Brad Wetherall (4:22)

Yeah, yeah. I think that the complicated relationship I think that GBP or local SEO has specifically with link building and citations, it's an interesting one, right. Because it doesn't really influence rank that much. Right. But what it does do is it increases data accuracy or at least Google's philosophy of data accuracy. And I'll give you an example. Most people in the SEO industry know of the nap, the importance of nap, right. Like name, address and phone number, you know, and I think that for those businesses out there that are having a real hard time getting verified, right. And you know, it's, it's because Google doesn't really have any information to validate against. And so this is where link building and citations can be a benefit for you early on in your business's evolution is that if you do have an online presence before Google, right, like an established website, and your, your name, address and phone number is represented through a variety of different citations, it actually streamlines the verification process. So instead of going through video verification, which is Google's now replacement for the old postcard verification method, if Google has something that it can lean into and verify, then you'll get real time verification channels, you'll get a phone or an email verification option available to you. Where the point of verification is to verify two things. It's to verify the existence of existence, both the business and the existence of the business at its geographic location. In the real world, if it's a storefront business, it's not does the business exist? But it's also does it exist at that address that you say it exists at? So that both of those things are existence. And then, then the other thing is affiliation, which is like are you authorized to represent that business? Do you work at that company? Or are you just some bloke walking by sees a sign on the side of the street, right? And so if, if Google knows something about you because you've, you've invested in citations and whatnot and links and, and building up a great website and it knows all that information about you, it doesn't have to confirm the existence part believes that already. It only has to confirm the affiliation part, which is why the real term real time verification kicks in and they only require an email or a phone number to validate that. Now as it, as it pertains to rank, right, like, it's like oh well my, my GBP business is up and running and it's all good. Does that actually improve the ranking? I haven't seen any evidence to support the fact that it does. But what it does do is it increases trust, right? Because like if you, if you build all these, these citations where these third party sources are referencing back to you and they're saying like yes, this is a legitimate business in the event that those sources of information collects referrals or reviews like, like a Yelp or any kind of like industry specific review platform that does actually help with, with the, with the authority and existence component of it. So I'm cautious to say that there is zero impact on, on rank through link building. But it's not. The existence of the link itself doesn't predicate that you're going to perform better. It's kind of like you know, the, the other information that Google can extract from those sources of information which, and, and with the introduction now of, of AI overviews and AI modes, it, it, it's more important about what that says about you like the, the context of the citation than it is to just have a citation in the first place, an example of this is like, if you go out to like yext or Uberall or any of these big companies and they're like, we will get you in a hundred different directories. And I'm like, of those hundred directories, ten of them are probably good and the other ninety are just garbage. Right? And so like, it's, it's, it's, it's a, you know, from a, from a Google authority and rank perspective. Right. So like, you know, my advice to a lot of my clients and is, you know, like, be selective at, at the directories that you invest in getting into because they're not all created equal.

Matt Bertram (8:55)

Yeah, well, and also we're going to make sure that they're accurate every month and we're going to charge you a boatload of money to make sure that each one of them doesn't get changed.

Brad Wetherall (9:05)

That, that's an important point. Sorry, sorry to interject, but that's an important point, right? Because if, if you make the commitment to invest in these directories and citations, it has to be consistent, right? If you've got different names, different addresses, different phone numbers all kind of proliferated out across different sources, it actually works against you. So like, you know, you need to make sure that if you get a go with that strategy, that you're doing it right. You know, and it does require management.

Matt Bertram (9:34)

So a couple things that I wanted to talk about in there, and I do want to make sure we include the video verification process and that change. I think that that was something that when we move locations and you helped us facilitate that, I think that was super valuable to a lot of people. But I do want to kind of go back to how you've been trained and what your outlook on like, eat, expertise, authority, trust, experience. Like, I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about just kind of what, what the lingo is inside of Google about trust and authority. And then people can make their own inferences. And then I want to dovetail that into when businesses or when people make suggestions. And I feel like, you know, that is something that I want to definitely unpack, but I want to hear from you, like, okay, when you say trust, okay, what does that mean to you? What does authority mean to you? I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that, just in general.

Brad Wetherall (10:33)

