By the way, if you’re an attorney who wants to grow or improve your practice in any way, you won’t find a better law firm consultant / coach / sensei than Jared.  I’ve seen his work up-close, and he’s the real deal.  Even if you’re one of us non-attorneys, it’s worth following Jared’s YouTube channel, and maybe some of his other podcasts, because a lot of his and his guests’ insights are widely applicable and the shows are entertaining.

Any questions for me?  Any topics you’d like me (or Jared) to take up?  Leave a comment!

We SEOs are quick to declare things dead.  Links are dead, citations are dead, websites are dead, Google is dead, SEO is dead.  None of those has assumed room temperature yet.  Some of us are also quick to ignore things that often have demonstrable value: a page on a niche topic, a Google Business Profile page in the boonies, a media hit or guest post that didn’t earn you a backlink, another language, and the list goes on.

You know what else is not dead and something you should not dismiss?  A review that’s been filtered.  That is, a review that a customer wrote and posted online – typically on Google Maps or Yelp – only to be hidden from public view instantly or after a while.  Google doesn’t tell you when a review has been filtered.  (The reviewer can see it, but nobody else can.)  Yelp serves it cold.

I assume you’re clear on the many benefits of live, not-filtered reviews, and you probably try to get them whenever you can.  But nobody likes filtered reviews: not you, not the reviewer, not potential customers, and not even the review sites that filter the reviews (Google Maps and Yelp).  The only filtered reviews you like are the ones for that slimy competitor down the street, who must be greasing customers.  Karma.

On the surface that makes sense: What good is a customer’s good word if nobody else sees or hears it?  But you need to look deeper than that.  A filtered review isn’t a failure, because of all of the things that had to go right for you to get it, including acquiring the customer, doing a good job for the customer, and having the customer take the time to review you.  It’s just one wrong turn at the end of a much-longer journey you took with that customer.  Turns out you can get back onto the right road and get to your destination, sooner or later.  Getting a review isn’t the process by itself, but rather is part of a larger process.

At the risk of slowing you down with another metaphor, here’s another way you can look at it: A powerlifter tries to deadlift 585 lbs., which would be a personal best.  He pulls up the bar most of the way, but can’t quite lock it out.  He rests for a few minutes, loads up 580 lbs., and tries again.  This time he does pull it up all the way, and even squeezes out one more rep.  It’s 5 lbs. under his goal, but 580 is still a personal best.  He also got a great workout and maybe learned a thing or two from the attempt.  Now he’s better able to clear 585 next time.

So why exactly should you keep asking for reviews, even if a lot of them are getting filtered?  Because of the many layers of payoff between your current situation and when the filter becomes a non-issue for you.  Here are the main ways filtered reviews can help you get your local SEO and overall marketing more locked-in:

1. You can copy and paste the review and use it as a testimonial on your site.  I suggest you do so regardless of whether the review was filtered.  It’s relevant and persuasive content you don’t need to write, and customers, Google, and the AI chatbots will see it and factor it in.

By the way, if it’s a Google Maps review, you can still provide a link that allows anyone to read the review, even if it was filtered or might be filtered in the future.  (This is a good step to do because, for one thing, it shows skeptical would-be customers that you didn’t just make up the review.)  Simply copy the link in the notification that Google sent you when your customer posted the review, or pull up the review in your Google Business Profile dashboard.  Somewhere next to the review, include a link to that URL.

2. You may be able to grab or ask for the photos your customers uploaded, if they included photos with their review.  You can optimize those photos and stick them on your site.

3. You can probably get the same review on another site.  If appropriate, nudge your reviewer to a site where you have few reviews (BBB, HealthGrades, Avvo, etc.), perhaps because you’ve overlooked or neglected that review site.  You want reviews on a diversity of sites anyway, particularly now, in the AI era.  Also, as I’ve written, customers who reviewed you on Google Maps and who have written at least a few reviews on Yelp are the most likely people to review you on Yelp.

4. You get to sniff out your customer’s sentiment before it’s public.  If the review wouldn’t have done you any favors, the filter just did you a favor.  That’s often the case with one-liners, ratings without any review text, gibberish, reviews that look forced, and similar unhelpful reviews.

5. It’s excellent keyword-research intel, regardless of whether or when that filtered review sees the light of day. Reviews (yours and other businesses’) are arguably the single best place to find the search terms that actually matter, in that they usually include search terms used by people who paid for what you offer.  Those may be terms you’ve ignored, hadn’t encountered, hadn’t thought of, or hadn’t focused on enough.

6. The review may be unfiltered sooner or later, often as a result of your doing absolutely nothing.  Just because the review hasn’t seen the light of day doesn’t mean it won’t.

7. You get an early warning.  Let’s say you get a review you’re not crazy about, but it’s filtered right away.  There’s a decent chance it’s only filtered for a few days, during which time you can figure out whether and how you’d like to respond to the review, whether to contact your customer directly to sort anything out, etc.

8. If your customer is willing to revise the review, it can be an occasion to ask your customer some follow-up questions and glean useful intel about what makes him or her tick (and, by extension, get some insights into other customers and reviewers).

9. You can simplify your review-encouragement strategy if you stop caring so much about filtered reviews.  Are you tired of suggesting certain points you want reviewers to touch on, or asking them to use a specific device or app, sending them a direct link to where they can write a review, paying for expensive / ineffective / unwieldy ORM software, or shepherding reviewers in some other way?  That might be what’s causing some of your reviews to be filtered in the first place, so you can probably micromanage less and see better results.

10. You refine your strategy.  In your effort to send fewer reviews into the meat grinder, you’ll learn more about what works for your business and what doesn’t.  If you’re losing a lot of reviews to the filter, it’s a great time to experiment.  The single best thing to try, at least for starters, is different timing.  Don’t ask lots of customers at once for a review.  Spread out your requests.  Asking 1 customer every day for 30 days is better than asking 30 customers in a weekend.

11. Filtered reviews keep you frosty and focused, by reminding you that you don’t own anything online besides your website, and that any online asset can go up in a puff of smoke.  Now that you know the filter exists and that it can whack you in the face at any time, you may be more consistent in socking away every (good) review you get, in case it ever goes missing.  (By the way, a germane pro tip: be sure to copy and paste and store long-term any reviews you get on the Better Business Bureau.  BBB removes reviews every 2-3 years, even though the BBB doesn’t filter reviews, to my knowledge.)

