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.

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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!

The 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey is as full of insights as ever.  It was published yesterday, over at Whitespark.  (As always, a big thanks to Darren for organizing it and herding the cats.)

If you do nothing else today to improve your understanding of local SEO and ability to get more visible in local search, pour yourself a mug of your finest moonshine and read through the survey or watch the video recap.  There’s a ton of useful info, whether you like to get into the details or just want a quick gut check.

In case you don’t have time to read the full survey, at least you’ll want to skim through the comments.  That’s always been my favorite part of it anyway.  Sometimes you find gold nuggets in there.

Even the comments section is a long read, though, which is why I’ve rounded up what I consider the 10 best comments from the 2026 LSRF.  Of course, you’ll find many other insights in the survey, so I suggest you read the whole thing sooner or later.  This is just my curation of it, similar to the one I did back in 2017, which has aged unexpectedly well.  By the way, I’m not including my own comments on this top-10 list.  That would be unsportsmanlike.  (My comments are lurking in the survey, if you’re interested.)

So here are my 10 favorite LSRF comments, in no particular order, each with an extra-valuable local SEO lesson that can help your business become a little more visible:

1. I got 20 teenagers to search for a PI attorney in Pleasanton, click on their GBP, then use GMaps to drive to their office every day for a week. Within a week they were #1 for PI attorney queries in Pleasanton. This got me thinking about how we can get clients to encourage this kind of behavior – asking employees to always do driving directions on their commute, holding events, etc. If you have access to plenty of teenagers, this is the strategy for you. – Andrew Shotland

Google cares about what I call “signs of life.”  Those may include all kinds of little actions people take as customers or on the way to becoming customers, and they almost certainly include driving-direction lookups and customers’ reviews.  The late, great Bill Slawski documented this back in 2013.  – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

2. Discovering new “FOMO” words for title tags still works well. “BEST”, “FREE CONSULTATION”, “TOP” etc. – Colan Nielsen

Colan is zeroing in on exactly which part of your title tag can get people to click.  The words he mentioned can be extremely compelling, as can be “Open 24/7,” “Emergencies Welcome,” “Affordable,” etc.  Also, his suggestion to discover new zinger phrases is important.  I find that great ways to do that include (a) sifting through your Search Console data and (b) sifting through your and your competitors’ reviews. – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

3. AI Mode is going to be the dominant interface for searchers. Google will get very good at prompting the searcher through a buyer journey. It’s going to feel like a much better version of an IVR flow (e.g. “press 1 for xyz”). A searcher will ask Google why their lemon tree is dying, Google will ask for a photo of the tree and provide a diagnosis, then it will ask the searcher if it would like recommendations for fertlizer or nearby arborists, etc. All queries are going to be “full funneled.” This is going to be an amazing opportunity for both SEOs and SEM types. The ad units are going to be super-targeted as you will get the searcher at exactly the time they will be moving into buying mode. For SEOs, the buyer journey will be spelled out for them which is basically an optimization roadmap. – Andrew Shotland

4. My hope is that the AI hype will eventually die down. I’ve been around long enough to remember when most SEO and tech publications were insistent that all local businesses would have beacons and VR in them, or the voice search was a game changer. Things sometimes don’t play out at advertised. What we are seeing from the major tech titans right now is a willingness to experiment with social engineering at scale if it will result in stakeholder profits. It’s their right to do that, but if that’s not how you view your role as a local business owner serving your neighbors, then my friendly advice is to keep building a big moat around your brand made up of loyal customers with whom you have genuine and trusting relationships in the real world. Whether new customers discover you via AI, a local pack, a social mention, a private discord server, a video channel, a podcast, or what have you, once that neighbor crosses your threshold, treat them very well and earn their friendship and referrals. At a branch/city level, this is the magic of doing business locally: you have the power to become part of the culture and resources of your community and to earn a living by treating people with care and respect. – Miriam Ellis

