Christian Hustle (00:01.282)
Hey, welcome back to the Local Marketing Beat brought to you by Uberall. My name is Christian Hustle. I’ll be your host for this episode. And we come back with a great episode. We’re talking about how to manage search, sentiment, and scale for restaurant brands and franchises. And for that, we have a great guest, Ari Nahmani, CEO and founder of Kahena. Welcome, Ari. I am thrilled to have you here.
Ari Nahmani (00:24.829)
Oh, it’s awesome to be here. Thanks for having me. It did, it did.
Christian Hustle (00:27.306)
Absolutely. it took us a little bit of time to get this in the books, which is all good. You know, it’s, the, there has to be some persistence and making it, making sure that this happens. We made it happen. So Ari, why don’t you, why don’t we start and tell us a little bit about you and Kahena. What do you guys do just for anybody that may not, may not be familiar with the brand.
Ari Nahmani (00:36.689)
But we made it happen. We made it happen.
Ari Nahmani (00:43.568)
Sure.
Ari Nahmani (00:48.189)
Sure, sure. So, you know, I’ve been in the search marketing world.
for I think about 20 years now, this summer, which kind of makes me feel old. And about 15 of those have been in the agency world and the agency I founded called Kahena. So Kahena is a global search marketing agency focused on SEO and PPC. That’s our core and what we’ve been doing for many years. And obviously more recently on AI search and how it affects both organic and paid search.
Christian Hustle (00:54.989)
Wow.
Haha.
Ari Nahmani (01:22.431)
And we’ve been really lucky to partner with some great brands, ranging from e-commerce to omni-channel hyperlocal search, which I think we’ll talk about today, as well as some B2B SaaS. So a wide variety of brands and targeting. And on the local side, from the very beginning, we had a great break and had an opportunity to partner with
some local, some big brands that then that experience allowed us to kind of piggyback and, you know, gain some experience with some other larger brands. So we started in the department store world and worked with Sears and Belk, you know, some larger department stores. And that was, you know, learning very quickly, you know, thrown in the deep end, know, multi-store location and, you know, e-commerce. And this is the early days, like 2016, 2017 of buy online, pick up in store.
Christian Hustle (02:07.853)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (02:12.877)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (02:20.158)
and all of that stuff. And then we worked with lot of retail and fashion brands.
Tillys and Hot Topic and Torrid, Bay Bay, BCBJ, retail brands that you might see in the mall. And then over the last, I don’t know, I’d say seven plus years, we’ve been lucky to work with some QSR, quick service restaurant brands. So Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, Smash Burger. So really awesome brands. We’re a boutique agency and I feel really lucky to have had that experience
Christian Hustle (02:35.106)
Okay.
Ari Nahmani (02:58.398)
because there are not a lot of consultants, agencies in the SEO world who get to kind of work at that scale, you know, the hundreds or thousands of locations. And there’s not a lot written online about the specific, you know, use cases there and like what might be happening algorithmically and so on. Like I think a lot of folks work on, you know, smaller…
Christian Hustle (03:06.253)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (03:12.066)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (03:22.584)
or a branch locations of a few locations here or there. But so that’s been really awesome. And I think that’s kind of given us a unique perspective on local SEO.
Christian Hustle (03:33.772)
Yeah. And it’s great. I mean, that’s, that’s exactly why you’re here. have several questions for you that I’m very curious. I was going to mention, mean, I went to a mall recently and all those department stores, mean, are nowhere to be found. Right. So it’s such a different atmosphere nowadays.
Ari Nahmani (03:44.987)
Yeah, yeah. Yes. And that’s been cool to kind of ride the waves of what’s been very, very popular versus things. And so we’ve seen the ecosystem change over the years, certainly over the last 15 years. But yes, that’s sad.
Christian Hustle (04:05.526)
What it, and it is sad. mean, it’s a whole different experience than back in the day. And why don’t we start there when we’re talking about those waves that you’re surfing or riding as up and down. What is, what is the discovery journey and what you’ve seen working with these large restaurant chains and franchises? What does the discovery journey looks like from your perspective? Right? Obviously me as a customer, I kind of have an idea. Everybody has their own journey.
Ari Nahmani (04:10.276)
Yep. Yep.
