The Near Memo

Hosted by Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm

Marketing Entrepreneurship News

Website RSS feed

Episodes

273

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN-US

About the show

Exploring the big stories for the week at the intersection of local business & marketing across the spectrum of search, social and commerce. With Greg Sterling, Mike Blumenthal & David Mihm.

Listen to episodes

60 recent

August 14, 2026Episode 3055 min

Tactics for Building a Local Brand in the Age of AI Search — An Agency Panel

Send us Fan Mail Four agency operators join Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to close out the Near Memo brand-building series: Paula French (Search Influence), Joy Hawkins (Sterling Sky), Andrew Shotland (Local SEO Guide), and Matt McGee (SEO Savvy Agent). It's a tactics-first conversation about what "brand" means for a local business now that AI Overviews, LSAs, and ads have squeezed organic off the first screen. The panel gets specific: a startup's AI visibility jumping ~400% in a week off two press mentions, why third-party mentions now outweigh review count in AI answers, local listings as a cheap brand-mention engine, the reusable "fast expert" bio that scripts what LLMs say about you, "competitor jiu-jitsu" content, and why YouTube is both a top lead source and the most AI-proof play you can make. It closes on a warning: scaled content and scaled link building are what's getting penalized this year — foundational marketing is what's rewarded. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

August 7, 2026Episode 2929 min

AI Overviews, Brand Search & Local SEO: Cyrus Shepard on Earning the Click - from the archives

Send us Fan Mail We're on vacation this week, so we're re-running one of our favorite April conversations. It still speaks to our current series on brand in local, and a live panel on local digital brand strategy follows next week. Cyrus Shepard (founder of Zyppy) joins David Mihm and Mike Blumenthal to unpack what the Google antitrust trial, the leaked patents, and the API leak revealed about how Google really ranks: user click data. They walk through the three signals that matter — clicks, long clicks, and the "last longest click" — why brand search keeps correlating with rankings, and what AI Overviews are doing to the click ecosystem, including how local businesses can still earn (and satisfy) the click. Practical throughout: consolidating reviews and booking onto owned surfaces, using Search Console's branded-query filter as an AI-Overviews scorecard, and why a too-clickable title tag quietly costs you traffic. Be sure to listen to our series on branding. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

July 30, 2026Episode 2852 min

Legal Marketing in the AI Era: LSAs, Reviews, and Manufacturing Brand Demand

Send us Fan Mail Part 3 of the Near Memo brand-building series brings brand down to earth in professional services — specifically legal, where a client hires once in a lifetime, can't judge quality, and every ad on the screen looks identical. Gyi Tsakalakis, co-founder of AttorneySync, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal to talk about what actually moves the needle for personal-injury and other high-stakes firms. The throughline: you can't outspend a bad intake experience. Gyi makes the case for treating intake and even rejections as review-generation surfaces, signing prospects up before you qualify them, and manufacturing brand demand offline that you route back through Google Business Profiles. They close on AI — still a top-of-funnel research tool for most local consumers, while Google (and the GBP data ChatGPT scrapes) remains the last click. Watch Part 1 (John Jantsch) and Part 2 (Cyrus Shepard) for the general and technical sides of local brand. Links: - AttorneySync: https://www.attorneysync.com/ - EP 265 — Decoding Local Branding with John Jantsch: https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-265-decoding-local-branding-with-john-jantsch/ - EP 266 — Cyrus Shepard: What Local Brand Actually Means to Google and AI: https://www.nearmedia.co/ep-266-cyrus-shepard-what-local-brand-actually-means-to-google-and-ai/ - Michigan Auto Law "3K for Free": https://www.google.com/search?q=3k4Free - Kruger & Hodges, The Hometown Lawyers: https://thehometownlawyers.com/ - Lunch Hour Legal Marketing Summit: https://lunchhourlegalmarketing.com/ - Google ATLAS study: https://ai.google/static/documents/GoogleATLASv1.pdf Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

July 22, 2026Episode 2749 min

Cyrus Shepard Interview: What "Local Brand" Actually Means to Google and AI

Send us Fan Mail Cyrus Shepard, founder of Zyppy, joins Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal for Part 2 of the Near Memo brand-building series — this time on the technical side: how Google and AI systems actually model a brand, and what a local business can do about it. To Google, a brand isn't a feeling. It's an entity — an entry in a database, connected to your website, your Business Profile, and you. Cyrus walks through what strengthens those connections, why branded search volume is still the single best lever in SEO, and why the decade-old fundamentals came roaring back the moment AI systems started needing the same entity signals local search always needed. We also get into why ranking first no longer guarantees you're recommended, why Google stopped wanting content and started wanting evidence, whether llms.txt is worth your time (Cyrus says no), and the surprisingly low review threshold where a local flywheel starts turning. Plus: the cross-business referral tactic neither host had heard proposed before, and a plan involving an unreasonable number of pizzas. ▶️ Be sure to listem to Part 1 of this series, with John Jantsch on small business brand building Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

July 15, 2026Episode 2633 min

The 3-Step Trust Equation: How to Build a Local Brand That Customers (& AI) Trust

Send us Fan Mail What separates a commodity local provider from a business that easily commands premium pricing? In this kickoff to our four-part brand series, Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal are joined by marketing pioneer John Jantsch. John details how small businesses can harness real customer language using clinet interviews, reviews and LLMs to establish distinctiveness, why top-down strategic leadership is required to effectively implement AI, and how to navigate the emerging threat of "agentic flattening" as AI agents and structured protocols begin to alter direct website interactions. Streamline your marketing operations from strategy to final customer touchpoint. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

July 10, 2026Episode 2641 min

Ep. 264: Web Authenticity & The Agentic Future of the SMB Website with Raj Singh

Send us Fan Mail Are traditional websites dying, or are they just changing shapes? Hosts Greg Sterling and Mike Blumenthal catch up with serial entrepreneur and Mozilla VP of Product Raj Singh to discuss how AI search friction is changing the local web. Learn why small businesses must lean into "trust artifacts," how APIs and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) will surface local businesses to AI agents, and why human-in-the-loop authenticity is your best defense against algorithmic spam. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/

July 2, 2026Episode 2538 min

Beyond the Star Rating: Extracting Strategic Content Insights from Customer Feedback

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/

June 25, 2026Episode 2449 min

Ep. 262: Regulating the Digital Wild West: Inside the FTC’s Battle Against Review Fraud and AI Deception with Michael Atleson

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/

June 18, 2026Episode 2346 min

Google Maps' AI Shift: Why Brand Building, Reviews & Social Presence Are the New Local SEO

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/

June 10, 2026Episode 2235 min

Goodbye Traffic, Hello Sales: The New Playbook for Local SEO Visibility

Send us Fan Mail How do you build brand permanence in a local market when web attribution metrics are fading? This week, we dive into Part 2 of our post-Google I/O masterclass with Cindy Krum, Krystal Taing, and Greg Gifford. The panel shifts completely from macro trends to hands-on execution strategy. We explore why search traffic is splitting across social apps and niche forums, how businesses can produce narrative-driven video assets that anchor themselves in AI overviews, and the structural limitations of using automated AI tools to write generic content. Plus, discover an exceptional, compliant framework for optimizing customer review acquisitions that subtly prompts consumers to write comprehensive, high-value keyword reviews without violating platform terms. Subscribe to our newsletters and other content at https://www.nearmedia.co/subscribe/