In this article I'm going to address the current state of local SEO in 2016, review some findings from a new data-driven local SEO study, and provide you with some actionable tips to win the local SEO game.
If there's one thing that's consistent about Google, it's the fact that it's always changing. Over the years we've seen many changes in local search. The most recent changes included ads that display in the 3 pack of local results, leaving only two positions. Since Google removed the sidebar ads, you now have to scroll further down the page just to see the local results. These days, local SEO is more competitive and more confusing. So where do you start?
I suggest that you start by defining your primary goals. You can't get to your destination if you don't know where you're going. If you're promoting a hotel, for instance, your primary goal is probably to get more reservations — local SEO for you will mean ranking high in Google's local results, attracting positive reviews on websites like Tripadvisor, etc.
The reality of local search in 2016
The algorithm, the amount of effort business owners are putting in, the amount of effort marketers are putting into their local SEO — it's all changed. Where just a few years ago there were many businesses on the sidelines not doing much in the way of optimizing for local search, you now see more people trying harder.
Just the other day at the gym, my personal trainer told me how his business partner figured out what was necessary to rank higher in Google's local results. But how does Google decide which business deserves to rank higher than another when most of them have followed the same guides that preach the same basic optimization tactics?
Do you see the problem here? If everyone is doing the basics now, the bar has been raised.
Speaking of goals, keep this in mind: There isn't just one way to search. #1 rankings don't mean everything.
Let's talk user behavior for a moment, because it's super important. Imagine you find yourself in the bummer of a situation I was in last week. I needed a plumber. To find one, I decided to turn to Google (since I spend all day there anyway) to search for a local plumber. Here's my personal journey.
Step 1: Search for a local plumber. I skip the paid ads because I feel bad clicking on them.
Step 2: Look at local results. Ahh, that's more like it! Let me click on the one with the most reviews. I like reviews. They make me feel good.
Step 3: Let's be honest — I wasn't really happy with a 3.1 rating. I'm going to look at the finder results now. I skip over the first result and move to the one that looks the best based on the star rating. I'm in the industry, I know how people can spam these things, and yet I still like shiny objects. I find myself overly critical and biased.
Step 4: After judging everyone at face value, I decide to click on Master Blaster and read the reviews.
Step 5: I'm not convinced with the reviews for whatever reason. After this, I ended up turning to Yelp and reading reviews which I thought were from real people. I decided on this company, which did a great job at a fair price.
My behavior seems really weird in retrospect, but it proves a point. There's not just one way to search. Some users may not click on the first result; some will click the third result. They may click into the local pack and look at reviews. They may go to another website to check out your reviews. I think this proves my point: you need to focus on your primary goals.
Let's look at a data-driven local SEO study & what it means for you
At the end of June, Local SEO Guide and PlacesScout.com published a great study on local SEO ranking factors. (Props to Andrew Shotland, Dan Leibson, and Mark Kabana.) While there are other studies that are mostly opinion-based, they looked at data to come to their conclusions (which I really like and respect).
As with any SEO study, there are more data points we could analyze and many we can't, as we don't have access to the necessary data (because Google hates us). That's why you hear "correlation is not causation" a lot in our industry; this is especially true with machine learning. However, I think Mike Blumenthal said it best:
"Dan and the team at LocalSEOguide have done some great work attempting to bring some clarity & discipline to an otherwise opinion-based and myth-rife topic: local search ranking factors. While correlation studies can never elucidate causal effects, particularly in an era of machine learning, they can provide real and solid clues on where to look."
– Mike Blumenthal
I agree. To be honest, there haven't been very many data-driven local SEO studies done yet; I hope this is the first of many. Now, let's look at some of the top factors from the study and break them down.
Key takeaways from the study:
Here are the top 5 ranking factors they identified:
- Locations with a lot of reviews tend to rank higher.
- Profile views correlate with higher rankings.
- Sites with high Majestic AC Rank have a strong correlation with high local rankings. (According to a representative from Majestic SEO: "Some of our download files contain AC Rank, but generally we've moved from it to use only Trust & Citation Flow scores." I interpreted this as: "Don't expect to see this anymore.")
- Referring subnets had high correlation with strong local rankings.
- The total number of referring IP's also had high correlation with strong local rankings.
Obviously there were many more data points than those top five. You can see the whole graphic they made above, published with permission from Local SEO Guide.
