The GBP Loop - Mike Martin on Google Business Profiles

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, I'm Jeremy Rivera, your unscripted SEO podcast host. I'm here with Mike Martin, creator of GBply and it's not a peeling website, but it is a site and tool focused on Michael Micro, my, my good friends Business profiles. Yeah, BPP I can talk to. I swear, guys, I, I'm a good host. I, I can do this. Let's try that again. Mike Martin, GBP Lee, why don't you tell the folks what your software does so I don't dig myself a deeper hole. [00:00:39] Speaker B: So my software has basically been built around Google Business Profile management and optimization. We've created a system called the GBP loop that enables agencies to probably cut down about 75% of their workload and automate most of the daily manual actions that provide all of the SEO benefits to Google Business Profiles. [00:01:02] Speaker A: Tell me about verification for GBP as an entry point. What is the state of play? Is everybody getting shuffled to video verification? I have my own experiences of trying to avoid or managing to fly through and getting auto verified with what from your perspective and feedback, you know, because obviously, you know, if you're working with agencies about gbp, there's, you know, the regular management of it, but then there's, you know, you gotta get it started to begin with. So what's your take on, you know, how does verification mostly work for a lot of people? Is it different for different niches or industries and anything you can help to help people do it more effectively. [00:01:57] Speaker B: So Google Business Profile verification. We wouldn't actually look at Google Business Profile verification first. There's three different setups. But what I would do first is take you back to the website and the citations because what, what Google does is it gets information from user input, it gets information from the business owner, it gets information from verified sources across the web, like your website citations and things like that. So we have a strategy called profile completeness mirroring. And when I say mirroring to somebody, I mean your Google Business Profile mirrors your website and it mirrors your citations across the web. So if you want to improve your chances of going through verification, get the website and the citations set up first. Make sure they all mirror exactly what's on there. Business name, address. Like people used to say, nap information. Yeah, nap information, it's kind of gone one step further now. It's more, it's more to do with your visibility of your Google Business Profile is based around all of your business information. Your working hours, your categories, your services, your prices. Everything needs to now match not just, just the nap information because AI's made it super simple to crawl. So step number one is make sure the website and everything's set up properly. First make sure your citations and everything match everything that's on your website. Then make your Google business profile matches all of that and then go for verification. But then there's also an area which I'm even seeing experts make mistakes. So for example, a lot of people will tell you that you need to show your address on a Google business profile because it ranks better. I don't know if that's true or not. I have no idea whether it's true or not. But it's against Google's terms of service if you're a service area business. I do know that. So for example, let's say my missus used to be in tattoo removal, but she was a mobile tattoo remover, okay? So she would leave the house and go to people's homes to do tattoo removal. Nobody ever came to our home or to her business premises. So that being said, you wouldn't show your address on your Google business profile. So what a lot of people make the mistake is they'll use plumbers, roofers, electricians, joiners, tree services. And what they will do is they will show the business address. Well, if that's the case, you need a commercial premises that customers visit, you need signage on the premises. And then going through video verification is impossible if you haven't got that set up. If you're working from home, okay? But if you're a plumber and you set up a service area business, then somebody then and you don't show your address, getting verified is easier. You walk outside, you show them your van with your sign written, you show them your tools, you show them your invoice book at the front of your van. And this is where I live. And here's a utility bill to show I live there. Done. So verification, simple, as long as you follow the rules correctly. And what a lot of people do is they do it wrong because they just don't understand the difference between storefront service area business and what's called a hybrid business, which is one where you are a service area business and you show your address. [00:04:50] Speaker A: It's definitely one of those areas of contention because I have worked with a number of different service area businesses and some service area businesses who've invested in having a specific geographically located office that they've rented pretty much just so that they can play by the rules and have a physical address that's close to the centroid of the city. And you know, under the the process which from my own perspective at different times I've, I've seen different things work with Google. My business just anecdotally on, on clients and you know, I've seen certain literal service area businesses that went through that process. They, they were getting nowhere on Google Maps and then they got a specific address and that address, that office was very close to the center of the city and you know, Bob's your uncle, that once they actually verified that office location because they had it and they got signage and they, they did the proper things to do it. But you know, it almost feels like, you know, if there is a difference and it is worth it to you to try it, then you know, finding a desk to ride or find renting office space to do it right would be a much better process because then you also have a lot easier time, you know, and you also don't want to move it. You know, you want to have somewhere where this is going to be the center of your business for a long time. So you're either committing to, you know, the rent for that office space, maybe you actually use that office space for somebody who does admin. But you know, it's not against the rules for you to open an office. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Well, no, no, you can open an office. It does say that the office needs to be staffed. [00:06:43] Speaker A: Right. [00:06:43] Speaker B: But, but the key is, it's, it's distance, relevance and prominence. That those are your three factors. [00:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:49] Speaker B: So if you're, if you're right in the heart of somewhere, it's quite easy to get a Google business profile to rank in a very small geographic square. And the reason is that you are the most like, as long as you're relevant, you're geographically positioned, the closest to the people searching to you. [00:07:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:06] Speaker B: Then it's nearly, it will nearly always show up. But like what? So for example, what we try to do is we have up to a 25 mile radius map grid which is, which is 50 mile across. Okay. And what we try to do is get number one in every single location in that type of radius area. And the only way you're able to really do stuff like that is, is with consistency. So we, we've created a system called the GBP Loop which as I was saying earlier, profile completeness and mirroring. [00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:33] Speaker B: Filling your profile. Then you make sure that it mirrors your website, you go to all the citations you've got across the web and you try to make sure everything's accurate. [00:07:40] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:07:40] Speaker B: Straight after that it's pick pictures. Which is, which we say pictures because Profile completeness, pictures, posts and praise. It rhymes with the P's, but pictures includes video, so it's media and regularly keeping. Like images don't affect ranking. But what images do do is they put a face on the business and a face on the business as it is today, not as it was two months, three months, six months ago. [00:08:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:03] Speaker B: Then there's posts. So. So post is the third step in the GBP loop. And posts, you should be doing these on a regular basis. But posts are designed to do really three things. You're either providing information, you're building a relationship, or you're trying to convince a prospect to become a customer. That's it. If it does that, it goes on the profile. If it doesn't do that, don't stuff keywords and all that doesn't work. Google doesn't. They don't even get indexed. The whole point of them is when somebody visits a profile, they see images that shows your business. Now they see posts that's relevant for special offers now, updates that you've been talking about now, things that have happened this week, last week, the week before, stuff like that on your profile. And then the next one is praise. And praise is basically reviews and review responses, which Google does actually tell us that reviews and review responses can affect your visibility. Okay, so with a GBP loop, it's super simple. I always explain it to my clients like this. All the technical stuff happens on the website, all