Local SEO with Andrew Shotland from Local SEO Guide

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, it is Michael Costin here. And this week we are talking local SEO on the SEO show. And I've enlisted the help of Andrew Shotland to run through everything local. So Andrew runs the business local SEO guide. He's actually been in the SEO space for well over 15 years now and had a really good chat about his background originally working at a startup that got acquired and then how he found his way into the SEO world. We did a really good deep dive into local SEO. So if you're a local SEO Business or a business trying to rank locally. Let's say a plumber. We spoke about plumbers a lot in this chat This episode is for you because we talk about everything you need to know around maps around backlink citations on-site content and a whole range of stuff that you could do yourself to try and get some local visibility, get some runs on the board, get some local leads. So it was a really good chat. That's enough for me. Let's jump over to our chat with Andrew Shotland from local SEO guide.com. Hi, Andrew. Welcome to the SEO show for people who may not have heard of you. If you could please give us a quick intro to yourself and maybe your backstory and we'll get, we'll get going.

ANDREW: Sure. Thanks, Michael. Um, So I'm Andrew Shotland, I'm the CEO and founder of local SEO guide.com. We're a 16 year old first full service SEO agency, with a specialty in multi location businesses, local marketplaces, like say Yelp would be an example of local marketplace. And then what I like to say is anyone, anyone with a website and a budget. So, so we'll do it. We don't just do local SEO, we do SEO for pretty much anybody.

MICHAEL: Yeah, cool. Okay. I had 16 years there. That's a pretty big thing. Um, you obviously were around the early days of SEO. Um, how did you get into this world? You know, before local SEO guide, how'd you sort of find your way into SEO? Was it a strategic thing? Did you fall into it?

ANDREW: Uh, so it's actually a fascinating story. So, uh, I was at a startup in 2003 called Insider Pages. I helped start the company. Uh, and Insider Pages was an early version of Yelp. And we were only in Los Angeles, and we didn't have anybody coming to our website was just wasn't working. And one of our board members said, Have you tried this thing called SEO? I don't know what it is, but I keep hearing people are doing it. And it's, it's cool. And so I asked around, and I knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was an SEO consultant. And I hired this guy, I think I paid him $3,000 or something. And we got on a Skype call. And he spent like an hour with me just picking apart our website and going, okay, update your title tags. Add a meta description to every page or something. And we did that. And our traffic started to take off. And so I kept calling him up and he kept giving me more tips. And then I started to figure it out and we started experimenting and we pretty quickly became one of the fastest growing websites in the world. Um, there for a very short amount of time, we were like, um, the unicorn that everyone was talking about on the internet. This was at a time when Facebook was still pretty early. YouTube was a little bit early. Um, and we, so now we were able to raise a bunch of money from some pretty big investors, uh, hired a bunch of people. And one of the things we hired a head of marketing who said, Oh, we have to redesign our website. We redesigned our website and I didn't know what I didn't know about technical SEO. And we introduced a technical problem that I could solve in five seconds today. And we lost all of our traffic overnight. We went from about 5 million uniques a month to like 100,000. And I didn't know how to solve it. And my consultant was nowhere to be found because he probably had 1000 clients and didn't need to deal with the pain in the ass ones. So, um, I ended up losing my job and we ended up selling the company. The day I got fired, I was having drinks with the head of websites at the Los Angeles Times, the newspaper. And he was all excited because he just got approval to redesign their site. And I said, oh really, what are you doing about SEO? And he said, what are you even talking about? Because he didn't know what SEO was. And I was like, well, let me tell you what happened to me today. And he freaked out and asked if I could do some consulting for him. I didn't have a job, so I was like, sure, why not? And next thing you know, I'm an SEO consultant, and I guess I had a good enough network, right place, right time. People started calling me and saying, hey, I hear you do SEO consulting. And I was like, yeah, I guess I do. And that was 16 years ago. Nice, haven't looked back.

MICHAEL: No, kind of crazy. Great backstory. Out of interest, what was a technical problem? If you can sum it up real quick.

