Nasser:
Welcome to Shift Happens, I’m Nasser Sahlool. Today I’m joined by returning guest Kyle Harris, who leads local optimization at DAC. Welcome to the show, Kyle.

Kyle:
Thanks for having me. I am surprised after our last episode that I’m getting a second opportunity here.

Nasser:
Well, Kyle, you’re a contrarian, which I think helps you not just in your everyday life, but in your job. Because if we think about the cozy little cartel that is the SaaS industry when it comes to local optimization, you’re kind of like the Yoko Ono of that space, right?

Kyle:
Yeah, I think that’s a fair analogy.

Nasser:
Trying to trying to tell truth to power and break up the cozy club?

Kyle:
I have some salmon DNA, I like to swim upstream.

Nasser:
Oh, my God, I don’t even know what to do with that. So for anyone who’s listening, for a multi-location brand, what are we talking about today? Every location has a digital front door. When customers search nearby, the information they find can help them choose that location or send them elsewhere. Is it open? Does it offer what I need? Can I trust it? How do I get there? The details our services, categories and reviews can shape whether a customer chooses a location. Tools and AI can certainly help manage the work, but people still need to keep those details accurate and useful everywhere.
We’re calling it the 90% problem. The distance between knowing what good local optimization looks like and delivering it consistently across a brand’s locations. So Kyle, talk to me about that problem. What is the 90% problem in local optimization?

Kyle:
All right. So thank you for this question. It’s one I definitely am enjoying talking about most recently. Because, you know, local search is starting to become, you know, not this new emerging thing. It’s been around for a while. Yet, I’m finding it really interesting that the reality is we are not really, you know, ready for that next thing to happen in local search from a multi-location, brand standpoint. And what I mean by that is we still have 90% of the opportunity to do those foundational elements. Because for the average, thousand plus location brand, getting those things done, even though we’ve known about these tactics for a very long time, is an unbelievably difficult thing to actually get into market.
Well, you probably would love an example of this, and I will most certainly give you one. So, hey, you know, the average local business should have great photography about it. Where and what the parking looks like, what the products look like on shelves, or what the menu or food items and dishes… And, you know, depending upon your business, that’s going to look differently. But capturing visually what that actually looks like, the consumer experience is not a new tactic. But the average multi-location brand has simply not got into market that type of optimization. So me calling this essentially the 90% problem is not new tactics, but operationally getting that 90% done, remains a massive problem.

Nasser:
And that I think feels counterintuitive because like you said, this category, this industry has been around for a very long time, and millions upon millions upon millions of dollars have been spent on SaaS platforms and self-serve platforms to allow for marketers to do just this. Again, Yoko, you know, what do you mean the work hasn’t been done? Why hasn’t it been done?

Kyle:
Yeah. So what I really think the opportunity and why we’re not really connecting the dots here, I think it really boils down to local. I mean, I think SEO in general doesn’t have a seat at the table at every room that it should. And I think local SEO has even less of a place at the tables where these decisions and budgets and everything else is getting finalized. It is still, and I don’t have a good explanation as to why… It is still, at least in my experience, not something that brands are willing to essentially devote full-time employees and marketing people and everything else to essentially focus at.
This still seems, from a sea level standpoint, to be a data accuracy exercise and not necessarily looked at as a performance channel, where we should be essentially rolling budget to and focusing. I think that’s mostly the problem. There seems to be a “checking the box” of doing local search instead of, hey, am I fine tuning this to get the most out of it on a day-to-day basis? That level of focus is simply not happening, and I just don’t think we’re seated at the right tables.

Nasser:
And that is fascinating, especially when we think about what’s going on right now, right? With GEO and AI answers and overviews and all of these kinds of things, and the obvious connectivity of local optimization into SEO, which is something that you kind of alluded to there. Do people not fully understand how this works and why it’s critical to connect those two things together?

