How Local SEO is Evolving in AI Discovery

0:00The Voices of Search podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Jordan Cooney.

0:47Joy Hawkins: Local search is changing faster than most businesses realize. According to Sterling Sky's research, local pack ads grew from 1 % to 22 % of track searches. And now AI is adding a whole new layer of disruption. Between AI-powered local results, AI mode, expanding ad inventories, and Google's increasing reliance on third-party data, local businesses are facing a future where visibility is becoming harder to predict and harder to measure. How do you adapt when rankings become less reliable? AI systems show different results to different users. Paid placements continue to consume more and more of the search experience.

1:25Joy Hawkins: I'm Jordan Cooney, and joining me today is Joy Hawkins, owner and president of Sterling Sky. Joy has spent nearly two decades studying local results and has led more than 1 ,000 local SEO tests to determine what ranking factors really matter. Today, we're going to talk about local SEO, how it's evolving in this age of AI, and the rise of paid visibility in what businesses need to do to stay ahead. Joy, welcome to the Voices of Search podcast. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. Likewise, I am pumped. We don't get enough time to talk about local on our show. It is something that I think is wildly underestimated in this ecosystem, not only for consumers, like what consumers need to know about how local businesses are served and shown, but just in the way that the systems work.

2:13Joy Hawkins: It's a different environment. It's a different game of SEO. And I'm one of the people that always says, like, I'm not a local expert. Like, I don't know a ton about this space and how to yield the sword of, like, success for local businesses. But you do. So, Joy, tell us about Sterling Sky. Tell us how you started this company and what you guys do. Yeah. So, Sterling Sky started in 2017. It wasn't a planned thing. never really wanted to be an agency owner at all whatsoever. I worked at two different agencies for a total of 11 years before I went out on my own. And I only went out on my own because, I don't know how to say this, I'm like an overachiever.

2:58So I have really high standards. And the place that I was working at the time would sell SEO like crazy to businesses and they would have me be the salesperson. So I'm selling based on all this like knowledge and expertise that I had with being an SEO for over a decade. And then they would have some like junior person come in and actually work on these accounts who'd been doing SEO for like three months. And so there's a big disconnect in the quality of work that the clients were expecting versus getting. And it really bothered me. Like I was not okay with it. So I was like, I'm going to go just do it on my own.

3:31I actually wanted to do SEO. Like I didn't want to be a business owner. I just wanted to do good SEO. And I wanted to know more about Google's algorithm than any of my competitors. Because that's like, I'm a very driven, motivated person. So that's all I wanted to do. I wanted to hire maybe two people, um, to do the things that I wasn't good at. And, um, that was it. And then I guess we started getting quite a bit of demand. So then I hired more people and then more demand and then more people. And then we have, we're, we're getting close to 50. I think we'll probably hit 50 staff this year. Um, which is crazy.

4:03Cause I'm not like a big, like I'm a people person, but I'm not the type of person that would be like excited about managing 50 people. So, uh, it's really, it's really weird. Um, but hopefully you don't have to manage all 50

4:13Joy Hawkins: yourself. No, no, I do not. No, no, no. I know. I'm teasing you. That's amazing. Yeah. That's amazing success. It's great. And like, tell us more about like, what, what are the, what is unique about like the services that you guys offer? Like, how is it different? And I don't think most SEOs understand the differences of like, what is a service for a local business versus a service for like an enterprise business or a startup or a company that their customer base is not tied to geography? Yeah. So, I mean, we specifically work on local SEO. What local SEO is, is like any business type that has a local customer base, right?

4:55So our clients aren't local to us. Like I'm in Canada. Most of our clients are in the United States, so they don't live near me. But our clients are like lawyers, insurance agents. Senior home care is a big one. Home services is huge. We have a lot of home service clients because all their clients are local to them. So when you need a lawyer, you're searching things like criminal lawyer, Denver, or divorce lawyer, Denver, or whatever, right? So those are the camp of local SEO. But local SEO encompasses all of Google, like not just the local pack. Some people like, oh, you're just talking about like map results or Google business profiles.

5:31No, we're talking about all of it. Anything that pertains to that type of business is what we would work on. And as far as what I think makes us different, I found that in local SEO, a lot of businesses liked to come up with packages, you know, like, hey, you pay 2000 a month, and we're going to give you this many citations and this many new pages every month and it's like some scalable solution, I don't find that that works. So we're really custom. For example, last year when we started seeing that ad increases that you alluded to, like ads are kind of taken over quite a bit. It's very intrusive.

6:06And so we're like, okay, clearly we need to kind of push our clients to do more ads and ads are cutting into SEO a little bit, not a lot, but a little bit. So what we did was just like, we started telling our clients, listen, if you'd rather us work on an ads account for you instead of putting out more content or whatever, like let's just swap that out. And where we want to do whatever is going to result in the business having the higher ROI, I don't really care what that looks like as long as it's valuable and that we can measure it. So I'm big on like making sure if my team spends a bunch of time doing something for a business that I can actually tell the business, what do we get from that?

