Local SEO: Maps and Yelp reviews in one monitoring feed
Listings and reviews on Google Maps and Yelp as JSON. Not ranking for blue links. Not ASO.
Local SEO, on this catalog, is reputation: Google Maps and Yelp reviews for a place or a multi-location brand, as JSON. It is not “how to rank on Google” — that is SERP data — and not ASO. Geotagged Instagram posts can sit in a supporting sentence; they are not the job.
Access without Places API or Fusion is on the Maps and Yelp notes. This note is the combined watch.
People say “local SEO” and mean three different things: pack rankings, citation NAP consistency, and review volume/sentiment. We can help with the third as a feed. We do not sell a rank tracker for the local pack. We do not sell a citation database. If your deck needs those, buy those. If your week needs “what did people write about shop two,” stay here.
Reviews as the signal you can fetch
Identify the place on Maps, identify it on Yelp, pull both review corpora on a schedule. Ratings and review text are the objects.
https://google-maps.fetcher.sh/api/place/{fid}/reviewshttps://yelp.fetcher.sh/api/place/{id}/reviews
A multi-location brand is two ids per location, not one brand endpoint. Pull both corpora and diff the text. Blue-link rankings belong on Google Search. App store ratings belong on Play and the App Store.
Store the native ids. Do not try to join on name and street: “Joe’s Pizza on 7th” will collide. Search once, confirm the listing, save fid and Yelp id, never search again unless a location moves.
A weekday cadence is enough for most shops. Hourly is for a crisis or a launch. You are paying per GET, so a thoughtless every-five-minutes loop is how a monitoring job becomes a billing surprise — still cheaper than a seat, still wasteful.
How to keep the two corpora honest
Maps reviewers and Yelp reviewers are not the same people. A 4.6 on one and a 3.9 on the other is common. Do not average them into a fake “true rating.” Keep two columns. Alert on new text and on sudden drops, not on the fact that the platforms disagree.
Hashtags are not a substitute for place reviews. A Reel tagged at the cafe is marketing. A Maps review is reputation. Brand mentions on X, Reddit, and News are a third watch if the brand is also a story. Do not dump those into the same spreadsheet as “the restroom had no soap” unless you like noise.
Restaurants and hospitality are the same two hosts with a vertical name. The monitoring job does not change because the cuisine did.
A case: three shops, two corpora, one morning
A hospitality group has three cafes. They used to screenshot Maps once a week. They missed a Yelp pile-on on the middle location.
They store a Maps fid and a Yelp id per shop. A weekday job pulls both review lists, diffs new ids, and dumps new text into a channel. They do not rank for “coffee near me.” They do not run ASO. They catch the pile-on the day it starts.
The middle location had four new one-star Yelp reviews overnight about a supplier issue the manager already knew about. Maps was quiet. A Maps-only screenshot workflow would have called the week fine. The combined feed did not.
They still reply to reviews in the native UIs, as the owner. This catalog does not post replies. It only reads. That is the point of a watch: see it, then go to the product where you can act.
A case: a new location before the paint dries
They open a fourth shop. Google and Yelp listings go up in a messy week: wrong hours, a photo of the old interior, two similarly named competitors in the same pack.
The monitoring job is not going to fix the hours. A human will. The job will show the first reviews as they land, on both corpora, so the opening-week narrative is not a surprise on Friday. They add two new ids to the same cron. They do not buy a local-SEO retainer to learn that the espresso machine review came in.
Wrong hours show up in review text (“closed when Google says open”) before anyone on the team opens Business Profile. The watch does not fix Business Profile. It makes the mismatch loud. A human still goes into Google’s owner tools. This catalog will not.
Instagram geotags for the opening week are extra color. They are not the rating. Do not average a Reel’s likes with a Maps star. If comms wants social, that is brand mentions or IG lookup, in another channel.
Not web SEO, not ASO
If the question is blue links, use google.fetcher.sh. If the question is app storefronts, use Play and the App Store. This job is places.
Docs for the two hosts; payment is 402 or a bby_live_ key. The feed is yours to schedule. We do not host a dashboard that emails you a PDF. JSON in, your channel out.