As always, Miriam understands the big picture, and how local SEO is a means to an end.  As I always tell my clients, the ultimate point of SEO is to make itself unnecessary, by helping to grow your business to the point that repeat business, word-of-mouth, and other sources of customers give you all the work you need so that everything else is icing on the cake.  If you spend even 1/10 as much time taking care of existing customers as you spend trying to nab new customers, your head will rest easier on the pillow.  – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

5. Preparedness is KEY to resolving a GBP suspension quickly. One of the things I don’t hear talked about enough is how devastating a Google Business Profile (GBP) suspension can be for a business. If it’s a hard suspension, the GBP is no longer visible to the public, and on top of that, they won’t be able to run Local Services Ads (LSAs) while it’s suspended. This means the business is losing organic traffic and, at the same time, can’t run paid LSAs to generate leads until the issue is resolved. While many businesses recognize the lead volume their GBP generates, they often don’t realize the risk of not being prepared for a suspension. Businesses often struggle with reinstatement because they don’t have the up-to-date supporting documentation that Google requires. I’ve worked with businesses that needed to update their business address with the Secretary of State, and in one instance, it took over six weeks due to a backlog of requests and processing delays at the state level. If a business is investing time and money into their GBP, they should proactively gather and organize their supporting documentation. This way, if their profile is ever suspended, they can quickly submit the necessary documentation for reinstatement. It’s something I now do with all of my clients and we review their documentation yearly. – Tricia Clements

A critical insight.  Sometimes a perfectly compliant GBP page gets suspended in error, while nobody lays a glove on a bogus one that’s ranked in the 3-pack for 10 years.  Arguably, what matters more than compliance is: what’s your plan if your page is suspended tomorrow?  Do you know exactly how you’d go about re-verifying the page?  Do you have enough non-Maps visibility to tide you over?  Make every Google Maps-related local SEO decision with those questions in mind and you’ll be fine. – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

6. The actual text of customer reviews will become more important as new AI systems can now detect nuance, intent, and sentiment. This means search results can be differentiated based on the text in all reviews. For example, queries like “best,” “cheapest,” or those related to customer service will be interpreted more accurately, allowing AI to highlight businesses whose reviews match those specific queries. Businesses should encourage customers to leave detailed, descriptive feedback. Prompting them with specific ideas such as mentioning the service they received, the location, the outcome, or what stood out about the experience can help. Not only will longer more detailed reviews help the AI system mentions, but they will help conversions as well. – Yan Gilbert

7. The main thing we need to consider when looking for citation opportunities is indexation rates. There are a ton of citation websites that have Google dropping more and more pages from their index. If you are going to build citations, make sure they are getting indexed or it doesn’t count for anything. – Colan Nielsen

If a local review site or other directory isn’t itself visible in Google, you probably don’t need to get listed there.  Or at least it shouldn’t be high on your to-do list. – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

8. Unstructured citations are more relevant than ever, especially for AI. These platforms love to cite a wide swath of sites when answering query prompts. Ensuring our clients are in the conversation, on forums, top X lists and other unstructured citations sources is a big priority. – Darcy Burk

9. Thankfully, local search has been less negatively impacted by the increased use of AI products than non-local. Google has an edge due to it’s wealth of local business data. It will be interesting to see how other AI products handle local search in the future. – Andy Kuiper

10. I’m surprised how much other platforms rely on Google Business Profiles. I shouldn’t be that surprised. Local business data remains one of Google’s actual competitive advantages. It will be interesting to see whether this continues over the following months and years. – Gyi Tsakalakis

A lot of the local AI results seem to be influenced by your ranking in the Google Maps 3-pack, and definitely by your Google reviews.  One corollary is that if you can get a competitor’s GBP page suspended (for one kind of foul play or another), there’s a high likelihood he or she will show up less prominently in the AI results, too. – Peanut Gallery Comment from Me

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Anything that rings true for you, based on first-hand experience?  Either in the 10 comments above or in another one from the 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors.

Do you have a different take on anything?

Any questions for me, or for any of the commenters?

