Local SEO / service-area pages

There are all these new tactics for being recommended by large language models. Now some of them feel a little silly or even spammy, and I hear a lot of people asking, sure, these work right now, but are they really gonna continue working?

And so I just wanna talk about why I think a lot of these tactics are going to continue working for the foreseeable future, and which ones you might want to avoid. The tactics that are especially effective right now, that are different from just traditional SEO, could collectively be summarized as recommendation spam.

You essentially want to spam recommendations for your brand all over the websites that these large language models trust. The most common form of this is probably spamming Reddit comments.

I think the most effective form is spamming listicles. This is where you create like top 10 best lists and put yourself at the top.

Incredibly effective even when it's on your own website. It can be done effectively using press releases or on any sites where users can post their own content, like YouTube, LinkedIn articles, or Medium...

this take is it's from other SEOs. SEOs that would prefer to just keep doing what they've always been doing and who really hate this idea that they have to change their methods.

It's a really good excuse to not have to learn something new. And honestly, I've fallen into this trap myself in the past.

I've been doing SEO for about 16 years, and maybe about 10 years ago I got it into my head that Google's getting a lot smarter and therefore these spammy tactics aren't gonna keep working. One example of a tactic I stopped using temporarily was service area pages.

If you're, say, a plumber in Houston, it doesn't necessarily make sense that you would have a page about your plumbing in every city around Houston and every neighborhood within Houston. You can just have one page that says you serve the greater Houston area.

However, if you want to rank in those neighborhoods and cities, this is incredibly effective. And 10 years ago I thought, you know what?

Google's gonna figure this out. Google doesn't want this to be effective.

It's super spammy...

really all they can do. Now, you might think well, eventually these models are gonna be smart enough to realize that the recommendation came from the brand's website or was probably placed by the brand themselves, but the truth is that would be way more expensive than just a simple search tool.

It would have to be causing a serious issue for the large search engines to be forced into doing that. It's much more likely they'll handle it the same way Google has.

They'll penalize the biggest offenders with manual actions. Instead of spending money having the models automatically vet every single web page on the internet, they can just manually identify the biggest troublemakers, brands that are spamming thousands of recommendations every week.

So my advice: don't try to automate this. Don't do this at scale.

Even if they never give out manual penalties for this, do you really want a bunch of spam about your brand out there on the Internet? However, I think it's equally as dangerous to ignore this tactic...