Google Business Profile 2024 News Updates: Everything You Need to Know

 Podcast Transcript:

Let’s talk about the three most recent Google Business Profile updates. That includes Google Business Profile call history going away. Google Business Profile chat also going away, which is actually a pretty big one. And the last one was an interesting one. A new accessible little icon in Google Maps that shows users and searchers when a business has an entrance that Wheelchair accessible.

All right, let’s jump in.

Hey, welcome back to local seo unlocked My name is christian hustle pleasure to have you here And that’s right We’re talking about three updates coming from google business profile that I know that if you have a local seo strategy Which I hope you do You’ll want to stay in the known on this one. So let’s start with the first one So beginning july 31st 2024 call history reports will no longer be available This does not mean that customers cannot reach you They can still reach you.

They still can’t convert via clicking website, clicking on call you now, or, or click to call the call history was actually a feature that was logging phone calls. If you had that enabled, not everybody had it, but if you had it enabled, it was logging every incoming call coming from Google maps. and hence call history.

So that is a section that is going to go away. Google is giving you a chance until August 30, 2024 to download your call history in case you need that. But if you’re using call tracking software or you’re, or you were not even using call history, Then there’s not anything to change for you. Number two changes to google business profile chat or profile chat This is a big one.

So the chat is going away is being deprecated Uh, this was an announcement a few days ago out of the blue not a lot of time given by google Now this is impactful because I do see Customers and brands and local businesses using it in a variety of ways one You I mean, as a chat. So if customers wanted to chat with you, sending you messages via Google maps directly, that will no longer be available.

This feature will be deprecated by July 15, 2024. And again, it is a bigger deal because I’ve seen, we work with several automotive shops, auto repairs and things like that, where they are using such chat feature to, or customers are using it to request quotes and request pricing or schedule appointments easily via chat that will no longer be available.

Now, Google is recommending for you to use their Booking now or order now or depending on your products or services It may not even apply so you may be completely out of this and instead leverage your chat on your own website again, all the call to actions the request directions Call you now visit your website.

Everything stays the same. This is just that feature message us feature That is going away If you’re managing your google business profile or somebody in your team is managing it They probably received an email with this notification Google also said that if you have active chats open with customers, they will be notified that the chat is going away So July 15.

So keep that in mind as you start to plan ahead and try to move those conversations or if you work heavily leveraging this chat feature to move it on to your chat on your website. Now let’s talk about the third one which is that wheelchair accessible icon showing on google maps. This was spotted by Anoush Hopefully I’m pronouncing it right.

We’re basically showing that there is a little icon that shows wheelchair accessible entrance. A lot of the times when they’re spotting things like this are it’s Google testing new features and it’s very hard to replicate. So I went on Google maps and I looked at the profile of one of our nail salons and I was able to see that icon right here.

So I said, okay, well maybe that’s, because I’m managing it. So I went on to search in Google maps. And I started to search for car dealers and I started seeing that icon again and again on, I mean, even on sponsored ads search, not all of them have it because if the profile does not have that wheelchair accessible attribute in Google business profile, this will not show.

So if your business has that. Such a feature, make sure that you’re taking advantage of that attribute. Here’s another example looking at restaurants, same similar thing. If you’re, we actually have several restaurants that we do SEO for local SEO in the Austin area. So this is another great one to make sure that you’re taking care of that attribute.

Again, it’s going to depend on the industry. If you have a B2B office where you don’t really get food traffic, It’s not as important versus a restaurant, a car dealership that people are frequently walking through the door. I think this is a great way to stand out, right? As you saw it here on some of the dealerships.

Uh, it looks like a good 70 percent of them have the attribute enabled, which is great. But those that do not is a good reminder to go add that attribute on your google business profile Those are the three updates I have for you regarding google business profile If you like this video give it a like consider subscribe it to the channel as we talk about All things local seo here on this show.

Thank you so much for watching. I will see you on the next episode

Rev Up Your Visibility: Local SEO Audit for Car Dealerships!

 Podcast Transcript:

With more and more updates to the Google algorithm, Google AI overviews, and all the things that are happening in search engines, specifically, how do you stand out at the local level when your customers are searching for you nearby? That’s exactly what we’re going to talk about on this video, where we’re going to go in together and we’re going to do a live Google business profile audit, as well as, Google maps visibility and talk to you about how we are optimizing profiles to make sure that they are visible when customers are searching locally.

All right, let’s get started.

Hey, welcome to another episode of Local SEO Unlocked. My name is Christian Hustle. Pleasure to have you here. If you are new to the channel, hit that subscribe button, hit that like button as it’ll help us promote the video with other users on YouTube. And With that said, let’s just jump in because it really is getting harder to stand out on places like Google, Google maps, because the algorithms are getting smarter, right?

