In this episode of Local Marketing Secrets, Danny Leibrandt sits down with Jason Brown — the no-BS spam-fighter behind ReviewFraud and a former Platinum Google Business Profile Product Expert. Jason has been featured by CNBC, BrightLocal, and NBC’s Today Show for exposing shady local SEO practices, from fake listings to review manipulation. He even helped the FTC craft its policy on fake reviews.
Jason shares the raw truth about the current state of Google Maps spam, how to remove fake reviews (step-by-step), and why more businesses are getting suspended — even when they play by the rules. You’ll hear about review farms in Indonesia, lead gen scammers abusing LSA responsiveness, and the exact documentation needed to reinstate your profile if it gets suspended. Plus: why responding to reviews boosts conversions, how to use citations correctly, and why black hat SEOs are still getting it wrong.
If you care about ethical local SEO and protecting your business online, this is a must-listen.
Jason Brown, Founder of ReviewFraud:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jason-brown-keyserholiday/
X: https://x.com/keyserholiday
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/keyserholiday.bsky.social
ReviewFraud: https://reviewfraud.org/
Danny Leibrandt, Founder of Pest Control SEO:
Facebook: https://facebook.com/DannyLeibrandt
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/dannyleibrandt/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DannyLeibrandt
Website: https://dannyleibrandt.com
Pest Control SEO: https://pestcontrolseo.com/
Local Marketing Secrets Platforms:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@LocalMarketingSecrets
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/1TCL0LhZbsJS6mzanqnnT1?si=224075c9fbda42f5
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/local-marketing-secrets/id1741176782
Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0bb5254-5d6c-4940-8211-085157cc1239/local-marketing-secrets
Podcast Chapters:
00:00 Introduction to Jason Brown
03:04 The Importance of Reviews in Local SEO
06:01 Combatting Fake Reviews and Spam
12:08 The Impact of Reviews on Business Reputation
14:58 Understanding Google Business Profile Suspensions
17:51 Navigating the Reinstatement Process
25:45 Documenting Your Business for Google
28:36 Optimizing Your Business Name for SEO
34:59 The Role of Citations in Local SEO
41:33 Increasing Conversion Rates on Google Business Profile
44:54 The Impact of Reviews on SEO
46:49 Advice for Local SEOs and Business Owners
#jasonbrown #googlebusinessprofile #localmarketing #localbusiness #homeservicebusiness #homeservicemarketing #homeserviceadvertising #localseo #localadvertising #seo #marketing #podcast #business
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey there, and welcome back to Local Marketing Secrets.
I'm your host Danny Lebrand, andtoday I'm with Jason Brown.
If you don't know Jason, he's a former Platinum Google Business
Profile product expert, the founder of Review Fraud and
Bright Locals resident Spam Sheriff who's helped countless
businesses stamp out fake listings and fraudulent reviews.
He's been featured on Bright Local, CNBC and even NBC's Today
(00:22):
Show for exposing the dark side of local search.
And he even helped the FTC crafta fake review policy.
Now in this episode, we're diving into his battle tested
tech tactics for cleaning up Google Maps spam, safeguarding
your online reputation and ethically dominating local SEO
so you can outrank sketchy competitors and win more
customers. Now without further ado, Jason,
(00:43):
welcome to the show. Thank.
You for having me, it's a pleasure.
Of course. So I'd like to jump into your
background a little bit more. Tell me how you got into local
SEO, you know, about 20 years ago.
Well yeah it was kind of a fluke.
My now ex-wife and I had bought a condo.
Met our neighbor one Sunday evening.
We chatted for a little bit. He was a web designer and he
needed a project manager. So he said hey I need a project
(01:04):
manager. He was building websites for the
online casino industry. And then Congress came in and
stopped that and said you can't do that anymore because it was
being used for, you know, nefarious money laundering.
So he had a client say, hey, do you know anything about
localist? He always says sure.
And so we started researching itand next thing I know, I ended
(01:27):
up building a career out of it just out of out of fluke.
Wow, that's awesome. And walk me through what's been
going on the past 20 years or so.
So you I've seen you've been involved in many different
companies and the past nine years or so you've been really
focused on reviews. Tell me more about the journey.
Yeah, so I ended up working for like a couple turn and burn
agencies and just just hook themand book them, you know, selling
(01:54):
snake oil over a promising underdelivering in 2016.
I ended up getting hired for that over the top.
And the CEO pulled me aside the first week I was there.
It took me to lunch. He's like, just so you know,
anything we do has to be white hat.
We have to protect our brand at all costs.
And I was like, sure. You know, I'm like, I'm not
(02:15):
going to do anything Black Hat, you know, maybe a little Gray
hat, you know, with like press releases, but nothing, you know,
nothing nefarious because this is a nationwide franchise.
If we nuke their website we we would we would knock out like
360 legitimate franchise locations across the US.
So I was sitting at my desk one day in December and a friend of
(02:37):
mine had tweeted that somebody showed up at her house over a
negative review. So I did a reverse image search.
Found her Yelp profile. No, she only left two reviews. 2
negative reviews. One for a salon, a nail salon,
and the other for plumbing company.
So I looked up the, so the plumbing company had like a 2.1
rating on on Yelp. I look at their Google profile
(02:58):
and they've got a 4.7. I was like, something's not
adding up here. And I know Yelp tends to skew
towards the negative. So I looked into their profile
and I started seeing a lot of the same businesses in multiples
in different states all being reviewed.
And I was like, ah, it's a review pod.
At that same time, one of our franchisees was trying to boost
his marketing, so he bought 19 fake Google reviews.
(03:19):
And so I ended up working with Mike Blumenthal for like 3 1/2
months to get Google to remove all but one of the fake reviews.
And so because Mike was so helpful, I decided, well, I'm
going to start helping out on the forum.
And then I became a ended up becoming a product expert.
And then so for like the left, since June of 2016, it's been
(03:39):
nothing but either local or spamfighting for me.
Awesome. Yeah, let's talk about removing
spam reviews. So there's like a whole another
question. I get a lot of clients coming to
me and even even some of my friends that own businesses that
they get a one star review, but it's actually a customer of
theirs and they actually did do a bad job.
But what about those, those one stars that maybe you get
(04:00):
spammed, Maybe it's a competitor.
How do you get rid of those? Yeah.
So what I do is I put together adetailed sheets where it's the
reviewer name, the reviewer link.
And then I start highlighting all the businesses that they've
been reviewing. And what I do is I show them,
hey, these eight people all leftreviews for these same 7
(04:21):
businesses and the one that got attacked.
And then I say, well, here's thehere's like 15 others that
reviewed 6 of the same businesses.
And so I just basically just highlight and show Google, look,
this is not a real profile, you know, cuz they're, you know,
going all over the United Statesliving reviews in Canada,
they're living reviews in. And it's just like, so I put
together a real well documented sheet and then I turn it into
(04:44):
Google and then let Google go and do the investigations.
And then they what they've been doing now, instead of just
removing the reviews, they're actually nuking the account so
that they can't log back in and leave more reviews.
Nuking the Google account as in they can't log in at all or they
just can't delete it? They.
Completely delete it. Wow.
Yeah. OK.
So that's something that's pretty recent.
(05:07):
Yeah, this is within like the last couple of years because
before what they would do, whichwas ridiculous, and I looked at
some of the review profiles thatI gone to the Today show with
and Google would go in and wipe out all the reviews.
But then the the the fake reviewsellers would go in and log in
and keep posting review, postingnew reviews.
(05:27):
And I was like, you know, so just became a game of whack A
mole. Then all of a sudden Google was
like, all right, you know what, now we're going to start
disabling the account. So that's that's been a real
bonus of late. Huh, so something I've heard
from it was someone else in the little classio space.
I forget who, but someone told me that like in some foreign
countries, I don't know, it might be Vietnam or something,
(05:49):
they have like sweatshops of like just tons of phones and to
leave reviews. Is that true and is that what
goes on? Yeah, I, yeah, it's, it's in
India and Indonesia is where they're OK, where they're doing
it the most. And yeah, it's just, you know,
it's just a call center, you know, sweatshop where they've
got tons of people just, you know, here's your script here,
(06:10):
here, here's the reviews to, youknow, to, to leave.
You know, they give them like, you know, like 150, you know,
they wanted to leave for like 1 client.
And they do such a poor job sometimes, like don't sometimes
they'll leave the quotation marks in or they'll leave like
the name of the business that's supposed to go to.
And you're just like, you're like, oh, Yep.
To me, wasn't paying attention. So he was moving too fast.
But yeah, that's what that's what they they do.
(06:31):
Yeah. There's a lot of Black Hat
tactics. There's API in, in Southern
California. He's got his workers overseas
clicking on LS as and submitting, submitting requests
for, you know, for for a lawyer because he knows that one of the
ranking factors for LSA is how responsive you are to those
(06:54):
leads coming in. So if he does it in the middle
of the night when the lawyers are sleeping, it tanks through
LSA after six months. Plus he does a lot of click
fraud with PPC. He does fake reviews for his
location. He's done fake negative reviews
for his competitors and Google won't do anything about it.
It's just it's, it's insane. Is there any way to combat that?
Do you see that getting fixed inthe future?
(07:15):
Yeah. So the nice thing is, is Google
started turn created this ability to turn off reviews for
certain businesses. So what I saw in December of
2023 was several law firms lost.Not only did they lose reviews,
they lost the ability to get newreviews for six months.
Now here's the beauty. One of the ranking factors with
(07:36):
there's two ranking factors withreviews.
The 1st is when you get to 10 reviews and the next one is
review Regency. So these businesses not being
able to get reviews for five or six months tank their whole
online rankings. Like if you look at if you look
at a heat map, they went from ones and threes down to
eighteens and 20s. Like they just got decimated.
(07:57):
And they had and these and thesewere a law firms with multiple
locations. So it wasn't just one location.
So it was really, it was really nice to actually see a business
actually get penalized once for having fake reviews.
Yeah, definitely. So kind of playing off what you
were saying, how important are reviews regarding ranking?
Like I've heard some people say 50% or that's, you know, you do
(08:18):
a little bit of setup optimization.
That's pretty much the only recurring work.
Like how exactly important are they to rank your Google
Business profile? Oh, it's, it's become, it's
become bigger in the last few months.
It's, it's, it's always been somewhat of a ranking factor,
but I think Google's cranked up the dial for review recency.
And that's according to what Darren Shaw is seeing.
(08:38):
Joey Hawkins was the first one to talk about review recency and
do a case study on it. She was working with a business
that wasn't really ranking well.And they went months without
asking for reviews. And all sudden they started
asking for reviews and they started, they started popping up
in the ranking. So I think it, I think it's
becoming a, a, a, a huge part. But the problem is, is like
(08:59):
people think, oh, you need to put your, you need to have your
clients, you know, put keywords in your reviews.
Well, that doesn't impact ranking.
Then they say you need to respond to your reviews with
your keywords in it. That doesn't impact rankings.
So it's just getting reviews andand listening to the feedback,
right. Like people are like, oh, I got
this one star review and it's like, well, yeah, did you screw
(09:22):
up? Yeah.
Well, can you rectify it so it doesn't happen in the future?
Sure. You know, one of the businesses
I first looked at in December 2016 was constantly getting
negative reviews for poor service, whole food, watery
drinks and, and the business, instead of rectifying those
issues, kept saying, oh, we're so sorry, we missed the mark,
(09:44):
please give us another chance, blah, blah, blah.
But then all they did was buy fake reviews.
Well, they're now out of business, right?
Because they didn't listen to their customer feedback and
didn't work on any of their areas that needed to be
improved. So it's like, you know, that's
the important part for for reviews for, for businesses.
And that's where I first, you know, dug into reviews for our
(10:05):
franchises and I was like, OK, here's our five pain points,
right? Horrible cancellation policy
route staff not open when they say when poor service, right?
And so it's like, and I was like, OK, well, here's the,
here's the franchises that are in, in the most negative
reviews, right? If we can get corporate to
address this, then they're goingto do, then they're going to do
(10:28):
better. And a lot of times it was the
people are always coming and complaining.
It was, hey, our call volume is down, our leads are down.
