Local SEO is a relatively new term that describes the process of optimizing your website for specific geographic areas. It’s very different from traditional SEO, which focused primarily on keywords and content quality to rank high in Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages.
When we think about the world of online shopping, companies like Amazon and Apple may come to mind. But it’s often overlooked how this “always connected” change has affected small local businesses’ landscape. The truth is that today’s local business customer journey has changed regardless of whether they interact with the site or in person.
For example, if you live on one side of Denham Springs where there are three grocery stores within walking distance, but your preferred store just closed down without warning, now not only do you have to go out farther for groceries than before; when they get home those same items will be more expensive because gas prices went up with increased demand over time from people who also moved far away or were forced into it.
A local business has a much more limited physical footprint than ever before. They need to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly or else risk being left behind in this new landscape. And that’s where local SEO comes into play. Local businesses can’t compete by solely relying on word of mouth anymore; they have to focus on the internet.
Old Approaches No Longer Work
In the old days, local businesses would invest in traditional advertising like print and telemarketing to attract new customers. But today’s customer is different – when they want something online, it will be at a time that suits them best – not anyone else!
People no longer need to depend on just one voice for their opinions about products and services in this digital age. Thanks to online reviews, today’s customers can get hundreds of unbiased voices in seconds!
Speaking of reviews. Please never, ever, ever review your own business or have employees do it. Google hates that and will punish you for it.
In the pre-internet days, when a customer wanted to know more about a product or service, they had to either physically visit the business or (god-forbid) pick up the phone and call them.
Those days are long gone…
Today, customers can learn about your business with just a few taps on their smartphone or tablet! In fact, according to research from Search Engine Land*, 57% of local searches have been made by mobile devices in the past year – up from 50% last year! This is excellent news.
The truth is: customers today have access to more information than ever before. I say this because it’s good to get product descriptions and prices from our smartphones without being bothered by pushy salespeople or telemarketers.
Today’s Customers Start off Further Down the Sales Funnel
Do you know what’s great about today’s customers? They’re way further down the sales funnel than they would have been in the olden days.
Well, that might not be such a good thing for you if your business has an atrocious online reputation because those prospective buyers are far more likely to spend their hard-earned cash with someone else!
This is why your business must encourage customers to leave you reviews and ratings on websites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, or even Yellow Pages!
I’ve used many businesses in my day-to-day life that have either had next to no online presence (in the form of reviews) or been awash with negative feedback. Either way, I haven’t gone back to them for business because they don’t deserve my patronage.
Online Traffic Drives Offline Sales
I’ve used many businesses in my day-to-day life that have either had next to no online presence (in the form of reviews) or been awash with negative feedback. Either way, I haven’t gone back to them for business because they don’t deserve my patronage.
Now more than ever, an online presence is essential for any business looking to grow its revenue. 78% of local mobile searches result in offline purchases – meaning that not investing your time and effort into building a quality website and optimizing it for local searchers could be the difference between success or failure.
Investing in Local Search Marketing
A recent study by Google found that SMBs that are making the most use of online marketing techniques like local search, email campaigns, and social media channels enjoy revenue growth up to 2.8 times higher than those who do not invest in these strategies at all!
The benefits for your business don’t just increase sales; many companies have noticed a decrease in customer churn rates thanks to this strategy.
If you’ve been thinking about taking advantage of some new technologies or investing more time into digital advertising, now is the perfect opportunity – call us today, or contact us to help explore what other options might be best suited for your needs.
There are over 500,000 businesses that close every year. One of the main reasons companies fail is that they don’t adapt their business to succeed in this new online-first world.
The more you invest in the local search market, the better your chances are of succeeding.
Local SEO Helps Generate More Leads
It’s no secret that the world is now a digital place. Companies are always looking for ways to interact with their customers more effectively– and we happen to have some of those answers! Our main goal at BlakSheep Creative is to help your business generate leads online, whether by getting phone calls, emails, or walk-ins from prospective buyers.