6:43Joy Hawkins: Mm-hmm. And I mean, we're going to dive into this ad conversation. I also want to dive into how you materialize value from a local perspective, because I do think this is a huge learning for our community, right? I think most SEOs, they underestimate the complexity and the level of rigor you need to convey value to a local business and a local business owner. Even if it's a franchise, even if it's a big nationwide or global franchise where their local businesses are dependent on local customers, there's still a level of complexity there that I think most people underestimate. But I have to ask you the big question, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be a good podcast host.

7:24Joy Hawkins: What the heck is going on with AI and local? So like how is AI disrupting the local space? What's the same or different from pre-AI mode, pre-AI overviews? And is or is this not impacting local experiences? So it's absolutely impacting it for sure. So I'll tell you, there's two big ones. AI overviews are definitely stealing informational traffic, right? So all of the, how do I do this? What do I do with this? And for some industries, that stuff you might say doesn't really matter, which is true. Like if you're a plumber, you probably don't care about ranking nationwide for how to fix your toilet.

8:03That's not going to bring in more business. But I will tell you for our lawyers, for example, their informational articles that have to do with different laws. And what do I do if I have this happen? Or what do I do with this? They do drive conversions and leads. So they do matter. So I'm not in the camp that thinks traffic, traffic does matter. That being said, we're not seeing a direct correlation between a drop in traffic and a drop in leads. So there's a lot of businesses that will have less traffic and their leads are fine or the revenue is fine. So those two don't always equal the same thing, right?

8:32Which is why, like you said, it's very convoluted where we are really trying to like push all of our account managers is like finding out like how the business actual revenue looks, because even leads, which is what we track, can be misleading. You know, you could get a bunch of robocalls that result in more calls and that's not more revenue, but it looks like your call numbers are up, right? So it's becoming harder and harder. So we're getting stricter and stricter with how we define a lead because it used to be like, oh, calls a lead. Well, no, not a call. Actually, it's calls over 30 seconds.

9:01Or for some clients, calls over two minutes. Like it depends on the business, right? So we're trying to get better at like only defining what's actually a lead and then not stopping there, but like actually having conversations with our clients every month going like, okay, how's business? Is business up? What types of things are you getting more business from? And really trying to understand more about how they're making money because that should define what we spend time on. And I've found over the years, that's a lot of times a big disconnect. People just aren't talking to their clients enough or asking those questions.

9:33Like we need to actually care about them making more money or they're not going to want to continue paying us.

9:37Joy Hawkins: 100%. And like one of the things that I think is impactful with this AI change and just the results changing is like, I'm curious to get your perspective is like, is the quality of traffic different today than it was in the past for local businesses? In particular, I want to take maybe a spicier edge on this. Has spam changed to local businesses from the past to today with AI results? Yeah, so I do think definitely spam has changed. I will tell you, like, compared to lead. And we're not talking about the food, right, Joy? No, God. So actually, it's funny. Literally this morning, I was looking up one of my insurance clients, and, like, there's all these fake lead gen listings.

10:22I'm like, whoa, I haven't seen those in a while. He's, again, I've been working with this guy for, like, seven years. And, like, they come and go in waves. And I'm like, man, every single time I'm like, spam's dead. they figure something else out. I got to tell you, the people that do lead gen, they are the most creative, like smart people. They are always coming up with new ways to get on Google. Like I have to credit them, man. They're good. So I think they're smarter than Google. They're always ahead of Google. Google knocks them down and they just find something new. So I don't think you're ever going to find a world where that doesn't happen.

10:53I do think it is getting harder. I've heard people like there used to be this rank and rent model that was really popular in the local space where you'd set up a website, rank it, and then, you know, sell the leads, right? I think that I've seen as a trend at conferences that is less and less popular over the years because it's harder. Google has made it so that like the things that are weighted are things that don't necessarily come naturally to a lead gen website, right? But there's always a level of lead gen and local like that you're always going to have. And when it comes to local pack results, you can get rid of them.

11:26Like they're not allowed to have listings. Google will act on them. When it comes to organic, that's where I usually see like exact match domains, things like that. That's something that still works very well. We don't do this, but again, that's what we're competing against. And it does still work quite well in, especially the more niche you get where there's not as much competition. So I think the, the, the thing, the opportunity for business owners is like, they often all want to target the same things because they want to go after the things with volume. Sometimes you can really dominate with like the more niche you get, the more specific you get, but it's not as attractive because you don't get the immediate massive increase in leads and volume.

12:10Right. But I would say long-term, it could be a good plan.

