Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera with the Unscripted SEO podcast. I'm here with the infamous notorious and awesome Melissa Popp. Why don't you give yourself an introduction for those who don't know who you are, where you've been, and how awesome you are?
[00:00:17] Speaker B: Well, that's quite an introduction. I'm gonna have to save that. And just every time I do anything, we're gonna start with a clip of you saying all those things about me. I.
Yeah. So for those who don't know me, my name is Melissa Popp. I am the content strategy director at Rickety Roo.
A lot of people know Rickety Roo. We're pretty much everywhere.
We like to think we're the cool kids. So we have a lot of fun doing the work we do and just, you know, trying to make local SEO more accessible for just about everybody. So I love my job there. I love the root crew. But in addition to that, I also do consulting on the side and have a whole freelance business that I've run for about 15, 16 years now.
And I've done a little bit of everything in the industry. I started out as a journalism major and then moved into technical writing. I've done a little bit of in house E Com, worked for big SaaS companies.
I've done the agency side at the enterprise level and now I'm with Ricky De Roo focusing on the, the small medium sized business and kind of trying to help people just get, get themselves out there. You know, it's really hard for smaller businesses to really kind of compete sometimes. And I, I find a lot of challenge in that, a lot of joy in it.
But yeah, I'm, I've been doing this for a really long time, 20 years now, without dating myself.
You know, before SEO was really SEO and before content marketing was really content marketing.
Yeah, I've, I've done a little bit of it all.
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Awesome. I'm glad that 18ish year mark as well. So wherever 2007 falls up in the count of years, so I lose track of time myself. I think that's 18.
Yeah, it's a good thing. And, and it's great to connect with someone else that's also kind of been around in multiple different positions executing on SEO. Because there is a difference between executing on SEO as an in house and working at an agency versus as a freelance.
I think I want to go there first because are you actively now continuing to take on freelance customers right now while you're Rickety Rooing and what niche or industry Was your last freelance consult in.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I'm always open to opportunity. You know, I'm a big believer learning the harsh lesson very early in my freelance career that you never want to have your eggs in one basket.
And so when it comes to freelance right now, I definitely, definitely for the right clients, the right niches, like, I'm always open to opportunities, but I'm much more discerning now because, you know, my primary focus is Rickety Roo and growing that business with the team.
But yeah, so that's a good question. The last niche I took a client in, it would be in the nutrition and health and wellness space, which is a whole can of worms of regulatory issues and compliance issues. And, and it's been fascinating and I do have experience in industries like cannabis with compliance issues, so very much, very similar kind of attention to detail and research that has to be involved in executing an SEO and content strategy there.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Awesome to hear another person who has some experience in the cannabis industry. I did some subcontracting work for bojum. They're like a CBD company, so I definitely know the duplicity and multiple layers of. Okay, well, you can run ads, but if you say cbd, you can't run those ads. But if you say tincture, then by.
[00:04:02] Speaker B: All means hemp instead of cbd.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Yeah, cannabis is totally fine, but CBD ain't.
[00:04:12] Speaker B: Yeah, we could have a whole episode on cannabis that could go like 8, 10 hours long. I feel like, oh, that's such a. Such a hard but challenging and fun, you know, marketing that goes into that niche for sure.
[00:04:27] Speaker A: Well, we'll have to book another time because absolutely would be fascinated to find out all of the depths to which you got into in the cannabis side. But let's pull back into the health. I'm curious because I worked on Dr. Axe when he was a and helped set up his successful machine of creating an insane amount of content using lots of citations. And then Medic Update came around 2016, 2018ish and just gobsmacked an entire niche industry of alt health writers putting fingers on scales. I remember one ridiculous situation where the article that used to be ranking was literally, you know, 5,000, 6,000 words long with 23 citations.
And all of a sudden WEMB WebMD came up and there was literally one sentence on the page that was ranking. It had no links, was barely hardly relevant. So I'm curious, how does that look now? Because your what, what that is is an expression of Google's application of your money or your life, applying it to that niche.
