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Transcript
How to Get Found and Win Business in Local Search
Today we’re going to be talking about how to get found and win business in local search. Right now, possibly later today, someone is going to be searching for your business, maybe by name, or maybe they don’t know who you are yet, and they’re just looking for a tailor near me, or Wiscasset bed and breakfast. Maybe they’re not even specifying a location, but Google understands that there’s local intent, like a search for Chinese food or men’s barber.
Whatever the case, if you are looking to generate more business in person or online, and you serve a local audience, or if you serve visitors coming to your town, like all the cruise ships dropping off people right now in Portland, Maine, local search is incredibly critical to your success, and here’s why.
The percentage of consumers who use search engines to discover local businesses, a whopping 97%, or basically everybody out there. The number of consumers who conduct a local smartphone search and then visit a physical business within the next twenty-four hours, 67%, three-quarters of those people. The number of local searches that lead to a direct purchase within twenty-four hours is 28% percent. Still one out of four, not bad. And then finally, the number of local mobile searches that yield an offline purchase within forty-eight hours is an incredible 98% percent. So basically, it’s a done deal.
So yeah, local search visibility is important to your leads, to your sales, to your business, and to your bottom line. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t even need to assign a geographic location or say near me in a search. Google may still infer what we call local intent. In this screen grab, you can see that I searched for men’s barber, but I didn’t include a location.
Google, however, understands that if I’m looking for a men’s barber, I’m likely looking for one nearby. In its search engine results page, or SERP, right at the top of the page, it displays what’s referred to as the local pack. The local pack, as you can see, is made up of the top three results, four if there’s a sponsored ad, as there is here, and then a map showing where these businesses are located.
For some more competitive searches, we might also see paid search results above the local search results or below it. Depending on the category, Google might also display local service ads, or LSAs, that come with a Google Guaranteed or a Google Screened badge. These categories include home services or professional business services, health and wellness providers, beauty and personal care, and more. So those are two different specific types of ads that also might appear at the top of the page specifically for local audiences.
Local search can include more than just ads and the local pack, however. As we scroll down the page, we can start to see the local organic results. So today I’m going to be talking a lot about the local pack, which is that pack that includes the map, as well as local organic results, which are the typical results you would get outside of the map pack itself, which I refer to as local organic results.
Here you can see that Yelp, Reddit, and a couple of local businesses showed up in the organic results. This is a little atypical, as often this first page of the results is dominated by directories and review websites like Yelp or major national brands. Google tends to favor large established companies over small businesses, and those big businesses can also sink a lot of resources into their SEO marketing, making them a double threat to your visibility. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try and rank in the organic section, but because of the heavy competition and the fact that it usually comes after the ads and after the local pack, I’d give it a lower priority, a nice to have, if you will.
For most of us, our best opportunity lies in getting into the local pack. But even though it might be our best and possibly easiest opportunity, it still comes with challenges. Only three organic results appear in the local pack, which means that if you’re number four, you might as well be 104. The information and insight that I’m about to share is pulled from a number of resources, but primarily from Google’s own documentation on local search and what they’re looking for from the local search ranking factors. It’s a report that’s put out annually by WhiteSpark, and of course from our own experiences here at flyte new media, working with hundreds of local businesses over the years to help them succeed in Google search.
Today I want to cover a number of subjects. I want to talk about the local visibility factors, both the factors that impact your local pack visibility, as well as your local organic rankings. We’re going to talk a lot about your Google Business Profile. You’ll often see that referred to as GBP, but it’s harder to say than to type out, so I’ll probably say Google Business Profile or Business Profile, all means the same thing, and how to optimize it. I’ll share with you some of the things that you can do with your own website to improve your visibility, and we’ll also look at what off-site signals you can be sending to Google to improve that same visibility.
And finally, we’ll take a look at some special consideration for SABs, or service area businesses. These are businesses that don’t have a physical address where customers can come and visit. Think of a solopreneur working out of her home, or a garage door repair shop that only works at customers’ houses.
So for those of you who are not familiar with me, don’t worry about it, I’m fine with that. My name is Rich Brooks, and I’m the president of flyte new media. We’re a digital marketing agency located here in Portland, Maine. We offer branding, web design, and digital marketing services, including SEO, like we’re talking about today.