Now, let's break down the top 5 local ranking factor from the study.
1. Locations with a lot of reviews seemed to rank higher
We'll talk more about this later, but if you do a lot of local searches you'll also see that businesses without many reviews (or less reviews than their competitors) can certainly still rank high.
On the other hand, if you've seen some of the click studies I've run, we've consistently seen that local listings with reviews tend to get more clicks. This will tie into #2 below:
2. Profile views seemed to correlate with higher rankings
If you're new to SEO, you may not have seen some very interesting click-through rate studies done by Darren Shaw of Whitespark and Rand from Moz. There seems to be measurable correlation that, when a result is clicked more, it's given a higher ranking.
This being the case, you can see why reviews might be important and also correlate with higher local rankings. On a side note, I always click my client's websites in the local results and stay on the page for a bit when searching.
3. Majestic AC Rank seemed to have a high correlation
There are tons of backlink measuring tools out there. Moz has one, Majestic SEO, Ahrefs, Link Research Tools... and the list goes on. This study compared Moz & Majestic. In the future, it would be nice to compare other tools, as well, to get a better sample. Link tools don't detect every link that Google does, as of course Google itself has the most resources for web indexation.
Importantly, 3 out of the 5 top correlation ranking factors from this study involve link signals. So should you believe all of those "SEO is dead" posts? No. Links still carry a tremendous amount of weight. Not only does this study help show that, I can tell you from personal experience that moving the needle in competitive law firm niches requires good-quality links (assuming you're doing everything else right).
What was missing from the top factors?
Noticeably missing from the top factors were citations and website landing page (on-site) factors. I know what you're thinking: "But wait, Casey, everyone says to build those darn citations!" I'll address this in the section below.
Overall the study had lots of great insights. I suggest you check it out yourself and dig in when you have a chance. But now I want to shift the focus a bit and talk about what you must do to rank higher in competitive local niches.
Conquering the competition
Are you ready for the top-secret super-formula we use to get our clients ranked in competitive niches? Well, it's probably not a secret. We just work hard and take into consideration that tools are not 100% accurate.
Speaking of being competitive here and beating your competition, I'm going to assume you've put in the elbow grease to get your Google My Business listing optimized. If not, I suggest you read the best practices in my Ultimate Local SEO Audit guide and make sure your listing adheres to Google's guidelines.
And if you're not ranking organically for your keywords, you have a lot of work to do. Don't expect to rank locally unless your website deserves to and does rank organically. Here are the things I look at once everything else is in order.
If you have major outlying issues, fix them first
If you're not ranking in the local finder's top 20 results for the keywords you're targeting, this article may not be for you yet. First make sure you don't have any underlying problems with your website or listing. If you're sure you're doing everything else right and seeing movement, then feel free to follow along. Otherwise, here are some common problems you may want to look at first:
- Duplicate listings // Do you have duplicate listings for your business? Read this.
- You're suspended // If you spammed GMB, check this out.
- You're trying to rank for a keyword you can't // Are you in the city of search? Keep in mind that if you're outside the city limits you're going to have trouble for searches using a city modifier.
- Incorrect categories // Bro, are your categories even right?
Stop taking shortcuts // Report spam
Seriously. If your competitors are spamming, be sure to call them out. Google has made this much easier now. If you need practical advice, check out Joy Hawkins' article The Ultimate Guide to Fighting Spam on Google Maps. Those of us working in this industry have the ethical and professional responsibility to avoid spamming local results and to report those who are behaving badly.
Traditional signals go a long way
Although I've been seeing more variation than normal, it still rings true that companies who rank high in organic, non-local search results will also rank high in local search results. Your organic optimization should be in order, both from a ranking perspective and a user experience perspective. Don't treat these as separate, isolated channels.
Reviews // Reviews are cool
Let's talk millennials for a second. According to a study from The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation,
millennials like me are review-happy. According to the study, millennials "use mobile devices to read user reviews and explore information on social networks. Having grown up with mobile and digital technology as part of their everyday lives, they switch their attention between media platforms 27 times per hour." While millennials aren't the only user group by any means, this showcases my point from earlier: reviews are important to many.
Reviews, in my opinion, can have a positive impact on rankings due to the resulting increase in click-through rates. Reviews will also help you build trust in your business and earn more business. I'm excited that the next big local SEO study is slated to take a deeper look at reviews.
