Melanie
Welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast for all decision makers and action takers. Take it away, Esther.
Esther
Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today, we're joined by Sam Sarsten, founder of Thencan Designs Local SEO expert from Bend, Oregon. Welcome, Sam.
Sam
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's an honor to be here.
Esther
It's so good to have you with us because Local SEO is one of those topics that we always get asked about, and it's one of those things that always seems to be changing and they're changing the goalposts on. So we're here with Sam to answer all the questions that our audience has. So first of all, Sam, how How did you get interested in Local SEO?
Sam
It was the most backward way possible. How much time do I have? The show is only 20 minutes. I'll try to be short.
Esther
20 minutes, yeah.
Sam
Essentially, I was around 2020ish I was starting to make a career change and get my values aligned, the total millennial existential crisis. I realized that service is my primary core of value, so I wanted to figure out a way to help people. I've always been interested in technology, so I was I was actually learning how to code. I was this close to going back to school for computer science. Thank goodness I didn't because OpenAI has taken all those jobs. But as I was doing that, somebody reached out to me to build a WordPress website. I didn't even realize that WordPress was still a thing. This was near the end of 2022. It was way easier than coding from scratch. Surprise, surprise. And so I started to go down some rabbit holes, took some courses, joined a community, filed an LLC to get a business going over here in the States. In May of 2023, I left my job and went all in and started showing to networking events and said, I build websites for small businesses.
Everybody was like, Cool. So does SquareSpace. How do I rank higher on Google? Once I got out of the fetal position on the ground, I said, You know what? I'm going to try to figure this SEO thing out because that's how you rank higher on Google. Over time, I realized there's different flavors of Google. There's national SEO, there's e-commerce SEO, SaaS SEO. But I really found for my business, I wanted to rank in Central Oregon where I'm located. That's what I started to work on first, started to do it for the first couple of website clients that I had, and it was working. It was easier than some of the other flavors of SEO. I was like, All right, I'm going to do this. I've been really all in on this service for the last year, really growing my business, have a little team now, and just trying to keep consuming knowledge. One of my core values a little farther down the list after service is lifelong learner. I to learn new things, and SEO is one of those things that's constantly changing.
Esther
Constantly.
Sam
Yeah. I love just digging in and seeing the little tweaks and changes and opportunities. And I feel like we got two choices in this life. We can stay complacent and do this. People that are listening, my hand's going down, or we could keep growing and keep expanding. That's the path I'm hoping to choose. That's how I got an SEO. I thought I was going to code, and now I'm trying to help people rank higher on Google.
Esther
Brilliant.
Melanie
I think we should do a competition on how many times Sam said SEO in that first question.
Sam
I'm trying to help us rank in the podcast SEO.
Melanie
How we came across Sam is interesting because Sam has made himself quite well known online because of his SEO and because of his prolific video creation, talking about a certain areas that I'm personally very interested in and quite invested in. He is my teacher in Google Business Profile. I came across your profile whilst I was doing a search when I wanted to bone up on the topic, and you ranked first in every search I did. It must be good at a thing. Yeah, it must be, especially as you're all the way over in the It was hardly like a local thing. You now do that for other people, don't you? You show people how to do it, and you also manage local SEO of all types for them. Give us a list of the type of SEO styles that you perform for your customers.
Sam
I would say our bread and butter package, I like to call it the SEO TLC plan. TLC stands for Traffic, Leads and Clients because that's what we all want more of. A little fun play on that. But the main thing we do with that package is we really focus on what's most important for local SEO. And so what's most important, it comes down to three things: Google Business Profiles, which I know we're going to talk a lot more about today, your website, telling Google what you do and where you do it on your website. And then the last thing is authority. Now, I know this is a marketing podcast. You talk a lot about social media, and there's this whole concept of becoming a thought leader and things like that. Hopefully, I'm working on that for local SEO on YouTube. But this authority is different. The way Google thinks of authority is like other websites pointing to your website. The game's changed. 10, 15 years ago, it was all about quantity, and that's why you can still go on some of those marketplace websites and buy a ton of those links for $10. But here's the thing, that doesn't work anymore. The algorithm has gotten complicated, but it's really important for local SEO to get the right signals pointing back to your website to say, this is where we do this, so these local references, and then also this is what we do, so these industry-specific references. You guys have a whole episode about backlink, so we don't need to talk about that today. But that's what I'm talking about. So our main package is we focus on those three things: GBP, website, and building authority.
