In Episode 79 of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark and Joe DeVita welcome local SEO expert Claudia Tomina for a deep dive into what it takes to dominate local search in 2025. This episode is a must-listen for marketers, SEOs, and business owners looking to stay competitive in the increasingly complex world of local SEO.
https://page2pod.com - In this powerhouse episode of the Page 2 Podcast, Jon Clark and Joe DeVita sit down with local SEO guru Claudia Tomina to uncover the most effective tactics for dominating local search in 2025.
Whether you're a restaurant, lawyer, or roofer, Claudia shares invaluable insights on auditing Google Business Profiles, choosing the right categories, navigating service areas, and dealing with the dreaded GBP suspensions.
She also discusses how user behavior, popular times, and review strategy impact your visibility — and how to stay ahead in the age of Google's AI-powered local results. If you manage a multi-location business or serve a wide geographic area, you can't afford to miss this!
🧭 In This Episode
Get ahead of the competition and future-proof your local SEO with Claudia’s expert advice!
📌 Subscribe for more expert insights, and don’t forget to leave a comment sharing your biggest takeaway or local SEO challenge!
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Jon Clark (0:1.336)
Welcome to season four, episode 79 of the Page Two podcast. I'm Jon Clark. And as always, I'm joined by my co-host and partner in crime at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. Today's guest is Claudia Tomina. She is an expert in all things local SEO. And we're really excited to dive into hopefully what's a more tactical conversation today. We've been talking a lot about Google I.O. in the past.
I'm so excited for this one. think this is a topic that doesn't get coverage uh enough um and is extremely nuanced from the one uh local shop to um the company with many locations. So really excited to dive in here. Welcome to the show, Claudia.
Joe DeVita (0:47.900)
⁓ the franchise with a thousand locations. Jon's froze a little bit.
Jon Clark (0:50.616)
Exactly. So I know one of the...
Claudia Tomina (0:52.020)
Yeah, okay.
Joe DeVita (0:54.626)
Wow.
Claudia Tomina (0:56.875)
I thought I was going to be the one with the technical difficulties.
Jon Clark (1:0.877)
No, it's just me. uh So uh maybe the obvious place to start is just diving into um maybe how you approach a new client, m right? Just starting with maybe a Google local audit. What does that look like? What are the key things that you're evaluating and sort of digging through when you start to look through a Google My Business profile?
Claudia Tomina (1:23.617)
Yeah, you know, every client's unique and really it's industry driven. um I tend to work with a lot more restaurants than I do other channels. And so for me, restaurants is like a great niche. I really love working with restaurants because there's so much activity on the Google business profile. There's so much you could do. And to be honest with you, um there's so much in the restaurant ecosystem within the Google business profile that helps that restaurant rank well.
So ah really working with restaurants is like an easy win. You know, I can always get them to rank like pretty fast. Then you have like lawyers, personal injury lawyers. It's so competitive, right? And so you really have to kind of dig deeper into like website SEO with more service-based ah profiles. like overall, if I have somebody come to me, I will audit their Google business profile, look at the business name.
I'll look at the categories. Those are like the very obvious ones, right? The first things you're going to look at. And then, um, I make sure that like everything's filled out from like the attributes and everything's like fully optimized. mean, um, optimized, but you know, I do explain to clients like what's going to really drive the ranking factor and what's not, because there's like a lot of confusion, um, you know, with what really pushes the needle and like, do reviews help? Do they not? Is it the keywords? There's so much.
Um, nuanced behaviors that like you actually really need to like tie in and it's not just really one signal. It could be multiple signals to really get something ranked for that keyword. And we could get into that later, but yeah, like a full audit of the Google business profile, everything. And it depends on the industry, whether I'm looking at services, whether I'm looking at the menu, whether I'm looking at, um, like any API integrations. And so all that plays in based on.
the category.
Jon Clark (3:21.986)
Yeah, I think that might be a great place to dig in a little bit is the category itself. I feel like there's a lot of misunderstanding around what category to choose. Should I write a custom one? Should I choose one of the defaults? ah Can I choose multiple categories? Maybe dig in there a little bit and talk through some of the things that you've uncovered through testing or maybe just through performance around the category itself.
Claudia Tomina (3:50.111)
Yeah, categories are like one of the like biggest ranking factors and you can actually manually enter a category Google gives you. I think they have like I want to say 4000 categories to choose from. um But so you there's um there's actually a um Google Chrome extension that you can use called GMB everywhere and um it'll give you like related categories. So like I want to say like two three years ago everyone always said oh don't have more than
Jon Clark (4:11.202)
Great, yeah.
Claudia Tomina (4:19.136)
three categories because it confuses Google. But then just recently in the last like year or two, all the SEOs have changed their minds and said, if Google allows you to have 10 categories, you need to have 10 categories if they apply, of course, right? You don't want to have an unrelated category. You could trigger a suspension. ah the idea is like, restaurants are a great example because you're a restaurant, you are a family uh restaurant.
You are a chicken restaurant. You could be a hamburger restaurant. You can be an American restaurant. You can be a fine dining restaurant. You could be seafood steakhouse. So there's so many, right? And the restaurants really need to like hone in on all those categories because you can miss out on search queries if you're, if you don't have that category listed. Uh, like, so for example, um, I have a client that's an Italian restaurant.
And I never had pizza restaurant listed because they serve flatbread pizza and there was only like four on the menu. So it's not like a primary like menu item. It's just like, you know, they have flatbreads. I added a pizza category and then now they can rank for pizza near me and best pizza restaurant. Before I was never able to get them to rank because they didn't have that category. So you see like those, those are really big signals to Google and they care about like,
identifying the search intent and they use categories as a way to identify that search intent for the customer.
Jon Clark (5:50.168)
Yeah, maybe to dig in there a little bit more. there's there.
Joe DeVita (5:53.018)
⁓ I have to ask the question. You get to work with so many great restaurants. Do you build contracts with some trade in it where you get some kind of allowance to eat at these great restaurants that you service? Or are they too far away from your house and you can't do that?
Claudia Tomina (6:7.564)
You know, some are far away, but I do, um, I do actually have a client that has like a lot of local restaurants and I frequent them often, but he never knows when I'm there and you know, he's just like the, uh, owner big shot that's never going to be there, but every once in a while when the managers, um, are there and I can help get a review removed, I do get 20 % off my bill.
