Most algorithm hacks work for a while, then stop. In this Localist Lab session, host Carrie Rollwagen welcomes marketing consultant Laine White to explain why. Laine’s answer is simple. Google, Meta, and AI tools all want the same thing: a good experience for real people. The hacks that last are the ones that give people that.

Laine starts with a story from 2012. Home sick from high school, she learned she could gain followers by commenting on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram posts. She got to about 5,000 followers. But her posts only got a handful of likes, and years later Instagram wiped most of those accounts. The lesson stuck. Quick tricks can build something that disappears.

Then she gets into three algorithm hacks that still work. On social media, saves and shares now count for more than likes, so make posts worth keeping. On your website, write FAQs in your customers’ words. Make each answer clear on its own, so ChatGPT can pull it. She uses the Ladybird Taco FAQ page to show how. On Google, fill out every part of your Google Business Profile and ask for reviews. Laine also tells how Breakout Games won in Birmingham with great service and thousands of reviews.

Before you try new algorithm hacks, Laine suggests three questions. Why is this popular? Would it still be worth doing if the algorithm changed tomorrow? Does it fit the brand? She closes with five steps you can take this week. In the Q&A, she covers Google Business Profiles for businesses with many locations, where FAQs belong on your site, and who to follow to keep up. Her big idea: serve before you sell.

Algorithm Hacks Topics Covered in This Episode

Why Google, Meta, and AI assistants all reward a good user experience
What happened to the 5,000 Instagram followers Laine gained in 2012
Why most hacks are short-term fixes, not long-term strategy
Why likes got cheap and saves and shares matter more
How story stickers, polls, and question boxes signal interest
How an HVAC company or car detailer can make save-worthy content
Why LLMs skip FAQs that rely on context, and how to fix it
The pronoun flaw of FAQs, using the Ladybird Taco website
Relevance, distance, and prominence in Google Business Profile ranking
Why your address should match on your website and your GBP
How Breakout Games used customer service and reviews to win
Three questions to ask before trying any hack
Why mass-produced AI blog content hurts more than it helps
Five things to do before next week
Managing Google Business Profiles across many locations
Where FAQs belong on your site and why to label them FAQ
Who Laine follows to keep up with algorithm changes

Mentioned in This Episode

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Connect with Laine White

Laine White is a marketing consultant in Birmingham. She works with small businesses on social media, websites, and search, and shares deep dives on marketing on Instagram.

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Thanks to Our Sponsor, Infomedia

The Localist is sponsored by Infomedia. They are a Birmingham-based web and digital marketing company. They help small businesses grow online.

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Localist Lab is a free event series for small business owners. It meets on the third Thursday of most months at Saturn in Avondale. Free tacos and coffee too.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Below is the full transcript of this Localist Lab session of The Localist with Laine White. This transcript is provided for accessibility and SEO.

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Carrie (00:11): Hi, I’m Carrie Rollwagen, host of The Localist. What you’re about to hear is a live recording from one of our Localist Lab events. This is when we bring in experts to talk about practical insights on marketing for small businesses. This session was recorded in front of a live audience, so you may hear some room noise and some shuffling around during the Q&A. Hopefully that just makes you feel more like you are actually there. For more background on the speaker or to view slides from the event, check out our show notes, or you can also grab a ticket there to our next event. I hope you enjoy this conversation.

Carrie (00:51): All right, I think we’re going to go ahead and get started. If you’re still grabbing coffee and tacos, that’s cool. Go for it. Well, good morning. Thanks so much for being here. My name is Carrie Rollwagen. I’m the host of The Localist podcast, so hopefully a lot of you are listeners. On The Localist podcast, we bring on small business owners most every week to talk about, basically, how do you run a small business. People talk about their successes, their failures, their story. I’d love it if you find us wherever you listen to podcasts or on YouTube.

Carrie: On the podcast, we typically bring on small business owners and talk to them about their experiences. But here at Localist Lab, we bring on experts to talk about topics that are relevant to small businesses and creators and marketing managers. I think that probably fits a lot of you here today, so thanks for being here.

Carrie: Our expert today is Laine White. Laine is head of client strategy at Uptick Marketing. Laine is fantastic. I definitely recommend you follow her on Instagram if you haven’t already. She’s @imlainewhite, I-M like the letter M. I was just talking about this before with somebody here, but Laine does deep dives on things that make your social media better and your marketing better. For example, she did a deep dive on pinned posts where she shows a lot of great examples and tells you how to make those. If you haven’t followed her already, she’s definitely worth a follow.

Carrie: She’s going to speak today on hacking the algorithms. We are going to be talking about social media, but we’re also going to be talking about Google, LLMs, all of that good stuff. This topic really came from Localist guests and from people here today, because if you’re posting anywhere, it feels like this is a game that I don’t know the rules of, right? I feel like there’s a trick here, but I don’t know what it is. And Laine is going to help us navigate that.

Carrie: Localist Lab is brought to you by the Lovoy family of companies. That includes Infomedia, Uptick Marketing, which is where Laine’s from, Tempo, and Infomedia Studios. What that means is whatever you do in the digital space, whether it’s websites, marketing, photo, video, social media, anything like that, we can help you with. If you’re interested in that, find me or somebody who has a similar name tag afterward, and we’ll introduce you to somebody who can talk that out. But for now, here’s Laine.