By focusing on Local SEO, your business can be found more easily by your local customers. Now, we’re not just talking about the people who live five blocks away from you– we mean all of them!
Local Search Engine Optimization
Local Searches vs. Non-Local Searches
Google has a different algorithm to rank local searches vs. non-local searches.
An example of a local search is “local SEO company in baton rouge.”
An example of a non-local search might be “Sony 43 inch TV” because this is a product that’s not tied to a physical location.
So when we look to improve rankings on Google, we first need to understand what Google wants. All Google wants to do is give the searcher the best possible result for their query.
How Does Google Determine Search Results?
If we dig a little deeper into this, Google uses a local algorithm to work out which results it thinks are best. The algorithm consists of three simple elements: proximity, relevance, and prominence.
Proximity.
Proximity is how far away the business’s location is from the person searching.
For example, if you’re a lawyer based in Mississippi and somebody searches for “lawyers in Baton Rouge,” you’re never going to appear in the results. Proximity is a metric that you can’t control or influence; you can’t decide where somebody searches from or what city they search for.
Relevance
Relevance is how well your business’ online presence matches what the searcher has searched for. A simple example of this is that if you’re a lawyer and someone searches for a plumber, you’re never going to appear in the results.
Now, this is an extreme example, but it’s layered. As another example, if you’re an employment lawyer and a person searches for an immigration lawyer, it’s unlikely that your business will be returned ahead of lawyers that purely specialize in immigration law.
Prominence
How does Google know which businesses to trust? The answer is Prominence. It’s how Google measures the factors that give a company more authority and reliability, such as reviews or links.
Google uses different algorithms for the two types of results you see when you do a local search.
Local Pack Results
The first is for Google’s local pack results, which are in this section here. This includes three Google listings that sit at the top of SERP below paid ads.
Every year Moz surveys some of the most recognized practitioners to learn what factors affect rankings and provide clients with a helpful breakdown of how they work in ranking businesses like yours.
This survey gives us a valuable understanding of how Google is looking at local businesses.
Organic Results
Google has a separate algorithm for the organic results, which are the blue links you see below the local pack. These organic results are still based on where in Google’s index your site ends up being ranked, and as such, we often refer to them as localized organic rankings. We focus both algorithms to help our clients drive more leads from Google – I’ll show you how!
We believe in full transparency with our clients; they must know what factors affect their search engine performance and how we build authority for them by improving these areas over time. The first step? Explaining each element and giving an example of work done
Google My Business (GMB)
Google My Business is the first thing prospects will see when they look for you online. So it’s not a surprise that Google account makes up 25% of your SEO ranking score! It’s also free to do, so why aren’t you using it?
But, it’s not enough to create a GMB page for your business; it needs to be optimized for local search. If your Google My Business profile hasn’t been properly optimized, then you’ll never succeed in local search, period.
Setting up a Google My Business listing is tricky; luckily, that’s why we’re here. We’ll walk you through setting it up so your business can be found by customers when they search for what you offer!
Our GMB Approach
Keyword Research
So in terms of what work we complete for our clients’ GMB listings, it all starts by uncovering which search terms people are actually searching for. We use Google’s tools to pull back the total number of local searches on Google every month for each of your services. This helps us identify which search terms we need to optimize for.
As an example, if there are 300 people a month searching for “Nissan dealerships” but there are 700 people a month searching for “Nissan car dealers”, we want to make sure we’re optimizing the client’s GMB profile for the search term with the higher volume.
Competitor Research
You can’t just put any old thing on your Google My Business listings. That’s where we come in! We poke around with the tools of a mad scientist and uncover all those little nitty-gritty details that people search for when they want to find businesses like yours, like find a restaurant near me that’s open on Sundays?
And then do some crazy tech stuff behind the scenes so that potential customers see exactly what they’re looking for right off their phone screen!
The work is never done because there are always new ways to optimize your GMB through creative marketing strategies or social media engagement.
The good news is that our marketing services experts take care of all of that for you, freeing you up to run your business.
