Tim 00:19
Hi again. I'm Tim Coleman, and I'm your host today. I'm also the managing partner of A2O Digital, a full-service digital marketing agency working exclusively with home service businesses. My guest today is Natalie Canas, who is the LSA specialist at our agency. Welcome Natalie.

Natalie 00:38
Thanks, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim 00:40
Yeah. So, alright, so we're going to talk about LSA today. And this is when I go into the forums and the Facebook groups and all this type of stuff, this is always a hot topic. But Natalie, from your perspective tell me a little bit about why we're talking about this today.

Natalie 01:02
Sure. So on our podcast, we've covered Google Local Services like as a whole, and the spam that's impacting that product today. But we are actually going to focus on all the updates that the platform has made within the last year and how best to adapt to them.

Tim 01:21
Okay, cool. So why don't we start with like, kind of the visual change. What, what it, what did it used to look like? What's it looking like today? How is how has Google changed the way it looks?

Natalie 01:31
Sure. So, for when the program started up until maybe, I want to say six months ago, there would be three tile ads at the top of the page, and it was the first ads you would see during a search result. And now they changed it to two stacked ads. And originally, that's how the mobile view used to show them. So now they switched what was on the original mobile view to show on desktop, and now mobile is showing three stacked ads.

Tim 02:01
Okay, so Google's placing a little bit more emphasis...when you stack ads on the left-hand side, that's where our eyeball tends to go. Google wants us clicking on these things, I guess, right?

Natalie 02:15
Yeah, so this change really is designed to, like, enhance the visibility of the companies shown in the top positions, and it's supposed to result in higher quality leads.

Tim 02:27
Okay, all right, so that sounds like Google talking as always, but Google wants more phone calls to make more money, but that's...

Natalie 02:38
Pretty much.

Tim 02:38
Yeah, okay. What about the number of players?

Natalie 02:42
So Google LSAs used to show 50 LSA results, but now they've limited that to 20 LSA results. And it's not necessarily like the top of the top, it's just trying to even out the playing field for everyone. And obviously there's some performance factors that are involved to people that are showing. So Google's prioritizing businesses that offer message leads, which is a feature that you could enable on the back end. And they're also encouraging potential customers to connect with more than one business. So that's really what they're trying to do here.

Tim 03:20
Interesting, interesting.

Natalie 03:21
Yeah, and this update is giving like, those smaller companies like the mom and pops, to have a more fair advantage and show and display evenly versus those bigger guys that are outranking them in the past.

Tim 03:39
All right, so I'm going to stop you right there for a second. There's a lot to unpack with what you just kind of said, Natalie. So first of all, we know, but just take desktop for an instance. You just said there's two stacked, like I type in, you know, on the search results pages, two stacks. Then when I click through to see more listings or whatever, there, that's where I'll see up to 20?

Natalie 04:02
Correct.

Tim 04:03
And it used to be, there used to be more there, right? They could see...so what, what happens? What happens to the to the other 30? Do we, where'd they go? Do we even know?

Natalie 04:15
Um, I feel like they have to either enable message leads to, then, you know, help with their ranking, boost their ranking factors, their ranking, and then they can stay competitive. So there's, like, if they keep that feature off, that feature Google has prioritized as, like, one of the number one ranking factors. If you have that off, you're not going to show in that top 20 at all.

Tim 04:37
Okay, so the top 20 are based on the ranking, some combination of ranking figures and bid, correct?

Natalie 04:47
Correct. And responsiveness is also...

Tim 04:50
Responsiveness is going to be a huge ranking factor, right?

Natalie 04:53
That's right.

Tim 04:54
Okay. Next thing you said that I found interesting, and I never really thought about this before, Natalie. We all know that Home Advisor and Yelp, or these, these, Angie, actually, I don't even know about Yelp, but Angie, they're going to, if they get a lead, they're going to kind of package that lead and sell it to multiple people. They might sell that lead to seven different...you know, somebody wants a plumber, they might sell that to seven different plumbers that same lead, right?

Natalie 05:24
Right.

Tim 05:24
Yeah, you kind of just intimated that too. Google, you feel like is encouraging...they're turning on message leads because they want to encourage consumers to maybe get in touch with more than one brand. Is that what you're saying?

Natalie 05:39
That's right. Yeah, they're giving that potential customer options.

