Mastering local rank tracking: Expert insights from Joy Hawkins

Our first speaker is Joy Hawkins, president at Sterling Sky. Joy, thank you very much for joining. Welcome and please introduce yourself in a few words before jumping in the topic. Yeah, so hi everyone joining you from Canada. It's so cool to see like how global the audience is here. So it's pretty fantastic. Uh I run a local SEO agency called Sterling Sky. So we are based in Canada. We also um have presence in the US as well. So our employees are kind of split between the two countries and we work with small businesses. So local SEO is like my everyday and I've been in the industry for quite a while. I started in 2006. So this is quite an interesting era we are in and hopefully you guys will learn a lot from some of the stuff I'm going to share today. So excited to have you today. The stage is yours. So I'm going to start us off here by just telling you guys a story um of what I ran into last year with a client. So we had this client that came to us and they were seeing kind of some of the stuff in the content that we were adding to their website and they wanted to replicate it. They're like, you know, we live in the era of AI, and in the era of AI, you can do things at scale, which is true. So,

he wanted to basically take what we were creating uh contentwise and duplicate it across 200 different pages. He essentially wanted to target 200 different cities, create kind of similar content for all those cities, put them all live on his website at once. Um, and he used AI to draft the content. Sounds kind of like a genius plan, right? Uh, spoiler alert, it wasn't. So when he launched these pages, for the record, I told him this was a bad idea. I was like, I don't think this is going to work. I was like, first of all, you launching this many pages at once. Kind of, you know, a big indicator to Google. Uh, that's not really normal for your site. Your site isn't big. It's not super authoritative. But he didn't really like my advice, so he did it anyways. And when he launched these 200 pages, like you would expect to see this massive spike, you know, in traffic, right? Like his site wasn't even 200 pages big. So essentially like doubling his site. And uh what we saw instead, unfortunately, was that the number of pages that were on his site that were not indexed, well, that doubled. So Google's literally saying, you know, hey, we're going to make you twice as invisible. So, not great. Um again, this wasn't a massive site to begin with,

depending on the site size. Maybe you'll get away with this, maybe you won't. I've heard some some other stories, but in this case, it was an absolute fail. And if you're thinking the problem is that he used AI for content. You know, Google doesn't like AI content. That was not it. And to kind of confirm why I'm I'm certain that is true, I have a similar story just like it. Another business owner had reached out to me via our local search forum. Um, if you're not familiar with the local search forum, we operate a free online forum that anybody can go to to ask questions about local SEO. And this guy posted on there and was like, I got hit with a manual penalty. And he panicked and I messaged him. So, we were kind of going back and forth and I wanted to get some details from him. Well, what had happened, he logged into Google Search Console one day. He saw this big red warning up on his screen that basically said, "Hey, by the way, we are giving you a manual penalty for thing content." And honestly, nothing says welcome to the SEO leagues like a manual penalty. It's not not the golden ticket that you want. Well, this particular website, I kind of dug into details. He gave me the domain name. I I looked at it. They had uh over 3,000 location pages that

basically were similar content, but again, just targeting different cities. And the kicker here was that the business owners was like, "Joy, I spent a lot of money hiring actual people to write this content to make sure it was different." So, he literally had all these 3,000 pages if you went to them. It wasn't like he just substituted the city. He actually had people write content for each of those pages by real humans. But again, the sheer volume of this content, Google's like, "There really isn't anything different about these pages. Like, it's just boilerplate rewarded stuff." And it's not exactly what Google's looking for. So, it's important to remember that like simply changing a word like changing red to maroon or changing blue to navy. This is not enough to please Google. This is not what Google is talking about when it says it wants like quality content, unique content. You hear all this kind of stuff that SEOs say. It is definitely a lot more than that. So, using humans alone is not the solution to make your content good because this guy did that and he failed miserably. So, what does that how do you come up with something that Google actually will index and