What are some of the extra hoops that you're seeing that publishers or product, the health and wellness space need to be aware of or need to tackle that's specific to their vertical?
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Well, I'm going to tackle that one from the perspective of kind of multi channel marketing because I think that, you know, your money, you life has been a name stay of how content should be created in so many different niches, not just the help space. And I think that, you know, whether Google calls it your money, your life, they ever take that away from the algorithm. Any, any changes there, like that space should already have been doing that without Google telling you to do that.
And it just, it just cracks me up that we still have these conversations throughout the industry of like how in depth this content should be, how should research and citations be? You know, what's the peer review process for this, what's the update process for this? Because to me this is like common sense stuff.
And what's wild, I think that's changed since the medic update when you're thinking of just the holistic SEO and content strategy is organic isn't really where the health and nutrition and wellness space is being found anymore. You know, and you're, you're on Instagram, you're on TikTok, your YouTube shorts, the Instagram in particular exploded with these so called health and wellness influencers that have millions and millions of followers and you know, you don't quite have to vet what you're putting out there on video on Instagram or TikTok. Now you should, I mean, absolutely. But the rabbit holes you can go down of what people are sharing and whether or not it's even true has changed from moving from the web and Google and other search engines on someone's website to these to video. And it's like a whole other can of worms that you have a client that you're working with in that space who wants to focus on organic. And then you look at where traffic is actually coming from, from competitors and it's not going to their website.
You know, people are starting on Instagram and TikTok and so now you have, you know, this idea that there's one set of rules for Google, of course, course there's another set of rules for what you're doing for video.
But you know, going to that, the idea that you're trying to create one piece of content and distribute it, it's like how do you capture that attention on Instagram and TikTok when it doesn't align with what Google wants for the content that's on their website. So what do people do? They're ditching their websites, they're ditching their blogs, creating all this video content that could be do.
I mean, frankly, my competitive research into this industry, to me, like I'm making up a statistic here, so nobody quote me on this, but like I feel anecdotally probably 70 to 75% of the content I'm seeing from health and wellness folks on Instagram and TikTok, I don't know that I can trust it, you know, and so, you know, it's so hard to be told, okay, we need to create quality content, but then that's not what's actually showing up in algorithms, whether it's on Instagram, whether it's on Google. And I think, you know, aios are the perfect example of that. You know, you ask a question and gosh knows Google's trying. But look at any of the folks out there, like Lily Ray, sharing these ridiculous results. I think last week or the week before it was saying she was dead in an AI and I'm just like, oh, I mean, she was just at SEO week, she's alive and kicking. So it's like, what's the point of creating quality content if Google doesn't seem to care? If these other platforms don't care, we know it's the right thing to do. But then like you said, you, you know, WebMD pops up there with one sentence, probably doesn't even have to be talking about what they're actually claiming they're talking about.
And it ranks number one. It's like you're damned if you do, damned if you don't. And you know, I wish I had a better answer of where people should be spending that time. We know it's creating quality content.
Yeah, but why would you, when, when you're seeing what actually is ranking and what's showing up in video reels.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: It'S definitely a challenge, you know, because I'm seeing like that kind of multi channel challenge of, you know, like a lack of being attuned to, you know, we used, Google used to be the North Star, you know, and now we have multiple opportunities. But I think, I mean, part of me sees it as opportunity if it's cultured. Well, because, you know, I, I went to Mozcon in Seattle and they had a great example of where they realized that a second channel was a good option of like, hey, we can get an influencer. We've got this product, you know, we want to have influencers promote it. So they made up a video and got a bunch of influencers to post that had pink pants and I think was the example.
The problem was that they didn't align it well in two different ways. One was they only had in stock like a small amount of pink pants. So after a day they sold out and then they dropped off the front page because E commerce like tons of searches and you're no longer have product. Bye bye.