Joe DeVita (6:31.694)
Hahaha!
Jon Clark (6:32.629)
Very nice, very nice. ah
Claudia Tomina (6:34.260)
It's happened to me twice, so it's really funny.
Joe DeVita (6:37.646)
That's great.
Jon Clark (6:38.658)
That's amazing. Circling back to the category real quickly. So you can choose a primary and then it sounds like you can choose basically anything that's applicable. Yeah. So for maybe a rest. Okay.
Claudia Tomina (6:47.125)
the secondary.
And it doesn't matter the order of secondary categories, right? You just have to have them listed. And it's not like it's prioritized by Google. It's like, it's actually, I think they just like rank it based on like the internal code of um that secondary category. But you have to have the secondary category there oh for you to be able to, but I mean, of course, like primary category, like if you do a search on like pizza, for example.
If pizza is not your primary category, it's really hard to rank in the top local three pack for pizza, for like a pizza inquiry. So like if you're an Italian restaurant and like a pizza secondary, you might end up in like four and five. You're not really ending up in the top three. So you really have to decide like what you want your primary category to be. And like I have another client that's like fast food, but they're all like, it's fast casual. You know what I mean? And
but then they're like a hamburger restaurant, like a slider ah thing. So, you know, they had to decide whether they want primary to be hamburger restaurant or fast food. And like really it just, it's experimental. It depends on your competition, who you're trying to outrank. And then you kind of just go from there. And also I would say like your business name. So like if you have a keyword in your business name, then you can afford not to have that as your primary category.
So like for example, I'm just, yeah, so like Sliders, ah it's in one of my clients like business name. they don't necessarily to me need to have a hamburger restaurant as a primary category because if somebody's searching Slider, they're already gonna get listed just because of that business name. So business names actually matter more than the category.
Jon Clark (8:17.090)
Interesting.
Claudia Tomina (8:41.110)
So when you can add a keyword into your, and that's why everybody does it, right? They're like stuffing keywords into their category, into their name. And like us SEOs are advising our clients like, hey, just update your DBA name, right? Like, cause really technically the guidelines state that they should match signage. So if like the keywords really not in your signage, you could technically get suspended or not pass verification and we could get into those things later. But, uh
If you have a DBA on file, you can get unsuspended by showing proof of that DBA name.
Jon Clark (9:16.988)
interesting. mean, let's stay on ranking factors. I know you published a post recently around popular times and how that can influence the visibility. um Let's dig into that a little bit. This was sort of the first time I had heard about that personally. um So talk a little bit more about maybe where you even find popular times if you're a business owner and sort of looking for that.
Claudia Tomina (9:39.756)
I'm gonna talk about.
Joe DeVita (9:41.045)
I read your blog too about the popular time optimization. It sounded like something you should be careful with.
Jon Clark (9:43.377)
Thank
Claudia Tomina (9:48.895)
Yeah. So like you can't really influence popular times, right? So Google like tracks like people's activity, right? If their location is turned on on their mobile phone. So they know exactly how much traffic is coming into the door. And if you look at the Google business profile, they highlight it. Like it'll tell you like this place is busier than usual or not so busy. And it'll tell you like by day of the week, you can actually see the busiest times of the week for that business. So I've noticed that when I'm like,
like experimenting and like looking at rankings. ah Like I had noticed that this one unverified listing, right? It wasn't verified. It was another deli and it kept showing up in ah search results. And I'm like, they don't have it claimed. They don't have their like menu listed. They don't have this and that. Why does Google keep showing me this? And I was constantly doing my tests at that same time of the day.
And so it was like lunchtime. So this deli is a very popular lunch spot and people hang out there all the time. And then I really, like, I started connecting like, Oh, it's because like popular times it's, always busier than usual. So I started looking into it a little bit further. And then I started to realize there's a correlation between like when, when Google thinks that you're really busy and there's like, like you could be to Google, they have it listed on their blog. Like you could be having a sale.
You could be running a promo. You could be having events. So they want to promote your business. And when they see that signal and it's real time, so it's not like you're only going to have that ranking boost at that time that Google sees that you're busier than usual.
Jon Clark (11:28.514)
Got it. So is there a way to manipulate that to sort of, I don't know, influence your popular times? Because even thinking about a
Claudia Tomina (11:35.117)
I feel like it would take a lot of effort and it's like short lived, right? Like, I mean, you could do it naturally by like having like events and hosting events and things like that. Um, but yeah, like I, I did notice like a client of mine, um, their rankings were like, they're kind of like not doing that great. And then all of a sudden on, uh, it's a dispensary. So on four 20, everything was green in the ranking report. And it was because they were so busy on that day.
Jon Clark (12:0.482)
That's funny.
Claudia Tomina (12:2.206)
And I just laughed because I knew it was like popular times data.
Jon Clark (12:8.513)
That's really funny. The correlation there is uh pretty obvious, right?
Claudia Tomina (12:9.600)
Yeah.
And then they dropped like, you know, right at like a few days, like the next day. it like really is just like, you'll notice like, if you see a jump in rankings, it's something's good. Something happened. There was an event and I can, and most of time I asked my clients like, Hey, you really took off on this day. What'd you guys have going on? And they had something.
Jon Clark (12:33.602)
So maybe the flip side of popular times is a location that maybe has radius targeting, right? So maybe they don't actually have or serve uh users at their location. Maybe it's a service-based business. We work with some roofers, for example. um Can you talk to us a little bit about how to work with companies like that where there may not be a definitive business location, but rather they're serving a
you know, a 15 mile radius or a 30 mile radius, are there any tips or maybe tricks to uh improve their uh visibility around that radius when they don't have the advantages of things like.
Joe DeVita (13:15.832)
Jon, you keep freezing. I'll ask the question too. this, ⁓ you know, we do work with a couple of roofers and people don't go to the roofers company to get their quote. The roofer goes to their ⁓ home, right? So we, so ⁓ one example with the, ⁓ we've struggled with this decision and we've gone back and forth on what is the service area that we should let the Google profile know that we service. They well service multiple counties, but there's really only a
few cities where they get most of their business and they're more interested in ranking high for these few cities within the counties that they serve. So should they let Google know they can service all these counties or should they only service the three cities where they really want to rank for?