Yeah, yeah. So it's, it's interesting because I could, I could use that term trust to talk about two different topics. There is, there is trust in terms of, I'm, I'm making an Edit to my business. Google looks at every single edit that you make to, to your, your business profile and assesses it for risk. You know, and, and this is really built over years of us observing like really malicious and fraudulent behavior that exists over, you know, people really trying to take advantage of the visibility that Google gives businesses and exploit that for, you know, malicious intent. And so, you know, that that's the reason that certain industries are more, more scrutinized than others. So, so actually years ago, you know, like the, the, the GBP team invested in internally, we referred to it as the Evolution of Trust or eot. I mean Google loves three letter acronyms. So like Evolution of Trust was eot. And so the whole philosophy behind that initiative was we're going to make it easier for you to make edits on your profile. So instead of having a real high barrier to entry where we're going to force you to prove very heavily that you belong in that profile and are able to make edits, instead we're going to allow you to make simple edits. But if it triggers over a threshold, a risk threshold, then internally we would say we're going to make you jump through some hoops. And this is where the re verification checks come in. What that translates to is that if you make what Google perceives to be risky changes, this would be a change to the name of the business, the address, the phone number, the primary category, and the website. Those are the five core attributes that we have observed over the years as being the most risky in terms of people exploiting the system. I've probably got a story that I could tell you for each one of those of where there was some level of fraud or malicious activity for each one. But just trust me when I say those are the things that they're paying attention to. So Google needs a differentiator now, right? Because it is normal that people will make a change to their phone number or address if they move, you know, you know, and so, so this is where the Evolution of Trust project really came into play. Because it's like, all right, what is the change that is, that is taking place on the platform and how much do I trust the person who is making that change? And so there is this algorithm behind the scenes of Google that rates your level of trust. And you can, you can build that level of trust by going in and suggesting edits or making edits to profiles, like leaving reviews, adding photos to businesses. All of those activities, assuming that they are accepted from Google, will elevate your level of trust in the system. So the idea is that I know this bloke, Matt, he's been editing GBP for five, 10 years and he's always, always gives us good stuff, right? Like, like all the changes that he suggests, all the edits that he makes, they're all good, they positively contribute to the Google Maps ecosystem. Or it's like, so we trust Matt. So now if Matt was to go in and make a change, that was more suspicious, right? If you were to go in and change the name or the address or the phone number or any of these attributes that are high, higher risk, they're more likely to say, you know what Matt, you're good, we trust you. Right? And that's kind of the way that this trust threshold works. And so trust in the context of Google Business profile is really around like how much history do you have within your profile of making edits and changes? And is that history representative of positive contributions or is it resulting in rejections and whatnot? Right. And so like the trust is a two way street, right? It can go up and it can go down. So, so trust in that context is really about how much influence do you have over manipulating what Google says about a given business?

Matt Bertram (15:11)

No, you keep going, keep going. I want you to finish the thought, but I do have something to ask you about that, right?

Brad Wetherall (15:17)

So, so I'm just going to introduce the second part of trust, which is so that's kind of like framework number one in terms of like the trust of your profile's ability to make a change and for Google to believe that you are giving them good information. And then the other part of trust is in the, in the EAT acronym, right? Like the expertise, experience, trust and authority. And this is different because this has an AI context to it. So now it's not do I trust you to make an edit now, it's that, okay, you've got information published on your website, how can I trust that to be true, right? It's like, oh, I read it on the Internet, it has to be true, right? I mean like, like Google is now in the information intelligence business actually, right? So they've moved away and they're, they're investing more in providing answers to questions instead of providing links to answers to questions. And, and this is a really big fundamental shift that Google is moving in because it used to be that Google was the librarian that would point you in the direction of where the book was, that you needed to find your answer. Now Google is now the librarian that can just straight up tell you the answer. So you don't have to read the book. And so that's the danger that runs in Google, serving incorrect information. Right. And we'll have to wait and see how this plays out in terms of liability of like providing false information. Because Google is extracting all this information from various sources of the Internet and, and serving it in the AI overview and in AI mode as their source, as their opinion. Right. That's AI is saying, based on all this research that I've done, here is my result. And so who is liable to that? And so in order for Google to get ahead of that, they need to be able to trust the source of the information of where it's coming from. So trust in this case is more about like this website that I'm extracting this content from. Like, is that a reputable website? Like, like, what do I know about this brand? What do I like is that, is that referenced other places as being an authority on a particular topic? How do I know that this is something that Google's going to put their name on as they represent it in the context of AI? So this is where AI optimization, or I mean there's about 30 acronyms for kind of like, you know, AI. Like what, what is it? AI optimization or LLM MO. Like there's all these funny, I don't know if there's really a proper acronym for this right now, but the thing that a lot of SEO companies are really trying to do is influence the way that your brand is represented in these large language models. And an interesting story on that actually is that I was leading the GBP team and the product manager that was building what is now known as the AI Overview. At the time it was Search Generative Experience, or sge. Again, three letter acronyms. Right. So they came to me and they said, hey, we're going to, we're going to release this thing. We were, we were, you know, piloting it internally at the time and, and she said to me, like, what are the businesses going to say when we release this? Right. She's trying to get a sense of the, the, the, the way that it was going to be perceived. And I said to her, businesses on the platform are going to want three things. They're going to want to know how to get in the AI overview, how to get out of the AI overview and how to change the information that's in the AI overview to ideally make it more flattering. She turned to me and said, they're not going to be able to do any of those things because that's not how AI works. It's not a database that you can go to and says, oh, it says X, I'm going to change it to yeah, it's all trained, it's all learned data. And so what that means for us is that we have to build authority in information that we are representing, even about our own companies. So it's not good enough to just create content and throw it on your website. You also have to have that be represented in other parts of the Internet so that you can increase your authority and trust with Google that, that you actually know what you're talking about and that if they're going to reference your information and your website in AI, that the risk to Google is really low, that they're not going to get sued because it's incorrect information.

