Old Hand But New At Local
-
Hi Mozzers,
I've enjoyed success for customers with national campaigns but until now have never taken on a local campaign.
My method has been to find out what prospective customers were looking for and create content around this, then engage customers through various inbound channels. This, combined with a strong value proposition and strong calls to action has been successful.
What if anything should I change for a local campaign? I'd be interested in hearing from some people that have successfully conducted local campaigns.
As always, any help is greatly appreciated.
-
Hi Wayne,
Sure, I'm glad to give a quick answer on this. I'm assuming your client is a go-to-client business model like a plumber, general contractor or carpet cleaner, from your description.
Because Google considers local businesses as being most relevant to their city of location, the client's main local efforts will need to revolve around their city of location - not other cities in which they serve. They can strive to achieve a high blended/local ranking for their physical location, but not really for their service radius cities. Instead, for those other service cities, they can create a content development strategy for building up content on their website that highlights their work in those other cities. You can do further research on this topic if you look up discussions of 'city landing pages'. The goal of this work is to gain secondary organic rankings for these service cities where the client has no physical locale. The goal in NOT local rankings, because they won't typically be able to outrank competitors who do have physical offices in those other cities.
So - local rankings for city of location; organic rankings for service radius cities. This is my top advice for this very common situation for service radius businesses.
-
Can I ask for one further bit of advice? My client covers several smaller cities within a fairly tight 100 mile range. How would you handle regional location?
-
You are very welcome, Wayne.
-
Thanks Miriam.
-
Hi Wayne,
It sounds like you've taken such a great approach with your national clients. This mindset will also serve you well in Local, although Local SEO is definitely a distinct practice. I've been working in Local SEO for about 7 years now, and would like to offer you some resources to start getting you up-to-speed in this unique discipline.
I'll start with David Mihm's Local Search Ranking Factors 2012. This is the premiere annual industry report. It's a survey of some of the top Local SEOs on the planet, and while the last survey took place just before Google made the big change from the old Google Places to the new Google+ Local, the report is still relevant in nearly every regard: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml
Next, I will give you two articles of my own which I share with incoming clients and which have received a nice bit of industry acclaim in 2012. These 2 articles lay out what I can consider to be the best mindset and the best tactics for approaching a Local campaign. They should fill you in on the key areas of focus you will need to understand and keep in mind:
The Zen of Local SEO
http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1314
The Rudiments of Local SEO http://www.solaswebdesign.net/wordpress/?p=1344
Finally, I'd like to link you to what is generally agreed to be the top Local SEO blog going. This is Mike Blumenthal's blog, and should become weekly reading for you if you're delving into Local: http://www.blumenthals.com/blog
A couple of other Local blogs I highly recommend for regular reading:
http://marketing-blog.catalystemarketing.com/
The main things to understand about Local SEO are that Google rules the roost because of their market share, obeying their rules is critical to succeeding and violating their rules is a really bad idea, all of Local SEO hangs on the consistency of your client's NAP (name, address, phone number) across the whole web, and that the medium is constantly changing, meaning that Local SEOs must keep up with the news on a daily basis, literally. It's an extremely lively and exciting area of SEO, but is also probably the area most fraught with bugs and client frustration due to a lack of transparent communication on Google's part and their beta mentality regarding the products they roll out. So, buckle your seat belt; you are in for a fun ride! I sincerely hope the resources I've provided will get you started on the right foot!
-
Thanks Chad. Interesting that both yourself and Tom are not afraid to promote quality relevant directories.
-
Thanks Tom, great tips. I've never stopped using directories but have become much more selective. If it's a quality directory that's relevant to my subject, I'll use it. I agree with you completely that you get referring traffic as a bonus.
I've been reading about the enhanced value of local citations. In your experience is there truth to this?
Also, the client covers several cities within about a 100 mile radius. Do you have any dos and don'ts for multiple city strategies?
-
Actually I see quality local directories joining the stage platform. By quality I mean a real-brand that is geo-targeted. Not myfrogdirectorydotcom!
I believe the next few years in SEO will be all about white-hat-seo. By starting with a content algorithm that is targeted to help local users solve their pain-points; you'll naturally curate a list of excel workbook of places to build quality links.
For local anyway, there still is not a ton of competition, so you can certainly get some quality links and let your content algorithm produce your social sharing signals, track-backs, and other link sharing.
-
Almost goes without saying, and I'm sure you've already taken this onboard, but utilising Google+ (which is now used for Google Local) is a big thing for local.
Creating content for what people are looking for is an integral part of local as well. Almost automatically, people searching for "widgets new york" are further down the conversion channel than people looking for "widgets" - so your content can obviously utilise this and really big up the local aspect.
I've found that this extends to local directories and listings. It's funny because as people have been moving further away from directories (and with good reason) I've seen a growing number of referrals (converting ones at that) from local listings. As always, take care in where you list, but these can be a converter. Users have seemingly referred to these sites, preferring them to Google (draw your own opinion from that) in order to find the targeted shop that they want.