Please leave a comment here, and be sure to follow your favorite Local Search Ranking Factors commenter(s) on your platform of choice.

Scrawny pages get a bad rap.  Certain types of low-content pages, when employed wisely, can fill gaps in your business’s SEO armor.  They can rank not only in the organic results, but also in the Google Maps 3-pack results, and sometimes even in the up-and-coming AI results.

Contrary to popular belief and most SEO dogma, not all pages on your site need to be long or detailed to rank well.  One way you already know that’s true is: how many times have you seen a featherweight page or post punch way above its weight in the search results and thought, “That’s it?”  The search results are not stacked from top to bottom with info that’s meticulously researched and organized – to put it kindly.  Google didn’t become Google by handing everyone a stack of PhD dissertations, but rather by offering a variety of search results that can satisfy the searcher.  It’s always possible that a high-ranking skinny page has good backlinks, or is on a domain with tons of good backlinks, or has ranked for years and become one of Google’s golden children.  Those factors matter a great deal, as you may know.

The point is that some types of pages don’t need a specific bodyweight to be strong.  It’s fine if they are hefty, and it’s fine if they’re not.  Whether wafer-thin pages have a place on your site, in Google’s index, and in your SEO strategy depends simply on this: do they serve a describable purpose other than you hope they rank?

Certain kinds of thin pages tend to serve a clear purpose, and those pages also tend to rank well.  These types of pages can complement the rest of your local SEO in all kinds of ways, and in general I suggest you create them when you see an opening to do so.

Examples of “skinny” pages that can be effective include those with little or nothing on them but:

1. A video, typically and preferably in the form of an embedded video from your YouTube channel.  (Google even encourages these, in the form of dedicated “watch pages”.)  Here’s an example.

2. A photo, particularly if you’ve optimized it thoroughly.

3. A review or testimonial.

4. Links to other pages or to review sites.

5. Contact info – i.e. what you’d find on the typical “contact” page.

6. Your business hours.

7. Your service area.

8. A “store locator” map or similar functionality.

9. Dynamic pages, which your site may have if it has any ecommerce component to it.

10. A few sentences in another language.

11. An embedded PDF or a link to a PDF that’s on your server.

If you create a page that contains nothing besides one of the items I mentioned above, there’s a decent chance it will scoop up some rankings.  That’s much more likely if you lay down at least a few internal links to each page, if you write an effective title tag for it, and if your site-wide footer makes your service area (or locations served) unmistakably clear.  For good measure you’ll probably want to request indexing in Search Console as soon as the page is up.

I also suggest you have clear and intuitive navigation, particularly in your main menu.  Don’t just have a tiny hamburger menu way off to one side of the screen, because everyone will miss it and nobody who lands on one of your “skinny” pages will venture farther into your site.  You want anyone who finds you through a skinny page to find quickly what he or she is looking for, and then to take the next step (whatever that may be).

Generally, skinny pages won’t bust down the saloon doors, but they can help you pick up some long-tail rankings, and they can help your GBP page show up as a local one-box result (that is, the only Google Maps result).  Once in a blue moon they might even surprise you on competitive local search terms you’ve struggled to show up for.  So that’s what you have to gain.  

What’s the possible downside?  From what I’ve seen, the worst that can happen is Google doesn’t index your skinny page.  But even then probably all you’ll need to do is add a few more internal links to it and maybe expand it a bit.

None of this should change your overall strategy much, if at all.  Here are my SOP suggestions for you:

a. When in doubt, err on the side of making most pages comprehensive and detailed. Your homepage and “service” pages, in particular, pretty much always should be on the longer side, because they need to cover a lot of terrain.  In other words, not every page on your site should be skinny.  That would be dumb.

b. Create a skinny page whenever you want to provide one quick thing on it (a YouTube embed, a large photo with a caption, your contact info, etc.).  Don’t shy away from creating a skinny page just because it will be skinny.  It will not hurt, and it may help.  You can always expand it later, if you want or need to.