Ari Nahmani (04:16.132)
Yes. Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (04:30.619)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (04:33.99)
Yeah.
Christian Hustle (04:35.192)
But what are you guys seeing there?
Ari Nahmani (04:36.922)
Yeah, and this has changed a lot over the last five, six, seven years. So I think historically there was an even larger opportunity to show up in traditional search and bring folks to the website and experience that
Christian Hustle (04:41.091)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (04:54.906)
brand or that restaurant for the first time and explore their menu, maybe go on the phone or desktop, whatever, and then go and go visit the restaurant or just have that experience that’s native from the brand telling their story on their site, moving you down the funnel into maybe placing a first order and building loyalty program on the website. And I’m sure you’ve experienced that the customer journey, at least the introduction to that brand or that restaurant is how
happening on third parties platforms now, right? So whether that’s delivery aggregators, DoorDash and Uber Eats and Grubhub or review aggregators, know, like Yelp and OpenTable, right? So it’s just the experience is happening elsewhere. And so what that means for folks who optimize is that you need to kind of be everywhere and optimizing everywhere, right? And so that has really changed. And the other thing that’s
Christian Hustle (05:27.382)
Right. Yeah.
Christian Hustle (05:42.253)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (05:54.703)
changed is for repeat customers that a lot of the loyalty has moved to the app side, right? So the brand has an app and so much of that experience, you you get a text message
Christian Hustle (06:02.742)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (06:08.805)
to come back or like a coupon or whatever. So all that retention marketing is happening through the app vehicle. So when we see brand search decline year on year, it’s not just that the brand might be getting less popular. It’s that it’s not happening in Google. might be direct to app. So the challenge is trying to optimize everywhere, but also to measure that whole journey of where the customer is.
Christian Hustle (06:10.274)
Right.
Christian Hustle (06:24.833)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Christian Hustle (06:36.844)
I feel like in every two, three years, this comes up where the user journey changed again, right? And I mean, every three years, it just changes drastically, radically. And I’m just curious. You mentioned that you’re seeing a lot more of those less branded searches because there’s other avenues to find them, right? Whether it’s AI or you have your own, you know, the brand has its own app. You don’t even have to search. Just open the app, right?
Ari Nahmani (06:57.617)
Yes.
Ari Nahmani (07:03.751)
Correct.
Christian Hustle (07:04.154)
What is that looking like nowadays when you’re talking about branded versus non-branded searches?
Ari Nahmani (07:10.513)
Yeah, that’s great question, Christian. So it is true, and this is both for local SEO or all search, is that the pie of possible clicks is becoming smaller, right? So there’s just less search to website click pie, I guess. The size of the prize is smaller. That said, it’s also worth noting that even still today,
Christian Hustle (07:21.742)
Mm hmm. Right.
Christian Hustle (07:30.305)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (07:38.425)
for large brands anyways, I think for most brands, but for large brands, the majority of clicks that you’ll see in Google Search Console are from brand search. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just that if you’re a restaurant or you’re a local, you know, some sort of local brand, people are coming back to see you to get directions or look at your menu. And so the vast majority of search is going to be your brand.
Christian Hustle (07:45.899)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (07:59.247)
or brand plus menu or hours or coupons or some special or brand related search, let’s call it, right? So it’s like a product. So, some limited time offer product that you might have on your menu or whatever it might be. But.
Christian Hustle (08:07.042)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (08:17.479)
there’s still a lot of opportunity and on brand. So all of the near me search, right? Or, you know, all the local intent search or especially with AI search, people are searching longer queries. are getting more specific and there’s query fan out, right? So, you know, if you search something like, you know,
Christian Hustle (08:20.43)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (08:34.702)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (08:38.811)
I don’t know, best Mexican restaurants near me, query fan out might look for tacos, might look for burritos, it might look for like all sorts of, know, like top reviewed. so there is an opportunity to show up both in traditional and AI search in optimizing for non-brand search almost more than there was historically because of the way that what AI search does
in the mechanics of the back end of it, if that makes sense.
Christian Hustle (09:09.708)
Yeah. And do you think there’s still opportunity for brands to go after those unbranded slash near me keywords? Cause near me used to be big, right? Like five, six years ago, that was the biggest thing you could optimize. Everybody wanted near me keywords. What is your take on those today, right? With AI and all these tools, what is that looking like?