Laine (03:34): Hi, guys. I am so excited to be back on the Localist Lab stage. I am very loud, and I was telling somebody beforehand that I kind of put my loud voice to use. But if you can’t hear me, let me know.

Laine: Today we’re talking about hacking the algorithms, and I’ve got to be honest, the algorithms are actually really interesting and fun for me to study. But for most of you, if you are in the business space or the marketing space at all, algorithms are probably a curse word to you. So many of the people that I know spend all this time talking about how in the heck do we figure out these algorithms? How do we get around them? How do we use them? And why do they keep us up at night? So we’re going to talk about some of that today.

Laine: Originally, I have to confess, I actually wasn’t going to give you any hacks today. I really wanted to help you think through why hacks work and why they exist, so that you could have a framework to go after. But Claude told me that was going to be really mean, because the talk is about hacking the algorithms, and you might leave feeling like you don’t have enough to do or to learn from. So don’t worry, I’m going to give you some hacks too. But I’m also going to teach you a little bit about how to decide if hacks that you’re seeing out there, or that you’re being sold, are actually valuable and worth your time.

Laine (04:56): First, I’m going to tell you a story about 2012. Instagram came out in 2011, and this is actually a photo from my actual Instagram in 2012. Instagram was the first social media platform that I fell in love with, so I’m going to use it as a reference point a lot today, because I just really love Instagram. It’s a really fun platform for me.

Laine: When it came out, Instagram was new. It was a very different social media platform. We were all used to MySpace and Facebook and Twitter, back when it was called that, but Instagram was the first really visual platform that we all had access to. It’s funny, because the photos you see on Instagram now are very different from the junk that I had on my own Instagram.

Laine: I was in high school in 2012. I got the flu and I was stuck home sick and bored to death. We didn’t have on-demand Netflix, so I couldn’t go watch reruns of all my favorite shows. I had to find something to do while I was lying in bed. And for some reason, and if you know me, this is probably not surprising, I got it in my head: I want to figure out this whole Instagram game thing.

Laine: When Instagram first came out, not everybody had hundreds of thousands of followers, and having 1,000 followers really meant something. It doesn’t mean a whole lot now. Every college kid has thousands of followers. But at the time, it was like, how are we going to get these followers, and how does this work? Virality, and even influencing, was just a very different world than it is now. So there were these hacks that you could do to get a bunch of followers really quickly.

Laine (06:33): One of them was kind of silly. Kylie Jenner’s account was the biggest account on Instagram. I wasn’t a big Kardashian fan or anything like that, but somehow I learned, and I honestly don’t know how, because we didn’t have ChatGPT to tell us these things, that if you go and comment underneath Kylie Jenner’s latest Instagram post, you will get a bunch of followers.

Laine (06:58): This whole thing turned into an adventure. You could comment like for follow, or follow for like, or comment for comment, and there were tons of people who would go to these comment sections to find other people to follow, or people would just follow everybody in the comment section. It was kind of a silly hack. Obviously that’s a dumb way to earn followers, but I was just trying to play the game and see what could happen.

Laine: Over the course of a couple of months of playing around with this, I went from just my friends, which was maybe a couple hundred people, to around 5,000 followers on Instagram. Again, not a big deal to us now. By the way, I don’t have 5,000 followers now. But at the time, it felt really big. It meant something, and I kind of got the bug. I was like, ooh, this is really exciting. There’s a way to game the system, and we all love a quick shortcut, right?

Laine: The problem is, I had 5,000 followers, but if you noticed on that last picture, there were only five actual likes on that post, because the content was really, really boring. Years later, Instagram wised up and said, OK, there’s a lot of bot activity. There’s a lot of junk activity. You used to be able to literally buy followers. Instagram penalizes this now. The issue was that all those followers didn’t actually translate into anything real. I wasn’t selling anything at the time. I really was just playing the game to play it. But years later, Instagram wiped a lot of those followers. It’s why I don’t have 5,000 followers now.

Laine (08:35): That is one of the biggest things I want you to remember: hacks often are a short-term solution. They’re not necessarily a long-game strategy. So the hacks we’re going to talk about today are going to be more focused on getting you to a place where it’s a hack you can use that will serve your audience long term. That way, you don’t build up something, feel really excited about it, and then watch it just disappear later.

Laine: These social media platforms, and honestly LLMs, Google, Bing, whatever search engine you’re using, want to quantify a good user experience. They want to figure out how to predict what their audience is going to like. That’s why, when they see these hacks and tactics that we all use, like buying followers, they don’t want that, because it’s not real. All those people who followed me for my Kylie Jenner comments didn’t care about my content at all. That is why a lot of these hacks don’t work long term. When you’re thinking, oh, I want to hack the algorithm, Instagram, Facebook, Meta, YouTube, whatever platform you’re using, they are saying, I don’t want you to use a hack.

Laine: I love to explain the why behind all of this, because what I love about understanding the why behind something is that in the future, when things change, you can still take this knowledge and use it.

Laine (09:54): So first, I want to talk about why these platforms are focused on keeping people on their platform. Google, Meta, AI assistants, all of them want to keep users coming back. For Google, they want to make sure that you find exactly what you’re looking for, so that they can keep charging people like me hundreds of thousands of dollars to run ads on behalf of my clients. The more people go to Google and trust it, the more likely they are to go to Google again, as opposed to Bing or ChatGPT or something like that.