Tim 05:44
That's super interesting. Yeah, why wouldn't they do that? I never even thought of that. Okay, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, um...

Natalie 05:56
Now, there's also some, like service areas that are not as saturated in, within players that are in the Local Service Ads, right? In those areas, they will add in Google Business Profile listings or map listings into that playing field.

Tim 06:14
So they're always going to try and fill out to the best of their ability to get to 20 if you click through.

Natalie 06:19
That's correct.

Tim 06:20
Okay. And then once you're in that 20, they sort of rotate you, Natalie, that's what they're doing?

Natalie 06:25
Yep, they're rotating you pretty evenly.

Tim 06:29
Okay.

Natalie 06:30
So, to the players that have always ranked very well and have a high rating and high review count, and those were number one factors, and proximity was a number one factor. They were always showing one, two or three. They are now getting less leads because they're showing everyone evenly,

Tim 06:51
Right, yeah, that's kind of the way that if you were dominating before, and they started rotating, you lost leads. If you were kind of near the bottom before, in a crowded space, and now, now they're rotating, you might have picked up leads.

Natalie 07:06
You're getting a piece of the pie.

Tim 07:08
Yeah, for the first time, in some cases, maybe, right? Yeah. I feel like our clients were dominating before, so that was largely like a bummer for us.

Natalie 07:16
It was. It wasn't a good update for our customers.

Tim 07:21
No, it wasn't at all. Right, these leads tend to be really on the inexpensive side, relatively speaking, so...

Natalie 07:28
And really high quality. Like, the potential consumer is calling because they have a need, versus them shopping around, right? They actually are calling to find a company to do the service.

Tim 07:41
Yeah. Yeah, I know, I know. High quality, inexpensive, it's a nice combination.

Natalie 07:47
Yeah.

Tim 07:48
All right, so let's talk about lead responsiveness a little bit. Natalie, how do you think Google's kind of figuring this out?

Natalie 07:57
So they are figuring this out based on response time and how quickly it takes for someone to answer a phone call lead, and with message leads being so important now, they are figuring out how quickly it takes someone to respond to a message lead. So they are actually putting that on live search now. It'll say to you, if they have message leads enabled how quickly it takes to respond. So like, it could say up to a day, it could say up to a few hours, up to half an hour. You want to make sure that you're getting to these message leads very quickly.

Tim 08:35
So when you see that in message leads, that's not the business owner telling you that. That's Google having figured it out?

Natalie 08:42
Correct.

Tim 08:43
Super interesting, right? Google, Google. What does Google not know?

Natalie 08:47
Yeah, so they must have some algorithm in place on their end where they're figuring out how quickly you're getting to these leads.

Tim 08:54
Yeah. Yeah. All right, so, so, so, okay, there is an opportunity to put in your business hours there, right? Um, if, if it's, if it's after hours and you're not getting back to these people, probably the best thing is to tell Google you're not open during those hours and don't even show right?

Natalie 09:16
Correct, or you could even toggle message leads off during those off hours.

Tim 09:21
Okay.

Natalie 09:22
My recommendation is, you know, a lot of our customers work with call centers so they can have someone like, 24/7 answering these things. But if that's not the case for your business, then you might want to turn off message leads during those off hours, because that responsive time, it will impact your overall ranking.

Tim 09:42
Yeah. So, so we have for our customers recommended they put on message leads. Have most of them done that Natalie?

Natalie 09:51
Yeah, I would say like 90% of our customers have already.

Tim 09:56
Yeah, good, okay, and the message leads are, they tend to be less expensive as well?

Natalie 10:01
That's right. So, Google has put a strong emphasis on the messaging feature for a while now, and they've been recommending for us to turn it on for all our businesses. It is, a message lead is half the price of a phone call lead, so that's definitely, you know, an interesting factor about that. And also you can dispute it, just like you could a phone call lead.

Tim 10:27
Okay, so that's good. So, so as long as you have somebody to respond and respond relatively quickly, it makes sense to turn on message leads.

Natalie 10:38
That's right, and just make sure like, those responses are quick and effective communication, because that plays an important role for overall performance of that listing.

Tim 10:47
Yeah, that makes, that makes sense. So, so even though there's not a lot of dials with LSA, there are some dials, and you got to make sure that you get them right. Otherwise you're not in the top 20.

Natalie 11:04
That's right.