I’m also the founder of the Agents of Change, a weekly podcast and an annual conference, hopefully coming back soon, that takes place in Portland, Maine, all about digital marketing. The podcast itself has over 630 episodes for you to check out if you’re looking for something to listen to on your commute or next time you’re mowing the lawn or at the gym.
I’m also the tech guru at 207, which is the evening news program on the NBC affiliates here in Maine, and I wrote a book called, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing. So I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and implementing it both for flyte and for our clients, with the help of some very talented marketers, I should say.
So let’s dig into it. What levers can you pull to gain visibility in local search? In Google’s own documentation, they identify three pillars that determine your local rankings and visibility.
The first one is relevance, which is how well your Google business profile matches what someone is searching for. So not your website, but your business profile. The second is distance, which refers to how far each business is from the prospective customer who is searching. However, it seems that there’s not one set distance, so I can’t tell you you have to be within such a distance that covers all types of businesses. It appears that Google is likely to give you, as a searcher, nearer options on items like pizza or a coffee shop versus for searching for something like a plumber or an accountant. And this may just be due to the nature of the vertical and how important proximity is to how you would make your own decision.
And finally, prominence, or how well-known your business is. Prominent places are more likely to show up in the search results. This factor is also based on information like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews your business has. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.
So if your Google business profile is the most important factor to your local visibility, let’s start there. To claim your business first on Google, you can first Google it, and then within the knowledge panel, which will come up when you search for your company name, or at least it should, you click on ‘Own this business’ to get started.
Now, there are a few ways that Google will verify your business, and sometimes it depends on the type of business you run. Verification could include a phone call, text messaging, email, a live video call, or even snail mail. In some cases, Google requires multiple verifications. Generally, this is a slow but painless method, although we’ve definitely worked with some businesses that have struggled to get verified.
If your verification fails, you may want to get a professional involved who’s been through the process before. If you do have a Google Business profile, you can access it and optimize it by visiting business.google.com. Or if you’re logged into your business account already, you can access it by searching your name. You can see here that I’m logged in as flyte, and when I search for us by name, I see this section called, Your Business on Google. If you Googled flyte new media right now, you obviously wouldn’t see this. You might see your own business if you Googled it.
From here, I can edit my profile, read my reviews, and more. Your business profile feeds the information that shows up here in the Knowledge Panel, which often appears when somebody searches for you by name. Now, before we go and start investing time and energy into our business profile, it’s important to recognize that Google isn’t showing us all of their cards. In fact, Google says, “We do our best to keep the Search algorithm details confidential to make the ranking systems as fair as possible for everyone.”
In other words, they’re not giving us a teacher’s edition with all the answers in the back, which is why the Local Search Ranking Factors Report becomes so valuable. It started in 2008 and was taken over by the company WhiteSpark in 2017. The most recent survey includes 47 top local search experts, each taking a two-hour survey and scoring 187 different factors between zero and five to help us better understand what’s actually working in local search. In short, the best of the best in local search, the people who are working on this day in and day out contribute to the survey.
The answers are calculated and weighted to help us better understand what’s working now in local search. I’m not going to go through all the methodology here, but I’ll share a link to the current report in the follow-up email, which I’ll send you in the next couple days once we get this recording up on our website.
As I mentioned, there are a hundred and eighty-seven different factors that they asked the local SEO experts to weigh in on, but I just wanted to call out a few of the top ones. And by the way, the way the report works, it talks first about the local pack, and then it takes those same 187 factors and reorganizes them specifically for local organic search. But right now we’re focusing on the local pack and Google Business Profile.
At number one is the primary Google Business Profile category. In other words, the most impactful thing you can do is make sure that your business is listed in the appropriate business profile category. Here you can see from flyte Zone One that our number primary category is as a marketing agency.
Number two is about proximity, how close the searcher is to your business. There’s not much you can do here. Well, maybe if you set up your business like a food truck, but actually that probably wouldn’t work. You’d run into different problems then. So let’s just chalk this up to something that we can’t control and focus on the things that we can control.
Number three is keywords in the Google Business Profile. In other words, a locksmith with the word locksmith in the title will do better than one without locksmith in the title, everything else being equal. A company named Maine Web Design will do better for web design than flyte new media, unfortunately.
You may be thinking, “Why not just dump a bunch of keywords into your business title?” Well, people have and people do, but it does break the terms of contract with Google, and you may be penalized for this. It happens all the time, something I would definitely recommend not doing.