doesn't already have 5 million copies of? That is obviously the golden question. Because the internet is flooded with content, especially the AI generated fluff that looks like it's written by a toaster, Google's job is basically to figure out which of this content is worth showing and ranking and which is not. So, how does Google know what to prioritize is the question. Well, we got to look at what Google's actually doing, right? Forget what they say, always look at what Google does. So, when you look at Google, you start to see certain trends and patterns. One of those trends that I'm sure everybody here is well aware of is that Reddit is just killing it lately. Reddit shows up in the search results. Their trajectory of how well they rank on Google has skyrocketed in the last two years. And there's something that small business owners can get from looking at this pattern because Reddit has real human stories on it, right? They have experiences. Personally, I love seeing Reddit in the search results myself as a user because it's like you can actually get real stuff. It's it's real things that happen, real experiences with that business, whether it be good or bad. And that's the kind of stuff that humans want to see. So, how does this translate

to a small business or an agency that is doing this for small businesses? I'm going to share with you examples of how we have basically mimicked red how it's working. So, the first example I'll share with you is a criminal lawyer. So in the same fashion that I was talking about this criminal lawyer uh they wanted to rank better for DUI related keywords like he wanted to rank for things like DUI lawyer DU DUI lawyer in his city. So we went to his DI DUI page and we added basically a story an example of a particular guy that he helped who got a DUI and why hiring this lawyer basically helped his case. He was able to get you know the penalty was a lot less. Turns out that um the people that were kind of charging him had mishandled the evidence and he was able to get a better result for him by hiring this lawyer. So adding that example, that story, whatnot to the page, what did that do to his ranking? Well, we saw an increase in several variations of DUI keywords when it came to local pack ranking. So these grids are just basically showing you before and after. And you can see obviously what we like

to see in local SEO with green pins. There are more green pins on the right side than on the left, right? And we've been able to repeat this several times for other clients. Essentially, it gives Google the information that they want. I'll give you some more examples. Next one up is a dentist. So, this particular dentist had this uh expensive procedure called tooth contouring. I've learned a lot about a lot of industries by working in uh local SEO, and this is certainly one that I had no idea what it was. So, tooth contouring is like a a basic way of like reshaping your front teeth. So, we again got a customer story from this client, and we're like, okay, can you give us, you know, somebody you helped that had this problem? They give us all the details of the procedure. The more details the better. Like you know what did it cost? How long did it take? What was involved? What was the outcome before and after? Like how did this help this person? So that's that's what we did. And here's the the thing like yeah we're talking about rankings. Rankings really are great only if they actually lead to more business for this particular business. And that's what happened here. So what we're really looking at measuring here is conversions. Their conversions went up by 57%. That's great. That tells you that it's SEO worth doing because not

only does it rank better, but people that are going to the page are actually seeing the content and contacting the business as a result. Conversions are literally the only thing that matter when it comes to SEO. Next up, we've got a painter. So, this particular business kind of similar. You're starting to see a pattern here. They sent us a job they did. You know, here is an example of like a house they painted and this is what it looked like before versus after. And you can kind of visually see it looks a lot nicer. Uh we also listed details such as how much did it cost. I'm telling you guys, if you're a business owner and you're afraid of putting prices on your website, you really need to get over that fear. Prices are like SEO gold. You want to list them on your site. Google wants to show them because users want to know. Um, and we've never seen cases where it has had a negative impact. Again, you can always test this, but all I've ever seen from doing this for clients is more conversions, better ranking, and it's just like a win-win. So this particular painting painter sorry when we added this detail to this page uh they went from having almost no traffic on the page at all wasn't really ranking very well to 350% more traffic um in the next

6 months. So really helped the page perform better again because it was giving useful information that users wanted. Now the last example is a personal injury lawyer and this one was kind of interesting because this particular lawyer was actually doing a split strategy. On one hand, they were like, "Okay, Joy, we're gonna have our lawyers actually use AI to write." And they're like, "We're gonna essentially come up with the topics. We're gonna feed it to AI. AI is going to write the content, and then we'll have our attorneys edit it to obviously make sure it's factual." On the other hand, the other strategy that we were suggesting doing was like, "Nope, let's interview you. Let's ask you questions that we actually see people asking on Google, um, and let's get your answers to those, and then let's get, you know, example customer stories and put them on the page. Sure, this is not going to be like a shocking ending. You're probably already guessing which strategy did better. Well, on one hand, here's one of the AI pages that they launched. Uh, it ranked on Google somewhere for a very short period of time, then got de-indexed. This is a story that I kind of see all the time. Then we have another page where we had an existing page, but we were adding to it. So, we added some of the AI content to the page. Uh, this was the result. Nothing