So they ended up basically paying for advertising and all of these influencers to, you know, to, to drive additional volume, which is an awesome example. But it wasn't aligned properly and they had fallen off of syrup.
So I think there are, there are correlating things and like secondary impacts. I talked to another clothing brand, I'll call them a clothing brand. They sold men's banana hammocks.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: All right, there's a niche for everything. No judgment.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: There is, but it was funny because they would do like ridiculous like tik Tok lives and like have like guys in costumes answering questions about their banana hammocks.
But it actually, you know, was a viable content marketing effort because they would get genuine questions about fit, about, you know, how to make sure that they get the right one. The material used and so like he was walking through is like, you know, like these TikTok lives were on one level totally ridiculous, but on the other hand, like they were satiating the population and the audience's genuine curiosity about fit and material and which led to people doing branded searches because that's what Rand Fishkin has been pointing out, that we're living in zero click. You know, like you go to TikTok, it's not meant to click. You go to Instagram and unless you're paying extra advertising, you can't have a link that goes directly to a thing. So there's kind of this secondary effect of if you've actually engaged them enough with your brand or the concept, then it pushes them with more of a seed of what they want or need to go and do that Google search.
So how do you make that? Do you, do you still try to make that play of like generating content that is going to play nice on Google with the intention of partnering with your other channel, even though it's not going to be one to one, like there's no attribution, like you're just going to hopefully maybe catch maybe more. Maybe you'll see a lift in branded queries after you pay your TikTok influencers to mention your name on a few of their videos.
Have you, have you followed that rabbit hole and how do you stage that to your customer that hey, you're going to get more traffic? I'm. But you won't be able to attribute it.
[00:14:19] Speaker B: There's like eight different tangents I can go off from that one question.
So let me start kind of at the top. So one of the things I think a lot of us fail to do as SEOs and I understand why, is we don't look at multichannel marketing at all. Because typically a client comes to us and they're looking to improve their organic reach. They're not necessarily understanding how branded search and why there's a benefit there. They're looking to chase shiny nice high ranking keywords.
But then what happens? Where are we at now? You know, you look at, you know, Rand Fishkin has been beating the zero click searches for years, even before this became more apparent than it ever is right now in search results.
I fully expect within the next 18 months to two years that we're going to see even less organic space on page one of Google. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind but for some reason as SEOs, we wait until something happens to actually address it. And the writing's been on the wall about branded search, about zero search clicks.
You know, everyone's acting shocked by how much Google is pushing out AIO reviews. And it's like, of course they are. They don't want you to, to go anywhere else, they want you to stay there. That's how they earn their revenue.
And so the first thing I think we have to adjust as SEOs is that even though a client comes to us for organic performance, our due diligence should be giving them what they need to succeed as a business as a whole. And what we know is organic is one slice of that pie and that other marketing channels help drive organic traffic.
By circling back to what you were saying about Brandon, you know, this company that's doing the banana hammocks, they were able to increase that because they were meeting their audience, part of where they were, you know, for us as SEOs, I mean, realistically, how, when's the last time anybody looked at what Bing's algorithm is doing? As far as, you know, we, we have ideas of how Google's algorithm operates and we create checklists and to do lists that go down. Here's what our H1 has to be. Let's get our site speed here. Let's do this and do that. Right?
But we don't even look at any other search Engines to make sure that we're also doing well there and adjusting strategy there. All our focus is laser focused on Google and what's Google done to us. Time and time again they've kicked us in the butt and said, you all suck. We don't want you to do this. We're gonna make it harder.
I do think they make it harder intentionally, but more often than not, unintentionally, I question whether or not Google actually understands what they're doing sometimes as well.
But like I said, we have to look at this as a bigger picture. Organic success isn't just from doing SEO anymore. It's from looking at how we can drive traffic from other channels as well that lead to conversion.
And it's like the more we can talk to our clients about this now, it doesn't mean we lose business. It doesn't mean we say, hey, we can't help you because you need to do xyz.