c. Don’t consolidate or redirect thin pages by default.  If you have a skinny page that’s been indexed for 2 years and hasn’t yielded more than a few blips in impressions, sure, consider recycling it.  But if it’s producing a dribble of impressions and even a few clicks, let it cook for a while.

d. Don’t try to prevent the crawling of any subdirectories on your site where thin (but generally useful) pages are located. For example, on a WordPress site, most of the good stuff will be in the /wp-content/ subdirectory, so your robots.txt file should not disallow that one.

e. If applicable, create “city” pages with nothing on them (or nothing unique on them) other than photos or videos of work you’ve done in those cities. Of course, if you have more content you want to add, add it.  All I’m saying is don’t put off creating a “city” page just because you don’t have a lot to write at the moment.

f. Study all of your pages – including the skinnies – in Google Search Console. Just see what kind of effect they have collectively on your impressions and clicks.  Also, be on the lookout for accidental rankings.

Even if you don’t go out of your way to create a bunch of single-purpose skinny pages, at least don’t avoid creating them, and don’t assume you should shake them off of your site.  Roll around in them and see if that helps your fur coat.

Just about every business owner wants to be more visible in the AI local results, but it’s easy to get analysis paralysis.  Where and how do you even check your visibility?  How should you size up competitors?  What are realistic next steps, particularly next steps you don’t already plan to do?

Most advice on AI local SEO is like other SEO advice, but even squishier.  When it’s not the same candy in a new wrapper, it’s extremely broad, or it’s a fancy version of “I don’t know.”  Nobody has the AI local results figured out, but that doesn’t mean you should be a spectator, and it sure doesn’t mean your competitors will just sit around and watch.  AI is still a relatively small part of local search, but it may not be that way for long.  You can and should plant the flag now.

A starting point to consider is this simple self-audit I’ve put together.  I’ve used it for my clients (most of whom do very well in the AI local results), both to see how we stack up and to figure out what we should do.  It may help your business, too.

Here’s a filled-out example of the audit (one I did for an attorney client of mine): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTMeLJ56LHesOa_ksUnNwBDjZcMRpm4OO3Wc6IfUESrooWsDgqbKhAQm-1b9ffQU3IzMGqeKwAA_JGd/pubhtml

Another example (this time for a plumber client of mine): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vT3usn6djTLIgYrOMcAwxOiRHCAoCw1exNNh0DjrbkADs2d_jS5_BvexXwdsvcxgaQI76BRZU2vfnr8/pubhtml

And here’s the blank version of the audit template (which is easy to download and customize): docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vSYjO2dBfv7z3P9TPato62f85WiKH4GOw4h6yDxjlWEtIMdoggXxRC2WHX6-51C1lvL4JVWnlBY5y-S/pubhtml

As you’ve probably gathered, it’s free to use, and you can share and adapt it freely.

I hope the self-audit is self-explanatory, but either way, here are the main concepts of it:

1. Cover all the important AI chatbots, plus a few.  Your local visibility in the AI results is much more than how you’re doing in ChatGPT (for one thing, the local results there tend not to be helpful).  If you don’t look at multiple AI engines’ results, you won’t see any patterns.

2. Check one high-priority search term, not a long list of terms.  You’ll over-complicate things and overwhelm yourself.  If you want to check multiple terms, I’d suggest filling out a separate spreadsheet for each.  That will be less of a jumble and easier to manage.  If you’re not sure what search term to look up (or look up first) and compare, try “best ____ in [city].”  The results tend to be more illuminating than what you’ll see for “____ in [city” terms.  Also, though this is speculation on my part, you won’t lose any money by assuming that most people search for more-specific, longer-tail terms in an AI chatbot than they would in regular old Google, simply because they assume that the AI engine will understand the request better.

3. Zero in on overlooked review sites, directories, and best-of lists.  They will jump out at you.  Do what’s necessary to get on them or to get more good reviews on them.

4. Assume that the more obvious a strength is, the more important it is.  By that I mean: if the body of reviews doesn’t seem to be the main strength of any given business, it’s probably the content of the site (i.e. a granular page structure, and lots of detail on exactly how your business is better).  If the site isn’t that good, the big strength is probably the backlinks profile.