12. Customers are more likely to write you reviews if they know you’ll see them no matter what and you’ll use them no matter what.  Happy customers are as unhappy as you are when their reviews get filtered, because it seems like a waste of their time.  The customer whose review was filtered today might in the future write you a review on another site, or update the original review to be even more glowing – IF you have made it clear that reviewing you was a good use of his or her time.

Are Google’s and Yelp’s review filters a PITA?  Yes.  Are unfiltered reviews better than filtered reviews?  Of course.  But the takeaway here is that even filtered reviews have a lot of value.  You’ll need to deal with some number of filtered reviews anyway, on your way to getting your review strategy down pat.  You’ll get there faster if, rather than trying to avoid filtered reviews at all costs or viewing them as failures, you listen to what those often-ignored reviews are trying to tell you.

What benefits have you gotten out of your filtered reviews?  How have you adjusted your strategy based on them?  Any immediate problems or concerns?  Leave a comment!

At least some of your potential customers probably speak another language.  They may form a huge chunk of your customer base, or a sliver.  You may know for a fact they’re out there, or maybe it’s just a maybe.  Whatever the case, it’s easy to find out how big the opportunity is, because it can be very easy for you to reach people who use another language to search locally, whether by Googling or asking AI.

In a nutshell, the idea is this: install a translation plugin that creates a whole section of your site in a language you consider a high priority.  If you’re on WordPress, try DeepL or a similar plugin.  If you’re on another platform, consider Weglot.  (Those are paid plugins, but I’m not aware of a similar translation that isn’t.)  Whichever solution you pick, what you’ll end up with is a subdirectory of your site in that other language – like example.com/es (Spanish) or yoursite.com/fr (French) – and those pages will be translations of the pages already on your site.  Sure, Google Translate can translate most sites, but it does so on the fly, and so it doesn’t give you pages – pages that you control and can refine.

The action item is simply to install (or have your developer) install one of those translation plugins on your site.  The plugin lifts 4 big pyramid stones for you:

1. It translates your pages (some or all of them) into the other language.
2. It puts them in one specific neighborhood of your site – a subdirectory or subdomain.
3. It links those pages together in the same way the pages in your primary language are linked together.
4. It handles the hreflang tags, so it can serve those pages to people who tend to search in that language.

A couple of examples of sites using these translation plugins are PowersServicing.ca (the 2nd language is Canadian French) and Prosper Injury Attorneys (the 2nd language is Spanish).

The biggest upshot for local SEO is obvious: you can rank for a greater variety of search terms if you rank for more than one language.  The pages in your 2nd language might rank before your primary-language pages do.  Different searchers, different pools of local competition, and different search volumes.  One language is probably lower-hanging fruit than the other.

It’s ideal if you or your staff speak that language in your professional daily grind, but even nobody on your crew speaks it, it’s still probably worth targeting a 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) language.  The people who find you may also speak your language (let’s assume it’s English), or if they don’t they’ll be able to decide for themselves how much of a language barrier there is.  In other words, you’ll find out pretty quickly whether ranking in another language yields any additional local customers.

Besides seeing what kinds of customers you get after you set up the plugin, how can you measure results?  Just in Google Search Console.  Go to “Performance” and then to “Pages.” Then filter by the name of the subdirectory with your translated pages (/es, /fr, /pt-BR, /ar, etc.).  That will show you how many impressions and clicks those other-language pages generated for you, and for what specific search terms.  Those impressions and clicks can add up.

You’ll also get a keyword-research jackpot, if you sift through the “Queries” tab.

The quality of the traffic might even be higher.  People searching in that other language might have fewer local options for businesses like yours, or maybe every competitor of yours does nothing to reach people who speak that language.  Keep in mind, too, that your pages in the other language typically will trigger the local map (Google Maps results) for various terms, in addition to hauling in visibility in the organic results and (most likely) in the local AI results.

By the way, the main alternatives to the plugin are (1) to translate and build pages manually and (2) to build a separate site.  Option 1 is fine, but can be a ton of work, and the internal linking can get tricky or messy.  Option 2 might be faster to get off the ground, but it’s still a lot of work, and generally isn’t ideal, in that any additional site is an additional series of expenses and you’ll have to scrounge backlinks for two sites rather than for one.

A few notes:

1. Make it clear whether anyone in your organization speaks the other language(s) you’re targeting.  It’s probably not a problem if you don’t have a speaker on-staff, but nobody wants a misunderstanding on that point.
2. The original pages on your site – those the plugin translates – should be good.  Otherwise, the plugin will replicate all the shortcomings of the original page, and you’ll have a multilingual mess on your hands.  The original pages should have a clear purpose (e.g. describing a service you offer), and they should be detailed, address basic questions, list the areas you serve, include plenty of internal links, and so on.  They should be plainly written or sound like you or both.  Take some time to fix them up before you configure the plugin.  (That might even help your primary-language pages perform better, too.)
3. You can use the plugin on a limited basis, to create translated versions of only some of the pages on your site.  It’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.
4. You’re not in it for life.  The plugin can be either a long-term solution or a proof of concept.  If you want or need to ditch the plugin later – perhaps just because you think you can do better without it – you can always go the scenic manual route.  You can have a speaker tune up the plugin-translated pages , or you can build a subdirectory or subdomain without the plugin, or both.

Once you’ve got the pages in the other language, don’t forget to do a few follow-through tasks:

• Submit the new pages in Search Console.  (Or just confirm that your XML sitemap includes the new URLs, that you’ve submitted that sitemap to Search Console, and that Google processed it OK.)
• Get Google reviews in that other language, if possible.
• Copy and paste any Google reviews in that other language onto your site.
• Consider using one of the other-language pages as the landing page URL of a Google Business Profile page you have in an area where lots of people speak that language.  You should probably use the top-level page in the subdirectory – the translated version of your homepage, like yoursite.com/es/.  Or you could also use a “location” page, like yoursite.com/es/el-paso/
• Fill out the “Services” field of your Google Business Profile page(s) in that other language, too.

TL;DR: check out DeepL or Weglot or a similar translation solution, and see if you can use it out on your site.  I bet you can, and that it won’t be difficult.  The results may be glorious.

Do you target more than one language on your site?  If so, how do you do it, and how has it worked out?  If you haven’t, what pros and cons are you weighing?  Leave a comment!

There’s a good chance your site is on WordPress.  If so, priority #1 is to keep it above the earthworms.  Keeping your site up and functional is critical for business, partly because it’s critical for your local SEO.