Tim 11:05
And you're shut out. But once you make it into the top 20, they're going to be distributed relatively evenly.

Natalie 11:13
At this point, yes.

Tim 11:14
At this point, right? Good point, at this point.

Natalie 11:16
Unless something changes again in another month or two.

Tim 11:18
Yeah, yeah. As always, as always.

Natalie 11:21
Which with Google LSA is possible, so.

Tim 11:23
Yeah, right, right. So, I know with our customers, we've had a couple of profile suspensions. And, you know, obviously on the GBP side we see those, they're a pain. I'm sure they're just as big a pain on this side. What, what are you telling our customers Natalie, right now, in terms of like, how to manage that situation?

Natalie 11:50
So there's always going to be changes that are required for these LSA listings after they go live. Some of those changes are because of expiring documentation, such as a certificate of insurance or a state license that are required during the onboarding process of the LSA listing, and you'll have to make sure you're maintaining and staying up to date on these documents. So once we get to that expiration date, they give you, Google gives you like a, like a month to get the expired documents updated and into their platform. And if they see that you're running ads with expired documentation, they can bring you down at any time. So what we're saying is, plan accordingly with these updates, and try to make these changes either at the end of the day, or towards the end of the week, when it's like, the less busier times for LSAs to run.

Tim 12:47
That makes sense. So this way, if you do get suspended, it's not going to cost you as much business.

Natalie 12:52
That's right, yeah.

Tim 12:53
Makes sense. What, what are you seeing once, once they go down? If you have the documentation Natalie, are you able to get them back up relatively quickly, or is it like a wild card?

Natalie 13:03
So we've been seeing that 48 hours is like that sweet spot. It can take anywhere from 24 to 48 hours, but really it's getting close to that 48-hour mark to get your ads back up.

Tim 13:16
Okay, and that's...

Natalie 13:19
Sorry, or to see the changes reflected in Live Search.

Tim 13:25
Okay, and that's been pretty consistent?

Natalie 13:29
Yes, recently, we've noticed that the last two weeks.

Tim 13:33
Yeah, that's, that's good, because sometimes, like on the GBP side, it's like the wild wild west, you just don't know how long it's going to take, so.

Natalie 13:40
Yeah, I mean, they say it could take from 10 minutes to, like, 30 days.

Tim 13:46
Yeah, yeah yeah. So, so two days stinks, but it's, it's at least, I don't know it's like, at least a normal time period.

Natalie 13:54
Yeah.

Tim 13:55
Okay.

Natalie 13:56
I think, and especially if it's, I think they count the weekend in that too. It's not just business hours. So if it comes down on a Friday, it should be back up on Monday morning when you're back in the office.

Tim 14:10
Okay, that sounds strange to say, but that sounds good actually, when I compare that to some other things. Alright, tell me Natalie, I've been reading about LSA Direct, tell me, tell me what that is.

Natalie 14:26
Yeah, so LSA added this feature. It's called the Direct Business Search feature, and you can toggle it on or off, just like you could message leads. And the reason they introduced this was because they wanted to give you that option if you toggled it on to be the only company showing for a branded search. And you'll only be charged for new leads that come through for that search, not for repeat customers.

Tim 14:54
Okay, so we know there are going to be some people we talk to absolutely hate this, and some people we talk to absolutely love this. So I'm going to, I'm going to take devil's advocate first Natalie. Why do I have to pay Google for people who are actually looking for me, and I have to pay for the phone call?

Natalie 15:18
So with anything that Google LSA rolls out, there's going to be bugs or hiccups. I can understand why they want to do this if you're the only company showing, but right now that is not how this feature is working. If you have this enabled, they're showing competition show for a branded search for your business. So it's not working the way it should.

Tim 15:45
Oh, oh, boy. Okay, so now, okay, so, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna say this just so I'm making sure I understand this correctly Natalie, between what's supposed to happen, and what's actually happening. Okay, so the first thing is, we know whether you're a plumber, garage door guy, whatever, they'll typically only show these ads for certain types of queries. So like, we know if you type in "garage door repair," LSA are going to typically show in that situation. So now you toggle this on, and now it's going to show for my...so if I own Tim's Garage Door Repair Company, and I have this toggled off, and somebody types in Tim's Garage Door Repair Company, no LSAs will show up. But then if I toggle it on, LSAs will show up. And it's supposed to be just me, correct?