Coming in at number four, having a physical address in the city of search, which can hurt if you have a service area in, say, all of Southern Maine, but your offices are only in Portland, and the searcher is looking for landscaping in Saco. You’re definitely going to be at a disadvantage. Again, outside of moving your business or opening additional branches, there’s not much you can do here.
So moving on, number five, this is new and it’s a little controversial, that your business is open at the time of search. This makes sense for retail shops, because why would Google recommend a closed store when others are open? But how about somebody who’s researching lawyers after business hours? Doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it is what it is. Some people have taken to artificially extending their hours or using a call service to say they’re open 24/7, but that can backfire, too. If someone’s expecting your store to be open because of Google Business Profile, and then they arrive and it’s not, they might leave a bad review or even submit a complaint to Google. And again, you might get away with this until you don’t, and then it’s going to bite you in the butt.
Numbers six and nine are about the quality and quantity of your reviews, and number 11 and 14 are about their recency and frequency. So two of the top 10 and four of the top 20 factors, are about a steady drumbeat of reviews. The rest of the top 20 are about location, which you have little control over, consistency between your Google Business Profile listing and your website, which you have complete control over. And the click-through rate from your Google Business Profile to your landing page, which is likely going to be your homepage unless you have multiple locations, different story, which you have some influence over.
So there are things we have total control over, some things we have influence over, and some things that we really can’t control. So I’m going to continue to focus on the things that really move the needle that you have under your own control. So just an example of one of the knowledge panels. I did notice that some of the knowledge panels come up horizontal rather than vertical, and that’s a fairly new thing. I hadn’t seen it before putting together this presentation. But here’s our neighbor and client, DiMillo’s on the Water, and you can see that they’ve got a lot of reviews, especially for Maine, and very strong reviews as well.
So to summarize, the collective advice from the top 47 professionals in this field is to optimize your Google Business Profile, get a steady stream of positive reviews, and to be close to the person searching. Which again, beyond your control. Of course, there are 167 other factors in this report, and if you’ve done everything possible in the top 20 and you still aren’t getting the visibility you’re looking for, I recommend you start working your way down the list and/or invest in some advertising.
Again, these are the factors that impact your results in the local pack. The report, as I mentioned, is a completely separate reordered list for organic results, but I recommend first focusing on the local pack as it almost always appears above the organic results and tends to be more engaging and get more clicks, as I’ll show you right here.
So when the local pack is present, in this screen capture I’ve scrolled past it, it captures about 44% of the clicks. That number goes up to 52 if you include the people that click on the ‘More Places’ link within the local pack, which takes you to a new page with a bigger map and a lot more listings on it.
The organic listings capture about 29%, and paid ads about 19% as well. And keep in mind that the organic results are often dominated by big companies and directories. In this particular search on ‘wedding venue near me’, we can see how many of these results are from big directories rather than small local businesses.
We’ve got The Knot, WeddingWire, PartySlate, Eventective, and Yelp. So five out of the six top organic results are all these big directories. And with each organic result getting fewer clicks than the one above it, the one local business, The Greenhouse at Highland Farm, is likely only getting, I don’t know, 2% or 3% of these clicks.
Maybe less. I’m just guessing. Because if I was doing this research and I somehow scrolled past the visually engaging local pack, I might be tempted to go to a site that is built on rating and, and ranking all of these venues, like a WeddingWire or The Knot. Even at 2 to 3%, however, this could bring in a lot of revenue to The Greenhouse at Highland Farm.
This isn’t a high-volume business, uh, wedding venues. You don’t need, uh, a, a ton of business. Uh, and there’s likely very limited invent- in- uh, inventory on dates. So like everything else in marketing, it depends on how much energy you wanna spend here. Consider your business, your vertical, and your available inventory when investing your time and energy in local organic results.
Okay, so let’s optimize our Google Business profile.
We’re gonna focus first on our local pack visibility. So let’s go and optimize the Google business profile. Uh, as you saw before, there are multiple ways to get there, but I’m just gonna show you how to do it when you’re logged into your account and search for your brand name. Here you can see a nice dashboard of all the things you can optimize.
So why don’t we go ahead and click on Edit Profile?
This takes us to a screen where we’re able to edit our business information. Our primary business category, as you can see and I mentioned before, is a marketing agency, and that’s not gonna change. Since we last updated our Google Business Profile, we’ve been doing a lot more work in branding, Flyte New Media has, and our new website is going to reflect that, uh, focus on branding.