It's like, yeah, look at your negative reviews, like you're
pushing people away. Yeah, 100%.
And then what about, So we're talking about mainly the spam
reviews, but what about like youwere getting into the legitimate
one star reviews, like your company actually did a bad job.
(10:49):
Is it worth rectifying those? And if so, how?
How can you do that? Yeah, so I always tell people to
come at it robotic, right? Just be like, hey, you know
what, We're so sorry we messed up.
You know, please contact us so we can try to rectify this,
right? Because the one thing you want
to do is you want to bring that,bring them offline, right?
You don't want to, you know, stay there.
(11:10):
And by doing that, you're also showing potential clients and
customers that you're actually engaging with your reviews.
They show that you have a human side to you.
And here's the thing, another myth with that comes to online
reviews is people think that youhave to have a, you have to have
a perfect five star rating and one negative review is going to
knock you down. It's not.
If you respond to that review inan irate way, then it's going to
(11:33):
do more damage than just that one star review.
And people know that businesses aren't perfect.
And it could just be an off day.It could just be a customer who
may have been in a sour mood. You know, you never really know
what's going on, but you want tomake sure that you come off as
genuine, you know, and bright locals review factor study shows
(11:55):
that people want to see businesses engaging with the
reviews, right? You know, think about like this.
If somebody goes out of their way to, to, to thank you, are
you, are you going to say, are you not going to say you're
welcome? It's the same way with reviews,
right? And so, you know, it's always,
it always blows my mind when I come across these and I look at
so many Google business profileswhere they don't, they don't
(12:17):
reply to all the reviews or any of the reviews.
I'm just like, you're leaving money on the table.
It's like, why are you not doingthat, you know?
Yeah. No, you're so right with the.
Where was I at with that? OK.
Anyway, so we'll go through withwhat you're saying of the review
replies. Can you talk more about why
those are so important of why? Like is it more for conversion
(12:38):
because you're saying it's not for ranking?
Conversion, correct. It's for, it's for conversion.
So if somebody's going to be looking at business A, comparing
them to do with business being in business C and business A may
have more reviews and a higher rating, but a business C is like
a 4.7, but they're upon all the reviews and they seem genuine,
(13:00):
then which business are you going to go with?
The one with more reviews and the higher rating or the one
that's actually responding to their to the reviews, you know,
and and Aaron Wiki, who was the Co founder of what was then get
5 stars and then rebranded to gather up and then gotten sold
to to another company. But he actually found data that
(13:22):
shows that you get a higher click through rate with a 4.6
rating than you would do with a 4.7 or five point O.
Interesting, Okay, yeah, no, I've heard that a lot in the
local SEO space. Yeah, I have a friend who's
like, Oh my God, I got 1 five star.
My business is ruined. It's like, dude, you're still at
a 4.8, you're totally fine. And the other thing I was gonna
bring up, I keep seeing this meme come up on my Twitter feed
(13:46):
and it's essentially two products on Amazon, one that has
like 50,000 reviews and it has a4.5 and the other has like 20
reviews and it's a 5. And it's essentially everyone
wants to pick the one with tons of reviews, but yet they're not
a perfect rating. Because you understand, like you
said, not everyone's going to beperfect.
(14:07):
You're not, you know, the unboxing might be a little bit
weird and it's the same thing with local businesses.
You're just you're going to havea bad waiter for your restaurant
or you might have a bad tack foryour home service business.
So kind of just accepting that those happen.
But just to kind of go back on that.
Is it worth actually having the person change the review like
(14:27):
having them change it from A1 toa five star?
Or should you just let that be? Well, I mean, you can.
I mean, you can always ask them if they would.
But if they're satisfied, you can ask them to change their
review. But, but you know, here's the
other thing, I mean, people discount reviews or than three
months. So it's not going to have like
this massive shelf life, you know, and I've had somebody like
(14:50):
reach out to me on, on Reddit and he's like, Hey, can you help
remove these reviews? And I was like that reviews from
7 years ago. It's six or five years ago.
It's like nobody's looking at that.
You know, it's like, it's, it's like forgotten because, you
know, we know that businesses can change.
They can change for the worse orfor the better, you know.
And so, you know, it's sometimesit's just like, just chalk it up
(15:11):
as as a loss and just move forward, you know, and, but this
whole mentality that I've got tobe a perfect five star business
and I'm just like, no, it's like, that's not what it's
about. And you work with pest controls.
And so I know a lot of the pain points that they get one is, you
know, for going door to door andsoliciting, right?
And so people leave negative reviews because they're like,
(15:32):
Oh, I had a, you know, no soliciting sign and they didn't
honor that or I told them to go away, but the salesperson was
pushy. It's you know, it's, you know,
and so you know, but if you, butif you take that in the, in the
into account, you're like, OK, hey, tone down a little.
You know, if you see a no solicitation sign, don't knock,
just go, just just leave. You know, or if you know, if
(15:54):
you, if you get a negative review because one of your
drivers was driving aggressivelyand speeding, then you tell
everybody in the company, hey, make sure you're not speeding,
you know, go to the speed limit.You're, you're an ambassador for
our brand when you're out there in public, but keep that in
mind, you know, and, and things will, things will be cool.
But you know, I, I see pest control companies all the time,
(16:15):
same negative review over and over again.
And it's like, guys, come on like this is, this is not, this
is a no brainer. Like this is like stuff you
should learn in like the first grade, right?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
I would say my threshold there for clients or at least what
what we're looking to get is a 4.5 or better.
I I think anything you know, 4.54.64.7, those are all
awesome. But once you're getting like
(16:36):
below 4, if you're like a 3.8 ora 3.6, that is definitely too
low. Like do you have a threshold
there? Does it have to be above 4?
Yeah, I do like to see it above 4 but you know and it but it
depends on the industry like howcompetitive it is.
I was looking at 1 industry the other day and it was in the map
pack was a business that was a 3.8.
And I was like, I rarely see a business with a 3.8 rank into
(17:00):
the map pack. And you know, but yeah, it's
like if you're, if you're below 4, then you're average, right?
Like, you know, something they're passing grade in, in, in
school. So it's like, yeah, you want to
address that and figure out why are you getting such negative
feedback? You know, and you know, like 11
case I was working on where thisguy was, you know, buying fake
(17:23):
reviews. Everybody that left him a
negative review, he came at him as combative and and put all the
blame on on his client. He's like, why?
I told you I shouldn't take on this project.
It wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonnawork out.
Raul blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And it's just like buddy, you'remaking yourself look worse, you
know? And he actually called 1
(17:44):
reviewer a Karen. I was just like, no, no.
Yeah, it's yeah. No customer has to come first.
Yeah, but yeah. And I mean, I man the stuff, the
stuff I see in reviews, There was one that actually got
written up. The restaurant owner replied to
the reviews and told people, I hope you die in a car accident.
(18:07):
Yeah. Yeah, what the owner said that.
Owner said that he was from the UK.
That is insane, I've never heardthat.
Yeah, I'll send you the screenshot cuz it's just, I
mean, it's one of my favorite. But yeah, up on, on Joy's local
search forum, we actually have athread where we would post the
(18:30):
worst owner responses. That's hilarious.
It's some, it's some like reallychoice funny.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe you said that.
You could think that in your head, but you put it to pen.
Yeah. Well, it comes down to your
brand, right? So the things that you are
putting out, the way that you'reinteracting with customers, it's
(18:50):
a great way to show people that are either prospects or existing
customers. This is how we talk to people
that we deal with. So they assume if you say, I
hope you get hit by a car and die or whatever car crash, then
they're going to think that you mean the same for all of your
your newer customers. It's like, hey, wait, I just
became a customer of this company.
You want to, you want me to die?Like I don't think I want to be
(19:13):
a customer anymore. Yeah, yeah, over, over a $20
meal. Oh my God.
It's not worth it. It's not worth it.
I'd like to switch topics a little bit here, switch gears.
I want to cover suspensions. I know this is a huge thing.
Some of companies deal with it. I've had many people come to me
with this problem and a lot of times it's not completely valid,
(19:33):
but you know that each each casevaries.
So let's 1st jump into this. Why do companies get their
Google Business profiles suspended?
What are the most common reasons?
Yeah, so the most common reasonsis they get reported by a
competitor using either suggestion, edit or redressal.
Lately, it's because Google's stupid.
(19:55):
There's no sugar coating it. They cranked up the debt, the
dial on AI and algorithms, and So what we saw in February.
Was a massive amount of suspensions and it's a lot of
legitimate businesses got caughtup in this in this sweep.
The reason for it is the black cat spammers where going hog
(20:20):
wild creating a bunch of fake listings.
So twice Google prevented locksmiths from being reinstated
or creating new listings for like 6 months because they just
went hog wild creating massive amount of fake listings.
Google just sued a, a Israeli guy in Boston, I think Boston or
(20:40):
Massachusetts, I think Massachusetts for and they
suspended 10,000 fraudulent leadgeneration GBPS.
And yeah. And so they're so they're suing
him and everybody that's connected with him.
And so people get upset with Google when they're listening,
get suspended. Well, it's because Google really
can't tell what is a legitimate SAB means hiding your address
(21:04):
and, and what's legitimate. And So what they do is they use
a lot of, they use like a lot ofalgorithms.
So like 1 case people were creating like 30,000 or 40,000
fraudulent lead generation personal injury attorneys all
across the US. So we were seeing it in Chicago,
(21:24):
California, Texas, Florida, New York.
And it was like the most ridiculous names.
So I pitched the story to the Wall Street Journal and they
covered it and the Sunday beforethe article was supposed to come
out, Google did a massive sweep and ended up removing about
40,000 Google business profiles.Some of them were legit, but a
(21:47):
majority of them were fraudulent.
And the reason why I'm saying some of them were legit is
because one of the ranking factors with Google is putting
for your Google business profileis putting your keywords in your
business name in your title, right?
And so a lot of law firms rebranded themselves to be a
personal injury attorney Dallas,right, car accident attorney
(22:08):
Dallas, you know, And so when Google would see like those
types of patterns and oh, you'vegot multiple locations.
So not just one location, but you've got like 8 locations and
you know, in the, in the Dallas area, they got caught up in
that, that sweep. And so that's what we're seeing
a lot more of is Google is really going after these Sabs.
And not only are they going after the Sabs, they've made it
(22:31):
more difficult to actually applyfor reinstatement.
So I would be able to get somebody reinstated like right
away with just a couple of pieces of documentation.
Now they're wanting your business registration, your EIN
number, copy of the leaves city license, if you have it, copy of
insurance, the utility bill under your your company name.
(22:53):
And so they're they're making they're pretty more than onus on
on the business owners and they're rejecting it, you know,
for rinky dinky things. But one of the biggest fails
that I see when it comes to Sabs, it's their business
description, your business description, just say who you
are. But a lot of times people put in
like sales words, you know, we're the best pest control
(23:16):
company, you know, 100% satisfaction guaranteed, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And so when Google sees that
they're like, no, no reject. And you know, or it could be a
case where the SAB moved, well, you're not supposed to move in
SAB. You're supposed to create a new
SAB, contact Google and have them merge the two Sabs together
(23:36):
because because you're always going to, of course, don't have
some rain in the middle of this,because you're always going to
rank at the original address that you were verified at.
Because they ended up taking it that stupid phone because they
ended up taking the address out from the back end.
So there's no way that you can actually go in there and, and
(23:58):
get that and get that updated, right?
So you used to be able to go in there and just update your
address and boom you were good to go.
Once they removed it from the back end for for privacy reasons
it screwed the whole system up. But Google also wasn't ready for
SA. PS when they created Google
Maps. Google Maps is only supposed to
be for brick and mortars addresses you can go to.
And because there was such a push back on the fact that you
(24:21):
couldn't have an SAB, Google ended up changing the policy to
allow for an SAB. OK, got it.
Yeah, No, I I actually didn't know about that story of 40,000
Google business profiles gettingwiped out.
That is insane. That is like huge local SEO
news. Oh, it was, oh, even even
better. The the team behind it actually
(24:41):
spoke with the Wall Street Journal reporter and said, yeah,
we don't care. We're happy doing it.