Claudia Tomina (14:2.292)
Okay. So there's, there's a lot I could say about this. first, first of all, okay, service based companies, technically they're an SAB it's service area business. And so a lot of SABs have to hide their address because Google says people don't come to you, you go to them. But the problem is when you hide your address, you don't rank as good. So you really don't want to hide your address if you can avoid it.
Joe DeVita (14:5.825)
Take your time, we've got an hour.
Claudia Tomina (14:31.168)
But here's like the work around. Technically, if you have an office and you have signage, you don't have to hide your address. Like you can have your business listed because you could have deliveries and they need to, you know, they need maps to get to your place or employees or anything like that. Clients can come visit you. You might have a showroom. like technically just because you do service people at their homes doesn't mean you're stuck in this like SAB mode. So anytime like I can have a client like
get signage at their office. Like I advise them, like you should show your address because then it just, it's way easier to rank because then Google's looking at proximity. Most, okay. Now most people think that your service area, when you listed on your Google business profile is a ranking factor. It's not all it's doing is drawing a map. like, you know how, when you like find a business and then it shows the map of the service area that you're servicing. So if I list like this County or the city or this zip code, Google's just,
drawing the map for that. So it shows the user, hey, they service this area. But as far as like ranking you in that area, no, what's ranking you in that area is the address that you used when you created the business profile. So if you used your home address, you're going to rank within your home address proximity. And so, and then it gets complicated. So let's just say you move and you're in a service area business, you hid your address.
and you want to, and you moved. And so you updated your address. It always causes a glitch. No matter what, you're always going to rank at the original address that you create created the profile in. So even if you update the address, so say you're a window cleaner or a roofer, but you move out of state, but you want to keep your Google business profile because you're just transferring your business. just kind of relocated and you want to keep your reviews. The problem is when they, when they move the address,
they're still ranking in the old place that they were at. They're not ranking in their new area. So what Google support and what like most SEOs will advise is to create a new business profile and transfer your reviews. So you need to like, you need to be very thoughtful when you create the profile, the address that you're using. Like, so if, if you work from home, you can't show your address. That's when you hide your address. So like really the only time I recommend hiding the address is when you're at a home address.
Claudia Tomina (16:57.036)
And lot of people work from home. They can still go out and service, like locksmiths, for example. Most of them work from home, they're service area businesses. But really how you rank would be creating service pages on your website. Location pages.
Joe DeVita (17:15.606)
Yeah. So I'm going to follow up because it's a, it's been a tough question that we've had to go back and forth with clients on this. Um, over the years, um, you, you have a location, but you service a much larger geography, you know, a radius of maybe 60 miles from your location, but in order, but it's very hard to rank outside of just the area where you've told Google your business sits. there things that you do to try to.
get that company to rank 60 miles away is even possible. It's very hard to monitor, so it's hard to say if you're doing it or not.
Claudia Tomina (17:53.677)
Yeah. I mean like your Google business profile, you're only allowed a two hour service area. So if you're traveling more than two hours, you can't have it listed or you risk being suspended. And if you are suspended, they won't, you can't put the whole state, right? Like if it takes you two and a half hours to get somewhere and you have that listed as a service area, you won't get reinstated. You have to have a two hour, cause, cause think about it. Google business profiles are meant to show people like local visibility. So if you want to rank outside that local area,
Joe DeVita (18:20.610)
Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (18:23.820)
Um, you need to like tell Google where you service on your website. So just create like service pages. Like, so you might say like, uh, refer, you know, servicing, you know, this city, and then you might have another page that says that you service like this city and then change up the content and things like that to help you rank and then really like Google ads. Like LSA ads and things like that to get the clicks and the engagement and the click through ratio.
Joe DeVita (18:45.848)
Yeah.
Joe DeVita (18:51.886)
Do you do a lot of the LSA ads for clients too or is it mostly or? Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (18:54.652)
I don't, have my partner's agency handles all like website SEO and all the um ads. And I'm pretty much like reputation management and Google business profile management and listings management.
Joe DeVita (19:9.443)
Awesome.
Jon Clark (19:10.488)
I wanted to circle back to the situation where you might have an existing location, but are moving to a new one. I feel like that's something that companies come across every once in a while and it's very complicated, right? So I was wondering if you could walk through the proper steps to do that. So it sounds like you shouldn't mark your existing location as closed until you have all the reviews and everything transferred. Is there like a specific order of steps?
Claudia Tomina (19:40.279)
So what, yeah, like I would recommend like creating the new Google business profile at the other location. And then I, you can go on Google maps and like, um, mark one as a duplicate, but it gets like a little sticky because like I've done that before. And then the one I'm marking as a duplicate ends up staying and the new one got merged. And so like Google's like dumb, like I don't like, there's no rhyme or reason to it. It just happened. And then, and then I was like,
Jon Clark (19:40.417)
that
Claudia Tomina (20:10.464)
great, like now I have to like, and then I had to re verify and it just caused a little bit more issues. So I would say like create the new Google business profile, reach out to customers, customer support, give them the old profile ID and say, I need you to transfer the reviews. I moved. I need you to transfer the reviews to this Google business profile and mark this one closed or merge it with my other one. And so however they kind of handle it, it's just, it's just hard to get through to customer support and like,
Like we could touch on this for a little bit. Like if you contact customer support, you're going to get an automated response. Like that's normal. Like by default, expect it. Like you're just going to get that automated generic response. You have to reply again. You're going to get a generic automated response. You have to reply again. And like you need to be really like tactful and thoughtful in your response and make sure you're including images, maybe a video. This is what I need done because you're dealing with people overseas that like
Jon Clark (20:41.730)
Very difficult.
Claudia Tomina (21:8.288)
They're trained in a certain way. here's, you're just getting that automated response. And so until they can really like understand, then they can escalate to like the end, like a different team. So it's like really all they are doing is saying, Oh, you're worthy enough to get moved to technical support.
