How To Build Local Pages That Win In AI-Powered Search

0:02
Hey, hey, hope you’re having a great day and so glad that you chose to spend your time here with us.

0:09
I’m Heather Campbell, I am VP of Marketing and Sales here at Search Engine Journal.

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And for today’s webinar, I have Anna Rendells and Nick Larson, both from the outcomer team.

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We’re here to talk about how local pages win in AI powered search.

0:25
This team is going to give you some great insights and I think it’s your first webinar for both of you here at SCJ.

0:30
How are you both doing today?

0:32
Doing doing great.

0:33
Yeah.

0:34
Really appreciate SCJ for for having us on.

0:36
Super excited to talk about all things local pages and an AI search.

0:41
Yeah.

0:41
Feeling good.

0:42
Excited to be here.

0:43
We’ve heard only the best things about the SCJ community, so we’re excited to be chatting with you guys today.

0:49
I love to hear that.

0:51
So when we talk about the Sej community, for those of you who’ve been to one of these webinars, you know the drill.

0:56
Use that chat.

0:57
Let us know where you’re coming in from.

0:59
I’m hanging out in West Virginia.

1:00
Anna, Nick, where are you both based out of San Diego for me.

1:05
San Diego for me too.

1:10
But now let’s get to this housekeeping so we can get to the real meat of why everybody’s here today.

1:15
So if you need closed captioning, it’s the CC in the top right of your screen.

1:20
Give that a click.

1:22
It’s telling me my network is unstable, so if I leave, just take over.

1:26
But all right, so we’re going to have some polls for you today.

1:30
So if you see a poll, you know, love to see your engagement there.

1:33
We are going to do some Q&A with this team at the end.

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So if you have questions, add them to the Q&A tab.

1:40
If you see a question you’d like give it a little thumbs up and it lets us know that that is important and we’ll do our best to front load those.

1:46
Before you leave.

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Today’s call, we’re going to have a short survey for you.

1:49
It lets us know how today went and it gives you an opportunity suggest future topics that you would like to see us do.

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Lastly, you’ll receive today’s recording and the slides in your inbox.

2:01
So before my network tells me I’m unstable one more time, I’m going to get out of here.

2:05
Nick and Anna, they’re all yours.

2:08
Amazing.

2:09
All righty.

2:10
Well, let’s go ahead and get into it.

2:11
Now before we dive in, I want to quickly just ground us in what we will be talking about today.

2:17
So we’re going to start with how it’s shifting and the AI powered search world and then walk through the differences between traditional SEO and what we’re calling Geo, otherwise known as generative engine optimization.

2:30
Say that one five times fast.

2:32
I’ve, that’s the only thing I had to really get down for today.

2:36
From there, we will go ahead and transition into how information is actually being pulled from your website and your listings and then break down the core pillars for a strong strategy, your local pages, schema listings, reviews.

2:50
And then we’re going to wrap up everything in the technical foundations.

2:53
Some new KP is to track success, plus a very clear action plan for where you can go with your Monday morning and then hopefully some time for some Q&A at the end.

3:03
So a lot to cover, but let’s go ahead and jump in.

3:08
Well, I teased Jess because before we actually kick things off, here’s a quick poll coming your way.

3:13
We would love to know how you are currently managing your locations, if it’s looking a little messy, if it’s fully optimized.

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No wrong answers here, just pure curiosity to see where we’re all coming from.

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So go ahead and give that a little click.

3:29
There she is.

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Sometimes the first one, it’s just got a little lag on it.

3:34
Just give it a second.

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They ought to be coming in.

3:36
Hopefully that’s popping out for.

3:38
There we go.

3:38
OK.

3:39
I was worried.

3:39
It was amazing.

3:42
Thank you guys for filling that out.

3:43
This is so fun to see in real time.

3:45
Yeah, we got a pretty even mix across the board.

3:47
I like it.

3:47
Yeah.

3:49
OK.

3:49
A lot of optimizing, a lot of scaling.

3:51
That is good.

3:54
Amazing.

3:56
Alrighty.

3:56
Well, thank you guys for filling that one out, but we’re going to go ahead and finally get to the meat and potatoes of why we’re here today.

4:03
Now, before we get tactical, it’s important to understand where we are in the search landscape overall because it is actively shifting.

4:11
We all know AI is evolving quickly, but what’s really changing is how people search.

4:15
So users are no longer typing in short queries like coffee near me.

4:19
They’re asking full, very detailed questions, almost like they’re talking to a person.

4:24
So for example, they would say something like, what are some fun, low key things to do in Nashville with friends this weekend?

4:31
We love food, like music, but also want something off the beaten path.

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That’s a completely different type of query.

4:39
It’s longer, it’s more specific, and most importantly, it’s intent driven.

4:43
And because of that, ranking on a page is no longer enough.

4:47
Now you have to actually earn your way into being the answer.

4:50
And that means your content needs to be clear, it needs to be structured and arguably very important, written in natural language so that it can be surfaced in those types of responses.

5:00
So while the shift adds complexity, it also adds a huge opportunity because brands that adapt can become the source being pulled in, not just one of many, many results.

5:14
All righty.

5:15
Well, let’s talk about what actually is changing, specifically between the difference between traditional SEO and Geo.

5:21
So traditional SEO focuses on things like long form content, keywords, meta tags, backlinks.

5:27
I feel as if we’re probably all kind of familiar with that and these fundamentals still matter.

5:32
But with AI driven search, the focus is shifting.

5:35
So Geo is about optimizing for how AI understands and delivers answers.

5:40
That means prioritizing contacts and intent, using natural conversational language, structuring your data clearly and directly answering user questions.

5:50
So instead of just trying to rank, you’re trying to be selected.

5:53
Now what hasn’t changed are the fundamentals.

5:55
So think your strong content quality, a great user experience, clear site structure, solid technical foundations.

6:02
If you get those right, you’re still setting yourself up to perform well across both traditional and AI driven search.

6:09
But the key shift is this.

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It’s no longer about disappearing in the results.

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It’s about truly, truly being the answer.