the SEO, all the keyword, all of the contextual relevance, all your internal external linking and all the rest that happens on your website, everything sits over here on your website. And since Google went from being a Google my business, which is what you said earlier, which was a static listing, to a Google Business profile, which is more like a social profile, it kind of almost follows social profile rules. If you're trying to build a YouTube channel. [00:09:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:21] Speaker B: Then you will post every single day with a Google Business Profile. It's daily manual action. So we have profile completeness and mirroring posts, pictures, praise, times, consistency. You get to the end of the month, you go back to the beginning, you do the whole process again. Make sure the profile is still complete and up to date. Make sure it's still mirroring the website, make sure it's still mirroring the citations, pictures, posts, praise, background, and you make sure you respond to every single review. And as long as you stay on that hamster wheel, so to speak, then you're going to beat 95%, if not more Google Business profiles out there, because nobody's staying consistent What a lot of SEO agencies do is they optimize it once and then they sit and it's like we've done you what we've done. Your Google business profile, it's not, it doesn't have an end date. It keeps going and keeps going and we're winning like 100% of the Google business profiles that I've personally optimized on. I've seen massive visibility change within 12 weeks. Huge. And be absolutely everybody in the industry. I've got mine that's number one everywhere within a 50 mile radius. We had it ranking in France, okay. When it's in the south of the uk, on the south coast of the uk and, and this is all because we follow that process and that's what the software is designed to do. The software we've created isn't all about these tips and tricks about putting metadata in images and doing all these crazy little like almost black hat hacks that work at a short period of time. So Google gets onto and they disappear. It's a proper system that just as long as you stay on the hamster wheel, it just works and the system controls everything. So it asks the client for what's needed, the client puts it into a client portal, the client portal puts it into the publishing schedule and the hamster wheel keeps going without you. All you need to do is the first bit. [00:11:01] Speaker A: Talk to me about data aggregators and tell the audience what are data aggregators when it comes to the local search ecosystem and citations? [00:11:12] Speaker B: Explain to me what you mean by data aggregators. [00:11:14] Speaker A: Well, you've got locales, you've got factual, you've got fourSquare, New Start EZE. There are these five, there are currently five and they two of them, you know, two or more of them will change hands every couple of years. And these are the big data programs where they distribute citation data to multiple hubs, you know, so if you enter your business information and verify through super pages, you're not just registering that one citation, but you're also registering on the whole constellation of sub directory sites and citation sources. And so you can actually knock out a pretty good sized chunk of your citation work just by hitting these five data hubs first. I know Bright Local has a connection to them. There are manual processes to go and you know, submit yourself manually to them as well. I think Bright local is like 20 or 30 bucks last time I did a like six, six or eight months ago. But you know, there's such a constellation out there of, you know, different size. I think, I think the Last metering was like 2 to 3,000 directory type sites in local local SEO that are displaying citation information and you know, up to 1,000, 1,500 are either pull data from those data aggregators or they'll verify, you know, your profile against what they have in the aggregator. And that was why it's not Yelp. What was that other. There's a tool that, where you'll go with them but they'll lock you in and make you keep paying and hold your local citation data hostage. If you don't pay them, they'll undo all of the citations that they built. I'm trying to remember what the name of it is. [00:13:19] Speaker B: Well, I won't call anybody out on that one. So one question first. So your experience with data aggregators for citations. [00:13:28] Speaker A: Sure. [00:13:29] Speaker B: Can you go off and actually edit all of the citations easily after they've been set up. [00:13:36] Speaker A: So with the data aggregators you can, it's like a one time push with, with Bright local it's been a one time push and it'll, it'll put your information out and it'll distribute through whatever that citation network is updating as it goes. So if you move to shop like my. It's funny because your, your wife does tattoo removal. My wife does tattoo application. She's currently an apprentice. And they're moving, they just moved their shop, they like around the corner but the address changed. So you know, I'm like hey, you gotta, you gotta go update your address, you know, on the web because it's got all of these, these old shop addresses and now you're going to be inconsistent. So you know, my recommendation was hey, start with these five data aggregators. It'll push out and then you can see how much more manual work, how many more that you have to grab, how many apples you have to bob for manually after that. But you know, you can push a new update to them that way. It's been a minute since, it's been eight years since I had to do it manually with Factual Foursquare and Super Pages. That was then. So I'm sure there's probably new processes or data partners. But yeah, that's how it works right now as far as my most recent [00:15:01] Speaker B: experience, you see because like and we were talking about numbers there a minute ago and do you remember when you could go to Fiverr and you still can probably and get what we were calling a link wheel and you could go and get 3,000 links in a link wheel and everybody like the, some of the data aggregators, the quantity is what scares me with these type of things. Like imagine. And in fact, I was just doing a video before and I explained exactly like this. Do you know Dana White is. [00:15:30] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. The UFC promoter, Right, exactly, the ufc. [00:15:35] Speaker B: Do you know where Bob Smith is? [00:15:38] Speaker A: No. [00:15:39] Speaker B: No. Right. So imagine Bob Smith, some guy that sat in his house smoking pot all day, right? And he, and he has like three or four people that go and visit him and he's got no other connections in the world. He sits there smoking pot, his dealer turns up, he does it. And then imagine Dana White, right? And there's. And, and, and all the connections he's got and all the people he sees and all the areas he goes and all the things he does. When you're talking about these data aggregators in your citations, don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't get 3,000, but if you're going to get 3,000, make sure that they are editable. And there's a difference between a Dana White type of citation and a Bob Smith that sat at home. And that's why I like to avoid these big mass citation. You call them data aggregators. We don't use that. That's why I said to just clarify to me what you mean by data aggregator. We just call them citation tools. But. [00:16:26] Speaker A: Well, they're not. These are. So there's a difference of like, you know, there's. Because there's bright local, white spark and then white white local or spark local. They took the name and smashed up and they, they play an in between role and they're like, oh, hey, you know, get 100 citations for $200. And you're like, okay. And then it goes and does it, but then you check it and half of them are kind of super sketchy profiles on, you know, like, is this, this, this doesn't quite feel right. So it's not that what data data aggregators actually are, are they're on the business side and they, they find and manage the citation information that's put out by the Better Business Bureau, by local chambers of commerce, when people register their business. Because you'll notice, like you register a small business, you'll start getting spam within a week. Well, that's because your data immediately, as soon as you register a new business gets put into a directory and that directory gets distributed. And then cold callers and spammers are tapped into that to get new numbers and emails that they can call, cold call and spam call. But these data aggregators buy that data from several different sources. And package and distribute it. You know, they have different, they have multiple different data models all based around, you know, data accuracy and things like that for, you know, for Google, for Yahoo, for other businesses and various types of things. So it's, it's, it's. When I say data aggregator, I mean they're, they're aggregating business data and pooling and collecting it and slicing and dicing and selling it to different business industries for different purposes. So that's what I mean by data aggregators. [00:18:31] Speaker B: Honestly. In my experience, Google says that it finds your information on the web from your website and verifiable information from verifiable sources. I personally, for a local business, would Prefer to have 10 verified, manually created citations on proper places than a hundred just genuinely okay ones. But then again, last week we released