Natalie 15:47
Yeah. It's supposed to be just you, but it'll probably show Bob's Garage Door Company alongside Tim's Garage Door Company.

Tim 16:42
Oh, so now Tim is doubly mad.

Natalie 16:45
Yes.

Tim 16:46
Because now he has to pay for his phone calls that should just be coming to his business for free, is how I would typically feel about it. However, the reality is I would probably pay for that call to keep my competition from competing with me, I'd probably be happy to pay $20 for that call, even though that sounds crazy. But, but now I'm mad because Bob's company showing up when I toggled on.

Natalie 17:13
That's right. It really was put in place so it's only your company showing during a branded search, and that's not how it's working.

Tim 17:22
And then do we have this turned on for some of our customers, Natalie?

Natalie 17:26
We have it turned on actually for all our customers right now, because we want to see what benefits happen now that it's fully rolled out. Like, this was just an experiment for Google LSA in February, and now it's a full rollout nationwide.

Tim 17:41
Gotcha. So now when we turn it on, what about cost of phone calls? Are they the same as others, do they cost less? What's, what about, what's the cost of a typical phone call? Have we looked into that yet?

Natalie 17:55
So we haven't really dove in too deep with...I don't think we're getting many branded searches to begin with. Most people are doing regular queries like "garage door repair" or...

Tim 18:07
Okay, okay, so that's gonna take a little bit more time to try and figure out if there's a cost, if they cost a little bit less, okay.

Natalie 18:13
Right, if it's a difference in cost.

Tim 18:16
Okay, and, and Google...how come when Google makes a mistake it's always like, in their favor?

Natalie 18:23
Yeah.

Tim 18:24
Right? Like, oh, well, you toggled it on, oh, sorry, we turned on 14 other LSAs too. And you know, we're making extra money, I'm sorry.

Natalie 18:32
That's right. So I mean, we do have the advantage to work with some Google reps. They've been made aware of the bugs and issues we're seeing with the experiment and the rollout, so they're working on it.

Tim 18:47
Okay, good to hear. All right, so I'm glad, you know, honestly, I'm glad we have that turned on for our clients, and I think it's the right thing to do. I think that LSA is just shown so prominently, and we have so many folks competing with our branded searches and PPC, that for us this is really well worth doing. And I hope that Google fixes that problem, and I hope to see, obviously, that we don't get charged for a branded call at the same rate we get charged for a category search.

Natalie 19:29
I agree.

Tim 19:30
Yeah, okay, so I, that one's kind of a mixed bag. I think if they get it fixed, I'll consider that a positive, right? Is that how you're looking at it as well, Natalie?

Natalie 19:40
Yeah, that's how we're looking at it, and we're encouraging our customers to just keep it on right now until we can see the benefit, or if we see, you know, the cons of it, we will recommend something different.

Tim 19:52
Yeah, okay. All right, let's, let's talk about proximity. We've been involved with LSA since Google rolled this out. I don't know, it's been, it's been like, I feel like it's been five or six...when was it Natalie?

Natalie 20:08
2017.

Tim 20:09
It's been seven years, oh my god, I can't believe it. Okay, so we've been, I know we've been involved in it from the beginning. We have a, we had a customer who was in the San Jose area where Google launched their test pilot of this way back then. Wow, that was a long time ago. And proximity at that time seemed really similar to me to how GBP is that, you know, the number one ranking factor is where you're located. And I know it was like that for some period of time, and then it changed. I'm still a little bit confused about proximity regarding LSA, why don't you just kind of walk us through that Natalie?

Natalie 20:52
Sure. So like you said during its inception, it worked exactly the way GBP proximity works, and it prioritized and favored the companies that were physically located closer to that searcher. Since then, it's the last year I would say, proximity has really taken a back seat. It's always still been part of the ranking factors, but it's a lot less weighted than it was when it started. And actually, I came across an article today that said in the Google Local Service Ads Help document the proximity anecdote was removed. So that anecdote used to say "proximity to potential customer locations is a ranking factor," and that has since been removed from that document.

Tim 21:40
So, so that's, you know, you go back to, you know, a lot of forms of advertising, and you can just choose, as long as you're paying for the leads, you can just choose whatever service area that is. So right now, the advertiser can just make the service area as small or as large as they want it.