ANDREW: So we had a, let's say a category page like plumbers in Los Angeles or lawyers in Los Angeles. And we created a duplicate of the URLs for that page. One that ended with a trailing slash and one didn't. And back then Google couldn't handle that.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ANDREW: It was, I remember when I got it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Trailing slash, no trailing slash www, no www. And it was, yeah.

ANDREW: Today, Google would just be like, oh, we're canonicalizing that for you. But back then it was like, sorry, no traffic.

MICHAEL: Game over for your traffic. Yeah. Well, that's a good backstory. Really interesting. And it sort of, I guess, segues there, like the reference you gave plumbers and we're sort of talking about local SEO today and maybe what a local business like a plumber can be doing with their SEO based on your last 16 years of experience running local SEO guide. I always like to start, right at the start when we're talking about local SEO, you know, what are we talking about as opposed to regular SEO? Is there anything special about it or areas?

ANDREW: Like the, like the name, it, it deals with searches that, um, have what we call local intent. Uh, so Google's gotten pretty good at understanding when people want a local business versus just any old website like Amazon or something. Right. And, um, and so, a lot of businesses with physical locations or service area businesses that serve a specific geography. That's where they get all their search traffic from, from these queries, like plumbers near me, or emergency plumber, 24 hour plumber, or, or even fix clogged toilet, that might, Google might think that's a search for a plumber and show you a list of local plumbers. And so, and so it's, what's really interesting, been interesting over the last 15 years or so, is what we've seen is I don't want to say every query, but the number of queries that Google has decided to have local intent has grown at an incredible rate. Um, I'm making these numbers up, but just to give you an idea of scale, let's say back in 2005, 5% of search queries showed local results. I bet right now it's like 60, 75% of search queries, some crazy number. Um, and, uh, And so, so for a local business, like a single location business, uh, figuring out some basic things about SEO can be a real win for their business. Cause it doesn't have to be super expensive to do or complicated, but like everything else, you just have to put some effort into it.

MICHAEL: Hmm. So let's say a local business owner is listening and they're like, well, I want a piece of that. I want to do some simple stuff. Where are you getting the most bang for your buck when it comes to investing time in local SEO on your site? Is there certain things I should be doing?

ANDREW: So the first thing they need to do is make sure they have what's called a Google business profile. Used to be called Google My Business page. You don't even need a website. You just need one of these Google business profiles, which essentially says it's like a yellow pages listing in Google. And it basically says, hey, yeah, I'm a plumber in this location. And here's what are my services. Here's my phone number. And these are the areas I serve. And just by having that, you can start to show up in map results when someone searches for whatever you are. And, um, and it also, well, you can also show up first when people search your brand, which is usually how most small businesses start out the more people searching their brand than them ranking for like, like big keywords like plumber. Um, and you can do little things on those Google, my business pages to try to stand out. You can add videos to them. So just with your phone, you can make a quick video. Hey, we, fix toilets, you can do a post on those things, it takes about five seconds, you know, you need to log into yet another thing to log into, but you log into Google. And you can add a little post to your listing, hey, we're having a sale today, that kind of thing. And then what you want to do is get reviews from your customers, ask your customers, send them over to Google to write a review of you, hey, like, This is the, give them a little coaching, even though you're not supposed to give them a little coach coaching about what to say. This is the best plumber in Perth, right? Like something like that. Right. And, uh, these guys did XYZ and they were awesome. So that's like the most basic thing, uh, local business can do for SEO. Then if you have a website, which most of you will have. Uh, you want to quote unquote optimize it for, to make it as relevant as possible to the search queries that you want to show up for. And so what that means is if we'll just keep using plumber, cause that's what everyone uses. If, um, if you want to show up for plumber in Perth, well, you should have a webpage that says like, Hey, we're a plumber in Perth. Uh, you should have some content about, which is like our services. We do emergency 24 hour plumbing. um, lay pipe, whatever. And, um, and then talk about where you serve. So Perth, whatever, whatever the cities around it, um, the zip codes, maybe your postal codes that you use. Uh, and that's, again, another basic thing. Um, what you want to do You don't want to spend a ton of time in this, right? You're just starting out. You're cheap. Like you don't want to, you don't want to have to like go all in and hire someone like me. Um, you want to do it yourself. So far, look at the pages that rank or the businesses that rank well for the searches you want to rank for it. If they show up in the, in the Google, my business pages, like a map result, click on the website link on those results and see what page shows up in the link. So. You want to link to a page that's about whatever you want this listing to rank for. So as an example, if I have a website that just says Andrew Shotland plumbers, I might have another page that says best plumbers in Perth. And so if I want to rank for Perth plumbers, I probably want to link to that best plumbers in Perth page versus my home page. Um, but look at the pages that are ranking and basically copy whatever it is they are doing. You won't get it perfect. because maybe they're doing stuff you can't see, but that's like a great way to start. Just rip off the next guy and add a little extra to it. Um, that's, that's the easy way to get started. Um, just to give you an idea of like, okay, now you've got started and you're not ranking for anything, right? Well, the things you need to do on an ongoing basis, probably get some links from other sites, which is always painful. Um, Get reviews from your customers. That's probably the easiest thing to do and most satisfying thing to do. Add more things to your Google My Business or Google Business profile page, the videos and the posts and things like that. And then start adding content to your website about what you do. And think of your content as what are the 100 most common things that prospective customers ask you. If you're on the phone and they're asking you this question, you can write it down and write it on your page. And that's the kind of thing people are searching for in Google. And that's basically SEO. There's a lot of detail. It's like anything else. If you want to be really good at it, you have to focus on it. And, but there are a lot of basic things that a business can do in a day that you don't have to pay some fancy consultant to do.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Beautiful advice. I can't agree more with pretty much everything you've said there. Um, I'm interested on the GMB or Google business side of things now. Um, you know, there used to be a time when you could have your profile, let's say you serve a Sydney and you're a big plumber that wants to go all over Sydney. Are you still finding that people are able to have their GMB profile show all over Sydney with the one profile or, you know, is there multiple location tactics people can use? Cause this is a question that comes up all the time, you know, at the top.

