I recently flew to Germany to present on Local SEO at SMX Munich, sharing expert strategies to help businesses dominate local search results. In this presentation, I will dive into key tactics like optimizing Google My Business, using local keywords and leveraging customer reviews to improve visibility. Sit back and relax, and get ready to learn something.

Video Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I've got a treat for you. I'm sharing my entire presentation from last week's SMX Munich.

I was lucky enough to be invited back to Germany for SMX Munich. I've spoken at this event a few times in the past and was even the opening keynote a few years before COVID. It's always a stellar event, and Munich is such an awesome city. I presented on a new topic this time, so I wanted to share the presentation with you in this week's episode. Kick back and get comfy, this episode will be a bit longer than usual.

Using UGC from your GBP to make your site stand out.

Probably already know who I am because you're watching this on my video series, but in case it's the first time you've ever watched, I'm Greg Ifard. I'm the COO at SearchLab, and I'm lucky enough to get to travel and speak at a lot of conferences. I've also got a weekly video series. Definitely check it out.

It's this video you're watching right now, but usually it's short three to five minute clips on specific local SEO tactics that will help you gain better visibility. And this is a fun picture of me speaking at a conference a few years ago. I'm lucky enough to get to speak at these conferences all over the world like this one in Munich, Germany. But, unfortunately, a lot of the conferences that I attend or, you know, speak at, a lot of these conferences will put salespeople on stage, and they're not that great at public speaking.

And they'll stand locked behind the podium, and they won't move, and they'll talk quietly and quickly, and it's hard to follow. And even worse, they don't typically know how to put slides together, and they don't use any designers. So it's just plain white background and black aerial font, and they pack every slide with bullet points, and they just read bullet points the entire time. And there's actually scientific studies that have been done that prove that bullet points kill kittens.

So we're gonna keep all the kitties safe today, and we're not gonna kill any kittens. And you saw the reference there at the beginning. I now have thirty different movies tattooed on my body. I'm obsessed with movies.

I was even a film major back in college. So every time I do a presentation, there's a movie theme. So I can share my love of movies along with my love of digital marketing. And, typically, I only go back and include one movie for every year in the last fifty years.

But this time, we're going back fifty seven years because, hey, if we're doing sci fi, we gotta get all the cap or all can't even talk today. Gotta get all of the Planet of the Apes movies in there. So let's kick this off. Are you watching this presentation because you need a hand with local SEO?

Are you spending too much time looking up at your competitors that rank higher in local search results?

Local search is a pretty tough puzzle to crack when there's a lot of moving pieces.

But you can't really try to float along with minimal effort because if you do, your business is gonna be virtually invisible in online search results, and that means you'll be basically invisible to potential customers because you're blending into the background. But don't lose your head. I'm here today to help you. I'm gonna give you some tips that will really help as opposed to most of the stuff that you hear in the giant pile of crap that's out there on the Internet. It's almost like I'm giving you a cheat code so you can see the matrix behind Google's algorithm. Now everybody always talks about how your Google business profile is your new home page, and it's the key to your local SEO strategy because it's the first impression that you make with anyone who finds you online, and properly optimizing helps you show up better and map pack results and all that kind of stuff, but everything is always talking about how you need to optimize, optimize, optimize.

Like, you gotta have the right categories. You gotta have the right hours listed. You gotta have quality photos uploaded. You need to do Google posts to stand out. You gotta get more reviews from customers. You gotta answer all your reviews. You gotta answer questions in the q and a section, and sometimes you're even told to load your own questions into the q and a section.

But nobody really ever talks about using the user generated content from your reviews and your q and a section in your Google Business Profile to improve your website.

The biggest problem is that business owners and most marketers almost always have blinders on because, you know, we know everything about what we do.

Whether you're working on a client site or whether it's your business or you're in house working on the website, you know everything about the business. You know everything about the website.

But if we go and use this user generated content, it helps us remove those blinders and broaden our point of view.

You really got to think about the noob experience.

I like telling people to take the noob test.

Think about what it's like for someone who's never bought that product or service before to find the answers to their questions on your site.

Customers don't really care about the marketing bullshit that you put on the site.

You have to remember that in pretty much every situation, customers have a problem, and they're looking for a solution.

And part of finding the solution to that problem is figuring out which business that they're going to purchase the solution from.

So why wouldn't we be paying attention to the way that people, our customers, are talking about us in the real world? And I'm really surprised that we haven't heard more about the super important concept of information gain that Google has been talking about. It's essentially a way to measure how unique your content is compared to all of the other content that's about the same topic, and it's massively important in today's digital marketing world, especially with the deluge of just ridiculously awful AI generated content. Information gain is the way that you're going to win moving forward because you've got to stand out from the sea of competitors.

But you also need to make sure that you're offering an authentic experience on your website that matches the reality of doing business with you. So you've gotta share helpful information on your site that your competitors don't have on their sites. And the benefits of this aren't just limited to optimizing to show up better in search results. Information gain also helps improve the user experience on your site, and it will increase your conversion rate.

