The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™

How Google Ranks Business Profiles: Trust, Reviews & AI with Brad Wetherall

• MatthewBertram.com

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Brad Wetherall, former head of Google My Business, reveals insider knowledge about how Google evaluates and ranks business profiles in the evolving search landscape. He shares crucial insights on trust factors, ranking signals, and how AI is reshaping local search strategies.

• Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) remains critical despite the focus on AI and LLMs
• The three most important ranking factors are business name, primary category, and reviews
• Consistent review frequency matters more than total volume for ongoing relevance
• Google has an internal "trust" algorithm that evaluates profile owners based on their editing history
• Fake reviews can result in a 90-day review collection ban, making manipulation not worth the risk
• Brand mentions are becoming more valuable than backlinks in the AI era
• The AI overview feature heavily utilizes GBP data, making profile accuracy increasingly important
• Photos should be geo-tagged and added regularly rather than all at once

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Guest Contact Information: 

- https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradwetherall

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The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing podcast is a podcast hosted by Internet marketing expert Matthew Bertram. The show provides insights and advice on digital marketing, SEO, and online business. 

Topics covered include keyword research, content optimization, link building, local SEO, and more. The show also features interviews with industry leaders and experts who share their experiences and tips. 

Additionally, Matt shares his own experiences and strategies, as well as his own successes and failures, to help listeners learn from his experiences and apply the same principles to their businesses. The show is designed to help entrepreneurs and business owners become successful online and get the most out of their digital marketing efforts.

Find more great episodes here: https://www.internetmarketingsecretspodcast.com/  

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Speaker 1:

This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential, let's get started.

Speaker 2:

Howdy. Welcome back to another fun-filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt Bertram. There's a lot going on in search today, so thank you for tuning in. I thought it would be good to bring in somebody that I highly respect and I've brought in to train my team and I think there's so many things going on with LLMs. People forget that Google my Business owns a big part of the layout of the SERP and I think it's one thing that SEOs, I think, understand to a good point, but it's getting missed in everything that's happening. So I wanted to bring in Brad Weatherall, former head of Google my Business, to tell us the real deal on how Google looks at things from a standpoint of the Google my business, GMP, whatever you want to call it, GMB. It's hard for me to still say Brad, welcome to the show.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for having me, matt. Yeah, it's funny that you're still having a hard time with the branding of um, of, of GBP or GMB Um it. It went through five different names over the course of like 15 years, so, uh, you know, people still have a tendency to call it Google, my business Um, even though it hasn't been called that in, uh in in probably over five years now, so it's.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, when I say it, I like it. There's actually some additional like cognitive load that I have to like, say it or do a slash and like. I think people understand but it's not the right name from Google.

Speaker 1:

My Business to the Google Business Profile, and the whole point of moving away from Google my Business is because no one knew what it was. It was very like it turned into a brand, but it wasn't very descriptive, and so when we were going through that exercise of renaming the product, our philosophy was just let's just call it what it is. It's your business profile on Google. All right, google business profile. There you go. It's obvious, right? And the irony is that everyone still refers to it as Google my business. So so we were. We were really trying hard to to, to rebrand it, to be a little bit more obvious and and and it it hasn't. Really, it took a long time, I think, for people to get out of that GMB branding.

Speaker 2:

I think that Google business profile is the right name. I just wish it was called that from the beginning and I think that's part of, like you know, the internet's growing up, seo is growing up, google's growing up and it's just a more professional name, right, and so I think it is definitely more descriptive and I think it was the right decision and, and who knows why, it didn't stick. But I know a lot of people listening have a lot of questions. I know that through the trainings we did, there was a lot of myths out there that I want to try to bust, because I still see today so much misinformation. Like, I'm in a number of different SEO groups and I always like to see what people are saying and I don't know there's just a ton of false, uh, false information. So let's, let's kind of jump into it.