Build reviews & customer feedback into your business model
If you haven't already done so, you need to be sure you're getting customer reviews. They need to be built into your business processes. It's as simple as that. If you don't have a review strategy, you're going to struggle with this forever. If you're in-house or need a solution for your clients, check out a review service like Get Five Stars. It's easy to use and allows you to easily streamline reviews from your customers. It also allows you to easily add a review widget on your website.
Easily create a review link for customers
If you're using your own marketing system like Infusionsoft you can generate direct review links for your emails by using tools like this one. This will bring up a direct link to the "leave a review" screen for your business if your user is logged into Google. Check out the sample link we created for ourselves here.
Put reviews on your website
One thing I like to do for my legal clients is add reviews on the website. Not only do we like to add yellow stars, customers' faces, and quotes on actual website pages, but we also like to add the review schema to help get stars in organic search results. Although this is more of a conversion rate and organic play, you should try it.
On-page SEO // Technical SEO
I bring up on-page and technical SEO because of the shocking number of people I speak with who say things like "Well, I don't care about organic SEO, I just want to show up on the map." That's still a common misconception. Try to be the best in all of your marketing efforts and you'll be rewarded for doing things the right way.
How's your site speed? If you don't know how Google sees your website's site speed, check out their mobile-friendly test here. Is it bad? Is it slow? If you get traffic to your website, you're probably missing out on conversions unless you're taking site speed and usability into consideration.
Usability
What's the conversion you care about? Now ask yourself this question: "If I was given a list of search results with an ad, my business, and one competitor, would the user click on my result before the others? And once they've clicked, will they be satisfied with the results?" If the answer is no, you have to consider why.
It's nice to have a high ranking for an important keyword, but you have to think about the customer journey. If the user sees your listing, clicks on your website, and then bounces back to click on another result, how does that look? Why would they do that? It's probably because a) they couldn't easily find the information they need, b) it took too long to load, or c) there were usability issues.
Why I still talk about citations // What you should do
As I mentioned above, citations were notably missing from the local ranking factors study. This is probably because Google's gotten much better with data and data sources. Devaluing citations as a ranking factor has been a discussion in the local SEO world for quite some time. I'm in the camp that citations should be cleaned up, but probably won't help you much outside of the basics. Here are a couple of thoughts to go along with that.
First off, many citations are links, or have a place to add a link. Those sources where your link is hidden between millions of businesses and given a nofollow aren't really going to help you move the needle, in my opinion. At the same time, you have to value your citation sources as link sources, too.
Second, you still need to correct the data at the data aggregator and top citation levels because of potential bad data issues. If you're a new business, you can just create these and go. If you're an established business that has moved in the past, you need to get this stuff right. Why? It wouldn't be the first time I've seen an incorrect listing created off of bad or old data. If a new Google My Business page is created off of this bad and old data, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. Alternatively, if there aren't a lot of signals sending bad or wrong info, you should be fine. Just sign up for Moz Local to fix this issue — it's super easy to use.
Third of all, you can still get business from 3rd-party websites. Like the example I gave earlier, if you're promoting a hotel, you want to be listed on TripAdvsior. This provides value towards your primary goals. You don't need to be listed on ThisAwesomeHotelBookingWebsiteThatNobodyWillSee.com.
I will say that you should only really focus on the top citations, though. Let's face it... Nobody is visiting YourCitysIndustryDirectory-CitationSourceofAwesome.org, which is ranking on page 47 for your city and industry keywords. I've done that in the past. Don't get that tunnel vision. Focus on what's going to make a difference.
Outside of the top citations, be sure to turn your attention to links instead of citations to avoid diminishing returns. I have not seen an example where getting more low-quality citations helps a business rank better in local results... but I have seen quite the opposite with link penalties from low-quality websites.
On a side note, also make sure your citations are indexed. I recently did a study that showed an automated platform didn't work that well.
Get some links // Don't get more crap links, get fewer great links
If you've done everything else, my advice is to focus the majority of your efforts on links. Links still work and they still make the most difference — not only in my opinion, but also based on data from studies like the ones discussed here. Out of curiosity, I also reached out to Garrett Mehrguth at Directive Consulting for his #1 tip to move the needle:
"The top thing you can do to move the needle in local SEO today, in my opinion, is to build authoritative links.