They’re AI powered and, and all the things that we hear on the media. So how the hell do you stand out? How the hell do you stay at the top and do you drive more customers? So I’m going to switch over to the computer and I’m going to show you this dealership. This was March, 20, 2024. Uh, so it’s been just a few months and this is in a very competitive area as you can see Um, I can actually zoom in zoom out.

You can see a lot of red which means we are off top 10, right? This is way past top 10 means hard to find and as of today as i’m updating this in the end of may You can see much better standing right? This is a downtown area very competitive bunch of car dealerships nearby And yet we are achieving that top one top two even top three farther out beating competitors So this is the kind of results that I want you to set in your mind as possible Even in 2024, this isn’t trying to hack Google, right?

That’s not what we’re trying to do. We are following guidelines, but there are certain things that Google may not like for you to know, because every time a ranking factor is discovered and shared wildly, People start abusing it. So it’s not like we’re going against google guidelines It’s just they may be hiding the truth a little bit here on this one So let me guide you through some of the things that we are looking and then we jump into the google business profile So here we have average ranking right for this specific dealership and we are looking at things like review rating We’re looking at number of reviews, but more importantly, share a voice.

This means how positive are their review sentiment? What are people saying about the dealership? Are people enjoying it? Is this something that they’re positively talking about it, or it’s just a horrendous experience every time they visit the dealership. This is something that we work with our clients very closely, because if we do see here a average of 80 percent or even lower than that, there’s a lot of work to do on the, on the location side.

Right. If we are on the 90s, hopefully high high 90s, we’re in a great spot and google is going to like to see that Another thing that we are definitely going to keep an eye on is categories business categories in google business profile It’s a very strong ranking factor And you’ll be surprised a lot of car dealerships and a lot of other different verticals and industries use the wrong one And in the example of car dealerships, we’ve been testing a lot of You know if you’re talking about a kia for chevy dealership There are some categories that will let you select a four dealership and that’s good, right?

It’s it’s a perfect fit if you want to rank for four dealership But if you want to rank for other things, maybe you know used cars in this example that i’m going to talk about today Maybe you should consider playing with that first category Particularly in this area what we have done is obviously with the partnership with these dealerships that we work with You Is figure out how can we connect the primary category to their inventory?

So let me give you an example. When there’s plenty of new cars on the, on the lot that are not pre sold and they’re just sitting there, we swap that primary category for Ford dealership. And we focus all our efforts for that month or two or three into new car keywords. Now, as we saw a few years ago, there was a slow new car inventory.

We switched everything to used cars, including the primary category was used car dealership. And we were able to rank for used cars instead of ford as much because obviously ford it’s in the name, right? It’s part of the the business name is going to rank no matter what So if you test that and you switch it over to used car dealerships, you may see some additional rankings visibility and clicks Coming from people who are searching for used inventory.

So that’s another great little tip But with that, let’s jump into another audit that we do right before we go into the business profile. And by the way, you can go to wubound. com slash local SEO audit tool. And you get access to this specific report that I’m about to share with you. You just basically simply fill out the name, right?

Whatever it is for dealership. And then just select the one from the list and run that real report. Now, this is what this report looks like. So it’s going to look into things like your link authority, the rankings, local listings, reputation management. It’s going to do a really comprehensive GVP audit in social channels.

Now, this is an active client. They’ve been with us for several months. Obviously, it’s all green, which is what we want to see, which is what we want to show you. Um, if you run this report, don’t be surprised, especially if you’re not doing local SEO as a strategy, as part of your strategy, which hopefully I, I hope you do, but if you’re not, don’t be surprised to see some yellows and some reds.

That’s good, right? Like you you found areas of improvement to really optimize your location All right, let’s jump into google business profile now so we can talk about the back end What are the things that we are doing here and for this same example? I’m gonna go into edit this profile and we’re gonna look at some things The first thing that we’re gonna look at is business category as you can see we switch it to use car dealer Which really help with visibility for car dealership use cars use cars business Near me, etc.

So even though this is just specific to use card dealer It really boosted impressions and I will show you what it looks like on google search console as well Probably on the next video. We’ll talk more in depth into that But it is all connected to really think about that business category, especially when you’re talking to corporate I know that they’re very picky with this primary category but if you come in with a strong business case and you show data on why you think that is better to You I mean, in this example, go for a used car dealer category versus a Ford dealer category.

Trust me, at the end of the day, we all want those impressions and we want those clicks. Now, description is something that we played with. We haven’t really attributed ranking improvements or traffic improvements to description. That just doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It definitely is important because one thing is, it’s optimizing for rankings and impressions and things like that.