That is. That is insane kind of leading
after what you were saying of these companies getting
suspended and you have to include more information now.
So let's say someone does get suspended, how can they make
(25:01):
sure that their appeal gets accepted?
Yeah. So like I said, you want to go
through your business profile. I just tell people just remove
your business description just to make sure.
Make sure you set your out, makesure your hours are normal
hours, you know, eight to six, nine to five.
Don't do the 24/7. 24/7 is a guaranteed block on
(25:24):
reinstatement. Really.
Yeah. Yeah, I was, Yeah.
This one guy came to me and I looked at his business profile.
I'm like, OK, you got it set to 24/7.
You got a bad business description and you and your
business name is, is all jacked up.
No wonder why you got, no wonderwhy you got denied, you know,
and then again, you want to haveyour Secretary of State.
Finally, if you're doing ADBA, include your DBA, your EIN,
(25:47):
paperwork, copy of the lease if you're showing your address.
If you're not showing your address, you don't have to worry
about that utility bill under the name of the company.
If you do have a city license orinsurance, include that.
If you're, If you're a lawyer, then you want to include your
State Bar license just as much documentation as you can.
What I tell people to do and what I always do is I create a
(26:09):
drive folder and I upload all the documents to it.
Cuz Google is only gonna let youupload I think four or five
pieces of documentation. But if you have more than you
can include the link and see whyyou think it should be
reinstated. And you're like, all of our
documentation is listed right here.
So that way they can go through each and every single document.
If you have more to sit there and say, yeah, we're good.
(26:31):
And that's the thing I don't getabout Google.
It's like if Google's requiring more documentation, this is how
stupid Google is. They don't think if they're
requiring more pieces of documentation, they only allow
you to upload 4. Hello.
Yeah. Anybody home McFly?
Yeah, no. Pretty stupid, yeah.
And it's kind of funny, you know, people, people argue with
(26:53):
me on Reddit, they think I'm a Google apologist and I'm not.
I, I, that's funny. I, I, I tell like it is.
If there's things that Google does well, then yeah, I'll give
them kudos for it. But the things that they don't
do well and things like we've been harping on them for for
like years, yeah, I'm going to call Google out on it.
I don't, I got no skin in the game.
But if, but if a business owner is like, well, I'm not going to
(27:14):
do the appeal. And then Google can go screw
themselves or I'm not going to do paid ads.
I'm like, dude, you're just hurting yourself.
Like it's not, it's not on me because I'm telling you just the
things you should. Do Yeah, definitely.
So then what what happens? And what, what should people do
if they're rejected or sorry, their appeal gets denied?
So if you you try to submit all your documentation that maybe
(27:35):
someone just does it off the fly, maybe they just do one
piece of document, they get rejected.
What what do you have to do the next time?
How do you make sure that you get that reinstated?
Yeah. So you get, so you get, you get
two tries and then you're able to use the another appeal.
If that doesn't work, you can either hire people like me to do
the reinstatement or you can go directly to the Google Business
(27:56):
forum. But you also want to make sure
that your GBP, you know, is in compliance in all your
documentation. You got all your ducks in a row
because if you go to the forum and it's backed up there, you
know, if APE looks at it and escalates it and says, yeah, no,
you're not in compliance. You know, after they, you know,
they kick it up to Google and Google's like, yeah, no, we're
(28:17):
not reinstating this. Well, you just wasted a bunch of
months, so you want to make sureyou do it right The.
First thing, yeah, 100%. It's something you were
mentioning before, which, you know, I've seen this plenty of
times and this is just a fact that having the keyword in your
business name helps ranking. Do you recommend that people do
that, and if so, how should theygo about it?
Yeah, totally fine to do. But you got to get ADBA, right.
(28:40):
So you either, so either you need to update your Secretary of
State filing or you need to get ADBA.
So that way you can actually, you know, show that you can use
that name, you're allowed to useit.
So you then you got to change your logo.
You got to get that, you got to get that new name added onto
your website because if it's notthere, then you're going to run
(29:00):
into the issues. And Google kind of like screwed
the pooch. They decided that they didn't
want to start enforcing some of their TOS policies.
One was name in the business name, you know, keywords in the
business name. So they allow you to do like up
to three keywords. So say you're like personal
injury attorney in Dallas, then yeah, then you could be, you
know, the Jake Morrison law firmspace hyphen personal
(29:25):
engineering Dallas and Google won't go in and change it.
You know, another policy that they don't enforce as much is
when you're showing your addressand you're not supposed to,
there's like, yeah, I don't care.
It's like, you know, which is kind of like infuriating
because, you know, I had this guy got suspended.
He goes, yeah, show my address. I'm not supposed to, but all my
competitors are doing it and youknow, and so my buddy was like,
(29:51):
is this like if my friends do it, I should be able to do it
too, you know? Yeah, No, I hear a lot of
controversy here. A lot of companies want to add
an address because it helps ranking.
I mean, a lot of, I've talked toa lot of people in the local SEO
space, it's I'd say pretty much confirmed that it helps your
ranking. Is it worth getting?
Is it worth getting a business location?
(30:12):
Like what? What does it make sense to get
one as a service area business? Yeah.
So it's yeah. So this is one of those it
depends. So yeah, I've seen, cuz I've
seen cases, you know, where SA BS have actually ranked really,
really well over businesses withtheir addresses showing right.
And I've looked at that on heat maps and I can do side by side
(30:32):
comparisons with place of scouts.
If they're not ranking well, then trying to add your address
might give you a ranking boost. But a lot of times what what
people do with Sabs is they go and they move that SAB to to a
brick and mortar. They get an office.
(30:53):
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Keep your SAB. Create a new business profile at
the new address, because you're allowed to have an SAB at your
address, at your home address because you're the owner.
Yeah, nobody talks about this. The only reason why, the only
reason why people don't want to do that is because they already
have a whole bunch of reviews ontheir existing GBP.
(31:14):
But it's like, but you could have dual bang for your buck.
And then if you do have two GBPS, you can create a second
set of citations for that new GBP and then you're going to get
a bunch of links pointing back to your website, so.
Interesting. So.
So then you don't sacrifice yourkey.
GBP, Right, right. Exactly.
(31:35):
And so and so now if you're getting, you know, you're
getting a new influx of reviews and you separate that new GBP
out to its own landing page. And that's the thing that people
don't always think about. I'd say probably like 96% of the
time people are linking to theirhomepage.
Well, if your homepage is not properly optimized for your
(31:57):
keyword phrase, then you may be doing more harm than good.
So one thing I would say before deciding to update your
addresses, maybe change the URL that you're linking to from your
GBP. Think of it as think of your,
your URL on GBP like you're setting up a paid ad, right?
You're not. You don't send it to your
homepage. You send it to a page that's
(32:19):
been set as no index because it's going to have a whole
different Click to rate and, andbounce rate, you know, so
that's, so that's what I tell people to do.
It's like, well, if your homepage isn't ranking with your
GBP and especially now with thisnew update that there that
Google's been doing, where if a business shows up in the map
pack, they're not showing up in organically, or if they're, or
(32:41):
if they are showing up organically, then they're not
showing up in the map pack. So you got to change the URL,
you know, to get your, your rankings back, you know, so
there's all sorts of things thatpeople can do, but the things
that people always want to do iswatching you to add my address
and I'm going to be fine. Well, now here's the problem.
Some categories. If you add your address, it's
going to so 4 things happened. One of four things will happen
(33:03):
when you, when you make an update to Google business
profile, it automatically get accepted.
They're going to pending review.You'll have to reverify.
And the 4th 1 is a suspension. Now there's two types of
suspension. There's a soft suspension where
you're still showing up online, but you can't manage the
profile. And there's a hard suspension
where you're completely wiped off of Google.
So I sit there and tell people like, before you make this
(33:25):
change, Are you ready to apply for reinstatement?
And can you afford to be knockedoffline now?
We've seen delays up to six weeks.
Can you be offline for six weekswaiting for the team to go in
and check and, and, and get yourdocuments?
I don't know a lot of businessesthat can survive that.
So that's what I always tell people.
(33:46):
OK, awesome. Talk to me more about the
there's two kinds of suspensions.
I don't think I've heard that actually.
That's the difference. Yeah, so soft suspension means
that Google trusts the business,but not the activity on it.
Hard suspensions, Google's like,we don't think you're legitimate
at all. We don't trust you.
You don't have, you don't have an online footprint, right.
So, you know, cuz like, you know, I get these people, you
(34:08):
know, and they're always complaining about their
suspensions. And then when I run a citation
scan on them, I say all you've set up was Google and Facebook.
Where's Yelp? Where's Yahoo?
Where's Bing? Where's Apple Maps?
Where's all these other directories that you could be
listed on? Like you didn't do anything, you
know, and so and so, so yeah, you're going to get a hard
suspension, you know, but I'm like, if you would have set
(34:29):
these up and you would have gotten registered with the BBB
and got accredited with them, you'd be in a much better
situation. But you basically like Google's
like, well, we don't really know.
And if we don't really trust thethe the profile, we'll knock it
offline. Yeah, Where do citations play
here? I feel like, well, even Darren
Shaw said this. I've gotten it from him that
(34:51):
citations used to be a much bigger ranking factor, but now
is it just more so to not get suspended and just build your
entity or what exact role do they play?
Yeah. So yeah, it's to build your
entity. But here's the thing.
So I was talking with an agency and I was talking, I was talking
about they're, they said to me and they're like, hey, we're not
showing up for our knowledge panel, right.
And the knowledge panel is whereyou got your business listed on
(35:12):
the right hand side. And I said, well, have you set
up citations? He said no.
And I said, well, set up citations.
He's like, oh, I don't believe in citations.
So, so he just, we went back andforth for like several weeks and
he's like, fine, I'm going to goto White Spark and get citations
to get citations set up. Two weeks later he starts
showing up for his knowledge panel for, for his brand name.
(35:34):
And I was like, I'm sorry, what?What was that?
Was that correct? You know, and so and so that's,
that's the, the, the difference with citations.
Now, if you use a platform like Yext, they give you, they give
you 2 places to put your websiteURL right.
One is called a featured message.
(35:57):
So what I do is I go for the keywords in the city that I want
to rank for. And some of those directory
sites, you actually get an anchor link text back to your
website. Wow, OK, I got that one.
I got that one from Blake Denman.
And that's like, and I because also what I, because when I
first set it up, it was like walking chiropractor.
(36:19):
And so we started ranking for a lot of walk in medical terms.
And I'm like, what's going on here?
And I realized when I looked at the, when I looked at her
backlinks, it was because I set it up that way.
So once I switched it to HoustonChiropractor, then all of a
sudden we started ranking for Houston Chiropractor terms.
And there's a, there's a that old saying that you can only
rank in the map pack once. Well, one time I actually got
(36:42):
all three of our chiropractic franchises in the map pack in
Houston. At the same time.
At the same time, I showed that to my boss and he was floored.
I lost this. I lost the screenshot of that.
I wish I had that because it wasand it was.
It was funny to you because likeone of my buddies was
complaining to Joy Hawkins. He's like, man, I hate the
person does the SEO for the joint chiropractic.
(37:04):
And she's like, well, you actually know him?
He's like, what you? And he calls me and he goes, are
you doing the SEO for the joint chiropractor?
And I said yeah. And he goes, I hate you, but I
love you. That's hilarious.
Yeah. You're telling me before the
show that you have a lot of haters and a lot of people,
you're kind of living rent free and a lot of people said why do
people hate you? Yeah, people hate me because I
(37:25):
disrupt the apple cart. So actually got 1.
I actually got one Black Hat spammer.
He's like, he's like, hey, I don't know about you, but I know
that I work for money and I'm trying to, you know, employ
people in a third world country.And it just makes sense if, you
know, if you just leave me aloneand I can, I can, I can, I can
pay you to just, you know, leavemy listings alone.
And I was just like, what? And people and people don't like
(37:47):
me because I, I tell the truth, right?
I don't pull punches. You know, like I said, I, if I
have issues with Google, I'll take issues with Google.
If I take, if I find that somebody's doing out bad SEO
vice, you know, you know, like one of the one of my favorites
is, oh, you need to add new photos to your GBP.