Matt Bertram (19:43)

Well, you, you open up so many things. I'm like taking notes here of like I, I don't know, you got a hard stop but this could be long one. So I wanted to make sure to call out something that it's, it's really helpful to talk to you because you identified questions when, when we were doing our training that the reviews, right. Which reviews are one of the hue, like that and the, the name of the business are the, the two weight most weighted factors for rankings that those reviews are actually tied to the individual. And then you were talking about trust and, and you were talking about making edits and you were saying well that's like the local guide. I don't know all the different names of. But like, as you increase that I would love for you to talk a little bit more about that. And I feel like there's a lot of businesses out there and there's a lot of individuals out there that might not be leaving reviews that might not be leaning into the ecosystem and even the label in their chrome doesn't identify who they are that's making these edits. Right? Yeah. And so where do you see where like, so what does that amplification of, of, of trust look like? Is there any idea or anything you can share from a threshold standpoint or a recommendation best practice standpoint. But I almost feel like when you were talking the owner of the business that's attached to the gnb, which they understand that relationship goes back to kind of like Google rolled out authorship and pulled it back and now Authorship, I think is really, really important today and your money, your life, like categories, et cetera. Now if you're making changes to your business or you're active in that community, it's tied to that, that individual and Then that individual is managing this profile. So, you know, just like Google says, you know, do not follow, doesn't matter. Right. We're looking at everything like, is there like a relationship there? And should the, the people or the owners of the business be active in the community? And does that have any kind of impact in, you know, eat? I don't know. It's just something, when you were talking, made me think about that.

Brad Wetherall (22:03)

Yeah. So there's a couple of things to unpack there. Right. So there's the, the value of reviews. Right. And then who is leaving the review, the trust attributed to that person. Because you know what I think what started this conversation and to bring everyone else up to speed, there's a lot of challenges that a lot of businesses have when reviews disappear from their profile. And if you're a company that's had that experience, you're probably also familiar with filing a ticket with Google support, and Google support is saying, they're gone, I can't find them. Right. And so there's an element of truth to that response. There's also an element of misinformation to that response. So the truthful part of that, and this is what Matt was saying a second ago, is that from a data architecture perspective, the review that is written is not owned by the profile that it's leaving it for. It's actually owned by the person who leaves the review. So what happens behind the scenes when Google suspects, you know, like that the review is fake or whatever, it'll, it'll delete the connection between the user and the review and the profile, so it disappears. And so when you file a ticket with support, support is being truthful when they say it's gone because the association for the listing doesn't exist anymore. So it's very difficult for the support agent to actually find the review to put it back. Now the way to actually get it back is to actually either give them the name of the person who left the review or the text of the review, some additional piece of information that they can then use to do a lookup to find the person in the review that they left out of that data architecture. And once they found that, then they can reattach it.

Matt Bertram (24:00)

So is the review, even if it gets severed by algorithmically.

Brad Wetherall (24:06)

Yeah.

Matt Bertram (24:06)

Is the review still on their profile? It's just not showing up. So then they can go look at the profile, they see it, and then they somehow reconnect it.

Brad Wetherall (24:14)

It's not on the profile or their.

Matt Bertram (24:17)

Their, their individual profile is what I'm saying.

Brad Wetherall (24:20)

They're so the, to the, you to the user profile.

Matt Bertram (24:22)

The user. User profile. Sorry.

Brad Wetherall (24:24)

Yeah. So it is still connected to the user. It's just not displaying because the, the way it displays on the business profile doesn't display on the user.

Matt Bertram (24:33)

Got it.

Brad Wetherall (24:33)

So it does exist. And so when, when they're saying like I've heard people say that like once the reviews are gone, they're deleted and they're gone forever. That's incorrect. That is not true. They can actually be recovered. The hard part is finding them. Right? And so like if, if you use software like, I don't know, like a lot of agencies will, will use management software. I actually partner with GMB API. It's a kind of a, a pretty decent cost efficient solution for, for, for multi location.

Matt Bertram (25:08)

For multi location.

Brad Wetherall (25:10)