6:15
I’m going to drive that one home today, I promise.

6:19
OK, now this is where the strategy comes to play.

6:22
If there’s one framework to keep in mind, it’s it’s truly this.

6:25
First, you need to be the primary source of truth.

6:28
Your information is being pulled from multiple places, your website, your listings, media.

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So it needs to be complete.

6:34
It needs to be consistent and most importantly, easy to understand.

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Second, your content needs to be accessible.

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This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but if it’s not crawlable, indexable and support supported by structured data, it simply won’t be used.

6:48
And then third, you need to clearly define what makes you different, so your local expertise and differentiators need to be quite obvious.

6:55
4th, consistency is critical.

6:58
Your information is constantly being cross referenced, so conflicting details, lower trust and visibility with the user.

7:05
And 5th reviews help shape your story where you’re going to get into this one a little bit later.

7:09
But customer feedback is actively influencing how your business is represented.

7:14
So engagement matters just as much as volume.

7:17
So when you think about AI search, it’s not just one tactic.

7:20
It’s truly an ecosystem.

7:22
And if you put all these pieces that make the ecosystem strong together, you will start to actually show up.

7:28
But that is all for me for now.

7:30
Transitioning it over to you, Nick, I think we have another poll.

7:34
Yes, we do.

7:34
And I skipped it no problem.

7:38
Yes, one one last quick poll question.

7:41
How many locations are you currently managing?

7:45
That could be just physical locations out in the world or how many locations do you actually have listings for, like a Google Maps listing or an Apple Maps listing or a Yelp listing or anything in between there.

7:58
The beautiful part about the majority of this webinar is that these strategies really scale, no matter how few or how many locations you are actively managing.

8:12
And again, it looks like we have a pretty even distribution again across the board.

8:17
All right, awesome.

8:21
So moving on.

8:22
So yeah, for the purpose of this webinar, we’ve sort of broken down everything that we’re going to talk about into 4 pillars.

8:33
And if you optimize and get these 4 pillars correct, you’re going to set yourself up for success not only for traditional SCO, but also for Geo as well.

8:44
So pillar one is still your local pages.

8:47
So these are your authoritative answer driven pages for every single location that you manage.

8:54
This is still the single biggest lever that you have for local AI visibility.

8:59
Pillar 2 is structured data, so ensuring that your schema markup tells an AI engine exactly what your business is, where it is and what it offers.

9:10
Pillar 3 consistent listings, and I already hit on it a little bit.

9:14
We’ll probably keep harping, harping on this, but just ensuring that your name, address, phone number across everywhere where your business appears online is accurate and consistent, still extremely important in this AI world.

9:29
And Pillar 4 reviews and engagement.

9:31
So we still want to ensure that we’re collecting real customer language ratings because AI will quote this, we’ll summarize that and we’ll actually use reviews and engagement as a, as a trust signal.

9:46
So again, if you miss or you’re not optimizing for any one of these pillars, AI is going to fill in the gap with one of your competitors as it relates to to AI search.

9:56
So AI doesn’t leave anything blank.

9:58
They’ll just pick up on what the next best source is and show, show that.

10:02
And instead of you.

10:06
So to dive into each individual pillar here, pillar one having strong local pages.

10:12
So every location still needs its own dedicated unique crawlable page.

10:19
And I want to underline and maybe define the word unique here.

10:23
I’m not talking about unique as in every single page needs to look different or have a different design, but the content on that page needs to be unique and detailed and dedicated for that specific location.

10:37
But you know, one of the common mistakes that we see when we do audits of local pages is effectively templated content.

10:44
You know, the same exact business description where you’re just swapping out a city name or a service at at the top of the page.

10:54
Honestly, AI is going to detect that and it’ll treat it as as low value duplicate content and could potentially, you know, devalue, devalue that.

11:05
So the key is again, to basically ensure that you’re listing like the neighborhood, the local services, you know, the staff, the hours of parking situations in in the directions this is actually you want to have on your local page is everything that a human would actually want to know about that location and about about your business.

11:29
So a little bit more about content here.

11:33
What does that content actually look like?

11:35
So 3 principles that we like to think about 1 is ensuring that your content is fact based and, and specific.

11:43
So we’re not really looking for adjectives anymore.

11:46
Things like conveniently located in or or something to that nature.

11:52
You can say things like, you know, two blocks from the river Riverwalk transit stop, you know, AI will actually weigh fact density and, and help get you propped up in those in those answers.

12:04
And also also already hit on this a little bit, but short and answer driven content is still very important.

12:12
We want natural language short answer driven content.

12:15
We want to lead each section essentially with the answer and then explain more about that.

12:22
AI will extract the answer and then that explanation actually builds trust with within within the AI models.

12:30
And the thing that’s changing a little bit, traditional SEO is more focused on, you know, keyword stuffing in the AI semantic search world.

12:41
AI will understand the meaning.

12:43
You don’t have to repetitively keyword stuff on your pages that could potentially actually hurt you ’cause it might read as as as low quality.

12:55
So really, if there’s one thing that I would suggest to do on your local pages this quarter is to rewrite, you know, the top of your about section or your page.

13:07
Ensure that the first sentences that are on your local pages for any section are the most likely question that someone might ask about your individual locations.

13:21
So moving on to a little bit more of the technical, technical side of things.

13:25
Again, this still is relevant in the traditional SEO world.

13:31
We want to really ensure that your schema and structured data matches your business.

13:37
So really the way to think about this is your schema is how you will hand the AI, the large language models, basically the facts about your business on on a on a plate and ensure that it’s in a format that machines can easily read.

13:52
You’re not necessarily right.

13:55
You like your schema isn’t necessarily you writing for that bot, but you are labeling your local page or business for the bot to be able to index.

14:04
So the five must haves, if you’re a local business, you want to make sure that your schema is local business.

14:11
You want to make sure that you have an FAQ page.

14:15
We’re going to harp on it again, but making sure that reviews and and aggregate ratings are appearing on your local pages, telling what services and offers you actually have for each location and your breadcrumb list.