That's going to, that's going toaffect your rankings.
Like, no, it doesn't. We're regurgitating stuff from
(38:08):
2016. And then people are like, well,
you need to have nap consistency.
I'm like, no, you don't. You know, Mike Blumenthal in
2019 says it's dead. Joey Hawkins has said that you
don't need your suite or billingnumber because Google doesn't
use that for, for ranking factors.
You can have a separate telephone number on your GBP,
your website, Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, so you can track
(38:30):
those calls coming in. So Google's not even looking at
the at the phone number. And I've seen cases where
somebody will update their name on GBP and start ranking higher
even though it doesn't match anyother citations.
But I say that and the people are like, oh, you're an idiot.
You know what you're talking about.
I'm like, I really do. And so whenever I say that, then
it's just, it riles people up and I'm just like, you know, one
(38:51):
guy's like, oh, your GBP is not ranking.
You need local links. I'm like local links aren't
going to fix your GBP ranking. It's like, you know, it'll help
with your, it'll help more with your website now, but that won't
do as much with GBP, you know. So the main ranking factor for
GBP is your business name, your primary category, proximity to
the searchers, influx of new reviews and click through rate.
(39:13):
And nobody wants to talk about click through rate unless we're
talking about click through ratemanipulation, which works, but
only works for like two or threemonths and then it stops
working, you know, So you got to, you know, because Google's
like, OK, this is fake block traffic.
You know, we're not we're not buying it, You know, So that's
why I always tell people I'm like, just go white hat.
Forget looking over your shoulder, you know, wondering am
I going to get suspended? Is Google going to catch on to
(39:34):
my new scheme? You know, yeah.
Play by the rules the first time.
No, definitely. I I'd love that.
You take this. Truthful, honest approach and
I'm a white hat myself, so I don't I mean, I've, I've had a
Black Hat or two on the show, but generally I, I'm looking for
white hat people. I, I want to keep it truthful
because Google's, Google's cracking down more and
ultimately like it's, it's way better to win the right way
(39:57):
rather than like, oh, I tricked the system and it worked for
three months, then it got removed.
It's like, why? Why even do it if we end up
getting removed and the and the and the Fascinating.
Thing is, these Black Hat and local Seos cannot answer a basic
question right. Like you and I are talking about
suspensions 1 Black Hat SEO got got asked the question, what
(40:18):
should I do when I got that I got suspended.
He's like, oh, don't think he's going to start over from
scratch. And it's like, you can answer,
you can answer an easy softball question.
I was like, but you can tell people how you know how to
manipulate, you know, your, yourrankings.
And then, but then they always sell like that stupid stuff like
the map stacks and this, then the other, and I'm just like,
(40:39):
oh, stop, just stop, you know? And there's also a lot of
infighting with the black hats too, which I, which I love.
Like there's this one guy, he had a bunch of people come up on
it, come up on a show, started buying their courses and started
reselling their courses as his own.
And so they turned on him. And then the guy kept getting
booted off of Facebook, so he had to keep creating new
(41:01):
profiles. I'm just like, dude, you could
have just played by the rules, man.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous. I, I think there are less and
less black hats as the time goeson, but there's, there's still a
good amount of them. But I want to cover which
actually, I'm glad you already brought up the kind of the top
ranking factor. So I believe you mentioned 5,
but the one I want to hone in onis conversion rate because we,
(41:23):
we kind of talked about the other ones already, but is there
a way to increase your conversion rate on Google
Business profile? Is there a way to do that?
Yeah, so so. Responding to reviews will
increase your will help increaseyour conversion rate having a
great primary photo. So what I always tell people is
(41:44):
these are these are there's two types of photos that Google
loves photos of people. Actually three photos of people,
photos of the exterior and a product shot.
So what I tell people to do is get a get a group photo in front
of the establishment. Everybody's all dressed up,
pristine nice shirts or the company polo or whatever, and
(42:05):
have everybody have everybody take a photo standing in front
of the building that's going to that's going to sell more than
just some random photo, you know.
And so, and so that, that will help with conversions.
Don't harp on on uploading all these photos.
If you, if you're in an industrywhere you can get people to
upload photos, then do it. You know, like I talked to real
(42:29):
estate agents and I'm like, oh, it's so hard for me to get
reviews. And I'm like, you want to, you
want my easy tip right now? So you're a real, you're so
you're a realtor. So what are the two types of
photos that people take the day that the sole sign goes on the
House? So that could be either the
seller or the buyer. And then the day that they get
their, the day they get their keys and they're going in their
(42:50):
house. So you meet them there on the
day that they're going to get their keys because they're going
to take that photo. So they say, Hey, can I take it
for you? Hey, will you upload that photo
to, to, to Google and Yelp for me?
And so, you know, Yelp has that.Don't ask for reviews, but it's
not a violation to ask a customer to upload a photo
because both Google and and Yahoo, I mean Google and Yelp
(43:12):
will ask that consumer if they want to leave a review with that
photo. So now you just got to duel in
because Google loves user generated content.
I actually saw a case study where a company went in and
removed all of the, they over overrode all of the customer
photos of the of their food dishes with their own images
that they took. And the metrics just completely
(43:33):
tanked. And this guy was talking to me
and I'm looking at this and I'm like, he's like, yeah, is this
your Regency did such a horriblejob.
They had, they had more customerphotos than professional photos.
And I was like, dude, are you not looking at the metrics of
how Fuse just tanked and you've got the API access?
And I was just like, I'm like, you know what, not dealing with
it. Like there's just certain people
(43:55):
on this. Like if if you don't know your
craft and you're not looking at data And my, my personal pet
peeve is when they call it Google My Business or, or GB, PG
MB. And I'm like, I'm like, dude,
you're not even current. I'm like, it hasn't been called
that since the, I think 20/21/2019.
Like I'm like, I'm like, no, if you're, if you're going on
device and you're calling it Google My Business.
(44:17):
No, sorry, Charlie. Yeah, no, I I get the the.
Home service owners, whatever that are calling it, it but
like, come on, it's it's been like 5 years.
I I think it's ready to change. Yeah.
I mean, you're if you're in the,if you're in the.
Industry and you're and you're still using the wrong name you
know like like yeah you don't really know your craft at all
Yeah definitely I've got. Two more questions for you.
(44:39):
This one relates actually to what you were saying.
And you were mentioning, you know, photos on Yelp and other
platforms, maybe Facebook. What about reviews on these
platforms? Do those help GBP ranking?
I've heard mixed opinions on this.
So they don't. Impact GBP rankings on Google,
however, there is strong data toshow that it help with rankings
(45:03):
with ChatGPT Really. Yeah, Darren.
Shaw just came out with. Came out with a screenshot from
a couple days ago and it was andit was some of the obscure, you
know, review platforms, but Google seems to be favoring it.
You know, they used to because they used to have from the web
(45:24):
where they would pull in review,they would pull in reviews from
other platforms. It'd be like, oh, here's here's
a review from Angie's List, here's a review from Judy's book
or, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, these obscure ones
that people don't go to anymore or think about.
But Google does like that third party data, you know, so, you
know, so they're not using it now on, on, on local or map
(45:46):
packs, but in ChatGPT, it does seem to be making a, a
difference. But I think people put too much,
too much of their eggs in one basket.
So just just reviews on Google. It's like, well, you forget Yelp
feeds to I think Yahoo or Bing, I can't remember which one.
And they also feed reviews into Apple Maps.
So it's like, so if you're ignoring Yelp because you're
(46:07):
like, oh, I don't like them, They're they're evil.
And I'm like, every company is evil in some way, shape or form,
right? Like you got sales guys are
trying to make a buck. OK, you know, and so you know so
but you don't want to cut off your nose to spite your face.
So you do need to, you know, getan influx of reviews across
multiple platforms to to even have a shot.
(46:29):
Interesting. OK.
So they definitely matter not. As much as Google reviews, but
you should still be collecting those as well.
Awesome. And last question I have for
you, Jason, kind of a general one, but overall, what advice
would you give to maybe local SEOS or local business owners?
What do they need to know in thefuture?
What? What call of action do you have
for them? Yeah.
So I think the best thing that people can do is go to the right
(46:52):
forums, right? You know, figure out who the,
who the leaders are in local SEO, right?
So follow Joy Hawkins, follow Darren Shaw, follow me, you
know, 'cause we're the ones thatare putting out the content
that's really truly important and not the, the fluff stuff,
you know, it's so, you know, I'monline everywhere.
I'm in so many different Facebook groups and I'm in
(47:15):
several subreddits, help out on local search forum, you know, So
anywhere that somebody's asking questions about local, then I'll
go there and post, you know, andI think that's the other thing
is don't be afraid to ask questions, you know, especially
business owners, business owners, there's no stupid
question you can ask. Some SE OS can ask some pretty
(47:38):
stupid questions. I I actually had one, she asked
me three times if we could get AGBP verified when they were
showing their address and there was no signage.
And I was like, you have 19 years experience in the
industry, same as me, and you'reasking me this question.
I was like, there are dumb questions, yeah, you know, but I
(48:00):
think, but it's just, you know, it's just, you know, keep
reading, you know, Barry Schwartz puts out a bunch of
good content on SEO Roundtable. Search Engine line has some good
stuff. Search engine journals, OK,
occasionally they'll let stuff slip in.
You know, I've had it, I've emailed them because somebody
rewrote the same Article 3 timesand all three times it was
(48:22):
incentivized for reviews. Well, you can't do that, you
know. So you know, it's just, you
know, it's, if it's your business, it's your baby and you
want to see it grow. If you're, if you're an agency,
you know, and you see, you see me online somewhere, don't be
afraid to hit me up and ask me aquestion.
You know, if you see me on LinkedIn or, you know, blue sky
or Reddit, you know, I actually had somebody, you know, ping me.
(48:44):
He's like, hey, Jason, you're, you're really good at this one.
Do you mind answering this question?
I'm like, sure, dude, this, thisis because thank you so much.
I'm like, hey, happy to help. You know, that's what that's The
thing is I have a bad reputationof just, you know, being this
mean cuss, but I, I genuinely care and I give solid advice
because I want to see people succeed and not fall into these,
(49:05):
you know, SEO, you know, Black Hat courses.
You're like, oh, I want to, you know, increase my rankings and
blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm like, these
courses are snake oil. They're not going to give you a,
a leg up or an advantage. So definitely no, at least from
what I've. Seen on this podcast, you're a
super nice guy, super humble, but yet super experience.
(49:27):
I mean, you've been in it for a while.
And I even learned several things in this podcast.
I feel like I know a ton in local SEO, but you taught me
some things in this show. And the people you recommended
again, Darren, Joy, Barry, all those people are great.
I I vouch for all of them as well, including yourself.
So yeah, cool, awesome. So we can wrap up the show here.
So where can people find you, learn more about you and your
(49:48):
services? Yeah.
So you can either go to review. Fraud or just do a Google search
for Kaiser Holiday because that's my handle.
KEYSERHOLIDAY back in the day, Matt Kutz was always like build
a brand, build a brand. So I built out the Kaiser
Holiday brand. I took 2 characters from 2
movies. It's Kaiser Sosay from usual
(50:09):
suspects and it's Doc Holiday with the 1L missing.
And so I put them together and so then all of a sudden I was
like, wait a minute, my this is my brand.
You know, as I started becoming the unofficial sheriff of
Google. It's like Kaiser cuz I'm an
enigma and Holiday cuz I'm a gunslinger and Google review.
It's like the wild, Wild West. And so it's just like, yeah, you
know, it's just, you know, embrace it.
(50:30):
And so yeah, you can always findme on on Facebook, LinkedIn,
Reddit, blue sky. Just search Kaiser holiday and
it'll come up awesome. Cool.
So all those links will be in the.
Description and anything else you'd like to plug or mention?
Yeah, No, I don't. Have anything to really plug if
you ever do need advice, you know, with suspensions or review
(50:52):
removals or your competitors being super spammy, hit me up.
I love I love diving into that Ido a lot of big case
escalations. I'm working on what I've been
working on since December of 2023 and it's a super shady pest
control company really. Yeah, they actually got
investigated by the Michigan attorney General because all
(51:17):
their websites didn't have the actual real company's name.
