Why Maptimal Matters for UK Lead Generation | James Dooley Interviews Paul Truscott (James Dooley Interviews Paul Truscott)

James Dooley: Why is Maptimal.com needed for UK lead generation? Today I'm joined with one of the co-founders of Maptimal.com, Paul Trostra, who is also known as the king of Google Maps. He is the legend when it comes to Google business profiles. But Paul, why is Maptimal.com needed for UK lead generation in today's era? Is it bringing leads? Are the Google business profiles bringing leads within the Google Maps or within AI?

Paul Trostra: The short answer is yes. I think every local business understands just empirically that Google My Business, as it was now Google business profiles, bring in more business generally than a website will. It depends on what it is, but if it's a fairly low ticket service that you offer especially, people tend to just look at the Google business profile, look at how many reviews you've got, look at the star rating and they phone. Often they won't even visit your website. So people have traditionally responded very well to Google business listings. Now it's more important than ever because those maps listings, whereas they used to live in two places, now live in five places. So they're now in AI overviews, they're in AI mode and they're in Gemini. ChatGPT also has its own. It's a blended thing. It pulls information in from both Bing and Google and its own training data. And then it will layer that on top of its own maps platform. I think it uses Mac, I can't remember the name of the Mac something or the other, but that's just the platform that it sits on. And they'll generate their own maps overview for you. So it's really, really important now to be in all those places so that wherever people are searching because they're not only searching anymore in Google's normal search and maps app, they're looking in all these other places. And so it's more important than ever that you understand how local from a maps perspective works because even in ChatGPT, they're borrowing a lot of the same architecture as Google and Bing have used in order to construct their maps overview. So yeah, very, very important, especially if you're a service-based business, if you offer services locally, it's absolutely vital.

James Dooley: For me, what I found strange, right? Well, not strange, but like, I didn't realize until I started to dig deeper into the Google Business Profiles and started to obviously launch maptomall.com was last month when we looked, and this was across 850 different industries, the split down was approximately 30% PPC, 30% was Google Business Profiles, 30% was organic SEO, and 10% was AI and social media, right? Now, it was depended, there was a lot more for Google Business Profiles where it was like locksmiths and the calls was mainly coming and stuff like our emergency niche was coming from the Google Business Profiles. But across the board, it seemed to be split three ways. However, it was only when I started to dig deeper with yourself that I started to realize, is the better that the Google Business Profile ranks, the increases the rankings of the website rankings and vice versa. So if I increase the SEO value of the website, it increased the Google Business Profile. But also now Google Business Profiles kind of integrate into AI overviews and in chat GPT. So it becomes an integral part, like if you're trying to do SEO or AO, you need to do Google Business Profiles alongside them too. It complements each other. Holistic marketing, being omnichannel and being omnipresent. And for me, that's the main reason why I was excited to launch mapsimple.com with yourself, because a lot of people go, oh, James Dooley, the king of AEO. It's only really since I then started to speak to you on the maps and that being pulled in and speaking to Peter Jones on local lead generation and his split as well, with how much he's getting from Google Business Profiles was for me to go, if I want to be the king of AEO, I need to integrate Google Business Profiles very, very quickly for local lead generation. What's your thoughts on that with regards to AI map pack? Do you think though, in time, the AI mode is gonna come in default within Google or in local search? Do you think anything else is gonna change with regards to, it looks like the other day, I've seen eight, I've seen a map pack before of three businesses. The other day, I seen eight Google Business Profile listings showing and only two organic. And I'm like, oh God, like this is not good for organic SEO. What's your thoughts on the future of Google Business Profiles for UK lead generation?

Paul Trostra: It's difficult to know what Google's going to do because I don't think they truly know themselves. I think they're watching people's reaction to what they roll out and then they'll make their decisions based on people's engagement with it. So it's gonna be led by the people's interaction with what Google are rolling out ultimately. But so far, what we're seeing in America is that Google is serving more and more AI overviews that include maps results for local queries. When it started with AI overviews, it was primarily informational queries. So you would get a little snippet of information at the top that kind of summarized what it is that you were searching. Now we're seeing it on full transactional searches. Like it's not uncommon to see a transactional search and it's showing AI overviews. And people might think, well, why would that happen? And it won't happen for certain things. So for example, if your business is defined by a query that is very, very narrow in scope, right? So when people search it, they only use maybe two or three variations of that query. Google will probably not show an AI overview for that because there's not much context to add to it. But if you just put in plumber, right? Google's not gonna know really what to serve other than it's just plumbers. But if you said, if you define what type of plumbing you need you're much more likely now to see an AI overview in the States, I don't know about the UK yet. And so as people's habits change with the way that they search, people are becoming more descriptive and using more natural language in the way that they search. You're gonna start to see more and more of these AI overviews being served. Once that happens, and if people like it and Google finds a way to monetize that, which I've no doubt they will, that you'll find ads creeping into that AI overview. I think we could easily see a day when the organic maps results disappear and you end up with just AI overview maps and Maps app. That could happen. If it does, I'd say about 99.9% of businesses currently aren't prepared for it.

James Dooley: Yeah, it's crazy. For anyone who wants more leads within the UK and you're looking for a UK lead generation agency, I would strongly recommend heading over to maptimal.com. Paul Truscott is one of the founders. He's an absolute legend when it comes to Google business profiles. We've got an audit that can be set up. We can then help to get more exposure within the AI overviews, within chat GPT, but also within Google Maps. Make sure you head on over to maptimal.com if you're looking for more inquiries within the United Kingdom. Paul, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you, James.