14:29
This is your effective hierarchy of how your entire site is is structured.

14:35
The nice thing is, and one very critical step that some people skip is to basically validate your existing site.

14:43
Google has some very convenient tools.

14:46
Schema.org is an extremely valuable resource to be able to run your pages, and it’ll tell you exactly what it thinks your schema and structure data is and allow you to then make any changes and updates from there.

15:03
Next pillar we’ll focus on listings and NAP info.

15:08
I’ll pass it over to you, Anna.

15:10
Yeah, thank you.

15:10
And I think I saw a question in the chat about maintaining listings consistently.

15:15
And yes, you do need to do that.

15:16
And I’m going to be talking about a little bit as to why your listings and your local page.

15:22
I, I would think of them as kind of a power couple.

15:24
They, they fuel each other and they’re Better Together if they’re correct.

15:28
And you can see that here.

15:29
So on the right hand side, you’re seeing a Google Business profile.

15:33
On the left hand side, you’re seeing the corresponding local page.

15:37
And just if I ever say GBP, I’m also talking about Google Business profile.

15:41
We love acronyms in this space.

15:43
So just throwing that one out there as well.

15:45
The key thing to notice is that everything, everything matches.

15:49
So the same hours, the same address, same contact information.

15:52
That alignment, it’s not just a best practice, it’s really how you build trust.

15:57
So I would think of your local page as a credibility check for your listing.

16:01
When everything is consistent, platforms like Google in this example can confidently surface your business.

16:07
But the second there’s a mismatch, even something small like ours, that confidence drops.

16:12
And it makes sense if you think about this in, in real life kind of examples.

16:17
If someone sees you’re open until 11:00 PM on Google, but your local page says 10:30 PM, Now you’ve just created confusion for both AI and your customer and Google and everyone’s upset and you’re probably going to lose business real life visits out of all this confusion that’s been caused, which we don’t want to do.

16:37
And this becomes even more important at scale.

16:40
If you need to update your hours, promotions, anything on your listings, it’s it’s best to do it in one place and push it out to everywhere.

16:48
All of your listings on Apple, on Google and Bing, and your local page at the same time.

16:53
The key here is just really, really consistency.

16:56
Your listings and your local pages should be mirror images of each other.

16:59
They should work together because consistency is what ultimately will build that trust and trust is what builds that visibility.

17:08
So I could talk about listings all day, but I will go ahead and move two reviews, which we’ve been teasing up because this is really, really powerful and often underestimated as a signal in this AI search world that we’re living in.

17:22
Reviews are no longer just a reputation metric.

17:25
Honestly, back in the day, that is what we considered them.

17:28
But now they are content that gets surfaced, it gets quoted and it used, gets used to answer questions.

17:34
And this is one of the biggest shifts that we’re seeing right now.

17:37
So things like volume and recency, of course, that matters, but how detailed they are is where the real value is.

17:43
So staff was great.

17:44
That doesn’t really tell us much.

17:46
But the Friday brunch was fast and the outdoor seating was perfect.

17:50
That’s something that can actually be used because when users are asking detailed questions, platforms are looking for equally detailed signals.

17:58
And reviews are one of just the most natural sources of that.

18:02
And we’re seeing this play out in AI search review and rating content are being serviced directly in results, sometimes before user even clicks into your listings or local pages.

18:13
And we can see an example of that on the screen.

18:16
This is just a ChatGPT result that we pulled, but you can see the ratings pop up first.

18:20
So you’re seeing that 4.74.3.

18:23
So people are looking at this type of content and it’s not just about getting more reviews.

18:28
Of course, quantity still matters, but it’s just not the full story anymore.

18:32
It’s about encouraging more specific feedback and then actively engaging with it.

18:37
And when you think about reviews, again, think beyond just the ratings.

18:40
They’re really dynamic content that can directly influence whether or not you show up.

18:45
The detail in them is what makes them usable and those AI generated answers and not just searchable in the traditional sense.

18:52
So a lot more to unpack here, but Nick, I know you’re going to dive deeper into this, so I’ll pass it to you.

18:58
Yeah, again, really just to drive this point, this point home, White Spark has done some pretty nice analysis this year.

19:06
Review signals are still the second kind of highest ranking factor that that, that we find.

19:14
And so again, reviews and star ratings kind of feed 3 distinct ranking factors that AI engines and traditional SEO will use.

19:24
And one again is that trust high volume and authentic reviews signals a real, you know, established business that that people are visiting freshness collecting, collecting new reviews on a regular basis and responding to them.

19:39
Still very important really signals freshness and then as it relates to more sophisticated AI queries and results, the AI will pull out specific phrases that are left within reviews.

19:54
You know like wheelchair accessible, open late.

19:56
You want to have those signals not only on your page, but it really helps if those types of phrases are are listed in your reviews and are in match with with the queries that the users are using.

20:09
So you know when someone asks.

20:12
You know Chachi BT or something like that.

20:14
What’s a kid friendly restaurant in Chicago that’s open late.

20:19
The AI is going to match a query against basically those types of attributes and and pulling from the reviews as one of your sources is still extremely and important.

20:34
All right, moving on to a little bit of strategy here.

20:40
You’ve folks might already be doing this, but there’s obviously like tears of actually responding to reviews and ensuring if you’re doing this yourself or if you’re using a partner to help you respond to reviews, kind of understanding sort of the full landscape and how best to optimize that is, is really an important, you know, and again, responding to every review is can be a real burden, especially if you’re managing locations at scale.

21:09
But ignoring reviews or responding generically will actively hurt you.

21:14
So we’ve kind of teared out an approach here on on the screen, but tier one probably makes sense.

21:21
This is kind of the old school way of responding to reviews fully manual.

21:25
You have an employee that’s reading reviews, responding to them, handcrafted messages or using some type of a review review template.

21:36
You know, a little hard to scale at that, at that level.

21:40
Obviously there’s a many, many tools out there now that that allow you to have AI to start responding to review.

21:47
So Tier 2 is just basically clicking a button, have AI craft you an answer and then publish that that review response manually.