ANDREW: There's no, there's no right answer. It's so dependent on all the different, variables that are happening in that market. So in general, it's harder to show up. The farther you get away from your physical location, it's harder to show up in Google for those queries. You definitely should consider creating landing pages for the major geographies you're trying to target. So if there are neighborhoods in Sydney that you want to show up for, create pages for those neighborhoods. And add some content that seems relevant to the neighborhood. right near the airport or something, right? Like whatever that is, right? Um, it's funny. We're actually, this is now way too in the weeds. We're working on a tool right now that can basically show your rankings across a whole geography. So you could see like, you're really on the cusp of this neighborhood, but not this one. So why don't you go after the one you're on the cusp of, right? Um, and see what you can do, uh, get some links from other sites that are relevant to the neighborhoods you want to rank for, which is really hard to do. So don't even try to do it because you'll hate yourself. But if you're the kind of person who knows a lot of people with a lot of websites and don't mind reaching out to them and say, Hey, can you link to them? The guy who has the website about that neighborhood is the one you want to click from the page about that anywhere. Um, but. In general, if you really want to succeed at ranking in multiple cities, there's nothing that beats having a physical location in that city. And so if your service is valuable enough, so let's say someone, the value of a customer to you is like $5,000, let's say, then it might be worth it to you to actually rent a physical location in a city. because one, one booked customer a month will pay for that well over it. Right. Most clients, most sites, businesses are not willing to do that because it's, um, it's like a whole business just to do that. But I don't know, businesses have gotten trained over years to like buy expensive ads in yellow pages, books and newspapers and coupons. And so this is just an, new way of spending marketing budget, right?

MICHAEL: Yeah. And I quite like that idea. You used to be able to use like a serviced office and get, you know, like the verification card sent there. Is that still working? Are you seeing that working a lot or is it you talking more like they need to go get an actual… It's really tricky.

ANDREW: There are co-working spaces or temporary offices that have been kind of blacklisted by Google. So, you don't want to try to set your business up there because they'll know you're spamming right away or getting a PO box or something like that. The best way to do it is actually to partner with like a legitimate business. So, as an example, let's say you're a plumber again. How about Doing a deal with a local hardware store that, um, if you need a plumber, like you're the guy they refer people to, and you can set up some signage in that location and get verified. And, um, sorry, I don't know if you can hear, but I forgot to turn my slack off. Uh, okay. Yeah. You can get verified and basically it's what's called a store within a store. So as an example in the States, FedEx has a counter at Walgreens, a pharmacy for you to drop off FedEx packages and they have a Google business profile for FedEx at Walgreens. So this in this case would be having a Google business profile for Joe the plumber at the hardware store down the road. Yeah. It's not easy to do because it requires like doing a deal with someone like that and getting the verification thing done. But once it's done, it'll become your most profitable storefront.