12:12Joy Hawkins: So one of the things I think is, is, is fascinating about local and, you know, any, any national businesses that there's this, there's this insatiable desire to always want to fixate yourself on a single search result. You know, it's the, it's the age old, I I've shared this story a million times, not only on the pod, but, but at other, at other events, right. I, I worked at eBay and our CMO just wanted eBay to rank for iPhone. And I was like, well, man, I don't know. I don't think I can do that, but that's what we fixated ourselves on for like a whole year is to rank for iPhone. Right. And there's the same desire, obviously, with local businesses.

12:49Joy Hawkins: And it's maybe even more acute. Because if you're a lawyer in a very specific region with a very specific specialization, that keyword gets just cross-sectioned out really narrowly. And you're just fixated on ranking for that one term that is so relevant to how you do business in that market. With AI now, that's just changing. It's changing super fast. And in our prep session, I really loved how you were thinking about this transition, right? Which, you know, business owners have always been focused on like single keyword expectations. And those search results is like what they basically go and check every single day.

13:28Joy Hawkins: But now with AI and the hyper personalization and expectations that consumers have in their own prompts and their own prompt desires, that is becoming a very different world. And there's different influences that drive that. How are you seeing this response world impact local businesses? How are you communicating this single keyword expectation with business owners? And give us your thoughts on how this has changed now with AI results. Yeah, I think that the generic type of content is just failing, right? So let's just say you're an appliance repair business. Every appliance repair business by default would normally have a page for new appliances, repairing appliances, right?

14:11If you stop there, you're not going to be successful because every single appliance repair company has that. Where I think you're going to need to dive further in an AI world is you're going to have to have prices. You're going to have to have all the specific brands for the models names of like some of these appliances. Right. Like I don't know how many different types of stoves that KitchenAid makes. No idea. But again, if I have a very specific KitchenAid stove and I'm looking for somebody to repair it, we are seeing that like having those types of details on your site can can really help again it's like the little things like maybe you only get one click for that but if you have enough of those you'll get a lot of clicks right and this is where so that's that's great but it's dangerous because then people's response to hearing this go okay great I need to have a page on every single model that KitchenAid makes so I'm going to go create 500 pages and one for each model that's where I'm like, no, like you don't want to do that.

15:08So I think the volume of pages that we are recommending is definitely less than it would be like several years ago. I think it's actually better to have, um, you know, a page that has like all the details on it. But when you start scaling content, which I'm seeing a lot of businesses do, cause it's so easy with AI, there are serious risks in the last year. I've started to see Google actually do like domain wide penalties on lots of small businesses, which I've never seen in my entire life. I've seen it once where it was like a penguin type penalty back in like 2015. This dentist got all these links and I think they actually got a manual penalty.

15:41Manual penalties, I think they're still around. I don't know. I never see them. But the algorithmic penalties are the things that are terrifying because you have no answer as to what caused it. You have to figure that out. And I was just auditing this like giant home services business the other day who got completely destroyed last year by one of the core updates, like wiped out all their pages. but I'm looking at what they did and they created hundreds of location pages, like all the same rewritten to be clear. They're not the same wording on every page. It doesn't matter. They're exactly the same.

16:11Like if you were, it's just like swapping out one word for another kind of thing. So I think that it's a really hard balance because you need to be more detailed with your content. But if you start scaling content, you could land up with a penalty because Google doesn't want you doing that. So you have to make sure how you do it is in a way that appears to be really useful for users as well as search engines because Google's getting really harsh with some of this stuff.

16:34Joy Hawkins: So I want to unpack a few of these topics because some of that stuff is like really deep. And I think like, especially if you're a local business owner listening to this show, like some of these concepts like penalties and animals from the zoo, like penguins. Now you're like, whoa, where the hell am I? It gets very confusing very fast. But let's unpack a few of these things because I think it's really important for our listeners to understand how the mechanics of some of this stuff works. And one of the things that I want to understand from your perspective is what is authority today for a local business, right?

17:09Joy Hawkins: And I think authority signals are very different for a local business than for other types of websites. And how do you guys communicate what those signals look like? And maybe I'm wrong about whether they're different or not, but I want to get your perspective on that. And I want to understand how business owners should be thinking about the concept of authority. There's so much hype right now about authority. There's so much noise, right? And we're not too far away from a new zoo animal being one of the penalties for poor authority practices, right? I'm not trying to bring the penguin back, but it's the reality of like how some people are thinking about tactics like, what do I do in Reddit?

17:48Joy Hawkins: What do I do in Wikipedia? What do I do in these other community UGC channels to build my authority. So first question is, what is authority for a local business? Help our listeners understand that. And then what's happening today with all these hype cycles and noise around authority? And what should business owners and agencies that are helping local businesses pay attention to? Yeah. So I think when people think authority, they think links. I'll tell you, man, links are one of the biggest liabilities these days, depending on what types you're getting. So let's talk about like what types of things do matter that are not dangerous.

