Darren Shaw reveals the hidden ranking signals, review strategies, and optimization tactics that are actually driving visibility right now. If you want to understand what’s working today—and what’s about to matter even more—this is one you can’t afford to miss.
https://page2pod.com - In this episode of the Page 2 Podcast, we sit down with Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark, to explore how AI is transforming local search and what it means for businesses trying to rank in Google.
Darren shares insights from over 20 years in local SEO, including how traditional ranking signals like reviews, citations, and proximity are being reinterpreted by AI-powered systems. We dive deep into review strategies, semantic SEO, citation optimization, and how tools like AI-driven maps and Ask Maps are reshaping visibility.
If you're a local business owner, marketer, or SEO professional, this episode is packed with actionable strategies to help you stay ahead in an AI-first search landscape.
🚀 In This Episode
• 🧠 How AI is rewriting traditional local SEO ranking signals
• ⭐ Why review recency and consistency matter more than ever
• 📍 The hidden risks of removing your Google Business Profile address
• 🔍 How AI uses reviews as training data for search results
• 🧾 The power of citation optimization and semantic triples
• 📊 What “review diversification” means and why it’s critical
• 🤖 How Ask Maps and AI interfaces are shaping local discovery
• 📸 Using images and content strategically for AI visibility
• 🧩 Why niche specialization can outperform larger competitors
• 🛠️ The evolving role of SEO tools in an AI-driven future
This episode breaks down the future of local SEO and gives you a practical roadmap to adapt your strategy for AI-powered search.
🛠️ Tools & Resources Mentioned
• Darren Shaw on LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenshawwhitespark/
• Whitespark Local SEO Tools → https://whitespark.ca/
• Whitespark Reputation Builder → https://whitespark.ca/reputation-builder/
• Local Ranking Grid Software → https://whitespark.ca/local-rank-tracker/
• 2026 Local Ranking Factors → https://whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors/
👉 Don’t miss future insights on SEO, AI, and digital strategy—subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast الآن!
💬 What’s YOUR biggest challenge with AI and local SEO right now? Drop a comment below—we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Welcome to the Page 2 Podcast where we uncover the strategies, systems, and tactical decisions that move brands beyond page two and into real visibility across search and answer engines. Local SEO has always been about signals, but what happens when the signals themselves start getting rewritten by AI? Darren Shaw has spent more than two decades figuring out how local businesses show up in Google and why some win while others disappear. He is the founder of Whitespark and the force behind one of the industry's most trusted ranking factor surveys.
This conversation is really about what happens when local search collides with AI. Darren walks through how Google's traditional ranking signals—reviews, citations, proximity—are being reinterpreted by large language models and new interfaces like AI-powered maps. We dig into how something as simple as review recency or a business description suddenly becomes training data for AI and why that changes the stakes for every local business. He also breaks down what actually moves the needle today from semantic triples to review diversification and how those tactics translate into AI visibility.
Even he admits the roadmap for AI optimization isn't fully clear yet. This episode really sharpened that perspective for me, from how to use images for AI analysis to considering how to close the brand gaps in Ask Maps. If you learned something new today, take a second to subscribe to the Page 2 Podcast. Leave us a rating or review and let us know what resonated. We'd love to hear your thoughts. This is a good one. Let's get into it.
Welcome to episode 116 of the Page 2 Podcast. I'm your host, Jon Clark, and I'm joined as always by my partner at Moving Traffic Media, Joe DeVita. If you do local SEO, you probably know our guest today, maybe you've even used his tools. He's spent 20 years studying how Google decides which local businesses win. He's the founder of Whitespark, and every year he publishes the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey, which we're excited to talk a little bit about today. The closest thing SEO has to a local Bible, Darren Shaw, welcome to the show.
Darren Shaw
Thanks a lot for having me.
Joe DeVita
It's crazy. 20 years? You've been running this company for 20 years. It's like the first thing you did out of college. You had this like draw to local SEO and you've been doing it for two decades. It's really impressive.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, so I started as a freelance web developer. I was actually building websites while I was in university in like 1996 to 2002. It took me six years to get my degree. I started building websites and then I just had enough freelance clients that I just decided to start a web development agency. I was freelance for the first little while and then, actually, local didn't really exist when I first started. It was about 2008 when the first 10-pack appeared, and my web development clients were like, 'Hey, what's this? How do we get ranking in this?' and so I became obsessed from that point on.
Joe
I think our audience is probably familiar with your software, but we can talk a little bit about that too. I'm curious how your company has changed over the years, because I know you offer a great piece of software and you offer services too. Can you talk a little bit about how the company has changed over the years?
Darren Shaw
Yeah, sure. So we did start in 2005 as a web development agency, just me making websites for small businesses locally. Then I grew enough to hire a few people, and so we were more of an agency at that point. In 2010—so in about 2008, we started offering SEO services for our clients as in optimizing their websites and getting a little bit into Google Business Profile stuff and local SEO. And then in 2010, we launched our first SaaS software.