MICHAEL: Worth the effort. And I've actually seen people in the past, like using residential houses for it and just then removing the address and just doing like a service area around it. I don't know if that still works these days, but yeah, like a plumber in Sydney might have multiple GMBs in the one city. So, um, What do you think about that? Is that probably taking it to the extreme? Is it still working? Is it not worth the investment?

ANDREW: So I'm sorry, having multiple GMBs with multiple locations or just trying to set up fake locations?

MICHAEL: Multiple locations in the one city, but they're using like a friend's residential address.

ANDREW: Residential addresses are tricky, right? They're really tricky. I would say they still work. Um, but they are under much more scrutiny. So I would, the one trend we've noticed over the last two to three years is Google has gotten a lot more, um, uh, I don't know, strict about these kinds of programs. Um, so. As an example, we had a client who was a, um, ski rental company, like an, like a, and they had partnerships with all this ski resorts in Europe. And we said, oh, just get a desk and some signage at each hotel and we should be able to get you a GMB page. And we couldn't get it done. It made no sense because it was legitimate. You could rent from these guys at the resort, but because they didn't have a legal address or something there, Google wouldn't allow it. So I'd say start at a small scale and try not to build up. Don't get greedy. We've seen, we've seen businesses that figured out some kind of scam, like, Oh, I can create 10 locations and make a lot of money. And they do make a lot of money. And then six months later, they all get burned. Yeah. Because they, they pushed it too far.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. So for people listening, start small. Um, Google, like from my experience, they will go as far as, you know, getting onto a Google meet where you have to show the front of your building and your signage and all of that stuff. So it is quite hard to gain this. Um, so I like your approach of, you know, striking up partnerships with real businesses, like legitimate sort of uses.

ANDREW: It's funny. We have, um, we have, uh, a client who, uh, is a service business, so they don't have physical locations. They just have pros and trucks. And I said, you know what? I think you're, you're never like you're, you're never gonna get a you'll always be at a disadvantage in Google, my business, like, maybe I can go down to my local hardware store. And, and see if they'll, we can do a pilot program for you. Now, the local hardware store thought I was crazy. I went down and asked him, I was like, I'll pay you 500 bucks a month in rent. Like if you can just do this. And he was like, I need to ask my boss, he got all freaky. But I was like, Dude, who else is giving you $500 to do nothing, right? And so I think if you're entrepreneurial, you could figure this out.

MICHAEL: Yeah, there's gonna be hardware stores with about 20 businesses in them after this call.

ANDREW: A million years ago, I thought there was actually a really good business model around creating a business that only existed to verify Google My Business pages for different businesses. Like, yeah, I think they called that WeWork.

MICHAEL: We all saw how that worked out in the end. Exactly. Well, I heard you before mentioned with reviews, framing or helping the person leaving the review frame how they do it. And you mentioned like, I think it was Plumber Perth in the review. Are you saying with that, that if a review mentioned specific keywords on your Google profile, that Google looks at that as a ranking factor from local SEO?

ANDREW: It's hard to say a ranking factor, more like a relevance factor. Right. We figured this out when we were looking at Mexican restaurants in California. And what we noticed was you were more likely to rank for tacos if you had the word taco in your name, your business name. But you weren't ranking for burritos. We're like, Because no one has burrito in their name pretty much. And what we noticed was in this one city, the Mexican restaurants that ranked better for burritos all had reviews that said this is like the best burrito in town.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ANDREW: Makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And so I can't say that we've done like a scientific study and said, oh, if we just add five keywords to every review, it works. I can just say anecdotally, every little bit helps.

