Building a Local SEO Marketing Strategy

OK, awesome. So like Angela said, my name is Zane Tuck. I am the Local SEO and Reviews Specialist here at SEO Rocket. I've been here for 6 1/2 years since February of 2014. That is, I have spent nearly all of my time here, really focusing on local search, local SEO. How businesses can take advantage of the tools that are easily available to them to help be as visible as possible when it comes to local search. Because over the years the rules have changed. What's deemed important has changed and we really have to stay on top of these things. So, that's what I've spent a lot of time on and hope to share a few of those things with you today.

So we'll go ahead and get started.

And so a few things before we dive in.

Local SEO is for, who's it for is for businesses that serve a local community. Types of businesses that do benefit from local SEO include everything from coffee shops and hair salons to plumbers, HVAC companies as well as certain individuals such as attorneys, insurance agents and real estate brokers.

We’ll make sure that you understand that SEO is still SEO. So that if you tuned into our webinar last month, and if you haven't, please go to our YouTube channel and check that out. But, our SEO senior SEO expert, Tom Veltri, the items that he covered in last month’s webinar regarding a lot of website and technical components, those are all still applicable for local search because your website is still important to your local visibility. Your website technical components like site speed, title, tags, schema markup - all of those things need to be implemented and tested. They still are applicable. So again, if you didn't get to watch last month’s webinar, I highly encourage that you go to our YouTube channel and check it out. It's really informative and it kind of sets the groundwork for a lot of what we're going to talk about today.

So, a few things more that we want to talk about and I mentioned it before briefly. Many aspects of local SEO have remained the same over the years. But some things have changed, including what Google considers a local ranking factor. So, things like the proximity of the business to the searcher that over the last four to five years has become more and more important of a factor. Things like that. Things like your information in Google My Business, which we'll talk about a little bit, and content links those sorts of things. Those have become more of a factor when it comes to ranking higher in local search.

So today we're going to look at 5 things that we, as SEO Rocket, and me personally, look at when I'm determining a local SEO plan.

And so the first thing I mentioned - Google My Business. It has become THE source for local business information on the web. Google tops the charts for search engine market share. 80% of desktop searches go through Google and a whopping 95% of total mobile searches goes through Google. So they have the market cornered. Obviously Google My Business and Google in general is and should be your top priority.

The top of factors that affect rank in what Google calls their “Local Pack” are - proximity to the searcher,  site content and reviews. 3 of the top factors and we'll talk about all of those today.

So we mentioned the Google Local Pack. So what is that? So if you do a search on your phone or in Google Maps or even on your desktop you'll see something like this. This is an example of a search for “pizza near me”. That's what I searched and got this in the Google local pack.

The Local Pack occupies prime real estate on a search results page, 'cause it's usually right at the top and a lot of times it's even above Google's paid ads.

Local Pack will show two or three locations and sometimes there will be a paid ad within the local pack, but usually there's two or three locations. This has all sorts of information that you can get about the business, from the location on the map to reviews. How many they have. What their average score is, product photos... Here are different pictures of pizzas from these different places, special attributes. And you know, with the coronavirus and the COVID 19 situation that we're dealing with Google added some attributes that restaurants and other businesses can add to their listing. So things like is dine in available, is takeout available, delivery, or in the case of Pizza Hut up here “No contact delivery”. So this is all information that you can add for your business. Then of course, hours of operation. You know if they're closed, what time they open, or if they're open what the hours of operation are. And in some queries it'll even give you buttons. Or, you can call the business or visit their website. And all of this information can be entered through Google My Business.

So this is what the Admin, the back end side of Google My business listing looks like.

Once you claim your listing, you can update the information about your business.

First off, if you have not claimed your Google My Business listing for your business, make a note and as soon as the webinar's done, go do that. That is vital to being able to control information about your business.

And so if you haven't claimed it, as soon as we're done here, go do that. And once you do claim it, you'll be able to see all of this and edit this information. So, and if there's a lot as you can see on the left, you've got, you know, info inside. You can look at reviews, photos, all of that information. So as you get into the back end, you can see where you can update your street address, your hours of operation, special days that you may be closed. So, if you know you're going to be closed the Thursday and Friday of Thanksgiving, you can go ahead and put that in. If you know you're going to be closed Christmas Eve Christmas Day, you can go ahead and put that in and plan ahead. Your phone number and put that in there. Your website as well as other things such as links to making appointments, which again, is great for businesses like hair salons services that you offer. And again, you know you know if you're a hair salon you can put in, that you do cut, style, shampoo - all those things. Business description. which really helps you and lets you describe who you are and what you do to the world. Adding photos and all kinds of information. So, there's a lot of information that you can add in here.