exciting. Um, now contrast that with this. This is a brand new page that we published and was not written by AI. It was part of the interview. It contained a customer story just like what I was talking about. So a particular uh person that they had helped who had injuries from a car accident. Um we put this on here and the page performed really well, ranked, got traffic. Another example, another different page was targeting a very specific type of injury. So they wanted to rank for that specific type of injury plus the word lawyer. Again, this content helped them do that even though lawyer wasn't like the focus of the content per se. Um it helped them rank for that. So they went from ranking like 12th to sixth, 19th to fifth, like big jumps in ranking. That obviously leads to more traffic, right? So that's that's good. So key takeaway here, if you're not adding customer stories on your websites, on your client's websites, you need to start doing this. Basically, take what is working for Reddit and make it work for you. Now, another question I get related to content that is definitely worth visiting is how long your content should be. And this is something that I actually like I've argued with my staff about. I'll argue

with other SEOs about because there is this kind of assumption that word count is something that you should be using as a as a KPI uh to assess what is good SEO. And I'm hopefully going to show you reasons why you should chuck that KPI out the window. We had a realtor. They had two different pages. Let's call them page A and page B. Now, both were covering the same topic. They were about neighborhoods in a city. So like the top neighborhoods in Seattle, for example, and page B had more words. It had a lot more detail, but page A was actually the one that got the majority of the traffic. So page A outperformed it regardless of the fact that it had less stuff. Now, page B, the one with all the content, um it had all this like kind of fluff that SEOs we like to add to make our pages rank, had things like real estate prices, things to do nearby, commuting tips on how to commute to that city. We were like, well, you know, maybe this stuff is is helping them. I don't know. Let's try removing it. So, we just removed all this extra stuff from page B. And guess what happened? Their traffic didn't change at all. Like, it stayed the same. Didn't drop.

Saw no ranking drops removing the content. The point of the story here is again, this is something I've repeated and seen along amongst lots of clients. The idea of more is better is false. More is not always better. Sometimes it is if it's like again adding a case study or adding a client story. But the concept of just like you have to get to a certain word count. You have to have a 10,000word page in order for it to rank. That is just not true. Unless of course your ultimate goal is to, you know, impress your hosting provider by wasting tons of storage, in which case feel free to continue adding tons of content. But just kidding. Google does not care. One of the other examples of that helps illustrate this is these blank pages. So I'm kind of fascinated by that. When you search for things like alimony calculator, for example, can't remember where I was when I searched this, but this page ranked in the number one position. And when you look at the page, there's like no content on it. All it is is a calculator. That's it. So, it's interesting because again, us SEOs would think, oh, there there needs to be content on this page. Like, how is it ranking without content? Well, it turns out Google is a little better than it used to be 10 years ago and

understanding intent. And when somebody types in alimony calculator, Google's like they want a calculator. I cannot tell you how many attorneys I have looked at who have these pages with no calculators on them. They are targeting calculator keywords. They don't have a calculator, but they like do the math. And I'm like, guys, nobody nobody wants to do math. Like, let's be honest. What do we do? We added a calculator. And we've done this and repeated this on tons of clients. Simply adding a calculator. No other content made that page increase substantially in traffic. Uh ranked really well. I've I've repeated this for several lawyers. Um it has worked every single time. And the great thing is I'm going to give you lots of reasons why AI is both good and bad. So here's a good this is a plus for AI. AI will help you do this a lot better because you don't have to be a developer to create one of these anymore. This is where AI is really changing jobs and the SEO reality. I'm not a developer, right? Like I don't know how to code a calculator. But if you use chat GBT and you use a prompt similar to this, they'll just give you the code. You give them the math, they give you back the code. um it makes it easier for the average SEO to implement

these kind of tactics because we have AI at our disposal. So that's a team AI tip there. Now I need to talk about image it because images is a type of content right and if you had asked me a year ago I would have told you a very different story about AI image. See, we did a test last year on AI images and what we did is we had a home service business and we were like, "Okay, we are having a hard time getting images from this client." Like, we keep asking, we keep asking, they're not getting. What if we just go like create the image using AI of what we want it to look like? You know, make it similar to the types of jobs that they would do, the type of outcome they would do, but just create the image with AI. We did this. We added the image to their website and we saw a substantial lift in traffic. So, again, like images for certain search results can absolutely help ranking. So we saw that with this particular client, their traffic went up when we added these AI images. It's even more visible of a trend when you look at image traffic. So this is the same site, same page, but in search console, you can select image instead of web, and it'll show you how much traffic you are getting from Google images. Well, that went up a ton obviously when we added this AI image.