Ari Nahmani (09:22.265)
Absolutely.
Ari Nahmani (09:28.133)
Yeah.
I still think it’s a really big opportunity, especially it depends on your scale and it depends on what industry you’re in. you know, if you do some kind of niche part of.
Christian Hustle (09:34.158)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (09:43.87)
I don’t know, automotive repair, like, I don’t know, like you do something like frame straightening. I don’t know that that, you know, the near me is going to be a huge opportunity. And that’s true for any search market, but I definitely think it is a really important opportunity. And even if the exact match, right, of that query is not large again, because of AI search, I think it adds context around the user’s location. And, you know,
Christian Hustle (09:50.84)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (10:12.411)
We have the search engines, the LLMs, they have so much more rich data about the users. And I think that is why near me matters. So maybe it doesn’t look like stuffing near me in a title tag or in page copy. Although that stuff can still work depending on the use case. I still think there’s a lot of opportunity there and not just for like the head term. like pizza near me or fast food near me or, you know, whatever it might be. But also longer tail
Christian Hustle (10:16.653)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (10:42.335)
local intent queries. And that can get very informational. I think because user behavior is changing, it means that folks are more used to searching longer, more specific queries. Like…
Christian Hustle (10:45.272)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (10:54.861)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (11:02.829)
need a great reviewed burger place open at midnight near me, you know, whatever. So all of a sudden there’s a trust of the user that the search engine, the AI or LLM is going to return, is going to be able to process that based on context. And so I think it’s our job again, from an optimization perspective to make sure that semantically data structure
Christian Hustle (11:14.21)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (11:32.817)
which we can get into, that were set up to be able to inform the engines that, we matched those criteria.
Christian Hustle (11:41.645)
Yeah. And it was funny because you mentioned when we were optimizing for near me, I remember seeing meta titles on, Google search results that were actually quote near me, right. Instead of optimizing for the city or the address, they were, they were trying to hack it. Yeah. Yeah. business names. I don’t know if you remember. Yeah. There was a, there was a picture of the name of the company is dentist near me. And I took a picture and that picture caught on fire. This was like three, four years ago. went viral everywhere. And it was just.
Ari Nahmani (11:51.772)
Yeah. Or business names. Yes, a business means yeah, yeah, plumber near me.
Ari Nahmani (12:03.441)
That just scared me, right.
Ari Nahmani (12:10.324)
that’s so funny.
Christian Hustle (12:11.584)
It was hysterical and I went back to see, actually wanted to go into the dental’s office and see if they got any business from all these heat that got online.
Ari Nahmani (12:14.097)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (12:19.813)
I mean, I think it’s gotten harder to game the system in that way, but it doesn’t mean that you don’t have that in a natural way written on local intent pages. You may not want it on your brand’s homepage, right? But there’s a place for that. There’s a place for that, right? Or, right, I’m okay with non-branded driven
Christian Hustle (12:23.543)
Yes.
Christian Hustle (12:36.077)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (12:44.123)
keyword driven landing pages that are sub store location pages. So you may have the store location page and then having another page that’s sort of hierarchically underneath it that targets something specific. So if you offer breakfast, for example, you may want like a breakfast near me or a breakfast in city state landing page that is hierarchically, you know, under a local intent page or right that we call it or a city based page that targets specific keywords. We have seen
Christian Hustle (12:54.392)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (12:58.603)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (13:14.047)
that still work. know a lot of people say, Google will figure it out or AI. But the truth is, is it still works if you do it in a smart way that’s not spammy and you provide value to the user. Little landing pages that show the amount your restaurants that fit in that city that match that criteria. Maybe certain locations don’t offer breakfast or do offer certain things. Right. So that that becomes complex. But when done well, it’s very powerful. And
Christian Hustle (13:18.062)
Mmm.
Ari Nahmani (13:43.29)
One thing that we’ve done is A-B testing.
Christian Hustle (13:45.741)
Okay.
Ari Nahmani (13:46.002)
Right? So like this only really works at scale. But if you’ve got a lot of locations, you could say, hey, let’s try implementing this thing on Google Business Profile or in overall, for example, only modifying a certain district or region or write some group of subset of your locations and trying something different, changing your cat, your primary category, adding secondary categories, changing your description.