For a WordPress site, plugins giveth and taketh away.  They’re half the point of the platform.  The AI era hasn’t changed that yet: For now, WordPress is still ubiquitous, and so are plugins, including those that break and cause sites to catch fire.  The good news is that AI has at least made preventive maintenance a little easier, which can save your bacon.

Exactly how can you tap into that, though?  You may know that systems run by AI chatbots (e.g. Claude Code) can make changes to your site, but you may not want to rely on that just yet.  What if you want AI to help you find and fix holes in your site, but don’t quite trust it enough to pack your parachute?

If that’s the case, I suggest you use your AI tool of choice (or maybe a few) to do a quick review all of your installed plugins and give you recommendations.  It’s a practical first step if:

1. You’re not sure how much access to give the AI tool.
2. You want only recommendations for now, and will figure out the implementation later.
3. You want the recommendations to be clear and simple, partly so if something goes wrong you can get the horse back into the barn.
4. You may want feedback from a variety of AI tools, and not just from one, in which case you need a simple and low-risk way to let them all peek into your site without clunking heads.

You’re not ignoring the utility of AI, nor are you handing it the keys.  If you have developers, you’ll help them help you.  If you are your own webmaster, it will save you some time or guesswork.

Here’s all you do:

1. Log into your WordPress site and go to “Installed Plugins” (under “Plugins”).
2. Save the “Installed Plugins” page you see as a PDF.  (Open up “Print…”: CTRL+P on a PC, or Command-P on a Mac.)  It will be ugly, with goofy formatting.  That’s OK.
3. Upload that PDF to your AI chatbot of choice and ask for its assessment, perhaps with a prompt like this:

Based on your knowledge of WordPress plugins and on the attached PDF, what specific plugins installed on mysite.com might be security vulnerabilities or might pose other problems? Please put your findings in a short prioritized audit memo.

That’s it.  A couple of minutes of work for you, and a couple of minutes of work for your AI helper (I like Claude).  You may have follow-up questions, or the suggestions might be pretty self-explanatory.

Most likely, what you’ll get is a triage: advice on which plugins should stay, which plugins should be removed, and which plugins are “maybes.”  The AI chatbot will probably also tell you which plugins you can simply remove now, and which plugins might require some prep or a replacement.  Here are the kinds of recommendations you might get:

Here’s what you might see in a tidy, deliverable report:

Your mileage may vary.  Of course, I have no way to know what you’re running on your site, and the AI recommendations are completely situational.  In general, though, I recommend running as few plugins as possible, but removing plugins gradually (rather than all at once).  When in doubt, get feedback from a developer or two, and maybe even from your SEO gofer.

The goal of your plugin sweep, of course, is simply to keep your site from going down or becoming unusable.  That’s usually a local rankings killer.  As you probably know, a bad or updated plugin can lead to malware infestations or other hacks, which often result in your site being taken down by your host or being deindexed by Google.  A conflict between multiple plugins can cause server errors or other malfunctions, which in turn can cause problems ranging from a contact form that doesn’t work to high-ranking pages dropping out of the index.  Any of the above can also increase the chances that your Google Business Profile page gets suspended, drops in the rankings, or stops generating business, once competitors or would-be customers see that your site is down.

It’s usually not a big deal if your site is offline for a day or two.  But downtime longer than that can derail your rankings in the organic results and the Google Maps results (and probably the AI results), and it can irritate or infuriate customers and would-be customers.  Even one unhappy plugin can bury you in rubble.

For many years now, people who know just enough about local SEO to be dangerous have blasted out “city” or “location” pages like they’re the Funyuns factory.  Sometimes those pages are effective, and produce both visibility and customers, but usually they flop.

Now, with AI on the scene, there’s even more incentive to create “city” pages for your site.  They’re a great way for service-area businesses to rank in areas where they work but don’t have a physical location (or a gray-hat Google Business Profile page).  The same is true of “state,” “province,” or “county” pages, or other pages that target a specific region.  For multi-location bricks-and-mortar businesses, solid “location” pages – one for each physical location of the business – can serve the same function.  For the sake of simplicity, I’ll just refer to all of them as “city” pages.

Anyway, one of many ways AI chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.) have changed local search is that they’ve made it much easier for searchers to refine or tweak their queries until they find exactly the right local business.  These queries have become extremely specific: “nearby dentists who see 1-year-old infants,” “local plumbers who only use copper press fittings,” “Honda dealerships near me that sell stickshifts,” etc.  Much of the time, people want to see 1-2 businesses that meet all or most of their criteria, rather than sift through 10 blue links or a pile of Google Maps results and maybe or maybe not find the best-fit business.

In other words, more and more people will look for businesses that (a) are in their town or serving their town, (b) offer such-and-such, and (c) meet at least one other criterion, which might be totally crazy or unpredictable.  Thoughtful, well-crafted city pages can still help you attract those customers. 

It’s long been the case that a good city page (1) ranks well in Google’s organic results, (2) draws clicks or helps pull you into the Google Maps results, and (3) compels people to become customers.  But these days there are at least two more marks of a good city page: it also (4) shows up occasionally in some of the AI chatbots’ results, and (5) it isn’t AI slop.  That last point is key: If your city pages are AI slop, they’re unlikely to rank well long-term (if and when Google and LLMs start dishing out penalties), and they’ll turn off would-be customers, because they offer the visitor nothing of value.  Now it’s easier than ever to belch out terrible city pages.  AI makes that supremely easy to do.

So, assuming you want to use AI to aid in this part of local SEO effort, how do you avoid making AI-slop city pages?

Ask your AI chatbot of choice (I like Claude Sonnet) to draft or customize each page to some or all of the following 10 specifications:

1. Find, include, and cite “local” statistics that are directly relevant to whatever it is you offer.

2. Cite and link to stories by local news stations that tie into your offerings.

3. Identify and summarize common complaints based on competitors’ or other similar businesses’ reviews.  Competitors don’t offer free quotes, aren’t open on weekends, aren’t specialists, average 2 years of experience in the field, tend to run late, etc.

4. Download your Google Search Console “performance” data, upload it to your AI chatbot of choice, and ask it to tailor the content to the specific search terms that have historically performed the best, or to what it considers “content gaps” on your site, or both.

5. Find and link to or incorporate existing content on your site that’s relevant to the place you’re targeting. Maybe you have a forgotten blog post from 2013, or an old attempt at a “city” page, or a “bio” page for someone who no longer works with you.  Your AI helper can probably surface that content and maybe reuse it in a way that can help you now.

