I just got back from fantastic trip LocalU in Nashville, where I asked some of the smartest local search experts to share their best quick tips. In this episode of Local Search Tuesdays, I’m bringing you the highlights so you can pick up a few new tricks to improve your digital marketing. Check it out!

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. This week, I’ve got some awesome tips to share with you from the speakers and experts at LocalU in Nashville last week!

I hopped a plane to Nashville last week to play board games with Joy Hawkins, and there just happened to be a LocalU conference at the same time. As always, I grabbed my camera and microphone and asked the speakers and experts to share one quick tip to help digital marketers be better at their jobs. I was the emcee for the conference, so I didn’t have enough time to get to all the speakers, and even worse… I had a microphone problem and couldn’t use four of the tips. But, I still got some good ones, check ‘em out:

Andy Crestodina:

Search was about visibility, is about visibility. But AI is a bit different, the way people use it, they're not just looking for options, they're looking for recommendations. AI is really about training the model to be a sales rep for your brand. And to do that because it's training on your website, pack your site with supportive evidence, proof points, outcomes, testimonials, data. That is how you're going to get AI to love you and get relevant in the sort of word of mouth. It's like word of mouth, word of an artificial mouth. That's my top tip for being recommended by AI.

Andy Simpson:

Okay, so my SEO AI Google tip is play with all the things. Google is introducing in its labs, like, um, deep research, audio overviews. Sign up, go to Google Labs and sign up for all the things 'cause it's these tools that are gonna be introduced into AI mode, into AI overviews, and it's things you're gonna see in the future. So don't be surprised when you see 'em in six months and go, "Oh, I didn't know about this." Start playing with the things that Google is in, in beta and introducing to users. That's my tip. Play with all the things.

Cindy Krum:

Hey everybody, today we're at Local U and I gave a presentation about optimizing TikTok. TikTok is a fun kind of thing. You can use your SEO skills to optimize with, but it's a little bit different because you're optimizing for two things. People do search in TikTok, but then you're also optimizing to try and get in individual people's feeds. So the main things to remember are, uh, engagement is key. So post three to five times a week, don't post things that are too long. Like it could be as short as 15 seconds. That's a great amount of time. Get your hook in the first three seconds and that'll keep people like engaged and stay.

The longer they stay the better. And then you wanna get them, encourage them to comment or to engage somehow. Like, share, comment, look at your profile. All of those things are engagement stats that help. And then the other thing from a more traditional SEO perspective, know is the text in your transcripts or your close, your captions matter text on the screen matter. And even if you don't do captions, um, TikTok is listening and so you have to say your keywords as well. So optimize in all of those places, including the title of the video, of course, and the description. Uh, and then you should be in a really good spot.

Joy Hawkins:

If your business has a bad Reddit thread ranking on Google when you search for your business name plus reviews. The best way to get rid of that is to go do what's called an AMA thread on Reddit. AMA stands for Ask Me Anything. And it's a format of content on Reddit that does really well. It's bound to get tons of comment, tons of engagement, and that is the kind of thing that Google looks for when it comes to ranking Reddit threads. So the idea is to find a thread on Reddit that you can create that will be more engaging and have more user signals than the one that's currently ranking so that you can displace it.

Paul Andrew De Vera:

Hey, what's up? I'm here at Local U Nashville. Today I actually listened to Joy's presentation and I learned something I could possibly apply to video. Um, she was talking about AMAs on Reddit, right? And to get the most engagement, this title is AMAs. I'm think like why not do this for YouTube videos, right? Title your YouTube videos as an AMA in it and get more engagement. Get more people coming in, ask questions on the live interviews.

Brad Wetherall:

Alright, so the, uh, the tip that I have for you today is that did you know that there is a method of verification called manual verification? And you probably don't know because it's hidden. The way that you find it is first you have to attempt video verification and then on, on the support website, you go through the verification workflow. And once you get to the end of that workflow, at the bottom of the the screen, it will say, send feedback. That's how you know that you haven't completed video verification. If you go through video verification for the first time and you come back to that, it changes to, uh, contact support. That link takes you to a hidden form that allows you to upload your documents and complete your verification manually. Enjoy.

Thanks for sticking around to watch all the tips! 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 ‘cause you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.