Laine: Meta is the same way. Their goal is to keep your attention as long as physically possible. They want to keep you coming back to Meta. And to be clear, Meta is Instagram and Facebook. If someone has a bad experience on a social media platform, they’re going to jump ship and go to another one.

Laine (10:43): We sometimes like to say we’ll give up on social media altogether, but most people just tend to move to another platform, so they’re all competing with each other. Meta makes a lot of their money off of the ads that people run, but if people aren’t out on the platform, those ads are not going to go anywhere.

Laine: The AI assistants are the same way. Their goal is to give you exactly what you’re looking for, and give it to you easily and quickly and as efficiently as possible. There’s a variety of reasons why they want that. Obviously, they’re training their models. They’re also learning from your data, and they’re also stepping into the ad space, like ChatGPT, for example.

Laine: All these platforms want to make sure that a real person can go to the platform and get what they need. They are incentivized to give people what they need, and that knowledge is insightful to all of us who are trying to figure out what to do. If we can help Google get people where they need to go, and they have a good experience when they get there, Google’s happy. We’re happy. And, hopefully, our purchasing customers are happy as well. So I want you to remember the why behind all of this, because that’s going to help you understand why these hacks work.

Laine: So first, let’s talk about some specific hacks. Remember, Claude said I was going to be mean to you if I didn’t give them to you. So if you’ve got a notebook, this is the time to start taking notes. We’re going to start with social media, because I think a lot of us think about algorithm hacks in a social media space.

Laine (12:14): Social media started as a primarily recreational platform. Yes, especially you folks who are here listening to this conversation, you probably get some education from social media, and you probably shop on social media too. But the biggest reason we’re on social media is entertainment. As a business owner, it can feel really jarring for your content to show up in a largely recreational space, because all of a sudden it’s like, oh, I’m here to have fun, and now you’re showing me some Google review that you reposted in a Canva graphic, and I don’t really care about that. That’s in my way. I want to swipe away from that as quickly as possible. It’s why those posts don’t tend to get a lot of traction.

Laine: So as a business owner, what do you do to get your posts in front of people in a recreational space in a way that holds their attention, or actually makes them want to see your content again?

Laine (13:07): What I like to think about is how expensive an engagement metric is. We all know that likes are a metric we can look at to see if our posts are performing well. The thing is, likes have gotten pretty cheap. What I mean by that is it doesn’t cost you a lot to like a post. When I see my friends or fellow business owners that I really love and respect, I’ll like their post even if I don’t read the content all the way. And to be clear, Instagram, Facebook, whatever social media platform you’re on, they know. They have the data for how long a post was viewed before that like happened. All of those data points go into the algorithm and help predict the future success of what’s going to happen there.

Laine: Because likes are so cheap, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, whoever, have stopped optimizing toward likes exclusively, because they don’t mean as much as they used to. The metrics that are more important now than ever before are a save or a share.

Laine (14:05): When you post something on the internet that is save-worthy, so someone decides to hit the save button or save it to their phone somehow, the signal we’re giving to the platforms as the user is that we like this enough to keep it and go back to it. Now, let’s be honest. I save a lot of posts that I never go back and look at. But that data is so valuable to these algorithms. Remember, the goal of the algorithm is just to predict what a good user experience is. It’s to try to find the data patterns that predict if people are actually going to enjoy some content in the future.

Laine: When you produce content that is save-worthy or share-worthy, that sends a signal to the algorithm that the content is valuable to the person who saved or shared it. And it actually makes it more likely for your next content to be shown to them.

Laine: Shares are my favorite thing right now. When you save something, it’s kind of a private thing. When somebody saves my content, I don’t know who saved it. I just know someone did. But a share is very public and personal. When you share content with someone else, you’re saying, I endorse this, and I like it. For us business owners, it is one of the most valuable things we can have, because sharing, whether to someone else privately, to a story, or to another social media platform, is literally free advertising for your business.

Laine: So this is what’s going on with the algorithm: Meta is reading these saves and shares as a predictor of you liking the content again in the future. When you’re creating content, I want you to think about making content for your business that is save-worthy and share-worthy. To be clear, every single one of your posts is not going to get a ton of saves and shares. You do have to mix it up. But if you have educational insights from your business, that’s valuable. For example, what I’m doing right now is the kind of content I post on Instagram, because it is save-worthy and share-worthy. Carrie mentioned it earlier. It’s stuff that people want to keep or look at again later, and that’s really valuable to me, because the next time you hop on Instagram, if you’ve saved or shared my content before, you are statistically more likely to see my content again.

Laine (16:31): This is also true on Instagram Stories, for example. If you use the little stickers, like a poll or a question box, it may feel a little gimmicky to you. Does everybody really want to vote on everything all the time? Probably not. But by someone taking that action to engage with your content, they’re sending a signal to that platform that they want to see your stuff again. It’s why you should use those engagement tools whenever you can. Comments, of course, are also very valuable. There are a lot of different metrics that are important, and I will always tell people to optimize toward things like website clicks more than anything. But I want you to know that the reason people produce content that is save-worthy and share-worthy is that it gets them in front of people again in the future. That’s what we’re going for.

Laine: Here’s the moral of the story. We’re going to talk about the hacks themselves and then the why behind them. And the why here is: I want you to make something worth keeping.