6. Find (on your site) reviews from customers who live in or near that city, and include those reviews in the draft. That’s a cakewalk if you’ve followed my longstanding recommendation of copying and pasting customers’ reviews onto relevant pages of your site, referencing each customer’s city, and linking to where that customer originally posted his or her review.

7. Ask and answer germane FAQs, particularly regarding what local competitors offer and how it compares to what you offer.  Ask your AI chatbot to include points like competitors’ pricing ranges, typical business hours of competitors, how many competitors have such-and-such professional certifications or licensure, how many years of experience your average local competitor has, who else speaks such-and-such language.  Basically, think of some of your selling points and ask the chatbot to determine whether and how many local competitors can claim the same.

8. Link to or embed relevant videos from your YouTube channel. This is an easy way to weave in some visual content.  It may also be a simple way to scrounge some more views and possibly some channel subscribers, either or both of which can help expand the reach of your YouTube channel or specific videos.

9. Include internal links to your relevant subpages. Possibly also include a list of related or add-on services you offer.  Can you do this without your AI chatbot?  Of course.  But it gets tedious, especially if you aim to create lots of “location” pages.

10. List nearby cities, towns, or neighborhoods in your service area or that customers tend to come from.  Same comment as for point #9: you can do this manually, but why would you want to?  Also, your AI buddy can more easily calculate which specific communities are in or near your service area.

How might you cram all of that into an AI prompt?  Below is an example of a prompt I suggest you try, at least as a starting point.  Of course, you’ll want to modify it to fit your situation (swap out the underlined parts), even if you’re not a professional sheep shearer.

Claude, please draft up a page for mysite.com geared toward potential customers from Anytown who want to hire a professional sheep shearer. Where possible, find, cite, and link to the following: (1) local statistics relevant to sheep shearing (e.g. demand, typical pricing, the number of local professionals who offer it, etc.), (2) relevant news stories from local news stations, (3) frequent complaints about other sheep shearers based on online reviews from their customers, and (4) FAQs and their answers. 

Where possible, also include excerpts from any content on mysite.com that’s relevant to Anytown, include reviews on mysite.com written by customers who seem to be from Anytown, include links to subpages on mysite.com that seem relevant to potential sheep-shearing customers, and embed any YouTube videos from youtube.com/@MyBrand that pertain to sheep shearing.

Include a “Service Area” section of the page, in which you list all of the communities within 10 miles of Anytown that are NOT targeted with a landing page on mysite.com. Most of these will be nearby communities smaller than Anytown.

Attached is a spreadsheet of the Google Search Console “Performance” data on mysite.com. When in doubt as to which specific search terms to target, please refer to the specific search terms and/or pages on mysite.com that seem to have performed best so far.  In cases where you see “content gaps” – like a search term for which mysite.com gets significant impressions but doesn’t target with a dedicated page – I’d like you to include a section on that topic in your draft of the Anytown page.

With the right specs (like the above), your go-to AI chatbot will produce a rock-solid city page that goes something like this:

Whatever your AI cat drags in, I suggest you check it over and spend at least a few minutes editing.  The 1.0 version doesn’t need to be amazing, but it shouldn’t stink up the joint too much.  It should sound generally like you.

By the way, you might want to replace most or all of the em dashes (“—”) with more-precise punctuation, or with whatever punctuation you tend to use.  AI-generated content tends to contain a ton of em dashes.  My tinfoil-hat theory is that those later will serve as telltale markers for Google and the LLMs to identify AI-produced content that was churned out without much or any quality-control.  It’s probably just a matter of time before that can result in a penalty of one kind or another.  That’s my hunch, anyway.  Your AI chatbot spared you the heavy lifting, so if you’re serious you’ll put at least a little effort into the finishing touches.  You need to stay sharp, too.

Which AI chatbot do you find most useful for your local SEO effort?  To what extent have you used it – or eschewed it – for the “city” pages on your site?  Any questions, concerns, or tips?  Leave a comment!

Sometimes I think Yelp might have matured, mellowed out a little, and eased up on longstanding policies that make no sense and don’t help anyone.  But then Yelp just doubles down.

Case in point: Yelp has started asking reviewers whether you asked them for a review.  As you probably know, Yelp doesn’t want business owners, employees, or anyone else to ask anyone else for a review.  (As you may also know if you’re a longtime reader, I think that’s a horrible policy.)

The question is as follows:

Did this business ask you to write a review?  For example, did a staff member request it, or did you get a text or email asking for a review? Your response is confidential.

That prompt comes immediately before the “Post Review” button, and reviewers can choose from two answers: “Yes” or “No.”  It IS an optional question, in that reviewers don’t have to answer it, but Yelp doesn’t tell them it’s optional.  Even if they go back in later to edit the review, they can’t change your answer.  In other words, Yelp wants reviewers’ off-the-cuff answers.

Exactly how new is this?  I don’t know.  I don’t post Yelp reviews constantly, but I do it from time to time and have done so for many years – mostly to keep my ear to the ground, as someone who deals with this stuff for a living.  So it’s possible Yelp made this change a couple of months ago.  On the other hand, I haven’t seen anything online about it.  (If someone’s covered this already, please email me or let me know in the comments so I can give eagle-eye credit where it’s due.)

Anyway, if you ever ask customers for reviews – specifically on Yelp or on customers’ review site of choice – the hazard is clear.  If enough people answer “Yes,” it’s likely someone at Yelp will become your shower buddy.  The usual public shaming may follow, or the review might just be filtered or removed manually.

Even if you don’t ask for reviews on Yelp (or anywhere else), and instead rely on spontaneously written reviews, what’s to stop someone from answering “Yes”?  A misunderstanding or a sausage finger and an errant click easily could give Yelp the wrong idea about you.

This little change affects you even if you don’t ask anyone for reviews.  For one thing, Yelp’s search results are as visible as ever in Google’s search results and in the AI results.  Also, as usual, Yelp doesn’t do much to prevent or deter competitors or disgruntled customers or non-customers from hurting your reputation.  Presumably all Yelp needs to pillory you is for the writers of a few 5-star reviews – either happy customers or people pretending to be happy customers – to say that you asked them for a review.  Time will tell whether that actually becomes a widespread problem and whether and how Yelp deals with it.  But in the meantime it seems competitors have yet another way to stick gum in your hair.