21:55
Tier 3 is kind of the bulk, the next sort of level of the AI drafting of responses, which is the bulk generated.

22:03
You know, AI is basically drafting responses.

22:05
You they’re still human in the loop here reviewing and publishing the responses that it drafts Tier 4 selective automation, you know, basically paring down the types of reviews that you want the AI to automatically respond to big efficiency gain here.

22:21
But let’s say if you only wanted the AI to respond to four and five star reviews with no text, ensuring that you have a partner, a way to do that really important again, will help you scale as as a business and and increase efficiency.

22:35
And then Tier 5, I think as it stands today, I think people are sometimes a little bit hesitant to fully go the fully automated route where you just have AI responding to all reviews automatically, especially as it relates to sensitive reviews.

22:52
You know, one and two star reviews, you probably still want to have a user in the loop and employee in the loop that’s reviewing those so you can proactively reach out to those customers that might have had a bad experience.

23:02
But but again, Tier 5 for going the full automated route will save you the the most time.

23:09
I would say, like I said before, most of the our own customers are probably between Tier 3 and Tier 4 with their overall review response strategy.

23:20
Again, the big unlock here is that you stop treating review responses as kind of like a a daily task, but you can start treating it as more of a managed system that again will help you scale no matter how few or how many locations that you have.

23:38
All right small detour there.

23:40
But to kind of bring us back to the little bit of the technical foundation checklist that I would strongly advocate that the folks on the webinar today start start to take take a look at.

23:53
So before I get to kind of the the KPISI want to harp on sort of the the technical foundation.

24:01
This might be very self-explanatory, but if the AI large language models cannot crawl your pages, you’re not going to show up.

24:13
So again, really important that you’re allowing GPT bot, perplexity bot, cloud bot, whatever it may be in your robots dot TXT file.

24:24
Very, very important.

24:25
Also, ensuring that your CDN and security settings actually allow these bots to crawl your your sites and your pages.

24:36
Again, really important.

24:38
Another kind of tip, ensuring that on your local pages themselves, your server side rendering as much content as you can.

24:47
Very important because if it’s in behind JavaScript, the crawler may never be able to actually see that bit of content that’s on your page.

24:57
Something that’s kind of new and upcoming.

25:01
I’m personally excited about ’cause I’m a little bit of a nerd like this.

25:05
There’s a LLMS dot TXT file that some some companies are starting to use to use, which is effectively an all-encompassing file that you can add to your site that will allow large language large language models to to crawl the your page.

25:23
So instead of allowing each of those individual bots in your robots dot TXT file, you can use the LLMS file to to to crawl your your site.

25:37
Next, next side is just ensuring again that you have the your site is fully sort of citation ready.

25:45
So once the crawlers are crawling your local pages and they’re actually, you know, reading on, reading the content, what is actually going to get picked and kind of led with this previously, But leading each section with kind of a direct answer and then explaining what that is, is, is very important.

26:07
So things like adding specific stats or dates or numbers, basically fact density again, is a good quality signal.

26:18
And in making sure that you have clear, you know, H1H2H3 hierarchy on your page with essentially one topic per section.

26:26
The per section is, is really important.

26:31
And again, this all kind of feeds into ensuring that you are, you know, not not only like setting and forgetting your content on your pages, but you’re actively updating that content because again, that shows freshness and that shows up to date, you know, AI citations, they might decay after a while.

26:52
Freshness generally wins.

26:53
And again in traditional SEO and in the new the new Geo world.

26:59
So again, pro tip, if you take one thing away from from this slide is just do a quick audit when you go back and make sure that on your local pages site that you are allowing those AI bots to crawl your pages.

27:15
And if you are actually tracking like logging, that behavior should be actually be able to see the logs and see if those bots are actually hitting your pages.

27:25
You know, if you see no hits, then you’re probably not getting any, any citations.

27:29
You know, pretty hopefully a pretty quick, easy kind of diagnostic that that you can run with.

27:37
All right.

27:37
So let’s say you’ve done all of that, you’ve optimized your pages, you’ve structured your content, you’ve done all sort of the the quality or optimization checks.

27:50
How do you actually figure out, OK, am I being successful or or not?

27:57
This is inherently a very difficult problem in the world as it stands today.

28:02
And the reason why is that large language models are non deterministic.

28:08
And So what that means is every single one of us on this webinar today, we could all go into Chachi BT and we can say what are the best, what’s the best burger restaurant in Dallas, TX?

28:19
And we are probably all gonna give slightly different answers.

28:24
So again, how do you actually measure that?

28:29
And I would think about that in kind of three pillars, 1 is mention rate, citation rate and answer position.

28:37
But I would not do this on a one off basis because again Anna and I can go into ChatGPT, we can ask the same question at the same day at the same time and we’ll get different, different results.

28:50
So again, I would think about this a little bit more kind of at scale and you’re wanting to use this more as a benchmark or averaging out where you appear or where you don’t appear over over time.

29:04
And so just to define these a little bit more, mention rate should be the percentage of AI answers that mention your brand across, you know, your, your kind of prompt set citation rate should be the percentage of those answers that actually link back to your own domain versus like a Reddit or something like that.

29:23
And then answer position, probably relatively self-explanatory, but are you showing up 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, that type of that type of thing?

29:35
So again, kind of a, a strategy that I would use and I would start to think about is effectively doing this on a weekly or monthly basis, but try to do this at scale, you know, run 15 to 25 target prompts that you want to show up for.

29:51
Again, you know, best apartment complexes in San Diego or again, a pizza restaurants with the best happy hours.

29:59
Start to pick those types of of queries and ask them on a consistent basis and start to log and kind of benchmark where you’re appearing over time.

30:09
And that’ll kind of be your best way to sort of pare down and get a good benchmark for how you’re how you’re actively appearing.

30:20
And again, I would be want to really harp on this.

30:23
If you hear a company say we can tell you exactly where you show up and and ChatGPT or in any large language model, I would really question that because again, inherently large language models are non determined, non deterministic.

30:40
All right, pass it back over to Anna to talk about some some more pitfalls that could kill your AI visibility.