While I believe that citations and NAP consistency are essential, these to me are requirements more than needle-pushers. For action items, we have seen success with chamber of commerce links, local scholarship links, links from industry partners (wholesale plumbing supply company linking to a plumber for example), hyper-local directory links (we find these by searching:”city name” and then looking at any directories associated with the area that rank well organically), local newspaper links via press releases to business journals, and creating content for local magazines. All of these are big wins that definitely move the needle once you already have your keyword targeting, content, NAP, citations, site design, and other fundamentals in place."
After working with a client who received a nasty manual penalty a few years ago, I changed how we get our links for our clients. If you can get your city name or type of business in the anchor text naturally, then that's great. Don't overdo it though.
Now, let's get you 4 links that are legitimate for your business.
1. Sign up for HelpAReporter.com
Dedicate 10 minutes every morning to read the daily emails from HARO. HARO stands for Help a Reporter Out and it's awesome. Daily there are a couple of emails that come through from journalists looking to interview experts. The business owner or even an employee of your company should be able to get a request. Don't be afraid of failure or rejection and pitch often. Here's a great starter guide for getting links using HARO.
2. Sponsor a local event
Find a cause that's dear to your heart and sponsor the organization. Many causes list sponsor logos and links to their websites on their local landing pages. If you host your own event, you can usually get listed on the town's website (if it's a community-approved event).
3. Get listed on your local business directories
You know about the top citation sources. Now Google your city name and see which websites rank for your city. Does the chamber of commerce? Join. Does the BBB? Join. Are there city-specific directories? Join.
4. Run a community initiative; give back.
I work with a lot of law firms these days and we're always looking for ways to give back to the community. Some of our more successful campaigns this year are free cab ride programs on holidays, toy drives, and food drives. These are all ideas that get media exposure and are real marketing ideas.
Need more links? Check out Point Blank SEO's guide on link building here; it's a very good list for any industry. If you're a law firm in need of links, check out these specific resources.
Moving the needle further
If you're having trouble moving up in the SERPs to at least that number 3 position, remember that it gets harder to rank the higher you get. The people competing in that landscape are probably investing resources. You don't have to outspend their resources, but you do have to outsmart them. In addition to this, I believe that Google's much slower than it used to be. The effects of the links you do get may take longer to have a positive effect.In situations where I have to move the needle in a tough market, you'll find me doing this:
- Making sure I'm doing everything right that I possibly can
- Creating content that earns links to other pages of my website
- Focusing on more ways I can earn links and boost my authority ← This is my top tip!
Keep in mind that tools are imperfect. If your metrics look better on one tool versus another, that's not a stopping point. It's a point where more effort needs to be put in to figure out what you're missing. Broaden your toolset, rack your brain, and work to outsmart the people trying to outsmart you.
Great post Casey!
If anyone else is interested in learning more about our 2016 Local SEO Ranking Factors study I go through all the data, results and insights in this Mozinar:
https://moz.com/webinars/reverse-engineering-google-local-search-algorithm
I highly recommend checking this out.
What tactics are you using today that are getting you the best results? Is there one specific tactic that you have been able to attribute to increasing your customers visibility?
Great Post for local SEO. Focused efforts yield better results, however where to focus the efforts is something that this post clears up.
Really liked the point of view that there is not only one way to search. We newer know which search result will be the most appealing one. And Reviews in my experience seem to have some serious levarage.
Nice post Casey. Very well-illustrated and explained pretty well. I appreciate the useful information. Haven't explored too many seo software tools, but may give PlacesScout a closer look. Does anyone have hands-on experience with this 3rd party? Thanks!
Yes, our agency, Doctor Genius, has worked with Mark Kabana and his team for years. Not only has their ranking data been a crucial part of our success to monitor thousands of clients but their prospect data tools help fuel our sales.
Hello!
Do you think it exists some relationship between local seo positions on the map with the use and activity in the google+ account?
Its possible that more pots and more +1 in google plus directly affect to the position in local search?
Thank you so much for your attention.