Of course, it’s always possible this change is all bark and no bite.  Maybe Yelp won’t do anything with reviewers’ responses, just as Yelp (like Google Maps) very often doesn’t remove business owners’ reviews of themselves.

If you do anything to encourage Yelp reviews, my advice is simple: either don’t ask customers whose moods are hard for you to read, or mention that this question is optional.  If you don’t give a hoot about Yelp, at least know what Yelp asks of the people who do.

—

Any observations, gripes, first-hand experiences, or questions?  Leave a comment!

Most advice on “how to use AI for local SEO” faceplants in at least one of three ways:

1. The problem isn’t a problem you’ve got.
2. The solution is too complicated or hard to digest.
3. You can do it better yourself, perhaps the old-fashioned way.

Even so, your local SEO campaign is a lot of work, and you just know AI can help lighten your lift.  What are some specific, practical, high-payoff local SEO tasks AI tools can help you with, starting right now?

1. The quick competitive backlinks check. Go to your AI chatbot of choice (e.g. ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc) and type in “what domains link to [URL of competitor’s website]?”.  You’ll see where they’ve got their most-prominent backlinks, plus some.  Will this show you as many links as a paid backlink checker will?  No, but even when you use one (I like Ahrefs) generally you’re trying to find the most authoritative or relevant sites anyway.  Going straight to an AI chatbot is a nice cheap way to see generally where a given competitor has planted the flag – and where you might want to do so.

2. The street address triage. Ask your AI buddy “what kind of address is [street address]” or “what kind of address is [name of business] located at”.  This will tell you whether your competitor is probably spamming or probably not violating the Google Business Profile page guidelines, which in turn tells you whether and how you might be able to get Google to remedy that   Your AI chatbot of choice should even tell you whether your competitor is at a UPS store address or similar party-foul address.

3. Use Arvow or a similar tool to generate images that you can optimize and put on critical pages on your site.  Arvow’s free AI image-generator tool is an awesome way to generate images that you can use for free, without needing to spend time searching high and low for almost the right image, and without fear of an accidental copyright violation.  Play around with the generator until it spits out a relevant image you like, and then optimize the bejeebers out that photo as per my SOPs.

4. Create a transcript of a YouTube video with NoteGPT or a similar tool. Not sure what you should put in the “description” field of your YouTube video?  Want some quick, relevant content to paste onto on a “watch” page or other page you created specifically to house the video?  Easy money.  This AI tool will give you the transcript in seconds.  Just be sure to proofread it for typos, because YouTube’s built-in captioning or someone’s accent might garble certain words (as in “sophets” rather than “soffits”).

5. Various citation-auditing tasks. A quick inventory of your non-Google local listings (Yelp, YP, BBB, etc.) typically is something you’d do for your own business, but it can also be useful if you want to sniff out where a specific competitor has online listings and maybe some reviews.  An easy way to pull up the major listings is to type in something like “show me the key online listings of [name of business] in [location of business]”.

You can also search for something like “all phone numbers used by [name of business]” or “all former names or DBAs of [business]” or “what is the real business name of [name of business]”.  Then you simply Google those old names and old or alternate phone numbers and see which citation sources show up.  If you’re snooping on a competitor’s business, that intel may also help you determine whether the name is legit or a spammy DBA that you might be able to get fixed.

6. A deep website scour for variations on a specific search term. This is a more-robust version of what search operators used pull up in Google.  For example, let’s say you’ve got a site with hundreds or thousands of pages, and you want to update your hourly rates on all of the pages where you mention your rates, but some of them mention $150/hour and others mention $175/hour.  Type in something like “on which URLs on [URL of website] is the hourly rate mentioned?”.  Your AI chatbot should up a list of specific pages one hourly rate or another is listed, at which point you can update those pages without needing to dig deeper.  You can also do a version of this if you need to update your business hours, or your policy on free estimates, or your service area, old Schema markup, etc.

7. Create a list of communities you serve based on specific criteria, like county, region, population, distance from your HQ, etc.  As I tell people constantly and may even have told you in the past, in most cases it’s extremely beneficial for SEO to put a near-exhaustive list of the communities your serve all over your site.  That list usually should go in the footer and in a prominent spot on each of your “money” pages (homepage, service pages, city pages, etc.).  Can you create that list yourself?  Probably, but having your pet AI bot drag it into the house is quicker.

8. Figure out which citation sources offer followed backlinks. These are simply directories (general, local, or industry-specific) where you can list your business and get a good or not-terrible link out of the deal. I suggest pulling up Google’s AI Mode and searching for “which [industry] directories offer dofollow backlinks.”  (Or something similar.  Yes, “dofollow” technically is a misnomer, but at least the AI will get your meaning.)  Your AI gofer will still probably mix in some unhelpful results, like of directories that stick nofollow on all of their links, but you’ll still have saved yourself some elbow grease.

9. Extract a list of customers’ email addresses for a Yelp “Find Friends” lookup.  Seeing which of your customers are active Yelp reviewers is the best way to give those customers an oblique or hard nudge that you’d really appreciate a review somewhere (maybe, just maybe, on Yelp).  The problem is that your list of customers’ contact info is probably a hot mess.  Even if it’s on a spreadsheet, the email addresses are probably concatenated with names and other info.  In that case your designated “review outreach person” will probably spend more time picking email addresses out of your spreadsheet than on contacting would-be reviewers, so the latter will never get done.  If you upload a spreadsheet with just one column, ChatGTP or a similar AI chatbot can very easily separate the email addresses out, allowing you to look up a cool 100 customers a day in Yelp’s “Find Friends” feature.  Then you can finally contact a few strategic customers and maybe get a couple of Yelp reviews of this joint.

10. Extract page topics that a competitor’s site covers and that your site does not cover.  Go to AI Mode and type in “which pages does [competitor’s URL] have that [your URL] does not have?” or something similar.  You can also see content gaps between your YouTube channel and a competitor’s.  Type in something like “what video topics does [name or URL of competitor’s YouTube channel] cover that [name or URL of your YouTube channel]l does not cover?”  You’ll get a high-level comparison.  That will give you some good ideas and some…ideas.

Most business owners, marketers, and SEOs see the promise of AI only in terms of showing up in the AI search results, and don’t think as much about how to use AI to do the things that help them to rank.  You can apply a few of the recommendations above to accomplish both.

I am certain I missed a lot of local SEO tasks that AI can help with.  How have you found it to be handy?  What’s something you’ve tried to do that hasn’t really helped you with yet?  Leave a comment!

