 OK, everybody, we're going to talk about local SEO. So even if you don't do a lot of local SEO like me, it's so important to know what's going on in that space because so many of Google's queries are turning into local SEO, local intent, local everything. And our next speaker is probably one of the foremost authorities on the planet in this space. She owns a Sterling Sky agency in Canada, owns the local search forum. She wrote the expert's guide to local search, local SEO. She's a Google contributor all around general expert and amazing human being. She spoke last year at MozCon. I learned so much. Excited to see what she talks about today. Let's kick it over to Joy Hawkins. Hello. So for those of you that aren't familiar with my background, I run a fully remote team of employees in the US and Canada. And everybody's remote, they all work from home. And although I love working from home, I do often miss the ability to do office pranks on my coworkers. So last year during our annual meetup, we decided to have some fun. And I had someone install a Chrome extension on one of my colleagues' computers. What it does is it changes the word cloud on your page to the word but for every single instance. And we installed it, thought it would be really fun, but kind of forgot about it for a few months. Until one day, my coworker sent me a frantic message on Slack. She wanted to know why one of our clients was using this website that was talking about butt devices. And she was very confused. She was like, what are butt devices? So she then proceeded to Google what they were and instantly wished that she hadn't. See, my coworker, Nikki, she was very confused. And she made some very bad decisions due to having the wrong information. I would say this is also true of many people in the local search industry. I often see a lot of confusion and poor decision-making being made due to having the wrong information. So one of the things that we see a lot in the local search industry is these studies that are done. And they're talking about Google My Business, and they often analyze performance based on these things called views. So these are these charts you see in the Google My Business dashboard. And at first glance, it seems like a very good metric to track. Why wouldn't you want to see how many people had viewed your listing on Google? However, over the years, I've watched many agencies use this metric and then run into issues when their graphs look like this. Like, why on earth did your views quadruple in one day? Or this, views flat line for a few days only to go back to where they were. Or this, the thing that people often get confused is because these examples are not matching up with other real-world data. So it's not like their calls flatlined. And so they're kind of wondering, like, should I even trust this data? Is it even correct? And the biggest reason why people are confused is because they're misunderstanding what exactly this metric is reporting on. According to Google's Help Center, if you try to see what their definition of a view is, it's not extremely helpful. I'm going to give you a few examples of how views are actually generated. So every time that you browse on Google Maps, if you go to Google Maps and you zoom in or you look around, every single business that has an icon, you are contributing one view to that business. So if you're like me and you zoom around a lot, every time you refresh is going to add another view. Additionally, if you're looking up, let's say your favorite restaurant on Google, there are competitor listings at the bottom of each knowledge panel. And you're not looking at these, but these are still all getting a view. Photo views are very similar. If you're browsing a restaurant listing, for example, and clicking around like crazy, every single photo that is on your screen will get one view. So you can kind of start to see how it's really easy for these numbers to get inflated. And the best way to kind of think of a view is to think about, like, hit counters on websites. So you know how these used to be these like awesome metrics that we used to think are cool back in the 90s? Well, honestly, this is very similar to how views are calculated. They're extremely high in inflated numbers. So a much better metric to use is searches. Although these are not unique numbers, at least they actually represent actual searches done on Google for terms that surface your listing. And one of the things I like to do with these is rather than looking at them in the Google My Business dashboard, I like to import them into Data Studio so you can kind of see them month over month and you can do this via the GMB API. And it's a much better way of looking at the data. There is another metric also inside Google My Business that has a ton of value and I rarely see marketers in the local SEO space even reference it. So inside Google My Business Insights, there is a section called search queries. And I believe that one of the main reasons why these kind of get neglected is because they only exist inside the Google My Business dashboard. So they're not yet available in the API and they're not included in a lot of the third party tools that people use to analyze their clients. So thinking about this, if you have to go manually pull them from Google My Business, wouldn't it be just easier than to look into search console which does actually export easier? Technically, if you add UTM codes to a listing inside Google My Business, you can look at traffic inside search console. And if you're not