I don't know really. But I think that the +1 effect in google plus is an indirect effect not a direct effect. But I think that Google will reward you for using the google products ;)
Hey Casey,
Thanks for mentioning our review link generator : )
What we usually do is create a page on the client's domain such as xyz.com/review and redirect it to the link generated by the tool. That way if Google changes the URL in the future, we can make any changes to the redirect.
eg for our domain we use https://supple.com.au/review/
I love that think. That's a great idea to use on clients domains.
Very complete guide local SEO. I congratulate you.
I have a doubt. if you have a local business and you have already Yelp and Google maps to insert opinions. Is it good to move those opinions as testimony to the web? I have a business blog where comments drew up the articles are inserted, but the testimonies of valuations not put them. It is true that for now there are very few.
Great post because in my opinion there aren't enough actionable local SEO tips out there that are based on solid data.
I completely agree with how important of a factor it is to have a keyword in the business name (if possible).
Back when I was learning local SEO, I owned a business with my main keyword + county name as the legal business name and ranked #1 in local + organic search results by "hitting my head on the keyboard."
Thanks Ben. I wonder how that affects user trust and behavior? In a study I just published I found that some participants didn't like names like that but they were the exception and not the rule.
Great post, Casey! I have a question for you about your example of searching for a plumber. Like me, you shy away from the ads, and you also look with a weather eye on a plumber with hundreds of review (is plumbing really this exciting?). I want to ask you ... how much do you feel your work in SEO has trained you to behave this way?
Can you pretend for a second that you work in some totally different industry (let's say you're a chef or a plumber or a doctor). Do you feel you WOULD avoid those ads or think the overload of reviews was odd? I was talking with Phil Rozek about this recently and am curious as to your opinion.
Thanks Miriam! I think that working in SEO has trained my search behavior to be much more skeptical than most :) By default I avoid most ads in most of my search behavior.
I think this could make for an interesting click test study which is something we're working on.
It's hard to say what I would do without bias but I feel like I would want to behave the same way and take more review driven approach.
Thanks for the reply, Casey, and I'd surely love to see that click test study when you publish it. I think it's very cool that there are services out there you can book that let you actually SEE how users are interacting with your website, in particular. Userfeel was one that recently came to my attention. Haven't ever tried it, but it would be neat to watch videos of users interacting with your website, and the same would be cool to see them interacting with your targeted SERPs. Again, thanks for the great post!
@Miriam. Check out this study I just published today on click test results for law firms: https://jurisdigital.com/local-finder-where-searchers-are-clicking/
Hey Casey!
Finally got a chance to read this today and it is a totally fascinating study! I was surprised that some of your users did, in fact, steer clear of ads, but it seems that reviews are a deciding factor. Like you said, an ad with reviews could be a winner.
Studies like these are invaluable for our industry. Thank you for your curiosity and generosity in conducting this one and sharing the results.
To our community: totally check out Casey's link. You'll love this study!
This was a great read. Thanks for the tips Casey.
Great Post Casey, Nowadays, local SEO is very competitive. 5 stars and good reviews are not enough to get top rank in SERP. Many folks use keywords with business name in local listings to get rank on specific keywords.
I think this is negative to your business and through this you never get top rank in serp.
Your post is very helpful for mine and also others who not known the real meaning of local SEO.
Local is the future!
Very helpful and interesting. Thank you very much!
You mentioned one of the popular review management tools in your article. I would encourage you to also learn about Grade.us, located at https://www.grade.us , one of the other tools available for online reputation and review management. It works very well for my clients and their reviews.
Hey Tim!
Have you used both GetFiveStars and Grade.us? I've been trying to find someone who has used both and can give their take on what the differences are and why they like one service more than another.
I think it's so funny that I do the exact same thing! For some reason, I don't believe in google reviews because it's easy to spam. When I'm not satisfied, I also go to yelp for help.
Need to sit down with a knife and fork and chew on Casey's excellent article. So much goodness. Would like to echo what others have already said as initial takeaways - STOP TAKING SHORTCUTS, THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SEARCH, and if no one else has said it already REAL CUSTOMER REVIEWS AND REAL LOVE matter alot.
As to the last point, we have found happy customers to be such a powerful force, online and offline, that we try to lasso them into whatever SEO/Marketing work we are doing as much as we can.
Thanks again Casey!
Carl Kruse
"Stop taking shortcuts."
I love this. Marketers everywhere are looking for the "quick wins" and "low-hanging fruit."