MICHAEL: Yep. Yep. Makes a lot of sense. I think, yeah, I can't see why it wouldn't particularly on that. If we're talking relevancy for Google to figure out what it is you offer and what you do and positive review talking about something is probably going to be a sign of some way, shape or form. Um, the other thing you mentioned before is service pages. So there's a lot of, um, angst out there that I've come across over the years around service pages, creating them the time that goes into, writing content, how much content needs to be on them, can you just do it programmatically or using a template, for example, where you change out a few suburbs or do you need to go as far as writing about the suburb and embedding Google Maps, that sort of stuff. Maybe if you could go a little bit into your experience with that and what you think is, I guess, the best bang for buck in terms of time investment. in creating service pages, location service pages?

ANDREW: Sure. I've never seen embedding a Google Map make a difference. That's like one of the biggest fallacies, I think. Oh, just add Google Map and pull, right? Let's see. Again, the easiest thing to do is look at what's working in your market and copy it. That'd be my first thing to do. And then try to do it a little better, right? Whatever that means. Little better means like add a high quality image. or a video, embed a video in it that's about this topic you're trying to rank for. Look at, do like related queries to the topic. So not like plumber, but like emergency plumber or whatever. And there'll be different businesses that rank for those things. And you can start to see how each of them is a little different and take the best of all those things and put them into one. And because you want to be, this is a stupid word in SEO called topical authority. And I think the theory is something like, if you want to be seen by a machine, Google, as the best plumber, you don't have, you can't just have a page about being a plumber. You also have to have a page about all the other things people search about plumbers, right? Like clogged toilet, right? That kind of thing. And if they say, oh, you've got a clogged toilet page, the machine goes, oh, on every page I've ever seen on the internet, the ones that are mentioned plumber, 20% also mentioned clogged toilet. So you must be a plumber because you've got the clogged toilet mentioned, right? I always like clogged toilet as the example. What we like to say, it's the same thing with plumbers, actually. So I hope plumbers are listening. When anybody can do SEO, right? But just like anybody can unclog a toilet, but most people don't want to unclog their own toilet. So that's why SEOs exist. But back to the question about service pages, I think there's a lot of tools now that can help you write those pages. You can basically, like there's one called ClearScope we like a lot, that Basically, you run any query through it. It looks at the top 100 pages in Google for any given query and breaks it down and goes, oh, these are the most common elements of these pages. So use this on your page. And I can't guarantee that works, but it seems to work. And the thing you asked about programmatic content, that one we don't think works so well. Sometimes there's no avoiding it. You can't afford to write unique content for a million different pages. start out with like insert city name and product name here or service name. But I can tell you we've done a lot of work. Every time we rewrote content to be more original on the page, we see the SEO improve. So it's okay to start out if you have 50 locations, just make the pages the same and insert the city, the city name and the service name here and the address. But you're going to want to go prioritize and go, okay, which pages do I think I can boost the fastest by testing out unique content? And the way to think about it, it's, it's, it's kind of a generic SEO thing, but it really does work. Think about if you're the customer, what would be in searching for whatever it is, what would they want to see in a landing page?

MICHAEL: Yep.

ANDREW: The name of the business, what they do, um, some information, like how much does it cost? Maybe I can book an appointment. Hey, here's more information before you make a decision. All those things, I can't claim that Google understands all those things, but it understands engagement. And so if you hit that URL and spend a lot of time on it and don't go back to Google and click on other URLs, that's a signal that this site should rank for this thing because it was engaging.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. And a good tip on that is you mentioned in the sales process, the types of questions that come up, you know, as a business owner, if you're not taking the calls, you can speak to the person that takes the calls and ask, Hey, what are the common threads that, you know, themes that people are asking all of the time, and then just take that and put it on the site and you're halfway there pretty much. So.

ANDREW: Yeah. We're, we're, it rarely happens, but when we start with the client, we're like, can we just spend an hour with your salespeople? And like, I just want to hear all the, cause they know they are actually the best SEOs because they know what people want. Right. Yeah. And it's, yeah. And it's not actually as an example, it's not plumber in Perth. They want cheap plumber, affordable plumber in Perth or you know, plumber who can come over in an hour in Perth.