So, when I'm evaluating a potential client you know what am I looking for? First off, like I said, I'm going to look and see if the business has been claimed in Google My Business.

Next, I'm going to look for the NAP and what NAP is is that's an abbreviation for name, address and phone number. And I want to check and make sure that that's correct and consistent. Does it match what they have? You know what we have in our information? Does it match what's on their website? Or if I Googled their business, if I searched for their business on Google, you know, does it match what shows up on Yellow Pages or on their Facebook page.

So as you know, looking for you know, does the business name match? You know, it really needs to be the same as what you would have on your signage outside. The address needs to match your street address. You cannot have a PO Box or use an address of a virtual office like one that has locations in Winston in Greensboro locally. So, you have to have your mailing address listed as your address. And then again, your phone number should be your local phone number.

We look at the categories that the business has assigned, you know, is it the best category available for that business? Within Google My Business you can select multiple categories, so if you are a heating and air company you can have their categories about heating, contractor heating, repair, air conditioning repair, air conditioning, contractor, HVAC contractor. Those are all separate categories within Google My Business. And you can select multiple ones. But, you want to make sure that the best category available for your business is set as your primary category and then you can select the others ad secondary categories. And you only want to select categories that apply to your business. You know. So, if you are a heating and air Company you don't wanna put that you are , you know, that you're an electrician or that you are a handyman or anything like that. You want to make sure that your categories only apply to your business.

Good use of keywords in the business description. Again, this is you telling the world who you are and what you do. And, so that's where you kind of have to walk a little bit of a fine line because your business description needs to have a good, clear, thorough description who you are and what you do without seeming spammy. You don't want to stuff it with keywords.

Thinking that it will help you get more views or more calls or more clicks. That may have worked 15, 20 years ago and then was an acceptable practice. But, that's not the case now. It is frowned upon and can get you penalized within Google. So, remember searchers are real people, they’re your audience. They are who you wanting to target not the search engines.

And, then good clear photos of the business, of the signage, of products, of the interior of the business. And those are things that we look for. You know, the logo - do they have their logo updated? Is it nice and clear? Because good quality photos help convey your brand.

Views come from all kinds of searches, not just web. But, also image searches using Google Maps - the app on your phone. And so, this is an area that really should not be neglected.

The next thing we look at are what's called citations. And, what they are is they are listings on 3rd party sites and they are not as effective now as far as ranking goes as they used to be. But, they're still important for local SEO because  - not everybody, even though Google you know, has the market cornered - when it comes to search. Not everybody does. People don't always get their information from Google. So, you know if you're looking for the phone number of a company or you're looking for their hours for their address, or what their website is, sometimes people end up going to other sites, like maybe their Facebook page or their page on yellowpages.com or on Yelp or other sites and directories that have that NAP information for that business.

And one thing to keep in mind is that this is not; getting citations is not a one and done thing. The info that you have out there gets sliced, diced, shared and passed along to other sites.

And one way I want to show that is this graphic here. This is a graphic representation of the Local Search Ecosystem. And as you can see information goes all over the place. There are what's called data aggregators, and there are four primary data aggregators, actual Infogroup, Acxiom, Neustar, Localeze. They then send out your information. They send it to sites all over the web from, you know Apple and Google and Bing to lots of other lower tier directories.

And in a lot of cases, even information provided by a verified owner, you know, through Google or another site where you've logged in, created an account, put in your information. Sometimes that's not always considered the most authoritative source.

And, one way that we help tackle that issue is we use an agency data feed as part of our local SEO service. What this does is it continually pushes correct, consistent information to sources, and in addition to helping provide consistent data, what it does is it helps create and increase authority and build confidence for searchers that they found what they're looking for.

So, if you can imagine manually updating your information at all of these sites it would take you forever. And, so that's part of why we use the data feed as part of our Local SEO service.

So, when it comes to citations, what? What do I look for? Well, I'm looking for is the information correct and consistent? You know, are there old listings or old map info? If the business has moved, you know changed locations within the last few years. Are there listings that still have the old address for the old phone number?

Or maybe they, you know, change their website and so that's information, and that we need to know because that will need to be addressed. And, the next thing we look at is is the business in those well known directories? Sites like Yellow Pages, super pages, Dex knows, but also others like Yelp, Google and Google My Business in Facebook. You know, want to make sure that they have the presence in those directories.