30:47
Yeah.

30:48
And these are the things we honestly we see constantly, even with brands that are doing everything else right.

30:54
There are a couple traps that you don’t want to fall under.

30:57
The first one is templated local pages.

30:59
A lot of brands scale quickly, which is understandable.

31:02
But if every page is essentially the same with just the the city swapped out, AI starts to devalue that content, as Nick mentioned.

31:10
And that’s usually where we see performance begin to dip.

31:13
So I would steer clear of templated local pages for the most part.

31:17
Second is blocked crawlers.

31:19
I mentioned this one earlier, but it flies under the radar more than you’d expect.

31:23
But it makes sense.

31:23
If AI can’t access your content, you’re essentially invisible.

31:27
And sometimes that’s just coming from security settings that were put in place without even really realizing the downstream impact.

31:34
3rd is not consistency.

31:35
Even really small differences like I mentioned, like hours being wrong or spelling out sweet versus abbreviating it just can create some hesitation.

31:44
So being consistent with that is really important because that hesitation can ultimately translate into into weaker trust signals.

31:52
Now the 4th is content freshness.

31:54
We’ve mentioned this as well.

31:56
A lot of teams build out great pages and then leave them.

32:00
But if those pages aren’t updated, they slowly start to lose relevance and visibility tends to decline over time.

32:09
And then the last reviews for one, one last time, we will speak on this.

32:14
Reviews are actively shaping how AI understands your business.

32:17
So don’t ignore them and don’t respond in a really generic way.

32:21
It’s just a missed opportunity to reinforce those signals.

32:25
And I know we’ve really, really honed in on reviews and responding to them, but, you know, throw some keywords in, throw some, you know, natural language in your responses as well.

32:37
So overall, this isn’t about just doing everything completely new.

32:40
You’re most likely doing most of these things or most everything, correct?

32:45
But just making sure that you aren’t falling into any of these pillars that can ultimately, you know, just not drive trust and visibility at all.

32:55
They can do the opposite.

32:58
All right now before we wrap up, we always like to leave with just something that you should actually be working on and not just think about.

33:06
So if I were to take action as soon as tomorrow, here’s exactly where I would personally start.

33:12
First, take a look and just make sure your content is actually accessible.

33:15
Second, do a quick nap audit, so ensure your listings and local pages are fully aligned.

33:21
And then third, I would run, like Nick mentioned, a few real search prompts and see how your business is showing up today.

33:28
All of that can be done and I would say less than an hour and it gives you a really clear baseline of where you’re at and it’s usually pretty eye opening.

33:36
And then from there, it’s just, it’s just iteration.

33:38
So over time, the brands that stay consistent with this are the ones that we consistently see outperform.

33:46
So we kind of ran through that, but now we can definitely transition into some live Q&A.

33:52
I’ve seen a lot of good questions, so I’m going to pop over there myself.

33:58
Awesome.

33:58
That was great stuff.

33:59
So thanks, Anna.

34:00
Thanks, Nick.

34:01
And I know that before we get into the Q&A, we did have a limited, a limited time offer for 20% off.

34:10
So I want to throw that so everybody gets a chance to see that that should have popped out for most of you.

34:17
And with that, I will tell you we have a lot of questions.

34:20
So I am glad that we left a little bit of time.

34:22
We’ll see how many we can get through and anything we don’t get into, we will send over and you all can look at once you get back to your desk.

34:30
So first question, let me get.

34:34
Yeah, OK, so first question, there we go.

34:37
It wasn’t refreshing for me from Elijah.

34:40
What if you offer services that are targeted to a particular local region, but you aren’t tied to a physical location because the service is largely remote?

34:50
Any recommendations for strategies for showing up in local searches in that situation?

34:56
Yes.

34:56
So if we do understand that like service area businesses exist, right?

35:01
You know, you might have plumbers that you know, people aren’t going to the plumber to actually, you know, do business.

35:07
Plumbers are going to a house still important to have, you know, websites about the locations that you service.

35:16
My strategy for this was to really ensure that you’re adding the neighborhoods, the cities, the local regions where you’re actually doing business heavily on those pages.

35:29
Because again, at the end of the day, whether it be Google or Chachi BT or any other search engine, they need to know where you do business and what your services are.

35:41
So really just ensuring that you have, again, that fact based density of, hey, we do business for these specific areas on a dedicated page to that service area.

35:55
Business is where I would kind of start, start there, the Dottie asks.

36:03
I have a multi location business pest control, but some of the location web pages do not have a physical address and share the same phone number.

36:12
So what about this really same answer as as the previous question, you know, just ensuring that your pest control where you’re actually servicing the the areas that you service are clearly listed on defined pages for those for those specific areas.

36:33
So again, I wouldn’t have one page that said that said for each kind of location that says we service everything.

36:41
I would still break it down into individual pages per area that you service and just really ensure that the content on those pages kind of matches the the area and is unique to the areas that that you’re actually servicing.

36:57
OK, we have a couple questions around FAQs, so I’m going to do my best to bring these together.

37:03
So Rob asks if it matters if the FAQs is part of the menu or footer menu or can it just be in the background?

37:12
And should FAQ pages be separate for each service?

37:16
And then Carrie also asked about freestanding FAQ pages.

37:20
So yeah, any advice on FAQs?

37:23
Yeah, so a couple things there.

37:26
I would not put the FAQs kind of in a menu or or in a footer.

37:31
I would keep them on the page because kind of getting back to my schema and structured data slide, that’s not inherently looking like when you go to schema.org and you plug in a site, it’s not gonna inherently look at the header and the footer.

37:46
It’s gonna look at the main body content of the page.

37:50
So ensuring that you have FAQs that are visible on the page really important because again, if you think about it as, as AILLMS are crawling the page, they need to see and read the, the question and the answer on the page.

38:05
And if you bury them kind of in a menu or in a footer and kind of link out to a separate page, you could potentially get, get missed.

38:14
And to kind of answer that, the second part of the question, I would ensure that the FA, this is very, very common, right?

38:22
Like I know I’m a business and generally I know what the FA QS are for every location of my business.