18:22Social media, big one, huge. That one is growing tremendously. So what I mean by that is like, not, you know, how many likes your page has necessarily, but how much user generated content you have on your page, like are people interacting with you? Do you have a YouTube channel? And when I say that, people are like, great, I'm going to go make a YouTube channel with a bunch of really crappy videos that get no reviews. No, that won't help you. What helps if you are on YouTube is if you have an active channel that Google is actively serving to their users, i.e. you have views, you have comments.

18:54No, don't buy these. It doesn't work. Like really, I mean, actually, I should take that back. It does work for a short time, but you don't want to like do the fast, cheap way of getting there. But I am starting to see that like things like your Instagram profile, Facebook groups are showing up everywhere in the search results. So being a voice inside of public Facebook groups, especially because those get indexed and crawled, they're ranking all over the place in local search results and Reddit. No shock. That one is pretty much visible for every single local search I do. So Reddit is another one that most business owners don't understand how to be on Reddit.

19:29You cannot self-promote on Reddit. You have to be friendly. You have to be nice. You have to offer free advice. You have to be like, pull out your, your best, nice voice where you're just that helpful person and you're not trying to sell anyone. That's how you get success on Reddit. And it takes a long time because they're our group of the most judgy, like kind of snotty individuals you'll meet on the Internet. So just know when you come in that they're going to hate you from the get go. And you have to earn that trust. So social is big. Reviews is another one. Google reviews are still one of the biggest factors that matter across the board.

20:04They will help your ads. They will help because they show up in chat. GDT. They'll help your local pack rankings. Reviews are huge. and awards is another one that applies in the local SEO industry. So, you know, if Angie's list, for example, says that you are the best plumber in Denver, then Google is going to think you are the best plumber in Denver more than other people. We're seeing this more for AI, especially like Google's AI powered local packs that are kind of in the United States. So those are, those really heavily look at like, what designations do you have? How long have you been in business?

20:40How big of a company are you? They look at like those types of things, which awards often showcase, right? So I'd say awards are something that I paid no attention to a few years ago at all whatsoever.

20:52Joy Hawkins: Interesting. That is something I never would have thought of. And, but I want to double click on, on reviews, because I think reviews is one of those that, that every local business owner is super fixated on. I have a cousin in the Bay Area, who's a landscaper. And he's always asking me about the reviews that people leave on Google and other places. And I've got no clue what to tell him. So going to need some advice from you here. One of the questions I have is consistency. So there's reviews in Google versus say Yelp versus say Nextdoor versus say Trip. It depends on your category and your industry.

21:27Joy Hawkins: And some of these other aggregate websites are collecting reviews about your business depending on what their focus is. So like, how important is it to have some consistency? If Google says that you're a 4.6, but then, you know, Yelp says you're a 4.1, like, does that matter? Should you put energy into these places? Like what, what, what is a priority? And I want to then ask you a follow-up question to that, which is like, there's like weird regulations coming out in a lot of different countries around reviews. And like some countries like Germany, you can basically like remove reviews because they're slanderous.

22:03Joy Hawkins: And like now everybody in Germany has a 4.5. Miracle. But like averages just seem to be working really well there. So let's go back to my first question about like reviews, the importance of them, and then review consistency across platforms. So it does matter. I would say you still want probably the majority, huge majority of your reviews on Google, right? So I would say like, look at your traffic sources. Who's actually bringing you customers, not traffic, but like actual customers, you know, if you get, let's say one customer from Yelp versus a hundred from Google, well, guess what? You should spend 99 % of your time on Google then, and maybe send like one person and should probably put an asterisk here.

22:45You actually aren't even allowed to solicit reviews on Yelp according to their guidelines. So you're not even supposed to ask for them. So Yelp or, you know, everybody hates Yelp. Yelp is very hard to get reviews on. So maybe I'll use a different example, like Angie, for example, Like, do you want to, you know, have somebody review you on Angie? You do, but you're going to need to prioritize that at the, like a level way less than Google. So if you have a hundred requests that you're trying to do, maybe send 90 to Google and split the other 10 amongst other sites. Cause you definitely do want to have reviews on other sites, but nothing matters as much as Google does.

23:17Joy Hawkins: Are some verticals more important than others? Like travel, for example, like hotels, there's a lot of, there's tons of review platforms for that. Yeah. Travel's like its own thing. I wouldn't even put travel or hotels in local. They're like their own thing. Like they are so different. We don't even work with them for that reason, because there are so many different strategies. I mean, like there are there there are sites that matter so much in those. If you aren't on those sites, like you're going to be invisible, which is not true in a lot of the industries and local. I'd put restaurants in that camp to restaurants almost need their own strategy as well.

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25:17Joy Hawkins: Okay, okay. And then on the secondary piece around regulation with reviews, like, do you think that's helping hurting the ecosystem? Do you think there needs to be more there? Not to put you on the spot to try to advocate for legislation, but I do think that this is an area where a lot of local business owners have been very vocal. They've been wanting to understand how do I control what's being said about my business online. And I think it's important for us as agency owners and search leaders to understand how to guide those business owners in that path. Yeah, if anything with regulation, but actually I don't think I would advocate for negative reviews.