And then, is the business in any related niche directories or industry related directories? So, for example, a restaurant or a coffee shop. You know, are they on Urbanspoon or Open Table? Or if you manage a bed and breakfast, are you on Trip Advisor? So, those are the things that we're looking for when it comes to citations.

The next thing we look at is content for people at each level of the marketing. So, what do we mean when we're talking about that? Let's talk about that for a quick minute.

Ideally, your plan should include creating content for people at all levels of your marketing funnel. You guys were just learning about this. Those are the ones at the top of the funnel to existing customers and those who are ready to buy. You should create content that would be interesting to your audience. You know you have to know kind of the type of people and why they come to your website and post information that would be helpful to them. When you do this, it allows you to show others your expertise and authority on the subject. And it also turns your website from a static digital brochure to a sales tool that works for your business 24 hours a day.

I will be straight with you here. This it takes work. It takes commitment, especially to do it well. And the ones, the people who do this well, will benefit downwind. And, those who don't, want. It really is that simple. And it's not easy, but it really is that simple. You know, work and commitment.

Does the business post local content? This is another thing that we look at. So, again, you know, posting about maybe sponsorship of an event locally that that they're involved with or any other event . Posting links to or embedding videos of when they've been featured on the local news. Because of whether it's something good that their business did, or maybe they were tapped as a resource to talk about an issue going on within their community, having that information on the website helps build that local presence and it helps reaffirm that it's a local business in that area.

And then there's the business’s use of Google posts. You know Google loves it when people and businesses use their products. Google posts is a great way of getting visibility in local search. And,  so that's when we look at our businesses using Google posts.

And so, if it's a single location business, you know some of the things we look for, again are correct NAP information on the website. Is it in the footer an on the contact page? Are they the same? You know, do they have written out driving directions on the contact page? So, you know, you may see this on some websites where it says you know “from the East take Interstate 40 W to exit 201, Union Cross Rd” things like that using the local landmarks in those driving directions. Again, it just helps send the signal that you're a local business in that community. Then, kind of like what Tom mentioned last month. You know, we look at the page titles, making sure images are optimized. Because again, like I said earlier, site views and page views come from all kinds of places in all types of searches. And, so somebody may be looking or doing an image search and pull up a picture that you have on your website. So, these are all things that we look at.

And, if it's a multi-location business do they have a page on the site for each of those locations?

If they don't, they really should, and that's something we would bring up.

Because each page should have unique content and nap information, or that individual location, you know. So if you have a look at if your business and you've got a location in Greensboro, Winston. When is Charlotte when Burlington? You should have a page on your site for each of those locations with the NAP information, Google Map, local content for that area? So, that's something that we look at.

#4 is link building and what link building is. - It's all about your reputation as far as search engines go. A link to your site is considered a vote of confidence by search engines. It conveys a sense of authority about the topic that it is linked to. The reputation of sites linking to yours affects how much value Google assigns to that link. You know, the more links to your content the more Google sees your site as an authoritative source for the topic. But more is not always better. Think of links like a job reference. The quality of that reference carries weight. And another piece link building is another piece of the plan that many people don't spend enough time on. Much like content, it usually requires the most effort from business owners.

And just for a quick second, I want to talk about reciprocal links, and that's where, that's where a business may say “I link to you if you will link back to me”. Kind of a you scratch my back, I scratch yours kind of thing. Really not a big fan of that because it just waters down the value of the link. Even Google doesn't know whether there's any real value in the link from that website. And so, you really, you really don't want to get into any sort of link building schemes going along those lines.

Links need to be more than just reciprocal, you know? You don't want to have links that are from businesses and other sites that are way, way off from your subject matter. So if you are a heating and air company you don't want a link from a site that is any sort of really, you know, spammy site or even you know like if it's an ice cream shop. Unless you did business for that shop and maybe they've posted a  content that says we had a great experience with ABC heating, we highly recommend them. Check them out. That's different. But you really want links from sites that are highly authoritative and similar to yours.

And, so when it comes to link building, what are we looking for? We look at what's called the Domain Authority of the sources of those links. Domain authority is a search engine ranking score. What it does is it predicts a website's ability to rank on the search result pages, and it's a score from one to 100. The more likely it is that your website will rank, the higher the domain authority for a link to your site and the more favorable that link is in the eyes of search engines.