a free rank tracker, 100% free rank tracker on GBP. And we did a press release on it and exactly what you just said happened. We got about 150 emails of people trying to sell us links on hundreds of different websites. And it was the exact same thing. It was also. So it does generate traffic and it does generate things. But from a Google business profile perspective, we try to keep it as white hot as possible. Yeah, because once you've done, let's say you get your website and let's say you've got between 10 and 15 verifiable decent citations, the GBP loop and just follow that sequence, you won't really need to worry about these. And they're all, it's easy to keep them up to date, it's easy to edit them, it's easy to go in. So that's why I was asking you, can you edit everything on with a single click? Because if you're in somewhere and you've got them and you can edit everything, easily edit them without actually being tied into unmirror data. Yeah, because the unmirror data is worse. Google released something in their documentation about two weeks ago to say that they can now send you a notification that somebody's recommended a change to your profile. If you don't respond, they'll change it within four days if they can see that it's verified on verifiable information on the web. So if they go to your citations and see, okay, this phone number here is on 20 of their citations and somebody's just said change it to this number. So if somebody's got control of your citations and they edit all of your phone numbers, they can then recommend a change to your profile. And if you miss it that change can take effect, but not only that, it can take effect without them even telling you their documentation said this recently because they're trying to keep all the data up to date. So with these mass citation builders we'll call them, I am very, very wary of using them with Google business profiles because of how interconnected all the data is with the entity nowadays. And it's all interconnected with the data nowadays simply because AI can crawl everything in a millisecond. I can put some in chatgpt like we were talking before we came on live, say to it straight away, what's wrong with this Google business profile? And instantly if it should have its address showing ChatGPT, they'll tell me without me having any experience on Ology. It's like, well you're a service area business, you don't serve customers at your address you shouldn't be showing you. And you've already got to look at it from a driving directions perspective. If you click on driving directions and then you turn up and you run a street full of houses and you're like I was haters to see a business. Yeah, that driver gets pretty damn angry about it. [00:21:28] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:21:28] Speaker B: So that's kind of how I, I avoid mass citation builders. But we do recommend citations with verifiable sources, which is sources that have got the Dana White presence rather than sources that have got the, the Bob the Builder presence type of who's got no connections in the outside world. [00:21:54] Speaker A: What are some edge cases, what are some interesting clients or profiles or outcomes that you've seen recently Optimizing people's Google my business. [00:22:06] Speaker B: So do you know what an independent practitioner profile is? [00:22:11] Speaker A: I am aware that somebody like a tattoo artist, if the tattoo like you can be have a sub profile basically. I've seen it most often at like a health clinic, you know, where they have a main practice and then they've got a doctor underneath that. And you can change claim your own addressed location with a suite number that's at the same time location address of a bigger entity. Right. [00:22:46] Speaker B: You're one of the first SEOs that's ever been able to answer that. Pretty much bang on. Yes. We did it with Health Place recently and he had physios and he basically came to me and he's like we've got like these five different physios and what we want to do is like is there a way we can promote market this? So this guy's now got six Google business profiles for one health clinic and each of the individual physios that are based in his organization. So Google specifically mentions like lawyers, dentists, doctors and stuff like that. And what you can do is you can basically, yes, set up an individual practitioner profile for client facing professionals. Okay. So that are available at the premises during the working hours but people can phone up and ask for them specifically. So like you said with the tattoo artist. I've never come across it with tattoo artists so I wouldn't like to say yes or no because I've never tested it. But we did it with a client recently. But another opportunity that comes with Google business profiles is like let's say you get a big law firm in the United States, he might have 15 lawyers working for him. What you'll find is that law firm might be ranking number one for its, for its law firm Google Business profile. But what they probably won't be ranking for each of their individual lawyers won't have a practitioner profile and they could, which means they could potentially have 16 Google business profiles. [00:23:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:00] Speaker B: One for each of their lawyers. Lawyers and that. But what you do is what really builds the entity for you then is every single lawyer has a forward slash lawyer one, forward slash lawyer two, forward slash lawyer three on the website. So then what you do is you have a link to the main website from the group from the primary Google business profile for the organization and you'd have 15 lawyer profiles and they'd all link into the to their forward slash page be under their individual name like XYZ Esquire and so on and so forth or doctor. And you can do it with dentists. [00:24:29] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:29] Speaker B: And, and then another opportunity from it is I've seen dentists doing it where a dentist might work in three different dental practices during a week and he'll have like one on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday here, Thursday, Friday here. He'll have three independent practitioner profiles, one for each dental practice he works in that has the specific working hours in place and the amount of leads and sales and clients you can generate off the back of a Google business profile because it's kind of the only way a business can rank for single keywords. If somebody searches for dentist near me, the website is usually a big national brand or it's a directory style site because obviously you land on it and you get what you want and you never go back to search again. It's never usually a small local business. But the Google business profiles sit directly above the websites under the AI overviews, but above the websites and generate a hell of a lot of traffic and a hell of a lot of clients. Because the reviews. So yeah, probably setting up independent practitioner profiles, I do that a lot now with, with agencies I work with. I will sit, I'll have a 30 minute meeting with them, take them through setting it up, how to do it. And some of our agencies have almost doubled in size just off the back of setting up independent practitioner profiles for experts. [00:25:47] Speaker A: To what degree do you think based off of anecdotes does your website's profile of links count towards or is calculated as a factor in your Google my business profile ranking? [00:26:10] Speaker B: So I think that it's more to do with the website as an entity, not as a, as, as, as a link profile. So basically for, for example, like I said to you earlier, the SEO belongs on the website. So, so the website itself is where you're going to build the backlinks. That's where you're going to write all the content, that's where you're going to build contextual relevance. That's where you're going to do all your internal link ins and, and absolutely everything. If you've got a Google Business Profile and you cannot rank it and you go and build a well, well designed, well built, like, like a Wikipedia style website of the subject that you're trying to cover and then go into detail, put a lot of data driven content on there, not the, the that people are doing on an AI. And then from that point then, then start focusing on just, just quality, the quality of the entity. It will improve your Google Business Profile rankings, they will improve together. But the mirroring in my experience is the most important thing. If the information on the website doesn't match the information on the Google Business Profile, you've got a disconnect between the business and the website. And any disconnect, it's like the hottest girl at the party. If you walk up and say the wrong thing, she's going to walk away. Google's the hottest girl at the party and if you website and you and your Google Business Profile don't match, then all of a sudden you're in a position where Google's just gonna walk away, it's gonna pay no attention, less attention because of the mirroring. So I believe the mirroring is more important because it's one business, one entity and everything needs to match and then obviously your link building and everything else. So the more you build the website and the more you build the website as a business and it gets the connections, it does help the Google Business Profile with the rankings, but not necessarily just based on the link building. [00:28:05] Speaker A: I'm curious have you seen any studies or data or have anecdotes about or understanding of how LLMs are