Christian Hustle (14:04.504)
Yes.
Ari Nahmani (14:14.749)
changing the landing page from which you connect those Google profiles or changing text. We’ve done this a lot where we’ve chosen experiment, launched it on some subset of stores. If it works well, great. Maybe making a decision to roll this out nationwide. And we did that. One of our biggest successes was doing this for the primary category being fast food. And it…
Christian Hustle (14:31.491)
Right.
Ari Nahmani (14:40.773)
It was awesome. tried it. We kept expanding it. And so I really recommend people to think about A-B testing on the local side, because especially with non-brand config, you know, changes, don’t do it at scale right away. Don’t just flip a switch. That could be really risky. Start small and then scale up if it works.
Christian Hustle (14:42.274)
That’s awesome. Yeah.
Christian Hustle (14:54.413)
Right.
Christian Hustle (15:00.022)
and then basically compare the, because it’s the perfect A-B testing, right? It’s the same timeframe, same exact holidays, business days, weekends, but at the same time.
Ari Nahmani (15:10.343)
Correct. Listen, there are different regions of the US that may search differently, and things work differently in different areas. So that’s why I suggest trying a specific area and then maybe a region. So you’ve got to take into consideration based on what you’re testing for. But it’s been a sort of unlock of ours.
Christian Hustle (15:14.84)
True. Yeah.
Christian Hustle (15:24.75)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (15:33.411)
Yeah. Now you mentioned local pages earlier. That’s something that we bring up. I am a big fan of local pages, but I am feeling that, brands caught up to it. So they started launching local pages. A lot of brands have it, but to me, I’m in a V2 of local pages needs where that local page has to be more than just your address and the phone number and a couple of pictures. Like there needs to be, first,
Ari Nahmani (15:37.382)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (15:57.149)
100%.
Christian Hustle (16:02.018)
things that are different, right? They can’t all just be clones with just changing the address. And then, and then you tell me what you guys are seeing, but to me, I want to see the menu of that specific location because if it’s a burger chain and they don’t have the burger nationwide, well, I want to know if they have it at this specific location that I’m going to go. How does local pages, you know, I’m calling it V2. What do they look like with this brands that you’re working with? What are the best practices?
Ari Nahmani (16:06.183)
Correct.
Ari Nahmani (16:18.225)
Correct.
Ari Nahmani (16:26.833)
That’s a great question. When done right, they serve as the first experience that somebody has. And I think the problem was, that, you know, when users search and they land historically, these V1, as you put it, were really basic. And you’re like, this isn’t what you want to see when you come into a restaurant, right? Virtually. What you want to see is, okay, the location, the hours, sure. Maybe some reviews, the menu, make sure that the menu is correct for that
Christian Hustle (16:48.046)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (16:56.797)
location because not if it’s franchise based maybe only participating franchises have certain things that have been advertised on TV or online right so you have these limited time offers or these special menus not every McDonald’s or not every Burger King or whatever is gonna have specific right so making sure the data is correct having unique text about that place mentioning the the location but also maybe this what we call second city or second location because there’s probably a colloquial name
Christian Hustle (17:02.669)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (17:27.028)
or intersection or something else that users are familiar with instead of the address. So if I search, I don’t know, best pizza near Disneyland, right? so making sure that Disneyland is in your Orlando branch in the description, right? So.
Christian Hustle (17:32.91)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (17:45.63)
But then also having FAQs, right? Is breakfast still, when is breakfast served until, you know, is the ice cream machine broken? No, that’s a McDonald’s joke. But yeah, but like these things that people care about that we know that they search, combine that
Christian Hustle (17:48.566)
Mm-hmm, yeah.
Christian Hustle (17:55.31)
the
Ari Nahmani (18:01.915)
with queries so that the FAQ schema and so on can work there. And as I mentioned, I think having maybe some other links to other local intent subpages, right, from that page, or bringing people across the experience. One other thing I didn’t mention, at the top, what do most people are coming for?
Christian Hustle (18:03.246)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (18:14.049)
Exactly.