You wouldn't want this for just one location. Yeah but, but for, for multi locations this is really good. And, and one of the features and this is fairly common across a lot of these software providers is they will save a copy of all the reviews. So if they get deleted you can go into the software and say here are all the reviews that are missing. You can extract that, give that to Google support and say like hey, recover all these things for me. And that's way easier for a support agent to recover if they know what they're looking for. So that's kind of like part one is kind of like the architecture of reviews, right? And then you know, the other thing that I'll touch on quickly is the importance of reviews, right? Because if businesses are out there not asking for reviews, it's a big mistake from a future investment in growth. Because you know, you said correctly a second ago that the biggest influencing factors in where you show up and where you rank on Google specifically for local context queries, where the local package is rendered is, is the name of the profile, right? So like if you happen to have personal injury attorney in the name of your business, you're going to show up for that keyword search. And then the other, the second one is I would throw primary category in there as well because obviously the category of the business is incredibly important. But the third would be reviews. And so like you, you really need to get. This is like if you think about it from this perspective, there's, there's an opportunity for you to tell Google about your business and that's kind of like what your GBP is. But then there's an, also an opportunity for other people to tell Google about your business and that's what the reviews are. They're they're a third party recommendation of your business. So it's, it's a vote of confidence in your, in your business. And so if you can get more reviews, right? Because the, the million dollar question I get is how many reviews do I need? Right? It's like, okay, I got it. Reviews are important. How many do I need? The, the simple answer to that is it depends on your competition, right? Because if you're in a, in an industry where the norm is like 100 reviews per location, then you need to at least get 100 reviews to be competitive with that space. But if you're in an industry where 10 is, is the competition, then get 10. Right? But, but the other thing that I'll note on reviews is that volume is really important, but frequency is more important than volume, right? So it's. So yes, get the, the, the min. The amount of, of reviews that you need to be competitive in your space, but you have to get them consistently. If you have 500 reviews, but they're all from five years ago, Google's going to look at that and say, I don't know if I can trust that information. It's stale, right? It's old. But if you have 500 reviews from the last three months, you're going to be probably number one, right? Like on, on the ranking. Because Google trusts that it's not just what you're saying about your business, it's what other people are saying about your business. And so the value of reviews is just getting, getting more and more important, especially as AI comes in as well, right? And in fact in Europe and I've seen, you know, I haven't really seen a lot of experimentation with this in the United States, but in Europe it actually sources reviews from other places. It's not just Google reviews that shows up on the GBP reviews. It sources it from the equivalency of a Yelp, but in different countries and it sources different information of reviews. And I think that's an indicator for me the investment in looking at third party information is not slowing down. In fact it's speeding up, you know, and, and it's using that more and more for, for a voter confidence in, in, in AI rank as well as kind of like local and organic rank. The, the other thing that I'll say too is that the keywords in reviews are, is important as well. And it's, it's been really interesting to, to watch this trend over time and I think, Matt, I gave this example in the training that I did for your team where you know, like I was, I did a, a search in San Diego for a karaoke bar and I got a bar that showed up, but there was no reference of karaoke bar in the GBP profile itself. It wasn't in the description or anything like that, but it showed up because it was referenced in the reviews consistently where it's like, I went to this bar and they had great karaoke. So it's interesting how like even though the business themselves isn't kind of like promoting it as part of their GBP profile, the reviews is influencing the, that as a valid response. And Google is kind of like looking at the consumer opinion to influence what it serves. And so like that's, it's another really important factor. Now coming back to trust, the other part of your question, right is like so you know, does trust in reviews hold more weight to others? Actually, not so much, right. I think it does and it doesn't, let me put it that way. So for example, if, if, if the review is being left by someone who has created their Google account 10 years ago and they're pretty active with it, they use it every day, and then they come in and they leave a review, then there's a high degree of trust of that profile of that, that user profile of that Google account. What we found is that you know, when, when reviews was kind of like really prevalently used for spam. Right, right. Like where you could buy reviews, a lot of the times there was some telltale signs that it was a fake review. Like for example, the Google account was created yesterday. And then all of a sudden we've noticed that they've gone in and left five reviews all in the same geographic area, all for plumbers. And four of them were negative reviews and one of them was a positive review. Now that's obviously fake, right? Because like what, you know, it's, it's a brand new Google account, no history with it. The activity that they can see on the account is very suspicious. So all five of those review reviews will get pulled down for suspicious activity. Now the complication with that is that the companies that, who are out there selling reviews know that and they know that like if they were to do that practice, all the reviews are going to get pulled down immediately and they're not going to make any money. So they mine Google accounts, right? Where they create Google accounts, they use it a little bit every day to try and trick the system into believing that it's a real person. And then when they get an order in that says, oh I want 100 reviews on this business. They use those accounts that they've been mining over time to influence that. So our engineers have been pretty rigorous on fighting these guys, right, and finding new techniques and new ways of detecting fraudulent activity. And so, so that's kind of where like trust is, is kind of, it's an interesting discussion in this context because it is used to kind of like, you know, drive reliability in the data that is represented. But because the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, it means sometimes a lot of like legitimate listings get caught in the net. Right? Because the, you know, the, the bad guys are smart and if only they could use their powers for good and not evil, like we'd be fine. But like it's, it's just, you know, it's, it's a constant battle of fighting people trying to get around the system.

Matt Bertram (32:46)

So many things I want to respond with to that. I actually wanted to ask you in that note, can you speak to how Google views fake reviews? And like, what is the repercussions of people engaging in that? Like, is there criminal? Because like there's probably a line somewhere that you have a better handle on than I do of, you know, like, we won't do that. We won't, like there's been clients that in the past have had, hey, like, and I'm like hands off, we're not, we're not touching that. And I feel like there's some kind of consumer in issue too of misleading people right. About a, a product if you're leaving a bunch. So what is, where is the line that Google has and where's like the line of like if you're engaging this behavior, it could be against the law at a certain threshold too. I would think so.

Brad Wetherall (33:42)