Trouble is, most low hanging fruit isn't very good. I think we need to take a step back from "Local SEO" and focus on community building with real people, like businesses have been doing for thousands of years.
If it comes naturally, sponsor a little league team.
Volunteer for a local food shelter.
Give back to your community.
That's where we need to focus now.
Great example Brian. Many people focus on the easy wins and get links that end up having no value at all. I like any community based idea since you're already giving back to the community.
Hi Casey! Thanks for the post! Very interesting!
In our agency of marketing online, we usually work in local niches. I'm agree with your arguments, but I'd like to ask a question. In your opinion, if reviews are more important, Google will develop a way to validate these customer reviews?
Thanks! ;)
I hope so. It appears Google is putting more efforts into reviews again so it will be interesting to see what happens.
Great Post, I totally agree with you.
Local SEO its important and at the same time is very competitive.
About your "personal journey" to search.
The way to search that users have is varied. I like you, Casey, I skip advertising links. But I have seen that most users, the average user, click on those links.
On the other tips, all very successful.
Congratulations, good article.
didn`t know that google reviews are so important.. I knew they give you a little boost on SEO , but not so much.
I don't understand how Google gives so importance to reviews if are so manipulable. I'll suppose they make some kind of control to prevent bad reviews from competidors or goods reviews from the bussiness owners... Do you think that rankings will change substantially when google will perform controls by IP, for instance? Lot of owners manipulate the reviews in order to improve their ranking...
Regards,
Czd
Great post Casey,
I have worked with companies who have poor Google ratings and this has penalized the local searches. I always recomend giving a great customer service and ask to satisfied clients to rate your company on Google, that will help you ranking better :)
Very useful! Thank you so much.
Great information. Thank you.
Hi Casey and thx for the thorough article. I take a bit of a swipe at the repetitious advice found in these local ranking factor studies about 'get more links, get more citations', (although I do agree with 'get more reviews') in a post I did on August 5th on the Duct Tape Marketing consultants blog at https://ducttapemarketingconsultant.com/blog/page/2. My proven formula for powerful rankings and traffic increases boils down to posting a new video each month on a client's website and social media pages. We also take the same simple, low-cost video content and run it as a local Facebook ad, the one we ran this month had an over 90% click rate! No scrounging around link building. Citations that matter have been in place for years. This is about rich content that keeps coming out consistently which is what both Google and customers want to see.
Hi Casey,
Great post! Ive been implementing a good amount of review schema on my clients sites lately and it seems to be helping with CTR. Your recent click study also validated that theory. In addition, local links are the way to go. Showing G, the community and your clients you are active, involved and care about the community you are in is an added bonus.
Love the quote about the need to go beyond the basics because so many companies are doing the basics. I've seen this in progress in so many digital channels, not just local SEO.
Used to be years ago that companies who did "just the basics" were head and shoulders above others because their SEO (and local seo) was so bad. Just not the case anymore.
Thanks For this post. really it's very nice to understand about SEO, actually we also try to local seo and service provide in this field.
for more details visit this site:-https://www.dinpl.com/sem-seo-services/
Hi, Casey. Great article. Something I've struggled with is the process to get customer reviews in Google.
Wouldn't it be nice to send your customer a link to leave a review for you in Google?
In order to get a review, I need to instruct customers to search for my business then click "Write a Review" on the business listing.
Am I missing something here? If Google wants more reviews they should do something to make collecting them a little easier on behalf of business owners
Hi Casey, I really appreciate you for your blog post!! Nowadays Local SEO is what that makes people to go insane due to competition they face with similar business types. To keep the online presence more clear and configured seems to be a tough task. Thanks for sharing these useful tips to get along well with the subject and perform better SEO.
Hi Casey,
Great post! Ive been implementing a good amount of review schema on my clients sites lately and it seems to be helping with CTR. Your recent click study also validated that theory. In addition, local links are the way to go. Showing G, the community and your clients you are active, involved and care about the community you are in is an added bonus.
Lastly, creating good content is key but promoting the content via outreach is even more of a priority. You can produce the best content around, but if you dont promote it and no one is seeing it, it is not earning any links. Creating good local content for your website is also a good idea. Provide driving directions, a list of your favorite things to do in the city, great places to eat, etc. These things humanize the client and show its not a bot or ghost writer simply pumping out content on a weekly basis.