Your GMB’s Q&A Section
Another key area we’ll help you work on is the Q&A section of your Google My Business listing. These questions and answers are prominent on your profile, which means they act as a community-sourced FAQ for potential customers who visit it.
We take care to post brand-friendly FAQS that will convert visitors into buyers by showing them all their concerns that have been addressed in advance (and answer any hard ones if needed). Once these go live, we’ll monitor them regularly to stay fresh, with new local content added often enough to keep people coming back!
Posts
We’ll also continuously create Google Posts. These are like social media updates that live on your GMB profile and help drive conversions from your listing, which is a good sign to Google that you’re an active business in the area!
Links
A link is like a vote for your business. It’s an endorsement of the quality, character, and competence that you offer to those searching Google. That’s why it’s crucial to get links and make sure they are from sites with good rankings themselves so that these votes stack up in our favor!
For example, when a respected university or industry publication links to your website, they are endorsing your business and putting their reputation at risk should you prove unworthy of their recommendation. It’s the same with peers and partners too; vouching for you in the form of a link puts all involved parties’ reputations on the line if something goes wrong down the road.
Link building has been a difficult task for many years now. It’s not something that just happens to you, and it’s not like content or any other commodity where the product is easily traded; instead, links have to be earned through hard work.
Links are costly because they require time, dedication, and effort to create high-quality articles with unique information or have products and services worth linking to on your site. You have to have something that people will want to link back from their blog post about a related topic of interest within their niche market segment.
It is difficult to acquire links for your business’ website without the proper knowledge.
The best way to gain trusted relations with other sites and improve your local rankings is through a particular type of link called an inbound or backlink, which can help bolster rankings on Google Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
Learn about how to get backlinks from your Google My Business profile. It’s quick, easy, and FREE.
In addition, you will be able to benefit from traffic that would not have otherwise been available if those sources were linked elsewhere! This means more potential leads coming into contact with your brand, which are hopefully turned into clients and customers. In short:
Backlinks make sense because they lead people straight onto your site, where they may become prospects interested in purchasing what you offer them!
Our Approach to Link-Building for Local SEO
Here at BlakSheep creative, we use several methods to build backlinks for our clients. This includes leveraging the power of social media and blog posts, which are still highly effective in building links that can help boost your site’s local SEO ranking!
Audit
The first stage of our link strategy for our clients is completing a link audit to understand what your current link profile is like and to identify and remove any potentially harmful links. We also need to assess how your link profile compares to your competition in order to fully understand exactly what is required from a link building campaign.
Link Building
Your website is a significant part of your marketing strategy, and the more traffic it generates, the better. We specialize in Link Audit & Analysis to carefully identify and remove any potentially harmful links that may be hurting you from developing as much traffic as possible.
The first stage of our link strategy for clients includes completing a full audit on their current profile to find out what’s going well – or not so well. We also need to assess how they compare with the competition before fully understanding precisely what needs to be done during an effective campaign.
Reviews
Five years ago, companies were used to doing things their own way and hoping for the best. Nowadays, it’s a whole different story! Online reviews matter most when customers make buying decisions, so that means you need an online reputation management strategy if your company is not already following this trend.
Online reviews don’t just affect your rankings; they impact every stage of the customer’s buying journey.
A review can make or break a sale: from discovery to evaluation and even trust in the brand – all steps on that high stakes path to purchase.
Discover
The first stage of marketing is discovery. With more positive online reviews, you have a better chance to rank higher in local search results on Google and other sites for potential customers who will see your business when they’re searching the internet!
Evaluate
The next stage in the journey is evaluation. Your customers might be evaluating you on Google, and as they assess your listing with star ratings (and those of your competitors), they’re proving their worthiness.
If you have great online reviews, then your business is going to rank higher. This means that people will see and click on you more often than not because they know good quality when they find it!
Trust
One of the best ways to establish trust is by using online reviews. Small businesses with an excellent reputation have an advantage before they ever speak with a prospective customer.