So let’s update our business categories. We’ll roll over to this section, and an edit icon appears, and let’s click on it. We can now add another category. Click on add another category. I start typing out the word branding, and then I can select from the options branding agency. Once I added this category, I got an alert that my business profile should be updated in the next ten minutes or so, which it was.
I took this opportunity also to update our company description and some other information as well. Even though we take local SEO seriously, I definitely found some opportunities for improvement in our own local SEO. Plus, as we’ve discussed, these things change regularly, and so you always should be coming back to your account every once in a while and just continually optimizing it.
Next up, we can read and respond to our reviews. When I did this, I was slightly appalled for two reasons. First, as you can see, we haven’t gotten a new review since January of twenty twenty-five. What’s more frustrating is we’ve done a really good job of collecting client testimonials for our website, but we obviously haven’t been encouraging them to leave reviews on Google for us.
Can you guess the second? We haven’t been responding to those reviews. Whether reviews are good, bad, or middling, they deserve a response from you or somebody on your team. A few moments later, I did just that. Better late than never. By the way, there’s no evidence that shows that responding to reviews improves your visibility, but it’s the right thing to do.
It also shows the next visitor, especially if you’re responding to a negative review, that you actually care about customer service and customer experience, so it’s just a good habit to get into. Next up is photos, which as you can see, populate your knowledge panel. We’ve just gotten back into the habit of uploading screenshots of our recent websites and other works to our Google business profile.
We also recently completed an overhaul of our office space and took a bunch of photos for our upcoming website, so I expect we’ll add those as well. While adding photos and even videos doesn’t have a direct impact on your local pack visibility, the longer people stay on your business profile, the more Google sees that as a signal that they’re engaged, and that will definitely improve your rankings in the local pack. So adding photos, adding videos, anything you can do to get people to spend a little bit more time on your business profile, that will help you.
Next up are posts. Posts on Google Business Profile are something that most businesses just don’t do. Many of them are completely unaware that they even exist. Posting to your business profile is very similar to posting on your social media profiles. You can add a new post by scrolling down into your knowledge panel and then finding this section. We had made posting to our business profile part of our social media checklist years ago, but apparently that went off the rails a couple of years ago. I’ll need to talk to my team about getting it back up there. I think the reason why we had stopped is because we questioned whether or not anybody was actually using it.
We were attaching UTMs, which is a way of tracking who’s clicking on what links. So we were using UTMs, and we weren’t really seeing a lot of payoff in terms of clicks through to our website. However, in reviewing this WhiteSpark report, one of the factors is the quality of engagement, which signals on Google Business Profile, and that rose from forty-eight to thirty-four.
So it’s an increasing and improving spending. Getting people to spend and engage with your profile is something that the experts see as gaining in importance. The theory is that Google is leaning heavily on human behavior signals. Real humans engaging with your business profile by spending time there, by looking through your photos, reading reviews, watching videos, and reading your posts will definitely help improve your rankings. Even if people aren’t clicking through to where you want to send them with these posts, there still appears to be a big benefit when it comes to your visibility. In fact, I had a meeting right before this with my team, and we decided that we are going to start adding Google Business Profile to our regular social media event calendar.
Next up is performance. I don’t feel like there’s anything to optimize here, but it is interesting to go through and look at some of your stats, which could give you some insights into is the work that you’re doing paying off for you. I’m going to skip over advertising because it feels like a completely separate topic. I’m also going to skip over products, in part because flyte doesn’t offer any products, but also in part because it ranked so low as a factor in that local search ranking factors report. However, services did rank as an important factor, and it is also a good place to put relevant keywords. Here’s where I could see the possible services.
And I realized as I was going through this that we didn’t have a description for our SEO, our search engine optimization. So I updated that information. I also realized that because they require you to put in a price for this, I realized there was no way to say that this price was a monthly fee, so I had to kind of create a workaround. And what I ended up doing is in the description say, “flyte offers a monthly SEO package.” So that’s a way to kind of get your information out there and not break any of the rules.
I’m also going to skip through booking, but if you have a booking tool, you can connect it here. Now, one thing I’m embarrassed to admit, I’ve admitted quite a few things where our Google business profile wasn’t up to snuff, but I didn’t know that there was an ‘ask for reviews’ feature. Given how important reviews are to Google and how challenging leaving a Google review can be for many people, this is a really nice feature that I will be taking full advantage of going forward.