And I want to also clarify, they had other images on page that were not AI. So it was interesting to see that this AI image just outperformed um some of those other images. So this was great. We're like, "Oh, man. We need to start doing this for more clients. It's awesome." Until earlier this year, this SEO named Zach Notes published something on LinkedIn that caught my attention. He notices noticed this trend before anyone else. He had a bunch of sites that were using a lot of AI images and he's like, "Guys, Google's changed something." And if you look at this graph, you'll see where the little face is this huge down tick, right, in traffic. This happened at the end of February of this year. Google adjusted something so they can now detect if an image was created by AI or not. And for most queries they are going to like downplay any benefit from using AI. So to show you how this this works basically if I go back to that page where we had originally added that AI image that traffic boost they got they lost it. So it kind of nullified the whole impact of adding the AI image. And again even more visible if you look at image traffic they're no longer getting image traffic to that image that

we used AI for. Unfortunately, use AI images with caution. A lot of times it's a waste of time. It's not going to accomplish anything. Always test this stuff, guys. Like, don't just take my word for it or Zach's word for it. Um, but this is certainly the trend that he has noticed on a lot of sites and I've seen it as well. So, unfortunately, they aren't quite the solution I thought they were going to be. So, that leads me to wonder what types of images actually do well. Well, to figure this out, we actually recently conducted a study that I haven't even published yet, so you guys are the first to hear about it. We went and looked at clients of ours and we took 383 images and we specifically looked for images that were getting traffic from search console. So we're like, we want ones that are getting image traffic. Then we took those pages and we looked in Google Analytics and we said, are the pages these images on actually converting? So we're trying to figure out because you can't really tell if an image is responsible for the conversion, but if the page is getting traffic from Google images and the page is converting, then I want to know kind of what the patterns are for those images. So this is can't believe I'm sorry this the number of clicks. So like

the types of images that got the most clicks from Google images were infographics. And like I was talking to one of my team members uh earlier this week and I was like what do you think performs best for images? She's like well certainly not infographics. And I was like actually the data showed us that infographics still get a ton of clicks from Google images. It's like what people still like those? Like aren't those like what decade are we in here? Right? like it's uh not what I was expecting to see. And I'll tell you guys, like you'll have opinions on things as marketers, as we all do. Your opinions do not matter if the data cannot back them up. And this is one of those cases where my opinion on infographics is that they're stupid and gimmicky. And that does not matter because the data in this study showed us infographics actually perform well. Not only do they get image click, they go on pages that get conversions as well. So, I'm going to show you a couple examples. This is one for a lawyer, criminal lawyer who has this infographic all about gun- rellated homicides that breaks it down by state in the US. This page drives them a ton of traffic. It gets link, it gets traffic, it gets conversions, right? All complimentary of

this infographic. Here's another one. This was an electrician. That page this is on is like 7 years old. I don't understand how this page is still even ranking well, but this particular image still gets them a ton of traffic. And it's pixelated, too. Like, it's it doesn't follow any of the best practices. This is one that I really like because it's so simple. Um so this is one for a dentist again was in one of the top performers of all the images we looked at when it came to the number of clicks and um a really good one um that kind of breaks it down and I think this is one of those examples where it's really useful for users as well. All right, this next one. So when it came to the number of conversions, we were looking at like the image type that had the most conversions out of all of them. Guys, like I got to tell you like bugs was not on my list of predictions either. So, where do we see this? We have tree service clients, lawn care clients, obviously pest control clients. I'm not saying if you're a lawyer, go pick pictures of bugs on your website. But if you are in an industry that has pest related problems like the ones I mentioned, having pictures of bugs on your website actually help get more