currently processing accessing local search information? Last that I had seen, I think Chat GPT was tied in and could pull information from Bing business profiles. So is, and that's kind of sub question B is do you also manage being local verification? Is that something you have a sub process for or isn't on your radar or is coming. [00:28:48] Speaker B: We haven't touched Bing at all. Not, not, not, not gone near it. I mean one of the things I see a lot is, and you'll have seen it yourself, AI SEO expert. You've seen that a lot on, on LinkedIn. There's a lot of AI SEO experts and, and, and I know I can go to the, the Google to chat GBT or to Claude or to any of the, the LLMs and I can make a specific search. Okay. And it'll bring back the AI overviews or it'll bring back information about that search. If I then make the exact same search, it will bring back completely different information. So to me, I'm still at the position where I think it's, it's a, it's a giant split test. We're living in a world of a giant split test and still the LLMs are trying to figure out what they're doing. They still don't know. So no, we have looked at the way that it does work with the data and we have looked at certain studies and I've had conversations like I was talking with a guy called James Dooley the other day and because I watched a video with him and a guy called Charles Float and James Dooley explains how to make your AI overviews pop. And I thought, okay, let's test this. So I, I just did exactly what he said in the video and within 24 hours, my AI overview. But it's Mike Martin SEO, because we've got like MPS and that in the UK called Mike Martin. If you put in Mike Martin SEO, you'll see all the information about my start, where I started from, where my business came from, all the businesses I run, lots of different things. It's not, it's not completely filled out, but there's a lot of information where I started, how I got into SEO, like all my background, all of it. And it popped within 24 hours of doing what he said. So it's like they're definitely pulling the information. One of the things he did say is we've got a lot of books. I've got about eight or ten books on Amazon. And he said take some of your books and put them onto Google Books. I said and watch what happens within 24. And I put them on Google Books. And he's like bam. Overnight it's like the AI overviews and everything popped like really, really quickly. He said set up an IMDb profile, so it sets up an IMDb profile and it did all the little things he told me to do. And, and the way it popped was like I've never seen anything like it since. You know when we used to be able to put a thousand keywords on a page, then you just get number one position and you could change the color and have white text on a white background and still pop. It was like, it was like that type of speed, like you could build it and it was just there and it was, I was like oh my God, this is insane. And I've not seen anything like that since probably 2011 was probably when it started to slow down and stop a little bit and we couldn't do it. But now it's like with the LLMs we've got that ability again. But every, all the experts are still not really experts because 10,000 hours is 40 hours a week for five years. So and, and AI search came out in 2024. So it's kind of, there's no experts yet. So but we are like again we're playing with it, we're testing it. We, we're still building our own entities and building out. But I think, I think everything's more brand nowadays, more built around a brand. And if you build that brand into someone that's got a lot of connections, not necessarily all positive connections, just real connections. Yeah, I, I feel you pop a lot faster now and a lot easier. But I do feel that black hat SEOs are gradually going to start to diminish and see what they do. That their return on investment diminished to a point of non existence. I used to have, I owned Magic Page plugin. I released that 10 years ago. That's one of my products that was. It used to draw. You'd put a page on a website, draw a radius around your site and it build SEO optimized web pages for every town, village and suburb within your radius and then interlink all the pages together for you. It have 10 links per page there or thereabouts and it'd be the closest areas to each page it would automatically link out to. That popped. It worked really, really well. We made like. We ended up with 700 subcontractors from a locksmithing company in the UK using pretty much that strategy. And then single niche PBNs, most of them strategies still work a little bit but like the way they used to work because there's no. Each thing hasn't got a verifiable footprint anymore, is kind of dropping through the floor. [00:33:14] Speaker A: I was commenting the other day that SEO as a consultancy stands out as, and correct me if I I'm missing one, but a consultancy where there's a direct adversarial existence of an algorithm that has patents passed to specifically obscure, obstruct and prevent you from knowing if your SEO change had a positive impact immediately. They're called twiddlers is how Google refers to them. And these are patents that will, they'll change your rankings. Like let's say that you make a change on your site, you, you added all of the headers and it's a really solid piece of content. You launch it. Well, the rank that you're at, immediately it will pop it up and then drop it down suddenly and then kind of bring it up and then eventually three weeks later you'll float close to about what it'll do. Then it'll drop you down and bring you back up. And it's intentionally designed for low patients, black hats who are like, oh, did this work? I changed this. It didn't work. Change it back. And they, they Googlers, the spam team has specifically designed the algorithm to obscure when you do something good with your website. And I cannot think of a single business elsewhere. Any consultancy, any consultant ever is like, you know, oh hey my consultancy. Here's when you should go and plant your grass. It's not like the grass, the field is like I'm going to mess with these settings. So the grass grows really fast and then goes really slow. And the farmer is not going to know when to plant their grass. Like there's no other field where the surface upon which you are measured for the result is actively, intentionally being deceptive to obscure how good or bad your change was in terms of optimizing. [00:35:19] Speaker B: You can imagine these little evil engineers at Google sat laughing their heads off like thinking. And then they're watching all of the. Everybody's doing this because they think it's gonna work, but they don't know. In six weeks they'll all be gone. And yeah, it's totally true, I think. Do you know Edward Sturm is. Yes, yes, I seen a video from him a few days ago, about 9,000 and something tests that was done and I didn't listen to the Full thing. I've only listened to about half of it at the minute. But he was talking about similar things. Somebody that had done a lot of tests and silly things like having your page title in all capitals and having really long meta titles and like silly little things moving the call to action below the fold and silly little things. And it was telling percentages of how much different, how much of a difference it made over, over a period of time from the rankings. And it was one of the best like studies I've seen in a while. It wasn't him that did it. He was reading somebody else's study. But it was kind of what you were saying. Then it's like, right, we're going to test this because, because most SEOs like sit in a little dark room for days and like, let's test this and let's try this and let's, I mean that's, that's. So I built my very first business. I was a locksmith. I was out on the road. I was breaking into houses and cars and then paid ads just got way too expensive. So I started building the websites myself, figured it out and then all of a sudden it's like, wow, I can employ everybody else do this. And yeah, I guess SEO is for, we're almost cave dwellers, aren't we, when it comes to the, the nitty gritty we want to really get in and figure out. And I guess the engineers at Google laughing the heads off at us doing that exact thing. [00:36:58] Speaker A: Well, it's, I, I, it's funny because at the same time I can't be too mad because at the same time, you know, there's very few businesses where, you know, they do, they put out their radios and there isn't a specific industry out there that's trying to like leverage their radio technology to make a bunch of money, you know. So like from, from what it's it, I, I talk about this anecdote. Okay, so I went to pubcon in Las Vegas one year and we're at this Bavarian bar and this guy sits down next to me and starts talking about SEO. And it's like sitting next to Lord Sidious and he's the ultimate black hat SEO. He's like, no, like, you know, we're, we're providing a service for Google by finding these exploits, you know, these areas of weakness in their algorithm, you know, and you know, we, we are not beholden. It's, we're not breaking any law. It's not even really breaking a term of contract, you know, and, and you know, the more that we, you know, they're not investing. They know what these loopholes are and they're choosing not to fix them. So, you know, we're just using the system that they give us until, you know, they change it. And so he was making this argument, I'm like finding myself nodding along like, oh, yeah, yeah. He's like, yeah. And that's why you should buy, you know, 100,000 PBNs for