Ari Nahmani (18:21.563)
to get directions or to order online, right? And so if you offer it natively, make that front and center huge call to action. If you don’t, then give links out to all the aggregators that you work with, right? Give it a frictionless experience at the top for people that care about, nobody cares to read a whole paragraph of text right away. At the top, give the option.
Christian Hustle (18:25.058)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (18:41.046)
Right. We, we, they don’t want to, they don’t want to read the whole story of the company on a local page. Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (18:46.845)
Right, right. But you know, if they scroll down, give them more rich information about what they’re finding, know, especially if you have a story, if you’re more of a local mom and pop or you have a small chain that’s like, tell your story with a video or something. But I think people miss that. They miss the whole, wait a minute, this is not just a directions page. This is the first experience that customers have from search or from maps.
Christian Hustle (19:09.933)
Right.
Christian Hustle (19:13.196)
And we have, yeah, and we launched our gold LPO certification, shameless plug for our Uberall academy, if you haven’t checked it out, go check it out. But there’s a lesson where we talk about what is that new CRO optimization? What is that conversion rate optimization looking like nowadays? Yeah, back in the day it was like test the button location, the color, the what does the button say?
now is more about aligning the customer journey, right? Is like, what did AI responded for them to land on this page and what is the page supposed to do? So if they, you know, if they went and found you an AI and they said, you can order it online. Well, your page needs to be able to order it online, right? So that is kind of what you’re saying, right? Is like, make sure that you’re very aligned and you’re almost grabbing that customer and walking him down the journey that you decide.
Ari Nahmani (19:45.671)
Correct.
Ari Nahmani (19:53.319)
Correct. Correct. Yes.
Ari Nahmani (20:03.655)
Correct. And I think this is where SEO consultants, agencies, search marketers, we have this rich data
from Google Search Console and so on. We should be segmenting. You can add a UTM parameter in Google Maps or through Uberall to scale to all your places so we know where this traffic’s coming from. We know it’s Maps versus Google. And we can see what they’re searching, right? We can see keywords. We still get some non-breakthrough. So we turn to our customers, we turn to the brand and say, I think you guys are thinking about A-B testing and conversion rate optimization on the main site and the menu. think about how many people first land
Christian Hustle (20:27.895)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (20:41.769)
on location pages, on store pages, we should test.
conversion metrics, you know, if somebody lands on this and we change the calls to action or we change the layout on mobile and does that lead to a better down funnel click out to an aggregator or order online or whatever or driving directions. So that’s another A-B test I think is worthwhile is that conversion rate optimization because we have so much rich data about understanding who the customers are, what their intent is as they land on this first experience.
Christian Hustle (20:58.573)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (21:16.256)
I think part of the, that’s this data that you’re talking about, could be reviews and sentiments, right? What are people, thriving about, but what are they complaining about? Right? If, they’re complaining about the lining, your drive through, or they’re complaining that, you know, you have to call to make her to reserve a table. I mean, listen to those carefully. What are you guys seeing on the sentiment side of things? I know it’s a big thing in AI. Is there any particular that comes to mind?
Ari Nahmani (21:22.759)
Yes.
Ari Nahmani (21:33.574)
Right.
Ari Nahmani (21:39.144)
Huge.
What comes to mind are the strategies to try to improve. One thing that has been massive is this diversity update, right? And I don’t know how many people really know about this or pay attention in the general world of SEO, but in local search, especially in large brands, this was a massive change in late 2024, early 2025. The TLDR version is that at first it was meant to only allow one of your URLs to show up
the SERP, either in maps, the map pack, or in traditional results. But then it kind of morphed into
basically improving the diversity of results in the local pack. So showcasing these local heroes, this pizza shop or this local great restaurant that is known in the community and has great reviews probably, very active, high recency, high velocity of reviews and of course quality. Whereas if you’re a big chain,
Christian Hustle (22:27.79)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (22:46.513)
Who’s writing, you kind of know that chain, right? You’re not likely to write a review. The reviews you get are probably negative because who stops to write a review? If it’s a local place that’s wonderful and new, you’re gonna get a lot of reviews activities. But if it’s a major nationwide chain, everybody knows who they are. Why do I need to write a review? I know what I’m getting. It’s consistent, I love it, I’m gonna get it.