I had read a post from Garrett French about how you could search for competitors' phone numbers to find their citations, and then I used that to identify opportunities. I was like, 'I could build software that'll do that.' And so we did. We made our first SaaS software called the Local Citation Finder. And that made us like... it was like, 'Oh, there's a new local SEO SaaS company called Whitespark.' And we're like, 'Okay, well, I guess we're a SaaS company now.' So we started doing that and then we built our local rank tracking software.
We partnered with GatherUp and we resell their software for reviews, Reputation Builder. We have a whole bunch of free tools and we recently launched our incredible local ranking grids software. We also have a local platform for managing Google Business Profiles and staying on top of all the updates that are coming through. But yeah, we just kind of evolved that way. And then to get to the question, we stopped doing web development in about 2012. Around 2012, we launched our local listing service, so we started offering citation audit and cleanup and building services. That's now a huge arm of the business. And then, I can't remember how many years ago, but we launched our own SEO agency side as well. So we're doing SEO for small businesses. We have about 60 clients over there of all different sizes, and we work with them on an ongoing basis for doing the whole thing: managing their Google Business Profile, managing their website SEO and updates and all that kind of stuff.
Jon Clark
I can't tell you how many times we've used some of your blog posts and some of your information around why Yext is not like a great option for some of this stuff, right? When you sort of turn off Yext, basically everything goes away. So we've definitely utilized the service quite a bit when we're working with a local client for the first time and they're trying to figure out how to manage listings at scale. It's kind of a no-brainer. So we love the product.
Darren Shaw
Thanks. I appreciate that.
Joe
So your company is almost 50 people now. How do you shift your time between improving the software and helping clients? What's a typical day for you like?
Darren Shaw
Yeah, a typical day... so I start every day in marketing mode. So I meet with my marketing team—Gabbie and Nadia and Tracy. I have an incredible team of people to keep my posts posting every single day. I'm making videos... we're scripting videos, I'm publishing content, we're staying on top of what's new. I'm working on that for two hours of every morning.
So I meet with the team, we publish the posts, we script the next things. We're like working on what do we want to talk about, what do we want to share with the world. And so I work a lot on that. Then on the software side, I would say it's maybe only 10% of my time. I have a great team. So the software team lead and the designer and developers over there are really, really good. And mostly, I'm more of like the prioritization guy. 'What should we build next?' And then I review things and I provide input, but for the most part, they are very self-sufficient and they produce fantastic stuff at the highest standard. And so I'm not heavily involved in any of the development or oversight, just a little bit of review and just chatting with the team about what we're working on and that kind of stuff, vision stuff. On the SEO services side, again, I have a fantastic team and a fantastic team lead, Allie Margeson. She runs the whole service on the SEO services. And so I'm mostly just checking in with her on one-on-ones. I do a little bit of sales stuff, so if there's a larger client, then I'll get on calls with them and I'm doing proposals, but that's also mostly handled by either Jessica or, on the SEO services side, we have team members that are managing the sales. And the listing service, again, it's like Jag Slawek. He runs a great ship. So I'm in a fortunate position that I get to focus on marketing. That's really my number one job, and just oversight. And I'm just touching base with people and seeing what's going on and solving problems and that kind of stuff. But yeah, it's busy for sure, but I couldn't do it without all those fantastic team leads.
Jon Clark
Yeah. I wanted to jump in a little bit to the 2024 local survey. You added, I think, 40-plus AI-specific attributes of a local profile and how they impact local rank. I was curious how you put those 40 together? Are they things that you're hearing from your clients, things that you're observing? Like, take us through how you came up with that total number of AI attributes.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, the list is the list. And so we have 180 factors and we were scoring those factors on how... let's say something like primary category on your Google Business Profile. So that's one of the factors. Does it impact rankings and how much does that impact your local pack and maps rankings? How much does it impact your local organic rankings? How much does it impact conversions? We had that going back forever.
And so this year I added a new column that you have to score every factor on. And so it's like, okay, primary category on your Google Business Profile: how much does that impact your visibility in AI responses? That's what we did. And so we actually didn't add 40 new AI factors. I just kept all the existing factors and I said, 'Okay, now do you think that this impacts AI visibility?' These factors... I do always add and remove factors every year. So this year I did add about 40 new factors across the board. Every contributor in the survey scores them across four different sort of, I guess, channels, we'll call them, different interfaces. Something like being listed on best-of lists, right? If you follow AI SEO, you know that that's really valuable, right? And that's actually a factor that was on our list before.
And so that was a Google Business Profile, like local SEO factor. If you got listed on those, we always thought that that would impact your organic and your local visibility. And so now you're scoring that. It just jumps to the top of the AI list. Or things like review diversification. That was always on our list before, but now on the AI side, it's like, well, AIs are not just looking at reviews on Google. They're looking at reviews on these industry sites and whatever sites are prominent. So that makes that factor prominent in the AI results. And so that's basically how I was able to do it on this version of the survey, which is really valuable. And I actually almost think about branching it off as like a separate survey, right, and bringing in AI SEO people that are really in the weeds on that and get them to contribute. I better do it now that I've said it publicly. I better do it before someone else does it.