me. I'm like, oh, well, you know, okay. So, you know, you're making your money somewhere and I get it. But it's also like, I've been in SEO for 20 years, you know, and I've seen kind of the hypocrisy of people that were so high on their own supply of, hey, we're so white hat, you know, where we want to be super, you know, just make good content folks. You know, you're, you're doing great things. And then I interviewed, you know, Giselle Navarro of House Fresh, and they were doing like legit, really good third party reviews of something. Air fresheners. Not like spray air fresheners, like the machines that keep your air fresh. Air air cleaners. So they were doing like, taking them apart, setting up standards, putting out brilliant videos, in depth stuff, all this stuff that Google said that's what they wanted. And then the helpful content update comes along and slaps them down and their traffic goes, organic traffic goes to, you know, 1 or 2% of what it was. And all of these people, you know, SEO consultants are like, oh, you, you did this wrong or you did this wrong. She's like, I'm making great content. I'm following, you know, best ethical guidelines. Google got it wrong. And they actually invited her, among other publishers, to, to the Googleplex to talk with the engineers. And lo and behold, six months later, her rankings came back and she changed nothing of her on site strategy, of what she was doing. She had to flee and, you know, turn to building a community on YouTube, building a community on Reddit and finding alternative replacements. And that's kind of what a lot of our content society looks like now. Because Google stopped paying creative people for their content and, you know, replaced AI overviews and pulling, you know, food from the mouth of publishers because they're greedy. That's from my opinion. But like, there's so many people that just create good content. No, that, that's not enough. It's not enough to just create good content. There's more to running a, a site that ranks than just create good content. I'm sorry but. And you know, we as businesses, we're vulnerable when we, when one channel of our income, you know, is dependent on another entity and the outcome is a black box, there's an insecurity there, like, I don't know. Nobody knows what Google's algorithm is going to look like any given day. It could fluctuate. There's a big spam update, there's rumblings on the news vine right now. Several SEOs are predicting a really big release, a core algorithm update coming out soon. So you know, it's a volatile industry. [00:41:37] Speaker B: Do you know what I've never seen though? And I've never seen it, and I have seen it in with websites obviously because I used to have loads back in the day. I remember when I first started building websites, I figured out this hack where I could use a pay as you go sim card to get a free website off Google. So I went and bought 19 pay as you go SIM cards, built 19 websites over about a three day period and started SEOing and got them all ranking to the number one in all the major cities in the areas I wanted to cover. And I was absolutely smashing it. I was flying. And then just one day I wakes up and had no websites left. And it was just like, oh my God, what have I done? And I think that was at the point, it was at that point where I'd built all these websites perfectly. Like I'd done such a great job. But because I tricked Google, Google hit me big time. And after that I was like, right, I'm just gonna go black hat. And I kind of did. And, and some of the, some of the blackout tricks were like, I never used third party PBNs, never ever used a third party PBN. What I used to do with the PBNs when I was building them is I'd go to places like Yellow Pages, I'd scrape it looking for expired domains on the, on the listings. Yeah, because I know that had been a business in the past. So I'd scrape places like that looking for expired domains, use expired domains.net and places like that. And, and I'd buy like maybe 100 domain names in a day. Right. And then what I do is I'd build websites on them all using magic page plugin. So every single site was set up to have a central location, to have a target radius, to have SEO optimized web pages for every town, village and suburb within, say a 3 to 5 mile radius, maybe even a 10 mile radius in sparsely populated areas. But then what I'd do is I'd get every single website and create a triangle. So there'd be like four or five at the bottom, then there'd be two or three, then there'd be two, then there'd be one and they'd all point up and then the top one would point to a money site and these are all linked to each other. And. And then I create another triangle and another triangle and another triangle. And then sometimes I never knew why, and everyone used to ask me, because I used to do a lot of teaching and training, how do you. How do you make a site pop? And I was like, I have no idea. I have no idea. What I do is I build a triangle, right? And then one of these sites sat in the middle of that triangle will pop for some reason and it'll start generating hundreds of leads and all the others are just. Just become part of the network. So I'd get that one that was there and I'd build a triangle underneath it of sites linking to it, which would push it even further. And then so what everyone used to say to me, I'm building a money site or I'm building it. And I was like, I don't build money sites. Money sites build themselves. Based off my strategy, I create a single niche pbn. And it's just tiny little triangles, tiny little triangles. They'll link into existing money sites and then money sites will pop automatically. And I never knew why. And I just kept building and building and building and building and building. And some months I'd build. I'd build 150, 200 websites. But then this year was let 2,500 domain names go, about 2, 6, 600 that are set to expire next year, and then about 4 or 500 the year after. And then I'll have almost zero domains left, zero websites left. Because when you what where we were at, we'd have like 3,000 websites. And what I could see very clearly is that we had 3,000 websites. They're all still ranking in the areas where they always were, right? And. And they're all sitting in right. But the tr. The amount of leads we were getting were just going like this all the time. Just kept going down and down. And it's like I can see it happening because I had such a big network of websites, I had data to be able to say, this is. This is on its way out. And that's why a few years back we took a full 180 and said, you know what? We're getting out of the lead gen Game. We're getting out of the blackout game. We're getting out of the. And we're going to go into the Google Business profile game. Because we knew that all our Google assets, yeah, the traffic was going through the roof. And then recently, since the AI overview has now been popping because of Google Business profiles and things like that, we found that the amount of leads you're getting off your Google Business profile. In fact, I was watching a video yesterday, some guy said he was at an event and the lawyers that were there at these events were seeing 70% of their leads are now coming from their Google Business profile and their AI overviews and less than 30% come split between SEO and their PPC. And when he said it, I was like, oh, my God. And then independent practitioner profiles is like, there's a wide open opportunity there for all these. That is a blue ocean there, a massive blue ocean for SEOs that want to dive into this pit and say, like, what, what's coming next? Google's going all the way. Like, they've just done the biggest upgrade in 10 years for Ask Maps. Do you know what that is? [00:45:55] Speaker A: No. Tell the audience what that is. [00:45:58] Speaker B: So, so they've created like, they've integrated AI into Google Maps. So I can now say to, to, to, to Google Maps, for example, find me a vegetarian restaurant that's open within five miles of where I'm based right now. Find me a, a, find me a hotel that's got disabled access. Find me, you know, and you can say random, like little things. You can tell it, I want to go to a bar that doesn't sell alcohol type of thing. I don't think anybody ever would. But, like, if anybody wanted that. And that's why the same. Fill out your profile to a point where it's profile completeness. [00:46:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:31] Speaker B: Because that's enabling now Google and, and you can do that in your car. That's why they don't want people showing their addresses. [00:46:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:46:38] Speaker B: Because if they're asking this on Ask Maps and then you're driving and there's nothing there, people are getting mad at Google. So it doesn't want it. So it's got to be set up. Right. But yeah, they've just had the biggest overhaul in 10 years now they're pushing everything into the AI overview. And when I'm hearing things like that about lawyers and people aren't saying 70% of the leads that they get are coming from Maps and AI overviews. We know we made the right choice a few years back when we went 100 all in on Google business profiles and walked away from all the lead gen stuff. It's just slowly drifting. Real businesses are safe. Yeah, as long as they, as long as they continue to add to the online world. Was chatting to someone the other day and we was talking about if you live across the street from a business that's completely blacked out, but you see a massive queue of people turning up all day every single