All you know right now is that you’ve got an extra Google Business Profile page showing up on Google Maps and that it’s unverified (so you don’t have ownership or control of it).  You may have found it by poking around on Google Maps, or someone may have told you about it.  You may or may not know who created it: you, a helper, a former SEO person, a customer, a do-gooder, or Google.  You may not know how long it’s been floating around.  You don’t know how much it’s helping or hurting your local SEO effort overall.  And you sure as thunder aren’t sure what, if anything, you should do with it.

Sometimes you’re better off leaving a GBP page unverified or soft-suspended.  An unverified page is one you’ve never had control of.  A soft-suspended page is one you did claim at one time or another, but that Google has (at least temporarily) locked you out of.

The prevailing local SEO wisdom pretty much always has been a version of, “You’ve got to claim your GBP page!”  That is not a solid universal rule, though.  If you’re confident you can owner-verify that page without incident (more on that in a minute), then sure, go ahead and do so.  But IF you’re not sure you need to claim it, or you aren’t sure it’s a good idea, listen to your gut for now, because you may be right.

The first critical point to know is that you get no rankings boost from owner-verifying your page.  None.  Goose egg.  That’s true whether you’ve never owner-verified it, or you did create or owner-verify it before getting suspended.  Not only have I seen GBP pages not decrease in visibility after being soft-suspended, but I’ve also seen them increase in visibility as other local SEO factors come into play or are worked on.  At this very moment I have some clients whose unverified GBP pages rank as the only Google Maps result on the page (AKA one-box results).

(By the way, if you want to test that out, you can unclaim your GBP page and continue to track its rankings or monitor its performance in Google Search Console, under “Pages,” if you’ve put a tracking URL on it.  More on that a bit later.)

The other critical point to know is that all of the important parts of the GBP page are editable by the general public.  Most SEOs will say you need to claim your GBP page if you want to optimize it at all.  That’s true if you want to use all of its features, of course, but not all of its features help your rankings much or at all, and in most cases they’re not useful or noticeable enough to help your conversions, either.  Meanwhile, all of the features that can noticeably influence rankings are editable via public edit: the name, the landing page URL, the address, the category, and the hours.

That last point I mentioned is the only big downside of leaving GBP pages unverified: vulnerability to third-party edits.  Google is more likely to remove an unverified GBP page if someone (like a competitor) requests a change to it – or suggests its removal – via “suggest an edit.”  Especially if a GBP page doesn’t have citations on the basic sites, Google’s more likely to conclude an unverified GBP page represents an abandoned location or an attempt to sneak one past the goalie.  That’s one of many reasons I don’t suggest splattering Google Maps with user-submitted GBP pages.  Easy come, easy go.

Even so, as usual, what the right move is depends on your specific situation.  When should you probably not bother verifying or reverifying a GBP page?

• If you expect you’ll have difficulty completing the verification, for any reason.
• If you suspect Google will disapprove of the address (like because it’s a PO Box) or will want you to hide the address (like if it’s a residential address).
• If you suspect that in the process of owner-verifying and tinkering with it you will invite too much scrutiny to other GBP pages in your account.  When multiple GBP pages aren’t in line with Google’s guidelines, often several of them will be suspended in rapid succession.

If you’re in of those specific situations or a similar one and still aren’t sure whether leaving a GBP page unverified is a good move, here are some other factors to consider – factors that might tip you in favor of leaving it alone for now:

a. You have reason to believe you get customers or at least calls from it.

b. It’s ranking well for some terms, but not so high that your competitors all want it to wear a toe tag.  Let it quietly deliver for you.

c. It uses an address in an area where you really want to rank, and where your other GBP pages are much less likely to rank.

d. It doesn’t share an address with another GBP page of yours – one that you have claimed and that you’d prefer to rank.

e. It does share an address with a competitor of yours.  Your unverified GBP page may cause its roommate’s page to be filtered out by Google.

f. It’s got solid Google Maps reviews.

g. It doesn’t have any reviews you feel you MUST reply to.

h. Its basic info is basically correct.

i. It seems to have been around for a long time, and you can’t think of a specific benefit in rocking the boat (now that you know an unverified GBP page can rank just fine).

So let’s assume you’ve chosen to let that GBP page sit around and mellow.  Should you just go back to ignoring it?  Not necessarily.  You can still put an unverified or soft-suspended GBP page to work for your local SEO.  Even though you don’t have direct ownership of it, there are still a few ways you might manage that GBP page from arm’s length and (probably) bump its visibility:

1. Put a tracking URL on it, via a “suggest an edit” in Google Maps.  Yes, you can do that, and it’s very likely to stick.  You can see that URL in the “Performance” -> “Pages” area of Google Search Console, and can see the impressions and clicks it gets in the search results, and for which specific search terms.  As long as the domain of the tracking URL is one you’ve installed Search Console on, it doesn’t matter that the GBP page isn’t verified.
2. Change the primary category (also via “suggest an edit”).
3. Submit Google Maps edits on other fields that might not be optimal, like the hours.
4. Flag bad reviews.  As far as Google knows, you’re just a civilian who saw a low-quality review and took issue with it.
5. Flag bad photos.
6. Report nearby spammy competitors, particularly those who outrank you.
7. Build citations for that “location” of your business.  On those it generally doesn’t matter whether you use an address Google doesn’t approve of.  The citations will help suggest to Google that the GBP page is legit.
8. Optimize the landing page on your site that the unverified GBP page points to.  Load it up with info on the services / products / treatments / whatever you offer, and load it up with a list of the communities you serve, for starters.
9. On other pages of your site add more internal links to the landing page your unverified GBP page uses.  Internal links are a critical and often an underused part of on-page optimization.
10. Get more backlinks to the landing page your GBP page uses.  Even a couple of links from industry-relevant or locally-relevant domains can give you a serious bump in the Google Maps, organic, and AI results.

You’re in the good position of having options.  You can always try to owner-verify the GBP page and simply not complete the verification if you run into problems.  Or you can owner-verify it at a different address from the one it currently uses, even if you don’t know the address that the page was previously verified at.  If you want, you can fix just about everything but the cigarette lighter.

What’s been your experience with unverified GBP pages?  Are you on the horns of a dilemma?  Leave a comment!

There is a simple and realistic way to encourage Yelp reviews of your business, one that will take you only 1 minute a day (on average).  Just do a “Find Friends” search on Yelp on every person you’re about to ask for a review on any site (e.g. Google Maps), and adjust your request accordingly.  Even one “Find Friends” lookup a day is enough to keep the review doctor away.

