Why are so many businesses visible on Google yet receiving fewer and fewer phone calls? We talk about it with Joy Hawkins
Welcome back to SEO Confidential, the series where we sit down with the most renowned and authoritative SEOs on the international scene to analyse the changes that are redefining online visibility and the factors that today determine the survival and growth of businesses in search (and answer) engines.
Today we do so by hosting one of the most respected and listened-to figures in the international search marketing landscape: Joy Hawkins.
Founder of the SEO agency Sterling Sky Inc. and the mind behind the Local Search Forum (an online community dedicated to Local SEO professionals from all over the world), Joy is no armchair academic: she is someone who lives in Google’s “trenches” every single day. As a Product Expert on Big G’s official forums and a speaker on the most prestigious stages – from MozCon to LocalU – she has developed a surgical ability to separate real market trends from hearsay or, worse, paranoia.
With Joy we talked about facts, steering clear of obscure technicalities. About the paradox of those who have visibility but no longer receive phone calls, about extortion through fake reviews, which is becoming a parallel industry, and about how real the risk is of building strategies around “AI Overviews” that, for now, look more like a shop window than a revenue engine.
Reading this interview means stepping outside the “easy click” mindset and approaching business management in a more mature, conscious way. Whether you are a consultant or a business owner, the answers you will find here can genuinely help you be ready when the rules change once again.
“Waves of negative reviews are one of the clearest signs of an organised action against a business”
There is an issue few people say out loud: many businesses depend on a platform that can change the rules without notice, cutting leads and calls from one month to the next. What is the most common mistake you see companies make when building their online presence?
A pattern I often notice among business owners is the tendency to react too quickly to changes. As soon as they notice a shift on Google, many go into emergency mode and immediately try to work out a new strategy.
In reality, in most cases it pays to pause for a moment and calmly observe what is happening. When a change emerges in the SERPs or in performance, it is often wiser to wait a week or two to understand whether it really is a stable trend or just a temporary fluctuation.
Many fluctuations are in fact short-lived and tend to settle back on their own within a few days. A more patient, less impulsive approach helps you avoid rushed decisions, save time and cut out unnecessary worry.
More and more businesses report the same paradox: stable rankings, seemingly intact visibility, yet leads and phone calls in sharp decline. When this happens, what do you think is the most serious misreading that business owners and consultants keep making by looking only at rankings and reports?
Ranking reports will not give you the answer here: analysing changes in SERP features will.
I wrote about this recently to explain why we were seeing a strong downward trend in click-to-calls on Google Business Profiles. The moment you start looking at how the SERPs have changed over the past year, everything becomes clear.
We are seeing a huge increase in the number of ads present, in the size of those ads and in the features they include. At the same time, we see Google removing call buttons from many mobile search results.
The result, naturally, is a drop in click-to-calls in the local pack.
To get cited by AI-powered answer engines you need “consensus” across multiple sources, often outside your own site, which is why PR, Reddit and YouTube become part of the strategy. Where do you draw the line between legitimate visibility and manipulation of the ecosystem, and what signals do you expect Google will use to punish those who push things too far?
Google seems to be starting to target content created for purely commercial or promotional purposes (as Lily Ray has also noted), but it still has a long way to go.
Lately, the amount of purchased comments on Reddit has been insane. The mechanism is fairly simple: an account joins a discussion and openly recommends a specific company or service. For a moderator who knows the platform well, these profiles are often easy to spot and block. The problem arises when communities are not properly moderated: in those cases spam finds fertile ground and tends to spread quickly.
It remains hard to see how Google could handle a phenomenon like this at scale. Reddit, after all, manages to contain it thanks to the work of volunteer (flesh-and-blood) moderators who manually review discussions. Without a human oversight system, monitoring and filtering this content becomes far more complicated.
Buying comments on Reddit, in the end, is not very different from buying fake reviews. And yet many agencies today seem to use this practice with remarkable nonchalance. From an ethical standpoint, it is a questionable choice and a rather worrying signal.
More and more businesses find themselves under attack from waves of fake reviews, detailed and coordinated, that can destroy reputation and revenue in a matter of days. From your perspective, how structural is this problem, and how much is Google really underestimating the economic and psychological impact it has on small businesses?
Google has actually gotten slightly better recently at fighting this problem. If a sufficient volume of reviews comes in all at once, the system manages to detect it automatically and remove them.