day, you assume it's a busy business. You don't need to know what's going on or what's happening. It's the same with Google. If it doesn't, if it sees lots of active activity from a business and then nothing, it just assumes you're no longer a busy business anymore and drops you through the rankings. That's why the daily manual actions are giving so much such good results to our, our customers is because we're focusing on daily manual actions, not focusing on like gimmicks and hacks and little tiny tricks that it's like, look, just keep the daily manual actions flowing and Google, Google loves it. [00:48:03] Speaker A: What's your thought on you know, multi location businesses? Like there's a precast concrete wall company in Florida Permacast that, you know, they're thinking of opening a Houston branch to deliver their walls and have a new hub. You know, is there anything of when you're going through that thought process of a business or hey, we're large enough, we want to open up a second location. What's the mindset that you should have about that and as a business. [00:48:36] Speaker B: What do you mean the mindset? [00:48:37] Speaker A: Well, I mean you know, from an, from a business perspective, you know, opening up a second location, you have all of your considerations of like, well now I've got a second set of employees to, to pay, I've got to hire them and is there resources that I'm going use out of my main site, you know, my, my main hiring hub here. And until we get that launched up in its speed, um, you know, is there any, any difference, you know, because you, is there any special consideration that you do when you're becoming a multi location business that you should be aware of to optimize for or is it just the same as, you know, oh, hey, I've got, I've got a location and I'm, I'm verifying it. I'm just curious if from like a strategy perspective, an SEO perspective, a GBP perspective, is there anything specific of like doing multiple locations of your business, like spinning it off? [00:49:36] Speaker B: Not really. I mean if you've Got a second location. Because every single, every single part of a business with a Google business profile, every single additional location is treated as an independent. So. So it's not like you're pushing out images from this location and this location both to the set, both to both Google business profiles. That's kind of what you wouldn't do. You run them independently. So for example, we have something called a client portal that sits between the location and the agency. So it's kind of like an assistant that sits between the two. Like I was telling you before, the information comes in. Yeah, it goes in. What you do is you'd have a client portal on a per location basis and then the information had come from the business into the client portal and into the publishing schedule. So they'd be runners as independent. I mean what we do have a lot of clients who want to scale and grow. We first try and figure out if there's a way they can set up as a service area business first. Which means you don't necessarily need, you have to have a staffed location. But there's no rule that says that staff location can't be that the, the client is staffed from a residential premises. And because it's a service area business you don't need the signage. So you can basically start to generate lead sales and clients in a location as long as that person person is going to cover that as a service area. If they're not and that they're a shop style business, then what I would recommend doing is always set up the website first, then set up the citations and then finally go for the Google Business Profile. Because the Google Business Profile, the reason it's the last thing you do is because verification can be a pain in the backside. If you do any tiny little thing wrong and you don't get much in the way of feedback as to why it's been not not verified. So if you get the website and the citations first, Google will use that, in some cases will use that information to verify the Google Business Profile and that way you don't necessarily, you're just going to make verification a lot easier. Because the quickest route to leads without paid ads is a Google Business Profile. You can rank a Google Business Profile like we set up a brand new Google Business Profile on my coaching business and we had a website already. We set up a brand new Google Business profile and within four weeks we was the number one in two and a half mile radius. Within eight weeks we had a five mile radius and within 12 weeks we had a 25 mile radius around the business where we were number one almost everywhere in all those areas. So that's like two and a half mile radius. I think it's about 64 times the potential reach in three months. And because you're ranking for keywords like and that's the keyword Business coaching, not business coaching, location. It was business coaching and business coaching near me. So when you set up a multi location business I would get all your ducks in a row digitally first. [00:52:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:20] Speaker B: Before you even think about setting up like going and putting staff and everything else in the premises then invest into the setting up the Google Business profile and then probably start staffing the location from that point forward so you're not investing thousands in in wages and everything else before the leads start to get generated in the local because you'll know SEO slow but Google Business Profile SEO isn't. It's much, much much quicker. [00:52:45] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:52:47] Speaker B: Which is good. And I've never seen a Google Business profile drop a legitimate Google Business Profile drop the way I've seen a website drop. I think that's what we were talking about before and I kind of. We spun up in a different angle. But I've never seen a Google business profile just just drop overnight like that. A legitimate Google Business profile tends to sit and stay and rank long term and there is fluctuation. There is up and there is down and obviously it's not like a website. It's not you rank for this keyword in this location. It's based on where the person searching is based towards where you're based in all. That's why you do either 25 or 50 or 100 mappings when you're doing it when you're doing a ranking result. So what we do is we focus on obviously trying to get as as many green dots in as in a wide area as possible. [00:53:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:31] Speaker B: And that means that more people searching for more locations are gonna, are gonna. So from a business perspective. Yeah. I would probably build the digital business before I started to staff the location and then I would then put the stuff into the location and set it up from there. [00:53:48] Speaker A: Any worries about you know abusing AI or like or not abusing AI but creating your updates and posts through Claude. Is that going to be seen as AI slop or is since it's not a ranking matter as long as you give it a good prompt that understands and puts out stuff that is sellable and it's good. Is there any concern about leveraging AI tools to create Google Business profile posts? [00:54:21] Speaker B: Did you see that thing a few months back that said that all AI content and AI images now have to have some sort of machine readable information in them so that it can tell its AI. So what we do is we have a system that lets you create posts using AI, but then it has to be checked, edited and approved by a human being. So we won't allow you to create a post and automatically publish it. We allow you to upload images, whatever images you want. But we, we say stay away from using AI generated images because AI generated images, I, I can't remember when it came out, but apparently they have to have something in them now that's machine readable so they can tell it's an AI image. And Google asks you to make sure the images are pictures of the business. It actually specifically says in the wording avoid. It's something like excessive use of filters and AI. I don't know if that's the exact wording, but it basically talks about filters and AI in the wording which is so, so it's definitely something it doesn't want you doing, but it doesn't mention that there's anything against the AI content. But it, so what we want though, you want a human to go through and edit and approve it before you publish it. You don't just want to push AI to a Google business profile over and over. It's about building that relationship that, that, that's what you're post to there to do. Do they're to provide information there to, to, to build a relationship with potential new clients or to get a potential new client to become a customer. That's really what a post is for. It's not about the ranking. But again, if you're just throwing up AI and it doesn't really resonate with anyone, you'll know that yourself if you spend a week writing it. Like writing a blog post? Yeah, like, like a listicle. A good quality listicle. You know, it's going to rank all over the place for all sorts of different terms and keywords and, and, and all sorts of stuff. Whereas if you create one with AI and just put it up, the chance of it actually popping maybe 1 in 100, you might create 100 pages and one might pop a little bit. But if you spend a week on a proper decent article, you know, pretty much you can like 99.9 certain that that article is going to pop because you spent all the time, you've done all the research, you've set it up all right, You've, you've connected it with