But once you get that people will come to your profile and there has to be a really good description So this is one of those things where we’re not just optimizing for for robots We are optimizing for humans too because at the end of the day is a human taking the action getting the clicks Driving to your location.

So take description at a very Important level regardless of if it impacts your rankings or not I think it’s crucial to add it as well. You know, some of the other ones are pretty obvious I’m, just gonna skip through those, you know opening date phone numbers Website is one that I probably could spend several videos talking about it.

So website url Is basically where do you send a traffic when people find your email? Your business profile. What do you want to send them to when they click on your website now a lot of companies Just send them to their home page. Let them struggle. Let them, you know, find whatever they need and It’s going to take them several clicks who cares that’s one approach Our approach typically is to send them to a more specific page.

Let’s say that you have a A multi location brand you have multiple stores across the city or multiple cities And you have local pages i’m going to talk a lot more about local pages on a future video So i’ll drop the link in the description if we talk about local pages in a different video So I don’t want to go in too much in depth I’ll drop the link in the description if you want to go learn more about local location pages But the important part of this is that if this person is looking for a dealership In san antonio, you send them to the san antonio page on your website not to the home page because You Let’s say that you have six six dealerships across texas or across even san antonio They don’t need to go to the home page because they want the one that is nearby or they know what specific location They want to go to so it is a better customer experience But second search engines love it because you are giving them all the data.

There is about this specific location That will help you give more context get more keywords and overall give more content To google to read and learn more about this location So think about this one very specifically and if you want to learn more about that I’ll drop the link in the description social profiles another up and coming I don’t have case studies on this one, but we have started to see that google is using these profiles As one obviously proof of legitimacy, but two is displaying the links on search on search results So again the more questions Links that we can have on search results is the more real estate the more ways that people can find you And obviously not counting that people may be searching for you on those platforms as well So definitely make sure that you’re adding social profiles as well The next thing I want to talk about to you is location and areas because this one is a very interesting one This is something that for the last several years In our strategies, we have been adding zip codes to service areas.

Now, it is very hard to really pinpoint your rankings to this field, but we have had success. We’ve had tremendous case studies of success on visibility and traction and things like that. And either it’s adding the city that you’re servicing or specific areas. SIP codes, which are SEO reporting audit tools, and even Google business profile data will give you the SIP codes.

I would just grab these SIP codes that are triggering searches, are triggering visits, and add them to your service area. Because the more information you give Google, the better they are to know your business and to be able to rank you and give you a solution to that search. The next several things, business hours, special hours, I’m just gonna skip that.

Now, all the other fields are self explanatory. Fill out as much information as you can because it’s really going to help Google understand more about the location. Is not as SEO directly linked, so I’m just gonna skip them and I’m gonna give you another 10 minutes. Another example here of things that we like to do.

So the other thing that is highly recommended is if your dealership, if your business, you know, let’s say it’s a large center and you’re able to provide other types of services that may be considered different services, consider creating separate Google business profile listings. If you can have a different address, I mean, it may be the same address, but at least different suite number, different entity or different way of operating.

And if you can prove this to Google, you can create separate listings for each of these. So for example, you can have a listing for your service center. You can have a listings for your coalition center. You can have one for your service maintenance center. You know department you could even have one for your used department and then keep the new dealership side of things separate Now this gets very complicated as you know following guidelines and making sure that you don’t get your profile suspended But it is going to be a great way to network your entire hub your entire hub of services And really pass traffic from one to another and pass authority from one to another now Let’s start wrapping up because obviously this video went much longer than I anticipated But on a different video is where we talk about local pages or location pages And I just want to show you this example same property same dealership And even though we have all the algorithm updates going on on google And all the things happening on AI, this dealership is exploding in impressions.

One of the latest strategy was local pages. So that’s why I’m going to drop the link in the description for you to go check out that video, how we optimize local pages and how we bring them into Google business profile strategy to really achieve the growth that your dealership deserves. All right. Well, thank you so much for watching hit that subscribe button Give it a thumbs up as well share it with your colleagues or your boss and more importantly drop questions in the comments I love to read them.

Hopefully that triggers more ideas for more videos. All right. Well, thank you so much for watching I’ll catch you on the next one

Why Google’s Leaked Files Are So Scary

 Podcast Transcript:

So on a previous video, I was talking about some recent documents that were leaked from Google, talking or possibly talking about Google search ranking factors. And I’ve analyzed a lot of articles. There’s great articles out there that I’m going to talk about. But I want to give you my take on some of the learnings, because not everything in the documents are search ranking factors.

But let’s analyze those. What are some of the most important ones? And then That I, that you should know about and be aware of because this kind of confirms a lot of theories that we’ve had over the years. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today, coming right up.