But the educational component of explaining that marketing isn't one channel. You have to meet people where the they're at. And that's changing. More and more people are moving to TikTok and Instagram, they're making purchases there, they're filling out lead forms there, they're going through and you know, you may not be able to put that link in a post, but they're going to that link in bio and they're taking that effort and going to someone's website, to someone's YouTube channel and making decisions that way, cutting out websites altogether.
So it's like you have to meet your audience where they're at. And even in SEO, we don't even necessarily do that.
And when was the last time I would love to see someone way smarter than me in data analytics do a study to show are people still even caring about websites in certain industries anymore because of the shift to video and to short form content? Because I think people in the industry would be surprised to see that like we're spending all this effort doing SEO and what good is it in some cases anymore if people have moved to other channels? So we have to meet audiences there too. And you know, this is a mind shift change that we have to do.
You know, Morty Oberstein has hammered for the last year plus about branding and so many people in our industry are still acting like branding isn't important. And I'm like, how is it not important? It's important for every channel. To go back to your point. You know, it's like if you're driving branded search as well, while you're optimizing a site for SEO while you're building content. It all works together.
Might be driving traffic on attributed models, but it's all working together to benefit your client. And when your client makes more money, what do they do? They turn around and spend more money on marketing.
So I really think we need to be looking at SEO. So much bigger picture than we actually do to drive those results, especially with how quickly things are changing in Google. Like, what happens? We wake up tomorrow morning and Google's like, yeah, there's no more organic results on page one. And we know people don't want to go to page 2, 3, 4 to find good content anymore. What do we all do then?
[00:19:56] Speaker A: Yeah, and it sounds like a nightmare scenario, but in reality that's already happened in travel niches and hotel booking. You know, like there's been these creeps creep in areas where, you know, Google has supplanted what used to be businesses that were doing those things based off of search.
I want to tie it back to branding for just a question because there's a complicated, I think there's a nuance to brand claiming branding.
And it's happened twice. And I don't know whether it's just me coming across these, but one was for a small company called Save Fry Oil and the other is for Lead truffle. And you know, they were new brands, but Google was literally not showing their website at all when you did their brand query search.
And so it's the question of, okay, well, if Google is saying, you know, we'll reward brands by giving them more visibility, but even if you did take a secondary channel and do marketing and somebody did a branded search for that, for that brand name, nothing related to that, a brand would show up.
So how do you, how do you solve that chick? What's your approach to solving that? Chicken and egg? I know I did a couple of things, but I'm curious how you would approach that scenario.
[00:21:26] Speaker B: Yeah, and that, that is a really difficult one because when you have a new business starting out, no matter what capital, you have to be able to do marketing from the get go. You know, you're, you're already competing with presumed results in Google for what your brand name might be.
And if you have a brand name that's using words that are very common, then Google gets convoluted as it's trying to learn who you are, where you fit into things.
So in those cases, when I've worked with smaller businesses launching something brand new, you know, more often than not, they don't even know what their brand is to start with. So first you have to start there and you know, figure out, okay, what assets are we going to use? They don't have to spend tens and tens of thousands of dollars, but we have to start with something.
So I start with social platforms and I tell them, spend your money on social platforms first. Yes, it's great you have a website. I don't care if it's a one page website with a contact form on it to start.
We need to start showing Google that you exist outside of their bubble to be for them to associate that name with their brand. And so it shows up.
And so I start with social channels. You know, I'm a big believer that regardless of where your audience is, go grab those user handles everywhere you can. I swear, every time a new social media platform shows up right now to compete with Twitter, I'm not going to call it X.
When it competes with Twitter, I'm like right there, boom, grab my name even if I don't use it.