Joe DeVita (21:26.823)
the
Jon Clark (21:27.916)
We worked with a client who had an office in a WeWork and they wanted that location listed and there was no signage anywhere, right? Cause it's a WeWork. And so we basically ended up getting a printing of their logo for the door of their office and basically took a picture of that. And that was, that was the work room, but you're right. They're very rigid on what their requirements are to see. So, uh yeah, maybe, maybe that's a good segue into suspensions, uh which
Claudia Tomina (21:41.569)
Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (21:48.032)
Very.
Jon Clark (21:57.554)
are becoming more more automated, right? They're difficult to overcome. They're anxiety inducing for the business owner for sure. um Maybe talk to us a little bit about how ah or maybe some specific ways that you found um to get those lifted faster. Is it the things that you send as proof of life, if you will, or um
Claudia Tomina (22:5.674)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (22:24.745)
you know, any other tactics that you've come across and sort of working through these scenarios.
Claudia Tomina (22:28.864)
Yeah, there's so many, but okay. like, yeah, you'll definitely, especially in the last six months, there's been like huge waves of suspensions. And usually it's like focused on like one category, like edit, like I'll notice like this week it's all locksmiths next week's it's a garage door repair, you know, another week it's ah whatever category there's, there's always a cat. There's always like garage doors, locksmiths. They're very sensitive. They're very prone.
Jon Clark (22:31.325)
I'm
Claudia Tomina (22:58.526)
and roofers, they're very prone to like fraud and like having fake listings like lead gen companies that create these fake listings, hundreds, thousands of them. And so, you know, like they're just, they're just one of those categories where Google treats a little bit differently. So like, and if you're a restaurant, you have activity, you have people coming in, they could see that traffic. You, they're not taking you down, right? They don't want, they want you on maps.
Jon Clark (23:7.052)
Right.
Claudia Tomina (23:24.736)
But like when you don't have like strong signals, you're going to be like, it's more likely you could get suspended, right? Without those like, you know, popular time signals, I guess, and things like that. But ah what happens is like, you might have keywords in your business name, like even ruffer, right? Or something doesn't align with your website. ah The user could have been like, now that Gemini's like checking for fake reviews and things like that, what if you got flagged for a fake review and now you're
account that's associated with your Google business profile, um, may have triggered that suspension. People don't realize that it's the users on the account. You don't want to just let any employee on your account or like even like franchise owners. I don't, I don't even like when franchise owners have access to their account. Like the brand should have access. Then they should use a third party tool that like something that we have that allows them to respond to reviews or things like that. Because if that business owner has like a regular Gmail or something,
and it's not a domain ah related like email, which is more sensitive, then they could be flagged for something dumb, right? They suggested an edit, it didn't get accepted. They left a review on a business. They did something to a competitor, whatever it is, then they can trigger their business to get suspended. So there's so many things that can trigger a suspension. It could just be category driven. It could be user. It could be deceptive content, which seems like
everything's deceptive content. That's one of the main things, reasons for suspensions that Google uses. And people don't understand it. Like what is deceptive content? What did I do that? Like, you know, and it could just be that your website information doesn't align with your Google business profiles. So if you say that you're servicing this area, this area, and this area, but your website doesn't have service areas listed, that could be considered deceptive content. If you're like business name doesn't match up,
That could be deceptive content. um What else? There's a lot of different things. um I can't think of them all right now. at the end of the day, I will tell you this. There's certain categories. If you appeal, you'll get denied. um If you do another appeal and you get denied, the only way to get reinstated is to go to the Google Forum and have a product expert escalate.
Joe DeVita (25:45.845)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (25:48.142)
The Google forum is kind of like customer service. It's pretty hit or miss, you know, in terms of how many responses you'll get back. Is there a way to, I don't know, give yourself a better chance to actually get one of those experts to respond or?
Claudia Tomina (25:55.434)
Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (26:4.296)
Yeah, so okay, if you have like a bronze member who bronze members can escalate. So if you have somebody that's like trying to move up and they're like just responding to like a bunch of threads, because they are think like the more they respond, like the faster they're going to move up. ah Then what happens is like, I'm the product expert and I go into my dashboard, and I filter on unanswered. Because if you've already been answered, like I don't like I'm just looking for people that haven't gotten answered. So m
If you have somebody that's like bronze answer, you're less, a lot less likely to get a P to answer your threat. And so you might have to start over. So I would suggest just like maybe creating a new thread and then hoping like, like, uh like even silvers can't um escalate, but they could do a few things. But so like, yeah, you really kind of want like a gold platinum or diamond to kind of pick up the thread to really help you. And then um
I'm going to hate myself for saying this, but like I do get a lot of people messaging me on LinkedIn, like, Hey, can you help me? ah Um, but like, don't say hi. Don't like, don't tell me like in a page what happened. I don't care. Just send me the thread. Don't like, don't even say hello and just send a thread and I'll pick it up or, you know, and like, I do know other PA's that do that. I just feel like so bad for like business owners that are like struggling. They've been suspended for like a month.
Jon Clark (27:20.098)
So you.
Claudia Tomina (27:30.196)
And they're like, it's so frustrating, right? And they don't know what to do. They have no idea. They don't understand that like your paperwork has to like align with your Google business profile name or that the content on your website, like I just, I've done it so much. I know exactly what to look for. can pinpoint it and literally like 10 minutes where they're just like reading through guidelines and all kinds of stuff and it's taking them hours or they didn't submit the correct evidence.
Like, and then I have to tell them, give me a drive. This is the evidence I need. Like, you don't want to just submit an invoice. Google, like, doesn't trust that. You have to prove that you, actually exist. Like, you need an EIN document. You need, like, maybe, like, uh like a strong signal to Google. Like, tax documents work the best, articles of incorporation. Then it's like, and if the business name doesn't match, because, like, you're a franchise, right? So you're always doing business as the franchise name. You always have a different legal name.