Hey, welcome back to Local SEO Unlocked. And like I said in a previous video, we talked about thousands and thousands of documents from Google that were leaked recently. And the SEO community just went nuts and really tried to read and understand what was in these documents. As of the time of this recording, Google also came public and said that you cannot really just trust this without the context and without the background information or is missing information that may be misguiding you if you follow everything on these documents.

However, I think there are some key takeaways here that I want you to know to be aware of and let’s jump right in so we can start talking about Sandbox, even though you don’t often launch a new website, especially if you’re an established brand and you have, you know, you want to keep that website for a long time, but I just found it funny that One, a sandbox for new websites or based on age and authority do exist.

And that means you do not rank for some time until you prove yourself to Google. In fact, I remember a tweet from a long time ago where John Mueller from Google explicitly say, Hey, there’s no sandbox. You don’t, you don’t have to worry about that. And now that these documents are leaked, I found it very funny that his tweet was deleted.

Um, so, you know, just one of those funny things, you know, call it a geek joke. But I thought it was pretty cool to talk about that. Number two, using Chrome data. Now this is, again, it’s not shocking, right? Because we know, and there’s been a lot of experiments when a person searches for your company, let’s say they’re searching for an e commerce or some of your products or services, and they find, you know, those top 10 results, Google is keeping an eye out to see which of those 10 results are getting clicks.

Now, what this is proving is that Google is using Google Chrome browser data to know how long they’re navigating on the website. What is the experience of that user? Post click, right? So what are they doing after the click? Now it’s interesting to confirm it with these documents, but I, you know, it’s one of those things like Google has always said how important it is user experience and, and how it’s important for people to stay and not bound so quickly, they never confirmed the source of, of what they were reading or to really understand what that user experience is like, well, now these documents shows that Google Chrome.

Is sharing data with google but in my point of view I think that if it wasn’t the case for a google chrome browser to be sharing data with google It probably would have been google analytics anyway I mean, there’s a reason why these products are free, right? They say if the product is free is because there’s probably some some monetization in the back end on your data So either way, like it’s not shockingly surprising It’s just one of those that is has been confirmed with these documents at least Based on what the documents say, right?

Because to Google’s point, we don’t have the full context. These documents are pieces and chunks, but from our understanding and what the community has done, you know, that’s really the takeaway there. Number three, let’s talk about some demotion. So some of the factors that I found interesting, how Google may demote you from rankings or, or cause you to either drop or just completely disappear from search.

And there were plenty of these ones, but I just picked a handful to go over that I found very interesting. So one is Confirmation on CTR. So click through rate. We just talked about that, right? So there is a Correlation in demotion on losing rankings if people are not clicking on your website when they find you The second one was nav demotion.

That means if a website has a poor navigational experience It gets you demoted on search. I thought that was pretty interesting. Honestly most navigation bars nowadays tend to be tend to do a really good job of having a main primary top menu with some subcategories nested in. So I don’t think it’s quite shocking or, or for you alarming, but I do think that it’s important to keep in mind always, as you are adding more pages, service patients, things like that, keep that user in mind for your navigation.

And then there were other mentions that was like anchor mismatched. That means, you know, the, the link doesn’t match the anchor specifically. There was a lot of those misaligned things that if you’re trying to trick Google or like you’re, you figured out a way, or you bought an old website that has like, A url ranking on google and you’re redirecting them to a different side.

This will get you a demotion, right? So you’re going to lose some rankings there. And then the other one that was a product review demotion I saw this one one of my experiments was a pretty big Blog in a niche that we’re doing a lot or you know I had a content writer was doing a lot of product reviews and we kind of figured out what was working very well Right before the big 2023 product reviews update where we saw a lot of fluctuation on that experiment So definitely this confirms that but we already knew that one specifically now I’m, very passionate about link building and I talk about it all the time But in these documents, one of the learnings was link spam velocity signals nowadays Google is getting smarter when it comes to a negative seo attack let’s say that you made you made someone mad you did something wrong or maybe a competitor is just can’t beat your seo right because you’re out ranking them and Even though they have the bigger budgets They just want to come at you in a negative way.

So they go on to Fiverr and nothing against Fiverr, but I’ve seen Fiverr product, Fiverr gigs, where you can buy for backlinks in seven days. Google’s pretty smart nowadays. And this confirms an on the document that they are looking at that velocity on, on link signals to know if they are legitimate, trustworthy signals or link signals or their spam.

Because if you’re getting 30, 000 links in seven days, it’s probably something spammy. Either, hopefully you didn’t order that, but maybe somebody else ordered it against you. So it’s saying that this is easily spotted by Google, and that means that it’s not taking them into account because it knows it’s spam.