In fact, just today in reaching out to a client who had promised us a testimonial, I said, “Actually, I’d rather have you leave a Google review,” and I gave him the link that is the review link. And then here’s what you see, or here’s what the customer would see when they click on the link. But obviously, I’m not going to leave a review for flyte new media from flyte new media. You definitely don’t want to be leaving reviews for your own business. You don’t want to fake reviews. You really just want to persuade or influence happy customers to be leaving reviews for you.
And one of the things we do see in the report is that steady drumbeat. If all of a sudden you go from zero to 50 reviews in a week, Google’s going to flag that as being artificial, and it could even hurt you or penalize you. So as I mentioned before, optimizing your Google Business profile probably has the biggest impact on your local search visibility that you have control over. So just to recap, here’s what you want to focus on. Fix or confirm your primary category, make sure it’s right. Complete all the fields you possibly can on your business profile.
Go through them and see if you can answer every single one, and consider the keywords that you might want to rank well for. Not stuffing keywords in there, but if you’re talking about your services, make sure that you’re using your keywords. If you’ve had somebody do an SEO keyword research for you, this is a great opportunity to work some of those keywords in there.
Ensure NAP consistency. NAP is an acronym that stands for name, address, phone number, and it’s just come to be shorthand for all of your pertinent business information. What this means is, and we’ll go into this in a little bit more detail, but your name, your phone number, and your address should be as consistent as possible across every platform out there. And some things to keep in mind is that all the information that you’re putting into your Google Business Profile is also feeding Gemini and AI Overviews on the Google search results. So just more and more reasons to invest some time and really optimize everything you can on your Google Business Profile.
But there’s still more work to be done to capture that local intent search traffic. And next up is the work you can do at your website. Now, according to the experts in the local search ranking factors report, the on-page signals, the work your website is doing, has the biggest impact on your local visibility in the local organic results, making up 33% of the total weighted score across all factors.
Now again, we talked about the local pack, but we also talked about the local organic. It’s also the second most important collection of factors for your visibility in the local pack, coming in at 15%. And it’s also the most important factor for AI visibility.
I know that somebody asked a question about that just before we got started, and that’s a category that’s growing exponentially. I just did a presentation on GEO, which is generative engine optimization, which is about AI search, and we’ll probably be having that webinar as part of our flyte school seminar webinar series coming up soon. Stay tuned.
So some things that you can do on your website that make a difference and make an impact to your local visibility. Although this doesn’t seem at first glance to be directly related to your local search visibility, having one page per real service tops the list of priorities according to the experts. So an HVAC company shouldn’t just list all of their services on one page. It should create a page for each service, one for plumbing, one for heating, one for cooling, one for solar, and one for repairs.
Now, this is something we’ve told our clients forever. Don’t combine all your services into a single page. You really want to focus when it comes to search engine optimization so people can find you for the services that they’re looking for. And it turns out that it has a big impact on your local search visibility as well. The other thing is, it’s good to have location-specific pages, but only if you have a physical location in that city or region. So real physical location, give it a page. A town that’s part of a service area, don’t. Instead, include that town name in the service page instead.
Now, Google’s 2025 spam updates specifically target what they call thin location pages. In other words, having a lot of pages with very little original content that are just there because you wanted to have a focused page on Westbrook plumbers, that can lead to penalties and lower rankings. Content needs real specificity, actual staff, actual project photos, actual neighborhood references, not the same paragraph with the city name swapped out.
So again, a page for each service and a page for each real location. You don’t need to have hundreds of pages, each one almost like a matrix. That’s not what Google’s looking for. That’s not what people are looking for. Now, if you are going to build a location page or pages on your website, here are some tips to make the most of them.
Make sure that the NAP information on the page matches identically to the one on your business profile. Use real original photos, not stock photography. Gemini uses the phrase job site photos as the kind of photos you should be thinking about. Don’t use a generic staff photo of everybody. Instead, use a photo of the people who actually work at that location. Include local proof, which include things like testimonials, but tied to that specific location. So if you only have one location, this doesn’t matter as much. But let’s say that you have a bunch of testimonials on your site, and one mentions a specific town or location where you’re located, put that one on this page.