really sure how to do this, I've linked to a page that will give you instructions on kind of step-by-steps on how this is done. So you can track traffic in search console from Google My Business specifically. And you wanna make sure, kind of one tip here is make sure that you use the Google and organic for the medium and the source. If you don't, what ends up happening you actually end up stealing from your organic traffic. You might have a new client and you look at the organic traffic and you see a decline, not exactly what you wanna see for someone that just started working with you. So always make sure you get that straight and there's more details in that article there. But I really wanted to know exactly how the data inside search console compared with what you see in Google My Business Insights. So we decided to do this really in-depth case study. We took 78 different Google My Business listings for 29 different businesses. And for each one we went in and we took the top queries inside search console for the last three months and we compared it to what Google My Business Insights was showing for the last quarter. Inside search console, we were specifically looking at the impressions and clicks that were for the page containing the UTM code. So as described earlier. So as shown here, this is kind of an example. We went in, we only looked at the page and the activity on that page that was matching the exact URL we were using on the Google My Business listing. And what we found after compiling all the data and comparing the two lists was that 66% of the top 10 queries were different. So a lot more variance than what we were expecting to see. I'll share an example that will help illustrate this. This was an example of a plastic surgeon. In the last quarter, according to Google My Business, these were the top 10 keywords that surfaced the listing on Google. However, if I look in search console, this is the top 10 list. And the only one that matched between the two lists is the one that I put in bold there, which is rhinoplasty. So these lists in this example are actually 90% different. So quite some variance there. And if this was a new client and you were trying to kind of figure out which terms were driving volume based on these numbers, you could easily miss a ton of valuable information. If I had just looked in search console, for example, I might have concluded that lip enhancements were the thing to go after. And I may have missed out on lip fillers or lip injections, which were both highly searched according to Google My Business. So the real question that I wanted to answer was why are they so different and which one is correct? So first, unlike any other metric available to us, search queries in Google My Business Insights are unique visits. So technically, it might report on the same person twice if they're using different devices. So if I'm on my computer and I'm searching and then I go on my phone, it would report me as two different people. But it's not gonna report me 10 times if I go on my computer and search 10 times for a client. So this is different than search console and kind of explains why there was some variance. The second reason why the data sets didn't match is because one quarter inside Google My Business Insights is not actually representing the last three months. And I didn't know this. Like my entire career working in local search, I did not know this until recently. So we started digging around, looking for examples when I was putting together this study. And here's an example here of a screenshot of the last quarter, according to Google My Business Insights. And I pulled this on May 13th of this year. It was for a client of mine that does lawn care in the summer and he installs Christmas lights in the winter. Due to how much I monitor website traffic adds various different places, I am extremely confident that massive searches for Christmas lights installation do not happen after Christmas is over. It's also helpful if you have common sense here. So the last three months, given when I pulled this, would be February to April. But this is not reflecting searches done from February to April. And I also kind of concluded that was true because as I was going back over several weeks and checking this report, it didn't change. These numbers stayed the same regardless of the fact that time had passed. So I'm not sure what date range this is looking at. It is looking at a one quarter period, but it is not the last three months. And this helps explain why these two lists came up different. Google does not do this in real time when it comes to Google My Business Insights. The third and fourth reasons require me to dive a bit deeper, to further kind of understand why the data differed so much. We decided to break out all of the search queries into four different categories. And I'll kind of explain what these mean. So the first category are near me terms. They are literally that. They are terms that include near me. So like plumber near me or doctor near me, for example. The next type we targeted was branded. So we wanted to see, okay, like someone's searching specifically for a local company or a person that works at that local company. The fourth type, sorry, third type that we did was implicit. So this is where the user puts in a search that is local in nature, but doesn't actually specify a location. So for example, when you just search plumber or you just search lawyer, Google returns local results even though you didn't actually specify a city. And then