of cases that you may work on in your navigation. So by shortening the list all the ones you leave in increase

1:09:32like the organic traffic increases. Yeah. But nav links essentially function almost as a no follow link. So when you put a ton of nav nav links, you're just using a bunch of authority. You're not sending it to where you want it to go. Yeah, pretty similar then. Yeah, pretty similar. Yeah, we didn't disagree too much. I have a I have one last question. I have a last question. We're going to end it with this one. I think this is a good this a just a All right, we we talked about so much stuff on this episode and I think it's possible that some people might listen and just kind of feel

1:10:13overwhelmed and so and which is which is a point like we want to talk about a like we want to talk about a lot share as much good stuff as we can but for for that listener who is feeling overwhelmed if a listener is only going to take one action after this episode what action gives the highest highest probability of producing a measurable business result

1:10:37within 30 days. Go get an award and tell everyone about it. Make sure you tell everybody about it everywhere. Your socials, your website. Blast that sucker everywhere. Would you put out a press release on the award? Oh, totally. Yeah, I really I really like that. And yeah, it it it ranks. It's so good for

1:10:57LLMs. It's good for searchers, too. Searchers are looking up reviews, looking up the business name. They see they see like the reward stuff. Make a video on it. Mhm. Make a video talking about this reward. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Um I would say get your GBP correct. Get the services categories correct. Don't keyword stuff. Uh and then the secondary categories and the core services you really really care about. Talk about them on your GBP

1:11:24landing page. Caleb Joy, this is a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This is awesome. You forgot Caleb's dog. Caleb's dog. What's What's your dog's name? His name is Jasper. He's He spends most of his day sitting on my lap. Jasper, thank you for coming on the podcast. I don't even like dogs, but that's a

1:11:48cute dog. It's an adorable dog. He's He's a small puppy. He knows it, too. That's the problem. He knows it. All right. Hey, this is episode 1,128 of the podcast. 1,128 days in a row doing this show. Thank you again, Joy. Thank you again, Caleb. If you watch this on Thank you so much.

1:12:09Thank you. Thank you. Thank you both. This was great. If you watch this episode on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcast, thank you so much for listening and I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.