Speaker 2:

I I'm going to think back to, uh, the, the, the two trainings that that we've done recently with the team. Um, I'm going to actually ask another question and then we'll, we'll, we'll walk into that, cause I want to make sure I get this out there for me. One of the things we haven't talked about is how Google my business, google business profile, views, link building and citations. That was something that we didn't talk about or cover, and I would love to kind of get your thousand foot view of that and then maybe we can get into the weeds on that and then we'll go over some other topics.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, into the weeds on that, and then we'll go over some other topics. Yeah, yeah, I think that the um, the, the complicated relationship, I think that GBP or local SEO has specifically with link building and citations, it's, it's an interesting one, right, because, uh, it doesn't really influence rank that much, right? Um? So you know, know, 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, right? So most people in the SEO industry know of the NAP, the importance of NAP, right, like name, address and phone number, um, 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, 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 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. So you'll get a phone or an email verification option available to you where you know.

Speaker 1:

The point of verification is to verify two things. It's to verify the existence of the existence, both the business and the existence of the business at its geographic location in the real world. So 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 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 Google knows something about you because you've invested in citations and whatnot and links and building up a great website, and it knows all that information about you, it doesn't have to confirm the existence part. It believes that already. It only has to confirm the affiliation part, which is why the real-time verification kicks in and they only require an email or a phone number to validate that.

Speaker 1:

Now, as it pertains to rank right, like it's like oh well, 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 build all these citations where these third party sources are referencing back to you and they're saying like, yes, this is a legitimate business, um, in the event that those sources of information, um collects referrals or reviews, like like a Yelp or or any kind of like industry specific review platform, that does actually help with um, with the help with the authority and existence component of it.

Speaker 1:

So I'm cautious to say that there is zero impact 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. The other information that Google can extract from those sources of information, which and with the introduction now of AI overviews and AI modes, it's more important about what that says about you, like 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 100 different directories and I'm like, of those 100 directories, 10 of them are probably good and the other 90 are just garbage right and so like it's, you know, from a Google authority and rank perspective. So my advice to a lot of my clients is be selective at the directories that you invest in getting into, because they're not all created equal.

Speaker 2:

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.

Speaker 1:

That's an important point. Sorry to interject, but that's an important point, right, because 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 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.

Speaker 2:

So a couple of 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, um, 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. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

So it's interesting because I could use that term trust to talk about two different topics. There is trust in terms of I'm making an edit to my business. Google looks at every single edit that you make to your business profile and assesses it for risk. 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's the reason that certain industries are more scrutinized than others. So actually, years ago, you know like 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 right like where we're going to force you to prove you know very heavily, you know that you belong in that profile and able and able to make edits, instead we're going to allow you to make simple edits but if it, if it triggers over a threshold, a risk threshold, then internally, we would say we're going to make you jump through some hoops, right, we're going to make and this is where the re-verification checks come in and so what that translates to is that if you make what Google perceives to be risky changes, so 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. Right, and I've probably got a story that I could tell you for each one of those of where, like, 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, um, you know, and so.

Speaker 1:

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, um, 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 at Google that rates your level of trust, and 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, right. All of those activities, assuming that they are accepted from Google, will elevate your level of trust in the system, right? So the idea is that you know, oh, I know this bloke, matt. He's been editing GBP for five, 10 years and he always gives us good stuff, right, 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, so we trust Matt.

Speaker 1:

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 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 all? 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?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, go ahead. No, keep going, keep going. I want you to finish the thought, but I do have something to ask you about that.

Speaker 1:

Right, so I'm just going to introduce the second part of trust, which is, so, that's kind of 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 EAT acronym, right, like the expertise, experience, trust and authority, and this is different because this has an ai context to it. So, 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 investing more in providing answers to questions instead of providing links to answers to questions.

Speaker 1:

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 of liability of like providing false information, because google is extracting all this information from various sources of the internet and serving it in the ai overview and in ai mode as their, as their opinion. Right, that 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 this website that I'm extracting this content from. Is that a reputable website? What do I know about this brand? 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 represented 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 was it? Ai optimization or LLMO, like there's all these funny. I don't know if there's really a proper acronym for this right now, but you know 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.

Speaker 1:

And an interesting story on that, actually, is that, you know, I was leading the GVP 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 release this thing. We were, you know, piloting it internally at the time and she said to me like what are the businesses going to say when we release this? Right? She was trying to get a sense of the way that it was going to be perceived. And I said to her you know, like, 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 right, to kind of ideally make it more flattering. And she turned to me and said they're not going to be able to do any of those things.