all the entities and, and, and, and things out outside of, of what the actual article's got. You've spent, you can tell the difference. AI just still can't do it. It looks like it can to the outside world, but from an SEO perspective, when we look at it, you and like, like experienced SEO's look at it and we're like, we know it can, we know, it just doesn't, it just doesn't do it right. It's just not, it just doesn't, it just doesn't fit. And I've seen AI content pop and we've built websites with AI, but the, the websites we've built with AI, we've spent a lot of time on the content. [00:57:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:57:04] Speaker B: And we've spent a lot of time on explaining to the AI. Make this change, make this change, make this change. Edit this. Stop doing this. Stop using them stupid big giant hyphens. I don't know what they're called. You know the extended hyphens that AI, whenever I see one I'm like, no real person ever uses them. I don't understand why ya. Have you ever used one in a document? [00:57:28] Speaker A: Yes, but I'm a weirdo. I, I, when I would write, I would look for, how can I, you know, my paragraphs would turn into six sentences and some, some of them would be like three, three words long and then like a dash bullet table. Like I, I love creating content. That's it. Like you are reading it as a narration. Because I always was super bothered by walls of text because maybe it's like an ADHD thing, but I, I write text in a way where like, oh, I'm scrolling and experiencing this. So yeah, I, I had used M dash M dashes before AI so I'm kind of annoyed that everyone's like, ah, M dashes. I'm like, yeah, I, I did that before. [00:58:17] Speaker B: Call your content style presentation worthy content. If you write the way that you've just said you write. Actually creating a video or doing a presentation from stage and things like that, with that type of content you can really get the feeling behind it and you can really like. I do it all the time. Whenever I do a lot of sales presentations and webinars and whenever I'm doing a webinar, when I, if I have to write a script for a certain section of the webinar, most of it I wing it. But when I do have to write a certain section, that's exactly, exactly how I write like four or five words. Next line. Four or five words. And I don't even split the sentences correctly most of the time. I split it how I'm gonna speak. Yeah, but that presentation worthy content helps you breathe and you'll do it yourself. You do a lot of posts on social media and stuff, don't you? [00:58:57] Speaker A: I do. [00:58:58] Speaker B: You do videos? [00:58:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Also since I have, I'm playing with transcripts from this podcast all of the time and, and half of the struggle I've had with Claude is getting the prompts right so that it will, you know, help me break up the wall of text that transcripts will fall into. Because like as far as like a sentence goes and what I'm talking about, like technically it's like a, like this big paragraph but it's really like super all stretched out. You know, topically it's like within 1h2 but the pause that I just took, that wouldn't be represented in the transcript, but it was there. And this, there's emphasis. So you can start to get Claude to put out a version of the transcripted content that tries to honor that, but you have to force it. Like you have to have several prompts that go back like, hey, did you take time to like consider timing or emphasis and add bold italic underline spacing. Even more spacing. Ridiculous amounts of spacing. Like that's literally one of the lines in my prompt is like, use ridiculous amounts of spacing to communicate. Pauses and emphasis when a speaker is really trying to pause and put emphasis on what they're saying. [01:00:30] Speaker B: You know, I think my, my most used sentence is probably write it like so a 10 year old could understand it. I say every time I'm talking to ChatGPT, I say I don't want essay, I just want you to tell me the answer and write it like a 10 year old could understand it. And then I know that I'm getting close to his content that I'd actually put out for the real world because especially we, we do a lot in the home services niche. [01:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:55] Speaker B: And I was a locksmith for years and I think you find that if you start using some of the words and some of the, the adverbs and things like that that, that AI will throw into the text, it becomes almost unreadable and it sounds like you're really clever but nobody can understand it. So no, I, I, I really, yeah. AI, AIs put a our industry, it spun our industry on its head like completely. I had five full time writers in fact based in this office here. I've actually got a sauna here now and a Stand up desk. But I had five writers across this back wall in this main office and I remember taking each one into the other offices over there and saying to them, I need to show you something. And we had a tool at the time called, I can't remember the name of it now, page rewriter. It used to go to the first, the first page of Google. It used to take all the content from the first page of Google, bring it all back, calculate all the information, and then used to pull sections from the first page in and then you'd be able to rewrite it to try and get the mean. It was brilliant. And we released it and we sold about 250 subscriptions and then about in the first week or so and then chat GPT came out and I was like, oh my God, what is this playing with it? And then I remember taking me writers in there, each one, one at a time, and fire them all. But I remember taking all five of them in one at a time saying, come in here, we'll show you this. And I'm like, right, let's just tell this what to do. And they were like, are you telling me I'm fired? And I was, I'm not telling you fired. But I'm like, how are we going to use what you do now? How are we going to put value on what you do? And none of them writers still work for me. Not one of them. I mean, five of them. It really did spin our industry and it's had most people. Do you know any SEOs that use full time writers anymore? [01:02:44] Speaker A: A couple of agencies, but they, they have requirements that prevent those, those clients from using AI. And so, okay, you know, and then there's also, there are agencies that I've spoken to and they have full time writers, but they're more full time editor rewriters, you know, so they're humanized, coming in and doing final checks and edits. But yeah, I do know a handful that still do, you know, bespoke fully human, you know, fully written articles, but it's few, much fewer and far, far, far fewer. And in between, you know, you know, but it's not to say that a lot of the content writing that we were getting, let's be honest folks, we were getting it from the Philippines, we were getting from Colombia, we were getting it from, from, from the third World. So you know, like boo his, sure. But also, you know, I kind of feel bad for a lot of Filipino friends that I had made over the years, you know, because a lot of their revenue streams Are, are dried up, gone. [01:03:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the same thing in it. It's like we used to have and, and these were based in, in, in Eastern Europe and we used to have I think a team of about five full time developers based out there. We haven't even got that office anymore. We don't even have the office there. We literally had an office just for our development team and we just don't need the develop. You need AI operators now. It's like it's, it's completely, that's, that's the best job in the world. If you, if you, if you're the best prompt engineer, like that's the best job is it, it's a prompt engineer. The prompt engineers are the ones that's like, they can make anything, that will make anything. And because it's a template, it just, it can do it 10,000 times. So as soon as the best prompt engineer gets it and gets it right every time. Yeah, they're not needed either. [01:04:49] Speaker A: It's tricky. I certainly, it, I, I was saying earlier that I do feel like I, I'm using steroids and I know that there will be a cost attributed later. Right now I'm definitely able to do 10 times more the SEO tasks. You know, like my wife's tattoo shop, NVS Tattoo just moved and you know, they got, somebody said they were concerned about an ada, you know, lawsuit for the site. And right before the show I typed into cloud code, hey, use REST access, open up this site, check for ADA compliance violations, write alt text for the entire site. It's done. [01:05:33] Speaker B: While we start doing what we've been talking. [01:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah, while we've been talking, it's now done. It completed an audit. Let's see, you know, it resize the menu arrow arrows were too small to tap. The red links failed on contrast. Google Map had no accessible name, no top level heading, no visible keyboard focus. All of those were fixed while we were talking at the beginning of this conversation. [01:05:58] Speaker B: And if you'd have had to do that five years ago, how long I [01:06:03] Speaker A: would have charged, you know, at least $500,000 to double check documentation, ensure what I knew what, what was, what the problem really was. You know, go in, you know, make a few changes to this, test it, you know, go back to the tool. You know, that would have been, you know, hours of research and you know, manually going in and figuring out, oh, okay, what, where's