conversions. Really crazy. Again, not what I would assumed. I would have been like, "Keep that spider image off the page, please. I don't want to see it." I'm not going to show you examples. I'm going to save you guys the pain. Nobody wants to look at bugs in my opinion. So, here is a blank slide instead. All right, moving on. When it came to the best when it comes to uh conversion numbers, and I apologize, I misspoke. The last one was conversion rate. They had the highest conversion rate. Highest conversion numbers is this one, which is people. So, this one was not surprising, right? I would have assumed this is the case. Um, I've seen this in my own business. I have had clients talk about things that they would only know by reading bios of my staff on our website. I was like, "Huh, people still read those?" So yes, like people want to know about your employees. They want to know about the people they're working with. Having real human photos on your website is still good for conversion. So if your photos are 10 years old and you haven't done a team photo in a while or you haven't added the last 15 employees to your website, you may want to consider doing that. Um because again, this study showed that people still like people. Imagine that. All right. So I know I've been hard on AI when it came to content. So, I want to end by just giving you

some examples of other ways that we are using AI to make our jobs easier and honestly make us smarter at SEO. So, I have a lot of examples here. First off, inserting keywords into content. This is one of the ways that I really believe Chad GBT is better than any human I have ever met. Certainly made way better at doing this than I could ever do on my own. And I'll give you an example. Let's say you're GEICO and this is your page and you want to rank for car insurance near me. So, in order to do that, you actually do need to put the words near me, near you on your page. It might sound spammy. We have done tests on this. I have released videos on our YouTube channel. If you haven't watched them, I'm not going to dive into all of how it works, but you can check them out on the Sterling Sky YouTube channel. All I can say is it works, guys. It's stupid, but it works. You get the words near you in here or near me. It will help you rank better for those queries. So, Geico wants to do this and they're like, "Well, where do I put this in here naturally?" Sounds pretty stupid, right? Chat GBT is going to be your best friend here. They are so good at this. You can say like fit it in naturally somewhere. And the stuff they come up with is quite

impressive. Very creative, but again looks natural, not spammy. Um they do such a good job at this. So we use for all of our near me optimization. Chat GBT is like my go-to. Tell me where to put it. Chat GBT. Tell me how to get it on this page. It does a good job for you. This is also true for internal link. If you're not focusing on internal links, guys, this still works just as well as it did like 10 years ago. Internal links is like SEO magic. So taking stuff on your site and linking it to your money pages really works. And of course, you want to have keywords as the anchor text that matter. So in this case, I wanted the anchor text to be like, lawyer, you don't pay unless you win. How on earth do you fit that in to a a page naturally? Right? I got to tell you, I was like, I don't even think Chad GBT is going to be able to fix this for me. And they did. They actually found a way to make that sentence work. Um, so it's really really good at that. The other thing it's really good at dumbing down complex vocabulary. I don't know if we have any lawyers here or anyone that works with lawyers. We work with a lot of lawyers at Sterling Sky. And I got to tell you, as a fun exercise, if you want

to really just, you know, laugh and have a good time, go ask a 5-year-old or like a seven-year-old to read some of the content on a lawyer's website and ask them what they think it means. I almost guarantee you're going to have a really great experience. Because often you'll go to attorneys websites and you'll see something like that. Our attorneys demonstrated expertise and dedication to ensure rightful compensation for the client. Like, what the hell does that even mean? I I certainly don't know. So, stuff like this is not going to help you on your website. The great news is Chat GBT is great at dumbing down stuff. If there's lots of lingo or words that people are using that they know what they mean because it's their industry, but the average person isn't going to be able to follow them. Um, this is going to be an awesome way that you can use chat GBT to just reword your content, make it better, make it easier to understand. And the majority of lawyer websites I look at have this problem. So, this has been really great for that. Another way that we're using chat GBT like crazy, and this is probably the most frequent use of this is writing from transcript. So, think about it. If you're having a call with a client or you're getting information from them, recording it, getting a transcript, you