Recently a dedicated form was also introduced precisely to address these situations. I recently wrote instructions on what to do if you are hit by a large number of negative reviews.
When getting reviews removed depends almost entirely on the owner’s ability to report, insist and “make noise”, isn’t there a risk of shifting the responsibility for safety from the platform operator to the people who suffer the consequences?
Yes, unfortunately the responsibility has always fallen mainly on the business owner.
Based on the data you have analysed, what are the concrete factors that make a review “more relevant” in Google’s eyes, and therefore more visible over time on a Google Business Profile listing?
The factor with the biggest impact is the presence of a photo in the review. Reviews accompanied by an image tend to remain visible on a Google Business Profile for longer.
I conducted an analysis on this topic and I also listed here the other factors that help reviews stay on a Google Business Profile for longer.
In recent months you have been documenting coordinated attacks of fake reviews with genuine extortion dynamics. What are the recurring signals that allow a business to immediately understand it is not facing simple negative reviews, but an organised attack?
It usually all comes down to volume. When many negative reviews arrive within a short period of time, it is often the sign of a coordinated action. A fairly clear clue is the presence, in some reviews, of references to having contacted the company: this kind of recurring wording points to an organised attack.
It is also worth watching out for another rather suspicious dynamic. It can happen that, right after a wave of negative reviews, an online reputation management company “coincidentally” contacts the business, offering services to remove precisely those reviews.
From the cases you have analysed, it emerges that Google, in most cases, does not act on a single spike but on a set of behaviours repeated over time. What are the clearest operational signals that should tell a business today that its review acquisition strategy is entering a risk zone and could lead to the profile being suspended?
Google can also step in on a single spike, as long as the volume is high enough. If, for example, ten negative reviews arrive all at the same time, they are more likely to be removed than if only two appear.
In my entire career I have seen a suspension linked to fake reviews only once. In general, the presence of fake reviews and the suspension of a profile are events that rarely turn out to be connected.
With the expansion of AI Overviews, does it really make sense for a business to invest in AI visibility strategies or in tools promising “AI optimisation”, or is the risk that of measuring nothing but exposure with no impact on revenue?
At the moment, the number of leads generated by artificial intelligence is not yet enough, for most small businesses, to justify a dedicated budget.
That does not mean the topic can be ignored. SEO agencies should still adapt their strategies to include optimisation for artificial intelligence systems as well. The operating logic is different from traditional SEO and, at least for now, this activity should take up only a limited part of the overall strategy.
When a business owner asks for concrete results, what specific, verifiable metrics can you show them today to demonstrate that the visibility gained through AI Overviews, citations in AI systems or GEO strategies produces real value?
The most effective way to evaluate results is to look at the leads generated. That is why I always insist on one point: when a business invests in SEO, it should equip itself with call tracking systems, so that phone calls can be correctly attributed to its ranking activities.
(Call tracking is a system that lets a business track and monitor the phone calls it receives, linking them to the source the customer came from — for example a Google search, an advertising campaign or a specific page of the website — so as to understand which marketing activities are actually generating leads, Ed.)
The (bearable) weight of authority, in the age of AI answer engines
One fundamental point emerges from Joy’s words: in an ecosystem where the rules can change overnight, vulnerability is a fact of life.
The question, then, is not how to be immune to updates and volatility that are beyond our control, but how to equip ourselves to withstand fluctuations and upheavals of any kind.
If a sudden storm hits, which businesses do you think will prove the most resilient?
The most solid ones, or those at the mercy of the elements and of the mood swings of Big G and Big Tech?
With Joy we have seen how reviews are much more than simple “feedback”. Sadly, their commodification and the use of extortion confirm that online reputation is an asset under constant attack.
Sorry to break it to you, but Google will not protect your brand for you. Authority, today, is not built by manipulating Reddit discussions or buying consensus, but by consolidating a solid, verifiable presence across multiple touchpoints.
Your brand is the only real insurance policy: if the public trusts you, an algorithmic fluctuation or a barrage of fake reviews will not be enough to dent your business.
What’s more, if flesh-and-blood users recognise your authority, so will the AI-powered engines, which will pick you as the answer!
That’s all for today. We thank Joy for the pleasant conversation and the valuable insights.
See you next week with a new episode of SEO Confidential.
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