Jon Clark
That would be pretty cool. We've had some interesting guests from Similarweb and Conductor who, certainly, they've put out SEO attribute type of studies, but they did focus in on sort of the AI side of things specifically. And it's sort of interesting to take our guest segment out that data and compare it to what we've traditionally thought of as SEO metrics. You mentioned reviews. I wanted to dig in there a little bit.
So there's a period of time where we would see local business owners basically have their customer list and they would just blast the entire list and say, 'Hey, give me a review.' So you had these very unnatural spikes in review frequency, I guess. What do you guys see as the most impactful way to utilize getting new reviews to a business?
Darren Shaw
Yeah, so this was a new factor that really existed before, but it really gained popularity. In this edition of the local survey, local SEOs have really noticed that the recency of reviews is critical. If you haven't gotten a review in a few months, you're going to fall off. So even if you have 10,000 reviews, but you haven't got one recently, it kind of shows Google that you're maybe not in operation anymore. And so you basically fall off. So review recency is very important. Addressing the review spikes issue and just blasting your mailing list... so you need a regular process in place. And so you can either do that through software where every customer gets a follow-up via your CRM connection using software like Whitespark Reputation Builder, which will automate the process, connects to your CRM, and sends the emails or text messages out. That's cool. For me, my favorite for most small businesses—and if I was an agency working for small businesses, I would focus on my review card strategy.
So the review card strategy is: at the close of the sale, you're like, 'Oh, how was everything?' 'It was amazing. We loved it.' 'Great. Would you consider leaving us a review on Google?' The guy says, 'Yeah.' So now you've got the verbal 'Yeah, I'll do it,' and then you be like, 'Great. I'm going to make it so easy for you. I've got this little card. It's got a little QR code on it. All you have to do is just point your phone and this will take you straight to our Google reviews where you can leave us a review.' You leave that card with them and now they've got this physical reminder sitting on their desk, right? And you've made it very easy for them. This for me is the most powerful, most effective strategy to drive reviews. And so I like that one. That's what I generally recommend. If you are high volume, then you're like retail or restaurants, it's really hard to do the review card strategy, although both of the review cards that I have received from companies have both been restaurants. One is a Japanese restaurant in Banff, one is a local restaurant called Earls, and they both did it. And I love it. I love it when I get these cards because I'm like, 'I invented that.' I'm so excited. I did a video about my review card strategy years and years ago and I think it has made its rounds.
Jon Clark
For me, the review generation piece has always been the most difficult part of local SEO. And it sounds like you might be similar, but every time I see a good one, I either take a picture of it or I take one. So I have a little basket over here that is just filled with examples that I can share with clients of how others are doing it, because it's sometimes hard for clients to understand how easy it could be. If it's just a placard or a business card, yeah.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, there's so many things that you could be doing to generate those reviews, and you've got to do it.
Jon Clark
Two additional questions about reviews. You see a lot of reviews mention like a waiter's name or the guy's name who helped you take the tree down. Is there any data around actually referencing either the business owner's name or an employee that works there? Is there any validity to that as it relates to the review quality?
Darren Shaw
Well, I think whenever I see that, I know that they're using the secret hack of review generation, which is: the person gives you the card and they say, 'And if you mention my name...' like this guy's Fergus... 'If you mention my name, Fergus... we're doing a competition in the restaurant and whoever gets the most reviews will get like a $100 gift card.' So that actually adds an additional incentive for the reviewer. You're like, 'Fergus! He was such a great waiter. Love that guy. He was so nice. I'm going to do it because I now feel personally like I want to do something nice for Fergus because we had such a great night.' So that's what I think is usually happening when you see lots of reviews that are mentioning the name. They're running some kind of thing on the back end, creating a leaderboard and competition within the company, which is a smart strategy because you cannot incentivize. You can't say, 'I'll give you 10% off your meal if you leave me a review.' That's strictly against the Google guidelines. But you can offer your employees a bonus if they get more reviews. But how do you know if it was Fergus's review or someone else's review? That's why they have to mention the name.
Joe
I've got a story too because I just got a handwritten one recently too, and I'm meaning to leave the review for this woman. It was a great restaurant, but I'm using it as a bookmark so I don't forget to do it.
Darren Shaw
And you know, it's funny actually... have you done it yet? How long have you had that bookmark? Yeah, Fergus, I'm sorry I've had your card for like a few months and haven't done it yet. So, as a strategy, it's better than nothing, but it doesn't always work.
Jon Clark
All right. Last question on reviews. On one of your recent podcasts, which is excellent, so anyone in the local space should definitely tune in... but there was a comment around Google sort of prompting reviewers to go back and update their reviews. I was really curious if you had any information around... right, so recency is a ranking factor. Do you see someone going back and updating a review as sort of re-triggering that recency, or does that original review date still sort of stick? Does that make sense?