25:58I would advocate for fake positive reviews because I feel like there is almost no consequence to buying reviews. Like almost none. We say to our clients, I literally was talking to a guy yesterday who's a mover. And in that industry, everybody's writing reviews. Like literally they're all. And I was like, your competitor is getting 30 reviews a week. How in the world are you supposed to? Like, unfortunately, with LocalPack ranking, it's very much like a kingmaker moat. Like it's very much like if you are the leader, you are the leader. And it is really hard to outtake somebody who is getting a stupid amount of Google reviews.

26:27Very, very hard. So if you've got a competitor that's getting 30 reviews a week, let me tell you, they, there's not even possible for them to be doing that much business. Like there's not a chance. And then you start looking at some of the reviews. They have one truck.

26:39Joy Hawkins: So there's no way they can do 30 moves in a week. No way. And he's like, he was like, I've never even heard of these guys. I'm like, because they're buying reviews. And he's like, well, maybe I should buy reviews. I'm like, please don't. But I'm like, it's like me morally making an argument. Like, don't do it. Right. Yes. Cause it just like, it's so terrible. But I also like, how do you compete with that? Because my experience with Google is that Google will, and we're probably going to get them removed from his competitor, they're just going to go buy 500 more. So it's like there's no end to the cycle.

27:08And there's no consequence on the legal side. Like the FTC is maybe like a handful of businesses have gotten nailed. Like it is not enough for businesses to care. And like it's so frustrating because I think that people want to do the right thing. but then they're motivated by finances and there just isn't enough reason to not do it that so many people just end up doing it. And it's terrible.

27:30Joy Hawkins: Yes, that is interesting. I think it's a really valid point, which is like if we could limit the abuse, then the slander and the negative stuff becomes less of a focal point. and we really start to actually engage with real human interaction online and it adds a tremendous amount of value here for everybody, for the users who are trying to use these reviews as much as anybody else. I want to transition a little bit because one of the big pieces that I think a lot of business owners probably aren't thinking about is my expectation is around what is happening with LLMs. And, you know, we're now like a few years into the consumer LLM discovery era, you know, arguably maybe three to four years, but at least from some sort of mass market perspective, we're about one to two years in.

28:34Joy Hawkins: Now ChatGPT is approaching a billion monthly active users. And, you know, the reality is, is that like, this is going to continue to be a way that consumers search and discover information. Obviously, Gemini is probably leading the pack in terms of utilization, but it's just because of cross infiltration of Gemini into things like Gmail and now even Google Meets and all these other places that increases the adoption and usage of that product. But the reality is like these, this experience for discovery is here to stay. How should local business owners think about it? How much time and energy should they be putting to showing up in chat GPT versus showing up in the local pack?

29:24Yeah. So I'm not going to lie. This is one of those ones where I'm like, humans don't make sense. I think I like, I like to, I like to follow data. The data does not show anything that justifies the effort people are putting into ai so our clients haven't really seen any increase in their ai leads in the last year they're really low like small so we track this for every single one we track how many leads they get from chat gbt how many they get from claude whatever it's tiny i mean like it's a fraction of what google provides yet i can tell you that talking to especially some of our bigger clients like the amount of effort they are putting into ai versus google it's almost the same and i'm like you guys are like i can't understand the rationale they think it's going to be huge, but I'm like, it hasn't really grown.

30:07Like if I'm looking at your traffic from the last year, based on all these efforts you're doing and stuff, like I should see this exponential growth and I'm just not seeing it anywhere. I don't even see it for my own business. We track all of our leads. And originally we saw definitely a trajectory where we're like, okay, chat CBT, like we're getting all these leads from chat CBT. They kind of flatlined, then it went down and then we're starting to see more leads from Claude. But again, nothing compared to Google. Like, and I'm B2B and I'm in tech. So like whatever I see, I assume is the high end.

30:37Um, because a lot of people will tell us they use chat GBT, but like the one that I'm telling you that everyone's sleeping on is YouTube. YouTube is the one that is freaking exploding. And I think people sleep on it because it's really hard and you can't do it easily. And it takes forever.

30:52Joy Hawkins: I love this. In fact, you know, you and I were both at IO. we may have differing opinions of the value of this conference and event. But regardless, one of the things that Google absolutely made very clear is that video and multimodal is going to become more and more relevant in terms of how they're going to serve information and serve context to users who are doing discovery. Whether it be in Gemini, traditional search, doesn't matter. Video and multimodal is something that they made very clear is something they want to continue to push. This is really hard for local businesses. I don't care if you are a franchise with 50 locations or a one office law firm in a small town in Wyoming.