Christian Hustle (22:49.336)
Yeah.
Christian Hustle (22:53.314)
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (23:08.741)
and those that have a bad experience or want to just be not nice are going to write on there. So how do you change that? Well, one thing I think, I don’t know if you’ve seen these NFC review tap cards. So this is, mean, I guess a lot of people seen this in local businesses, but.
Christian Hustle (23:21.43)
Yes.
Ari Nahmani (23:26.083)
That’s very helpful depending on like if you have them. It depends on if it’s a sit down or quick service and so on. But like having your servers be armed with these and even incentivizing when you have a good experience, you know, you’re going to get a good tip or you know that it’s like a good experience. Bring that with and say, hey, we get a lot of feedback. If you know, I think you guys have had a great time. If you wouldn’t mind just tapping this with your phone and it’ll pop open up a Google Maps review or the post purchase email that you’ll get online or so on. You know, they’re like,
Christian Hustle (23:54.176)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (23:55.96)
here’s your confirmation, you can trigger depending on various factors, right, a review that they can just click from their phone and go right to Google Maps. So we need to increase the likelihood that people who have good experiences are going to fill out these reviews, especially if you’re a larger chain or an established business.
Christian Hustle (24:11.758)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (24:18.587)
Because of this diversity update, reviews matter even more. And to your point, with AI, it is another factor, not just from Google, but from all of the third party listing sites. And I can get into that if you want, but around AI search and third party sites and just how different that is now. But anyways, reviews are huge.
Christian Hustle (24:26.851)
Mm-hmm.
Yep.
Christian Hustle (24:39.766)
It’s yeah. I mean, and they’ve been huge for a while. They just continue to be huge. Right. It’s like they’re, they’re getting to this point where like, they’re just as vital as your visibility as people finding you. Because if your reputation is not on point, you’re just going to scare people away.
Ari Nahmani (24:46.789)
Yes, yeah.
Ari Nahmani (24:53.979)
Yes. Yes.
Correct, and so that includes making sure you have a team to respond to reviews because those reviews are important. And all of that UGC, all of that user generated content, including your response, gets ingested and trained upon to the LLM and to the AI search. So like, not just for the great reason of making sure that people are scrolling, see your response and see that you’re a cool brand or that you care, but also for the LLMs to train on the fact that you consistently say, we pride ourselves in ABC,
Christian Hustle (25:11.938)
Yes.
Christian Hustle (25:23.734)
Yes.
Ari Nahmani (25:27.977)
know actually that’s not true our you know ours are accommodating for x y and z so reviews are really important but
Christian Hustle (25:28.066)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (25:36.398)
And it’s to your point, right? The way that the brands respond, AI is noticing those responses to see is, Hey, are you defensive? Are you actually acknowledging issues, right? When they get it reviews and then over time, they’re going to monitor to see if things change, did you fix it? Or we continue to see the same trend and you’re just ignoring it.
Ari Nahmani (25:55.966)
I think that like in a simple way, the words used in user generated content, reviews, responses to reviews across the web, we know have an outsized impact on grounding AI search responses. So you can say what you want about your brand on your website. Great. You can do it on your owned media third party, you know, your YouTube page and, you know, all the other social media profiles. Great. You can work with your PR and so on to mention
Christian Hustle (26:14.414)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (26:25.919)
specific things, especially in, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the semantic triples, right? You want to write in a specific structured way, subject, predicate, et cetera. You want to write in a specific way that is basically great LLM food, right? It’s structured in a certain way.
Christian Hustle (26:27.383)
Mm-hmm.
Christian Hustle (26:40.621)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (26:43.593)
And you also want to respond to reviews mentioning this, this whatever your USP, your unique selling point, right? Whatever your value at is that you’ve defined, like we have the best Char-Broil burgers known nationwide or whatever your claim to fame is, but you do that across your different product verticals and you, everybody knows PR, social, SEO team, review team, that these are the statements that we say about ourselves. It’s like taglines, but not just one.
Christian Hustle (27:12.365)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (27:12.481)
Multiple sort of AI search driven taglines and that those words of third party sites reviews user generated content places. That is so powerful. I cannot tell you how powerful that is because when you ask not just where’s the best look, you know, near me.