Go to “Find Friends” and enter your customer’s email address(es).

If that customer doesn’t have a Yelp account, your search will yield nothing.  But if your customer does have a Yelp account, you’ll see his or her name, along with the number of reviews written, photos taken, and “friends.”.  If your customer has written at least 5 reviews, you’ve hit paydirt.  (More on that in a minute.)

There’s nothing else to it, other than to ask your customer for a review – on Yelp, somewhere else, or anywhere.  (More on that in a minute.)

A quick “Find Friends” check may seem too simple, but that’s why it can work well.  It’s just a way to gather facts before you ask for a review, rather than during a reputational autopsy later.  By taking this approach, you will avoid the big mistakes:

1. Ignoring Yelp and playing hope chess until the Customer from Hell gives you your first 1-star review.
2. Not doing anything to encourage reviews on Yelp, perhaps because you assume nobody’s paying attention.
3. Asking everyone to review you on Yelp, only to have their reviews get filtered.
4. Doing shady stuff to get Yelp reviews before getting tarred and feathered.
5. Obsessing over Yelp reviews at the expense of your reviews everywhere else.
6. Giving customers too many choices as to where to review you, which makes it much harder to provide clear and undaunting instructions.  (Better to focus on just one site, whenever possible.)

Mike Blumenthal laid out this strategy clearly and excellently in his 2015 post, which I suggest you read and apply.  I recommend a few tweaks to your SOP:

• Make a “Find Friends” lookup part of your everyday strategy, regardless of whether you’re dying for good Yelp reviews or are in good shape.  It should not be a Hail Mary pass.  Look up each customer before you ask for a review, even if you planned to ask that person to review you elsewhere.
• Skip the bulk-check process, which I described in my 2016 post., at least for now.  You’re trying to form daily habits that are so quick and easy that you have no excuse not to do them.
• If a reviewer has written more than 5 reviews, include in your request (probably an email) a link to your Yelp page.
• Also do a “Find Friends” lookup on customers who reviewed you without your needing to ask.  If your Yelp-reviewing customer has reviewed you somewhere else – like Google Maps – consider asking him or her to copy and paste that review into Yelp.  Why re-write a perfectly good review?  Cross-posting is fine, in that I’ve never seen it cause a review to get filtered, and in that the practice is standard enough that it doesn’t look odd to most would-be customers.

Some notes and suggestions:

a. You don’t need to ask specifically for a Yelp review.  You can just ask for a review on any old site, with the knowledge that the customer seems to like Yelp and is likely to post there by default.

b. You don’t need to use your Yelp business account.

c. You can always do the bulk lookup if you have a list of hundreds or thousands of customers and want to zero in on who’s active.  Expect maybe 1-2% of your customers to have written more than a couple of Yelp reviews.

d. If a customer has multiple email addresses that you know of, enter each email address into “Find Friends.”  If, for instance, a customer’s personal email isn’t associated with a Yelp account, his or her business email might be.

e. Yelp will also show you how many photos your customer has uploaded.  That will tell you, for one thing, the likelihood that your customer will post photos with his or her review – whether it’s on Yelp, Google Maps, or any other review site.  Encourage photos whenever you can.

f. Yelp reviews have become even more prominent in the AI era, with Yelp reviews often cited in chatbots’ results.

Now, for the elephant in the room: should you ask customers specifically for a review on Yelp?  I think you should.  Don’t buy reviews, ask your Uncle Bob to review you, or play with similar finger traps.  But also don’t overestimate Yelp and assume it sees or cares about everything, because it does not.  Is requesting a Yelp review against Yelp’s guidelines?  Yes.  Will Yelp have any way to know you asked for a review?  No.  In any event, it’s your risk to take or not to take.  Personally, I suggest you get scrappy.  What would Little Joe do?

What’s worked for your business, or hasn’t, on Yelp?  Any upsides or downsides of this approach I didn’t mention?  Leave a comment!

“Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.”  There’s a similar truth in local SEO: the businesses to keep an eye on are those that stay near the top of the local search results over time.  Like all businesses, they have their ups and downs, and they’re probably not #1 for nearly every term, but their downs seem temporary, and their ups are long.  Even if they’re down in the Google Maps results, they may be great in the organic or AI results, or vice versa.  They just don’t go away.

Months-long streaks of good rankings are easy to come by, and easy to lose.  Some businesses are in pushover markets, or they get lucky, or they employ spam effectively, or Google decides to shake up the results for a while.  But those don’t explain why some businesses routinely clobber others in competitive markets, year in and year out.  Why do some businesses avoid falling back into the bucket of crabs?

I’ve observed a few things that give businesses longevity in the local search results.  Most of those traits fall into the hamper of “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” but what a business works on is what really determines the length of its reign.  By the way, many of the moves and SOPs that keep your business visible can help you become visible in the first place, if good local rankings have eluded you so far.

Here are the practices that, in my experience, will help you get your local rankings up and keep them up year after year:

1. Take fliers. Try things that none of your competitors (or even any other business) is doing.  Don’t just copy others.  You may already see the merit in that approach, and in case not, I could explain why it makes sense strategically, psychologically, and ethically.  But that’s as boring as it sounds, so here’s a different explanation: reaction time.  If your experiment ends up working well – whether a wild backlink opportunity, or content idea, or new medium or marketing channel – it will probably be a long time before your competitors can benefit from it, if they ever do.  It may be months before they notice, and months before they try it.  Then, even if they execute it well (a big “if”), they probably won’t see any upside for months, during which time they might just ease up.  So next time your SEO proposes something that sounds edgy or downright crazy, give it a hard look.  Sure, ask questions and ask for examples, but don’t rule it out just because someone else in your local market hasn’t done it. What’s there to be afraid of, anyway?

3. When in doubt, work on your website.  Not on your Google Business Profile page, not on your citations, and not even on a social media channel that seems to produce for you.  You do not own any of those assets.  You should not ignore them, of course, but you should also know that they can vanish, be throttled, or go the way of the hair metal power ballad overnight.  You do own your website, though.  Help it so it can help you – in the organic, Google Maps, and AI results, and in those make-or-break moments after someone clicks.