Laine (17:40): This can be a little tricky depending on the kind of business you are. It’s easy to do in an educational space, but how does an HVAC company make something worth saving or sharing? I won’t get too far into the weeds, but all of us are industry experts in some way. I’m going to be honest, my husband does a lot of our HVAC stuff, like changing the filters. I know nothing about any of that. But if I saw a post online that reminded me how often I should change my air filter, and that it’s really good for my AC system to do that, that might be helpful and insightful, and I’d want to remember that. Am I going to go look at it again? Maybe not. But by signaling to the platform, even if you’re running ads too, those ads are going to be more likely to be shown to someone who engaged with that. So that’s why I want you to do that. Are we tracking so far? Does that make sense? OK.

Laine: Now we’re going to pivot a little bit away from social media, because I want to show you that there are hacks in all these spaces. It’s not just social media. It’s pretty obvious that hacks exist on social media, but there are tactics that you can use for your website and AI search as well. A lot of people have been talking about getting your website to show up in LLMs, because, as we all know, so many people are going to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude or Grok, or whatever your favorite LLM is, to get the answers they’re looking for. And remember, Google and the LLMs all want to make sure they’re serving people exactly what they’re looking for.

Laine (19:17): Most of you have probably heard by now that if you want your website or your brand to show up in LLMs, or even on Google, FAQs are a really good trick. And I’m not just going to tell you FAQs today, because you’ve probably already heard that. I feel like we’ve all beaten that horse to death at this point. What I want to talk about is how you implement your FAQs.

Laine: I’m going to use an example from Ladybird, because we’re all eating our Ladybird tacos, and they’re magical and wonderful. I wanted to test this theory with you.

Laine (19:57): First, you need to understand a little bit about how the LLMs work, and this is the fun stuff about the algorithms to me. It’s probably boring to you, but I’m going to share it anyway, so you get why this stuff works and can start thinking this way. LLMs have to be really efficient. We all know that because we’ve heard all the drama around the data centers. There are big ecological concerns and a lot of political concerns involved, and we’ve all probably heard the stories about the Greater Birmingham Humane Society and the data center involved there. So we all know that the efficiency of LLMs is really important to everyone right now. LLMs have to be efficient, because the more energy they use to get an answer, the more expensive it is, and the more impact it has on the environment.

Laine: Our brains actually work very similarly. Our brains are trained to think efficiently. When an LLM goes to your website, it doesn’t look at it the way a human does. Instead, it’s crawling for the keywords or clues it already knows about. It knows that an FAQ page is probably going to have answers to questions.

Laine: So I actually typed “Does Ladybird deliver in Birmingham” into ChatGPT to see what pulled up, because Ladybird actually has this in the FAQ section on their website. When I typed this into ChatGPT, it gave me the links, the sources of where the information was pulled from, and the FAQs were not cited in the answer. The answer was actually kind of ambiguous.

Laine (21:14): ChatGPT said something along the lines of, well, yes, they probably deliver in Birmingham, but there are some differing opinions on how far they deliver. It wasn’t a super clear answer. And I was confused, because Ladybird did what they were supposed to do. They have the answer to this question in their FAQs. So let’s look at how they actually wrote it on their website.

Laine (21:38): The FAQ on Ladybird’s website says, “Do y’all deliver?” And the answer is, “Yes. We have a $300 order minimum for catering deliveries. Otherwise, you can order delivery via our online ordering through DoorDash.” This feels very branded and relevant to Ladybird’s personality, and I actually really love it from a brand personality perspective. But the problem is, when an LLM goes to Ladybird’s website, it starts by finding the website, because that’s obvious, and then it’s going to look for the simplest explanation it can parse into something it can regurgitate back to you. What happens is it takes a chunk out of the context of the website.

Laine (22:15): There’s actually somebody who calls this the pronoun flaw of FAQs. When we’re on the website, human beings know that contextually we’re talking about Ladybird when we say y’all. But the LLMs are going to be smarter eventually, don’t worry, they’re just not quite as intuitive as we are about this yet. They’re not as good with that contextual relevance, because it burns extra energy. So even though this question was directly answered on the website, the LLM didn’t pull it, because it wasn’t written in a way that made it obvious to the LLM that the answer was there.

Laine: Here’s how I would do it differently. In their FAQ, I would say instead, “Does Ladybird deliver?” And the answer, because I’m going to be really strategic about this, would be, “Yes. Ladybird delivers both catering and online orders in Birmingham, 12 South Nashville, and the Gulch in Nashville. For more information about our catering, click here, and to order online, click here.” By the way, they have a fourth location that doesn’t deliver, and that’s why I listed out those locations specifically.

Laine: What that does is, one, if a human being is actually using your website, they’re going to get their answer just as clearly as before. But now the LLMs can also pull from this, and they know the specifics: three of the locations deliver, and the other doesn’t. I didn’t include the catering minimum there, because that’s not necessarily super relevant in this moment. In this case, I was asking about delivering food for me, not a whole catering order. But if someone then says, “OK, what about catering?” the LLM knows from the chunk it already pulled that there’s a link to catering elsewhere where they can get more information. I’m making it easy and efficient for the LLM, which means I get to control the narrative and make sure the answer the LLM gives is actually what I want it to give.