MICHAEL: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Right. That's all good advice. Um, I want to touch on everyone's favorite topic in the SEO world. I always say it's everyone's favorite, but the link building side of things. And, you know, we spoke about it at the start. It is a painful, time consuming, laborious part of SEO as a business owner. You don't want to spend your time on it, but, Let's say someone's starting out. Is there any quick wins or things that you can do to try and, I guess, give Google some signals straight off the bat from a local SEO point of view on that front?

ANDREW: Sure. First thing you should do is check what we call local citations. Those are the, like, think of them as your yellow pages listings. So in your case, like, is your business listed correctly on census or localsearch.com.au, right? Or true local, right? All the, all the, whatever those things are that show up, those directories, business directors that show up for the searches you want to rank for. Let's make sure your business data is up to date there. It's not a major thing and they all link to your, your pages. If you're multi-location, make them link to your location page. That's usually the easiest thing for a business to do. Once you've done that, forget about them and move on. You want to essentially get, in the perfect world, you're getting links from two places, two types of sites, and pages, actually. The page is what matters more than the site. So you want to get a link from pages that are either about the geography that you're focused on, so the city or the neighborhood, or pages that are about the service that you are selling. Right. And then of course, I guess three things, the page that's about both would be the ideal. Um, and so, uh, most of the people can't get links. If you're a plumber, it's hard to get links from other plumber sites. Uh, so, but you certainly know plenty of people in your cities. And so the first thing I would say is who are friendly people, you know, with websites about your city or about your topic and get links from them, ask them for a link. Uh, Hey, can you link to my Perth page or something? And then, What about your vendors and partners? So, uh, any of those, you know, if you're buying a lot of parts from someone, they should be like, Hey man, can you get a link on your damn site to me? I'm buying $20,000 of parts every month from you. Um, and then any local associations you're part of, uh, it's, it's kind of a stereotypical thing, but yeah, if you're in a local church group, make sure they have a link to your website on the church website. If you're in a, um, Chamber of Commerce business group, make sure they link to your website. Those are all the low-hanging fruit, easy things, or relatively easy things. Some goofy things you can do. This actually worked really well for some local clients. I've advised some local businesses now and then here. I'm like, hey, throw an event. Like, just throw an event, and you'll get links from the local newspaper and all that kind of stuff, or the local event sites and things like that. Those are relatively easy. Uh, for a realtor, I told her to give away moving boxes and put it up on Craig's list and next door and Facebook and say, Hey, come on down. I've got a lot of moving boxes. I can't tell you how many links she got out of that. And how many she got customers out of it because people were moving in moving boxes. Right. And, um, and everyone wants free moving boxes. It's just one of those weird things that no one has enough of. Oh, yeah.

MICHAEL: Your life is about boxes when you're moving house.

ANDREW: Yeah. Yeah. And so once you've exhausted those kind of relatively easy things, or in the case of most businesses, they don't want to even do that because they're too busy. Um, that's when you bring in a, uh, a company like ours or someone who likes doing this stuff. And that, and then, you know, we have a team of people who do nothing but this stuff and now, you know, but you have to pay for it. That's the challenge. And links are always the hardest thing to justify paying for it. Cause you don't really know what you're getting. Right. Like, okay, Hey, we got you 10 links this month. You're like, that's great. Like, what is that doing for me? Like, well, I can't really tell you, but I can tell you that, um, in the long run clients who get links and publish content tend to do a lot better than those that don't. That's what it's getting. Yeah. Um, so that's another, another reason why SEO is just kind of a, can be a tricky business to sell.

MICHAEL: It can be. It's very much sort of, here's a plan. It's probably going to work based on what we know has worked in the past, but everything's a bit different and I can't tell you how long it will take, but you need to trust in the process.

ANDREW: It's a tough sell. Yeah. I was like, Hey, you know, when you first bought like local coupons, you know, you probably were taking a risk on that too. Right. And where you first bought Google ads, like you were the challenge. This is what I think every business gets is Google ads are not getting any cheaper.

INTRO: Mm.

ANDREW: And so if I can, if, if, if you can spend some money with a guy like me and I can basically reduce your Google ad costs by some percentage, it suddenly becomes worth it because now you're saving X dollars every month.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep. Absolutely. Well, this has been an awesome chat. Really enjoyed it. Um, I like to wrap things up by asking every guest the same three questions just to see how everyone responds to it. And we get some pretty interesting answers. Um, So the first one is, what do you think is the most underrated thing in SEO?