Darren Shaw
Well, when you update a review, the date changes. So the date will change. In fact, there's been cases where someone left a really nasty review and then, just to really needle the business, they would go back and update it every month so it just kept jumping straight to the top of the profile. So a terrible review from five years ago, but they would just keep going back and making small updates just to keep it stuck at the top of the profile.
Jon Clark
Oh my god, this is so evil.
Darren Shaw
So I think it would apply to the recency. I'm speculating here. I don't have any data on this. But I do think that an updated review gets whatever the recency boost is of a new review. And I think that it's a really interesting initiative from Google, sending out the emails encouraging people to add more info to their reviews. It really speaks to where Google is headed from an AI perspective. That review data is the ultimate gold mine for them in terms of AI differentiating content that they have within their own ecosystem, and they know it. They're like, 'In the future world of AI, nothing is more powerful than your data, and the data has to come original from humans.' And so they have the ability to do this and so they're turning it on. They're like, 'We need to get more info.' Especially if it's a rating-only review or it's just like a simple one-liner like, 'I had a great experience.' Like, come on, tell me more. What service did you get? What food did you have? How was the atmosphere? Were the bathrooms clean? Google wants that information because you can see it surfacing in their interfaces now. The 'Know Before You Go' section is new in Google Maps, so it basically summarizes a ton of content from the reviews using AI to sort of give you this like, 'Hey, you should know about the parking. You should know that people say the washrooms are disgusting.' Whatever it is, right? So it can be positive or negative. And then there's also the whole new Ask Maps thing. And Ask Maps is, for me, a very clear insight into where Google is heading and that a lot of this is generated from the user-generated content of reviews.
Jon Clark
I mean, it's so interesting. You can definitely see Google moving that way in general, like with their focus on Reddit. I mean, if they have that data themselves, that's a much better piece of data.
Joe
I have a nasty review follow-up question too. It's more on the service side. A couple of weeks ago, I was out of town and I went to a local gym. I just needed to work out for the day and I met the owner of the gym and I was like, 'I'd just like to work out for the day. I can't sign up forever.' I was like, 'How much can I pay you just to work out here for the day?' He's like, 'Just... if you promise me you'll leave us a review, good or bad, before you leave the gym, you can work out for free.' And it was like not a great gym, but I wrote her a nice review. I just wrote about the nice parts about the gym. And then I checked her reviews after and there were some bad reviews, and I think that it was her strategy. 'I've just got to bury these bad ones.' So I guess like when you have to console a client who just got a bad review, how do you coach them through it? What do you talk to them about like the timing of it all? Because it could impact you, if you don't have a lot of reviews, it can impact you for a long time.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, so negative review management... it's tough. If your business has actual problems in it, then your reviews are a great indication of what you need to fix. If the gym's not clean, if the gym is lacking in equipment, you can learn from your reviews and it's like you have to fix the business. But if you are a business that generally does quite well and 97% of your reviews are positive, as you would expect on most businesses, and you get one negative... don't stress it, man. It's actually totally fine. In fact, sometimes a negative review... if you are a well-run, good business that generally provides a good experience for your customers, one negative review can actually help your profile from the perspective of making your reviews look more legitimate. You're like, '700 five-star reviews? Come on, no one ever had a single complaint? Not possible.' So this does create this sense of, 'Can I trust these reviews?' So getting a negative can help from that perspective.
And more importantly, the way you respond to the negative review can actually make your business shine. Everyone has a bad customer once in a while. And so if you handle that in the reply very professionally and very like, 'Hey, we're really sorry you had that experience. We want to make it right. Please contact us. This is not up to our standard,' that is a good sign for future prospects, future people that are reviewing your profile. And so I actually think a handful of negative reviews... not a bad thing, sometimes a good thing. And the other thing that can happen... sometimes you're going to get a negative review from someone who's just a completely unreasonable person, and there's no helping it. Sometimes you can get a totally reasonable person that just had a bad experience and they went to your Google Business Profile and left a negative review. And maybe their experience was legit, something happened, one of the staff just dropped the ball. In that case, you can make it right. I've actually seen negative reviews turn into a five-star review because the owner or manager got in touch with the person and really made it right. And at the end of that making it right, they asked them, 'Would you consider updating your Google review?' And then it's like, 'Update: The manager handled this so well, I'm now a loyal customer.' And in fact, if that happens, then they're a loyal customer for life. So I like a negative review. I want a trickle of negative reviews. They can be positive if handled the right way.
Jon Clark
I mean, I know you're not supposed to generate reviews unorganically, but is there a good ratio of good reviews to bad reviews that you've seen across the spectrum? Like for every 100, you should have one, or is there any sort of data around that?
Darren Shaw
No, I think a 10:1 ratio is too high. I want 10% negative reviews? No. I would want maybe 1%. Just a trickle, just a little taste of negatives. I want them mostly positive. Yeah.