the menu option? That's wait, that's controlled under the theme? No, it's under the child theme. Okay. Now I got to connect the. Find the. Who made this stupid thing. You know, it was such a pain and, and now I literally did it in minutes and solved a problem. I can, you know, tell it. Like, she just texted me back. Like, she said, that's amazing. It's already done, actually. Said, that's so hot. [01:06:54] Speaker B: Dictated. So what's your favorite AI tool? [01:06:57] Speaker A: Oh, Claude code. 100%. It. It took me a while to, to. To dive deeper. Like I was using Claude and then Claude Desktop. And then I interviewed Mason McCumber and talked to Matt Brooks of Seot and realized, oh, hey, you know, you. With WordPress, you can give it an application password in cloud code, and it can drive 99.8% of all changes you could possibly want on your WordPress site. Rebrand images, embeds text, H1, H2, you know, all at the, at the click of a button. And you can create, you know, a series of prompts that, you know, pulls from, you know, data for SEO, pulls from open SEO. I've got a partnership with them and pulls, you know, they've got multiple tools on tap through API. And so anytime before I write a page, I get a page written. It pulls all of the keyword cluster information for that subtopic and you know, I tell it what I want specific things have it generate unique, specific images. I've, I've got all of these things clued in of, you know, here's how you write alt text. Here's every image should have proper aligned file names that aren't duplicative of the H2, but then they're aligned topically to it. Like, there's all the things that I've always said that you should do for SEO. And I've written it into a series of prompts and now, you know, I can create, you know, get 98% there and then be like, ah, no, this isn't right. Like, I published a study on dark clicks recently about Google Search Console obscures anonymizes a certain portion of your content, right? They'll tell you at the top your site got 100 clicks. But the table where they say what those queries were, it won't communicate all of it. And so I did a study of the 4 million clicks that I had through all of my Google Search Console connections and discovered 64% of your clicks are anonymized. And, you know, like, the opening was like, oh, you may not know that you are not getting your data for Google Search Console. I'm like, no, this is boring. Google is lying to you, you know, Google is, you know, you gotta be, it's, it, it's so, it's so afraid of hitting a nerve, you know that the writing that it'll put out sometimes is very blase. But you know, when I posted that to the search community actually John Mueller replied and said, you know, just a small knit though the clicks are tracked on pages. It's just the query that's not. And the privacy threshold's not going away. There's no conspiracy behind it. And yes, with more people searching in unique ways, you're going to have to deal with the, with fewer exact queries because what they said is if the search gets less than a dozen searches per month, it won't show up in the table. I intend to test that theory. I'm going to be putting out a call in the next week for volunteers to, for a test to search to put in queries for search search for keywords that I know have more searches than a dozen. And I'm going validate, I'm going. So I gotta get a pool of at least 12 people. So if you're listening to this and you want to be pulled part of my Google search console test, you know, hit me up on, on socials, on, on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, substack, everywhere. I am love for you to participate to see if it's true because I think there might be some gray area there of, you know, because if, if we get 12 people putting in the same query to the same page, you know, for the same result and clicking through and it doesn't show up in that, the search console for that entity, well then we can maybe take that back to Mr. Mueller and say well you said that this was the rule of anonymization. And yeah, that's not quite accurate. Or maybe it's true, maybe the, the way, because we're seeing such multimodal search, you know, we're seeing searches, you know, putting in you know, all different forms of things. Maybe the, the old model and volume keyword volume model is well and completely shattered to to bits. Because if you think about the implication, think about the implication there. If 64 across 4 million clicks was anonymized, you know, that's more, that's 2 million queries plus the, out of that bunch that hadn't been searched by more than a dozen people. Like the ramifications of that is mind boggling. And you know, maybe that's what I'm proving with doing this study of like hey, keyword search volume as we've understood it as SEOs is. Is a broken model to begin with. [01:12:21] Speaker B: Well, like a decade ago we were all putting in keyword location. So we were all like plumber, Manchester, brief of Manchester, locksmith, London. And now it's all conversational. Like, like most people talk like I have a key on my computer that I press on my keyboard and whenever I'm typing I just, I just talk and it speaks straight into the computer. So when everything. I never type anything anymore, very rarely. So I think that data, if, if conversational search is where everything's going, especially because of chat GBT and things like that and, and voice input, I think that will actually skew with even further. I think eventually the searches will become less and less and less and less and less and it's more about how Google understands the intent behind the search instead of actually what the keyword is. Keywords eventually will go away and it's got. It's going to be more based around completely go away and it's going to be more based around the intent of the searcher than what they're actually putting. Do you know what I mean? It's going to have to read the intent and that's going to be so difficult for a machine because how many times do you ask AI to do something and it completely gets it wrong? Like I'll tell it to create me an image for XYZ and it'll describe how to create the image and I'm like, that is what I said do. But it's completely misunderstood the intent, even though it has the abilities that. To do it. So for it to do that, I mean, I. What I find really weird as well. And I don't know if you found this. Have you, have you ever used Gemini? Do you use Gemini much? [01:13:51] Speaker A: I've, I've used it. I've used it to verify that Google knew that a I, my. I'd done a community cleanup. That's the most recent use of Gemini that I've done. [01:14:04] Speaker B: We, we have a setup right with, with, with the LLMs where we. We constantly pulling in the documentation and any changes and things like that. And what we find is like chat GBT will sometimes make a mistake, but as long as you run it through multiple times and make sure it verifies itself two or three times, it works. Google will make a mistake and then double down on like Gemini not Google will make the mistake on its own documentation and then it'll double down on the mistake multiple times and it'll actually give us the wrong information. And then it'll double down on it and actually make the wrong information even more wrong. Don't can't use Gemini when we're talking about Google business profit and that I. I find that insane because I'm like how can it belongs to them and yet theirs doesn't work. [01:14:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:14:50] Speaker B: And it's one of those. Yeah. It's just like what like we find for that Claude the new chat GPT is a million times more accurate and better have you six point summer it is. I can't remember which one which number are but the newest one is probably better than Claude. I don't think it's been as good as Claude up until recently. [01:15:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:08] Speaker B: So it's definitely worth a play around with if you. If you sold on Claude just give it a shot because it's just got even better. [01:15:15] Speaker A: Give a final shout out for your company if there's any free tools, if you've published any resources or, or articles that you think people should go check out and if there's any social channels they should pop onto to talk to you if they have questions about what you've said. [01:15:33] Speaker B: So my personal website is mikemartin.uk you can get all my books and software and everything from there. My primary software company is gbpely.net which is GBP for Google business profile l y.net it's actually.com as well but we use the.net for some reason. I don't know why. And then if you go to YouTube.com forward/at Mike Martin I've got a YouTube channel there where I put videos out regularly and yeah, anybody is interested in the software we do a. A completely 100 free Google Maps rank tracker over at gbpely.net you can get 10 free scans a month which doesn't sound like a lot but if you pay for that yeah it can get. So you can cut. It can save you 25amonth just by doing that. So it's 10 free rank tracks for and it's designed for agencies but a lot of businesses are using it as well. [01:16:27] Speaker A: Fantastic. I'll make sure all of that gets linked in the show notes. Anybody who's listening. You can see more of this particular episode if you like to read versus listen when I dig into something specific. We said there's a full length transcript recap that'll go up there that's linked to all of Mike's stuff. Thanks for stopping by. [01:16:47] Speaker B: Cheers Jeremy. Thanks for having me on. Cheers mate.