38:28
Like it’s OK to have kind of like a templated FAQ section.

38:32
I would say it’s not optimal.

38:34
Like ideally you would like to have, you know, questions and answers that are specific to each individual location.

38:42
And I get that might be easier said than done, but the more localized you can make it, the, the better you’ll, you’ll kind of surface question from John and I know we get these on webinars often.

38:58
It’s how do you successfully ask for and receive reviews that have that more specific feedback you’re looking for?

39:05
Well, to, to plug, I mean Alchemer, we offer services for, for that, but there, there’s lots of companies that offer services that help, that help you solicit reviews.

39:15
But you know, depending on what type of business you’re, you’re associated with, you know, having like AQR code on, on a table of a restaurant is, is, is something that you could implement to, to kind of send, send a survey.

39:30
Really what you want to do is ensure that you’re sending surveys out as customers are visiting your, your place of, of business.

39:38
And if you’re kind of in a more of a, you know, service type of business, let’s say again, it’s a plumber or pest control type type of business.

39:48
Ensuring that you’re sending any customer that you’ve done business with a link to, to a survey, very, very important.

39:56
And then ensuring that you’re able to to see that feedback so that you can then aggregate it and respond to it to any feedback.

40:03
Very, very important.

40:04
Yeah.

40:05
And I will say, I mean a bit of it could be training to whoever is, you know, actually doing the service themselves, getting them involved in.

40:12
And some of this and kind of, you know, training them as to how to ask specific questions for feedback that’s more specific.

40:19
So getting some training involved.

40:21
I will say I’ve seen this gone kind of South when you you ask for like a templated response.

40:27
So don’t do that, at least for Google, they will flag you.

40:32
So don’t be sending out templates of like just plug this into to Google and leave us a five star review with this specific language that will get flagged.

40:39
So do not do that.

40:40
But there are a lot of tips and tricks on on how to be successful here.

40:44
Yeah, it’s case in case in point that kind of falls into the whole review gating world, which is, which is a big, big no, no.

40:53
Like Google does not like review gating.

40:56
They want honest and open, open feedback about your business, whether that’s a one star review or or a 5 five star review.

41:03
So avoid review gating at at all costs.

41:08
And so do the people reading them too, though if you start noticing a pattern, you’re automatically, at least for me, I’m automatically discounting them.

41:15
I know they’ve gained the system.

41:16
This is not, they’re not real reviews.

41:18
Absolutely.

41:19
Yep.

41:21
OK, so Xander asks, how should we adapt our PR strategy to strengthen local signals in AI search, especially across multiple locations?

41:34
I would probably need to see what your current PR strategy kind of is.

41:40
I would also like to take a look at your individual kind of listings in your local pages to see the type of business you are, kind of what content you’re putting out there.

41:53
I think that’s something that we might be able to kind of take offline here and we can circle back with you individually.

42:01
Cool.

42:01
Denise asks.

42:03
Our business location is by appointment.

42:05
To say that we’re open, you know, 24/7 would be misleading.

42:08
So how do they list their hours?

42:15
Well, I mean for local pages, I would I would say by appointment I would get that language on there.

42:19
If they’re talking specifically about listings, that one is a little bit trickier.

42:24
Honestly, Google and other sites don’t really support by appointment locations that well.

42:30
That is something they are aware of.

42:32
You do have to get hours on there if you want appears open or you can list with no hours and then put by appointment in your description.

42:40
And there are some other ways to kind of get that across to the user.

42:43
I would also probably do some some Google posts that say specifically by appointment and just get that content out there in other ways and then have that kind of fact checked on your local page with you specifically saying by appointment.

42:56
I would just make sure that language is specifically used as often as you can.

43:00
Yeah, to kind of go back to more of a a strategy or the idea of the idea is still that potential customers land on your local pages or your Google Maps listings to find out more about you as a business, even if that search is still starting within Chachi, BT or Cloud or any of these large language models.

43:24
So what Anna said, definitely, definitely appropriate.

43:29
You don’t necessarily have to list your hours that you’re open on a local page, but ensuring that if someone actually lands on that local page, it’s very clearly outlined with the CTA schedule an appointment.

43:42
There’s a big, you know, CTA button at the top of your page is something I would definitely advocate for in this case.

43:48
Yeah, having, you know, a specific way that they could make an appointment that CTA is pretty important.

43:53
So not just saying by appointment, but then, you know, leading them on how to do so, whether that’s calling, whether that’s an appointment specific link that they can book online.

44:03
Just definitely giving them resources on how to do so is important as well, just for a user experience as well.

44:12
So Jordan asks, are Google reviews more valuable than platforms like G2 or Clutch?

44:16
How do you determine which to push clients to?

44:22
I would say that Google reviews are more important than than G2 just because Google is referenced so, so heavily.

44:30
However, all that being said, as it specifically relates to the AI world, these AI models are so powerful, they’re sourcing information really everywhere where you’re online.

44:43
So I wouldn’t necessarily take the mindset that one is more important than the other.

44:48
I would I would kind of use the bulk the bulk approach and try to gather reviews about your business on as many different trusted sources as you possibly can.

44:59
You know, whether that be Glassdoor and DG2 Clutch, Google.

45:03
I would say all, all of all of the above.

45:08
To kind of answer your second question about where you determined to push clients to.

45:13
Like let’s say you do want to you know, someone does business with you and you want them to leave you a survey and then go rate rate you somewhere.

45:23
I would give them the option to to rate you wherever they want to go, whether that be Google or or G2 or or Clutch.

45:32
Again, it probably depends a little bit on what specific type of industry you’re in, but again, it never hurts to to start with with Google there.

45:43
There’s still a big fish.

45:46
Agreed.

45:49
David asks, are Apple maps important?

45:51
I never see them on these types of slides.

45:56
Apple Maps.

45:57
I can let you chime in a little bit, Anna, but yes, Apple Maps are still very important.

46:02
Apple released Apple Business Connect.

46:07
I’m gonna fudge the date maybe like a year and a half ago, two years ago now.