Speaker 1:

Right, and because that's not how AI works, right, like it's not a database that you can go to and says oh, it says X, I'm going to change it to Y. 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 right with google that that you actually know what you're talking about and then, 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 well, you, you open up so many things.

Speaker 2:

I'm taking notes here of, like, I don't know, you've got a hard stop, but this could be a long one. So I wanted to make sure to call out something that it's really helpful to talk to you, because you identified questions when we were doing our training that the reviews right, which reviews are one of the huge. That and the name of the business are the two most weighted factors for rankings. That those reviews are actually tied to the individual, tied to the individual. And then you were talking about trust 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.

Speaker 2:

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 it doesn't identify who they are. That's making these edits right. And so where do you see? Where do you like? So what is 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.

Speaker 2:

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, it doesn't matter, right, we're looking at everything Like is there like a relationship there? And should 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so there's a couple of things to unpack there, right? So there's the um, the the value of reviews, right? Um, and then who is leaving the review? Um, the trust attributed to that person. Because you know what, I think, what started this conversation and and you know for, to bring everyone else up to speed, you know, like there's there's a lot of challenges that a lot of businesses have when reviews disappear from their profile.

Speaker 1:

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 like they're gone, I can't find them. 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.

Speaker 1:

So what happens behind the scenes? When Google suspects that the review is fake or whatever, 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 to 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.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

It's not on the profile.

Speaker 2:

Or their individual profile is what I'm saying.

Speaker 1:

So to the user profile.

Speaker 1:

The user profile, so it is still connected to the user profile, the user profile, sorry, so it is still connected to the user. It's just not displaying because the way it displays on the business profile doesn't display on the user profile. Got it? So it does exist. And so 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, um, I actually partner with, um, uh, gmb API. It's a, um, uh, a kind of a, a pretty decent, cost-efficient solution for-.

Speaker 2:

For multi-location, for multi-location, yeah, multi-location.

Speaker 1:

You wouldn't want this for just one location but for multi-locations. This is really good and one of the features and this is fairly common across a lot of the 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, architecture of reviews, right. And then you know the other thing that I'll touch on quickly is the importance of reviews right, because, um, if, if businesses are out there not asking for reviews, it's a big um mistake from a, from a future investment in 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 the name of the profile, right. So like, if you happen to have personal injury attorney in the name of your business, you're gonna show up for that keyword search, and then the other, the second one 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 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 a third party recommendation of your business. So it's it's a vote of confidence in your business.

Speaker 1:

And so if you can get more reviews right, because 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 simple answer to that is it depends on your competition, right? Because if you're 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 the competition, then get 10, right.

Speaker 1:

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, yes, get the amount 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 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 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, like, the equivalency of a Yelp, but like in different countries, right, and it sources different information of reviews, and I think that's an indicator for me that the investment in looking at third party information is not slowing down. In fact, it's speeding up, you know, and it's using that more and more for a vote of confidence in AI rank as well as kind of like local and organic rank.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that I'll say, too, is that the keywords in reviews is important as well, and it's been really interesting to watch this trend over time. And I think, matt, I gave this example in the training that I did for your team, where I did 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 GVP profile, the reviews is influencing that as a valid response, and Google is kind of like looking at the consumer opinion to influence what it serves, and so, like it's another really important factor.

Speaker 1:

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 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, like really prevalently used for spam, 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 you know, 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 reviews will get pulled down for suspicious activity.

Speaker 1:

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, like and and finding new techniques and new ways of detecting fraudulent activity, um and so. So that's kind of where like trust is is kind of.

Speaker 1:

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 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 a constant battle of fighting people trying to get around the system.

Speaker 2:

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, 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 the, and I'm like hands off, we're not, we're not touching that, that, and I feel like there's some kind of consumer issue too of misleading people about a product if you're leaving a bunch of. So where is the line that Google has and where's the line of like if you're engaging this behavior, it could be against the law at a certain threshold too. I would think it could be against the law at a certain threshold too, I would think.

Speaker 1:

So, yeah, no, it's, it's a. It's a great point. Now the 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 lead gen 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 kind of like coordinated effort to kind of canvas a map with fake listings and then go in and defraud people.