I got, I got, I got them removedall the way down to three Google
business profiles. And then they started
reinstating and creating more. So I've got a new case in with
Google where we we're going after 48 of the GBPS when, when
(51:37):
they initially had like 83 and it was, it's, it's a, it's a fun
wild case. I'll share the I'll share the
link with you. And I started tracking from May
17th, how many times or actuallyApril 17th, how many times I
would get it removed and it would, and when it would come
back like like 2 days later. And so it's just, it's just wild
(51:59):
that just watch. It's like live removed, live
removed, you know, And so it's just, yeah, it's been, yeah,
it's, it's one of the fun cases I work on.
But I, you know, like every caseI work on is always, is always
fun. I always learn something new
about it, so yeah, that's crazy.No, it's super relevant.
Because it's a pest control case.
But yeah, awesome. It was so great having you on
(52:19):
the show, Jason. Again, I learned a lot.
And yeah, it was good to meet you.
Yeah. Bert, pleasure.
Take care. Thanks, Jason.
All right, bye.
Hey there, and welcome back to Local Marketing Secrets.
I'm your host Danny Lebrand, andtoday I'm with Jason Brown.
If you don't know Jason, he's a former Platinum Google Business
Profile product expert, the founder of Review Fraud and
Bright Locals resident Spam Sheriff who's helped countless
businesses stamp out fake listings and fraudulent reviews.
He's been featured on Bright Local, CNBC and even NBC's Today
(00:22):
Show for exposing the dark side of local search.
And he even helped the FTC crafta fake review policy.
Now in this episode, we're diving into his battle tested
tech tactics for cleaning up Google Maps spam, safeguarding
your online reputation and ethically dominating local SEO
so you can outrank sketchy competitors and win more
customers. Now without further ado, Jason,
(00:43):
welcome to the show. Thank.
You for having me, it's a pleasure.
Of course. So I'd like to jump into your
background a little bit more. Tell me how you got into local
SEO, you know, about 20 years ago.
Well yeah it was kind of a fluke.
My now ex-wife and I had bought a condo.
Met our neighbor one Sunday evening.
We chatted for a little bit. He was a web designer and he
needed a project manager. So he said hey I need a project
(01:04):
manager. He was building websites for the
online casino industry. And then Congress came in and
stopped that and said you can't do that anymore because it was
being used for, you know, nefarious money laundering.
So he had a client say, hey, do you know anything about
localist? He always says sure.
And so we started researching itand next thing I know, I ended
(01:27):
up building a career out of it just out of out of fluke.
Wow, that's awesome. And walk me through what's been
going on the past 20 years or so.
So you I've seen you've been involved in many different
companies and the past nine years or so you've been really
focused on reviews. Tell me more about the journey.
Yeah, so I ended up working for like a couple turn and burn
agencies and just just hook themand book them, you know, selling
(01:54):
snake oil over a promising underdelivering in 2016.
I ended up getting hired for that over the top.
And the CEO pulled me aside the first week I was there.
It took me to lunch. He's like, just so you know,
anything we do has to be white hat.
We have to protect our brand at all costs.
And I was like, sure. You know, I'm like, I'm not
(02:15):
going to do anything Black Hat, you know, maybe a little Gray
hat, you know, with like press releases, but nothing, you know,
nothing nefarious because this is a nationwide franchise.
If we nuke their website we we would we would knock out like
360 legitimate franchise locations across the US.
So I was sitting at my desk one day in December and a friend of
(02:37):
mine had tweeted that somebody showed up at her house over a
negative review. So I did a reverse image search.
Found her Yelp profile. No, she only left two reviews. 2
negative reviews. One for a salon, a nail salon,
and the other for plumbing company.
So I looked up the, so the plumbing company had like a 2.1
rating on on Yelp. I look at their Google profile
(02:58):
and they've got a 4.7. I was like, something's not
adding up here. And I know Yelp tends to skew
towards the negative. So I looked into their profile
and I started seeing a lot of the same businesses in multiples
in different states all being reviewed.
And I was like, ah, it's a review pod.
At that same time, one of our franchisees was trying to boost
his marketing, so he bought 19 fake Google reviews.
(03:19):
And so I ended up working with Mike Blumenthal for like 3 1/2
months to get Google to remove all but one of the fake reviews.
And so because Mike was so helpful, I decided, well, I'm
going to start helping out on the forum.
And then I became a ended up becoming a product expert.
And then so for like the left, since June of 2016, it's been
(03:39):
nothing but either local or spamfighting for me.
Awesome. Yeah, let's talk about removing
spam reviews. So there's like a whole another
question. I get a lot of clients coming to
me and even even some of my friends that own businesses that
they get a one star review, but it's actually a customer of
theirs and they actually did do a bad job.
But what about those, those one stars that maybe you get
(04:00):
spammed, Maybe it's a competitor.
How do you get rid of those? Yeah.
So what I do is I put together adetailed sheets where it's the
reviewer name, the reviewer link.
And then I start highlighting all the businesses that they've
been reviewing. And what I do is I show them,
hey, these eight people all leftreviews for these same 7
(04:21):
businesses and the one that got attacked.
And then I say, well, here's thehere's like 15 others that
reviewed 6 of the same businesses.
And so I just basically just highlight and show Google, look,
this is not a real profile, you know, cuz they're, you know,
going all over the United Statesliving reviews in Canada,
they're living reviews in. And it's just like, so I put
together a real well documented sheet and then I turn it into
(04:44):
Google and then let Google go and do the investigations.
And then they what they've been doing now, instead of just
removing the reviews, they're actually nuking the account so
that they can't log back in and leave more reviews.
Nuking the Google account as in they can't log in at all or they
just can't delete it? They.
Completely delete it. Wow.
Yeah. OK.
So that's something that's pretty recent.
(05:07):
Yeah, this is within like the last couple of years because
before what they would do, whichwas ridiculous, and I looked at
some of the review profiles thatI gone to the Today show with
and Google would go in and wipe out all the reviews.
But then the the the fake reviewsellers would go in and log in
and keep posting review, postingnew reviews.
(05:27):
And I was like, you know, so just became a game of whack A
mole. Then all of a sudden Google was
like, all right, you know what, now we're going to start
disabling the account. So that's that's been a real
bonus of late. Huh, so something I've heard
from it was someone else in the little classio space.
I forget who, but someone told me that like in some foreign
countries, I don't know, it might be Vietnam or something,
(05:49):
they have like sweatshops of like just tons of phones and to
leave reviews. Is that true and is that what
goes on? Yeah, I, yeah, it's, it's in
India and Indonesia is where they're OK, where they're doing
it the most. And yeah, it's just, you know,
it's just a call center, you know, sweatshop where they've
got tons of people just, you know, here's your script here,
(06:10):
here, here's the reviews to, youknow, to, to leave.
You know, they give them like, you know, like 150, you know,
they wanted to leave for like 1 client.
And they do such a poor job sometimes, like don't sometimes
they'll leave the quotation marks in or they'll leave like
the name of the business that's supposed to go to.
And you're just like, you're like, oh, Yep.
To me, wasn't paying attention. So he was moving too fast.
But yeah, that's what that's what they they do.
(06:31):
Yeah. There's a lot of Black Hat
tactics. There's API in, in Southern
California. He's got his workers overseas
clicking on LS as and submitting, submitting requests
for, you know, for for a lawyer because he knows that one of the
ranking factors for LSA is how responsive you are to those
(06:54):
leads coming in. So if he does it in the middle
of the night when the lawyers are sleeping, it tanks through
LSA after six months. Plus he does a lot of click
fraud with PPC. He does fake reviews for his
location. He's done fake negative reviews
for his competitors and Google won't do anything about it.
It's just it's, it's insane. Is there any way to combat that?
Do you see that getting fixed inthe future?
(07:15):
Yeah. So the nice thing is, is Google
started turn created this ability to turn off reviews for
certain businesses. So what I saw in December of
2023 was several law firms lost.Not only did they lose reviews,
they lost the ability to get newreviews for six months.
Now here's the beauty. One of the ranking factors with
(07:36):
there's two ranking factors withreviews.
The 1st is when you get to 10 reviews and the next one is
review Regency. So these businesses not being
able to get reviews for five or six months tank their whole
online rankings. Like if you look at if you look
at a heat map, they went from ones and threes down to
eighteens and 20s. Like they just got decimated.
(07:57):
And they had and these and thesewere a law firms with multiple
locations. So it wasn't just one location.
So it was really, it was really nice to actually see a business
actually get penalized once for having fake reviews.
Yeah, definitely. So kind of playing off what you
were saying, how important are reviews regarding ranking?
Like I've heard some people say 50% or that's, you know, you do
(08:18):
a little bit of setup optimization.
That's pretty much the only recurring work.
Like how exactly important are they to rank your Google
Business profile? Oh, it's, it's become, it's
become bigger in the last few months.
It's, it's, it's always been somewhat of a ranking factor,
but I think Google's cranked up the dial for review recency.
And that's according to what Darren Shaw is seeing.
(08:38):
Joey Hawkins was the first one to talk about review recency and
do a case study on it. She was working with a business
that wasn't really ranking well.And they went months without
asking for reviews. And all sudden they started
asking for reviews and they started, they started popping up
in the ranking. So I think it, I think it's
becoming a, a, a, a huge part. But the problem is, is like
(08:59):
people think, oh, you need to put your, you need to have your
clients, you know, put keywords in your reviews.
Well, that doesn't impact ranking.
Then they say you need to respond to your reviews with
your keywords in it. That doesn't impact rankings.
So it's just getting reviews andand listening to the feedback,
right. Like people are like, oh, I got
this one star review and it's like, well, yeah, did you screw
(09:22):
up? Yeah.
Well, can you rectify it so it doesn't happen in the future?
Sure. You know, one of the businesses
I first looked at in December 2016 was constantly getting
negative reviews for poor service, whole food, watery
drinks and, and the business, instead of rectifying those
issues, kept saying, oh, we're so sorry, we missed the mark,
(09:44):
please give us another chance, blah, blah, blah.
But then all they did was buy fake reviews.
Well, they're now out of business, right?
Because they didn't listen to their customer feedback and
didn't work on any of their areas that needed to be
improved. So it's like, you know, that's
the important part for for reviews for, for businesses.
And that's where I first, you know, dug into reviews for our
(10:05):
franchises and I was like, OK, here's our five pain points,
right? Horrible cancellation policy
route staff not open when they say when poor service, right?
And so it's like, and I was like, OK, well, here's the,
here's the franchises that are in, in the most negative
reviews, right? If we can get corporate to
address this, then they're goingto do, then they're going to do
(10:28):
better. And a lot of times it was the
people are always coming and complaining.
It was, hey, our call volume is down, our leads are down.
It's like, yeah, look at your negative reviews, like you're
pushing people away. Yeah, 100%.
And then what about, So we're talking about mainly the spam
reviews, but what about like youwere getting into the legitimate
one star reviews, like your company actually did a bad job.
(10:49):
Is it worth rectifying those? And if so, how?
How can you do that? Yeah, so I always tell people to
come at it robotic, right? Just be like, hey, you know
what, We're so sorry we messed up.
You know, please contact us so we can try to rectify this,
right? Because the one thing you want
to do is you want to bring that,bring them offline, right?
You don't want to, you know, stay there.
(11:10):
And by doing that, you're also showing potential clients and
customers that you're actually engaging with your reviews.
They show that you have a human side to you.
And here's the thing, another myth with that comes to online
reviews is people think that youhave to have a, you have to have
a perfect five star rating and one negative review is going to
knock you down. It's not.
If you respond to that review inan irate way, then it's going to
(11:33):
do more damage than just that one star review.
And people know that businesses aren't perfect.
And it could just be an off day.It could just be a customer who
may have been in a sour mood. You know, you never really know
what's going on, but you want tomake sure that you come off as
genuine, you know, and bright locals review factor study shows
(11:55):
that people want to see businesses engaging with the
reviews, right? You know, think about like this.
