The Entity-First Future: Mastering Local SEO and AI Perception with Ben Foster

Ben Foster of Steady Demand, a Google Business Profile (GBP) product expert, explores the critical role of GBP, which can account for up to 70% of a local business's revenue and is linked to paid media like Local Services Ads. Foster details his journey from web development to specializing in local SEO after the deprecation of Google+. His core philosophy is an "entity-first" strategy, which means providing the database (Google/AI) with the correct semantic and contextual information about a business. Ben also shares a four-step strategy for managing a business's entity association, which involves actively searching for brand reviews, analyzing the sentiment overview, identifying negative citations, and using "positive and negative reinforcement" (feedback) to effectively retrain the Large Language Models (LLMs) that interpret a brand's holistic image.