4. Keep your site growing bigger and better year after year.  Don’t get stuck in “break stuff and keep moving” mode,  in which you keep cranking out new pages or blog posts without blinking.  But also don’t get stuck in “preventive maintenance” mode, in which you just stare at your metrics, bother yourself with every little Search Console notification, and maybe doodle with your title tags.  Continue to mint new pages, posts, or videos that can fill in gaps in your visibility, while you improve existing pages on your site with more photos, videos, reviews, internal links, FAQs, case studies, etc.

5. Don’t keep working on the same things you worked on at the beginning of your local SEO effort. Some of the work is one-off, and some of it is ongoing.  It’s fun to do the basics on your GBP page, citations, and website and see a dramatic bump, but repeating the same steps for the same business or location won’t produce the same results.  Your priorities need to shift over time, because what’s holding you back shifts over time.  That’s simply because over the months and years you cross items off of your to-do list, your goals evolve, competitors come and go, etc.  As a wise chess player said, “Openings teach you openings, but endgames teach you chess.”  The real payoff in local SEO happens long after you’ve done the straightforward tweaks.

6. Get links to more URLs on your site.  Let’s say you’ve hauled in some good backlinks from various sources, and most of those links point to your homepage.  That’s a good thing and, to the extent you can control it, you should continue to give your homepage most of the links.  But not all of them.  Every now and then, point one of your hard-earned backlinks to a promising or high-priority “service” page, a “city” page, or another page on your site that you think might start ranking if you bump-start it.  If you’ve got no idea where to start, go into Google Search Console and look for pages with high impressions but few clicks.  One of those might benefit from even one solid backlink.

7. Only lose backlinks intentionally. At least some of your certifications, sponsorships, memberships, scholarships, or partnerships (etc.) have helped your local rankings.  Cut them loose if you must, or if you’ve concluded you just don’t need them anymore, like because you’ve hauled in other good backlinks recently.  Whatever you do, just do it intentionally, if only so you know which cats you might need to stuff back into the bag later.

8. Avoid making changes to your Google Business Profile page(s), whenever you can. That’s usually the best way to avoid suspensions.  That means, for one thing, don’t tinker with your GBP page more than you need to.   It also means don’t make any big changes you don’t need to make, or don’t make big changes now that you can make later.  Did you just open a new location and want to point the landing page URL of your GBP page to your “location” page rather than to the homepage?  Fine, but there’s a 70% chance your Google Maps rankings will drop as a result, sooner or later.  Are you thinking about showing your street address publicly because it may help your Google Maps rankings a bit, even though your rankings are pretty good now?  Don’t do it now unless you’re OK with a possible hard or soft suspension, followed by your needing to re-verify the page.  Considering hiding your address on your GBP page and specifying a service area instead, because you think (correctly) that that will invite less scrutiny and lessen your chances of a suspension?  Don’t do it now unless you’re fine with your Google Maps rankings taking a few hits here and there.  Have a GBP page with an old address, but it doesn’t seem to confuse customers?  Let it sit for a while – until you have a bit less on your plate, until you’re in a better position to absorb a shake-up of your Google Maps rankings, or until you have no choice but to update it.  

9. Spread out any big changes to your business, whenever possible.  Slow ‘em down.  For example, let’s say in the next few months you plan to rebrand your company, change your domain name, redesign your site, change web hosts, move to a new address, and maybe change your hours.  That is a lot for you to do, and a lot for Google and customers to adjust to.  Each of those changes involves a series of baby steps, any of which can go wrong and smoosh your rankings (or worse).  So, if you can, make a couple of the big changes, wait a couple of weeks or months, monitor your vital signs in Search Console, and then make a couple of the other big changes.  Spreading out major changes not only is more manageable, but also helps you keep an eye on how any given change might have affected your visibility, so that you can undo it or adjust it if needed.  You’ve got to maintain a grip.

10. Study Google Search Console data frequently. I’ve often described the usefulness of Search Console and how to use it, and you’re probably on the case.  Even after Google tweaked its reporting in September 2025 and made a dog’s breakfast of everyone’s metrics, Search Console is still the least-bad place to troubleshoot many SEO problems, prevent many more problems, and get ideas that can give your local visibility more cushion.

11. Overwhelm competitors in at least a couple of specific areas.  Don’t just squeak by them.  If they have 100 excellent Google reviews, get 200 excellent Google reviews (and keep going).  If they’ve got a few great “city” pages that rank well and several clunkers that also seem to rank well, make all of your “city” pages and your “service” pages incredibly informative and persuasive.  If they’re open 6 days a week, figure out a way to be open 7 days a week and maybe even open on some holidays.  It probably won’t matter what you choose to be the champ in, as long as you’re the best by far at something.

12. Constantly self-audit for distractions, time-wasters, and unnecessary expenses. Do you spend most of your SEO time on blog posts that seem to produce traffic, but little or nothing else?  Stop.  Do you obsess over page speed?  Don’t (it doesn’t matter much). Do you agonize over whether you’re listed on every little directory your competitors are on?  Don’t expect it to make a difference.  Do you spend more time and energy on what rank-trackers or other tools tell you than on influencing the results you see?  Flip that around.  If you think an activity that’s supposed to help your SEO may actually be a waste of time, there’s an 85% chance you’re right.  If you’re not sure, get a second opinion from someone who knows the activity well, but who has zero vested interest in persuading you to do that activity.

13. Keep a running list of marketing tasks you will work on the minute there’s a downturn in visibility or new business. I guarantee you’ll have a relative dry spell, or perhaps many more, over the course of the rest of your career.  Your job is twofold: to make those dry spells hurt less and happen less frequently, and to get even more growth out of each rainstorm.  Anyway, this is as simple as writing down every SEO-related task you think of, hear about and want to explore, or have meant to do but haven’t gotten around to yet.  Those may include content topics, preventive-maintenance tasks on your site, people you want to ask for a review, or just about anything else.  Jot everything down in an easy-to-find place and don’t worry about details or keeping it organized.  The second-best day in your SEO life is when one of your moves or ideas swoops in for the win.  The best day is when you cross it off of your list years after adding it, because it turned out you didn’t need it to succeed.

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Luck and randomness are not the same.  There’s a random component to luck, of course, but what your bad luck and good luck produce usually depends on the decisions you’ve made.  Even though the local search results (especially Google Maps) sure seem like roulette at times, in reality just about everything you see in the search results is a result of one decision made by one person at one local business.  Your competitors will want to follow you, if only they could.

What practices have served you well for years?  What seems to help keep your rankings stable and not on a roller coaster?  Leave a comment!