Another learning from these documents that you should know is that there is such a thing as a page rank. That might not be the correct name. That’s how it’s been called back in the day many years ago. But there is such a thing as a, a grade or a rank number. That goes attributed to your website and to each of the pages So again, this won’t really give you much context to go rank or optimize, but it’s just good to remind yourself How important it is to continue gaining authority and I say it time and time again even when i’m talking to clients your authority in the industry to me is more important than a number because You will see magic happen after 12 months of consistent Industry content being published on your site You Versus trying to manipulate that number just by buying backlinks and trying to raise that number.

It doesn’t necessarily correlate to traffic and rankings in that way. But again, it’s just another great one to say, hey, it’s confirmed, at least on these documents on the information gatherer and what the community learn, that there is such a thing. I think the next one might be a little bit controversial.

Short content is scored for originality. And this was pretty shocking because we’ve done testing personally i’ve published articles that are 400 words 600 words And then lately or at least in 2023. We did a lot of 2, 500 words to 3, 000 words articles just trying to Bring in and answer as many questions related to the topic as we could Now it’s pretty shocking to see that Google is actually scoring in a different way Short content because it means it’s being original.

It means that it’s not Really just being sourced from all across the web So i’m not recommending that you go within content or just start publishing 200 word or 400 word articles But keep an eye on it right this learning I think is giving us a big question mark on this topic to see if maybe there are opportunities on content where It is better to go short format versus longer format, but I think it’s just a good segue to go test, right?

Do your own testing. I would highly recommend find a very specific question. Answer it as short as you can in four to six hundred words and see how that performs. versus maybe a very complex topic where you’re going to talk about it for 2, 000 words and then compare how difficult even though they’re different queries but compare how the performance looks.

The next learning was that page titles are still highly irreverent. They are measure against searches or search queries. Nothing new. I mean meta titles on a website are probably one of my top recommendations as you starting to Optimize your website and you’re starting on your seo journey. You always start with those meta tags so it’s not shocking but again, this is just confirming that there is such a thing as a Page title score and how that score correlates or how connected it is to a search query.

And the last one that I want to talk to you and making sure that you were aware of was that dates on your content Are very important and I personally even on our wubound website on our agency website We’ve done we’ve had articles that are Five years old and the context is still the same So what we do is every once in a while, maybe once twice per year We come back and we update right?

We have a great article that is best keywords for car dealerships And keywords. Yes, they are There’s new keywords that are being added to it But at the end of the day a lot of them 80 percent of them maintain their their need right maintain this strategy So we continue to update that article and that’s just an example We continue to update the information and as we could discover new keywords as people change their search behavior We add more to it and we update that date now that has provided Consisting rankings in the top one Maybe drop for a few days to number two, but going back to number one for years.

And this just goes to prove that Google really is focused on displaying fresh content, new content, making sure that it’s up to date. And you know, if you’re running to an article that does a good job of answering a query, but it’s from 2017, there’s a higher chance for a 2024 article that. It’s equally or a little bit better.

It’s just gonna outrank the 2017 Again, this is the theory but I have seen it over the years where if you just leave a website sitting with no content updates Whatsoever there will be a competitor that’s going to surpass you easily. So to wrap this up I guess I just wanted to ask myself. Do I trust google or even better?

Can you trust google? And there’s spokespeople and people that come representing to Google and to the industry and talk about ranking factors and whatnot. I would say, I think at the end of the day, this document really doesn’t change my, my thinking, my, my way of doing things. I have never really followed to a T.

I guess due to the fact that during my, Early days of my seo career. I just learned that the best way was to test and learn Test as much as I could to try to figure out what worked what didn’t work and then learn and then continue test So this document doesn’t change whatsoever I don’t think this is a game changer as an seo professional or Leading an seo agency.

I don’t think this is specifically a game changer on strategy or what you need to focus on or what? You need to optimize I think at the end of the day experienced SEOs know what they’re doing because they have experimented for years I think that’s where the value of this comes from is is not the fact that you go do what?

What somebody else tells you to do if you know you you gotta take information Specifically from the web no matter who it is coming from even this video, right? Like no matter if i’m saying it you gotta take it with a grain of salt. These are my thoughts This is my based on my experience and my knowledge and my take on these documents You gotta take it with a grain of salt apply it towards your experience and then figure out your own game plan I think this is just another great example of that where SEOs just really know what they’re doing.

And it’s funny because I saw that phrase on, on some of the articles that I was reading, and I was trying to get my grasp on the, on the learnings from these documents, but I really think that is the case on this one. So with that, thank you so much for watching. Hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, as we have many, many different episodes coming that I think are going to be very valuable to you.

Thank you so much for watching. I will see you on the next episode.