So use the UGC from your GBP to help match your website language to the language that customers use so that you have that intent match. Because if your content matches customer search intent, you'll show up in the search results, and you'll get traffic.

And, hopefully, that means you'll get some conversions too.

And if your site experience matches the reality of doing business with you, that means more people are gonna find you and more people are gonna like you. So why not turn to your customers and see how they're talking about you?

This is where UGC from your GBP comes into play.

Reviews and questions and answers are a literal gold mine of helpful information.

You wanna look at the reviews and the questions and find those patterns, find those trends, find the things that people are saying over and over again.

Figure out how customers are talking about your business. Look for those phrases or those ideas or those concepts that are continually mentioned over and over again, but you also wanna look for pain points. Is there something that is a problem that people mention over and over again? And look for the things that customers are celebrating.

Because if it's a good review, they're probably happy about something. What made them happy?

Or look to see if they're sharing helpful tips that might be a good thing for your future potential customers to see. Take all of that and use that language on your site to improve the content on your site.

Don't ignore those bad reviews, though. Don't think that I'm only talking about the positive things because reviews provide powerful, powerful insights that show you what the actual customer experience was, and it's typically an unfiltered view.

The questions in the q and a section are more likely gonna come from potential customers. So your reviews are more people that have already done business with you. Questions tend to be more people that haven't done business with you yet. Now when you go and look to see if this language is on your site, you may already have that content on your site. It just might be buried, and it takes fifteen clicks to find it. So if that's the case, realize that you need to surface this content a little bit quickly a little bit more quickly and a little bit e more easily for your customers. So just make that content easier to find.

Add it to the main menu. Add callouts to different pages where it makes sense. Do whatever you can to make it easier for customers to find that information. And if you don't have those answers on your site, just add the content to your site. It improves your site. Now use your best judgment, though. It's not always going to be text content.

You might fill that content hole with a standard page of content like a a landing page or blog post, or you may just change the architecture of your site and bump it up higher in the menu or the submenu or add a widget that makes it easier for people to find that page. You don't even have to change where it is in the architecture. Or maybe it is just updating your menu, or maybe creating an image or an infographic or a video would be the better content solution to match customer intent for that particular concept or question.

So update your process.

Start paying attention on a regular basis to the reviews that you get and the q and a questions that you get and the answers that people supply to the questions on your Google Business Profile. And, sure, we all pay attention to our reviews anyway, but I'm talking about paying attention to the patterns, not just, oh, hey. I got a review, and I need to leave an answer. Now you can look for notifications in the menu icons in the new in search editing experience for your business profile. So when you log in, if you see the little red dot next to reviews or q and a, that means there is something new there that needs your attention. But, typically, I think it's a lot easier if you use some sort of third party monitoring tool that keeps an eye on these reviews and questions and answers for you.

Honestly, the best thing out there, in my opinion, is a tool called Places Scout. You can do tons of stuff with this tool, but the best part about it that we really like is the monitoring of your GBP and your reviews and Q and A specifically. You can customize what you wanna monitor, and you can even get daily emails, and you can customize what's in the email. So it could just be an alert, and then you go log in to the platform and handle it there.

You can actually copy all of the text from the review or the question into the email and have it just sent to your inbox. It's a really, really amazing platform. You should check it out. But monitoring the reviews and questions and answers is really only the basic first step that you take.

It just lets you know about the new stuff that shows up, but what if you already have a lot there. To do a full analysis of what's going on, you're gonna need to use some sort of a third party reputation management tool or local SEO tool that will allow you to download all of the reviews that you have and all of the questions and all of the answers to those questions.

And what do you do?

Heck, man. Use ChatGPT. Super easy. Upload that list to ChatGPT and ask it to sort the reviews in the buckets that match by concept and ask it to sort the questions and answers into topic and concept buckets as well. Because ChatGPT and all the LLMs are really excellent at identifying patterns. And, sure, it's pretty easy to find the patterns on your own if you don't wanna use ChatGPT.

Just go search for your business on Google Maps, Click on reviews, and then you can look at the keyword filter widget.

And I kinda like doing this because you can see how Google groups things together, and that gives you some insight. But, yeah, you wanna do this on Google Maps, not on your Google Business Profile because you get better information. Because if you click on reviews on your Google Business Profile, you'll just see a few of the keyword filters, and then you have to click to expand to see them all. So you'll still get them, but there's an extra click.

But if you go in on maps, they're all listed, and you can see everything really quickly. But more importantly, the reason that you wanna do it on maps is there's a cool little bonus where you go into maps, you click the reviews, and then you click the little icon at the top with the magnifying glass, and it opens up a box. And you can search for your own keywords in the reviews instead of only looking at the keyword filters that Google populates for you. It's really powerful.