Yeah, no, it's, it's a, it's a great point. Now the I, I, I might broaden the conversation a little bit to include all kind of like fraudulent activity. So like reviews is one part of it, fake listings is another one. Right, like where you're creating legion type listings where the business doesn't exist. You're really just trying to canvas the map to acquire leads. And so both of those things are kind of like both looked at internally from the Trust and Safety Organization. There's a whole team in Google that is focused on this. And in the context of fraudulent listings, there is some legal implications to that. And we have actually partnered with the FBI to take down, I mean it was a conspiracy of, of kind of like coordinated effort to kind of canvas a map with fake listings and then go in and defraud people. You know, I think that the, the locksmiths are kind of like the, the most famous user journey there where, you know, it usually is someone in a business that's in a duress vertical, right? Like address, meaning I'm locked out of my house in New York in the snow and I need a locksmith now, right. It's like an immediate need. And so they pull up their phone, they go to Google, they get the closest locksmith that has a great ad on their business that says, you know, like, hey, I'll be able to pick your lock. It'll be $20 in 20 minutes. And it's like, awesome. That's exactly what I need. But then when they show up, their script is usually something like, oh, you've got like a really great lock on your system that's impossible to pick. Kudos to you for being so security conscious. And they're like, so the only way that I have to do it is I have to drill out the lock and then put on a new lock instead. Right. And so, you know, of course that's complete bs, you know, like it could have been picked by a real locksmith. These guys just don't have that skill set internally at Google. I used to call them dudes with drills, right? Because they would just rock up, drill out the lock, and then sell you a new one for like 800 bucks. Then they bought it at Home Depot for 20 bucks. And so it's just bad behavior, right? And so for some types of conspiracies like that, we actually did get law enforcement involved to try and bring down these large, kind of like large scale, you know, like organizations that are doing this at scale to protect the consumer base as it pertains to reviews. I haven't been personally involved, nor do I know that we actually involved in legal action, but what we have done and, and I haven't seen this rollout again in the United States, but it has in Europe where people get blocked from reviews, right? So like, oh like businesses will get blocked from reviews. So the idea would be if you are paying for reviews for your platform or paying for negative reviews for your competitors, and Google detects that that's what's going on, they will lock down your profile. First of all, they'll remove all the reviews for violating policy so you don't get the benefit of the reviews. And then secondly, they'll say your business profile is not eligible to collect any reviews for 90 days. Right. And so it'll lock you out for a period of Time. And so in, in the past it was like, I'm going to remove the reviews and then just call it a day. Now there's some repercussions to it. And, and so my advice to, to, to, to businesses out there that are, that, that understand the value of reviews and are perhaps even contemplating like, hey, I just need to get a jump start. Let me just buy some reviews. I'm like, the, the risk is not worth the reward, right? I think that you can, you can just as easily get legitimate reviews into your platform and the effort required to get those legitimate reviews is not worth the damage that it would cause if you get all your removes removed and then flagged in the system where you're blocked from collecting any reviews for, for three months or more. So I, I just, if, if I was to look at it and if I was to advise clients on this, I'm like, it's just not worth it. You know, Like, I think that there's other places that you can invest your, your time and money that is going to yield a better response for you. And you know, I, Google is cracking down on this because you know that the trust and safety team take it personally. You know, in fact, I was chatting to an engineer, it was probably 10 years ago at this point, but I was chatting to him and he kind of had this interesting philosophy when it came to fighting spam. And he said that, you know, at the moment you can buy a fake listing. You can go out onto the Internet and you can say, all right, I want to buy. You know, I want you to verify my business for me and I'm going to pay for it and it's going to be, you know, like 20 bucks per listing to get it verified. And then a couple months later that same company was charging a hundred bucks. And then a couple months later it was 500 bucks. And the engineer's like, that's me doing a good job.

Matt Bertram (38:54)

Right?

Brad Wetherall (38:55)

Right. Like as the price goes up, that means I'm doing something right. Because it's getting more and more difficult to actually commit this fraud. Right. And so it was, it was an interesting way that he was kind of like judging his own performance. And, and the, the market rate of a fake listing was actually one of his, one of his criteria for performance.

Matt Bertram (39:14)

Okay. So I have so much. So they're sun setting the Google, my business, the FAQ section potentially. And I would love for you to kind of talk about what that intention was, how people are using it, the benefit of that. And then, you know, what might likely happen from that. And then I would, I would love to also talk about like categories because I think there's a lot of questions about, okay, there's that main category, but all those other categories. Do you, you know, how, how should you think about that?

Brad Wetherall (39:51)

Yep. Great. All right, well, let's start about the Q and A section, right? Also known as the FAQ section. So it was created years ago to influence engagement. And this is actually another important piece of information on the history of the evolution of gbp. Because the, the philosophy at Google is that activity on a listing is a proxy for data quality, right? The, the whole philosophy was if, if you built your GBP profile five years ago and have never touched it, Google doesn't know if it's still accurate. Right? So, so the data quality of that listing is a variable. But if a business owner is going in there and they're doing something in the profile once a month. Right, right. Like that was the, the measurement that we had. We actually had a goal to get to 100 million 28 day active users on the system right now that was a pretty big goal because I think at the time we were at 10 million. I think when I left, we're probably closer to like 30 million. They're probably a lot larger than that now. But, but the, the objective was get business owners using their profile more frequently. Once a month was the guide, right. Because you know, activity on the listing was a proxy for data quality. And we, and we were like, okay, if they're in there looking at stuff, then chances are they would fix any, any issues that they identify when they're in there looking at other stuff. So, so, so you know, Google built a lot of these engagement features, right? Like they built Google posts, they built, you know, like the ability to reply to reviews, you know, like, and they built the Q and A sections, right? Like, and that's the or faq, however you want to refer to it. And I think that the intent of that was allow users to interact with the profile, right? So they can ask questions, the business owner can reply to those questions. And you know, this particular field too had some rank implication benefits to it, right? So like you could kind of like drop keywords in there because it was similar to that of reviews where it's kind of like, you know, it's, it's interaction with the consumer, with an end user. And that interaction with a user has a certain amount of weight to it in terms of engagement and how visible your company is being with, engaging with the general public. And so there was Some inherent benefits to that.