46:12
And that’s basically their solution to Google business profile.

46:16
So Apple is definitely trying to get be more of a player in, in the map space.

46:24
And again, I would say Apple Maps are still important.

46:28
You know, think of use cases like someone in their car that’s using car play and they have an Apple phone and they asked Siri to find them a restaurant or something like that.

46:38
You still want to be listed on Apple and have that information be accurate to what’s on your on your Google page ’cause you don’t necessarily know what a search engine that a user might use.

46:52
And so you could potentially be costing yourself business if you’re not added on on Apple or you’re you’re not listed on Apple.

47:00
I don’t know, Anna, if you have any additional thoughts there?

47:03
Yeah, it’s my link because I live in this world with Apple every day.

47:06
So I have a lot of thoughts here.

47:07
But yes, Apple’s important.

47:10
Like Nick said, you never know where people are going to search from.

47:13
And specifically when it comes to local pages, to Apple scrapes from local pages as one of their main sources.

47:20
If you’re using a provider or partnership, of course, that’s prioritized.

47:23
But if you’re just, you know, managing these on your own, then your local pages are even more important.

47:29
Because what Apple will do is they have a team that will actually go to your local page, look at the hours, compare them to what they have, and you know, kind of Fact Check you that way.

47:38
So all of this being aligned is actually really critical.

47:41
And Apple’s still a big player.

47:43
I know we talk about Google a lot, but there’s still, there’s still probably #2 if we were to rank them.

47:48
So I would not count them out.

47:50
I would definitely definitely prioritize making sure that at least just for content consistency or Apple Maps are updated.

47:58
And then yes, last piece here, they did launch Apple Business Connect recently rebranded to Apple business.

48:03
They dropped the Kinect.

48:04
They didn’t want it anymore and they’re trying to make it more so like a Google like platform with like a a back end similar to GBP.

48:12
So they’re trying to become a bigger player in the game.

48:15
And I would I would not count them out.

48:19
All right, AR has a question.

48:22
How do you see the local pack changing in the next few months?

48:26
Will it be replaced by ask maps with ads or AI mode with ads?

48:32
What happens to near me keywords?

48:35
Will they stay relevant?

48:36
You’ve got any insight here what you expect?

48:38
Yeah, obviously I wish I was.

48:43
I could.

48:43
I could see the future.

48:44
But I do see local pack changing to more kind of an AI generated or AI powered solution.

48:58
We’ve already seen this with with Google where they had they deprecated their own Google kind of FAQ kind of API and they sort of moved to more of an AI powered kind of ask system for, for Google Maps.

49:19
So, you know, as time goes on, the one thing that I can say for sure is that AI is going to play more of a, more of a part in the world.

49:30
Now, I do think near me keywords are still pretty important because users are still going to tend to potential customers are still going to tend to search no matter where, where, how they’re searching for what’s close to them, right.

49:46
And and you know, if you’re on vacation somewhere and a new city, you don’t know anything about the city, even if you’re asking Chachi BT you’re gonna start to kind of use near me still.

50:01
But I do think it’s gonna change a little bit where it’s gonna be, you know, like near the Mission Hills neighborhood of San Diego or, you know, near the Nashville metro area, like that type of thing.

50:13
But I think the the word near is gonna be replaced by kind of in as as time goes on, you know, what is the best ** whatever in blah, blah, blah, blah is gonna be very, very important.

50:27
Yeah, that’s what I was going to say too.

50:28
I think the near me, I think they’re going to get more specific.

50:30
I think they’re going to get longer.

50:33
But I don’t think the entirety of the near me keyword is going to leave us anytime soon.

50:40
Timothy asks, does local business schema play well with real estate agent schema?

50:49
I would say probably, probably not.

50:53
Like if you’re like, if you are a real estate agent, this is where it gets a little tricky.

50:59
Like kind of kind of yes and no.

51:01
I would say though, in general, like having both on your schema isn’t inherently a bad thing.

51:10
You know, you want to have schema that really tells a search engine about your business.

51:14
So you know, if you are a real estate agent and you do think of yourself as as a local business, I try to put both both on there.

51:22
And this is where you can get kind of creative.

51:23
You can do some A A and B testing if you have, if you have access to to your site right where you could just start with local business and see how your ranking for a while, swap it out with real estate agents, see how your ranking, then try both.

51:42
You know, there generally isn’t like a a super one-size-fits-all, very, very clear answer.

51:48
But if you’re willing to kind of test and and be creative, I think you can figure out what’s works best for your business.

51:58
Mark asks, how should we handle call tracking numbers that may differ between the website and their business profile?

52:10
Yeah, so I mean, Google supports call tracking.

52:15
So it’s completely OK to have different numbers.

52:19
I guess in that sense, if it’s specific to the tracking and also Google, you can add in multiple phone numbers.

52:24
So you can still add in like a primary that you would find on your local landing page in addition to the tracking.

52:30
So they fully support that kind of a setup.

52:33
But I would just list, you know, obviously any that you have out there online on your on your website as well.

52:40
I do think it, you know, this question was specific to GBP, but I think Anna, correct me if I’m wrong, it does depend on provider.

52:48
There are some providers that are a little bit more strict with call tracking numbers than than others.

52:53
So I would just say yes, it’s OK for Google, but make sure that you’re looking at the specific provider requirements, whether that be Yelp or Apple and just make sure that those are OK on those sites.

53:04
Yeah, Apple does not allow it.

53:06
So since we’re talking about that, why Apple’s a no go?

53:10
And most of them aren’t, but Google does support it.

53:16
Joe asks when updating pages, do you still need to ping pages?

53:24
I don’t know what ping pages means.

53:30
Sometimes I take a shot in the dark and you know, I’m like, maybe it’s something I don’t know about.

53:34
You know, I come from the PPC space.

53:36
When I get too deep into SEO, sometimes I’m like, it’s a little deep.

53:39
What what I would say though, in general, like how it kind of works is when you do update a page, whether again, that be the Google crawler or AI crawlers, they’ll re crawl, re crawl your your page.