I've been playing with local schema for a bit now and honestly haven't seen any changes in rankings. I'm going to continue testing but the basics of high quality links are still the most reliable growth factor for me.
Hey, are you talking about links to the actual Google profile or to the website? Sorry if you mentioned that in the post. I didn't see it anywhere.
I'm talking about to the website specifically. The landing page connected to your listing needs to have the most authority.
Ah, ok. Thanks.
Hello Casey, Really descriptive and yeah one of the useful post regarding local SEO, I have learned two new techniques to get links which beneficial towards local SEO 1. Sign up for HelpAReporter.com and 2. Sponsor a local event,.
Thank you for sharing knowledgeable post. Please keep updating!!!
I'm glad you found it useful!
great article Casey!
I like how you summed up some of the findings of our local search study with your real world experiences, and the actionable tips and recommendations you provided were spot on and valuable.
Wanted to share that if anyone is interested in running keyword competitive analysis audits (these reports provide the same data gathered in our local search study for any desired keyword), you can sign up for a free trial for Places Scout here: https://www.placesscout.com/pricing-packages and run some sample reports for your core keywords.
The reports provide over 400+ points of competitive analysis data for businesses that rank in Google, and help you understand what you will need to do outrank your competitors based on how well they optimized for the various metrics we analyzed in our local search study.
Combine these reports with the tips in this article for a powerful local seo strategy!
Thanks Mark! Like I mentioned before you guys did a great job on this study :)
i totally agree with you Casey, local seo especially for smalll businesses its really important.
Not only that, the thing you said about the reviews its also true, the more the reviews the more trustful looks the company.
Very good article,
I have always wondered why Google give importance to citation when they are almost the same as directory submissions. It is easy to spam them.
Casey, some great points you include here. I like the live streaming search which you have did to pick your final search. I am strongly believe that it is not mandatory to get business to rank in top 3, specially in Local.
Users are checking many other stuff before they opt in any services. Also 3rd party sites work well in Local business.
Hi Casey
I loved the view you pose where you say, "What to do if you and your competitors have taught the same?" Sometimes we practice all the same strategies and in the end do not get neutralize ....
I love the guide and especially love the new tool you have given me to know (HARO) and consider it very useful.
Thank you very much for the post!!
Awesome article, thanks for sharing!
Hi Casey!
Great post! It's really interesting. One question that arises me is: How can we fight spam and that our local business more visible to the "business waste"? Could get Google to revise the bad reviews?
Thanks!
Fighting spam has always been tough but I believe Google is making some strides in this direction. I highly recommend you check out this post by Joy Hawkins which will help you fight it :)
https://www.joyannehawkins.com/ultimate-guide-fighting-spam-google-maps/
Hi Casey, wonderful sharing. All point are very useful but the one hack that come to my knowledge first time is that to sponsor an event can also be a SEO technique. Thanks
great post, honestly find reviews are the new black hat area, i am also waiting for paid local ads, they should be here any moment :(
Yep they sure are. People manipulate links and they will manipulate reviews. The good news is though if you run a bad business and actually get a lot of bad reviews there is no real way to fight that long term.
Great article Casey but i have a question
In the "ads that display in the 3 pack" link you posted, you marked 1 hotel as an ad, but how do you know it's an ad? i couldn't find any "Ad mark" only "Deal mark"
Impressive post!! Very thorought and direct to the point. I really like the way you analize the relationship between rankings and reviews.
Thanks Antonio. I'm glad you found it useful. I'm finding that reviews also have a high correlation to click through rate. No surprises there, but it's a bigger difference than I thought.
Now days, Local SEO is a powerful resource to compare of people comes from websites. Because most of the people not ready to visit the website and spend their time. If any one choose local business it depends on reviews and ratings. But some of the SEO professionals put fake reviews and ratings to help their customer and use fake address also. I also faced this problems. So, my suggestion is no one can ready to provide a service to people. Everyone need to promote their business and earn money. Very few of them (Eg. Wikipedia) are ready to provide a trustworthy information and satisfy the people needs.
Any way, you can compare the top most directories and choose the best one. If you feel the service is not well don't forget to put your review in that directory.
Very Useful Information, actually when we are planning Organic search result we have to optimizes the GBP for Local Search also.
Local SEO arrived using several years ago and I can assure you it works 200% . ROI maximum !! ; )
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