Kyle:
So I think that’s absolutely it. It is a crazy, you know, marketplace that we are existing in. And I think when you boil it down, there’s a lot of experience that, you know, clients and brands have in buying paid media or buying broadcast or, you know, buying SEO, they feel very comfortable in how to buy that, what questions to ask, what a deliverable looks like. And GEO is, is changing all of that. I don’t think clients exactly know from who and how and are feeling comfortable and exactly buying GEO, and or even what the right acronym is. Or you know what should be included in that.
Because of that, there is a lot of ambiguity out in the marketplace. And something that I’m trying very hard to do is to make sure that local search has a place at the table when those GEO conversations are happening. I am very worried that in every room that it should, you know, be taking place, that it is, I would imagine that it is not. But I think the brands that are going to be successful, understand that local search and solving that 90% problem are the ones that are going to be set up from a GEO standpoint, when those questions in these different LLMs boil down to a conversion local type of prompt.

Nasser:
So that’s interesting. You talked a couple of moments ago about this needs people, this needs actual work. And again, to be contrarian to what everybody else is saying, everybody’s saying don’t sweat the small stuff. And you’re like, no, no, no, no, no, no. You have to sweat the small stuff to actually make this work. Isn’t that counterintuitive to everything that’s happening in the marketing space around the use of AI and increased automation?

Kyle:
So I think it is a very interesting and I wouldn’t say difficult pill to swallow, but I do think that it is a little bit contrarian. And I think that that is essentially what leads to differentiation, though, right? If everyone is just going to try and automate everything and have an LLM, spit out your content and do your optimization, you are going to look exactly the same. And I think the brands that actually do sweat the small stuff, and that means, hey, we have to figure out if, you know, every one of our locations is wheelchair accessible, right? Like got it. That’s not a data point that we’ve tracked before.
And I truly am talking about these hyper, hyper local, individually differentiated pieces of data. If we can source that make it known and essentially just start to collect more information, and then start to feed these into Google and all these other LLMs, I do think that sweating that small stuff is essentially going to layer up to success from a GEO standpoint.

Nasser:
All right. So I’m going to put on my VP of keeping it real hat. Most marketing teams these days are very small. They’re stretched. They have so many different priorities. You’re asking them to do more work now. Like is that realistic? Is that really going to happen here?

Kyle:
So the answer is no. I am not crazy enough to think that we are going to boil the ocean here. And what you should be asking from your GEO partners, especially on the local level, is to help you prioritize this stuff right? We don’t have to sweat the small stuff at every location, when we have 5000 locations. Sweating the small stuff, market by market, in a prioritized way, understanding impact versus effort – that is what you should essentially be leaning on your local team of a very few people. That’s totally fine, but you can start to do some of this where it will have the greatest impact. And I think with data and the stuff that we have available to us, understanding how to make those priority matrixes are not really complicated to get done.

Nasser:
Okay. So you talked about impact. You talked about the data. So in this changed landscape, what should teams actually be measuring to determine whether or not all of these efforts in sweating the small stuff and the 90% of optimization, how do they know whether or not that’s working?

Kyle:
Yeah, so having to rethink what success looks like, I think is a very real question that everyone should be asking right? Like, I’ll raise my hand here, I would love to get more reporting from these different LLMs. I think that would be wonderful. But we still need to operate businesses today without it. And I think that really what we should be doing is looking at the same data through a different lens.
So hey, clicks are going down. That’s not the end of the world, if we’re still getting things like driving directions and phone calls right? The lead volume is there, the revenue is still there. We just need to look through these same pieces of data and understand it. One of the biggest things that I’m recommending is tracking just overall brand search. And if brand search is up, you can have a pretty good understanding that that’s due to LLMs recommending your brand. So people are in these different platforms that we don’t necessarily have access to.
But at the end of the day, Google has a moat and essentially a monopoly on local data, and everyone comes back to read reviews to get driving directions to locations. So brand search being up on Google is, generally speaking, very indicative of overall success in these different LLMs.

Nasser:
All right. So to drive that kind of an outcome, put yourself in the marketers shoes. What are three changes that they can make in the next 90 days, that is going to help fix or drive the kinds of outcomes you’re talking about.