And so, you know, I encourage businesses, you know, get your Facebook use page, get your groups, go to Reddit, even if you're never going to use Reddit, grab your business name there and actually fill out the profiles and build it out. And if you happen to have someone who likes social media on your team, have them start doing stuff on them. You know, it doesn't have to necessarily when you're starting be this, you know, $50,000 marketing plan to gung ho on social media, it's like just share some stuff, share some of what your business is doing, share about your people. It doesn't have to be a lot or every day but just, you know, slowly try to put content out there so that eventually it's going to get indexed by Google and Google is going to associate that.
So then my next step there, depending on the niche is I'm a big believer in forums still and not forum spamming BS for links, where you go and create profiles, throw a link, maybe talk for, you know, a little bit. I'm a big believer of finding forums where not just your customers are, but where your industry hangs out.
So you know, I work with a lot of home service businesses and contractors and there are DIY forums on every which thing you could ever do for home improvement project. And so I tell them, I'm like, look, who's your most knowledgeable person on staff.
Have them go and start interacting on the forum. Don't talk about the business, don't talk about anything like that. Build the profile out that also can help build that authority back to your domain without you spamming.
And so it's finding ways of integrating the people in the business into these things, you know, when they have time.
And then from there, that's when I focus more on, okay, let's start building out a blog. Let's start building out FAQs, let's start building out more top of funnel, middle funnel content on the website.
And of course, you know, link building, of course going on in the background.
I'm not going to pretend it's not.
Sometimes it's paid, sometimes it's unpaid. I'm not going to lie about it being paid because anybody shaking their head at that right now listening to this probably has bought a link.
Don't deny it, folks, it's okay.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: It's okay.
[00:25:02] Speaker B: And so, you know, you have to put the effort in. I feel like a lot more for a smaller business who has a smaller budget trying to build that brand to show up in those search results. And sometimes it's really easy and you know, the name is so unique that you know, a couple weeks, boom, all your social profiles, your website are showing up. In some cases it's not that easy, especially depending on the niche. And so, you know, and what we know about Google right now is they are slow to make SERP updates, they are slow to index content. You know, those days are long gone. So, you know, you have to manage those expectations as well with your client, but you have to keep chopping away at it. You can't just because it's not working now, roll back those efforts. But that's usually my three prong approach to trying to get Google to associate it. I've never had a situation in probably, I'd estimate probably about 50 freelance clients I've had over the last 15 years of that strategy not working.
The only cases it's taken much longer is when the name of the business is more common and the search results could be more mixed because Google is still trying to realize, oh, this is a brand or it's a person. It's not, you know, something else related to the words in the name.
[00:26:23] Speaker A: Yeah, both of those cases there's significant conflict in terms of, you know, like lead truffle, like half of the results are related to the food truffle as opposed to leads. And then on save fry oil, it's like literally people are typing it in because they want to save fry oil. So you got to compete with the AI overview to get in there. But that's what you know, so I, thanks for the, the direction on that and I think it ties back to, and we can talk now more about on the local side of things and how, how has that gameplay, you know, developed? Like, what is it in about small, medium sized and local businesses that attracts you as a challenge? And what are, what's the biggest challenge right now in getting, getting things clicking on local?
[00:27:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, up until Rickety Roo, I had never actually worked with a single local client.
And so I've always worked with just, just bigger enterprise level type accounts and I had a lot of fun with that. I love being able to work with big data sets and have more access to stakeholders. But when I went into Rickety Roo, you know, it opened up a whole new challenge of how do you scale down, you know, an enterprise level strategy? And specifically at Ricky Drew, you know, I focus on the content side of things and not the SEO side of things. And so, you know, it's finding ways to scale that down because more often than not, these smaller businesses, they don't have 50, 60, $100,000 a month to throw at marketing. You know, I mean, sometimes you have clients who are like, I really want to do this. I have $500. What can we do? Right.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: And you know, so the, the challenge is twofold. You know, it's scaling down strategies so that you can get what's impactful done for these clients while also, you know, mitigating budget control for them. Because if you have $500 and, and I am a big believer and I'm sure people are going to shake their heads with this.