So we talked about the importance of NAP consistency. As I was grabbing a screenshot for this presentation, I realized that on our website we spell out the word street, and we use the word suite as part of our suite number. But when I went over to our Google Business profile, I realized we abbreviated street as ST, and instead of spelling out the word suite, we just had the pound sign. Doing a little bit more research, because I was freaking out, it turns out there’s nothing in the documentation that requires this level of matching. This may have mattered in the past, but now Google understands that they’re the same thing.
Still, I wanted to kind of check all the boxes, so I opened up the editing tool in my Google Business profile to fix this, and what did I find? That the underlying data in our Google Business Profile was street spelled out and did use the word suite, and then Google abbreviated it for the knowledge panel. So my advice to you, don’t sweat the details. Just make sure that the information is the same even if the abbreviations are slightly different.
So far we’ve looked at our Google Business Profile and we’ve looked at our website. So on how we can move the needle on both the local pack as well as local organic listings, let’s slide into the third category, which is off-site, which means for local search visibility, it comes down to two factors, links and citation.
Links and citations are very similar in the fact that your business is getting coverage. I appear locally on the local NBC of affiliates to talk about tech news. As part of News Center Maine’s distribution plan, they often show up in Yahoo News, which means I occasionally show up in Yahoo News. You can see that they mention both me and my company by name, but there are no links leading back to my website here. So this is considered a citation and not a link.
When it comes to the local pack, links and citations don’t have a lot of power, coming in at only eight and six percent respectively as a weighted factor. But local organic is a different story. Links jump up to 24%. They’re the second biggest category after on-page content.
There are other benefits for links and citations as well, especially in AI search. AI is a growing channel for driving qualified local leads for your business, but not something we’re going to really get into today. Getting inbound links feels harder than ever, and honestly, it’s never been easy. There are companies out there that you can hire that will send out hundreds or thousands of emails on your behalf trying to get people to link back to you, but this is often costly and rarely effective.
In my experience, here are some ways where I think you could get valuable inbound links. Find local resources that list ‘best of’ categories in your vertical. Since Google values contextually aligned links, these score on two fronts, both because of the category or vertical, as well as the fact that it’s local to your geography.
Press releases. You can pay a service like PRWeb to distribute press releases that are often picked up by local news sources. These don’t provide a lot of traditional search value as they’re considered low-value links, but they seem to have a bigger impact on AI-powered search. And if they’re for local businesses, they also can impact your local visibility.
Publishing your own original research that’s relevant to your industry. This content is often linked to by a variety of other sources and can be a natural way to attract inbound links. Now, this does take time and energy, which is part of the reason why so few businesses do it. But if you can do some online surveys or hire a company to do some research for you and publish that on your website, and it’s relevant and interesting to your industry or to your locality, great way to get those inbound links.
And then guest blogging for someone else’s website is another way because your bio will link back to your website. And then similarly, appearing on other people’s podcasts, as long as they have a show notes page, is a great way of getting relevant links back to your website. And again, this is very powerful way of moving up in that local organic listings.
Now, the local pack is heavily anchored to a physical location. But let’s say that you’re a service area business, and that could be anything from a plumber to a home-based business to a property management company. I’m strictly talking about businesses that don’t see customers on premise. If you do have a space at your place of business to meet with your customers, even if you also visit their homes and businesses, you don’t have to worry about it.
This is really only for the people who are strictly either virtual or remote. Those SABs that don’t have an office where they can meet with customers definitely are at a disadvantage, and you’ve got your work cut out for you. If you are an SAB, you need to focus on authority from your website, from customer review acquisition, and from your off-page footprint to compete against your competition that do have physical locations On your website, if possible, you should promote town-specific projects that you worked on.
For some businesses, this will be easier than others, like a landscaper or an architect. But for flyte, we could focus on case studies of businesses here in Maine. Or if you’re an accountant, you could mention with permission some of the business clients and the towns they call home. You can also upload localized GEO-coded photos. Now, I’m not talking about the metadata behind the photos, I’m talking about focusing on what’s called visual entity proof and semantic image optimization.
I know that’s some fancy language, but basically Google uses AI and natural language processing to read visual content, to read images, to read photos. They do this so that they can basically read that visual content, identify landmarks, recognize text on vehicles, and then crawl the surrounding page content. So instead of using generic stock photos, use original high-res photos that tie your crew and equipment to the location. Maybe stage a shot of your company trucks or a field technician in front of Hadlock Field or the state capital in Augusta. Those are obviously Maine-specific references. You should make them your own.