ANDREW: Underrated thing in SEO? Curiosity.

MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah.

ANDREW: I like it. Like I, um, SEO is just like detective work for the most part. And also a, a tolerance for really ridiculous things, right? Cause you're basically at war with a machine that is, um, You think it's really smart, and it is really smart, but it's also really stupid. It does some really stupid things. Every client, there are edge cases of like, I don't know why Google's showing a piece of pizza instead of a car for your Google My Business page. How do we solve that? I think you have to have both an endless amount of curiosity and an endless amount of capacity for really ridiculous things.

MICHAEL: I love that answer. That's a great answer. Yeah, great. Totally agree. Yeah. All right. Well, on the inverse of that, what do you think is the biggest myth in SEO?

ANDREW: Biggest myth? God, there's so many. The biggest myth in SEO. Oh, God, I should have a really I should I should have like a Oh, yeah, it's this is bullshit. I don't know if this is the biggest myth. I People every week, I feel like someone's asking me if they should tag their images with location information in it and somehow that'll magically make them rank well.

MICHAEL: Yeah. That was a big one for a while there, like a couple of years ago, wasn't it? Yeah.

ANDREW: Okay. I agree with that. It's not a bad thing to do, but it's a waste of time.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. I agree with that. Okay. Well, the last question in the SEO world, we love our tools. Always wanting new tools, software, trying new things. But if you had to really whittle it down to three to get the job done every day, what would you be going for? Google.

ANDREW: Okay. Google search console. And, um, well, okay, this is going to be super self-serving. It's, um, a tool that we've built for ourselves. Um, so can I, can I do some shameless self-promotion?

MICHAEL: Go for it. I'm actually keen to hear about the tool a little more.

ANDREW: So we have a team of software developers who have been building us productivity tools for our team. And we've built essentially a tool to do a lot of, like all these, there's a lot of great SEO tools and they all like give you a mountain of data that you need to kind of export and make sense of. And we think there's a lot of opportunity in between that exporting and making sense of it and then taking action. And so we've been building tools for ourselves to kind of help us take action, make more sense of the data. So as an example, uh, we use Slack and so we've built a tool for ourselves in Slack or do you know what a Google my business post is?

MICHAEL: Yes.

ANDREW: Yep. So we have a client that has 5,000 locations. It's kind of hard to do, a post for each location manually. So we just upload a CSV through Slack, enter the domain name, and it posts it automatically to 5,000 locations. Nice. So we've been building a lot of tools for ourselves like that. And in October, November, we're going to roll out a SaaS version of it so that other SEOs can try it. So stay tuned. uh, follow my Twitter account, look at local SEO guide, and hopefully sometime in October, November, I'll be like, we have it. It's here. Um, in fact, you, you can actually, um, you can actually sign up for the beta, even though there's nothing to sign up for. Let me get you a link. Um, let me see if I can find it. Um, it's called squirrel. S Q U R. Um, S Q E R. I can't even spell it. We need a better name. It's called Squirrel, S-Q-U-E-R-Y-L. Okay. Yep. And let's see, do I have a, do we have a chat thing I can share in this or no?

MICHAEL: Um, it's a good question. I've not used a chat in here before. Um, but you know what? We'll put it in the show notes. Okay. And, um, I think as well, if people want to connect with you after the show, you mentioned Twitter.

ANDREW: Um, is there anywhere else that should go? At local SEO guide is probably the best way on LinkedIn. You can just look me up. Um, if you connect with me on LinkedIn, I apologize. I post, SEO videos like every other day there. So if you don't want to be spammed by my little SEO videos, then don't connect with me, but I'm happy to connect with you. And yeah, those are the best places. Or you can just go to localseoguide.com and hit the contact form.

MICHAEL: Okay, awesome. We'll put a link to Squirrel as well in the show notes. But Andrew, it's been awesome chatting with you today. Really appreciate it. And thanks for coming on the show.

ANDREW: Thanks for having me, Mike. I enjoyed the conversation.

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