Esther
Brilliant. And I love your TLC, your new take on TLC. So we're calling them flavors of SEO. It's almost like, which one's strawberry? Which is your favorite one at the top of the list. But yes, we're going to talk about GBP, not Great British Pounds, but Google Business Profile, because, again, all of these acronyms have been around for years meaning something different. Like the hashtag used to be the pound symbol and used to stand for number and now it's changed. So with all of these new acronyms and things like GBP, and how do we get the algorithm to change it from thinking that we're talking about Great British Pounds to Google business profile? I keep going to call it by the old name. That's how long ago I started using Google business profile. So that's why I slow it before I get there. But Google business profile has been known to be very powerful because Google itself is very powerful. So why aren't more people using the power of Google Business Profile?
Sam
Good question. Yeah, that's been a question that I've had the whole time. Once I realized the GBP had nothing to do with Great Britain, that it's not the Google My business anymore, I was like, whoa, this free tool isn't a valuable resource, especially for the small business owners that are trying to DIY their boosting their online presence. It's an invaluable tool, and it's fairly easy to use. It's got Google's algorithm behind it, so there's some things that are a little tricky, but the user interface isn't that hard to figure out. So being able to fill in the basics seems like it's pretty easy. And yet every week, I'm almost flabbergasted I meet this small business owner that's so savvy. They have all these things figured out about their business, and they either don't have their Google business profile set up or they have one review on it from four years ago. And I'm like, what are you doing? And I think, I don't know what it is, but it also brings me back to before I started doing this because I didn't come from a marketing background. So I would have never known that the little rectangles by the map when I search blank near me, and it could be something as simple as when you get a haircut, right? You search for haircuts near me or fill in your city and your area. That little map shows up. I like to call it the map pack. There's usually three results next to it. Those little rectangles are intimately connected to your Google business profile. That's essentially your Google Business Profile. But I didn't know that. I didn't know that's what that was called. I've actually seen this recently with one of my clients. He got one of those emails. It seemed a little fishy, but he said he was bored So I was like, I responded to the guy, and he was talking about Google Maps SEO. And my client reached out concerned because he's like, Are we focusing on Google Maps SEO? And so it's funny that it has different names, but that's really what local SEO is, is Google Maps SEO, but people confuse it sometimes. They're like,oh, there's the map. So this is Google, and I want to rank higher. And SEO, Search Engine Optimization, that's ranking higher. So that's Google Maps SEO. So I think it's easy for people to confused because it doesn't say these rectangles are Google business profiles, and so they don't really put two and two together. Here we are, to yell it loudly from the rooftops, like those little rectangles are the prime real estate if you serve local customers, clients, patience, it doesn't matter. You want to try to show up there.
Melanie
When it comes down to Google Business Profile in its essence, I think a lot of people don't appreciate that it's actually a social profile. I think, and I was quite ignorant about it myself. It's a revelation to everybody, I'm sure. But I think a lot of people think it's somebody else's job. It's the website designer's job to set up the Google business profile and it's not yours. I suppose there's a bit of an element of truth to that because of the map. If you do have a local service area or you have a shop or something like that, then it's worth obviously putting the map on your website. But do you think people are now changing their mind on how they're going to be using this now? Are you getting better educated to do it?