Don’t just see where you rank and call it a day.  Take a few minutes to read what each AI tool says about your business – and about each competitor, while you’re at it.  Also take a few minutes to flip through each high-visibility competitor’s site, to scavenge any good ideas you can adapt to your business.

Beyond that, though, don’t think too hard about what to do next.  Probably most of the next steps you arrive at will be things you considered doing anyway or are doing already, because they were and are good for your local visibility regardless of the AI factor.  If you just identify one more site to get reviews on, one “best-of” list or similar curated list, and one topic for a new page to create on your site, then it’s been a good day of fishing.

The AI results may be different, but they’re pulling from the same pool of local businesses, each with the same strengths and weaknesses as before.  The chatbots’ “thought” processes won’t be completely clear to you (or me or anyone else), but they will be clear enough for you to scratch down a couple of simple action items that you can work on now.  You can always obsess later.

We’re all still trying to get a grip on local SEO for AI chatbots (Grok, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc.).  Everything’s subject to change in about 5 minutes.  For all I know, maybe my advice here will have the shelf life of gas station sushi.  But one thing I’ve noticed so far is that what seems to work in the AI results is basically what’s worked for the last 78 “internet years” in Google and beyond: a your-website-first strategy.  Most of my clients are in the catbird seat in the “local” AI results because of it.  Your business can ride high in the AI results, too.  Don’t start overthinking everything.  Simple, practical stuff still works.  Start with that and build on it.

Of course, as the AI tools themselves are quick to tell you, there are many other factors besides your site.  Your online reviews (on all kinds of sites) are critical.  So is your location and your service area.  Your backlinks profile and social media presence probably also factor in, too.  But your website is the biggie.  It’s also your best starting point – the best way you can gain a foothold in the local AI results on the sooner side.  As Mike Blumenthal showed in his “web equity” graphic many years ago, your website isn’t the only part of your house, but it’s the foundation that everything else rests on.

Your first task should be to help the AI tools draw conclusions easily.  Feed them the info they seem to care about.  There’s no way to guarantee any of them will deem your business the “best” choice, or even a choice at all.  But give them the info they’re looking for on a silver platter and you’ll have the best chances.

How?  If you do nothing else today, put together a mean “Why Choose Us?” page.  It is exactly what it sounds like: all the specific reasons someone might pick your business over your competitors’.  It can be a standalone page on your site, one that you blast with internal links, or it can be a detailed (and prominent) section of your homepage or even of a “location” page.

What should go on your “Why Choose Us” page?  Cover at least some of the following points on your business (or on this location if you’re a multi-location outfit), in no particular order:

• What you offer: services, products, treatments, practice areas, etc.
• Degree of focus (i.e. do you offer just about everything, or are you a specialist?).
• Reviews, preferably with links to the sites where someone can read your online reviews.
• Your uniqueness or your main strengths in in your customers’ words (quote their reviews directly).
• Availability or turnaround time (e.g. same-day service, open 24/7, walk-ins welcome, etc.).
• Years of experience.
• Prices or rates.
• Policy on estimates or quotes (e.g. free, on-site, etc.).
• Service area or places where you have a bricks-and-mortar location.
• Languages spoken.
• Ownership (e.g. family-owned, minority-owned, 4th-generation, etc.).
• Awards won.
• Publications cited in.
• Licensure & certifications.
• Discounts offered.
• And so on.

When in doubt, type a couple of search terms you care about into an AI chatbot or two and check out what’s under the “Key considerations” sections (as in Grok and Gemini) or similar sections that explain the results that the AI chatbot coughed up.

They’ll tell you what matters to them, generally.  Those justifications tend to be more prominent in (and let’s assume more important to) “best [thing] in [city]” search terms than in the AI search results for broader terms.