53:52
You don’t inherently need to say like, hey, this, this page is updated as long as well as it is kind of good to have kind of a last updated date.

54:01
But these crawlers are pretty sophisticated and we’ll know when a page changes and re index your pages according accordingly based on the updates that you’ve made.

54:12
We talked about needing to respond to reviews.

54:15
Annie asks if we have reviews from like two or three years ago, maybe that they didn’t respond.

54:19
Should they go back and do so?

54:21
Yeah, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a conundrum.

54:24
We see it, we see it all the time.

54:28
Like probably depends on, on the review.

54:31
You know, if someone left a negative rating and you respond to them, you know, 2 to 3, two, 2-3 years in the future, that’s probably going to have a negative effect on that on that potential customer.

54:45
So I would just say ensure that you’re responding to every every review from now.

54:50
You know, moving, moving forward is probably your best course of action.

54:55
I would just probably make sure to be careful and read through through the the older reviews.

55:00
I don’t know if you have a different take there.

55:01
No, that’s a good call out.

55:02
I mean, if that would just not land well from a user experience, if the business is reaching out three years later for a one star review.

55:10
So yeah, use your judgement on this.

55:13
But if it’s a positive review even with no text, definitely I would use it as an opportunity to get in there and add some keywords and some natural fresh language that we’ve been talking about.

55:24
Why not?

55:27
OK, we probably have time for one or two more.

55:29
So a question from Adam, it looks like it’s long, but basically Adam is looking for consistency in the number of aggregated reviews versus like what they see.

55:41
So can I list the number of aggregate rating schema without listing all 450 or does it look like I’m false falsely inflating that number?

55:50
Sorry guys.

55:52
The short answer is it’s actually OK to do that on our own kind of local pages solution.

56:03
We have like a carousel that does show you reviews kind of in a carousel format.

56:10
It does not show literally every single review.

56:13
So like the short answer is like, yeah, that’s OK to say.

56:17
I have like 450 plus reviews.

56:19
My star rating is X and not show literally every instance on on a local page.

56:25
Otherwise they would take forever to to load and and stuff and stuff like that.

56:30
So yeah, that that’s OK.

56:31
All right, let’s see.

56:36
I think I saw one more in here.

56:39
Paul.

56:39
Yes, we’ll be sharing the slides and the recording.

56:45
I saw this question a couple times, so let’s let’s lead out with this.

56:48
This is always a good SEO question.

56:50
It depends.

56:50
But how much content should there be on a local landing page?

56:53
I think it depends on the content and what’s in there.

56:55
So, you know, there’s never like it’s, you know, this many words are this.

56:58
So do you want to talk to that a little bit?

57:01
Yeah, you kind of hit on it.

57:03
The, the short answer is, yeah, there’s not necessarily like A1 size fits all.

57:09
However, what I would say is you don’t want to have so much content that you start having like page loading issues.

57:17
One common thing that we see all the time is, you know, there’s businesses and they want to add a ton of like photos on the, on their local page that showcase their, their business.

57:27
That’s great up until a point.

57:29
I mean, in traditional SEO sense, one of the one of the ranking factors is kind of page speed.

57:36
So again, you don’t want to be so long have so much content on there that it actually takes a while for, for the page to load.

57:44
But I would say you do want to have kind of the core principles really set in stone, which again is like your traditional name, address, phone number, information and FAQ section is great.

57:56
Like we said, reviews are fantastic and about section that showcases, you know, kind of your business description on there and a services section what you actually are are offering.

58:10
Again, whether that be pest control, pest control, plumbing can be more nitty gritty happy hours, that type of thing.

58:18
Very, very important.

58:20
Kind of we mentioned it during during the webinar, but kind of think of it backwards like what would a potential customer ask the into Google or Chachi BT that you want to show up for and make sure you have content that kind of answers those questions.

58:35
And I would kind of work my way backwards from from that to to try to optimize your pages as as best as you can.

58:41
Yeah.

58:42
And also don’t just stuff the content on there and then and then leave it.

58:45
We’ve harped on this, but you can refresh your content so you don’t need to get it all out there and then it’s out there it’s done.

58:51
That could actually lead to a lot of problems.

58:53
So get the content that’s applicable at the time and then you can always go back and you can change the images, you can change the about like that.

59:00
You can constantly be refreshing that.

59:02
That’s actually a way more powerful way to use content on a page.

59:05
Yep, the, the like iterative approaches are, are best in this world.

59:10
You know, like we’re, we’re finding out new stuff about how large language models are indexing pages.

59:17
Google’s changing how they’re indexing pages all the time and making sure that you’re flexible with that and can iterate on the content to kind of fit that.

59:25
Changing the landscape is is really important.

59:29
Yeah, 100%.

59:30
Make sure you know you’re doing what’s best for the, for the, the reader, you know who is, who is going to be there.

59:36
So all right, I’m going to take this down.

59:39
That was great information.

59:40
Thank you, Anna.

59:41
Thank you, Nick.

59:42
Really appreciate it.

59:43
And there’s some questions that we didn’t get to, so we’ll send those all over your way before I let you go.

59:47
So real quick, if you’re still still here with us, stay here for 30 more seconds and stay here for that survey.

59:52
It’ll pop up as soon as we close out.

59:54
But Anna, Nick, tell the people where to find you.

59:58
Oh, oh, go ahead.

1:00:02
For it, yeah, I am Nick Larson.

1:00:05
You can find me on LinkedIn.

1:00:07
Again, I’m a product manager here at at Alkamer, so you should be able to look me up on LinkedIn.

1:00:15
Same here.

1:00:15
Anna Rendell’s at Alkamer, anna.rendells@alkamer.com, I believe, but find me on LinkedIn.

1:00:23
Awesome.

1:00:23
And with that, we’re going to let everybody go.

1:00:25
I hope you have a great rest of your day.

1:00:27
Thanks for joining us and we’ll see you on the next SEJ webinar or on LinkedIn.

1:00:31
Bye all.

1:00:32
Sounds good.

1:00:32
Bye, everyone.

1:00:33
Thanks guys.