Sam
I think people are recognizing more and more the value of it. Business owners seem to be getting more and more savvy about the tech stuff, especially when I work with more business owners that are millennial or below, they've already got a website and they whip something up pretty quickly. They're like, I watched 20, 30 hours of YouTube videos and I just got this thing busted out. I'm like, whoa, good for you. And so I think they're starting to realize, okay, the website is important, so I'm going to get something slapped together, even if it's not perfect. And then now I'm recognizing that I need to show up higher, and then they start to figure out like, okay, the Google business profile is important. But historically, it hasn't been It's not as important. There were other signals that Google was measuring at a higher rate because it wasn't as good a platform as it is now. I think we might notice this when we're maybe looking for food and it's like, oh, the menu is actually there now, and there's pictures of the inside, and there's these reviews. It felt like for a while we were all using Yelp, but now it's like most of the time I look for a restaurant, I just use Google. Even back in, say, 2021, there were other signals that were more important. And so I think people were web designers for more just setting this up just to have it up there. And then they were like, well, should I do anything with this? And they're like, no, because it wasn't as important. But that importance factor has gone up every year. And so now, like you said, it's almost like a full fledged social media profile. Not that you have to post on it every day, but you can post these little updates, and there's some research that shows that doing that's good. But the main reason why I think that it's going to continue to turn up an importance is because we're right on this precipice of Google trying to incorporate more and more AI into its search results. They even tested that. Now they have AI overviews. If you ask Google a question, you'll get an AI overview answer. The test version of that, the beta was called SGE, Search Generative Experience. For local searches, they were showing this local panel. So the AI was creating what really looked like a map pack. And when they finally launched AI Overviews in the US, US, they got rid of that because they were like, oh, the map pack's fine.
But they've hinted some other things that look interesting, like having the results, like these little blocks that come down that are generated by AI. So if you search more of a longer tail keyword into the search thing. You don't just search for landscapers near me. You say landscapers near me that specialize in hedges or something like that. It'll start giving you results that are more tailored to that longer search. And the more we use stuff like ChatGPT, we might start typing into search boxes. So that was a long-winded answer of it was less important, now it's really important. And it's probably going to get more important because where is Google going to pull that AI information from? Well, probably your website. They're probably going to still look at authority. But they have this primary data source of local business information, and it's the Google Business Profile.
Esther
Okay, so at the time of this recording, recently, there have been scares going around in regards to Google business profile, profiles that are being removed. And this is Especially, this is coming from people that we would talk to who are in service-based businesses and maybe working from home, doing those service-based businesses. Maybe they're not customer-facing or not getting customers in through the door physically. Is there a danger that these profiles can disappear from people who don't rent an office and pay money to somebody else to run, say, a digital marketing agency? Or is it something that's a glitch or a blip in the system? Because you're saying that it's going to be more and more important, but if not everybody has access to it, then what's going to happen?
Sam
Well, I don't work for Google, so I have no official statements on behalf of Google. No, I'm coming after you. I don't know. Well, one of the reasons why it's becoming more important, I think, over the last couple of years is since COVID, they've really relaxed their restrictions. It used to almost only be for places with physical locations. In some map platforms are still like that, like Apple Maps. I can't get a pin for Apple Maps because I don't have a physical location. I work from my home. I'm no longer in the corner of my bedroom, which is nice, but it's still my house where I work. And a lot of people are like that. Even service-based businesses, you think about your local roofer, they're usually starting with a truck out of their house. They don't need a physical location. And so Google recognized that, especially during COVID, where people were forced to work from home. And so now they've changed their verification process to make it so they can still make sure that the businesses out there are legitimate, but make it easier for these home-based businesses to still work. And so the main thing that I think you need to worry about is, are you following the rules? If you serve clients, if you have a physical location, you pretty much can always have a Google business profile. So check that one-off the list. If you serve clients either at their location or at a neutral location, you're probably okay. You should be okay in that one. If you only serve people online, online, then you actually don't qualify for a Google business profile. And another thing to think about, too, is the GBP is really just for local. I have a lot of people that could do both. It's like a hybrid SEO approach. You guys can do Melanie could do social media training with somebody in her town and also all of Ireland and also probably all over the world. But the GBP is going to be mostly for right there. And so I always try to remind clients, prospects, people I come across randomly on the internet and be like, hey, GBP is just for local. And so really try to focus on that. Sometimes people stretch their service area too thin, and that can show some red flags. But you're going back to the verification process, predominantly Now, it's a video verification for new businesses. You just got to make sure. You usually say, get your ducks in a row, but I went to a school where beavers were the mascot, so I say we got to get your beavers in a row first because the ducks are the other guys down the road, so we don't like those ducks. But anyway, you get your beavers in a row, you record the video, and you're usually good. But you also have to do Google only wants legitimate businesses. You got to make sure you got your paperwork, you got to show certain things. If you get stuck on that, there's a look up Google Business Profile verification video and scroll down until you see my face. There's a nice video by me that walks you through all the steps so that way you can get verified. But I've seen a lot of home-based businesses. I have had some troubles, but once they get past the video verification, then Google's like, Oh, you're legit, which is we want that. We wanted to only have legitimate businesses because spammers will take over that in a heartbeat if they make it easier. Is it annoying? Yes. Is it actually a good thing, unfortunately, yes.