Laine: So your job with your FAQs isn’t just to have them. It is to write them the way people actually ask and answer the question, and to make sure that each little question and answer can be pulled out of your website and still make sense without all the additional context. Ultimately, the why behind this is that you’re answering the question they actually asked, in the way they asked it. When you do that, your FAQs are more likely to show up in the LLMs, and you get to do a better job of controlling the narrative. So there’s another little hack for you.

Laine (24:40): All right, the last hack I’m going to give you today is about your Google Business Profile, because I think Google Business Profiles are one of the most important basic hygiene things for local businesses to do.

Laine (24:48): And no, the hack isn’t “have a Google Business Profile.” If you’re not doing that, I don’t know what you’re doing, and you should certainly start from the beginning again, because your GBP, your Google Business Profile, is incredibly important. But there’s a thing a lot of people do: they get into the back end of Google and set up their Google Business Profile, and it’s kind of complicated, to be honest. Google doesn’t make it super user-friendly, and a lot of us don’t really know what they’re going for. It’s sort of like filling out a survey, or when somebody asks you an ambiguous question. It’s like, what are you looking for here? So a lot of times I see business owners fill out the parts that are really obvious to them, like their hours or the name of the business, but they leave out other important details, like a really rich description, or posting. You can actually post on your Google Business Profile like you post on social media.

Laine (25:50): Google has actually told us, and this is one of the few things they’re transparent about, how ranking is determined for Google Business Profiles. It’s a combination of three things. The first is relevance: how relevant your Google Business Profile is to what the person is searching for. That’s where your categories, your services, your attributes, and your description can help you. I want you to be really thorough with that, and really intentional and strategic. It’s not just listing your hours. It’s also thinking about what people are going to search when I want this Google Business Profile to show up.

Laine: Distance is the one you can’t really control. Your Google Business Profile is based on your address, and if someone nearby searches, they’re probably going to find what is nearby. I love that question from my clients when they’re out of state, and they’re like, “Why don’t I see my Google Business Profile?” And I’m like, “You’re 100 miles away.” It’s not really a thing you can control. Although, pro tip: if you write your address with “St.” instead of “Street,” it should match what’s on your website too.

Laine (26:49): The last thing is prominence: reviews, and how much the rest of the web backs you up. That’s why, again, it’s important for that address to match in both places. These platforms are going to get smart enough to know the difference eventually, but for now, in the short term, we’ve got to play that game a little bit.

Laine (27:10): I want you to fill this stuff out really thoroughly and think about posting on your Google Business Profile. I actually used to advise people not to waste their time on it, and posting on your Google Business Profile is definitely optional. But it is a helpful extra bit of information you can give to the platforms, to the LLMs, and to your user, which is the most important thing to me. You can talk about a promo you’re running, an event you have going on, or something seasonal. We could post about Localist Lab on our Google Business Profile. That would be a fun thing to get in front of people, and it’s another place on the internet where Localist Lab is talked about. So when you search for Localist Lab, we show up in multiple places, because we have the rest of the web backing us up.

Laine (28:07): And those reviews are incredibly important, for almost all businesses. I put my husband’s business at the bottom because I talked about it last time, and he’s actually here in the audience today, so I can’t tease him about his business too much. My husband owns a car detailing business, and the only marketing he’s really ever done, other than a little dabbling in social media and really, really great customer service, is a website and a Google Business Profile.

Laine (28:18): Conveniently for him, he’s a mobile detailer. He loves not having to drive super far for his jobs, so that local Google Business Profile gets him a ton of business in our nearby radius. It’s really helpful, and he maintains it and keeps it updated. When his hours change, he changes them immediately, and he makes sure that information is always accurate and available, so that when people are ready to buy from him, he’s right there. It’s not a hard search, and he doesn’t have to do a whole lot of work.

Laine (28:49): So the moral of this story is: be easy to find and easy to buy from, specifically through your Google Business Profile.

Laine: I want you to think about all these hacks, because I can give you hacks all day long. There are a ton of different ways to do this, but the hacks will change. A couple of years ago, I was telling people that posting on your Google Business Profile didn’t matter as much. And we’ve all talked about hashtags before. Hashtags used to be so big. That was one of the tactics to get a lot of people to follow you. If you’re a TikTok person, everybody was hashtagging the For You page. There are all these little things like that, but then they go out of style, because the algorithm says, now I have a ton of people who are playing the game to play the game instead of to serve the audience.

Laine (29:58): So I want you to think about the pattern behind all three of the whys these hacks work. Remember, one is making something worth keeping, worth saving or sharing. Another is answering the question they actually asked, in the way they asked it. And the last is being easy to find and easy to buy from. What this really comes down to is serving your audience well. Serving them before you sell to them.

Laine: This slide right here was going to be my whole talk. But remember, Claude said I was mean. This is really what I want you to know: if you serve your audience well before you ever ask for their money, you are more likely to be successful. You are more likely to rank. You are more likely to show up on social media. You are more likely to convert. You are more likely to resonate with someone. When you’re in the posture of serving someone, you think more about them and their experience. That’s really hard for those of us who are business owners, or in the marketing or sales space, because we do think about our audience a lot, but we can’t stop thinking about it from our own perspective. And you just have to. The best way to know your audience is to think about their experience. The pattern in all of these hacks is: I want you to serve before you sell.