Christian Hustle (27:28.866)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (27:29.009)
But when you say, me more about this brand or compare this thing to this thing, or I’m thinking about taking out my wife, my husband for a great date night, what should I think about? And it’ll say, if you’re looking for this kind of stuff, these are the best. If you’re looking for that kind of stuff. So you need to be known not just locally, nearby and rank well, but you need to now with AI Search rank for specific context, contextual areas.
Does that make sense? Like it’s all about defining who you are and saying that in all the places that matter.
Christian Hustle (27:59.437)
Yeah, yeah.
Christian Hustle (28:06.03)
Almost like prove it right? Here’s the evidence. This is what we believe in. This is what we do every day. I have one more question that I really wanted to hear your opinion on. And that is as we talk about scale, obviously SMBs have different problems, but we’re talking about, you know, a hundred, 500, thousands of locations. What have you seen that breaks up first? mean, whether it is, you know, data hygiene.
Ari Nahmani (28:07.771)
Yes. Correct.
Sure.
Christian Hustle (28:30.718)
visibility sentiment, right? What do you think? And from your experience, what do think breaks first?
Ari Nahmani (28:36.317)
That’s a great question, Christian. So data hygiene, data accuracy, think historically, you know, back in 2016 and we working with brands like Sears and so on, that was a nightmare. But then companies like yourself, like Uber all came around and sort of handled a lot of that source of truth and data, name, address, phone number, NAP, you know, propagation across all the third party listing sites and so on.
Christian Hustle (28:49.613)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (29:04.445)
So that was huge. And Google had a nightmare prior, and now they’ve gotten better about fixing conflict, data conflicts, and allowing you to override them and so on and so forth. So I almost think that data accuracy has gotten way better because of the tooling. It’s still a challenge, and it’s still really important. You need to stay on top of closing and opening stores. You could have 15 new branches and five closed branches in any given month, right? So that’s, you got to keep up on that. But
Christian Hustle (29:08.973)
Yeah.
Christian Hustle (29:19.629)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Ari Nahmani (29:34.253)
I would say reviews is a really big challenge when you’re at that scale, just because of the things I mentioned. And then technical issues, right? So when you start customizing and you start wanting to do some of the things that I mentioned.
Christian Hustle (29:40.973)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (29:52.559)
You know, any update to the restaurant location page template, that’s you got to be really careful because if you make one bug, the scale is massive. The revenue drops could be potential. And so you have to really weigh out every change that you make and think about the scale. You can’t just roll it back quickly like Google and the other providers and take time to like recognize that across the hundreds or thousands of stores. So I would say everything becomes bigger.
Christian Hustle (30:03.406)
Yeah
Christian Hustle (30:21.997)
Mm-hmm.
Ari Nahmani (30:22.075)
But because of platforms and tooling, data accuracy is not the challenge. It’s more about tech and reviews and being careful about making changes because the impact is great, which is great for opportunity. But the risk is also great reward, but also great risk.
Christian Hustle (30:36.622)
Right.
Christian Hustle (30:40.108)
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, Ari, I want to thank you personally for making the time and hope, you know, still happy that we got to learn more from your insights, what you’re seeing with these brands and you made the chance to, or had the time to chat with me today. How can people connect, follow you, or even reach out to Kahena if they manage a large brand or things like that.
Ari Nahmani (30:54.245)
Absolutely.
Ari Nahmani (31:00.925)
Appreciate it. Yeah. So you can go to kahena.com, K-A-H-E-N-A, neon sign right behind me. And then you can just find me on LinkedIn is probably the best. just Ari Nahmani and LinkedIn and Kahena’s on LinkedIn as well. That’s probably where we’re most active. But yeah. And thanks for the opportunity, Christian. It’s great to nerd out, geek out about local search and AI. It’s great to meet you.
Christian Hustle (31:07.159)
Right?
Christian Hustle (31:22.796)
Yeah, absolutely. Hey, can keep geeking out here for another hour or so, but then it’ll be a long episode. Yeah, we’ll save it for a part two. Absolutely. All right. Well, thanks everybody for watching. We’ll see you on the next episode.
Ari Nahmani (31:29.405)
We’ll save the readers the, yeah, yeah, we gotta keep it short. People’s attention to really short, so.