Melanie
Okay. Well, that does make a lot of sense. I can hear people going, Okay, so it's really good for SEO. It's free, it's available, accessible, it's got AI in it. It's something else that we have to prepare content for, something else we have to schedule. Is this going to make our scheduling tools more expensive because it's another platform? Which platforms can we actually schedule on? Because I struggled to find any that did until I met Sam. How can we schedule to Google Business Profile and make this ordeal that much more palatable for our listeners?
Sam
Yeah. So I think one thing that's important to mention before we talk about how to schedule these updates is that when it comes to the hierarchy of what's most important for your GBP, this is actually really, really low. So I would say that making sure you have the right primary category, and that's as simple as looking at your competitors, and there's tools to help you do that, making sure you have all of your secondary categories in, making sure that you filled out your profile completely. And then really, the main activity you should be doing on a week to week, month to month basis is getting more high quality reviews, trying to get people to write more about the services you do, and particularly if you're a home service business, getting them to mention where they provided that service, that's a way to really expand your reach, because usually you just show up near your pin. And so that's one way to expand it. And even for something like what you do, Melanie, or what I do, just having to mention the city where they're at, that can be helpful. I would say, priority list, one, you got to get it optimized in the early days. You got to get it dialed in. Two, you want to keep getting reviews. Then three, that's where we can come into doing things like regularly posting photos, checking that little Q&A area. Then what you're talking about is scheduling updates. This isn't Instagram. You don't have to make a post every week. You could take maybe your post from the week, give it to ChatGPT and say, amalgamate this into one post that's targeting this service that my business does. Please take out all the hashtags and emojis or pound signs or whatever you want to call them. And then just take that and then post it with a really basic photo that you either steal from your website or you put together in Canva, and that's it. Because a lot of the research shows that humans don't look at this. Now, if they do, that's good because a lot of the recent findings from Google's legal troubles over here in the States show that Chrome is collecting a lot of data on us as we use it. And so if people are interacting with your profile, there's probably a really good chance that that will help. And so I think that's more for specific industries. If you're doing new stuff all the time, people might interact with that more. But if you're a plumber or something like that, you're mostly doing it to tell the algorithm about the services you provide and where you do it. And so I usually follow a strategy of, okay, what are the four services you offer or five or whatever, fill in the blank. We just make posts for each service, and then we loop back around. Every once in a while, we might do, here's a background story or the first post we'll ever do is introducing this business. And every once in a while, we'll switch it up, maybe do some holiday stuff. But again, humans aren't really looking at it. So that's why you don't have to worry too much about it. And so hopefully it doesn't add more stress. If I want to put any stress on you, it's to get more reviews, more high-quality reviews. And so when it comes to doing that one post per week, you really don't want to add to your monthly spend on something like Buffer or whatever you use for social media posting. So I've been using a tool called Planable, which is nice because it's free up to... I want to say, well, it could change, but it was free up to 50 posts. And so if you're doing one post per week, you're going to be fine. If you're a marketing person and you have clients, eventually you'll hit that cap. But that's actually still the tool we use to schedule GBP posts to this day, which I guess are called GBP updates now. But that's the tool we use. It's Planable, one-in. I don't have a referral code. If I would, I would take it. Just kidding. But it's free. You should definitely check it out and you can schedule it. Like I said, about one per week, maybe two per week is the most I would recommend. But I have seen, actually, some people get some results. I have one client where all we were doing is GBP management, which I don't usually do. But for this client, that's what we were doing. They got some reviews in the early days, which helped bump them up a little bit from way low to at least around 20. Then all we were doing were these GBP updates once per week. All of us, it took about a month and a half, but all of a sudden, just in their little strip in their little neighborhood, they were in the map pack, and they were also above 10th in the surrounding areas. All of a sudden, they were like, Oh, we're actually getting an uptick on phone calls. We're like, Where are you finding us? They're like, Oh, we're finding you from Google. It's really cool to see those results.
Melanie
It's quick as well.
