When I worked at Google between March 2020 until Feb 2022, I worked on the Google Maps team helping enhance the Google Business Profile product. Specifically, I was responsible for helping get everyday users to upload photos and write reviews about local businesses.
I worked on a few parts of Google Maps while there:
I worked as a Data Scientist, which means I did a lot of analytics to help support the engineers who were building the systems. I was responsible for helping clarify if any of the changes that the engineers made had any impact on user behavior.
How does this related to SEO? So glad you asked.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is a fancy term for the following: Google has more data than they know what to do with because they crawl the internet constantly. And they need to figure out how to show you something useful instead of the 80% of the garbage that's on this beautiful thing that's called the internet (hey, one man's trash is another's treasure!). So SEO ranks those webpages in terms of relevance to your search result. They use AI to do it (hence, Silvermine AI).
I learned a lot about how Google ranks the data using AI (called Google Brain). They use powerful algorithms like Computer Vision to inspect a photo. They use thousands of offshore workers to quantify and label content on the internet - which includes photos. For example, $2/hour workers will sit all day looking through thousands of photos and label them "man", "storefront", "cantelope" and rank the quality "low quality" or "blurry". They then use powerful AI algorithms to then evaluate the very photos you upload to your business.
A photo uploaded by yourself or your customers would have the following data (assuming this is a picture taken from the street to show your business):
I kid you not - they have hundreds of qualitative analysis (quality_core, labels) which and photo/review metadata. It's absolutely incredible. And it's an absolutely, massively complex system that nobody understands.
See, most SEO experts know a lot just by guessing or learning by experience and learning from others. It's actually the SEO experts outside of Google who understand SEO perhaps better than Google's own engineers. It's like how an Influencer understands the YouTube or TikTok algorithms better than the people using it.
Why is that?
The same reason you own a business. We're truly an insane bunch...
I loved my time at Google and loved the people I worked with. But I've always wanted to take that refined skillset and own my own company. I decided for a few years to work at some startups because maybe I could get the benefits of owning my own company without the costs of all the managerial headaches.
But eventually, I've learned I actually love the managerial stuff. And I want to pursue the American dream of business ownership.
So I started an SEO agency to solve a problem I saw while working at GoogleMaps: so many businesses are flooded with so much noise every day they don't have time to keep their profile clean and up to date. For a minor monthly fee they could outsource this, be ranking higher, and getting more phone calls.
But when you're focused on payroll, serving your clients, managing letters from the IRS, getting your payment processor working for the fourth time this month, managing inventory, hiring or (if painfully necessary) firing that employee...it all adds up. Your dinky Google Profile is the last thing on your mind.
Until you hit a wall where word of mouth stops working. Then you need to expand online. Then you find a company like Silvermine AI.
Please reach out if there's any way I can help - even if it's a free consult to see where you are, ideate new marketing ideas, and finding ways to grow your business.
Let's grow.
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