If somebody goes out of their way to, to, to thank you, are
you, are you going to say, are you not going to say you're
welcome? It's the same way with reviews,
right? And so, you know, it's always,
it always blows my mind when I come across these and I look at
so many Google business profileswhere they don't, they don't
(12:17):
reply to all the reviews or any of the reviews.
I'm just like, you're leaving money on the table.
It's like, why are you not doingthat, you know?
Yeah. No, you're so right with the.
Where was I at with that? OK.
Anyway, so we'll go through withwhat you're saying of the review
replies. Can you talk more about why
those are so important of why? Like is it more for conversion
(12:38):
because you're saying it's not for ranking?
Conversion, correct. It's for, it's for conversion.
So if somebody's going to be looking at business A, comparing
them to do with business being in business C and business A may
have more reviews and a higher rating, but a business C is like
a 4.7, but they're upon all the reviews and they seem genuine,
(13:00):
then which business are you going to go with?
The one with more reviews and the higher rating or the one
that's actually responding to their to the reviews, you know,
and and Aaron Wiki, who was the Co founder of what was then get
5 stars and then rebranded to gather up and then gotten sold
to to another company. But he actually found data that
(13:22):
shows that you get a higher click through rate with a 4.6
rating than you would do with a 4.7 or five point O.
Interesting, Okay, yeah, no, I've heard that a lot in the
local SEO space. Yeah, I have a friend who's
like, Oh my God, I got 1 five star.
My business is ruined. It's like, dude, you're still at
a 4.8, you're totally fine. And the other thing I was gonna
bring up, I keep seeing this meme come up on my Twitter feed
(13:46):
and it's essentially two products on Amazon, one that has
like 50,000 reviews and it has a4.5 and the other has like 20
reviews and it's a 5. And it's essentially everyone
wants to pick the one with tons of reviews, but yet they're not
a perfect rating. Because you understand, like you
said, not everyone's going to beperfect.
(14:07):
You're not, you know, the unboxing might be a little bit
weird and it's the same thing with local businesses.
You're just you're going to havea bad waiter for your restaurant
or you might have a bad tack foryour home service business.
So kind of just accepting that those happen.
But just to kind of go back on that.
Is it worth actually having the person change the review like
(14:27):
having them change it from A1 toa five star?
Or should you just let that be? Well, I mean, you can.
I mean, you can always ask them if they would.
But if they're satisfied, you can ask them to change their
review. But, but you know, here's the
other thing, I mean, people discount reviews or than three
months. So it's not going to have like
this massive shelf life, you know, and I've had somebody like
(14:50):
reach out to me on, on Reddit and he's like, Hey, can you help
remove these reviews? And I was like that reviews from
7 years ago. It's six or five years ago.
It's like nobody's looking at that.
You know, it's like, it's, it's like forgotten because, you
know, we know that businesses can change.
They can change for the worse orfor the better, you know.
And so, you know, it's sometimesit's just like, just chalk it up
(15:11):
as as a loss and just move forward, you know, and, but this
whole mentality that I've got tobe a perfect five star business
and I'm just like, no, it's like, that's not what it's
about. And you work with pest controls.
And so I know a lot of the pain points that they get one is, you
know, for going door to door andsoliciting, right?
And so people leave negative reviews because they're like,
(15:32):
Oh, I had a, you know, no soliciting sign and they didn't
honor that or I told them to go away, but the salesperson was
pushy. It's you know, it's, you know,
and so you know, but if you, butif you take that in the, in the
into account, you're like, OK, hey, tone down a little.
You know, if you see a no solicitation sign, don't knock,
just go, just just leave. You know, or if you know, if
(15:54):
you, if you get a negative review because one of your
drivers was driving aggressivelyand speeding, then you tell
everybody in the company, hey, make sure you're not speeding,
you know, go to the speed limit.You're, you're an ambassador for
our brand when you're out there in public, but keep that in
mind, you know, and, and things will, things will be cool.
But you know, I, I see pest control companies all the time,
(16:15):
same negative review over and over again.
And it's like, guys, come on like this is, this is not, this
is a no brainer. Like this is like stuff you
should learn in like the first grade, right?
Yeah, definitely. Yeah.
I would say my threshold there for clients or at least what
what we're looking to get is a 4.5 or better.
I I think anything you know, 4.54.64.7, those are all
awesome. But once you're getting like
(16:36):
below 4, if you're like a 3.8 ora 3.6, that is definitely too
low. Like do you have a threshold
there? Does it have to be above 4?
Yeah, I do like to see it above 4 but you know and it but it
depends on the industry like howcompetitive it is.
I was looking at 1 industry the other day and it was in the map
pack was a business that was a 3.8.
And I was like, I rarely see a business with a 3.8 rank into
(17:00):
the map pack. And you know, but yeah, it's
like if you're, if you're below 4, then you're average, right?
Like, you know, something they're passing grade in, in, in
school. So it's like, yeah, you want to
address that and figure out why are you getting such negative
feedback? You know, and you know, like 11
case I was working on where thisguy was, you know, buying fake
(17:23):
reviews. Everybody that left him a
negative review, he came at him as combative and and put all the
blame on on his client. He's like, why?
I told you I shouldn't take on this project.
It wasn't gonna, it wasn't gonnawork out.
Raul blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
And it's just like buddy, you'remaking yourself look worse, you
know? And he actually called 1
(17:44):
reviewer a Karen. I was just like, no, no.
Yeah, it's yeah. No customer has to come first.
Yeah, but yeah. And I mean, I man the stuff, the
stuff I see in reviews, There was one that actually got
written up. The restaurant owner replied to
the reviews and told people, I hope you die in a car accident.
(18:07):
Yeah. Yeah, what the owner said that.
Owner said that he was from the UK.
That is insane, I've never heardthat.
Yeah, I'll send you the screenshot cuz it's just, I
mean, it's one of my favorite. But yeah, up on, on Joy's local
search forum, we actually have athread where we would post the
(18:30):
worst owner responses. That's hilarious.
It's some, it's some like reallychoice funny.
Oh my gosh, I can't believe you said that.
You could think that in your head, but you put it to pen.
Yeah. Well, it comes down to your
brand, right? So the things that you are
putting out, the way that you'reinteracting with customers, it's
(18:50):
a great way to show people that are either prospects or existing
customers. This is how we talk to people
that we deal with. So they assume if you say, I
hope you get hit by a car and die or whatever car crash, then
they're going to think that you mean the same for all of your
your newer customers. It's like, hey, wait, I just
became a customer of this company.
You want to, you want me to die?Like I don't think I want to be
(19:13):
a customer anymore. Yeah, yeah, over, over a $20
meal. Oh my God.
It's not worth it. It's not worth it.
I'd like to switch topics a little bit here, switch gears.
I want to cover suspensions. I know this is a huge thing.
Some of companies deal with it. I've had many people come to me
with this problem and a lot of times it's not completely valid,
(19:33):
but you know that each each casevaries.
So let's 1st jump into this. Why do companies get their
Google Business profiles suspended?
What are the most common reasons?
Yeah, so the most common reasonsis they get reported by a
competitor using either suggestion, edit or redressal.
Lately, it's because Google's stupid.
(19:55):
There's no sugar coating it. They cranked up the debt, the
dial on AI and algorithms, and So what we saw in February.
Was a massive amount of suspensions and it's a lot of
legitimate businesses got caughtup in this in this sweep.
The reason for it is the black cat spammers where going hog
(20:20):
wild creating a bunch of fake listings.
So twice Google prevented locksmiths from being reinstated
or creating new listings for like 6 months because they just
went hog wild creating massive amount of fake listings.
Google just sued a, a Israeli guy in Boston, I think Boston or
(20:40):
Massachusetts, I think Massachusetts for and they
suspended 10,000 fraudulent leadgeneration GBPS.
And yeah. And so they're so they're suing
him and everybody that's connected with him.
And so people get upset with Google when they're listening,
get suspended. Well, it's because Google really
can't tell what is a legitimate SAB means hiding your address
(21:04):
and, and what's legitimate. And So what they do is they use
a lot of, they use like a lot ofalgorithms.
So like 1 case people were creating like 30,000 or 40,000
fraudulent lead generation personal injury attorneys all
across the US. So we were seeing it in Chicago,
(21:24):
California, Texas, Florida, New York.
And it was like the most ridiculous names.
So I pitched the story to the Wall Street Journal and they
covered it and the Sunday beforethe article was supposed to come
out, Google did a massive sweep and ended up removing about
40,000 Google business profiles.Some of them were legit, but a
(21:47):
majority of them were fraudulent.
And the reason why I'm saying some of them were legit is
because one of the ranking factors with Google is putting
for your Google business profileis putting your keywords in your
business name in your title, right?
And so a lot of law firms rebranded themselves to be a
personal injury attorney Dallas,right, car accident attorney
(22:08):
Dallas, you know, And so when Google would see like those
types of patterns and oh, you'vegot multiple locations.
So not just one location, but you've got like 8 locations and
you know, in the, in the Dallas area, they got caught up in
that, that sweep. And so that's what we're seeing
a lot more of is Google is really going after these Sabs.
And not only are they going after the Sabs, they've made it
(22:31):
more difficult to actually applyfor reinstatement.
So I would be able to get somebody reinstated like right
away with just a couple of pieces of documentation.
Now they're wanting your business registration, your EIN
number, copy of the leaves city license, if you have it, copy of
insurance, the utility bill under your your company name.
(22:53):
And so they're they're making they're pretty more than onus on
on the business owners and they're rejecting it, you know,
for rinky dinky things. But one of the biggest fails
that I see when it comes to Sabs, it's their business
description, your business description, just say who you
are. But a lot of times people put in
like sales words, you know, we're the best pest control
(23:16):
company, you know, 100% satisfaction guaranteed, blah,
blah, blah, blah. And so when Google sees that
they're like, no, no reject. And you know, or it could be a
case where the SAB moved, well, you're not supposed to move in
SAB. You're supposed to create a new
SAB, contact Google and have them merge the two Sabs together
(23:36):
because because you're always going to, of course, don't have
some rain in the middle of this,because you're always going to
rank at the original address that you were verified at.
Because they ended up taking it that stupid phone because they
ended up taking the address out from the back end.
So there's no way that you can actually go in there and, and
(23:58):
get that and get that updated, right?
So you used to be able to go in there and just update your
address and boom you were good to go.
Once they removed it from the back end for for privacy reasons
it screwed the whole system up. But Google also wasn't ready for
SA. PS when they created Google
Maps. Google Maps is only supposed to
be for brick and mortars addresses you can go to.
And because there was such a push back on the fact that you
(24:21):
couldn't have an SAB, Google ended up changing the policy to
allow for an SAB. OK, got it.
Yeah, No, I I actually didn't know about that story of 40,000
Google business profiles gettingwiped out.
That is insane. That is like huge local SEO
news. Oh, it was, oh, even even
better. The the team behind it actually
(24:41):
spoke with the Wall Street Journal reporter and said, yeah,
we don't care. We're happy doing it.
That is. That is insane kind of leading
after what you were saying of these companies getting
suspended and you have to include more information now.
So let's say someone does get suspended, how can they make
(25:01):
sure that their appeal gets accepted?
Yeah. So like I said, you want to go
through your business profile. I just tell people just remove
your business description just to make sure.
Make sure you set your out, makesure your hours are normal
hours, you know, eight to six, nine to five.
Don't do the 24/7. 24/7 is a guaranteed block on
(25:24):
reinstatement. Really.
Yeah. Yeah, I was, Yeah.
This one guy came to me and I looked at his business profile.
I'm like, OK, you got it set to 24/7.
You got a bad business description and you and your
business name is, is all jacked up.
No wonder why you got, no wonderwhy you got denied, you know,
and then again, you want to haveyour Secretary of State.
Finally, if you're doing ADBA, include your DBA, your EIN,
(25:47):
paperwork, copy of the lease if you're showing your address.
If you're not showing your address, you don't have to worry
about that utility bill under the name of the company.
If you do have a city license orinsurance, include that.
If you're, If you're a lawyer, then you want to include your
State Bar license just as much documentation as you can.
What I tell people to do and what I always do is I create a
(26:09):
drive folder and I upload all the documents to it.