Sam
Yeah. What would happen even quicker, though, is if you would have got more reviews. Always highly encouraging to go out and do reviews. Unless you work at a coffee shop or you get 100 customers per day, if you get 100 customers per year, take the time, write an email, personalize it, and then follow up with that person. It's probably going to take two or three contacts before they actually fill it out. But if you did a good job and they appreciate your work, they probably want to do it. They're probably just busy. It's okay to bug them a little bit. Just don't be annoying.
Esther
With these reviews, is it important to reply to the reviews that you get, or can you just receive them and have warm, fuzzy feelings inside and move on?
Sam
Well, it's always okay to have warm, fuzzy feelings inside, but you want to respond as quickly as possible. Ideally, it would be good to respond within about 24 hours. That might not be as important as it used to be, but that was the old gold standard. But some other places that have a lot more clients, they could do more research, have checked, and they're pretty sure that putting keywords in your responses isn't that relevant. It's good for them to put your services in their reviews, but you can just speak from the heart, say thank you. You don't have to be like, Thank you for appreciating the web design and SEO services we provided to you in Bend, Oregon. You don't have to say that. You can just be like, hey, thanks, Jim. I'm glad you really liked it. It really meant a lot. We look forward to working with you again in the future because that's what you want to see. Also equally important or potentially more important is not only responding to those good reviews, but respond to any negative reviews you might get because contrary to popular belief, there's pretty much no way to get a negative review removed unless it's legitimately spam, or you can prove, which is pretty freaking hard to do, that it was a competitor or something like that. All you can do is show up, be kind, lay out a plan of how you would handle it differently in the future, and say that you hope they'll be willing to give you a second chance in the future. Even if you don't believe it, even if it's really hard to do, just imagine that your potential client surfing through the internet and they see that one-star review, what are they going to do? They're going to read it, and then they're going to read your response. How do you respond? That's more important than the actual review. Studies have shown that a 4.4, 4.6 actually looks way more legit than having 500 reviews that are five stars. That looks fake. And so it actually doesn't hurt that much to get a couple of negative reviews as long as you're responding thoughtfully and kindly.
Melanie
Brilliant. Okay, so this It's a lot of discipline by the sounds of it that people need to muster themselves to get this organized, not just for themselves, but also for their clients as well. You did touch on that just briefly there, that there is a way of managing other people's Google business profiles as well, isn't there? Where you can actually manage other people's profiles for them and help them get found in search. It's just what you do as well for some clients. There is a possible revenue stream for marketers listening here who can add it to their list of services. But Largely, we just want people to have a bit more knowledge about how powerful this tool is. Google is not falling off a cliff as much as ChatGPT thinks it is. Everything's incorporating AI, including Google. It's not past its heyday yet, I don't think.
Sam
Not yet.
Melanie
Sam, we know you're in Bend, Oregon, but how do we get to contact you? If you've got any questions, if there's any particular products or services they want to chat to you about, what's the best way to reach you?
Sam
I think the best way to reach me, you can just go to the agency website. So that's thencandesigns.com. It's just like the word then and the word can. It's not that hard. The word means thoughtful. I wanted to build thoughtful websites. Then when I decided to get into the SEO, I said, okay, now we're going to get thoughtful results. So thencandesigns.com, that's the easiest way. You can just fill out a contact form and I'll get in touch with you right away.
Melanie
Excellent. Brilliant. Well, thank you so much, Sensei. For coming on to talk to me today. Sorry, to us today. It's been great having you back on, Sam. We haven't spoken to you face to face for a while, so it's great to chat. That's all the time we have for this week, but we'll be back again with another podcast, if I can say it properly. Have a great week and say goodbye, everyone.
Esther
Goodbye, everyone.
Sam
Goodbye.
Melanie
Do you want to hear something funny?
Esther
Go on.
Sam
Yes.
Melanie
I don't know if you heard it, but I have just been locked in and the alarm has been put on. When I go out of my office, there's going to be a really big alarm going,.
Esther
Sucks to be you.
Melanie
Thanks.
Sam
What did you do? That's my question. I got locked in.
Melanie
I didn't bother checking to see if I was still here.
Esther
She didn't tell anybody that she was working late.
Melanie
I said I was going to be here beyond 7:00. We left at 7:00.
Sam
I think I'd keep you locked out.