Unveiling Google’s Most Exciting Reveals at Google Marketing Live Event!

Podcast Transcript:

  Did Google really kill ads on Google’s new AI overviews? Because when Google AI overviews were presented, there was zero mention of ads. But no, the short answer is no, they probably will never do that. And that’s why Google Marketing Live 2024 happened a few days ago. And they revealed what the new version or new quote unquote, new features of their Google ads look like in AI overview.

So in this video, let’s talk about what you need to know about all the new things that are coming to Google ads.

Hey, welcome back to Local SEO Unlocked. My name is Christian Hustle. Pleasure to have you here. If you’re new to the channel or if you’re coming back, consider hitting that like button, hit that subscribe button underneath as well. As we talk about Google Ads and AI overviews, because when Google AI overviews were, was launched a few weeks ago, I talked about it and the first thing that popped in my mind was like, where are the ads?

No ads? What’s going on? So Google Marketing Live looks like they were holding back on the details because they had an event for this. Google Marketing Live just went out a few, about a week ago, and this was their presentation and all things. Ads in their ai results now. It was a very interesting one I’m gonna go over a few things that I want you to be aware of what’s coming You know and and what not really not a lot of shocking things to be honest But the one thing that I was very curious about I mean obviously it was an hour and a half video that I had to sit and watch and it was surprising to me how many times they mentioned how They have been doing AI for the longest than any other company out there and how they know it so well, and really giving this passive aggressive sense of like, we’ve been doing AI for the longest.

We are the experts at it. I thought that was kind of weird, but at the end of the day, the focus on all the things on, on ads, on AI, it was really focused on shopping. So for all of us who are heavily involved in local, it was not, there’s not a lot for us, but. I do want to mention that, you know, they focus a lot on, on this being a new era.

by AI, how their new features are basically going to be able to create ads for you. Uh, you know, they mentioned a few features where you give it a picture and it can create an animated video for you or a product in 3d 360 view. Which I thought it was pretty cool. They also mentioned a lot about how their, their AI is going to be able to also help you measure and optimize campaigns based on the knowledge and traffic and, and client interaction with your ads, which, I mean, it sounds promising, but again, everything, the whole session was very focused into shopping and e commerce.

They were showing Google Lens where like you get your phone, you take a picture of a product. And how it goes and find stores that carry that product for you to shop Which we work with a lot of automotive and I would be very curious if we can literally go and take a picture of a car And see if we could get some results, huh?

Taking a note of that one that might be a future video to try now talking more specific They did bring up the what we call local max performance campaigns These are campaigns on google ads that basically let you run ads on google maps youtube gmail Across a variety of platforms at a local level when people are searching for your products and services now It wasn’t 100 clear if the name is changing or this is a new offering, but they’re calling it power pair Which apparently they were super excited about the name And the promise here is that this is going to be one of their strongest ROI at the local level for search and performance campaigns.

Again, there wasn’t a lot of detail so I don’t even know if this is really a new offering or it’s just a fancy new name for One of the products that continues to keep changing their names over the last several years But I would be curious to see and let me know in the comments if you are trying or what’s your experience with local max Performance ads I’m a big fan, right?

Because I guess the reason it’s always had positive our eyes because of the cost being so low I mean, you know with very low budget you can get hundreds of thousands of impressions and phone calls and things like that We’ve had great success with them And But I just don’t know if this is this power pair is really a new offering Or is it just a new way to you know, give it a new name because there’s going to be some You know now your ads are going to show up in ai overviews as well.

That’s why it deserves a new name I mean i’m inclining towards that later option to be honest or rather than a brand new offering But we’re definitely going to give it a try We’re going to keep you up to date on our findings and see what that looks like Again, this was all just released so we don’t have any experience yet running it for our clients The other interesting thing was YouTube ads.

They mentioned that vertical assets perform better for YouTube ads. That’s something interesting It’s something that obviously depends a lot on on how your users are watching if they’re on tv Obviously horizontal videos are going to perform better, but they’re talking about videos on youtube shorts with YouTube shorts is really their version of trying to compete with tiktok And obviously they’re saying, you know vertical assets that are going to be full screen on your phone Perform 40 percent better or have better 40 percent better view through rate than a horizontal Which makes total sense to be honest and really that’s those are my key takeaways again Not a lot on the local side.

I think just power pair is really the one that i’m curious about to test and try Ideally is to have ads On those ai and they get this google ai overview answer Now you can place ads in there, which will be interesting again. I’ll keep you posted Let’s see where that goes. But with that, thank you so much for watching again Hit that subscribe button share with a colleague We have tons of episodes coming to local seo unlocked and I wouldn’t like for you to miss any of them Right.