finally, explicit queries. This is where the person actually specifies a location. So for example, lawyer, Chicago or plumber, Denver, et cetera, that would be considered explicit query. So here's an example, just kind of comparing the two. So I'm Canadian, first of all. And because I'm Canadian, one of the only of codes that I know is 90210. So I just use that as a default for all my examples here. So I set my location to 90210, Beverly Hills. And I did a search for Botox and I did a search for Botox, Beverly Hills. And I wanted to see just how different these are. And you'll see here, these two results sets are very different. The local PAC results are showing different businesses. And you'll see, of course, the fact that Google does return local results for Botox tell you that they do consider it to be a keyword that has local intent. However, something that I thought was really interesting is when you scroll down and you start looking at organic results, Google is not showing me local businesses at all for Botox. The only exposure these businesses are getting is in the three PAC. When you go down to the organic results, it's extremely unlikely that any local business has the SEO budget to compete with a site like Botox.com. However, when you search Botox, Beverly Hills, for example, the organic search tells a very different story. And you'll kind of see here, we've got the local businesses showing. The second I put in Beverly Hills, all of a sudden the organic results change. Another example here is comparing car accident lawyer with car accident lawyer, Beverly Hills. You'll see again, the three PAC, completely different results. However, the organic results, similar to the last example, are also different. But when I don't enter a city, Google is actually pulling in a lot of the attorneys from Los Angeles, which is kind of interesting. The moment I start specifying Beverly Hills, it is showing me specifically Beverly Hills attorneys. Even the directories that rank in both cases are ranking different pages. So that's something to kind of keep in mind. So I decided to try this in like a town that I was a little more familiar with that was local to me. So Aurora is a suburb of Toronto. Most people that live in Aurora, they work in Toronto, but it's 40 minutes away from Toronto. And I found the same thing happen. When I was searching for car accident lawyer located in Aurora as my location, I was getting all these organic results from Toronto. So it's almost like Google is like pulling in results from like the next biggest city over when it comes to organic, that they're looking at a much broader area. Whereas the moment you put in the city name, like Aurora, they are now specifically gonna pull in businesses that are in that town. So how this relates to our study. We found that the majority of keywords that were represented in the top 10 inside Google My Business Insights, but missing from Search Console were implicit queries. So queries exactly like Botox or a car accident lawyer where there's no city specified. And this was kind of interesting. So looking at Botox as an example, according to Google My Business Insights, Botox had 49 different people, like unique users, searching for it. But according to Search Console, it had 18 impressions. And I get, like we've already talked about two different reasons why these are different, but there was something else that I noticed while digging into this. If you don't rank organically, none of the mobile searches are going to count in Search Console as impressions. Now let this sink in, because this is something that I feel like a lot of people don't realize. There are no website icons on your Google My Business listing when someone searches on mobile. They actually have to click on the listing first, then they see a website icon. And that's important to remember because Search Console tracks your website. There is no website icon present is not going to count as a search. Google My Business, however, tracks your Google My Business listing. So regardless of it's on mobile, whether there's a website icon or whatever, it would technically get counted there. And looking for this plastic searching, you'll see the majority of the traffic that he's getting from Google My Business in the last six months is from mobile devices. It's getting six times the clicks that desktop is getting. And what's more interesting is when you look at the click-through rate, the mobile and tablet click-through rate for this business is almost 30%, whereas desktop is 1.4. And like we all work in SEO, we know that 30% is a very, very abnormal click-through rate, but it all starts to make sense when you realize that there are so many searches on mobile that are not counting. They're not generating impressions at all because there's no website icon present until the person clicks on the listing. And if I look at the entire site, just to make sure that there's something else not going on here, the entire site does not have this pattern at all. It is only when I start isolating the traffic coming to the website from Google My Business. This is what it looks like when I look at traffic to the Google My Business listing for just Botox. So specifically that query. You'll see again how crazy that CTR looks. And the thing here is you cannot use search console impression data to get an accurate view of search volume in local search because if your business gets a lot of traffic from the P3 pack, it is missing all of that information from mobile searches. Another really interesting takeaway