I don't know about other people, but I can work with $500. It doesn't mean that we are going to have all the results we want in six months or a year, but I can move the needle with $500. And for some small businesses, depending on their niche and their location, that is enough to keep their business going. You know, they're most likely not just spending on the SEO front, but they're also spending in paid advertising, display.
Gosh. I still work with clients who do direct mail. I love talking about that.
And that's a whole other fascinating app aspect of marketing that that's still in use and still can be effective depending on the industry.
But you know, to me that the biggest challenge is, you know, finding how creative and impactful can we be with smaller budgets. Because if you put the work in on the strategy side, you absolutely can.
But the problem is, is so much of SEO is Still checklist driven and still, you know, we have to do XYZ to get, get results.
And I understand why all of these things work from years of anecdotal results, from case studies and research, from all sorts of experiences that people have seen doing these things, you know. Yeah, but it's what order do we need to be doing those things with a small budget to be most impactful?
So to me, that's probably the biggest challenge in local goal on top of using that as, as an education tool for clients, of being realistic about timeline for results with those budgets and why we're doing things in a certain order versus trying to do everything and failing because, you know, we hit our budget for the month, we hit our hours for the month.
But that challenge to me is exciting. And I've found a lot of different ways to scale content for clients at Rickety Roo because of being challenged by these things.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, the timeline is totally something that most SEOs don't consider. It's like, you know, real estate agents like Norman, you've got a long funnel from when somebody is potentially interested in buying a home to when they're like, realistic, ready, ready to buy it, and then also that flux period of when they've got when they're ready. But they, you know, are they in a hyperactive market and they need all of their cash and paper ready to go at a moment's notice. So it can like speed up, be really long funnel, and then like instant mash at the end. So figuring out where to play your content in that and your connections.
So you, you, you said something interesting, which was that you were focused on content, but not necessarily focus for ranking or for SEO. How do you view creating content for those local clients as bigger than or justifying the cost of it? Like, what do those conversations with your client look like?
Because all of my conversations in the past would be like, oh, hey, we want to, we've seen this amount of search volume for this term, and so we're going to try to rank for this. You know, how do you shift that mentality or how do you have a conversation that takes content in a different spin?
[00:31:57] Speaker B: Well, first I want to clarify, while I do run the content strategy for our clients and that department, I am very much like our department does support the SEO side of things.
We do encourage both types of content at Rickety Roo, ones that will purely drive search results, you know, in local location pages, service pages. So important.
But also we focus on funnel optimization as well.
That's a whole that's also held up episode. We're have to do like six more episodes after this together.
[00:32:29] Speaker A: We have so much to talk about.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: You know, and, and I think it's really, it's a balance, you know, the way we approach content at rickety root very much is content first, SEO second.
Probably about 40% of the cases, you know, 60% I would say is much more geared towards organic rankings. Like I said, location pages, service pages, and finding ways to create better content there. Because anybody who works in local will tell you that location pages are probably some of the worst content that's ever existed in search.
The, the amount of low effort that goes into creating pages because the sole idea is these need to rank on page one and then that's it. We ignore the idea of getting someone on a page and selling them and converting them. And so you have these location pages out there that just are garbage. You know, sometimes they're just cities swapped out, sometimes there's no lorem ipsum on the page, you know, and they rank because there's not a lot of competitive space necessarily in where a client might be.
So, you know, it's for us, we absolutely approach it that, you know, we want to create location pages that are quality, that actually convince someone who lands on them to, you know, click to call or fill out a form or you know, you know, make a decision right then and there and not come back to it. Because you know, your location pages are supposed to be your, your bottom of the funnel content. You know, it there. People should already be convinced when they land there or have an immediate need to take an action. But so often you see these pages and no action takes place because they suck.
Sorry everybody. The majority of location pages I see out there, they suck. I'm not going to mince words there, you know, and so, but, but you have a challenge there because so much of SEO has been driven around the idea of purely SEO driven content that is based on like what you had said. It's like this client comes in, they want to rank for this keyword. So we got to create a piece of content for this keyword. But then you look at the metrics and the keyword gets like five searches a month. Why are we wasting time writing content for something like that? So you're managing client expectations.