Jon Clark
Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about map pins. This is, I think, maybe the area I know the least about and I love digging into how you're analyzing the impacts of a local map pin. I thought one of the things that was most interesting was... I might get some of these details wrong, so feel free to fill in... but basically if you had an existing location address and then you remove it and become sort of a service area business, the pin could default to maybe an address you had even before that, or it might just be dropped into the city center. Talk to us a little bit about that. If that happens, where do you start to try to understand which of those two options, or maybe even something, a third option, is happening there to try to correct it?
Darren Shaw
So Google is cracking down on service area businesses that have an address showing. And so you'll often get dinged, and you have to get into compliance. And to get into compliance, if you don't serve customers at your address, you have to turn your address off on the Google Business Profile. As you mentioned, that can cause various problems. So you could revert back to where you originally verified your address. And so you used to rank in Denver, but you started your business 15 years ago in Aurora, Colorado. And so now you've got a new address in Denver, you turn it off, and now you're ranking back in Aurora. That's annoying because you're like, 'What happened to my Denver rankings?' So this is a big problem for service area businesses. The other thing that can happen is it just goes willy-nilly. Google just doesn't know where you are and puts you somewhere weird. I have a case where a mobile auto detailer... his map pin got dropped up in the middle of the desert, like 200 miles north of the city. And nobody lives up there. So if there was a scorpion searching for his business, great, he might get some business. But nobody's searching for his business up there, and he no longer competes in his main city of Reno. And so this is very problematic. But here's the mystery: I have seen a lot of businesses where their address was removed and their rankings did not change at all. Lots of them. So it's not all the time. You're going to hear people saying, 'If you remove your address, it's an absolute death blow to your local rankings,' and I disagree. It's not true. It's like luck of the draw, roll of the dice every time you move that address. You don't know if Google's going to go wild with it or if everything's going to be fine. So it really is kind of this weird buggy situation. How do you know what happened? So if you remove your address, then the best way to figure out what happened is to use Whitespark's local ranking grids and build a grid around your city and you can see... it should be great if you had it before and then after, and then you could see once you remove your address, 'Where did my rankings go?' You might see the green from around your physical address move up into the top right, a little hint of green. Like you go completely red where you were before and now you're green up there. And then you can build a new grid where you can expand so you can use grid ranking to find where does your pin go. Because the tricky thing with Google is that if your address is not showing, you technically don't have a pin. You can't move it and you can't adjust the pin. So Google, just in its back-end system, has decided you now rank in this spot. And every business has a radius, and you can only rank around five to 10 miles around where you're located. But the question is, where does Google locate you once you remove the address? And that's the roll of the dice. And so you could use something like local ranking grid software to figure out where Google has put you.
Jon Clark
So if that happens, is it a request? Do you have to solicit a request to have that area fixed? Or how do you get back to your main service area? Is that something that's been figured out yet?
Darren Shaw
So no, there are two approaches. One: you get an actual office address and you re-verify your profile with signage and staffed hours of operation. That's one way. You want to put the address back on your profile, you've got to get into compliance. The other way, if you want to remain a service area business, is you can never change where Google is setting your location on your current Google Business Profile. But what you can do is make a new Google Business Profile. So you go and get a new one and you verify it at the location that you want to rank in. And then once your new profile is up and running—even if it's a service area business, every service area Google Business Profile is still verified at an address—so you verify it at the new address. Then you send a message to support and say, 'Our business has moved. We are no longer at this Google Business Profile. Please transfer all of our reviews from this profile to my new one,' and then you have effectively moved a service area business. It's the only trick to fix it.
Joe
I want to ask about other platforms too, because we spend a lot of time talking about Google right now. But you know, we work with some hotels, we work with some restaurants sometimes, and there are other platforms that are important for reviews too. And I think with... maybe we'll start talking a little bit about answer engine optimization with you too. There are LLMs that aren't going to use Google's information. So I wanted to maybe get you to talk a little bit about other platforms that local businesses should be thinking about for reviews and location information.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, it's a really good question. I have been advocating for review diversification for years before AIs even came around. There's huge value to that because Google does look at your reviews on other platforms. They're going to look at Yelp. They're going to look at TripAdvisor. They're going to look at home service pros... whatever the industry is, you're typically going to have really important industry-specific directories that are generating reviews. There's usually only one or two per industry that become important, but you need to be looking at it. And same with your Facebook profile. Google seems to care about Facebook. And I think the answer engines seem to be picking up Facebook reviews as well. Yelp is a huge one, but you can't ask for reviews on Yelp. Yelp is the worst one. Let's not even talk about Yelp. It's too painful. So review diversification is very important. It's pretty easy to figure out which ones are most prominent in your industry. Just start Googling your business and your competitor businesses with the word 'reviews' and you'll see them recur multiple times. You take your top 10 competitors and just put in their name space reviews, and then just look in the results. You're going to see the most prominent sites for sure.