31:39Joy Hawkins: Like it is hard to do multimodal well. How should business owners think about this? How should they prioritize? Where do agencies like Sterling Sky or others come to help here? Yeah, so I think it depends on the business and what their ultimate goals are. YouTube isn't for everybody. If you are a dermatologist and you service this tiny town in Wisconsin, and that's all you care about, you are going to get an ROI getting famous on YouTube, right? So you need to be in a position where you can either sell product placement, which frankly, a lot of businesses can, again, especially the bigger ones, right?

32:14They've got all the vendors and people that they want them to plug. Guess what? You can make money from those on YouTube. Also, if you're a multi-location business and you're looking to scale across the United States and location doesn't matter, you need to be on YouTube, like hands down. I'd say for any lawyer, you should be on YouTube because lawyers usually can take cases throughout the entire state and they're not block boxed into a small geographic area. So that's one where I'm like, yeah, you need to be on YouTube, but it's not for everybody. So like there are some, again, like restaurants, I don't know.

32:43I would say restaurants would probably be better off on like Pinterest or Instagram, right? Like, so it depends on the business type. But I do think there's a large number of businesses that should be on YouTube that are literally just sleeping on it. Like it's not a topic that comes up a ton. Wow.

32:59Joy Hawkins: Interesting. And like when you think about the areas where YouTube or video is helpful, like is there an emphasis to like double down there? Like should businesses be like more aggressive right now? Because this is clearly going to be a more consumed channel. And then my follow-up question to this is, if you're not interested in YouTube, should you be thinking about other media formats? Should you be thinking about audio? Should you be thinking about being like a guest on the radio or some local place? Or should you be thinking about building assets on your site that are engaging in a multimedia way?

33:37Yeah, I think that definitely like business in general have always been pretty bad at this, like images even. Goodness, like getting good images from them. And now they all just want to use AI. I'm like, no, no, no. Like people want to see if you're a bathroom remodel, they want to see that home remodel you actually did, not a fake home remodel that you made with ChatGBT. So like, that's where I'm like, yes, they want to see images. So I do think that that has always been a struggle for small businesses and always been needed. But what type you need, it does definitely vary quite a bit based on the industry, right?

34:05So I don't think it's uniform. You can just say all of local SEO should be doing this. Depends on the business type. But in some way, shape or fashion, they all have certain areas that they want to, that they should be doing better at, for sure. And it's always been a challenge because it's the thing that we can't do for them without their help. So in order for me to make an image do well, I first need them to take the photo. Right. Right. Absolutely. But quality over quantity. I think that's where people really screw it up is, you know, they want to be aggressive. So like, we're going to do 50 of these things.

34:37That's where I'm like, people, anytime you do scale with SEO, it has such a tremendous chance to fail.

34:44Joy Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So another area that I think is kind of tricky for local is our favorite moments in time, Google updates. Usually this is hair on fire moment, right? Like, I mean, everyone's just like running around, like what the hell is going on? And for a local business owner, I think it's even more anxiety driven because you're like, I don't even understand what this is. And why did Google even publish this? And for many SEOs out there, especially SEOs that don't work with local businesses, I'm one of them and I'm guilty of this. I think that there's this like huge, like, um, over-reliance on like evangelizing these moments and like sharing like what Google is doing without like providing any genuine context or helpful guidance to a small business.

35:35Joy Hawkins: Right. And so it's really created this like kind of nasty, you know, news cycle that candidly, I think, leaves a lot of agencies that manage these businesses and the business owners and the businesses themselves, the web developers in a bit of a vacuum of understanding. It doesn't help that Google doesn't give us a ton of context when they provide these updates. And then they say that there's like two weeks of chaos that, you know, hold on to your chair and hope that everything's fine. But like, what and how do you communicate with business owners? Is there like a different way that we should be thinking about these moments in time?

36:16Joy Hawkins: We're just coming out of this as we're recording. We just finished up a Google update about a week, two weeks ago. So like, where's your mindset on this? And what kind of impact have you seen when these moments happen? Yeah, I will say if you think you are being impacted by a Google update and you're a business owner, please don't try to make sense of it yourself. Like, you really do need to hire a professional. Because I'm telling you right now, like any business owner I've ever talked to. I know it sounds like a sales pitch. It's so true. It's so true. But it's like, I don't self-diagnose myself when I have physical problems.

36:48I go see my doctor, right? Because I don't know the first thing. And I'll tell you, actually, I do self-diagnose myself, but I'm always wrong.

36:53Joy Hawkins: So is chat TVT. Yeah. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. Oh, my God. It'll just tell you you're dying or something. Or you're going to get, yeah, it's terrible. Yeah, exactly. So I will say that the majority of business owners I talk to, when they come to us, what they think they did wrong is not what they did wrong. So just really, for real, if you're noticing trends that are concerning to you, like it's worth, if SEO is a channel that makes you money, invest in it. Don't try and like dime your way out of it. I think that one of the patterns that I noticed is it's getting harder to actually know what's going on and getting, you have to get so detailed.