Speaker 1:

You know, I think that the locksmiths are kind of like 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 to pick. Kudos to you for being so security conscious, like and, 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 and 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 um by a real locksmith. Um, these guys just don't have that skill set. Um, internallyally 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.

Speaker 1:

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 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, 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.

Speaker 1:

Um 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 um, to to businesses out there that are 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 reviews removed and then flagged in the system where you're blocked from collecting any reviews for for three months or more. Um, so I just if I was to look at it and if I was to advise clients on this, I'm like it's. It's just not worth it. You know, like I think that there's other places that you can invest your time and money that is going to yield a better response for you.

Speaker 1:

And you know Google is cracking down on this because you know that trust and safety team take it personally.

Speaker 1:

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 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, 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, 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 the market rate of a fake listing was actually one of his, one of his criteria for performance.

Speaker 2:

Okay, so I have so, um, so there's sun setting, um, uh, google my business, uh, the FAQ section, uh, potentially, and I would love for you to kind of talk about what the 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, cause I think there's a lot of questions about okay, there's that main category, but all those other categories, how should you think about that?

Speaker 1:

Yep, great, all right. Well, let's start about the Q&A section, right? Also known as the FAQ section. So it was created years ago to influence engagement.

Speaker 1:

This is actually another important piece of information on the history of the evolution of GBP, because the philosophy at Google is that activity on a listing is a proxy for data quality. The whole philosophy was 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 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, like that was the measurement that we had. We actually had a goal to get to 100 million 28-day active users on the system. Right, like that was 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 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 were like, okay, if they're in there looking at stuff, then chances are they would fix any issues that they identify when they're in there looking at other stuff.

Speaker 1:

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&A section right, and that's the 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 with an end user, and that interaction with a user has a certain amount of weight to it in terms of engagement and and your how visible your company is being, with engaging with the, with the general public, and so there was some some inherent benefits to that.

Speaker 2:

So, brad, that is different, though, than posting, because you're just pushing to that. 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.

Speaker 1:

That's right.

Speaker 2:

So I just want you to speak to that too.

Speaker 1:

You're exactly right, and while reviews and Q&A did have ranking benefits, posting does not, right, because 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 visual in nature, right, so, like you know, you put your imagery up there. It's kind of like a mini blog, right? So instead of having the blog sit on your website, you post it there, 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 go to your website, to make a phone call, to interact with your business? And I think that's a really interesting observation that you had is that the motivation was different from posts from day one, which is probably why it has less implications from a ranking perspective. But the reviews in the Q&A is more about consumer engagement.

Speaker 1:

I wasn't at Google when the decision to sunset that feature was made. My guess, however, is that Google is looking at the data and they're saying there isn't actually a lot of interaction with consumers in the Q&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 it's I'm seeding questions that I want consumers to see and then I'm proactively answering it. 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 um, a potential argument where, uh, they just don't want to spend engineering resources maintaining it right, and it comes down to a cost conversation.

Speaker 1:

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 that was used heavily by by agencies. It was turned off not because it wasn't used or wasn't effective. It was turned off because they there was, 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 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 kind of like why that was sunset. So I don't know if Q&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 um perspective to maintain we're just going to cut it what's the date on that potentially?

Speaker 1:

I don't know. I've been hearing that for a while and I still see it. Um, so it appears as though it's not a huge priority. Uh, 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 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 protocol.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

Yeah, photos is another great example of user engagement. Actually, it's business engagement, not user. So 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 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 1,000 photos. I'm just going to upload all 1,000 of them at the same time. That's not going to 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 customers include a photo in the review, that's huge as well.

Speaker 1:

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, um, the, the signage that you have right, like, um, the tools that you use proactively. Put that in your listing as photos, right, because google has that now at their fingertips, and it's more suspension prevention than anything else, because now it already can see a lot of the evidence that you would need to use to unsuspend it anyway. So just be proactive and get that into your profile and avoid the potential headaches down the road. 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, right, so like it drops the latitude and longitude into the metadata of the photo itself. So 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 is a photo of this plumber doing this thing in this location, and so the location. Now that's going to help you from a ranking perspective in the location of where the photo was taken.