Matt Bertram (42:21)

So Brad, that is different though than posting because you're just pushing information out. So you're viewing interaction like with the Reviews and the FAQs different than posting. So I just want you to speak to that too.

Brad Wetherall (42:38)

You're exactly right. And while reviews and Q and A did have ranking benefits, posting does not. Right. Because posting, posting was designed to kind of, it's more of a conversion factor than it is a ranking factor. Right. And so like once people find your listing, having the posts on your listing, it's, it's visual in nature, right. So like, you know, you put your imagery up there. It's kind of like a, a mini blog, right. So instead of having the blog sit on your website, you post it there and it, and it's more about conversion. It's like once they find your listing, what information can you give them that entices them to take the next step in that action to, to, to go to your website to make a phone call to, you know, interact with, with your business. So, and I think that's a really interesting observation that you had is that like the motivation was different from posts from day one. Right. Which, which is probably why it has less implications from a ranking perspective. But the, the reviews in the Q and A is more about consumer engagement. I haven't, I wasn't at Google when the decision to sunset that fellow feature was made. My guess, however, is that Google is looking at the data and they're saying that there isn't actually a lot of interaction with consumers in the Q and A section. What it's mostly being used for, and I'm guilty of this, I actually recommended this to a lot of my clients is I'm the one that write the questions and then I write the answers. Right. So I'm seeding questions that I want consumers to see and then I'm proactively answering it. And, and if Google is, if that, if that behavior is systemic, right, like where every business out there is, is using it for the same purpose, then it's not being used for the purpose that, by which it was designed. Right. It's not, it's not actually that level of engagement. So, so there's, there's that and there's also the, a potential argument where they just don't want to spend engineering resources maintaining it. Right. And it comes down to a cost conversation. And so I have seen a lot of features turned off. Business messaging is a good example of that. Where that was a feature that was used heavily by agencies. It was Turned off not because it wasn't used or wasn't effective. It was turned off because they ran out of resources to invest in the product and they had to prioritize and they, they wanted to sunset that feature so that they could reinvest the resources into different areas of the business. So not a, not a great answer for like, you know, because it's a kind of a silly reason to turn off a popular feature. But that was the truth of it. That was, that was kind of like why that was sunset. So I don't know if Q and A is being sunset for resourcing purposes or for usage purposes. It's probably a combination of the two, to be honest. They're probably looking at the features and saying it's either not being used or it's being misused. It's potentially expensive from an engineering perspective to maintain. We're just going to cut it.

Matt Bertram (45:51)

What's the date on that potentially?

Brad Wetherall (45:53)

I don't know. I've been hearing that for a while and I still see it. So it appears as though it's not a huge priority. They haven't turned it off. And the news that the desire to shut it down is also not new. That's been around for a while. So I, I don't have a date. But while it still exists, I'm still going to use it because there are still ranking implications that can benefit your business profile.

Matt Bertram (46:21)

Yeah, I, so let's go to the categories. I, I do have a hard stop on the half hour. But also talk about photos and, and the proper way to do photos. I want to make sure we cover that.

Brad Wetherall (46:34)

Yes, Photos is another great example of user engagement. Right. Actually, it's business engagement, not user. So it's, it's a way to make sure that you're maintaining a good, accurate profile. And so, you know, photos is another one of those things where, you know, the more photos you have, the better. But it's frequency versus volume is the, is the value, again, similar to that of reviews. So what you should avoid doing is having a look at your business profile, being like, hey, I've got this, you know, I've got an album of, of a thousand photos. I'm just going to upload all thousand of them at the same time. That's not gonna, it's not gonna really give you much benefit. What you really want to do is drip those photos into your system. You know, every couple weeks, drop a new photo. If you can have your, your customers include a photo in the review, that's huge as well. The other best practice when it comes to photos, and this would be a good recommendation for people who are dealing with suspensions or anything like that, is that a lot of the photos that you would typically use as evidence in reinstating your listing. So photos of the exterior of the building, the interior, the signage that you have, right. Like the tools that you use proactively put that in your listing as photos. Right? Because Google has that now at their fingertips and it, and it's, it's more suspension prevention than anything else because now it, it already can see a lot of the evidence that you would need to use to unsuspend it anyway. So, so just be proactive and get that into your profile and avoid the, the potential headaches down the road. The, the other advice that I would give you is that if you're taking photos with your phone, which almost everyone does these days, have the geolocation feature turned on. It drops a latitude and longitude into the metadata of the photo itself. When you're uploading the photo, it's not just the content of the photo that Google is looking at, it's the metadata. So it knows, oh, here's a photo of this plumber doing this thing in this location, the location. Now that's going to help you from a ranking perspective in the location and of where the photo was taken. Google has this, this, this internal system. We, we refer to it as mum. It's a multi list unified model or some, something like that. And it's a fancy word. All it really means is Google can read photo, understand photos and, and read and listen to videos. So it's, it's not just. And this kind of comes back to your website data as well, right? It's not just about the words you use, it's about the videos and the photos that you're using as well. And so just to make it easier for Google, have your photos be geocoded. And the higher quality you can give in a photo, the better because it's easier for the algorithm to interpret. I was chatting to this one business owner a couple weeks ago and he said that he was able to do a search for a restaurant that has a full bar, right. And he, he got a, he got a result in that that showed, you know, a restaurant with a full bar. But they're, you know, similar to the review scenario. There was no mention of a full bar in the profile. The only way that he inferred that they got that is there was a photo on their profile that had a picture of the bar behind Them and Google was able to infer that they have a full bar because of the photo that was contributed. So it's another example of how it's not just the words that you use, but all of the multimedia assets as well is going to be a really important factor.