My advice would be to utilise those local listings and directories - particularly those that might also be linked to community websites. It's kind of like a forgotten past time, directory listing! The SEO value couldn't hurt, but you may see a surprising number of converting referrals as well.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Reaching out to all SEO experts for exciting new brand and project
Hi everyone! We're a beauty and travel ecomm brand looking to hire an SEO consultant (independent contractors only - no agencies please) on a contract basis to join our team. We're fast-growing and need help to optimize our on-site and off-site SEO efforts (www.shopsphynx.com). Please message me directly if you're interested in working with us. Below is a little more about us. Thanks! About Us: We recently launched with our first line of products - a new and innovative 3-in-1 travel razor for women that includes a water spray bottle, moisturizing shave bar and two razors all in one compact case. We've received tons of press for the product's unique design and innovation within the shaving industry (and are also in over 900 retail stores nationwide), and only recently launched our new site on shopify (two weeks ago) to drive our B2C sales. There's a lot of room for SEO improvement in terms of on-site efforts, as well as some guidance we'd like to receive for off-site SEO strategies, so we can build up our traffic, audience and customer base. We're targeting a big market & demographic of young women (ages 19-35), mainly competing with Gillette and Schick for a product segment that has largely gone untouched for decades. We'd like to change that 🙂 Let me know if you're interested! Thanks.
Competitive Research | | shopsphynx0 -
Finding Local SERPs
Good Afternoon Everyone, I am looking into finding a tool that can use different IP addresses for local markets to find what their SERPs look like for searches such as: Cogs in Calgary Cog Installer Miami Cog Repair New York With local IP addresses for that search in that market. Not sure if such a thing exists, but thanks in advance!
Competitive Research | | RandyEpp0 -
Localized SERP Rankings - Multiple Questions...
The Google SERPs for my keywords are pretty regional. We are in the "IT Support Company" space. I've checked with friends in other parts of the country, and we don't show up in the SERPs in other parts of the country for KWs that we are ranking for locally. Questions: 1. I see both national and local players showing up in the SERPs. Is there any kind of formula for how Google decides who gets on the first page? 2. Some of my keywords trigger Google+ listings. How long does it take to show up in Google+, assuming we're optimized appropriately, and we have earned a placement? 3. For Moz's keyword ranking tool, how does it handle regional searches? Moz's tool is going to show different KW rankings than what I will see. My immediate concerns are rankings in my area (NY Metro), but we want to go national. How do we track rankings in different areas? 4. Is it possible to be on the 1st page with Google+ and Organic listings? 5. Do the Google+ 7 packs have generally better, or worse CTRs than similarly placed organic listings?
Competitive Research | | CsmBill0 -
Raise your hand if you're doing SEO for manufacturers please.
When you're working for a manufacturer it's not exactly the same as working for a company that is flat-out informing people with content and links and revealing a lot of information (relatively speaking). Please tell me what you do when you're working with a client that is not willing to reveal too much because competition = fear of the unknown (like if you take a chance and post something online that your competition may use against you). I would appreciate less speculative and more informed answers from people who have actually done this kind of work - as opposed to those who think theoretically they may know the best way to go because they work for other types of businesses that are not as proprietary as manufacturing is. Thank you.
Competitive Research | | karlseidel0 -
Is there a way to establish how old a link to a site is?
I wonder if anyone has any insight on the above question.
Competitive Research | | InTouchMarketing560 -
Local search
hi, Local search case i try to evaluate local competition on a local query such as "hairdresser + the city name" in Google for a merchant without website neither a google adresse listing. Top results : 7 google adresses pack : ok Organic results : SERP display only directories ! The first 10 pages are reviews platforms & local directories (qype, yelp, yellowpages etc..) except only 1 or 2 urls with personalized domains name. 1/ Would it be easy with to make a website + with a brand new domain name (myhaidresseShop.com) to dominate these serp (organics) quickly (first 2 months) ? 2/ Would it be better to first launch a targeted submission campaign (popularity) on those local directories with personalized data (first month) , and later on, to build a website ? 3/ Or ideally, from start, to make both a local campaign (Google adresse + submission) and launch a new website ? Tks in advance...
Competitive Research | | mlc0 -
Best methodology for creating local keywords when Google has no data?
Generally I'll look at data for specific geographical searches and incorporate the data from the other keywords, then track the metrics. I think there is likely a more efficient system but I'm not sure where to start.
Competitive Research | | DoriC0 -
Is it valuable for a local business to build links into its Google Place?
G'Day All, Almost all of my clients are geo-based small service-based businesses. I've noticed during my research that the google places for our competitors in 3 separate niches (3 different clients) seem to be the dominating results for almost all relevant keyword terms. I'm curious to see if anyone has actively tried to increase the ranking of a google place by building links into it. Is this something that anyone else sees value to for a local small business? I would love to get some thoughts. And for that matter I'm also curious to see if anyone thinks there might be value to optimizing a Facebook Fan Page or Yelp Business page. They all seem to be key drivers of traffic our client websites so I'm wondering how difficult it is to make them rank as opposed to a website. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | blahblahblah20150