That's okay. You just have to connect the dots, whether it's through your lease or your deep, like your assume name document. So like these are the kinds of things that I'm like, give me this, show me this. And then, um, then I send it over to Google, like, Hey, can you take another look at this? And so we kind of do the first check, we do an audit and like, it might take me like to go back and forth with the person because they can't get the documents or whatever it is. And then I need to see images of the Google business profile from the business name.
all the way down to the attributes because you can't, they're like, sometimes ah they're doing something in the business description, like running a promo. You can't do that. That's against guidelines. You won't get reinstated. Your service area can't be with, know, at like the entire US or like out of state or anything like that. A lot of people miss that. The business name, they're like, you know, my DBA, but the documents don't match it. So there's a lot of things that.
the P's just have tons of experience with that we can help with. But yeah, like if you are gonna reach out for help, just send a thread. And a lot of times people come on an existing thread and paste their thread in my thread and then I lock it. I don't even respond to them. And then I pick up the thread for them.
Jon Clark (29:44.098)
Got it.
Joe DeVita (29:44.184)
So it's frustrating to tell a small business owner that you just have to start over, but there really is no money that, right? Until you get the right person to respond to you, you've got to just keep asking that same question. Maybe you can word it a little bit differently so you get a different answer, but it's hard.
Claudia Tomina (29:49.386)
I know.
Claudia Tomina (30:1.172)
It's persistence. That's why I like when somebody actually reaches out to me, like I'm like, okay, they're desperate. They put forth the effort. I'm gonna help them.
Jon Clark (30:11.894)
Got oh it. I was hearing you talk about the consistency between the legal documentation and the business information. It reminded me a lot of the olden days of local SEO, where it was all about citation consistency. ah Is that still important in today's environment, or has Google given more weight to other signals within my business profile, for example?
Claudia Tomina (30:27.531)
Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (30:39.498)
Yeah. mean, like I don't think name consistency is as important as we used to say it was. Right. So Google knows, like when you connect your social profiles in your Google business profile, they know, like they can match that. Right. So, so like you might have a different Google business profile name because you have that keyword in there, but you wouldn't put that on Facebook. Right. Or, uh, like, but you need it in your Google name, but you don't necessarily need, Oh, and Yelp and Apple, they will not change your name.
unless it matches the website. So like even brands that legally, you know, add the city, like, so if you have like 100 locations and it's like, you know, this name of, you know, and then the city name, Yelp won't add the city name and Apple won't add the city name because it doesn't match the website. So that you're not really, you don't have that nap consistency, but your Google business profile has the city name because you want to rank, you know, for that search query with somebody who's running the city. Um, but I think that's,
That's another discussion, but I don't think that's as important as we think it is because Google knows proximity, you know? But yeah, but definitely your address, the inconsistency matters. um I mean, I wouldn't like be too worried if it's like ST or street, you know, or unit or I wouldn't, I don't think there's anything wrong with having minor discrepancies in that. And even phone numbers, like if you think about it, people use call tracking. So,
Jon Clark (31:44.396)
Yeah.
Claudia Tomina (32:5.814)
You're not having the same, lot of my clients use call tracking. They don't have the same phone number across all platforms. Like we might have a different number on Yelp, on Angie's list, on Google, on the website. It's all different, but it doesn't matter.
Jon Clark (32:19.298)
So that's really interesting to me, because I think the common rule of thought is that call tracking was bad because it may not be a local number or it may be a 1-800 number and Google sort of looking for this consistent local number. So that's really interesting. You haven't seen...
Joe DeVita (32:19.448)
We use
Claudia Tomina (32:35.968)
I don't like 1-800-NUMBERS. Most people aren't using 800-NUMBERS anymore. When I see clients using it, I kind of question it. I ask them why they need it. And having the same phone number across multiple Google accounts is a bad idea. You could run into mergers. Google doesn't like it. ah You should always have different phone numbers. And then if they all go into the same funnel, then they all go into the same funnel. But you should have different phone numbers for each Google business profile, every business.
Um, but yeah, like I would just say like citations matter. They could like that the overall like consistency, like not as much, right? Cause there's always those edge cases. So, but at the end of the day, like clients will say, well, I don't care about Yelp. Yelp sucks anyways. I don't care to be on Yelp, but Google cares. If you're on Yelp, it's a trust signal to them. They want to know that your business exists on Yelp and that like you're like, you are who you say you are.
Jon Clark (33:7.714)
Got it.
Jon Clark (33:30.616)
Sure.
Joe DeVita (33:36.674)
Yeah. People use Yelp. There's a lot of people who use Yelp just because you don't know where people are finding information about you. It's a tricky cop.
Jon Clark (33:37.163)
Absolutely.
Claudia Tomina (33:37.169)
It becomes, you're more established.
Right.
Claudia Tomina (33:45.517)
Or like if you're a service based company, you need to be on Angie. Like, you know, if they see that citation on Angie and like, you know, website URLs matching everywhere helps addresses. They can connect the dots without having that like, like huge discrepancies, right? They're smarter. Like these search engines aren't that dumb. They can still tell like you have the same social profiles on your landing page, on your Google page, on wherever else and the same landing, you know, website landing pages.
Jon Clark (33:47.361)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (33:53.782)
it
Jon Clark (34:14.220)
So I'm curious around uh tools like Yaxxed and uh Mozlocal and these other sorts of tools that for, you know, a small business owner or even for franchises, right? Where they're trying to manage all these locations at scale. uh How valuable are these tools? uh And I guess maybe a supplemental question, do they help prevent suspensions because they're being
Joe DeVita (34:19.992)
Erda.
Jon Clark (34:42.306)
pushed or the updates are being pushed through a trusted source or, you know, love to dig into the tool conversation a lot or a little bit, because I know that there's, you know, strong opinions on both sides, especially around the X, right? When, when a location is removed or you stop paying.