So with that I will see you on the next episode

Google Search Data Leak – Did Google Lie to Us?

Podcast Transcript:

 Breaking news! Google search ranking features leaked over 14, 000 ranking factors that were shared apparently online in the last several hours. Here’s my take on it because surprising or not, I’m actually not crazy surprised with them. These ranking factors leaked is not so shocking because there’s a lot of the information and thoughts that I’ve always shared for many, many years now.

That I feel like Google just disguises in a way that they don’t want you to know the truth Not that they’re lying or hiding it. It’s just they don’t want people to abuse them So in this video i’m going to talk a little bit about why this leak is probably legit And what I think about it Hey, welcome to another episode of local seo unlock.

My name is christian hustle pleasure to have you here If you are new to the show or even coming back consider subscribing give it a like to the to the video And again, we’re talking about some data leaked from google that has over 14 000 ranking factors And the community and the seo community is is talking about it.

Everybody is wondering what the hell is going on The as of the time of this recording this data is still available online You And I do not want to include a screenshot of any kind because I’m sure attorneys are in the works from on the on google Side, so I don’t want to be related to that. I just want to give my thoughts on what I think I actually don’t want to really go into depth with how the data was leaked or anything like that This is just educational purposes and my thoughts on this.

So a lot of these leaked ranking factors are talking a lot about Many many things that google actually says It’s publicly said the opposite. Uh, I saw comments online on Twitter from many, many well known SEOs that are talking about how websites do go into a sandbox, even though Google has said, no, that doesn’t happen.

How Google does has a way to grade a website’s authority and how that impacts ranking. I’ve said it for many years. I mean, there is a reason why we have many clients in the automotive industry where local dealerships. Even if you invest heavily, yes, there’s ways to do it, but it’s very hard to outrank websites like cars.

com or other very, very well known websites because of their authority, right? And, and this is something that is not just domain authority that we’re talking about. Um, I don’t have a specific name for it, but I, when I talk to clients, I basically just say an industry authority, if you like. Where these websites are so powerful and within the industry that they have they are prioritized to my to my opinion From what i’ve seen through the last 12 15 years of seo.

They are definitely ahead of the game They get advantages towards other brands like local dealerships or local auto groups as well Now there’s always also been the other discussion that i’ve always talked about as well is link building You know google tries not to incentivize link building Link building Where in the last 12 months they would talk about it once right so that they don’t really spot it on your radar Now link building since day one since I started seo many years ago continues to be to me One of the strongest ranking factors if done properly right if done white hat 100 Focus on quality.

We see tremendous results from that now This is just one of those where again, I don’t think google lies. I don’t think google hides You It’s just part of the way they work, right? They don’t want people to really understand the algorithms because then people have used it And and I think this is one of those cases where people are questioning how legitimate it is or not I think it’s a lot of the information is legitimate because It’s just from my experience, from what I’ve seen, either Google just doesn’t talk about it or tries to minimize the information, just like link building, right, when they’re talking about it.

And there’s a lot of this report that is similar, where the report is shining light on some of the factors that, That experience SEOs know that are important, that maybe Google is not talking about. But I think this is where experience really comes in, because this is why you couldn’t trust ChatGPT to do your entire SEO strategy.

Because if you go by Google guidelines, which, yes, I mean, it’s good to follow, you know, there are rules that you don’t want to break. But if you just go by that, or if you just go by well known ranking factors and you ignore all these years of experience that chat GPT doesn’t necessarily have is where you can fall into those traps where, you know, chat GPT may tell you, Hey, Google things that link building is black.

So you don’t do blink building and you’re going to miss out on rankings heavily. You’re going to miss out on traffic when you talk to an experience. I see, obviously it’s the opposite, but anyway, going back to our topic. I mean, I think there’s going to be a lot of. Of information coming out live after this leak.

Is there anything really new that we haven’t discovered through the years? Maybe this later leak will give us some answers finally to some of the unanswered questions that we’ve had for years Time will tell right let’s analyze it Let’s break it down and let’s see where it goes But I will keep you posted as we find more information about this And again, I don’t think is going to be anything crazy new Uh, or crazy shocking revealing but time will tell let’s see where this goes.

All right Well, thank you so much for watching again Hit that like hit that subscribe button share this video with a colleague if you saw value in it And drop your thoughts in the comments. I’m very curious to hear If you had a chance to review this documentation what you heard about or if you’ve ever noticed that There are ranking factors that you’ve been playing with that you as a marketer Have influenced or been trying to optimize towards and you saw great success regardless of what google says about it That’s really what I want to hear.

All right. I’ll see you on the next episode

Google AI Overviews: Your Ultimate Guide!