from our study was the difference in search volume for implicit queries compared to explicit queries. When we looked inside Google My Business Insights, the total volume of the implicit queries was 51% higher than the explicit queries. I found this fascinating. After spending the last 14 years working a local search, I feel like all I ever hear business owners and local SEOs say are things like, Joy, I checked my rankings for personal injury, or my client doesn't rank for auto insurance Chicago. I hear that way more than I ever hear people say, you know, like, oh, I'm not ranking for auto insurance or I'm not ranking for car accident lawyer. So why is that? Well, what I always assumed was that implicit queries wouldn't be as great for conversions. And it's probably my background in Google Ads that kind of shaped this in my head. After all, someone's searching for plumber. They could be researching. Maybe they want to be a plumber one day, but someone typing in plumber Denver is more likely to hire someone near them, right? Well, again, I kind of questioned myself. So I wanted to kind of answer this question with our study. So I went back to the same set of businesses. However, I had to kind of squish the data down a bit because not all the businesses we looked at originally are actually doing Google Ads. And it's important to know like, local businesses don't generally have massive budgets. So these are all small accounts. They're spending less than $10,000 a month on ads. And this is often what we're working with in local search. We have limited budgets, and it can sometimes be hard to come to the right conclusions because our data is so limited. So we were able to look at a total of 894 conversions across these 15 businesses, try and see if we could identify any trends. We only included keywords that had at least 100 impressions for this part. And just to clarify, I'm not saying keywords with low search volume aren't important. They are hugely important, but we wanted to look at the top ones to get a better sense of how they are performing in comparison to explicit queries. And we also counted conversions as leads. So contact form submissions, calls using call tracking and live chat. And this was the breakdown of the conversion rates for the different types of keywords that we found. So contrary to previous assumptions, it showed that implicit queries actually converted at a higher rate than explicit queries. However, I want to really point out that this was not consistent across all industries. It varied quite a bit. So for example, compare these two. The private investigator here his top searched implicit queries converted better, but it definitely wasn't true for the auto dealer. The auto dealer on the other hand, his explicit queries converted four times better than his implicit queries. Either way, the concept that explicit queries are always better at converting is wrong. And that was kind of the question I wanted to answer. Something else to keep in mind, it is possible that there's another reason why small businesses and local SEOs tend to focus so heavily on explicit queries. According to our study, 40% of the top search console top queries that were missing from site Google My Business Insights were explicit queries. And this kind of led to the last and final reason why they varied so much. This is pretty substantial. Search console impression data includes searches done by ranking trackers. And think about this. How many keywords do you track for your clients? How frequently do you run your ranking reports? Now, this is kind of a funny example. This is a ranking report that is run periodically when I request it for this client. It's a large ranking report. And we're standing a lot of different keywords from different geo-coordinates, so there's a ton of keywords total. Guess which day the report runs? You can kind of see the spikes there. Sometimes it's not even this obvious though. Imagine you're working with a lawyer in New York City and a lot of their competitors are also using SEO companies and all these SEO companies are setting up ranked trackers only targeting explicit queries. You can kind of see how the data starts to break down. I checked with Darren Shaw, who's a friend of mine who runs a local ranked tracking software over at Whitespark. I asked him, did the crawlers come in from the same device or does it come out as different devices? And he said, if you use a tracker that does desktop and mobile, you should get double the impressions, but other than that, it should be coming in from the same device. So theoretically, if you're using Whitespark, every time you run a report, it would count as one user inside Google My Business Insights for all the different queries, but hundreds or possibly thousands of impressions in search console, depending on how many keywords you have on your report. So the takeaways here, if you work in local search, first of all, Google My Business Views should not be a metric that you report on, use search impressions instead. Second, search impressions inside search console should not be used as a method to pick keywords. Use click data instead. Third, make sure you are tracking both implicit and explicit queries. Get rid of this thinking that one is better than the other. And fourth, start monitoring search queries inside Google My Business Insights. You'd be kind of surprised to see what you'll find. And that's it for me. Here's a link. If you wanna hear more about local search, we have a free newsletter, so feel free to subscribe.