Natalie 22:01
That's right. And that is one of the spam tactics that we are seeing in LSA today.

Tim 22:06
Yeah, because you could make your service area like, half the United States, right?

Natalie 22:10
Yeah. And they're targeting those states that really are like the wild wild west and have limited like, requirements to them. Like some of them don't require a state license, and so they're getting into those states.

Tim 22:23
Yeah, yeah. I know Google...proximity, proximity made sense as a ranking factor with Google from the perspective that spammers, you could not open, you know, you couldn't rank it. There's no, there's no one small business that's serving customers in half, half of the United States. I mean, how could you be a plumber in Los Angeles and get a call from Kansas City and go, you know, fix their pipe? It's, it's ridiculous. So I would like to see Google address that somehow. And I know we're not going to talk about...you know, we know that, you know, reviews have become a big ranking factor, and we talked about in our last one, all the spam with that and everything. I would like to see proximity reintroduced in some way, shape or form, to make it at least plausible. And they're...just stop the spam a little bit.

Natalie 23:21
Agreed and just, you know, something key for our listeners to keep in mind are that LSA ranking is consistently changing, right? And we don't know when it's going to change. Google will introduce a new ranking factor and start testing it and rolling it out, and we won't know until we start seeing it for ourselves, like with our profiles, with our listings. Like this rotation, we saw this rotation maybe a good two months before we even heard Google announce it.

Tim 23:51
Yeah, yeah just, our leads started to drop and we started to investigate why it was happening, and that's what we discovered, right?

Natalie 23:59
That's right.

Tim 23:59
Yeah, all right. One more...all right, what else? What else on the LSA front, Natalie?

Natalie 24:08
Yep, there was another thing that was added to that Local Service Ads Help document, and it's that average response time and any other information about your business that may influence user preferences, that was also added to that document. So, you know, we've talked about response time already, but it, it is very important, and we are pushing our customers to just make sure, like they are staying on top of that.

Tim 24:32
Yeah, good, good.

Natalie 24:35
And lastly, so a new update that we did see, they're starting to show pictures in the LSA results. So, similar to how GBP already has a little icon next to it during the business search, we're seeing that for LSA as well. And I've only seen it on mobile devices, but I'm sure it's supposed to roll out across desktop as well.

Tim 24:56
Okay, so I want to ask you some questions. For those who don't know, obviously there's no website associated with your LSA listing. So when, when did, when did it start that you could start to do these images Natalie, is this really recent?

Natalie 24:58
So they've always had the option to add images to your LSA listing, but I want to say the last few months it's become a performance factor. And they're recommending we add four to six images to our listings.

Tim 25:27
Gotcha. And have we, have we done that for all our clients at this point?

Natalie 25:34
We have, yeah. The minute we heard about it, we started rolling out four to six images for everyone.

Tim 25:40
Yeah, perfect. All right, cool. All right. So, so I, as always and with Google, I beef a lot. Natalie, you know that, but I have a lot of belief in LSA. I really want for our clients to get as many LSA leads as possible for the reasons Natalie and I just discussed a second ago, right? High quality leads, much lower cost than PPC. Let's just recap Natalie and just what, what do we got? What do we do to get as many of these leads as possible?

Natalie 26:14
So you want to make sure that you're staying competitive, you're getting lots of reviews to your listings, you're getting a high review count, and that obviously plays in with GBP reviews. So you have to do well in both platforms. You have to make sure, if you don't have message leads enabled, turn those on for your listing and make sure you have someone responding to them right away. Response time is key here. If you have pictures to add for your listing, make sure you get four to six images added to the back end. And lastly, I would say, just make sure that you know, you're kind of staying up to date. Like if you do notice a dip in leads, it's important to kind of just understand the climate of what's going on. It's an indicator that Google's messing around and changing something in their end.

Tim 27:11
And at that time, you probably will want to come back and listen to our new, updated LSA podcast whenever that is Natalie, right? Because we'll discuss whatever that change is. I feel like LSA is a frequent discussion point here. All right, anything else? Any final words Natalie?

Natalie 27:34
No, I think just stay consistent. Get those reviews.

Tim 27:39
Yes, that's good advice. All right. Thank you, Natalie. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe to our podcast, and thanks for listening. Have a great day.

Natalie 27:50
Thank you. Bye Tim.

Tim 27:57
Bye Natalie.