Cuz Google is only gonna let youupload I think four or five
pieces of documentation. But if you have more than you
can include the link and see whyyou think it should be
reinstated. And you're like, all of our
documentation is listed right here.
So that way they can go through each and every single document.
If you have more to sit there and say, yeah, we're good.
(26:31):
And that's the thing I don't getabout Google.
It's like if Google's requiring more documentation, this is how
stupid Google is. They don't think if they're
requiring more pieces of documentation, they only allow
you to upload 4. Hello.
Yeah. Anybody home McFly?
Yeah, no. Pretty stupid, yeah.
And it's kind of funny, you know, people, people argue with
(26:53):
me on Reddit, they think I'm a Google apologist and I'm not.
I, I, that's funny. I, I, I tell like it is.
If there's things that Google does well, then yeah, I'll give
them kudos for it. But the things that they don't
do well and things like we've been harping on them for for
like years, yeah, I'm going to call Google out on it.
I don't, I got no skin in the game.
But if, but if a business owner is like, well, I'm not going to
(27:14):
do the appeal. And then Google can go screw
themselves or I'm not going to do paid ads.
I'm like, dude, you're just hurting yourself.
Like it's not, it's not on me because I'm telling you just the
things you should. Do Yeah, definitely.
So then what what happens? And what, what should people do
if they're rejected or sorry, their appeal gets denied?
So if you you try to submit all your documentation that maybe
(27:35):
someone just does it off the fly, maybe they just do one
piece of document, they get rejected.
What what do you have to do the next time?
How do you make sure that you get that reinstated?
Yeah. So you get, so you get, you get
two tries and then you're able to use the another appeal.
If that doesn't work, you can either hire people like me to do
the reinstatement or you can go directly to the Google Business
(27:56):
forum. But you also want to make sure
that your GBP, you know, is in compliance in all your
documentation. You got all your ducks in a row
because if you go to the forum and it's backed up there, you
know, if APE looks at it and escalates it and says, yeah, no,
you're not in compliance. You know, after they, you know,
they kick it up to Google and Google's like, yeah, no, we're
(28:17):
not reinstating this. Well, you just wasted a bunch of
months, so you want to make sureyou do it right The.
First thing, yeah, 100%. It's something you were
mentioning before, which, you know, I've seen this plenty of
times and this is just a fact that having the keyword in your
business name helps ranking. Do you recommend that people do
that, and if so, how should theygo about it?
Yeah, totally fine to do. But you got to get ADBA, right.
(28:40):
So you either, so either you need to update your Secretary of
State filing or you need to get ADBA.
So that way you can actually, you know, show that you can use
that name, you're allowed to useit.
So you then you got to change your logo.
You got to get that, you got to get that new name added onto
your website because if it's notthere, then you're going to run
(29:00):
into the issues. And Google kind of like screwed
the pooch. They decided that they didn't
want to start enforcing some of their TOS policies.
One was name in the business name, you know, keywords in the
business name. So they allow you to do like up
to three keywords. So say you're like personal
injury attorney in Dallas, then yeah, then you could be, you
know, the Jake Morrison law firmspace hyphen personal
(29:25):
engineering Dallas and Google won't go in and change it.
You know, another policy that they don't enforce as much is
when you're showing your addressand you're not supposed to,
there's like, yeah, I don't care.
It's like, you know, which is kind of like infuriating
because, you know, I had this guy got suspended.
He goes, yeah, show my address. I'm not supposed to, but all my
competitors are doing it and youknow, and so my buddy was like,
(29:51):
is this like if my friends do it, I should be able to do it
too, you know? Yeah, No, I hear a lot of
controversy here. A lot of companies want to add
an address because it helps ranking.
I mean, a lot of, I've talked toa lot of people in the local SEO
space, it's I'd say pretty much confirmed that it helps your
ranking. Is it worth getting?
Is it worth getting a business location?
(30:12):
Like what? What does it make sense to get
one as a service area business? Yeah.
So it's yeah. So this is one of those it
depends. So yeah, I've seen, cuz I've
seen cases, you know, where SA BS have actually ranked really,
really well over businesses withtheir addresses showing right.
And I've looked at that on heat maps and I can do side by side
(30:32):
comparisons with place of scouts.
If they're not ranking well, then trying to add your address
might give you a ranking boost. But a lot of times what what
people do with Sabs is they go and they move that SAB to to a
brick and mortar. They get an office.
(30:53):
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Keep your SAB. Create a new business profile at
the new address, because you're allowed to have an SAB at your
address, at your home address because you're the owner.
Yeah, nobody talks about this. The only reason why, the only
reason why people don't want to do that is because they already
have a whole bunch of reviews ontheir existing GBP.
(31:14):
But it's like, but you could have dual bang for your buck.
And then if you do have two GBPS, you can create a second
set of citations for that new GBP and then you're going to get
a bunch of links pointing back to your website, so.
Interesting. So.
So then you don't sacrifice yourkey.
GBP, Right, right. Exactly.
(31:35):
And so and so now if you're getting, you know, you're
getting a new influx of reviews and you separate that new GBP
out to its own landing page. And that's the thing that people
don't always think about. I'd say probably like 96% of the
time people are linking to theirhomepage.
Well, if your homepage is not properly optimized for your
(31:57):
keyword phrase, then you may be doing more harm than good.
So one thing I would say before deciding to update your
addresses, maybe change the URL that you're linking to from your
GBP. Think of it as think of your,
your URL on GBP like you're setting up a paid ad, right?
You're not. You don't send it to your
homepage. You send it to a page that's
(32:19):
been set as no index because it's going to have a whole
different Click to rate and, andbounce rate, you know, so
that's, so that's what I tell people to do.
It's like, well, if your homepage isn't ranking with your
GBP and especially now with thisnew update that there that
Google's been doing, where if a business shows up in the map
pack, they're not showing up in organically, or if they're, or
(32:41):
if they are showing up organically, then they're not
showing up in the map pack. So you got to change the URL,
you know, to get your, your rankings back, you know, so
there's all sorts of things thatpeople can do, but the things
that people always want to do iswatching you to add my address
and I'm going to be fine. Well, now here's the problem.
Some categories. If you add your address, it's
going to so 4 things happened. One of four things will happen
(33:03):
when you, when you make an update to Google business
profile, it automatically get accepted.
They're going to pending review.You'll have to reverify.
And the 4th 1 is a suspension. Now there's two types of
suspension. There's a soft suspension where
you're still showing up online, but you can't manage the
profile. And there's a hard suspension
where you're completely wiped off of Google.
So I sit there and tell people like, before you make this
(33:25):
change, Are you ready to apply for reinstatement?
And can you afford to be knockedoffline now?
We've seen delays up to six weeks.
Can you be offline for six weekswaiting for the team to go in
and check and, and, and get yourdocuments?
I don't know a lot of businessesthat can survive that.
So that's what I always tell people.
(33:46):
OK, awesome. Talk to me more about the
there's two kinds of suspensions.
I don't think I've heard that actually.
That's the difference. Yeah, so soft suspension means
that Google trusts the business,but not the activity on it.
Hard suspensions, Google's like,we don't think you're legitimate
at all. We don't trust you.
You don't have, you don't have an online footprint, right.
So, you know, cuz like, you know, I get these people, you
(34:08):
know, and they're always complaining about their
suspensions. And then when I run a citation
scan on them, I say all you've set up was Google and Facebook.
Where's Yelp? Where's Yahoo?
Where's Bing? Where's Apple Maps?
Where's all these other directories that you could be
listed on? Like you didn't do anything, you
know, and so and so, so yeah, you're going to get a hard
suspension, you know, but I'm like, if you would have set
(34:29):
these up and you would have gotten registered with the BBB
and got accredited with them, you'd be in a much better
situation. But you basically like Google's
like, well, we don't really know.
And if we don't really trust thethe the profile, we'll knock it
offline. Yeah, Where do citations play
here? I feel like, well, even Darren
Shaw said this. I've gotten it from him that
(34:51):
citations used to be a much bigger ranking factor, but now
is it just more so to not get suspended and just build your
entity or what exact role do they play?
Yeah. So yeah, it's to build your
entity. But here's the thing.
So I was talking with an agency and I was talking, I was talking
about they're, they said to me and they're like, hey, we're not
showing up for our knowledge panel, right.
And the knowledge panel is whereyou got your business listed on
(35:12):
the right hand side. And I said, well, have you set
up citations? He said no.
And I said, well, set up citations.
He's like, oh, I don't believe in citations.
So, so he just, we went back andforth for like several weeks and
he's like, fine, I'm going to goto White Spark and get citations
to get citations set up. Two weeks later he starts
showing up for his knowledge panel for, for his brand name.
(35:34):
And I was like, I'm sorry, what?What was that?
Was that correct? You know, and so and so that's,
that's the, the, the difference with citations.
Now, if you use a platform like Yext, they give you, they give
you 2 places to put your websiteURL right.
One is called a featured message.
(35:57):
So what I do is I go for the keywords in the city that I want
to rank for. And some of those directory
sites, you actually get an anchor link text back to your
website. Wow, OK, I got that one.
I got that one from Blake Denman.
And that's like, and I because also what I, because when I
first set it up, it was like walking chiropractor.
(36:19):
And so we started ranking for a lot of walk in medical terms.
And I'm like, what's going on here?
And I realized when I looked at the, when I looked at her
backlinks, it was because I set it up that way.
So once I switched it to HoustonChiropractor, then all of a
sudden we started ranking for Houston Chiropractor terms.
And there's a, there's a that old saying that you can only
rank in the map pack once. Well, one time I actually got
(36:42):
all three of our chiropractic franchises in the map pack in
Houston. At the same time.
At the same time, I showed that to my boss and he was floored.
I lost this. I lost the screenshot of that.
I wish I had that because it wasand it was.
It was funny to you because likeone of my buddies was
complaining to Joy Hawkins. He's like, man, I hate the
person does the SEO for the joint chiropractic.
(37:04):
And she's like, well, you actually know him?
He's like, what you? And he calls me and he goes, are
you doing the SEO for the joint chiropractor?
And I said yeah. And he goes, I hate you, but I
love you. That's hilarious.
Yeah. You're telling me before the
show that you have a lot of haters and a lot of people,
you're kind of living rent free and a lot of people said why do
people hate you? Yeah, people hate me because I
(37:25):
disrupt the apple cart. So actually got 1.
I actually got one Black Hat spammer.
He's like, he's like, hey, I don't know about you, but I know
that I work for money and I'm trying to, you know, employ
people in a third world country.And it just makes sense if, you
know, if you just leave me aloneand I can, I can, I can, I can
pay you to just, you know, leavemy listings alone.
And I was just like, what? And people and people don't like
(37:47):
me because I, I tell the truth, right?
I don't pull punches. You know, like I said, I, if I
have issues with Google, I'll take issues with Google.
If I take, if I find that somebody's doing out bad SEO
vice, you know, you know, like one of the one of my favorites
is, oh, you need to add new photos to your GBP.
That's going to, that's going toaffect your rankings.
Like, no, it doesn't. We're regurgitating stuff from
(38:08):
2016. And then people are like, well,
you need to have nap consistency.
I'm like, no, you don't. You know, Mike Blumenthal in
2019 says it's dead. Joey Hawkins has said that you
don't need your suite or billingnumber because Google doesn't
use that for, for ranking factors.
You can have a separate telephone number on your GBP,
your website, Facebook, Yelp, Yahoo, Bing, so you can track
(38:30):
those calls coming in. So Google's not even looking at
the at the phone number. And I've seen cases where
somebody will update their name on GBP and start ranking higher
even though it doesn't match anyother citations.
But I say that and the people are like, oh, you're an idiot.
You know what you're talking about.
I'm like, I really do. And so whenever I say that, then
it's just, it riles people up and I'm just like, you know, one
(38:51):
guy's like, oh, your GBP is not ranking.
You need local links. I'm like local links aren't
going to fix your GBP ranking. It's like, you know, it'll help
with your, it'll help more with your website now, but that won't
do as much with GBP, you know. So the main ranking factor for
GBP is your business name, your primary category, proximity to
the searchers, influx of new reviews and click through rate.