By the way, you’re probably better off trying to rank for “best roofer in East Tree Stump” than for “roofers in East Tree Stump,” even though you can and must try to scoop up both.  When in doubt, focus on the superlatives.  That’s for a few reasons, but I’ll leave it at one very simple reason for now: most people who use an AI chatbot want the results curated for them – for the giant AI brain to do most of the thinking for them.  If they want a whole pile of local results to pick through, they’ll just stick to Google.

How do you put meat on the bones, though?  How do you explain what makes your business special?  Once you have at least a rough idea of which points are strengths of your business (rather than weak spots that you’d rather gloss over or avoid), start with what your customers say in their reviews of you.  While you’re at it, see what your competitors’ customers complain about in their reviews of your competitors.  Mine your reviews and your competitors’ reviews.  Either or both will tell you specifically why people already chose you.  The consensus from my clients, for instance, is that I offer practical suggestions, help execute them, and produce noticeable before-and-after results.  Meanwhile, in the words of my older son, I “fix Google clogs” for a living.  Somewhere in there is a pithy description of what makes you different, special, or the best.

Here are a few examples of great “Why Choose Us?” pages:

houstonfaces.com/why-choose-dr-siegel/

creativeconcreteinc.com/why-choose-us/

gmrodriguezlaw.com/why-giselle/

icedamremovalguys.com/best-ice-dam-removal/

waltsautoservice.com/why-choose-us

premoelectric.com/

A detailed “Why Choose Us” is a great first step, but no single tactic is likely to help you in all of the AI chatbots, at least at once.  Even if your local SEO is rippin’ along on all cylinders, you’ll probably be in bad shape in at least one of the AI tools.  There’s always one that got away.  Only time will tell how much that matters.  Time will also tell which AI chatbot(s) local customers actually use.  Keep in mind that if the results are total garbage or very hit-or-miss, either people won’t use that chatbot for local searches (exclusively or at all), or it will need to change its modeling to produce better results.  Even if the AI results on (let’s say) ChatGPT or Grok seem more thorough and helpful, if people get burned by bad businesses, they won’t trust the AI results as much next time.  The end results need to be better than what they could have found the old-fashioned way.

What seems to have helped your business in the local AI results so far?  What’s a great example of a “Why Choose Us?” page (yours or someone else’s)?  Leave a comment!

Some pages, posts, or other “content” on your site haven’t helped your rankings much – definitely not in Google Maps, and not even in the organic results.  Even worse, all of that so-called content just bugs you.  It may have been someone else’s idea, and it hasn’t worked out, even though you’re the one who spent time or money (or both) on it.  From where you sit, that content is the SEO equivalent of 1970s pistachio-green shag rug and wood panelling.  Why wouldn’t you get rid of it?

If a specific page or post is beyond salvage, sure, get rid of it.  Or if you want to remove the content regardless of how well or poorly it ranks, then you should go ahead and remove it.  Those are good reasons to prune content (as it’s called) in a deliberate and careful way.  But if you want to cleave out large chunks of content (usually dozens, hundreds, or thousands of URLs) for SEO purposes, or if you want to turn it into an asset and not remove it at all, then you’ll probably want to try a different approach.

Chopping out low-performing content impulsively isn’t a surefire way to improve your SEO, and it can backfire easily, leaving you in worse shape than you were in before.  It’s a common overreaction by SEOs who (in most cases) don’t know about the tradeoffs, don’t measure performance accurately, or just don’t know what else to try.  It’s easy to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Try instead to rehab those underachieving pages and reevaluate them later.  The basic reason that’s better than heavy pruning is threefold: it’s very unlikely to hurt your visibility, it may be more visible than you think, and you probably can improve its visibility easily.  Will it “skyrocket” your rankings?  Probably not, but it will probably produce a series of little gains for you.  Any gains are preferable to the unholy trinity of waste in SEO: time and money spent on content that didn’t help, the missed-opportunity costs of waiting around for it to help, and time spent removing it and guaranteeing that it won’t help.