You can also use descriptive geographic names for image file names. So instead of calling it image905.jpeg, list out the town name in the image file name. And further, you can use alt tags and even captions around the image to reinforce that location.
Now, if you are getting testimonials from clients, see if they’ll also work in the name of the town into those testimonials, and this goes for off-site reviews as well. So if you did some work for somebody in Boston, make sure that they’re using the word Boston in that review.
And very often when I’m asking people to leave us a review, I’m not asking them out of the blue. Usually, they’ve said something nice about my team, and then I’ll ask them if they would write a review. But I’ll often say, “If you could mention the fact that we did paid search for you”, or “You could mention the fact that your business is located in Holliston” things like that do make a difference.
And finally, also consider relevant content specific to location. So as I looked at the page copy on this particular page that you see in front of you, it references some strict regulations that have been put into place to preserve Sebago Lake. But it could have gone further. It could have specifically named some of those regulations and the towns that enforce them. A real estate page that’s promoting new condos in Scarborough should talk about the local school system and the restaurant scene, as anemic as it may be in Scarborough, Maine.
When it comes to the work you need to do off-site, it’s all about getting those inbound links and citations. The first category of links that you want to go after are sites that support what’s called address suppression, and that includes sites like Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, Facebook, and so on. Places where you can list your business, but it doesn’t require you to have a physical location. If they allow you to state or draw your service area, make sure it’s as close to the one that you’ve defined on your Google Business Profile as possible. Again, consistency is king here.
Once you’ve done that and you want to build your local authority through hyperlocal links and citations, these include things like localized ‘best of’ lists, which I referenced earlier, memberships in chambers or local trade guides that will list you as a member on their website. And also consider sponsoring youth sports or charitable events or civic programs, places that will either cite you or link to you on their websites.
So yes, SABs are at a disadvantage, but if this is you, there are still plenty of things you can do to compete. We’ve talked a lot about all the things that you need to do right, but let’s just hit on a few things that you don’t want to do. These will get you into trouble and can get your account suspended, which would lead to no visibility and no traffic.
Don’t list your address as a virtual office or mail drop. Google is wise to these tricks. Don’t stuff your business profile title full of keywords. In fact, keyword stuffing in general is a bad idea, but it’s a definite no-no here. Don’t define your service area larger than a two-hour drive away, no matter how fast you drive. That seems to be the limit that Google’s willing to allow you before it starts to dilute your visibility. And don’t put your home address in as your business address, even if you’re a psychologist and you’re seeing patients at home. This is for privacy reasons, but also if your competitors catch wind of it or Google checks its Street View map, which it will, you’re going to get pinged, and again, that can lead to penalties, and that can lead to you being suspended.
So as we wrap up today, some of the takeaways that I would recommend you have is prioritize your Google Business Profile. That’s the first thing that you want to tackle. It’s got the biggest impact. Then go ahead and optimize your website with all the things that I’ve mentioned. And once you’ve done that, really spend some time trying to attract those relevant links with the message that I shared with you today.
And finally, get help. If you need help, if you are busy or you can’t do this all yourself, or you’re not sure what you’re doing, we have local SEO experts right here at flyte new media. We’d be happy to help you out and help you grow your business through local search. And as I went through the process of creating this presentation today, as you could see, there were definitely some places where I thought we were doing well, and we are doing well when it comes to local search, but there were absolutely things that we could do better.
And so a couple of my own personal takeaways here were, I am going to invest more energy in getting people to leave reviews for us on Google than I am necessarily going to be looking to get testimonials for the website. Getting reviews, depending on how much business you do. So if a business like ours, we may launch a website once a month, we might have a new marketing client once a month, so I’m only going to have a small amount of new reviews. But if you’re a coffee shop, you might have 10 new customers a day who are willing to leave you reviews. So you really need to also take a look at the competition and see how many reviews they have. So reviews is a big one for me.
Also, starting to post more regularly Google Business Profile posts like I showed you before. Those are probably going to be the two main things that we’re going to look at, but I’m also going to be looking at some of the other things that we discussed, especially in terms of attracting relevant links, getting on ‘best of’ lists, all those sorts of things. All of those things will make a difference to my business, and they’ll make a difference to yours if you choose to employ them.
That’s all the content that I have for today. If you stuck around this long, I really appreciate it. Thank you very much.