Claudia Tomina (34:59.830)
So I'm a big believer in citations, but not just because that's one of my primary services, but because like, say you're a pizza place and you're seasonal, you change your hours. Like every winter you might have shortened hours in the summer, you're extending your hours. How do you get that syndicated out everywhere? And a lot of the tools are great, but what people don't understand is,
they really have to be managed too. like just because I change your hours doesn't mean the API uh syndicated it out appropriately everywhere. First of all, it could take Bing like a month to update your data. It's crazy being like when, when people say Bing's coming back, I laugh like they can't even update data properly. It takes forever. It just takes forever. And then, you know, Yelp, if you're not like a paid customer, there's very few, um,
Services that actually like have a API with Yelp. So that has to be done manually and then Apple will not get updated unless your website Has the same matching data. So a lot of people just like kind of just fail in that right? like imagine you're a franchise owner or just even a Like single business owner and you think you changed your hours on Google, but hello You forgot to change your website. You forgot the hooder. You have a contact us page that still has a
The hours listed right and they're wrong. You changed it only in one spot uh Who's gonna update Yelp who's gonna update Angie who's gonna update all these places and not not every like trip advisor is not uh Included in API integrations with these like local citations. So you still have to there's still a lot of manual work So that's what we do We're a little bit like more of a boutique shop when it comes to listings management where we have the tool to syndicate out your data
but we're also auditing it too. We're making sure that Apple did that Google sync like API's break all the time. You know, like I would say like eight out of 10 times, like I might have to do, do a manual update on Facebook for whatever reason, the sync didn't happen. If even though it's connected in our platform, but so it's, it's, still have to check to make sure that those hours got syndicated. And as a friend, as a brand, if you have franchisees,
Jon Clark (37:2.135)
Yep.
Claudia Tomina (37:20.042)
It's almost 100 % certain that you have to have a listings management tool like VAS, Revutation Arm, uh Bright Local, any of these tools. It's like a moss.
Joe DeVita (37:31.263)
How many locations when you get to a point, does it not make sense to try to do it manually? You need a tool once you hit two locations, three locations. Do you have a piece of advice on that?
Claudia Tomina (37:42.753)
You know, I, like if I have a lawyer, right there, one location and they're 24 hours, do I really need to recommend citation management for them? But you, it does help your rankings. Like people say like, Oh, it doesn't help as much. It does. You do get a boost in rankings. So if it's in their budget, um, I offer it and it could be like a one time, like citation build, uh, where you just do it one time. And then, you know, because you are 24 hours, you're not really changing. You're not moving.
Jon Clark (37:50.456)
you
Claudia Tomina (38:12.276)
But when you are more seasonal and you change hours often, you have to have a tool in place to syndicate out the data.
Joe DeVita (38:21.754)
I have so many like hypotheticals I wanna talk to you about. I'm not gonna stop. So the first one is with the like a personal injury lawyer has an office downtown Detroit and they're in the office from eight to five every day. And then at five o'clock has a call center answering the phone. Do you suggest that they're 24 hours on the local business profile or just in the office?
Claudia Tomina (38:43.276)
Yeah, because it depends. All the lawyers are 24 hours. So if all the lawyers are saying they're 24 hours and then you close at eight, if somebody's searching for a lawyer after eight o'clock, you're not going to show up because we know now that hours are a ranking factor. So like Google prioritizes a business that are that's open. And that's why you'll see like certain lunch spots do better. Like if you're searching for a restaurant during lunchtime and like your, you know, your favorite dinner spots,
doesn't open till four. You're not gonna see it in maps as often as you're seeing it during lunch, you know. So openness matters. And so if all the lawyers are 24 hours, you're gonna wanna be 24 hours.
Joe DeVita (39:25.186)
And you need to say it on your website too. You need that consistency everywhere. ⁓ can't, you can't choose. ⁓ Jon, I'm going to keep going with questions. feel like I'm.
Claudia Tomina (39:27.465)
Yes, yup.
Jon Clark (39:34.200)
I'll one quick follow up to that and then I'll let you get back to your hypotheticals. Going back to the scenario where you're working in a radius uh and it's service-based, you can technically collect leads at any time. So does that warrant a 24 hour timeframe or does it only make sense when they're physically answering the phone? Cause they have a, you know, the case I'm thinking.
Claudia Tomina (39:58.067)
mean, guidelines say you have to have somebody answering the phone. So if you have a call center, you could get away with it.
Jon Clark (40:6.358)
Okay, interesting.
Joe DeVita (40:10.988)
I want to actually, I don't, I want to talk about the tool that you built. We read a little bit about it and as I was reading about it, I thought maybe it was only to manage reviews. Is it more than that? You can, it's a citation building tool as well.
Jon Clark (40:11.010)
Go ahead Joe.
Claudia Tomina (40:23.466)
Yeah, so we do citation management through the tool and then we do reputation management. We have like an MPS. So you could do an MPS or you could just do like a regular review campaign where you drive them right to Google. But really you can you can ask for review on any platform. Like you could just add a URL and we could send them to whatever page that is. So especially now in the age of AI, like I'm encouraging some of my clients like, hey, let's get a little creative.
let's take your customer list and ask for reviews on TripAdvisor. If you need to do a refresh because things are getting cited, like you're seeing things pop up in AI and all these other third party sites that were less relevant are becoming a little bit more relevant. I mean, I'm not, I don't think we need to have a whole campaign strategy around it, but some fresh content there would help.
Joe DeVita (41:18.872)
Can you talk to us a little bit about building that tool? I saw you have a connection to Angie, which is huge for home service businesses. How did you develop that relationship to get that pipe into Angie?
Claudia Tomina (41:32.257)
We use a third party scraping tool. And so like with this integration with the scraping tool, we have access to a hundred sites. So we have DoorDash, Grubhub, ah Uber Eats, Open Table. So like I deal with a lot of restaurants, so Open Table is a big one. And then Facebook, Google is a direct connection. Yelp is scraped. um TripAdvisor is scraped. The majority of them are scraped. The direct connections we have are with.
Google and Facebook and that's because the API goes both ways But we have like really cool tools where we allow them to like send uh an email to get approval on the review response So anything that's like three two or one stars They can like send it off to a manager to approve it and all they have to do is hit approve you have like the AI responses ah I haven't really developed it where it automatically like posts an AI response just because I don't trust it I feel like there still needs that like human connection to kind of read over the review
Um, but yeah, then there's, um, there's just, oh, we track deleted reviews. So it's like all of a sudden Google does this big sweep and then all of a sudden you went from like 120 reviews to a hundred. You'll know exactly which 20 reviews were deleted. And then potentially you could go back to Google and say, Hey, can I get these reinstated? Yeah.
Joe DeVita (42:52.526)
Have you ever done that and successfully got them reinstated?