But I think you need to see some real world examples to really understand the concepts here. So let's look at some real world stuff.

As you're looking for patterns, you wanna look for things that jump out that are unique, that help you stand out from the competition, like this coffee shop in Amsterdam that has a hundred and four reviews that mention the incredibly friendly cat that just hangs out at the coffee shop.

That's like the second most mentioned thing in all of their reviews out of fifteen hundred reviews, yet there's nothing on the website about the friendly cat even though everyone raves about it. And how many people would decide to go to that coffee shop if they knew there was a friendly cat?

Or this restaurant that's got fourteen hundred positive reviews about brunch, and you really have to dig through the website to even see that they serve brunch.

So that's pretty problematic.

Disney World gets tons of questions on the q and a section about bringing in your own food. Can you bring in outside food? Can I bring value vanilla pudding cups? Like, I guess you would really have to get that brand mention in there.

Right? Or can I take packed food? Can I take candy? Well, yeah, you can. But, again, you have to click through a million times to find the random section of FAQs on the Disney site that lets you know, hey.

I can bring food in, and it's pretty important all the parents that take their kids there. And I work with a lot of car dealerships because for fourteen years of my career, I worked at agencies that only worked with car dealerships.

And we see lots of questions coming in. Like, for this one, hey. They're asking about down payments.

Or this one, asking if you've got bad credit and you can still get financed at this dealership.

Well, you know, you can ignore the obviously dumb questions when you see them. Like, if you get a question that's like, hey. What time do you open? Well, hey. It's listed on my website very clearly on a bunch of pages. It's also right there in the Google business profile, like, less than an inch away from where you have to click the button. So, yeah, just ignore those.

And here's a good one. So one of our clients is a world famous pizza place in Chicago. In fact, it is the best pizza place in the entire world.

You could tell me that you've got a better place, and I will tell you you need to go here. And afterwards, you will call me up and say, you know what?

You were right on stage in Munich. This is the best pizza in the world. But as we were working with this client, we started to see a lot of questions about shipping frozen pizzas popping up during COVID because people couldn't go out during COVID because of the lockdowns, and they wanted to see if they could get their pizzas shipped to them frozen.

And then we see all these questions. Do you ship? Do you ship long distance? We ship here.

Do you ship here? We saw a lot of questions popping up about reservations once we came back from COVID. So everyone was asking, do you need reservations? Do we have a hard time finding tables?

So all we did, we made a couple of easy updates to the above the fold content on the home page. We added the button that's right there front and center that says ship frozen pizza.

And we already had a reserve a table button there, but now we added the little callout that says reservations are strongly recommended.

And that little callout really draws your eyes. When you land here, that darker blue area in the arrow draws your attention to the reserve a table button. So it's improving the experience for customers because we're answering those questions and giving them what they need so that we're matching their intent. And you can get even more advanced by looking at the reviews and q and a on your competitors' Google Business Profiles.

Look for the good things that people are saying about your competitors and make sure you use that same language on your site too so that people know you're amazing. And specifically look for the pain points that people are complaining about, and you can add content to your site to let people know that that will not be the experience if they do business with you. And you don't even need to mention the competitor's name. You can just say, hey.

We don't do things like this. For an example, check out the reviews for the Walmart by my office, and Walmart's basically the devil, and it's always a fun place to go if you're wanting to find some fun reviews.

But like this one, multiple reviews from the service department talk about customer service, and this Ordrich person actually had four or five reviews listing their name as being rude.

Or these reviews for a taco stand in California where the entire thing complains about customer service and how nearly every review they've gotten for years has said that they're rude and they spend time playing on the phone and not talking to customers and that if you bring it up to the owner that you got bad customer service, he's combative and attacks you.

Easy to come back on your own site and say, hey. We're a taco stand that cares about customer service and treating our customers right. You don't have to call them out by name, but anyone searching around is probably gonna know what you're talking about, and that's gonna attract more customers. So remember, information gain is the key to future success.

So use the user generated content from both your own Google business profile and your competitors so that you can create better content on your own website. You're gonna win in the search results, and you're gonna win with your customers.

Now I went through that really quickly in the interest of saving some time since this wasn't a live presentation. Hopefully, no one's brain exploded.

And for those of you that haven't seen scanners, the guy's brain literally explodes.

The truth is out there about how to use user generated content to improve your website. I've hopefully given you the key to success in the future so that you can break out of your shells and write better content on your site so that your sites will live long and prosper.

That was using UGC from your GBP to make your site stand out. If you've got any questions, please shoot me an email. I'd be happy to answer them. Or if you'd like a copy of the slides, I'll shoot you a PDF.

You probably wanna get them because at the end, there is a list of all of the movies in order of release date. Thanks for watching.

Thanks for sticking around to watch the whole presentation. That's definitely all the time we have left for this week's episode, so you know what that means. Put your hand on the screen right here.

We totally just high fived because you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.