It’s probably time to explain the problems with aggressive content-pruning.  Here are 8:

1. There’s no site-wide penalty for bad content (that I’ve seen).  Whenever I’ve seen a site that seemed to get whacked by an algorithm update or penalty, there have always been other issues – not just weak content.  (When we work on those other issues, whatever they may be, the lousy pages tend to perform better.)  Even on a site that tanked, often a couple of pages will still perform OK.  Don’t confuse a whole site that sunk with a series of pages that can’t hold water.  In other words, Google only has problems with specific pages.  The worst that happens is they’re just paperweights.

2. There’s no penalty for specific weak pages (that I’ve seen).  Fine, you made a dud, or it’s decent content that’s badly optimized.  That page might not rank now, but you can resurrect it.  You may just need to make it better, improve the internal linking to it (more on that later), and (worst-case scenario) maybe get a few backlinks from relevant sites.  Whether you want to go to that effort is another question.  The point is Google won’t put a permanent “trash” label on it.

3. High-performing content usually doesn’t perform well right out of the gates.  Usually it’s indexed and gets very little action for weeks or months.  Then it gets a few impressions and fewer clicks.  Then it gets more impressions.  Then it gets a LOT more impressions and a better trickle of clicks.  Then it may start hauling in solid clicks.  Never prune new content, because it may do just fine even if you do nothing but wait.  That’s especially likely to happen if it’s pretty good content (in your estimation) and if it’s already got heavy internal links to it.

4. It may have some good accidental rankings, though it might not rank worth a flying flip for any of your higher-priority search terms. Those are a telltale sign that that specific page is not a goner.  You can build on those accidental rankings.

5. It may be a useful navigational page, one that people click on after landing on your site through some other page.  One’s “contact” page is a good example.  Do a lot of people find the contact page in the search results and click on it?  Probably not, but you do need it on the site, because most people will expect to go there when they’re ready to rock.  The same may be true of FAQs pages, “watch” pages for embedded videos, and some blog posts.

6. You probably won’t gain much by freeing up crawl budget, even on a large site (one with hundreds of thousands or millions) of pages).  If the junk pages constitute a high % of your total number of pages and therefore also a lot of your crawl budget, then sure, you can remove those pages and free up Google’s spiders to crawl the rest of your crappy pages a little more often.  The only trouble with that is it’s probably easy for you to improve a bunch of crappy pages in bulk, just as it was easy for you to create them in bulk.  With about the same effort it would take you to remove those pages, redirect them, and start over with plan B, you could probably just make them a little better and more visible.  If it’s a BIG site, especially one with solid backlinks, fixing up your pages will probably produce results sooner than if you removed the old pages and put up brand-new pages that need again to be crawled and indexed, before sitting around for a while and disappointing you once more.   Every “create, wait, remove” cycle costs you time and money, and it’s usually an endless loop.

7. You can lose precious backlinks to your site.  Sure, you can 301-redirect the pruned URLs to some other page on your site, but the owner of the site that linked to you might consider it a bait-and-switch.  Sure, maybe the new URL has the same content, or similar or equivalent content, but then the question becomes: why retire the old, existing URL in the first place?  At least for a “local” business, it’s usually extra tough to get good inbound links pointing to URLs on your site other than the homepage (which tends to get most of the good links), so hang onto those like they’re manhole covers.

8. You can always remove the content later, if and when you conclude that the content you wanted to prune wasn’t the problem after all.

So “Chop first, ask questions later” isn’t a great approach, at least as standard operating procedure.  Yet you still want to do something with that content, even if you don’t buzzcut it.  Here’s what I suggest you do:

a. Confirm that the page is indexed.  (It may not be, even if it’s been on your site for months.)  Inspect the URL in Google Search Console.  If it’s not indexed, request indexation and then blast it with internal links.  That alone might do the trick.

b. Check Search Console to see whether each specific page you might prune gets a trickle of impressions for loosely relevant search terms.  If so, you can probably get it to perform much better with minimal effort.  It’s an especially good sign if that page also gets even a few clicks for some of those search terms, in which case you’re probably close to paydirt.