can literally turn that into content. We started recording our sales calls. We started recording our audit calls. we can get transcripts from that and turn it into content. And Chad GBT is amazing at doing this. Another way that we do it is every time we publish a blog, sorry, a YouTube video on our YouTube channel, I don't want to have to then go write a blog on that same topic. So again, I'll feed the transcript of me talking on YouTube into chat GBT. It'll write it as me. It'll sound like me. It'll have all the information that I came up with. So it's not really AI content, per se, and it works phenomenally. And a lot of people aren't doing this. So, this is a really easy way that you can save yourself a ton of time. Here's just an example prompt if you want one to use. Honestly, there's nothing fancy about this prompt. It's just basically telling it to reward the transcript. And you can insert any specific criteria you want it to do. In a similar fashion, same thing. You can use it to write social posts. It is very good at this. You always always proofread everything, guys. I'm not going to say that multiple times, but like you don't just want to paste and

put out what chat GBT um comes up with without reviewing it by human. So do make sure you do that. But the majority of the time it comes up with stuff that's really good. So there's a a specific GBT that is great at this. So there's an SEO by the name of Julian Goldie and he came out with a really awesome custom GBT where you can paste the content from an entire page. So, literally, I could take this blog I wrote about uh this business that bought reviews, paste this entire page into chat, this chat GBT, and it'll actually create like a Twitter thread for me. And it's a good Twitter thread that's like eye openening. Like it's like a business lost thousands of reviews overnight. Like it's got that emotion, that kind of driving factor that's going to make people want to click. Really solid at doing this, guys. So, we use this all the time. I strongly suggest you uh check it out if you're doing any type of social posting. And then finally, I I want to end with this because this ties it back to the original story. You can write with chat GBT for service area page. Now, service area pages just to define them in case anyone's not sure. It's the exact stories I was telling at

the beginning of the the entire presentation. So, the concept of I want to target Denver and I also want to target Aurora and I want to target Parker, but it's really all the same kind of content. Um, and I want to have pages though that mention those city. Well, if you're going to do this, my advice is don't do it at scale. Do not be like the first guy and publish 200 and certainly not like the second guy where you publish 3,000. But we have seen this work on a smaller scale for clients where they have multiple pages that are pretty much the same content and like you know 10 to 30 of them I think is probably the max. We do have one client that's got a thousand of them on their website. That is an anomaly. I would not say that that is normal. These can work and I say can because it really depends on your industry. some industries it's a waste of time. But if you are going to do them, do not make the same mistake as the second business. Don't go hire a bunch of writers to write unique content that's basically just rewarding the same thing over and over. You can literally do this with chat GBT in 5 seconds. So if you're going to go that route, do it this way. But again, my big word of caution as I shared from previous examples, do not go

create a bunch of these all at once. It will likely backfire um on So don't do that. Now, I use chat all day. I could literally keep you guys here for hours, but I understand that you have things to do and other sessions to get to, so I'm not going to do that. The one thing I'm going to leave you with finally here is when you're approaching AI in this world and you're not really sure how to handle it, think of AI as your overachieving intern. They need supervision. They are not the boss. They don't run the show. You do. You need to basically overlook their work. Make sure that it I should say their it is doing a good job. Use it to help, not replace the real authentic content that's going to win the hearts and clicks of your user. Thanks so much for listening. Thank you. Thank you very much, Joy. That was amazing and really insightful and uh we see a lot of comments in chat. So, we can start with the Q&A session and have another look at what you've already covered. So, first question is from Alice. How can you close the gap between impressions and number of clicks? Yeah. So, impressions is actually not a metric I even care

about. So, if you're using it for anything, I would suggest just don't. Um, it is so inflated. It's not very helpful. Um, and one of the problems we run into is like, uh, especially in local SEO, rank trackers are usually the reason why you see giant spikes in impressions. So, we'll see like certain days for our clients where their impressions jump like 500%. As somebody running a rank tracker, so impressions is not even a thing I would look at. The basic way to get more clicks is to increase your position. So something to keep in mind, the number one position, I think the average click-through rate is like 26 to 40%. I may be slightly off in those numbers, whereas like number two is like 16 to 18. It's one of those unfortunate things like that number one position is so important for clicks that you got to do whatever you can to get it. Definitely. Thank you. Thank you very much for for your answer. Another question is from Diego. For multilocation businesses, is it wise to use AI to scale up unique pages content for each location? How do we avoid duplicate content when an AI is creating similar pages for local areas? So, I