Matt Bertram (50:28)

All right, so I have, we don't have a lot of time here. I want to ask you one more question and then I have like a dispelling something that you shared with me that I think would be beneficial about utilizing the website.

Brad Wetherall (50:44)

Right.

Matt Bertram (50:45)

Like the little website function that got sunsetted and the backstory on that. We don't have to spend too much time on that, but I want you to spend some time on the categories. Like just how to look at that because there's a lot of categories in there under your main category. Then tell me a little bit on the website sunsetting because I've been asked a lot, I've heard a lot of different things. And then one unknown secret about Internet marketing. And then we'll share your information and get out of here. But I want to, I want to make sure to talk about the, the, the website that was sunset. Not for too long, but I feel like that was a big topic of debate with a lot of SEOs.

Brad Wetherall (51:26)

So yeah, it's a, it's a fun story too. So I'll. All right, I'm going to try and time box this, so apologies if I'm short. So let's start with categories. So categories. I mentioned this earlier, probably the second most important factor of rank after the name of the business. And I would put that slightly above reviews as number two. It's just a critical way for Google to know the type of service that you offer. So when people do keyword searches, it knows that this is the type of business that would provide that service. So the primary category is the most important strategic thing that you need to choose. Secondary categories are also incredibly important. The risk you run with secondary categories though is that they, they need to be related to the primary category if they are completely different. Right. So if you're, if you're like, I'll give you a positive example first. So if you're a lawyer and you're the, the main area of practice for you is personal injury. Right? There is a category for personal injury lawyer, but there is also categories for lawyer and law firm and other types of law, like criminal lawyer and things like that. Right. So there's all these different types. The strategy would be go with the primary area of focus that you have. So go with Personal injury attorney is number one. And then you can add on lawyer, law firm, family law, immigration, all the other things that you may do, but they're just not your primary focus. The risk from, from adding secondary categories is if you add unrelated categories. So if you're like personal injury attorney and then you add a secondary category of plumber or restaurant, right, that works against you. Google, that's. Google sees that as, as. As spammy behavior. And it's actually gonna, gonna. It might suspend you or at least kick you into re verification because it's just weird, right? Like now it might be that you happen to do a restaurant as well as being a lawyer, but it's unlikely, right? And so I think that. And if that was the case, you'd probably be better off creating two listings for the separate primary categories than you would to have one of the primary. So that would be my advice. The other thing that I would tack on to categories, though, in the interest of time, would be there's a services section of the GBP profile where it gives you the opportunity under each of the categories that you've selected, to go in and describe the services that you perform under each of those categories. You absolutely need to do that. That is something that will impact rank. It's something too, that you would want to try and optimize for the service and the location. If you've got multiple locations, you want to kind of drop in. I'm a personal injury attorney in Houston, Texas. Or if you've got a different listing in Austin, I got. I'm a personal injury attorney in Austin, Texas. You have to tweak it for each one because that's going to have a benefit from a rank perspective. So I'll leave that there in the context of categories, but obviously that's a topic.

Matt Bertram (54:35)

We just touched the surface on a number of these items. Yeah, for sure.

Brad Wetherall (54:40)

All right, so the next one is the Websites feature, which is a fun story for me to tell because internally we call this presto. So if I refer to it as presto, I apologize. But the concept was we were. We were trying to drive engagement in developing markets, right? When engagement, you know, was the. Was the main motivating factor. And so we were looking at India and Brazil and Indonesia and a bunch of these companies, and we're like, they're not using gbp. And so we, we had people go out into those markets and ask them, like, you know, hey, we want to get you up on. We want to create a Google business profile for you. I think it was Google My business at the time and, and their response to us was we, we don't need to be on Google because we don't have a website, right? And, and we were trying to explain to them that you don't need a website, right? Like the business profile is your business representation on Google. You don't, you don't have to have a website to be on, on Google and it'll just get you more customers. And we were, were trying to sell, but, but the concept was just lost on them, right? And they, they didn't understand that they didn't need to. So the engineers just said, bugger it, we're going to go ahead and create a website for you.

Matt Bertram (55:50)

Now was that a ranking factor? Like how would you have viewed that? Because people are like, if I have a website, do I create this too? Or like, was it beneficial to not do that? Like what, what, what, what would you have recommended if, if someone asked you that? And that was.