c. In Search Console look at the last 16 months of data on that URL and see whether the page used to get significant impressions and maybe clicks.  If it performed well months ago but has dropped recently, the chances are even better than you can rehab it.

d. In Search Console check entire neighborhoods of content for impressions and clicks, both recent and historical, and compare them to the performance of other neighborhoods of your content.  Use the filters in Search Console to check on this.  Let’s say most of your struggling pages are under /blog/ or /articles/ or /2025/ subdirectory.  How do those compare to the pages that aren’t in that subdirectory?  You may find that content in one subdirectory generally does poorly, while content in another subdirectory (or in no subdirectory at all) does well.  Also filter by certain keywords.  You might find that content on a certain topic performs OK, while content on another topic struggles.

e. Ignore what Google Analytics tells you about the pages you’ve thought about pruning.  GA4 has its place in the world for other troubleshooting, but the inherent problem is it only shows you clicks, and not the visibility (i.e. # of impressions) that produces those clicks, nor the specific search terms that any of that visibility comes from.  GA4 can lead you to put into the “dead” pile a piece of content that’s perfectly viable, albeit with a flesh wound

f. Add more internal links to the page you wanted to prune.  Link to it on prominent other pages (e.g. homepage, “services,” “areas served,” etc.) and in the main menu, footer, or both.  Often a lack of internal links alone is enough to keep an otherwise-solid page, post, or other piece of content stuck in the mud.

g. Fatten up the title tag of the page (or blog post).  If the page already gets impressions (according to Search Console) for any of the terms you’ve already got in the title tag, simply add to it, like by adding a synonym or related term and maybe a location name.  If the page doesn’t rank for anything in the title tag, just take a crazy flier on something you think has the best chance of working out.

h. Consider removing the description tag (i.e. the meta description).  Yep, just wipe it.  Google will grab a relevant excerpt from the page and use that as the description that shows up in search results.  In my experience, that’s usually a better fit than whatever description tag I think will be a good one-size-fits-all.  That’s why I leave those blank on probably 70% of the pages I work on for clients.

i. Add on-topic, thoroughly optimized photos to the page.  Especially with detailed captions, photos alone can bump a page, and often they can help you get more leads out of however many (or few) people stumble onto it.  They can even help a page that nobody finds in search results, but that lots of people navigate to once they’re on the site (after having entered through some other page).

j. Copy and paste customers’ reviews onto the pages that need a bump.  Link back to where those reviews were written originally, so it’s clear your Uncle Bob didn’t write them for you.  If you’ve got mostly Google Maps reviews, use the somewhat-buried keyword-search feature to find reviews relevant to the page.

k. Expand the content.  Like with FAQs, examples, links to other pages on your site, links to resources on other sites, or whatever you think it needs.  No need to go crazy.  Just make it a little more detailed.

What if, even after all of that, you still decide to prune the content?  You may have great reasons.  Some things just are not meant to be.

• See what you can reuse elsewhere.  Before you snuff out a piece of content, grab and save the better parts in an easy-to-find document of your choice.  Then try to add them to an FAQs page, a blog post on a similar topic, a YouTube video description, etc.  You don’t need to use the whole pig to get a few edible meals.
• Don’t remove all of the content at once.  Let’s say you want to lop out 100 pages.  Try removing the 30 weakest pages and see what happens before you decide on the rest.

In other words, the approach I recommend is: measure twice (or three times), cut as little as possible, and reuse as much as possible.  You can use every 2×4, sheet of plywood, PVC elbow, quarter-bag of concrete, and half-roll of 14/2 cable to improve your house, sooner or later.

One good thing about the situation you’re in is that the two approaches – “chop” and “fix” – aren’t mutually exclusive.  You can try to fix up and still end up chopping out, if you so choose.  Along the way, you’ll look at the numbers in Google Search Console and at the other metrics you care about and will find out first-hand what works for you.

What’s been your experience with pruning or resurrecting flat pages?  Any suggestions or questions?  Are you on the horns of a dilemma now?  Leave a comment!