Laine (31:07): None of this is an exclusively digital idea, either. I pulled this quote from Luke, one of my colleagues at Uptick, because I thought it was such a great translation of how the real world can be mimicked in the digital world. He said, “Organic search is just word of mouth with a digital hat on.” All of this is literally just customer experience.

Laine (31:14): I used to work for an escape room, Breakout Birmingham. Shameless plug. It was so much fun, and we worked really, really hard on our customer service. There were other escape rooms that we all would play that we thought were probably better quality than the Breakout rooms. They’re great, to be clear, and I still really love the Breakout games. But we realized that customer service was maybe more impactful than having a cool escape room. I was in all the Facebook groups for escape room people for a while, and a lot of escape room people are so excited about the escape rooms, and so passionate about what they’re doing, that that is their sole focus: I’m going to make the best escape room ever.

Laine (31:54): But what we learned at Breakout is that a lot of people just want to have fun. They’re not playing every escape room in the world. They don’t know the difference between this escape room and that one. They just want to have a great time, and they want to feel really heard and valued every time they come. So we worked so hard on our customer service, and then we asked people for reviews once they came and played with us. There were competitor escape rooms in Birmingham that did not do as well and did not have the bookings we did, because eventually our Google Business Profile was covered with thousands of Google reviews. Breakout is actually a big company. They’re all up the East Coast, and they also own Activate and a couple of other businesses. And they became one of the most, if not the most, successful escape rooms, because they didn’t focus on having the best escape rooms ever. They focused on having the best customer service and making things easy to buy, easy to find, and enjoyable once you’re there. Then they made sure they asked people to talk about it online.

Laine: So when you see a hack in the future, I don’t want you to just jump on it because it seems like a quick fix. Spoiler alert: there are no quick fixes in marketing, and most of the time, if it is quick, it’s probably only going to serve you for so long. When someone tries to sell you a hack in the future, when they say, “This is the next big thing. If you do this, you’re going to go viral overnight,” I want you to ask yourself these questions.

Laine (33:17): First, ask: Why is this actually popular? How is it serving an audience? What does it give to people? I think about this in the context of those social media trends that are very silly and aren’t really a sales pitch at all. Lately it’s been, what did you look like in the ’80s? That’s not really selling anything, but it serves people, because it’s fun and entertaining.

Laine: I actually shared this with Carrie on a podcast recently. You hear a joke for the first time, and you think, wow, that’s a really great joke. I’m going to tell that joke at the next party I go to and take it as my own. If you can make it your own, great, that works. But once everybody starts retelling that joke and everyone’s doing it, the joke isn’t really funny anymore. That’s a great example of how these hacks work. When you’re the first one to do it, or one of the first, or you put your own original spin on it, maybe you tell the joke really well, you can get away with borrowing other people’s hacks. But for the most part, if you just keep regurgitating what everybody else is doing, it may not work for you long term.

Laine (34:24): Another question I want you to ask is: If the algorithm changed tomorrow, would I still do this? It’s like the hashtag argument. Are we going to post a ton of hashtags when that may not be why people care next month or next year? Hashtags are not nearly as relevant anymore. They’re not completely useless, but they don’t work the same way they used to. I don’t post 30 hashtags on every one of my posts anymore.

Laine (34:54): I think of this example often. A couple of years ago, when AI started coming onto the scene, there were so many people who would try to sell you a service where they would publish hundreds of AI articles on your website or blog to try to get you to rank better. Somebody actually called my husband one time, and I begged him to put it on speaker so I could hear the sales pitch.

Laine (35:05): They were typing questions about his business into ChatGPT, and you could hear them typing and then reading the ChatGPT answer. And they kept saying, “We’re going to help you rank so much because of all of these posts that we’re going to put on your website. You’d never be able to do this manually on your own.” And it’s true. It would have been a really fast way to get a ton of content out. The problem is, we’ve all read those articles. We’ve clicked on something and read a clearly AI-written article, and it’s just boring. As the user, it doesn’t do anything for me. So maybe it helps your business rank, but now all the traffic going to your website is stale, or it jumps off immediately. That’s also a bad signal, and we at Uptick refuse to do that.

Laine: I’m not saying AI can’t be a good tool for content creation. There are ways to do it, and you can listen to some past episodes from Carrie about how to do that, and Janna as well. But instead of just using AI to raw-generate content, what if you use it to make you more operationally efficient, so that when people actually land on your content, it’s still valuable? And sure enough, this summer Google came out and said, if you just keep spamming your websites with content, we’re going to deprioritize your content, because people don’t actually like it. It’s not fun.

Laine (36:19): The last, and arguably the most important, question I want you to ask is: Does this feel aligned with my business and my brand? If you’re doing a hack that’s trendy, but it feels really weird and out of context for your business, it’s not going to serve you. Just because it made so-and-so go viral, or another local business did it and got a lot of traction on their post, doesn’t mean it’s actually going to sell to anybody. If the hack you’re trying doesn’t feel aligned with who you and your business are, it’s not a good use of your time.

Laine (37:09): Now, I hate going to talks like this and walking away without a whole lot of actionable steps. When I consult with my clients, I’m always very intentional about giving them just enough that they can do on their own without overwhelming them. Unfortunately for me, because I really want you to remember the serve-before-selling thing, this is probably going to be the best part of this talk for you. I wanted to give you five things you can actually do before next week to impact your business. So I’m going to walk you through these real quick.