Jon Clark
You mentioned sort of like the best-of lists, which, in ChatGPT and I guess traditional SEO, GEO, whatever you're calling it, has been a tactic. Are there different ways that you're thinking about optimizing for LLMs specifically around local sort of outside of those best-of type of content? Are there other things that you're recommending to your clients there?
Darren Shaw
So everything that I would recommend for local businesses to do for answer engine optimization, AI SEO, is pretty in line with what a traditional SEO would recommend. So it's the same kind of strategies. And so it's working on your content in chunkable format, making sure it's concise, making sure that it is answer-focused. That is going to be beneficial for traditional SEO and AI SEO. So it's really important to work on your content strategy, how you're talking about your services using things like semantic triples. So content strategy on your website, very important for local businesses and most local businesses are not thinking about this yet. So it's a great thing for agencies to help them with. And then yeah, review diversification is on my list of things that I want to be thinking about as I'm future-thinking, making sure I'm not only focused on Google. Citations... one of the things I'm advocating and we're doing now is citation description optimization. On the web, you've got all these business listings on various directory sites and they're using the same description that you wrote in 2008. It's just like, 'Business is blah, blah, blah, blah.' So you've got to be thinking about entity SEO here. You've got to be thinking about what is your business known for? What do you want to be known for? How do you want to position your business? So rather than... you want to be writing multiple semantic triples in that description and then updating all of your citations and you could mix it up. And in fact, you should take the opportunity to mix it up. So before, if you asked me five years ago, seven years ago, I would have been like, 'Yeah, you can use the same description on every directory. Doesn't really matter.' Now I'm thinking a little bit more about it from an AI SEO perspective. I think there's opportunity there because it's just like... what you say about yourself is only so much. In AI SEO, what the broader web says about you becomes increasingly important and probably has always been important. We just hadn't been really thinking about it as much as we are now in the era of AI. And so yeah, that's just one thing that you could tweak. You have control over that, so do it.
Joe
I think I've read something you wrote also about using images and video to tweak that too, knowing that there are AI platforms that can kind of... they can grab the text from video. So I wonder if maybe you answer that a little differently now. You also have... you're a business owner, you can use image and video in that way too.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, what you could do actually... that's a great question because I've really only thought about that text overlay in terms of images on your website and your Google Business Profile. But your question just made me realize, okay, do that across all your citations too. I hadn't really thought of that. And so it's a good question. Because the reality is, you could say, 'What do we want this business to be known for?' Let's say it was Denver Plumbing Pros. Denver Plumbing Pros are Denver's best hot water tank installation specialists. That's a nice semantic triple. Denver Water Pros provides drain cleaning services. So you could basically make a series of images, each one of them representing whatever that semantic triple is, put the text overlay in small print, and then upload those to all of the directories as well. Yeah, I like this idea. I'm going to make a new video. I'll give you a shout out. No, I honestly had not thought about the broader web in terms of image optimization. Yeah. So now it's your idea.
Joe
I thought it was your idea, Darren.
Jon Clark
I wanted to quickly go back to the semantic triples. We talk about that a lot with our clients too, but it's typically like 'service is X' sort of thing. Are you thinking about semantic triples for local in the sense of like 'business is located in location' or are you still thinking about it as types of products that are on the menu? Like, how are you thinking about the semantic triple structure?
Darren Shaw
Like all of them. Yeah, it's like what do we want the internet to know about this business, right? And so 'business provides service,' 'business is located in,' 'business services clients in these locations,' building out all of that... 'business was established in year'... all of those things, right? So it's just kind of like... that's actually a real exercise to do with your clients, just build out the semantic triples. You could use AI to help you build your baseline and then ask AI, 'What else should I build out as things we want this business to be known for?' Get it to crawl your whole website or give it a Screaming Frog crawl, right? And just get it to build out those things for you. And then now you've got your list, and then you've got to make sure that they're being mentioned in the right places on your website, on your Google Business Profile, and on the broader web. Yeah.
Jon Clark
We found that clients struggled to build out an initial list to start brainstorming against. We built a tool internally where you can just add a whole bunch of attributes and it basically concatenates them all together into a list. And then you can at least use that to start the conversation with the client: 'Yes, this makes sense. Let's iterate on this one. No.' And so you at least start to get an initial data dump of what some of those options are. I wanted to talk about Ask Maps as it relates to AI, right? We hear a lot about tools like Profound and these other tools that are tracking LLM responses in these models. Do you see that as something you would want to track as it relates to what's being included or if your company is being returned there? Is that the right way to be thinking about that, or not really? Almost like a separate LLM, right?
Darren Shaw
Well, I think Ask Maps is on a specific profile. It's like 'Ask Maps about this business.' I don't think you can go to Ask Maps and be like... that's really more like an AI mode, right? If you're going to be like, 'Show me some businesses that provide the service' or whatever your prompt is. Ask Maps is really on a per-business thing. So what I would... my strategy for Ask Maps is figure out what it already knows about you, figure out what you want it to know about you, and then make sure you're trying to feed it so that it can return... what is it not returning when it should be returning? Yeah.