Claudia Tomina (42:55.658)
Yes. So like they're in the beginning, they were like, I think they had like issues and they probably knew they had issues and like you could email them, them an image of the review and they would put it back. ah But as their AI models are getting a lot more sophisticated, I think like the mistakes are like a little bit less. And so they're trusting their removals more. And so they're less inclined to reinstate some reviews, but you could still try. You could still try to contact support and get it reinstated.
Joe DeVita (43:25.848)
Have you noticed the different, um the way the review information is served? Have you noticed it changed with the AI overviews?
Claudia Tomina (43:35.819)
Yeah, like I'll give you the best example. Like I noticed a couple times where like I get the email notifications that say like your review was removed and I always look at them because I want to see like what are they focused on to like get that review removed and they're getting a lot more sophisticated. like once I had a couple reviews removed just because they were just emojis and like and yeah, like it was just an emoji and then they removed it.
And then I thought maybe okay, it was a fluke, maybe it was something with the account, but then it happened again. And then I posted on LinkedIn something about it and I know a lot of Google employees follow me. So they probably saw it and fixed something, Google's watching everything, so you're seeing something, their ears are open. So if you say something about AI mode and something's sucking or whatever, they'll fix it, so just speak up.
Jon Clark (44:12.724)
Thank
Joe DeVita (44:29.900)
Yeah, that's great.
Jon Clark (44:31.160)
That's funny. I feel like with all the AI conversations floating around, it makes sense. We have at least one AI question. I'm curious if you think that automated review detection will maybe eventually tie into user behavior. will they be able to tell? OK. Got it.
Claudia Tomina (44:48.468)
It already does. already does. Yup. So, and I think like that's like a lot of why there was that increase in suspensions because like, are they running these AI models and then flagging user accounts for like fake reviews? And then all of sudden that is associated with your Google business profile account. So then you triggered a suspension because your account is not in good standing. And why is your account not in good standing? Is it because of a review? I don't know for sure, but like that's the,
Jon Clark (45:14.210)
Got it.
Claudia Tomina (45:18.410)
That's the feeling I get. Those are the trends I see. Like if I see a bunch of suspensions and the reasons because like your account is not in good standing, like, or your account is restricted. I think that's the terminology they use. Like your account is restricted or, and they're like, what? Like why is my account? They have no idea. Like no, but like they don't understand like why would their account be restricted? They didn't do anything. Like it's all harmless edits, but you have to understand like Google has to like, you know,
keep an eye out on the fraudsters and all the other black hat tactics that people are using. so sometimes people do things that might seem or appear to be black hat to Google and then you're flagged.
Jon Clark (46:3.840)
Right. mean, reviews are so important. Um, and you really have to, as you mentioned, solicit them in a, in a, you know, correct fashion. Are there any tips to sort of nudge that request to make it more valuable for a business or are there very strict guidelines? You just basically say, can you please give a review if you had a great service?
Claudia Tomina (46:28.588)
Yeah, so I definitely think that like everyone should have some sort of review strategy in place, like some kind of like automated, if you can automate it, that's the best way to do it. But like if you're a personal injury lawyer and you're only like closing two or three cases a month, obviously you don't have to automate it. know, you, but, and you can ask for the review or whatever it is, but it's always best when you send a text or an email through a system. Um, it just like converts better. Like I hear it all the time. Like I have this plumber and he's like,
No, no, don't, don't want to spend the money on that. could just ask for the review, but he was just never getting the reviews. And then he calls me up one day and he's like, um, you're right. It works. I'm like, yeah, because they like have good intentions, right? The customers love you. You did great work, but they forget, you know, but then when you send them that email, it sits in that inbox or that text message, they're just more, a little bit more inclined to like leave the review. So it does work. It converts. And then I'll notice like when I have, uh
I have restaurant clients. export their reservation lists from open table and we import it into our system because we don't have a direct API. So we have to do this one manual process. so that like, if there's like 2000 reservations, I'm not sending 2000 at one time. We might send a few hundred, you know, but rankings go up because you're getting more clicks, right? So like Google seeing a lot more activity. like those review campaigns can work in another way, right?
So you are generating more reviews, which helps your rankings because review recency is a real thing. You want to make stay like, you can't go stale on reviews. If you go two months without getting a review and you're a roofer, like your rankings will drop. Like you have to stay, you have to get reviews like consistently every month. And then like those clicks too, even if I notice we didn't get a ton of reviews from the campaign.
But for some reason rankings just go up because there's like five or six more clicks on the profile. like click through ratio is really like a real thing. And then I just want to point out, I have this restaurant client and I just wanted to see how they ranked for Caesar salad because I was trying to understand keywords and reviews. And I know that all their reviews, like not all, but a ton of reviews mentioned Caesar salad because they do a table side Caesar.
Claudia Tomina (48:49.676)
And so like, was like, that's a good one. I'm just going to pick it. Not that I care that they ranked for Caesar salad. It was just for my study and my test. I thought it would be relevant. And they weren't ranking for Caesar salad, even though they have 43 reviews that mentioned Caesar salad. So I was like blown away and I couldn't figure out why Jay Alexander's and Chris Belli's pizza, who like aren't known for Caesar, right? Like, but this restaurant is an Italian restaurant.
has table site Caesar constantly was being mentioned in the reviews. And so I was trying to understand why I couldn't get my client to rank for this keyword. And what happened was I figured out that the menu, the menu item names said Caesar kitchen. a lot like they were trying to be the sophisticated Italian restaurant. And so a lot of their menu items didn't match up with the keywords. So people have to understand, like if you, if a person mentions a service,
in your review and you cannot back up that service or menu item with another signal, you won't rank. So make sure your menu item like says like slider, hamburger, know, Caesar salad, not nothing like too fancy. And then if you're a service based company, you have to fill out your services. you know, personal injury litigation or you know, whatever the keywords are that you're trying to rank for that you see in your reviews, they should be in your services.
and then you'll have a higher correlation of ranking.
Joe DeVita (50:21.378)
Great advice. We're running low on time. I'm going to squeeze one more. I want to ask about the recency on reviews. You said how important that was. It's somewhat out of the control of the business owner. You can have a review campaign and try and stimulate it. But how about profile posts? That you have complete control over. Is that still a big signal for ranking? m
Claudia Tomina (50:40.926)
It's not a ranking factor. So posts are not a ranking factor, but it does create engagement. like first of all, photos are keywords, right? They're the new keywords, add photos all the time and videos, cause Google can read them, right? AI can read what, what it is. And that's another signal. So like if you have sushi and you have reviews that say sushi, you have a menu sushi and you have images of sushi. It's a, you know, the culmination of all those signals that'll help you rank.