So not only will you rank higher and get more clicks, but customers will be easier to sell to. Plus, they’ll buy more from you because of your online reviews.
Our Approach to Online Reviews
Our approach to online reviews is simple. First, we conduct an online review audit of your website to see what is currently being said about you online.
Second, we help you improve the things mentioned in those reviews or areas where there isn’t a lot of information available.
Then third and finally, we push for local SEO by getting more clients to leave positive feedback on sites like Yelp and your Google My Business (GMB).
Audit
The first thing we do for our clients is an audit of their reviews. We analyze the top-performing companies in your industry and compare them to you so that we help you stay competitive.
Gather More Reviews
Next, we help you gather more reviews with an online review campaign that targets your most valuable customers. We use email marketing to reach these clients and give them a special offer in exchange for their feedback on sites like Yelp or GMB.
The biggest challenge with online reviews is that unhappy customers are far more likely to leave reviews than happy ones.
We use powerful software that helps your customers leave reviews on the most significant websites, boosting rankings and improving trust signals.
We’ll also make sure that you respond to customer feedback quickly not to lose their confidence in your business!
On-Page Signals (SEO)
The next factor is on-page signals, which are basically all the things living on your website- everything Google sees when they crawl it.
Optimizing on-page signals is an art and a science. Google loves sites that are up to date with the latest SEO best practices, so we need to run a site audit to make sure your page has all of the right ingredients!
Here are some of the areas we assess:
- Title tag + Header tag review
- Is there enough content, and is it locally relevant?
- Are there calls to action on your site to drive conversions?
- Is it easy for a user to navigate and get in contact?
Citations and Directories
Imagine how great it would be to have your business ranking at the top of search results. There’s a way for you to make that happen! A local citation is any place online that displays your business’ name, address, and phone number (NAP) – like Google Maps or Yelp.
Citations and directories are a great way to get local links for your website.
Suppose this information doesn’t match up with what other sources are displaying about YOUR BUSINESS. In that case, YOU will end up losing out on potential customers who find themselves unable to contact OR locate YOUR LOCAL ESTABLISHMENT in their area via internet searches.
Our Approach to Citations for Local SEO
Audit and Clean Up Incorrect Listings
We’ll run a full audit of the citations for your business, ensuring that we build out and clean up citations on the most powerful directories to ensure you have 100% accurate data. This provides optimal visibility in Google, which will lead to more customers coming through your doors!
We’ll help make it easier than ever for potential clients searching online to find you by ensuring all information is listed correctly and matches what they’re looking for with our comprehensive audits of citation listings.
How We Work With Clients
Here are the steps that we take to help our Local SEO customers rank higher in search results and bring in new customers.
Audit
First, we need to understand their current performance and the size of the gap between their business and our top competitors before we start implementing work for a new client.
Create a Strategy
Until we’ve completed this audit, it’s impossible to understand exactly what work is needed and subsequently what level of investment is required. The audit gives us a roadmap for our Local SEO strategy, determining precisely what we need to work on to increase the leads you generate online.
We’ll take you through the full results of your audit so that we can come up with a plan together.
In the next month, we’ll implement a strategy that will help us start on the right track and deliver as many quick wins as possible.
Let’s be honest. You want to know how much this is going to cost, and the truth is, we don’t know yet because many factors go into determining what level of investment makes sense for your business.
But I can guarantee you one thing: it will never make financial sense if things aren’t done correctly in the first place!
A successful Local SEO campaign needs to have a clear roadmap, timelines, and expectations. The audit takes 8 hours to build, and it will enable us to show you the best possible route for your company’s success in this field of marketing. Once we’ve presented our findings back, both of you can have an idea as to what results are expected from your budgeted time frame!
Contact us today to schedule a free consultation and learn more about how we can help your business succeed in this area! We’re Denham Springs’ leading digital marketing agency, with a proven track record for helping our customers dominate the search engine results pages.
Many SEO agencies make claims; we produce results!