Jon Clark
I guess maybe that was the question I was trying to ask. I just didn't verbalize it very well. So to understand what maps would return, would that be something that you would want to track? Establishing a baseline of 'Does X restaurant serve pizza?' And if it says no or it doesn't know, would that be something that then you would try to influence?
Darren Shaw
Yeah, it's an interesting strategy. I have not given it that much thought, but I'd say yes. I think your line of questioning is exactly the questions we should be asking about Ask Maps and investigating what does it know, what does it not know, and then making sure that it can know. And then in terms of tracking, set up a schedule to keep asking it. Like, okay, it doesn't know that we serve pizza, so let's make it know that we serve pizza. So updating the menus, updating our website, updating citations, updating whatever you can to try and feed it that information. And then ask again in a week: 'Does this restaurant serve pizza?' 'Yes, now I know it does.' And I actually think it would happen fast. If you went into your Google Business Profile and added a menu item for pizza... you know what the problem is? A lot of businesses won't call it pizza. They'll call it 'Mary's Flatbread.' Name it what it is so that Ask Maps can actually figure it out, right? And so that's actually menu optimization. Coming up with quirky names is going to hurt you in the world of AI. Then I think if you make the change and then you Ask Maps the next day, you'd probably see it trigger that fast.
Joe
Save that for your print strategy. I want to talk a little bit about your software. The industry is changing really quickly. All three of us have been working in this field for over 20 years. This feels like the most rapid pace of change I can remember. How are you thinking about the roadmap for your tool—your tools?
Darren Shaw
Yeah, I think so. Right now, local is still driven largely... we've got maps and local packs, and that's still good. But what happens when Google flips the switch and it's all very AI-driven? I think that it's almost like the service leads the software because, what are we going to do to help our clients? And then how do we build software to assist with that? And so when we build software to assist with that, then we can sell it to other agencies that will make it helpful for them. And so we're still figuring that out, continuing to add current features that our clients would care about. They're not necessarily AI-driven, though. So I don't really have anything on the roadmap that is like, 'This will help you with AI visibility.' Because if you think about all the things that we talk about to optimize for AI visibility, there is potentially in the future a webpage audit tool that says, 'How good is this page for AI?' So we could throw that into the software, and that's probably a useful addition. But other than that, how diversified are your reviews? What is your review velocity? These are things that are actually on the roadmap that are happening now, and so we're working on that kind of stuff. One of the nice things about AI SEO is that its foundation is SEO. So a lot of the stuff that we're already doing, that our tools already provide, are still valuable from that perspective. And so we're going to continue developing those and improving those because the RAG process... who's returned in the AI results? Often whoever's ranking in Google's results. So a lot of the stuff that we do is going to continue to pay dividends across that, which is good news for agencies. But it's also... I feel like this AI era is really good news for agencies too because it gives us a whole bunch of business owners that are like, 'I don't know what to do, I need to hire an expert.' And so it's kind of a new golden age because we've been doing this, the market's been saturated... so getting ahead of it and then providing this expertise to business owners... they're busy fixing sinks and closing legal cases and doing dentistry. They don't have time to worry about all this. And so I feel like from an agency perspective, we're looking good. AI is not going to knock us out in my opinion. A lot of people are really scared about it, but I'm like, 'Ooh, this is exciting. I think there's so much opportunity now.' Yeah.
Jon Clark
Maybe that's the developer background in you where you're excited to work with some more technology. One thing you teased on a recent podcast was some advancements around Google posts where maybe you'll be able to add UTM tracking and things like that. Is there anything else you can say about that release that you were working on, or is that live already?
Darren Shaw
Yeah. So Google posts is coming. We have a nice little simple Google review management feature with AI replies and really nice stuff in our local platform software that's coming. That's going to be really soon and then the next thing is Google posts. So we're going to build a Google post scheduler with built-in tracking and smart stuff and repeatable posts. But frigging Google keeps launching cool stuff in their own Google post software. They've launched scheduling, and they just this morning—I announced it on LinkedIn, I broke the news—they now have a new feature for repeatable posts. So let's say you have happy hour on Thursdays. Every Thursday is happy hour. You can make one post and set it to repeat. So you can do that in the interface there. They still will not allow you to do bulk pushing a post to multiple locations... or actually, I think they do have that too. It's just a little clunky. So anyways, yeah, we have a post feature coming. Of course, it's required functionality in our software. So that's coming soon. And it will be the best you ever saw. Yeah.
Jon Clark
Love it. Let's jump to some rapid fires. Does that work for you? All right. What do you think is the most underrated ranking signal today?