But let's just say um you have a special and it's in the, you know, like, so think about it. Google's looking at signals, right? Like you have a special for that week. Why should they rank you for that keyword? It's not on the menu. I kind of lost my train of thought, but you were saying something about.
Joe DeVita (51:28.374)
I just, in the past, we always would recommend a regular cadence for posting on your Google business profile.
Claudia Tomina (51:35.469)
All right, posts. So again, it's, if it helps with engagement, if people stay on your profile longer and they're clicking through and scrolling, that helps. So you definitely want to post and then they're highlighting posts and AI overviews. So you want to like, you know, especially if you don't have a huge social presence, which we know a lot of small business owners, like the plumbers, these like local businesses, they don't really push a lot of social. So Google posts is like a really good way.
of getting your profile like more complete and showcasing what you do and your jobs. So like if you're a roofer and you're showing images of like, you know, roofs that you completed and people are scrolling through, that's more time and clicks on your profile and that will help you. But like, are they honing in on the keyword in the post? No, they're not.
Jon Clark (52:25.816)
I have two quick follow ups on that. On the image front, there's been back and forth on whether embedding image metadata, like Latin longitude of a location and things like that, play a role or have an impact on ranking. uh Love to get your thoughts on that. OK. uh
Claudia Tomina (52:40.244)
It doesn't. It doesn't. They don't, that doesn't like really exist anymore. And I think Google like strips the metadata when you upload the photo. Um, so that's not really a thing anymore. And like, I'll give your audience like a really cool tip. Like you could go on your phone on mobile and then if you're on your profile, you can actually like hold down on the image and then, and then you can click search this image with Google lens and then an AI overview shows up and it tells you about the image.
Jon Clark (52:51.426)
That was my understanding as well.
Claudia Tomina (53:9.302)
So like if you want to know if Google's understanding your images, that's a really good way of testing that.
Jon Clark (53:17.812)
And then last thing, I don't know if this is a question or more of a statement, but so for link building, right? One of the things we would try to calculate is like, what's uh the rate of link acquisition? So if we were going to start a link building campaign, we wouldn't uh skew too far out of what Google is accustomed to seeing. It sounds like you could apply a similar approach to review cadence, right? Like what's the average cadence of
Claudia Tomina (53:43.274)
Yeah.
Jon Clark (53:47.894)
reviews that are coming in. And if you're thinking about implementing a campaign, trying to slowly maybe increase that, that average over time would be a smart way to do it. Um, you know, again, provided that it's a real and legitimate review.
Claudia Tomina (54:2.528)
Yeah. Like, so if like all of sudden you got, if you're like a restoration company and you got 10 reviews in one day and half of them didn't post Google's seeing some kind of like unfamiliar behavior, right? You're getting flagged. Maybe you got to be careful. Um, and then like I've noticed like lawyers with like overly sentiment reviews, like get filtered out. And so like sometimes like I'll tell the client,
Jon Clark (54:14.722)
pray.
Claudia Tomina (54:30.420)
There's too much, like it was too hyped up. Like just tell them to go on your Google business profile. And I learned this from another PE, Vinay, he's great. He was like, if you have the customer search your business on maps and then like click call or like click on your website and then repost the review, it might show up. So it's like those trust signals, right? So if like all of a sudden you're getting reviews or if you're getting a review from somebody out of your service area, that's a flag, you know, like you don't want to do things like that.
Jon Clark (54:51.094)
Interesting.
Claudia Tomina (54:59.466)
And like there's new laws out in the UK that, uh, like regarding reviews and fake reviews. And so like Google's under a lot of pressure to like, you know, mediate and like identify fake reviews. And so that's why a lot of these things are in place. And then now they have that like review badge of shame. I don't know if you're familiar, but like they can turn off review posting for your business if they see like a pattern of bad behavior. And so instead of people seeing reviews, they're going to see this like,
snippet that says like reviews are turned off for this place because we detected unusual review behavior. And so then you're screwed. You're not gonna rank, you're not getting new reviews, and it just like kills your credibility.
Jon Clark (55:45.240)
Yeah, that is not something you want on your, on your, business profile at all. Absolutely. Well, this has been an amazing conversation, um, filled with lots of useful tips. Uh, before we let you go, um, I don't know if you've listened to the other episodes, but we, we like to end with sort of a, uh, prediction. Um, so 12 months from now, uh, when you go to google.com, what do you think the local search experience will be?
Claudia Tomina (55:49.386)
No, scary.
Jon Clark (56:14.520)
um in the age of AI mode or whatever it becomes.
Claudia Tomina (56:18.026)
Yeah, so it's turning to AI mode. look, you go on, I'm opted in on my personal account for like search labs. So ah I could see Google discovery. You can only see Google discovery on mobile. And so I think Google discovery will be pushed into like the new, it's going to be the new browser. And then if you, if you're on Google discovery now, like if you search something, automatically takes you to AI mode. ah And so in 12 months, that's just going to be the norm.
They're testing it now. They're going in that direction. That's what we're going to see. And then AI mode is basically right now it looks like a four pack and it's linking to your Google business profile. So Google for local, not a whole lot's changing. mean, there, there are going to be different ranking factors. And if you follow me on LinkedIn, I kind of explore a lot of them, like review responses. Can you add AI context into your review response? Q and a now like that's another way you can add a lot of.
Jon Clark (56:48.354)
Got it.
Claudia Tomina (57:15.664)
context for AI like learning machines. So I mean, it's your website, your H1 headers. There's a lot of different things you're going to look at that's differently than just Google business profiles. But at the end of the day, you still need to maintain and manage your Google business profile. And it's like a huge data source ah for AI mode anyway.
Jon Clark (57:35.882)
Awesome. Well, thanks again for joining us on the page two podcasts. Um, and if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe rate and review. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.
Claudia Tomina (57:44.928)
Thank you.