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 -
Local SEO
Im trying to rank well for a local search. im trying to rank for my city plus lawn care. Its not that competitive, because people in this field dont know about seo. Im trying to just rank well for it can someone give me suggestions to do that. Should i create blogs and use the comments to hyperlink to my page. Im doing research on my competition and seeing what backlinks they are using. and off page seo ideas would be great as well We have a great google places page same with yahoo. We are trying to rank for different city's i rank well for the city i live in and my address is in, but i dont rank that well for other cities. Even tho they are less competitive than mine competitive under 500k results for my keyword
Competitive Research | | fhnhockey0880 -
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 -
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 -
Old Domains
I recently had a discussion with a fellow SEO on the importance of older domains. The guy said he uses a lot of auctions to dig out old domains and use them to setup sites. I considered this as a potential way of generating incoming links. He did mention he had been punished with the google Panda update. What are peoples opinions on this as a way of generating incoming links. A domain may cost around $10 plus the hosting could be found quite cheap - it seems a good idea ? Plus if you get lucky and perhaps get a domain with existing authority it could really be a good investment. In research I do come across these sites quite a lot a basic wordpress install with pages added linking into other sites. They type that have no contact details and you have to find the whois info to gain any contact with the webmaster.
Competitive Research | | onlinemediadirect0 -
Questiton about new ranking factors
Hi, I am new to seomoz and i was very much impressed with the stuff here in seomoz. The tools here in seomoz are very helpful to me . And i was doing good with the help of seomoz. But due to recent google's algo panda 2.0 update. I was bit confused about new ranking factors that google has released. I can see here in seomoz also that page level link metrics has good importance than backlinks now. Earlier google algo gives main importance to backlinks now i can see in the list it went to bottom. Can you help in explaining these things, on which things i need to concentrate on and does backlinks really count now?? Many people stopped concentrating on backlinks now and are going for facebook likes and tweets. Here is the good example that i can see: www.hotfilesearch.com which is a flle search engine. He was one of the competitor for me . He ranked very good in a short span of time, all he did was he bought some really good paid links and within 6 moths he was on top. Now i can see he was dropping out every link he has. But though he was ranking pretty good on the web. I really in need of your suggestions to optimize my site. Awaiitng for your reply.. Regards Dheeraj
Competitive Research | | achillies0000 -
Site in top 3 with a 1-day old domain and no backlinks
Hi everyone, I'm trying to understand some searchresults, when searching in the netherlands for 'online casino':
Competitive Research | | iwebdevnl
http://www.google.nl/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=online+casino&pws=0 You'll see as position 3 result this website: http://bit.ly/qhRsUT, it's obviously that this site is there because of blackhat. But how did it come there such high for a keyword with high competition? I don't see anything wrong in the website? It's not like Google did something wrong, because it happened already a few times for this keyword with different domains from that owner. Regards, Yannick0 -
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