Agencies and brands offering local SEO services have the inside track on trending client FAQs, industry developments, and what’s working in the workaday world for their companies.
Today, I’ll be sharing some of the smartest things I’ve heard recently from real-life local search pros. Catch these tips to build a better agency and provide expert answers to client questions!
Joy Hawkins’ straight-talking tips on SEO agency operations
Agencies can become entrenched in a certain way of doing things. If any of the following tips from Joy Hawkins startle your boss or your team, why not discuss them at your next all-hands meeting to see if you’re missing an alternative strategy that could actually deliver better results for your agency? Joy says:
- Don’t have client contracts
- Plan a long-term strategy for lead gen
- Specialize in a local industry niche
- Budget to hire experts instead of training novices
- Report leads, not rankings
- You don’t need a sales force
Darren Shaw’s agency is growing, thanks to YouTube
At 5:24 in this awesome NearMedia interview of Whitespark CEO, Darren Shaw, Mike Blumenthal asks,
“I know you guys do a lot of YouTube, and I see you on Linkedin sharing, for example, AI tips. Do either of those generate leads for you directly?”
Darren Shaw replies,
“I would say it’s been really significant for our growth over the last couple years at Whitespark. Yes, SEO for Whitespark – I’m sure it’s a decent channel – but our growth has really taken off since I invested heavily in being active on all the different social platforms and producing YouTube videos. [When our support teams ask] “how did you hear about us?” so often, we hear it’s YouTube, YouTube, YouTube.”
Our industry is definitely re-evaluating channels, including SEO, right now, due to the rise of AI. If your agency has expertise to share, strongly consider whether YouTube might be a moat for your brand that is less impacted by phenomena like zero-click search.
Mike Blumenthal wants local SEO agencies to get the difference between theory and praxis
At GatherUp AmpUp 2025, Near Media Co-founder, Mike Blumenthal, encouraged agencies to understand:
“Theory is how we think the world works. Praxis is how we act in it.”
Mike expressed concerns that too much local SEO advice is focused on tactics and execution instead of how local search actually works. Mike offered this definition of the goal of local SEO:
“It’s not just about showing up. It’s about showing up when it matters.”
For a full explanation, read Mél Attia’s summary of Mike’s presentation, and pay special attention to these points:
- You’re losing leads if you’re not managing your Google Business Profile as your top conversion tool. 90% of local discovery starts with search, not navigation. Google is your homepage.
- Don’t call reviews “social proof”. Reviews are your brand, driving visibility, shaping consumer perception, and influencing conversion.
- SEO is local by default. “Local isn’t a niche – it’s the norm,” says Mike. “Every agency should have a local search marketing strategy.”
Andrew Shotland did our local ranking factors homework for us
My favorite local SEO agencies have the generosity to share data with the community. Did you catch the results of Local SEO Guide partnering with Semrush to track local pack rankings across ten verticals in ten US cities? Standout takeaways included:
- Review volume correlates with better local pack rankings
- Review recency correlates with better local pack rankings
- Google Business Profiles that feature more categories often outrank those with fewer categories
- You really should comply with Google’s guidelines about not linking to redirected URLs; such GBPs show worse-than-average performance
- On-page SEO basics are still winners. GBPs linking to homepages that feature city names and category keywords in their URLs, title tags, and H1 tags frequently outrank competitors without these signals.
Sometimes, your agency doesn’t need to be surprised – you just need confirmation of best practices. Get the full data set from this study via Andrew’s Linkedin piece.
Are AIOs a local SEO agency game changer? I can answer that.
It was my privilege to partner up with Whitespark on this study of The Prevalence of AI Overviews in Local Search to help agencies like yours understand the degree to which this particular feature is impacting what your clients’ customers are seeing in the SERPs. We found that:
- AIOs are appearing for 68% of local business-type queries, but with lots of nuance
- AIOs are least prevalent for local-intent queries (think “lawyer near me”)
- AIOs are extremely prevalent for informational-intent queries (think “what do personal injury lawyers charge in Houston?”)
- AIOs are the most prevalent for hybrid-intent queries (think “do I need to hire a lawyer after a car accident in Houston?”)
- AIOs and Google’s local packs have an inverse relationship – it tends to be the case that when one of these features appears, the other is absent
Definitely read the full study, but the high-level takeaway here is that your clients likely need the two-pronged strategy of a local business listings management program for local pack visibility + a content and unstructured citations campaign for AIO inclusion.
Rand Fishkin reminds us to do our own customer behavior research
Every agency wants to know how much its clients’ customers are switching from Google to conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT. This new functionality from Rand Fishkin’s company, SparkToro, caught my eye because it allows you to break audience research down by industry. In a recent Linkedin post, Rand shared a screenshot of this chart showing that amongst landscapers, for example, Pinterest is the 6th most popular search and AI tool:
Local businesses will increasingly need to diversify outreach to the channels that are the right match for their industry and community, and SparkToro’s Overview Reports could well be worth checking out.
SEO is far from dead, but it’s only part of a winning local search strategy
Brittany Hobson addresses the reality that agencies which “only do SEO” are already falling behind in 2025 and will fall farther if they don’t expand their service menus and strategies. Read “SEO isn’t enough anymore. Here’s what agencies need to win at local search” to start mapping out a client services plan that meets the challenge of the new era we’re all finding ourselves in.
Brittany covers:
- How Google is no longer just crawling pages, but has moved onto “listening” to people
- Why reputation is the real ranking signal now
- How to fix the fact that reputation ops is the missing layer in most agency stacks
- Why your agency needs to get past merely delivering visibility; today’s customers are hungry for signs of caring and trust
Next steps for your agency
Is your internal clock (from years of attending school) telling you that it’s back-to-school time? Fall always feels like a natural time for hitting the books, or in our industry’s case, the blogs, podcasts, and video channels of our peers.
Today’s homework: check out GatherUp’s takeaways on Google review purges and how to avoid them.
Upcoming fall assignment: keep tuned to the GatherUp blog because our annual Consumer Review Study is now underway, and we’ll be sharing tons of takeaways in the coming months.