You know, a lot of local companies, local businesses that have worked with SEO agencies unfortunately have been taken advantage of and what's already created for them is terrible. So then you come in like we do, and we're like, yeah, there's a reason why this content isn't working and why it's not ranking. It's terrible. So we need to redo it. That's a whole other battle with local clients, both on the SEO on the content side because they're like, well, we already paid to have this done. What do you mean it's terrible?
Yeah, it's terrible to tell you that's why it's not working. So you have that battle too where it's like, it's not just about literally what you're ranking for, but it's like having to fix things so that they rank better, you know, and then, and then you're looking at what do you do new from there, you know, to support the SEO strategy. And so it's a delicate balance because you know, clients have an expectation. You as an agency or a consultant knows what works and now you're kind of, you know, that tug rope, you know, pulling back and forth, trying to figure out, you know, whose needs need to get met here for success.
And you have to re educate your clients on that.
[00:36:06] Speaker A: That totally makes sense as a kind of wrap up here. If you were taking a new local, local client on what is the most actionable thing that they should do this afternoon after they listen to this or evening. I'm not going to presume that they listen to it the same time as recorded it, but in the time in the day after they listen to this podcast, what's something high value that they should consider doing?
[00:36:38] Speaker B: Ignore everything else that anybody's telling you. Go to your Google Business profile and make sure it's filled out completely. Your hours are correct, wherever you're guiding them, whether it's to make a call to your website is correct.
Look at those reviews. You have some negative reviews there. Take some time to go through them and answer them them and be honest and truthful about it.
Sometimes we make mistakes. It's okay to admit that when you get a bad review, it actually makes you look better. To do that, look at Your Q&As answer ones for people who are asking.
This is an opportunity to show you care about what people are asking about and show your expertise. But yeah, ignore everything else and go and look at your Google Business profile. And if you don't have one, stop listening to this podcast and go create one right now.
[00:37:31] Speaker A: Let's talk, let's extend it a little bit more.
What is the inherent difference between a service area Google Business profile and a Google Business profile where it's associating specifically with an address and how do you see the interplay between those two, two types of GMBs in terms of rankings, challenges associated with either. Either form?
[00:37:58] Speaker B: That's a great question.
So you know, you have, like you said, the two different types of Google business profiles. One is very clear cut that you have a brick and mortar business that someone can step into an office, think of lawyers, think of doctors, that sort of thing, restaurants, then your service area pages.
The best example I can give for people for that is you think of home service contractors. You know they're coming to you, you're not going to them. And so they cover a certain service area which can be, you know, miles and miles big that they cover.
That was a terrible sentence. Everybody laugh at the writer who can't talk.
I never claimed I was a good public speaker, only a good writer.
So you, first and foremost, you have to understand what your business is. And so sometimes people that have brick and mortar businesses, if they're managing their own Google business profile, they'll think they'll reach a larger audience by setting up a service area for them. And what really they're doing there is diluting their value around the proximity to their address.
So for anybody's managing their own Google business profile listing, I would encourage you to go and make sure your address is correct. And if you are using a service area instead of an address for a brick and mortar, please go change that. You're, you're shooting yourself in the foot by not.
So once people actually understand how those two types of profiles actually work for their business, you know, we know proximity and relevance are two of the most important factors for how you show up in Map Pack as a local business.
So you know, there's optimizing your profile, ensuring everything's up to date, staying on top of that, encouraging reviews from people who are using your business, responding to those, you know, it's, it's just like the other SEO checklist. You have to stay on top of it. And then you have the added factor that you need. You know, this needs to be recurring task of checking Reviews, Q&As and more and just honestly checking to make sure the information is correct. Because anybody can submit changes to your Google business profile. And sometimes, you know, Google listens to people who are wrong.