Kyle:
Sure. So I don’t think that there are things that you’re going to do like these, like, “hey, what are three quick win like things that we can do…” It’s like the market’s a little bit too mature, I don’t think you have those. I mean, there’s plenty of brands that are still screwing this up. And there’s things that we can fix related to, you know, a category. We still find a website every now and then that’s like, you know, they they’ve blocked crawlers. It’s like, got it. Those things are far fewer, you know, essentially happening on a day to day basis.
So what my generally speaking like 90 day plan is: number one, it is asking the difficult question internally at your organization. That is, are we doing everything, throughout the entire organization, to generate as many reviews and ratings online as humanly possible? Do I have an incentive program for my employees? How am I tracking this? Am I holding people accountable from the C-suite down to the actual day to day operations? Am I doing everything I can do to generate as much online review content as humanly possible? That is for sure my number one. That’s probably my top three.
Outside of that, I am also trying to build out the single best database of information around the operational realities of my business as humanly possible. What are my services? What are my menus? How does that change based off of different geographies? Like I’m not selling winter tires down in Arizona. I absolutely am selling winter tires up in the northeast of the US. You know, how do I build out my product services in local? And I need all of the database behind that, of what product, what inventory, everything else related to, just like what the consumer would experience when they walk in. I want that data very easily accessible, and I’m trying to get that out to all of my different partners. I’m trying to make that discoverable to LLMs. I’m trying to make that discoverable to search engines, to social platforms, to essentially everywhere. But it starts with knowing what you have first. So that’s number two.
And number three, I am focused way more, in the short term at least, on general PR than I ever have been. I mean, a couple years ago, I would have told you that social media has no impact on local search. It is just different and separate and it does not really impact it. Of course, you should do it for brand building and everything else, but it will not actually help you show up for queries or prompts related to local. I’ve completely changed my tune on that. AI has completely changed the game for who gets recommended essentially to these things. And overall brand prominence, which to me is just an awful lot of PR, is really playing out there.
So for me, the three things that I’m doing is number one reviews. Number two, understanding my operational reality and making that easily digestible from anywhere on the internet that needs it. And number three, I am just working on the overall PR of my brand because we’re seeing that have really, really big impacts in overall success.

Nasser:
Doesn’t sound like things you can typically do inside of a platform.

Kyle:
It’s not, it’s not. I mean, it’s it is a lot harder. You do need a lot more buy-in. But brands that are essentially getting this right are leveraging existing assets already in their organizations. I’ll give you a really good example.
There is guaranteed to be a store manager. Now that store manager is in charge of a lot of things. But essentially, we figured out for a client of ours, we knew that there was a regional manager that checked in once a week with everyone of their stores. And we added on to that person, hey, here’s a little questionnaire of things to ask about, related to the products and services that’s going on. It’s going to take you about two minutes. Over the next couple of months, just see if you can get this filled out. And it did.
We were able to take that content, get it actually added to listings. And by properly listing out all of the services of a specific location, it really actually started to show up in KPIs that we could track like impressions, clicks, calls, and driving directions. So like the impact is there, getting this done and boiling the sea of like, I have to do, you know, 10,000 things is simply just too difficult. But hey, what processes are already ongoing and where can I just essentially pivot, add on a little bit onto someone’s day to day to collect this information in a point that it actually makes sense? We’re finding has a really big impact.

Nasser:
So there you have it. Local optimization is about driving the first impression that a customer gets over a nearby location. If the information is accurate and the experience is useful, it can help turn a search into a visit, a call, or a sale. If it isn’t, the customer may move on before the business gets a chance to serve them. And that’s why solving the 90% problem matters. It’s how brands make sure every location has a better chance to be found, trusted, and chosen, not just the handful that already get the most attention.
Now make it happen. Follow Shift Happens, leave us a review, and share this episode with your team. You can find out more about DAC’s local optimization work at www.dacgroup.com. If you have any questions for the podcast, email us at shifthappens@dacgroup.com We’d love to hear from you.
Kyle, thanks for making a big challenge feel practical.

Kyle:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Nasser:
And thank you for listening. I’m Nasser Sahlool and this is Shift Happens.