(39:13):
And nobody wants to talk about click through rate unless we're
talking about click through ratemanipulation, which works, but
only works for like two or threemonths and then it stops
working, you know, So you got to, you know, because Google's
like, OK, this is fake block traffic.
You know, we're not we're not buying it, You know, So that's
why I always tell people I'm like, just go white hat.
Forget looking over your shoulder, you know, wondering am
I going to get suspended? Is Google going to catch on to
(39:34):
my new scheme? You know, yeah.
Play by the rules the first time.
No, definitely. I I'd love that.
You take this. Truthful, honest approach and
I'm a white hat myself, so I don't I mean, I've, I've had a
Black Hat or two on the show, but generally I, I'm looking for
white hat people. I, I want to keep it truthful
because Google's, Google's cracking down more and
ultimately like it's, it's way better to win the right way
(39:57):
rather than like, oh, I tricked the system and it worked for
three months, then it got removed.
It's like, why? Why even do it if we end up
getting removed and the and the and the Fascinating.
Thing is, these Black Hat and local Seos cannot answer a basic
question right. Like you and I are talking about
suspensions 1 Black Hat SEO got got asked the question, what
(40:18):
should I do when I got that I got suspended.
He's like, oh, don't think he's going to start over from
scratch. And it's like, you can answer,
you can answer an easy softball question.
I was like, but you can tell people how you know how to
manipulate, you know, your, yourrankings.
And then, but then they always sell like that stupid stuff like
the map stacks and this, then the other, and I'm just like,
(40:39):
oh, stop, just stop, you know? And there's also a lot of
infighting with the black hats too, which I, which I love.
Like there's this one guy, he had a bunch of people come up on
it, come up on a show, started buying their courses and started
reselling their courses as his own.
And so they turned on him. And then the guy kept getting
booted off of Facebook, so he had to keep creating new
(41:01):
profiles. I'm just like, dude, you could
have just played by the rules, man.
Yeah, no, it's ridiculous. I, I think there are less and
less black hats as the time goeson, but there's, there's still a
good amount of them. But I want to cover which
actually, I'm glad you already brought up the kind of the top
ranking factor. So I believe you mentioned 5,
but the one I want to hone in onis conversion rate because we,
(41:23):
we kind of talked about the other ones already, but is there
a way to increase your conversion rate on Google
Business profile? Is there a way to do that?
Yeah, so so. Responding to reviews will
increase your will help increaseyour conversion rate having a
great primary photo. So what I always tell people is
(41:44):
these are these are there's two types of photos that Google
loves photos of people. Actually three photos of people,
photos of the exterior and a product shot.
So what I tell people to do is get a get a group photo in front
of the establishment. Everybody's all dressed up,
pristine nice shirts or the company polo or whatever, and
(42:05):
have everybody have everybody take a photo standing in front
of the building that's going to that's going to sell more than
just some random photo, you know.
And so, and so that, that will help with conversions.
Don't harp on on uploading all these photos.
If you, if you're in an industrywhere you can get people to
upload photos, then do it. You know, like I talked to real
(42:29):
estate agents and I'm like, oh, it's so hard for me to get
reviews. And I'm like, you want to, you
want my easy tip right now? So you're a real, you're so
you're a realtor. So what are the two types of
photos that people take the day that the sole sign goes on the
House? So that could be either the
seller or the buyer. And then the day that they get
their, the day they get their keys and they're going in their
(42:50):
house. So you meet them there on the
day that they're going to get their keys because they're going
to take that photo. So they say, Hey, can I take it
for you? Hey, will you upload that photo
to, to, to Google and Yelp for me?
And so, you know, Yelp has that.Don't ask for reviews, but it's
not a violation to ask a customer to upload a photo
because both Google and and Yahoo, I mean Google and Yelp
(43:12):
will ask that consumer if they want to leave a review with that
photo. So now you just got to duel in
because Google loves user generated content.
I actually saw a case study where a company went in and
removed all of the, they over overrode all of the customer
photos of the of their food dishes with their own images
that they took. And the metrics just completely
(43:33):
tanked. And this guy was talking to me
and I'm looking at this and I'm like, he's like, yeah, is this
your Regency did such a horriblejob.
They had, they had more customerphotos than professional photos.
And I was like, dude, are you not looking at the metrics of
how Fuse just tanked and you've got the API access?
And I was just like, I'm like, you know what, not dealing with
it. Like there's just certain people
(43:55):
on this. Like if if you don't know your
craft and you're not looking at data And my, my personal pet
peeve is when they call it Google My Business or, or GB, PG
MB. And I'm like, I'm like, dude,
you're not even current. I'm like, it hasn't been called
that since the, I think 20/21/2019.
Like I'm like, I'm like, no, if you're, if you're going on
device and you're calling it Google My Business.
(44:17):
No, sorry, Charlie. Yeah, no, I I get the the.
Home service owners, whatever that are calling it, it but
like, come on, it's it's been like 5 years.
I I think it's ready to change. Yeah.
I mean, you're if you're in the,if you're in the.
Industry and you're and you're still using the wrong name you
know like like yeah you don't really know your craft at all
Yeah definitely I've got. Two more questions for you.
(44:39):
This one relates actually to what you were saying.
And you were mentioning, you know, photos on Yelp and other
platforms, maybe Facebook. What about reviews on these
platforms? Do those help GBP ranking?
I've heard mixed opinions on this.
So they don't. Impact GBP rankings on Google,
however, there is strong data toshow that it help with rankings
(45:03):
with ChatGPT Really. Yeah, Darren.
Shaw just came out with. Came out with a screenshot from
a couple days ago and it was andit was some of the obscure, you
know, review platforms, but Google seems to be favoring it.
You know, they used to because they used to have from the web
(45:24):
where they would pull in review,they would pull in reviews from
other platforms. It'd be like, oh, here's here's
a review from Angie's List, here's a review from Judy's book
or, you know, blah, blah, blah, you know, these obscure ones
that people don't go to anymore or think about.
But Google does like that third party data, you know, so, you
know, so they're not using it now on, on, on local or map
(45:46):
packs, but in ChatGPT, it does seem to be making a, a
difference. But I think people put too much,
too much of their eggs in one basket.
So just just reviews on Google. It's like, well, you forget Yelp
feeds to I think Yahoo or Bing, I can't remember which one.
And they also feed reviews into Apple Maps.
So it's like, so if you're ignoring Yelp because you're
(46:07):
like, oh, I don't like them, They're they're evil.
And I'm like, every company is evil in some way, shape or form,
right? Like you got sales guys are
trying to make a buck. OK, you know, and so you know so
but you don't want to cut off your nose to spite your face.
So you do need to, you know, getan influx of reviews across
multiple platforms to to even have a shot.
(46:29):
Interesting. OK.
So they definitely matter not. As much as Google reviews, but
you should still be collecting those as well.
Awesome. And last question I have for
you, Jason, kind of a general one, but overall, what advice
would you give to maybe local SEOS or local business owners?
What do they need to know in thefuture?
What? What call of action do you have
for them? Yeah.
So I think the best thing that people can do is go to the right
(46:52):
forums, right? You know, figure out who the,
who the leaders are in local SEO, right?
So follow Joy Hawkins, follow Darren Shaw, follow me, you
know, 'cause we're the ones thatare putting out the content
that's really truly important and not the, the fluff stuff,
you know, it's so, you know, I'monline everywhere.
I'm in so many different Facebook groups and I'm in
(47:15):
several subreddits, help out on local search forum, you know, So
anywhere that somebody's asking questions about local, then I'll
go there and post, you know, andI think that's the other thing
is don't be afraid to ask questions, you know, especially
business owners, business owners, there's no stupid
question you can ask. Some SE OS can ask some pretty
(47:38):
stupid questions. I I actually had one, she asked
me three times if we could get AGBP verified when they were
showing their address and there was no signage.
And I was like, you have 19 years experience in the
industry, same as me, and you'reasking me this question.
I was like, there are dumb questions, yeah, you know, but I
(48:00):
think, but it's just, you know, it's just, you know, keep
reading, you know, Barry Schwartz puts out a bunch of
good content on SEO Roundtable. Search Engine line has some good
stuff. Search engine journals, OK,
occasionally they'll let stuff slip in.
You know, I've had it, I've emailed them because somebody
rewrote the same Article 3 timesand all three times it was
(48:22):
incentivized for reviews. Well, you can't do that, you
know. So you know, it's just, you
know, it's, if it's your business, it's your baby and you
want to see it grow. If you're, if you're an agency,
you know, and you see, you see me online somewhere, don't be
afraid to hit me up and ask me aquestion.
You know, if you see me on LinkedIn or, you know, blue sky
or Reddit, you know, I actually had somebody, you know, ping me.
(48:44):
He's like, hey, Jason, you're, you're really good at this one.
Do you mind answering this question?
I'm like, sure, dude, this, thisis because thank you so much.
I'm like, hey, happy to help. You know, that's what that's The
thing is I have a bad reputationof just, you know, being this
mean cuss, but I, I genuinely care and I give solid advice
because I want to see people succeed and not fall into these,
(49:05):
you know, SEO, you know, Black Hat courses.
You're like, oh, I want to, you know, increase my rankings and
blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, I'm like, these
courses are snake oil. They're not going to give you a,
a leg up or an advantage. So definitely no, at least from
what I've. Seen on this podcast, you're a
super nice guy, super humble, but yet super experience.
(49:27):
I mean, you've been in it for a while.
And I even learned several things in this podcast.
I feel like I know a ton in local SEO, but you taught me
some things in this show. And the people you recommended
again, Darren, Joy, Barry, all those people are great.
I I vouch for all of them as well, including yourself.
So yeah, cool, awesome. So we can wrap up the show here.
So where can people find you, learn more about you and your
(49:48):
services? Yeah.
So you can either go to review. Fraud or just do a Google search
for Kaiser Holiday because that's my handle.
KEYSERHOLIDAY back in the day, Matt Kutz was always like build
a brand, build a brand. So I built out the Kaiser
Holiday brand. I took 2 characters from 2
movies. It's Kaiser Sosay from usual
(50:09):
suspects and it's Doc Holiday with the 1L missing.
And so I put them together and so then all of a sudden I was
like, wait a minute, my this is my brand.
You know, as I started becoming the unofficial sheriff of
Google. It's like Kaiser cuz I'm an
enigma and Holiday cuz I'm a gunslinger and Google review.
It's like the wild, Wild West. And so it's just like, yeah, you
know, it's just, you know, embrace it.
(50:30):
And so yeah, you can always findme on on Facebook, LinkedIn,
Reddit, blue sky. Just search Kaiser holiday and
it'll come up awesome. Cool.
So all those links will be in the.
Description and anything else you'd like to plug or mention?
Yeah, No, I don't. Have anything to really plug if
you ever do need advice, you know, with suspensions or review
(50:52):
removals or your competitors being super spammy, hit me up.
I love I love diving into that Ido a lot of big case
escalations. I'm working on what I've been
working on since December of 2023 and it's a super shady pest
control company really. Yeah, they actually got
investigated by the Michigan attorney General because all
(51:17):
their websites didn't have the actual real company's name.
I got, I got, I got them removedall the way down to three Google
business profiles. And then they started
reinstating and creating more. So I've got a new case in with
Google where we we're going after 48 of the GBPS when, when
(51:37):
they initially had like 83 and it was, it's, it's a, it's a fun
wild case. I'll share the I'll share the
link with you. And I started tracking from May
17th, how many times or actuallyApril 17th, how many times I
would get it removed and it would, and when it would come
back like like 2 days later. And so it's just, it's just wild
(51:59):
that just watch. It's like live removed, live
removed, you know, And so it's just, yeah, it's been, yeah,
it's, it's one of the fun cases I work on.
But I, you know, like every caseI work on is always, is always
fun. I always learn something new
about it, so yeah, that's crazy.No, it's super relevant.
Because it's a pest control case.
But yeah, awesome. It was so great having you on
(52:19):
the show, Jason. Again, I learned a lot.
And yeah, it was good to meet you.
Yeah. Bert, pleasure.
Take care. Thanks, Jason.
All right, bye.
Host
Danny Leibrandt
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