So you want to make sure you're, you know, and so you know, it can be a lot easier to rank an actual brick and mortar location than it can be a service area page because you open up the competitiveness when you're covering a much larger area.
So you're not just competing with other service area businesses sometimes in that case, you know, if you're an auto mechanic, for example, you have mobile auto mechanics now that come to you, but you also have, you know, you still have brick and mortar car shops you'll go to for work.
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: So when you, when you have a business like this where you have a mix of those, you know, it can be much harder for that service area business to compete with someone who has a physical address.
Because Google is going to associate the proximity of where someone is searching first to an address that's closer to it. Then potentially that service area page.
You know, that sometimes is luck of the draw. You know, it's how close is someone to an address versus a service area, how deep is their query? Are they searching for just auto mechanic or are they searching for mobile auto mechanic? So it's not necessarily an exact science of.
Because we know the proximity is one of the most important factors. But you know, like I said, keeping your Google business profile up to date, making sure you're recurringly check that and then making sure sure that even as a service area business you have location pages for the different suburbs, neighborhoods, neighboring cities so that you're also showing up in those organic outside of the map pack is incredibly important for service area businesses too.
[00:41:59] Speaker A: I have a challenge for you. What about when the business blurs the line and they have a, like they're in IV drip therapy and they have an office where you can come in and do it, but they also offer mobile and they'll come out to you.
So when you do both, would you say lean into one and hope that, hope that you can make that local presence broad enough and an echo wide enough out to cover your entire service area where you'd be willing to drive to. Or is it time to consider, hey, maybe I create a service area business and register it as a suite, do two things which would be the better play.
[00:42:44] Speaker B: So to me it's leaning into what the core of the business is. If the core of the business is more in person than service area, to me, you'd want to lean more into that core address and maybe not necessarily build out a service area, but consider building out service area pages on the website and optimizing for them.
That would be the more appropriate thing than to kind of skirt the line and do a suite. And like, you know, you know, there are different violations with Google business profiles. We've seen suspensions go up and I am by no means an expert on all of the rules of Google Business profile. I'M not going to pretend that I'm an expert in it, but in my experience it's better to be truthful about, you know, from the start of what you're business actually is. You're not misleading customers and also not setting yourself up to have your Google business profile taken down by Google because you skirted around the lines. Now you know, the lines are gray. I'm not going to sit here and say otherwise. You know, there's a lot of bad ways people use Google business profiles, especially when it comes to using physical addresses that don't actually exist.
But this is where you mix in what you're doing on your website as well to support with location pages and that that's primary purpose of those, you know. And sometimes, you know, depending on the niche, you know, it's more competitive in the map pack than you know, a service area will be then a physical address and the proximity to that. So you know, there's also testing that needs to be involved there to figure out, you know, like what areas, you know, looking in GA4 and other analytics tools, you know, where are people searching from down to at that city level where you know, where are you seeing that? Because if you have, you know, primarily one city, then that might give you an answer as to whether or not to use an address versus a service area and then lean into that. But then if you see a lot of diversity there, it's like, okay, we need to capture traffic coming into Google business profile and a map pack but also organically because people are searching that way too. So it's kind of, you really have to understand your audience, understand how they're searching and spend the time to play around with the best ways to drive them. And for service area businesses, like I said, it's much harder in many cases to rank because of that proximity factor. And this is where supporting on the organic side by building out location pages can help mitigate some of that.
[00:45:14] Speaker A: I know you did a legendary post on service area pages. I'll make sure I add that to the to the show notes. Thanks so much for your time. I think I'm going to book you again and we'll go into some other rabbit holes, so many different areas. But I want to thank you for stopping in and sharing your insight and wisdom.
[00:45:35] Speaker B: Well, thanks for having me. It's, I love, you know, have these unscripted just rabbit holes we can go down because yeah, some of the best ideas come from being creative that way. So this has been fun.
[00:45:46] Speaker A: All right, see you around.