Speaker 1:

Google has this internal system. We refer to it as MUM. It's a multi-list unified model or something like that, and it's a fancy word. All it really means is Google can understand photos and read and listen to videos. So 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.

Speaker 1:

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 and he got a result that showed a restaurant with a full bar but, 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 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.

Speaker 2:

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 right, like the little website function that got sunsetted and the backstory on that. Well, 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.

Speaker 2:

But I want to make sure to talk about 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.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 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.

Speaker 1:

The risk you run with secondary categories, though, is that they need to be related to the primary category if they are completely different, right? So if you're like, I'll give you a positive example first. So if you're a lawyer, the the main area of practice for you is, uh, 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 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 restaurants, right, that works against you. Google sees that as spammy behavior, and it's actually going to. It might suspend you or at least kick you into reverification, 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.

Speaker 1:

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. So 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'm a personal injury attorney in Austin, texas. Or if you've got a different listing in Austin, 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 we could-.

Speaker 2:

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

Speaker 1:

So the next one is the websites feature. A number of these items, yeah for sure, 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 trying to drive engagement in developing markets right when engagement was the main motivating factor you know, 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 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.

Speaker 1:

I think it was Google my Business at the time and their response to us was we don't need to be on Google because we don't have a website. And we were trying to explain to them that you don't need a website. The business profile is your business representation on Google. You don't have to have a website to be on Google and it'll just get you more customers. And we were trying to set, but the concept was just lost on them, right, and 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.

Speaker 2:

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?

Speaker 1:

Like, what would you have recommended.

Speaker 2:

If someone asked you that and that was-.

Speaker 1:

So this is the interesting part of the story, right? So, like, the initial philosophy of Presto was to create websites in these developing markets for companies that weren't online, and we were trying to establish more of Google 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 also created these websites. Right, and I think this is where it 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 never designed to replace your website. It was really designed to be 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 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 on to this.

Speaker 1:

Um, 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. Um, I might my me. I'm skeptical that it did. Um, 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 solve a problem 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 Google's platform. You know, like it's, you know you could argue it was a good authority signal before AI even existed, or at least before AI was a search feature at least.

Speaker 1:

But I think it was unintended, I don't think it was by design.

Speaker 1:

Now, all of this is for naught, 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.

Speaker 1:

But we also have this Presto site, right Like this website that we've created out of the GVP data, so it's a duplicate right Like it's, you know where it's redundant, information being served in two different ways.

Speaker 1:

So they said, well, let's get rid of the the website, right, the the presto site in favor of gvp being the primary source of information, um, and so I think that's where it brings us to today, where you know, and I think we're even seeing the benefits of investing in GBP, because I personally see the data in AI mode over indexing GBP data. Right, I think that it's like it's the 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. Will that persist forever? Probably not, but 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.

Speaker 2:

So in AI mode, GBT, G, uh, GDP is not going anywhere, right, Like that is a a fixture that that you need to focus on. All right, Brad, we're, we're, we're, we're coming to the close here. I wanted to hear from you, 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? You know, I?

Speaker 1:

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 they don't need the link to draw the connection anymore. The brand mention is good enough. So going out and getting the name of your business and your brand represented in other authoritative sources is going to have an exponential return as AI continues to take over the search landscape. So that would be.

Speaker 1:

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. We even heard Elizabeth Reed, who's the the 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 IO 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 so like it's definitely future-proofing your business to invest in your brand mentions. I don't know that I would quite give up on backlinking and linking yet, but it's phasing out and media mentions are becoming the new backlinks.

Speaker 2:

I love that. Well, thank you so much, brad. I have some ideas about really getting into the weeds on some strategy, and there's a lot that we haven't covered, so I may want to try to bring you back on again, and we uh do have, uh some mastermind workshops that I would love to get you involved in as well. Uh, 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, uh, 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?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely no, I appreciate that. So so so I'm 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 logo there Square Digital. It's a company that focuses on search marketing essentially, and I'd be happy to talk to you, take any consultations. You can also find me on LinkedIn, just linkedincom slash bradweatherall. Reach out to me there and, yeah, I'd be happy. I have a bunch of clients that have very interesting challenges. So, thanks for having me again, mate, and yeah, feel free to reach out if you're looking for more assistance.

Speaker 2:

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 now.

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