Each domain linking to your site should have some sort of relevance to that site, either due to the purpose of the domain or because the topic of the article. And kind of, like I mentioned before, you run an ice cream parlor, but all your links are coming from auto manufacturers. That might raise some suspicions that you're getting your links through less than legitimate ways. And what it does is send signals that your links may not be providing value to people that encounter them.

For a truly strong link the anchor text needs to be semantically relevant to both the article it's linking to and the article in which it's included. You really don't want to click here for your links. When you're linking to other sites and even internal links to other pages within your site.

So, if you're linking to an article about repairing a roof. Then that “repair a roof” text really could be the link. Or, if you are linking to an attorney, you could have “contact the attorney”. That might be relevant.

But you don't want to use the same text over and over again. Google's algorithm will catch it and you could end up penalized. So again, relevant diverse anchor text links are much more helpful and much better off in the long run than using the same text over and over again.

And the last thing we're going to talk about are reviews.  And, this is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I feel very strongly about reviews and I think it's one of the most important aspects of local search.

Most business owners would say that reviews are important to them. But on the flip side, most owners would say that they're not being - night not be as proactive as they should be about getting reviews, and that could be for different reasons. Maybe they don't know the best way to get them? Or, the best way to ask for reviews? Or, they say they don't have enough time to manage the review process. Or, maybe they know that they have some issues and they don't want to deal with negative reviews.

But that's really important and we have a tool that helps with that called RocketReviews. It helps with a lot of these things that business owners site as reasons why they don't, aren’t, as active in asking for reviews as maybe they should be.

So, what do we look for? Is asking for reviews part of their internal process? If they're not, that's a big red flag for me. People put the same trust in online reviews as they do a personal recommendation from a friend. So, if they're not asking for and getting reviews - and the way I check that is I look at their Google listing.  I look and see how many reviews they have. How many have they gotten in the last month. That's a good indicator of how they may behave as far as asking for reviews.

Are the reviews only on 3rd party sites or do they have them on their own site? If a business doesn't have properly marked up reviews on its website, that's a missed opportunity. And actually, it's a couple of opportunities. Not only does having properly marked up reviews on your site show trust and authority both to searchers and the search engines, but it's also another place on your website where you're getting fresh new content on a regular basis. And, like we talked about before, fresh content is beneficial for local search. And, so having that content consistently coming in on a regular basis is super helpful.

Is the business actively responding to reviews, both positive and negative? I think that reviews can be a business's greatest tool. If the business commits to the process and that includes responding to the reviews, both the good ones and bad.

My feeling is that a business should respond to every review that it receives. It shows that management cares about the reviews. It shows customers that their concerns are being heard. And, it provides the human aspect. You're more than just a coffee shop or a hardware store. There's a human being behind the screen and responding to review showing that they care about the customers.

Reviews can let a business know what they're doing right. They can also let a business know where they may have some issues that need to be resolved.

Our tool RocketReviews helps with all of these things. It is easy to use and it allows a business to take control of the review process with as little time spent as 15 to 30 minutes a week. RocketReviews automatically sends requests to your customers.

Respond to reviews. You can respond publicly or privately. It monitors reviews all your third party sites - so sites like Facebook, TripAdvisor and about 40 or 50 others. It will let you know when you get a review on those sites.

It also allows you to have customers text a keyword to a phone number, and they'll get a review request on their phone. So, this was this is great for places like coffee shops, bars, restaurants, you know any place where you can have that signage up. Have it in your store. Have it on the menu. Have it on their tent card on a table. Any kind of way that you can ask for reviews, it'll let you do that. You can have a code or a website URL that you can put on your receipts. You can import customers, it's just super easy to use. And like I said, it takes less than 30 minutes a week of interaction for you to be able to go in. Check out your reviews and respond. Super helpful, we've got a page on our on our website with lots more information about that that you can go check out.

But in all five of these aspects, the big thing to remember is that consistency is key. So you want to have consistent map information for your business across the web. Consistent and timely content additions to your website. Consistent updating of your information in Google My Business. And consistently asking for reviews.

In closing, that's my big key. That's what I want to make sure and hope that people understand is that. You know, if you are consistent in doing these things you will see results.

None of these things are a one and done type of thing. You have to commit to the process. You have to spend time doing each of these things and when you do good things will happen in the end.

I I hope you've learned a couple of things. If you've got some questions, hopefully you guys have been sending them in the chat. I think we're and I think that's about it for me, so I'll toss it back to Angela.