Darren Shaw
Underrated, overlooked... I would say degree of focus on a particular topic on your website and your Google Business Profile. The more niche, the more focused you are, the higher the chance you have to rank. So if you are a law firm that covers bankruptcy plus tax law plus personal injury plus criminal, you're going to struggle, at least in local search. But if you then super niche down on both the website and the Google Business Profile to just criminal or even one particular practice area, like 'We are Philadelphia's number one dog bite lawyer, all we do is dog bite cases,' the more you niche, the better you are, the more likely you are to rank. And so I think that this has been a growing thing, and we see it in the search results. It's like this business has three reviews, but their website is absolutely focused on a niche and their Google Business Profile is completely focused on this one niche. They have the thing in their business name. They are the dog bite lawyers of Philadelphia. You're not going to displace them for dog bite if you are a general PI law firm. They are just... Google loves that. They're like, 'We found the ultimate specialist for you.' And so I think that is one overlooked factor that kind of indicates some strategy going forward, like diversifying multiple websites. If you go back into the early days of SEO—let's go back to 2010—microsites, we'd laugh. We'd be like, 'Haha, microsites! That's such a stupid plan.' I actually think we're back to the microsites world these days. Yeah.
Joe
I have a long-winded question, but I think it could be a rapid fire yes or no answer. So the Local Search Ranking Factors Survey... it's not always a perfect cadence of when you release it. And it feels like the page changed with AI mode, AI Overviews, probably going to consolidate a little bit throughout 2026. Would you be willing to do two reports in one year if there's enough change?
Darren Shaw
No. It's because I struggle to do one per year. It is a lot of work and I'm always procrastinating it and I'm on a pace of about every second year. That's basically what I've been doing. David Mihm was really good at it. So David Mihm originated the survey, I took over in 2017. He was really good at keeping it going at one per year. I'm a little bit off schedule, but I'm going to try and get back on track to one per year. Basically, my plan is to release the survey in early fall to the contributors, get the data back, get my analysis done, and publish it December 15th, and it's ready for the whole upcoming year, right? That's my pace that I want to try and stay on. But I would say, no. I've got to get better at these rapid fires. I should just be like, 'Yes' or 'No.' Okay, sorry.
Joe
Yeah!
Jon Clark
I think part of it's our problem. We position them as rapid fires, but in reality they're probably not at all.
Darren Shaw
I'm going to get more succinct. Okay, hit me. Next question.
Jon Clark
All right. What do you think disappears from local SEO by, I don't know, 2027? Anything?
Darren Shaw
No, I would only talk about the myths, the things that are absolute BS right now, like geotagging photos. I hope that they disappear. Everything else I think is... I just don't see anything stopping being important. It's like more, more, more. Yeah.
Jon Clark
Geotagging did work at one point though, right? Or was it always a myth?
Darren Shaw
I don't think so. I don't think it ever worked. No.
Jon Clark
Interesting. How about Facebook local SEO groups? Worth the time or a lot of misinformation like geotagging photos?
Darren Shaw
A lot of misinformation. I feel like they're dying a little bit. People's attention is getting diversified all over the place, and so I've seen the activity in those fall off.
Jon Clark
Yeah, interesting. Let's see... is there a local SEO tool, aside from your own, that you use regularly or that you would recommend?
Darren Shaw
Do I use anybody else's tools? Yeah, GMB Everywhere. I use GMB Everywhere, the Chrome plugin. I use that. I use PlePer's Chrome plugin once in a while. So there you go. PlePer, P-L-E-P-E-R. Those are the two Chrome extensions that I do use.
Joe
If you were going to plan a perfect day for a tourist in Edmonton, what would you put in that itinerary?
Darren Shaw
A walk in the River Valley. It's beautiful. We have a whole beautiful River Valley that runs through the city. So I'd want to go for a walk in the River Valley. I'd have to take the tourist to West Edmonton Mall, even though I hate it. I don't want to go there. It's like Vegas in our city kind of thing. And so we've got the West Edmonton Mall, you kind of have to see it, it's a spectacle. And then I would take you to some of our best restaurants for dinner and then to my house to have some drinks and hang out and... yeah, that's it. Edmonton is not a great tourist destination.
Joe
I mean, you post a lot on skis, which I like to watch.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, I would take you out of the city. We'd go to the mountains, we'd go skiing, we'd go for hikes in the mountains. It's beautiful.
Jon Clark
You're speaking Joe's love language there. All right, Darren, this has been great. I've definitely learned a ton about local that I didn't know. And thanks for all you do for the community in general. I know it's a labor of love in some cases, like the ranking survey. Let everyone know where they can find you online and if you'll be speaking anywhere coming up.
Darren Shaw
Yeah, so I'm generally not speaking anymore. It's just more work than I want to do, and I find I get more value out of our YouTube. So find me on YouTube, Darren Shaw SEO, or looking for our Whitespark channel on YouTube. I do a lot of stuff there. Every day I try to post on LinkedIn, so you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me on all the socials: Instagram, TikTok, making short videos and long videos and just trying to educate people about local SEO. And certainly, of course, check out our website, whitespark.ca. We have great software and services for agencies, small businesses, and enterprises.
Jon Clark
Love it. Well, thanks again for being on the Page 2 Podcast, and for those listening, if you enjoyed the show, please remember to subscribe, rate, and review. We'll see you next week. Bye-bye.
Darren Shaw
Thanks for having me.