wouldn't even worry about duplicate content. Like, let's say you're McDonald's, for example, right? And you've got, I don't know, 50,000 locations all over the US. You have 50,000 location pages. You should not be worried about having chunks of content on that page that's different because again, that's that's the story of the guy with the 3,000. It didn't make any different. If you're McDonald's, you're fine. Like, Google knows the real locations. They're going to want to rank those location pages. They're going to want to um have you represented in the search results. And there's nothing wrong with using the same content. Um because again, there going to be different things on that page already, like the address, the phone number will be different. The map of where to get to McDonald's, you know, um maybe drive three hours are different per location. There's going to be a lot on the page to differentiate it. So, people need to stop stressing about the little paragraphs of text being different. Like I've had this conversation with many large chains. Service area pages are a different story. So if you're just creating pages for the sake of having content and you don't actually have locations in those cities, that's where doing it at scale can really fail. So I would really proceed slowly. See what you know you get from creating some of those. I have only seen them work at a

four-digit number for one business like and they're a giant business with like 70 locations and they do have a lot of service area pages. I don't think the average small business can get away with that. Thank you very much. Very reasonable. Another question uh Joe you mentioned uh use cases and uh client uh testimonials, client stories. So there is a question is there a particular part of the website where these should be added and um should this be like a separate case study page for example? That's a great question. So this is actually where a lot of SEOs get wrong. Do not put them on a case studies page. That doesn't help you at all. You'd want to add them to the page they're relevant to. So, for example, if you're a personal injury lawyer, you have a car accident page, put one on there that was involving a car accident, and then if you have a slip and fall page, you know, if there's a slip and fall related story, then you put it on that page. So, whatever page it kind of belongs to, but it should be on your what we call money pages, which are the pages that actually uh send conversions to your business. Thank you. Thank you very much for the reply. Next one is about competition. Naturally, everyone is worried about how

to to compete. If a local competitor start leveraging the same AI content tools, how we can ensure our local SEO stands out. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're not going to if all you're doing is using AI tools, right? So, this is why I'm like going back to customer stories. The only people that have those are real businesses, right? And real customer stories are going to constantly change and you should have a ton of it. Like the average business should not run out of content if that's their main content strategy. So that is how you can become better than your competitors is have better customer stories and um continue to add more. Nice. Nice. Thank you very much. Continuing uh questions around what you've covered uh for the images you recommended. Are they most impactful on WBP landing page, location, service area pages, homepages or etc. Yeah. So actually I think most of the images um that we saw that actually got traffic were actually on blog not on like money pages or a location page for example. So, um, all those stats I was giving you is more related to like just content on your site, right? I do think that it

really varies based on the industry. So, I see this all the time in, uh, lawyers, for example, will add like 500 photos to their Google business profile and they're wasting their time. In an industry like a restaurant, you certainly do want a diverse set of photos, right? Like, you probably want every single thing on your menu to have multiple photos because Google will use those images for ranking. So, if somebody wants waffles near me and you have pictures of waffles, that's going to help you. But that is not true in industries like lawyers or um other industries where you just don't see a lot of images in the search result. So, we've done a lot of testing on images and basically found that like certain queries images matter for ranking, other queries, they don't. So, it's important to just look at what's on the search result and you'll get your answer. Yeah, definitely great piece of advice. Next one. What is the best approach for franchise pages? We host for client pages for their businesses. we need help ranking even higher. What are your feelings on schema? I've done a lot of testing on schema. I've never found that just simply adding schema to anything helps with ranking. Um, I'm a big fan of making sure that whatever it is that

you're marking up with schema. If Google doesn't already know those things about your website, I think you're in trouble. If you need to put schema on your page to tell Google you're a plumber, that's a problem. So, I don't think schema is the answer. Um, having an address, a full address clearly visible on every local page that you want to rank. Sometimes that's not just your location page. Again, if you're a single location plumber, you probably want your address on every single page on your site because all of those pages you want to rank for, you know, service plus city, right? So, we usually tell people put your address in your footer. That gets it on every single page of your site. If you're a multilocation business, do it dynamically so that the right pages have the right address. And that's generally kind of what we suggest. You should always have things like ours, photos for some businesses. Again, I've also seen like it doesn't hurt to embed your Google business profile as a map on the location page as well. So, we usually do that. Great. Thank you very much. Very actionable really. The next one, in what ways can AI support the implementation of dynamics internal linking as strategies to improve crawlability and topical authority across a website?