 Transcript:

So about a week ago, Google released the new experience on search called AI overviews. And although the theory and on paper is very exciting, I want to talk to you about some of the things that I think are going to impact how consumers search for your products and your services and how these new features really impact SEO, especially at the local level.

Now, when I looked at Google IO announcement, it was very promising. But then a few days later, people are hating and deactivating the feature. So in this video, I want to talk to you about my opinion, what I think it’s going on, with Google AI overviews, where I see them going and really, how is it going to impact our industry?

All right, let’s talk about it. So

to give you a little bit of context, first time experience using it on a daily basis for the last 12 months, and that was known as SGE, Google Search Generative Experience. Now that’s a very complicated name in my opinion. So. Kind of makes sense why they renamed it AI overviews. AI overviews is really a brief summary of an answer to a query, to a question or to a search.

Now on paper, that sounds great, right? Basically Google doing the Googling for you. You ask a question and you get an answer very, very quickly without having to browse through a bunch of articles and put it, putting together all the information by yourself. Now, as a consumer, that’s great. As a marketer as an seo or as a leader in in your organization That’s kind of scary because basically google is learning from your information from your data and giving it on displaying it on search results which means technically They, the user has the answer, so they don’t have to go to your website.

And this obviously has pros and cons in my opinion. I mean, yes, AI overview will allow the user to respond to more complicated questions. Let’s say for example, in the automotive industry, let’s say that I am in the market for a new SUV. So instead of spending hours on research and YouTube videos on reviews on what to buy, I can just type in what is the best luxury SUV for three kits with good MPG.

Now this is a very complex question, right? And in Google event, they basically broke it down into how machine learning is behind all this. Gemini is the platform that is powering these AI overviews. And I don’t want to get too technical, but basically Google breaks down your question and is able to absorb a lot of information to answer it very, very quickly.

Now, If you have a blog post that probably gave a good answer on your website, well, Google now has that same information and can display it to the user without sending traffic to your website, which means, you know, your traffic might see some conversion drops, but this is where it gets very interesting.

Again, I’ve been using it for 12 months as SGE and, and mainly just for experiments, right? Like I really wanted to understand how this AI is going to incorporate into search, but as a consumer, very quickly, my mind learned how to ignore it. So every time I would search, and I would get the SGE answer from AI, I would immediately skip it, right?

I would go to my usual Google map pack, or my search results, and continue my normal use. Now, with new branding, new name, fancy looking graphics, of course, right after the Google I. O. event, I went onto Google, for the next 24 hours, I was typing every single search I could think of, most of the time, I was getting an AI overview response.

Now, it’s been a week of that. And now I’m having such a hard time to replicate those AI overviews. I don’t know if all the negative press and negative feedback on the, on the talks on the street is causing them to slowly retract some of it because the day after the IO, I was basically getting an AI overview, nine out of 10 searches.

Almost all of them had them. As of today, one week later, I’m struggling both on desktop and mobile. I mean, out of 20, I’ve got one AI overview and that was Google’s recommendation on how to trigger it. No, I’m not saying Google is going to pull it out. I think this technology will continue to evolve and consumer searches are going to have to evolve.

There’s going to be some behavioral changes. I think there’s going to be some SEO strategic changes that you’re going to have to do to your strategy. How content is created, what content or what type of content you are targeting and creating. But all in all. Google is investing heavily on this. We know they’re behind compared to chat, GPT and Microsoft technology.

We know they need to catch up and so that they don’t lose any market share. So we know that I don’t see Google AI overviews. I don’t think they’re going to go away. I think they’re going to have to invest heavily. I think they’re going to have to evolve to make it much, much better preposition. Now I say that again, pros and cons as a consumer, that’s a good thing.

It’s. As a marketer, that may be threatening because technically is borrowing and learning from your content, from your information, and then just giving the answer to the user. So for the next several weeks, I’m going to continue testing it. I want to keep you updated on how search is going to evolve, how to adapt your SEO strategy.

So we’ll get into more of those details on a future video. But for this specific episode, I wanted to. Let you know what’s coming. What’s changing. I mean, this has the potential to disrupt how people search, how they consume content, how they’re answering their complicated questions, which you may have to adjust your search strategy, your marketing strategy.

How are you bringing in inbound traffic from search engines and whatnot? Personally, I think the SEO industry and all things search marketing is ever evolving, right? It’s never stopping. We’ve had so many updates. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. It keeps me on my toes, never boring with that.

I hope you liked this video. I hope you found it useful. Let me know in the comments, how you’re preparing your strategy. What are you planning to do to adjust for this AI overviews? Or if you’re just completely, you know, one of those users who turned it off after a bad experience or a bad answer from AI overviews.

Hit that like button, hit that subscribe button, and we’ll see you on another video. Bye bye.