37:26This is why I, so we use this tool that literally when it rank tracks, it takes screenshots and most tools don't do this. I use this one called Placescout. The reason why I need it is I'm like, I have to look at the search results and see what changed. I need to know like, what exactly did Google put there? What was there before? Like, it's so ridiculous. The level of detail you have to go to, to make sure you don't jump to the wrong conclusions because it's not an easy thing to conclude. You have to do a lot of testing and a lot of looking. So I will tell you one of the patterns I've seen in the last year that I'm like really heavily pushing is like, don't do link building.

37:58Like for real, like if you're going to get links, do it on a small scale, be really picky about the type of links you get. The majority, the whopping majority of link building agencies are actually going to be doing things that could either be a waste of money or actually penalize you long-term. And they are so attractive because they work so fast and they work so quickly short term and you see these big surges and you always see it the big surges is how they keep selling nobody talks about the the declines right that happened later and i'm starting to see that the the timeline or the window for that is starting to shorten a bit like what i typically would see with core updates is that you'll get penalized for links you bought like four or five years ago so like how do you even conclude that it's the links well you can tell if you map enough of them out all the sites that are getting linked to from these sites, oh, they're all tanking.

38:45It's the links, right? So I've mapped enough of them out to say that link building, especially for small businesses, it's one of the most popular things that local SEO agencies do because it works so fast. It's becoming riskier and riskier. So honestly, that's something that I think a lot of businesses need to really, really scale back on. Yeah.

39:04Joy Hawkins: And on this thread, right, not just of link building, but just like broadly, like the education around updates, you know, when, when, when businesses, when businesses get impacted in their, in their, in their businesses impacted in organic, one of the things is that it's always easier to blame something, someone else, right? It's easier to blame Google. Oh, Google must've done this, right? It's easier to blame the link building agency, link building agency to do this. But like one of the dangerous things, right? About being a small business owner is you are operating your business. You are a great landscaper.

39:39Joy Hawkins: You are a great contractor. You're a great lawyer. You're not a great web developer. No. And so like, how, how do you guys manage that expectation with a client? And like, you know, there's, there's always this desire. It happens in any business, right? But some businesses are well resourced to manage their web experience. Small businesses or local businesses are definitely not one of them. How do you typically like set that expectation of like, this is how you create a good website that's going to allow consumers to find you, access your data, inform themselves or sign up or call? Like, how do you do that?

40:19I mean, we like to educate our clients. That's why we're big on like video content and stuff. We invite our clients to our, you know, our webinars. We invite them to our events that we do in person through LocalU. Like we're really big on education because there is so much bad information out there. Like I talked to a lawyer the other day, literally was talking to him and he, um, he writes his own content. He's really smart lawyer. He does really good content, really good stuff. Cause he's the expert. Like as you, you know, I do believe that like you, if you're an expert on topic, you should be writing about it or talking about it, not having an SEO company talk about it.

40:49Like you are the expert, right? Have us make it magical and add in all the things that need to be there. But like the actual meat of it needs to be like from your brain. so he had all that right he had a site with tons of content he's like oh i need links just to make it better so he hires this link building agency he went from dominating to literally like june core update last year cut his traffic i think in half and then the december core just wiped out whatever was left like everything on his site doesn't rank like it's awful and he was totally fine before he hired this agency and he hired them because they're pretty well known they're all over youtube and he's like i had no idea and i'm like it's so frustrating i'm like so i'm gonna do a video on it talking about like, Hey, by the way, don't do this.

41:29Cause this is what can happen. But I looked at some of their other clients, some of their other clients are still going up, right? Like, it's like really frustrating. Cause it's not like Google uniformly across the board, uh, catches everybody at the same time. Right. And the more you do something, the more likely are to catch you, but some people still get away with it. And it's hard to explain that, but like, I'm starting to see more and more people not get away with it. So it makes it easier to say, this is the risk factor is getting higher. And I don't know what the solution is, to be honest.

41:56I don't think every business owner is going to be aware that there is such a risk factor. I'm trying to change that by educating more. So like putting it out on YouTube more and like talking about it more. But like it's hard. It's very hard. I feel for them.

42:10Joy Hawkins: So on this vein of like tracking and like understanding what's happening, let's talk about local business tracking and where local businesses usually put their emphasis, right? And earlier in this episode, you talked about calls and like, what is a qualified call, right? Is it a 30 second call? Is it a 15 minute call, right? It's going to vary quite drastically depending on the nature of the business, right? Right. And so when it comes to to event tracking and being able to really justify the value of having not only an agency, but the value of the channel, which is organic, where where should businesses be putting their emphasis and how do they ensure quality over quantity?