Brad Wetherall (56:05)

So this is the interesting part of the story, right? So like the, the initial philosophy of, of presto was to create websites in these developing markets for, for companies that weren't online. And we were trying to establish more of Google as a, as, as a source of information where people would go to kind of like understand where they could go and get goods and services. What we found is that when we launched that feature, all these other developed markets all also created these websites, right? And I think this is where exactly is what you were talking about, where they were like, hey, I know I already have this website, but Google's telling me to get another website, let's just create another website. And that will help from a ranking perspective. Now the truth of the matter is that was not the way that it was designed. It was, it was, it was never designed to replace your website. It was really designed to be the, the primary website for your listing. But the cool thing about it was that the engineers designed it to be uber mobile friendly because a lot of these developing markets, the, the norm was not to use a desktop or a laptop. The norm was to use a mobile device. And so it was optimized for mobile. And so this was also 10 years or so ago where it was like, okay, that was, you know, like a big trend. And so a lot of, a lot of companies in the US And Canada and developing markets really kind of like piled onto this. Now I don't, I, this is where, I don't know, I don't know if that actually had positive ranking implications to it. I'm skeptical that it did now it may have unintentionally because the team that built the websites feature in GBP was not the team that was optimizing search, right? They were doing it for a certain purpose. And that purpose was to increase engagement in the developing markets. It wasn't designed to improve rank or to, to, to, to solve a problem in these, in these developed markets. So that could have been a really interesting side effect where like, it's like, hey, now you've got. Google has a website that it's hosted on, on Google's platform. You know, like it's, it's, you know, you could argue it was a good authority signal before I even existed or at least before I was a search feature, at least. But I think it was unintended. I don't think it was by design. Now, all of this is for. Not because that feature got sunset. And the reason why it was turned off is because the leadership at the time was saying, we've got this Google business profile that we're really trying to turn into a page, right? A business profile page for a business. But we also have this presto site, right, like this, this website that we've created out of the GBP data. So it's a duplicate, right? Like it's, you know, where it's redundant information being served in two different ways. So they said, well, let's get rid of the, the website, right? The, the presto site in favor of GBP being the primary source of information. And so I think that's where it brings us to today where, you know, and I think we're even seeing the, the benefits of investing in GBP because we're, I personally see the data in AI mode over indexing GBP data, right? I think that it's like, it's the pro. I would argue the primary source of information about a business is being pulled from GBP right now. Now, will that persist forever? Probably not, but it's currently, if you were to experiment with AI mode and look up different sources of information, it pulls in GBP data directly and it references a lot of the information that is represented in the profile itself. So at least for right now, that should be a great investment in ensuring that data is accurate and says what you want it to say about your business.

Matt Bertram (60:04)

So in AI mode, GBT G GDP is not going anywhere, right? Like that is a fixture that you need to focus on. All right, Brad, we're coming to the close here. I wanted to hear from you out of kind of everything, if we were to sum up what is One unknown secret of Internet marketing as it relates to local SEO. What would be the number one thing?

Brad Wetherall (60:31)

You know, I don't know how much of it is unknown, but I think that what's different today than compared to Internet marketing from five years ago, even maybe three years ago, is the importance of brand mentions versus links. Right. And I think that the old school way of doing SEO is link building and getting connections into other websites. Because of AI and the investment in AI, Google is smart enough to, to, they don't need the link to draw the connection anymore. The brand mention is good enough. So, so going out and getting your, your, the name of your business and your brand represented in other authoritative sources has, is going to have an exponential return as AI continues to take over the search landscape. So, so that would be. I don't know if it's a huge secret. I hear a lot of people talking about that, but I would double down on it because it's, you know, we even heard Elizabeth Reed, who's the VP of search. I actually worked with her directly and she used to be the engineering director of GBP back in the day and she was the one that was on stage at Google. I o talking about the evolution of search and she used phrases like this is the future of search. And I know Liz and like, she wouldn't use those words lightly. Right. And, and so like it's, it's definitely future proofing your business to invest in your brand mentions. I, I don't know that I would quite give up on, on backlinking and linking yet. But it's phasing out and, and media mentions are becoming the new backlinks.

Matt Bertram (62:12)

I love that. Well, thank, thank you so much, Brad. I have some ideas about really getting in the weeds on some strategy and, and there's a lot that we haven't covered. So may want to try to bring you back on again. And we do have some mastermind workshops that I would love to get you involved in as well. What is the best way if someone like what they heard and they want to contact you directly, maybe they have a location change or you know, something like that, that, that they want to make sure it's handled with finesse. What's the best way to get in touch with you and follow?

Brad Wetherall (62:42)

Yeah, absolutely. No, I appreciate that. So, so, so I'm, I'm working in dual capacity right now, so obviously I'm doing a lot of speaking engagements and whatnot, but I'm also working as the, as the chief operating officer for a company called Esquire. Digital. This is, there's the, there's the logo there. Squire Digital it's, it's a company that, that focuses on search marketing essentially and you know I'd be happy to, to, to talk to you take any consultations. You can also find me on LinkedIn just LinkedIn.com BradWetherall Reach out to me there and, and yeah I'd be happy you know I have a bunch of clients that, that have very interesting challenges so so so thanks for having me again mate and, and and yeah feel free to reach out if you, if you're looking for more assistance.

Matt Bertram (63:36)

Awesome. Well everybody hopefully you enjoyed this. Keep it up. I know things are changing fast. Reach out to EWR Digital if you're looking for more revenue in your business. Follow what I'm doing online. The Mastermind group is coming. For all those that keep asking until the next time my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for.