Yeah. So, I would not use AI for internal linking. And the reason being it doesn't have the data that it needs to to make those decisions. So really what you want to look at when you're coming up with internal linking strategies is what pages make you money, which it's not going to know. And what pages get a lot of authority. So how you know if a page has authority or not is usually one of two ways. The page gets tons of traffic. So Google's so showing it all the time. It must mean it's authoritative. Or the page gets lots of links. Usually it's it's both, but um links obviously matter a lot. So if you have a page that gets a ton of links, for example, you would want to utilize that page um in a way where you can internally link to one of your money pages. like because you might have this likeformational blog that gets tons of links, but it doesn't make you money, right? Like nobody's calling you because of that blog. So that's where internal links could be super powerful, but AI just doesn't have that information unless you feed it to it. I guess you could maybe feed some of your analytics data to it um to get it to tell you what to do. So that potentially could work, but I have not tried it. Yeah, good idea actually. Interesting. Give it a shot. Right. Let us know.

Uh, okay. Speaking about meta descriptions, should you use AI even to write meta descriptions? What do you think? Absolutely. Yeah, like why not? You can tell it I need this, you know, this is the character limit. These are the keywords I want. It's great at stuff like that. So, yeah, absolutely. Speaking about risks, do you see any risks in relying on AI for local SEO content and how do you make sure it does not hallucinate about your city or region? And how do you make sure it is trustworthy and accurate? No, you can't. So, we actually tried this on a realtor client once. made up cities that didn't exist. Like it was crazy. So, you do not want to use it. That's why like when I said like use it with transcripts, it's not going to hallucinate necessarily. It's going to take what you said in your transcript and then just reformat it. That's what AI is good at. I would not use AI for strict writing. Uh you will absolutely run into a ton of hallucinations and false information. Um so, I think it's that's why I'm like it should be a tool that you use. You know, if you mix it with the knowledge that that expert, whoever your client is, has in that industry, then it's great, but I would not use it to write. Yeah,

definitely. Okay, I'm looking for some other questions that we haven't covered yet. Maybe this one might be interesting. Uh, how can AI help manage reviews and FAQs at scale without sounding generic? Speaking about the same, is it all right to use it? I don't even know. So, I haven't seen any studies that show that like using the same custom response to people matters at all. Like, if you're just like, "Thanks for the review." I don't know if that helps or not, but there certainly are lots of AI tools that can do that. Um, I think the biggest reason why people should respond to reviews of all types, good and bad, is just to be like to have a relationship with the customer. I don't think AI can take that role. So, I I personally don't use uh AI to automate review responses. We actually have like every review that Sterling Sky gets, somebody on my team responds to that review. And usually it's the person that like they're talking about in the review. They're like, "Colin was amazing. He did such a good job on my audit. I go ask Colin to respond to that review." Great answer. Thank you very much. And uh another interesting one is actually case. I made

the mistake of adding 20,000 pages to a website that Google is now refusing to index. How do I clean up? Oh dear. Okay. Well, uh delete them all. That's step one. If they're not in the index, deleting them should be fine. Uh, you'll want to make sure there's no like pages linking to them that now have for errors. Um, if the domain is completely toast, like seeing cases I hear about in the black hat community where like people just destroy domains like in general because they just do something too egregious and the entire domain is destroyed. I've seen that happen a couple times. Uh, not something that um I have a lot of experience cleaning up because we certainly don't do that approach, but um sometimes you you actually do have to go get like a new website. So, I don't I can't say if that's the case for you without actually looking at it. But, uh, if the all the other pages are fine, just delete the new ones. If the entire domain is like crap and not ranking anywhere, I don't know if it's fixable. Yeah, good good advice. And don't make such mistakes with Yeah. with the pages anymore. Thank you. Enjoy. No problem. Thanks for

having me. Thank you. according to to the feedback in chat the that was very clear very action taking and very insightful. So thanks very much for speaking with with us uh about the important stuff today and um we hope that uh your actionable advice will help our guests further. Thank you.