42:52Joy Hawkins: because I really think that's where we're in a real shift in the market is that it's really about ensuring that who's contacting you is genuinely going to be a useful lead for your business. Yeah. So, I mean, I'm a huge advocate of call tracking. If you are investing anything in marketing, you're paying for PPC, you're paying for SEO, you should be doing call tracking because you are not going to have that insight without call tracking. And then if you're legally allowed to record all the calls because the recordings are so insightful. Like we can tell by just usually listening to the first 30 seconds if it's the type of lead we want or not, right?

43:27It's really easy to tell when you're actually listening. I can't even tell you too how many business insights you'll get from this. So many small businesses put like these really bored new people in charge of answering their phones. And like, nobody's going to want to buy from you if the person answering the phone is like, hates their life and hates their job, right? And I can't tell you how many of those calls I hear where the person answering the phone like could not sound more retired and bored. And I'm like, you just spent hundreds of dollars for that lead. And your staff literally just like tanks that lead.

43:56So I think it's really important for business owners to like regularly review those things as well, right? Like make sure you have people answering the phones that are like your best closers, you know, like your best people that are going to be able to sell those. And then response times are horrific. So the average small businesses response times are terrible. Lead Furno has done some studies on this. So Aaron Wykey over there is a friend of mine. they've done some studies on what the average lead time response rate is for small businesses. And I can tell you from my own experience, hiring home contractors, how the people I contact don't even get back to me.

44:28Like they just ghost me. So those two I think are really, really important. We've set up automations with our clients so that if they have a missed call, they get an email alert and we are hounding them. We're like, you missed this call. That's money on the table. Like call them back. Why are you missing these calls? Stop missing these calls. Right? Like, so that's the kind of level I think you need to get to. And then texting is another one that most people don't think about, but like you need to have some type of integrated texting contact on your website because more and more people don't really want to call.

44:57They want to text. So we use Leadferno for this on our own site, but when you fill in the little chat box or whatever, it starts a two-way text message. So now when I respond to them, they're going to get text. So they can't ignore me as easily because nobody ignores their texts, right? Usually.

45:13Joy Hawkins: I'm guilty of that, unfortunately. But that's a different problem. Yeah, I'm the 1 % on that one. But on this piece, like, I actually think one of the beauties of what you just shared is the multitude of ways that you can connect with your prospects, right? And like, if you can create speed to that connection point, it seems like the value of getting a lead to a customer goes up significantly. So you can answer calls immediately with a friendly person. You can text your prospect very quickly. If you can respond to that email almost instantly with some value to the prospect, you're very likely to turn that into a customer.

45:54Joy Hawkins: But that speed to response is like critical. Yeah. And these are the things that, again, like an agency, like we can set up all the technical stuff to make sure they're aware, right? Like just notify them when things are happening. So that was like one of the changes we made last year where we started sending those email alerts. They've been great because I think our clients genuinely had no idea how many calls they were missing. Wow. That's super fascinating. Yeah, right in your inbox. So on this piece of data and like where data is at, like, you know, right now data is going through a lot of changes as we look at like AI becoming more prevalent.

46:32Joy Hawkins: And it's not just about like the old site map and getting that site map up and ta-da, you're going to get all these rankings. Like, you know, one of the closing topics, which I think is often very confusing for business owners, is data and what is data on your website. But data really matters for a small business, right? And it's not just the superficial external things that happen, like your reviews or quotes that are shared about your business. It's often like the hard data about your business and where your geography is and the zones you service and all these other key criteria factors. What should business owners be asking when it comes to ensuring that they are sharing the right data throughout their experiences on their websites or other platforms?

47:29I mean, like at a bare minimum, I can tell you we get businesses all the time, especially service area businesses that don't have like an address on their website because they work from home. And then Google can't properly tell where you are. So that's a big problem. I was like at a bare minimum, put your city in zip code, right? You don't need to necessarily list your home address, but like, and it should be in the footer. It should be clear to Google, like where you are located. Service areas are trickier because this is where, you know, every business wants to show up in 50 cities and then they only have one office.

47:57That doesn't work. So unfortunately, you can make service area pages. They are harder to rank than they used to be. And really what you need to do, honestly, if you're trying to expand your local presence in other cities, you need to think about getting more offices and more locations because that's the only way to do it. that really works. So that's a conversation we have constantly with businesses. We're like, okay, when are you opening your next office? Where is it going to be? And it doesn't need to be a stupid expensive venture, right? It doesn't need to be a huge office, doesn't need to be anything massively elaborate, but having a physical office is unfortunately tied to, you know, ranking in the local pack.

48:34So that is something, especially for home services, we see quite a bit. They don't think that way, but we like tell them, no, you need to get more locations. Otherwise, you're not going to rank in all these cities. It's just not doable.

48:45Joy Hawkins: Yeah, absolutely. And that wraps up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thank you to Joy Hawkins, owner and president at Sterling Sky, for joining us. If you'd like to contact Joy, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on thevoicesofsearch.com. You can also visit our company website, sterlingsky.ca. If you haven't subscribed yet and want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or on YouTube, and we'll be back in your feed every week. Okay, that's all for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.