Laine: First, you can open your Google Business Profile and fill in every service and category. It’s free. It takes 20 minutes. And if you’ve already done that, you overachievers, you can start posting on your Google Business Profile. Do some research. Make sure it’s strategic. It doesn’t take that much extra time, but it’s a little thing you can do to help. No, it’s not a gimmick that’s going to blow your business up overnight, but it’s something good you can do.

Laine (37:41): Another thing I want you to do is write down the five questions your customers ask you the most. If you work in your business, you hear it. What are people asking you? What are the questions you hear over and over and over again? And write them in their words. That’s the most important thing: how do they ask this question? My coworkers know I say this often: it’s the curse of knowledge. Don’t word it how you would word it. Word it how they would word it, and that literally comes down to the language they use. I’m not going to say on the Uptick website, “How do I rank for SEO?” because a lot of my audience knows SEO, but that’s not really how they talk.

Laine (38:19): They’re going to say, “How can I get my website to show up online?” or “How can I get my website to show up higher on Google?” For the record, that is SEO, but I’m going to say it in their language instead of mine. So I want you to do that and put it on your website, if you already have an FAQ. And if you’ve already done this, because many of you are good at this, go back and read those FAQs individually and ask, can we pull this out on its own?

Laine (38:47): Another thing I want you to do is look at your last five posts and ask if anybody would save or send those posts to someone, or if they actually did. If not, I want you to think about how you can turn the content you produce into something save-worthy or share-worthy. I’m not saying go do a bunch of those giveaways where it’s like, send this to five friends. In fact, Meta is actually deprioritizing that, and they don’t want you to do it. It’s sort of against policy. I’m not saying people don’t still do it, but it sort of is. Instead, think about how you could pivot your content into something that’s savable or shareable.

Laine: I told my husband the other day that he should do this with his business. As a car detailer, I’m going to be honest, I don’t really care a whole lot about the chemicals he uses to clean my car. But when he gives me a link to an Amazon supply list of things he keeps in his car to keep it clean, I’m like, oh yeah, I didn’t think about the little thing that goes in the crevices to keep crumbs from falling down. I had no idea. Now I have a link for where to buy it. And every time I look at this thing I bought for my car, I think of the guy who recommended it to me. Those are the kinds of things you can do to make your business save-worthy and share-worthy.

Laine (40:01): I also want you to read your last 20 reviews and write down the words that repeat. This really is your value proposition. Think about the Breakout story. Is it that the escape room is so great, or is it that people really loved working with you? The words people actually use to tell you what they like are the things that are most important. That value proposition is what your clients or customers care about, and you want to get that in front of them in more ways and tell more of that story.

Laine (40:28): And then, lastly, ask your customers for a review. Statistically, you are more likely to get a review if you ask in person, and if you ask quickly after their experience with you. The best time to do it is when they’re already having a great experience and they tell you they’re loving it. It feels really awkward. I know it’s miserable, but it really works, and everybody knows this is the way the world works now. So ask your customers for a review, especially your raving fans. Say, “I’m so grateful for you sharing that with me. It would help my small business so much if you would post about us or share a review on our Google Business Profile. I want to find more customers just like you, and that means the world to me.” The worst that can happen is they don’t do it.

Laine (41:13): At the end of the day, there is no version of any of this where you win by beating the machine and losing the person. If you’re ever doing a hack just to win the algorithm, and you forget about your user, your person, you’re not going to win. So go serve somebody. It is your most effective selling and marketing strategy. That’s it.

Carrie (41:27): Good job! I think we have time for a couple of questions. Laine mentioned this before, but she and I just did a podcast together. We have one that’s live about how to use AI without the internet turning on you, and we also have one coming up on social media, basically, is posting wasting my time? Spoiler alert: it’s not. We get into what platforms you should be on, and we really deep dive into trends and stuff like that. Those are on The Localist podcast. But do we have any questions? Yes.

Audience Member (42:04): We have locations coast to coast, I think 35 different locations. On Google Business Profile, I struggle. I’m a one-woman team, and they’re saying we’re not showing up locally. Because I’m in Birmingham and they’re in California, I’m having a hard time balancing that and figuring out how to serve them in that capacity when they’re all over the country.

Carrie (42:43): For the recording, the question is about Google Business Profile when you have a lot of different locations. Do you need a Google Business Profile for each one of them? How do you keep up with posting, and how do you handle that when you have a lot of locations?

Laine (43:02): OK. Some of my answer is going to frustrate the rest of your team, because one of the biggest ways you can make sure those Google Business Profiles show up is getting those reviews and asking people for them. For the record, I’ve done this with Breakout, where I’ve talked to teams and said, if you want more business, more hours, and more staff, the best way to get it is more reviews. You can help them from your position with things like email marketing or text messages that go out asking for reviews, and really make it easy for people to leave reviews.

Laine: But you’re right, it is a little tricky, because not all of those Google Business Profiles are going to rank at the same level, even if you put the same amount of effort into each one. Competition has a lot to do with it. If you’re looking at a specific location whose Google Business Profile just isn’t getting the love another one is, I encourage you to go look at what competitors are in the area and see if they have way more reviews. A little healthy competition is a great way to motivate a local staff. We used to dog on the other escape rooms in town. They’re great, by the way. There’s nothing wrong with them. But we used to say, they’re starting to get more reviews than us.

