Send us Fan Mail

Local SEO strategy often gets stuck playing a quantitative numbers game with review counts and velocity benchmarks. But what happens when you treat the collective text of your market's customer reviews as an ongoing, free focus group? This week, Celeste Gonzalez joins us to show how tools like Apify and Natural Language Processing (NLP) allow local agencies to scrape hidden market trends from Reddit, TikTok, and competitor Google Maps profiles. We break down exactly how to extract actionable copywriting blueprints from customer pain points, avoid confirmation biases, and keep your business answers consistent for modern AI search engines.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

What happens when federal regulators take on fake reviews and predatory AI applications? This week on NearMemo, Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal host Michael Atleson, former Senior Attorney at the FTC’s Division of Advertising Practices (now with DLA Piper). Michael walks us through the internal strategy behind the landmark Consumer Review Rule, the nuances of investigating multi-million dollar local business listing fraud, and how lawyers are using novel product liability theories to bypass Section 230 immunity. We also dive into the political shifts impacting AI enforcement, state-level legislation targeting companion bots, and the future of tech regulation in an era of congressional gridlock.

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

Send us Fan Mail

Are your local search frameworks ready for a probabilistic, AI-driven Map interface? This week, Greg, Mike, and local search practitioner Craig Burton map out the massive influx of automated algorithmic categorization structures rolling across Google Maps globally. From "Trending This Week" hooks to deep "Curated with Gemini" vertical subcategories, Google is testing dynamic, phone-facing carousels that ignore standard business profile naming and keyword densities. The team discusses the mechanics of how Google tracks localized user interactions, reviews, citations, and even point-of-sale data to create these lists, establishing a new competitive framework called "Evidence Optimization

Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/