Old Hand But New At Local

[waynekolenchuk]

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.

[MiriamEllis]

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.

[waynekolenchuk]

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?

[MiriamEllis]

You are very welcome, Wayne.

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks Miriam.

[MiriamEllis]

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://www.ngsmarketing.com

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!

[waynekolenchuk]

Thanks Chad. Interesting that both yourself and Tom are not afraid to promote quality relevant directories.

[waynekolenchuk]

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?

[ChadBreezy]

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.

[TomRayner]

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.