Laine (44:38): Other than that, some of it is just the natural game. There’s only so much you can control. But citations are a great way. Basically, that means making sure Apple Maps, Yelp, and all those other platforms that users may use, even if not as much, link between your Google Business Profile and those aggregate sites. I don’t remember if Luke is here today. He’s not. Bummer. You should find Luke Richey on LinkedIn and DM him a question about that too, because he does a lot of the citations for us at Uptick, and he talks about it a ton. We also have some stuff in our learning center about that that may help as well. Another question? Yeah.

Carrie (45:18): The question is, does it matter where the FAQs are on your site? And I would also add to that: does it matter if they’re labeled FAQ? Could you answer it in a blog or something like that?

Laine (45:30): That’s a great question, especially because I see people who have hundreds of FAQs on one page on their website, and that’s kind of obnoxious to the user. I always suggest going for your user first. The way I think about web pages is: answer the questions people have in the order that they have them. StoryBrand has some good templates for this, if you want a reference. I think they do a good job of thinking it through the right way. At the top of your page, it’s, what are you doing? That’s what your headline is for. Then, why do I care? There’s the value proposition. Then, wait, who even are you? There’s the explanation of your business. Then, oh, OK, I kind of like this. How does it work? There’s your three-step process. The FAQs often sit at the bottom of the page, because you’re going to answer their questions and give them all the information first. The FAQs are there for people who just aren’t satisfied yet and need a little bit more information.

Laine (46:45): Now, LLMs are not really reading things the same way a human is, and I do actually like calling it an FAQ, or frequently asked questions, because it’s a good signal to the LLM about exactly what it’s looking at. It’s sort of like when you go to a restaurant and they have a bathroom sign that is cute and clever, but you can’t totally tell which bathroom is the right one. It’s way easier when they use the standard graphics we all see all the time, and LLMs work the same way. So, unfortunately for all of us creatives in the room, I do think it’s good to say FAQs. But you can have FAQs on multiple pages of your website. They don’t all have to live in one place, and I think that’s a helpful way to do it.

Laine: To your point about answering questions in a blog, I actually want you to use your FAQs as blog posts and as social content. That is one of my favorite things. Carrie was talking about pinned posts earlier. I encourage a lot of businesses to have an FAQ post at the top of their social media, because, at the end of the day, the reason LLMs care about FAQs is that people care about them. Those of us who don’t like reading them will never get to them, and that’s fine. But if you make them available for people who have those questions, they can get the answers pretty easily.

Carrie (47:47): The question is, for social media specifically, how do you stay up to date with the algorithms? I follow Laine, but how do you stay up to date?

Laine (47:57): Which works great until my five-year-old starts kindergarten and I ghost the internet for three weeks. There are a couple of different people I like to follow for that. I was actually just talking with Hannah about who we follow on LinkedIn. Hannah, what was the one you suggested for social media? Annie-Mai Hodge. OK, so that was one I learned today. On Instagram, I love to follow Adam Mosseri. He is the CEO of Instagram, and I go to him first, before anybody, because he actually knows the why and what they’re building behind the scenes. His advice is always going to be good. There’s one I follow called Girl Power Marketing. Sorry, fellas. It’s great, though. Even if you’re not a girl, you’d probably enjoy it.

Laine: But I do think it’s good to find the people you really enjoy consuming content from. I think that matters almost more than the information, because in today’s day and age, we’re all going to hear the same things eventually. So find people on the internet who are enjoyable for you to follow, and follow them on the social media platform where you spend the most time. I love Instagram, so I follow a bunch of people on Instagram. That way I see it naturally, and I don’t feel like I have to go do a bunch of research. I’m kind of a Type B personality, so it really annoys me to have to keep up. Some people will build a Claude skill that tells them the latest stuff every day, and that works for them. I’m too lazy to do that. But find it where you’re excited about it. I share a lot of those to my stories, so Carrie’s right. If you want to find some new folks to follow, I’ll share some pretty soon.

Carrie (49:26): OK, I think we’re going to wrap up, because we’re up on an hour here. Thanks again to Laine, and please follow The Localist podcast. This is the Alabama Twisters, their jiu-jitsu team. They’re my most visually compelling guests, so I always use that. We just had Battle Republic on on Tuesday. We’re going to have the Greek Food Festival on, so that’s a little bit of a different one. And then the next week, Laine and I have that deep dive into social media, and we also talk on that episode about how to source those FAQs, so follow us.

Carrie: This is actually the last Localist Lab of the season. We take a break in the fall and winter because everybody’s pretty busy, so we will see you back next season. This episode will release as a video, so if you know anybody else who you think would enjoy it, you can find it at infomedia.com/events. It’ll be there, along with any of the other ones we’ve had this season. It’s also on our YouTube, and our YouTube handle is infomedia.com, which is very difficult to actually get your fingers to spell out. So find us there, and all of our past events too. We’ve done Localist Lab seasons over the past two years; those are there as well. Keep listening to The Localist podcast, and we’ll see you next season. Thanks.

Carrie: Thank you so much for listening to this Localist Lab session. Again, if you’d like tickets to the event, check out the show notes. The tickets are free, and we would love to see you there. And as always, whether you’re buying from a local business or running one, remember that what you do makes our community stronger every day.