#Dental and restaurants so it is the first place to visit before you choose any service.
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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Wading Into Local SEO: 7 Absolute Beginner FAQs, Simply Answered
Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.
Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!
Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.
1. What is local SEO?
Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.
It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.
Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.
When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.
2. How do you know if you need local SEO?
What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?
If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.
If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:
The exact model of the business you’re marketing
Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products
Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:
First, answer a simple question:
Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?
If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.
If your answer is “yes”, read on.
Second, identify your model
There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:
Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit
Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations
Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers
Home-based, like a daycare center
Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location
Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership
Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff
Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law
Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes
Mobile business, like a stationary food truck
Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models
Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.
Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model
Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.
These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).
If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.
To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.
3. How does local SEO work?
If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.
How local search engines work
Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.
Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:
The Google My Business listings you create for your business
Your company’s website
Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company
Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback
Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes
Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.
Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:
Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:
Google local packs
Google business profiles
Google local finders
Google Maps
Google organic results
Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.
How do you do local SEO?
So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:
1. An operational local business
You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.
2. A website
While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.
Your website should:
Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.
Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.
Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.
3. Local business listings
You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).
4. Online reviews from your customers
You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.
You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:
5. Market research and competitor analysis
You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.
Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.
6. Unstructured citations + links
Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.
The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.
For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.
7. Expanded media
Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.
8. Advanced analysis
Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.
Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.
Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.
How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?
The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.
For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.
You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.
All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:
Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business
Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query
Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet
In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.
So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.
4. What are the benefits of local SEO?
Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.
If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:
Customer service quality
Knowledge of your customer base
Sales
Repeat sales (customer loyalty)
Bookings
Rankings
Publicity
Foot traffic
Website traffic
Phone calls
Texts
Chats
Reviews
Form submissions
Brand awareness + positive reputation
Email subscriptions
B2B relationships
Word-of-mouth referrals
Power for civic good
And so much more!
The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:
1. Your budget of both time and money
2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them
3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base
A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.
5. How local is local SEO?
Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?
The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:
But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:
Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:
In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.
Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.
One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.
6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?
This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:
Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
The density of competition for the search term
The searcher’s history of previous searches.
The time of day
Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.
The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.
For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:
For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.
On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.
Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.
You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!
7. How can I learn local SEO?
Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:
1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide
This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.
2. Go where the advocates are
Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:
The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.
The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.
Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.
Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.
Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business
3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule
Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:
Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.
The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.
Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.
Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.
I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give
It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you
If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.
4. Hire a local SEO to teach you
In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.
That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.
My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.
5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!
Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.
There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.
Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu
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How to make the most of “Winter” break in Australia
My name is Brittani and I study at Griffith University Dental School. If you are thinking of coming to Queensland for your schooling (whenever borders open!), then allow me to convince you why you should!
Queensland is a beautiful state with a million things to see and do, one of which is the trendy beach town, Noosa. Considering the average winter temperature in Noosa is about 20–22 Celsius, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to spend your semester break anywhere else.
So, here’s my mini road trip to this beautiful place!
Day 1: Sunshine Coast, Noosa National Park, Noosa
Leaving from Brisbane at the wonderful time of 5:30 a.m. was not as fun as I anticipated it might be—but it was worth it! Not only did I get to watch the sunrise as we drove, but weeks before I set out on my mini road trip, I came across a little café that sells the most delicious looking muffins ever, located in Sunshine Coast. Naturally, I decided I had to have one—even though they open at 7 a.m., are an hour and half from Brisbane, and sell out very quickly. Hence my early wake-up time! Their muffin flavours change daily and I was praying that the day I went, it would be a delicious flavor. I was not disappointed. Behold, the beauty of my butterscotch brownie raspberry muffin from The Velo Project Café.
After this delicious pitstop, I headed north up to Noosa Heads. First stop: Noosa National Park! This is a must-do for anyone visiting Noosa. The scenic nature walk has breathtaking views of glittering ocean, white sand beaches, and beautiful rock formations. A few kilometers in, you can stop by the famous Noosa fairy pools! These are small pools located in the rock formations that have become very popular for their picturesque waters. Between the fairy pools, beaches, and nature hiking paths, you can spend the entire day at Noosa National Park and feel like you didn’t see it all. 10/10 would recommend.
Once the sun goes down, it gets dark very quickly. This is the perfect time to have dinner on Hastings Street, Noosa’s main drag! Filled with tons of restaurants and cafes, clothing boutiques, gelaterias, and hotels, this street is always full of life. All the trees are lit up at nighttime as well, making it a beautiful evening activity!
Day 2: Whales, Laguna Lookout
I had pre-booked an excursion for this day: Swimming with humpback whales! I can’t believe that’s even a thing, but it is! Unfortunately, I didn’t get to swim with the whales due to various circumstances (like the whales displaying aggressive behaviour that day), but I did get to see some beautiful humpbacks breaching off the coast of Mooloolaba (about a 30-minute drive from Noosa) and it was an unforgettable experience. Also, unfortunately, I did not manage to get any photos of these giant whales because I apparently am not fast enough with my camera… but I highly recommend this trip for anyone wanting a bit of an adventure!
After a long day of driving and seafaring, I thought it would be nice to wind down by watching the sunset. A popular place to do this is Laguna Lookout. You lookout over the waters of Noosa to see the sun set behind the mountains in the background. It was beautiful!
Day 3: Noosa Botanical Gardens, Beaches, Tinbeerwah
I love picnics, so of course I had to find a good picnic spot to attend while in Noosa. I came across the Noosa Botanical Gardens located on Lake Macdonald, complete with a Greek-style amphitheater that looked like the perfect place for a picnic. And it was! I went in the morning around 9 a.m. and the sun was glistening off the lake. The amphitheater was empty and all you could hear was the birds chirping. I enjoyed my croissants and jam by the lake, and I don’t think life gets much better than that!
After that, the sun was starting to warm up, so I thought the obvious choice was to go to the beach. There are many beaches to choose from including Noosa Main Beach, Tea Tree Bay, and Alexandria Bay. If you want a beach close by with lots of amenities and restaurants, Noosa Main Beach is your best bet (although it can get a bit busy). Tea Tree Bay is quieter and more secluded, but even more beautiful in my opinion than Noosa Main Beach. You do have to do a short hike into the national park to get there though, but it is free! Alexandria Bay is much further to walk to than Tea Tree Bay, but it has very calm waters and is also beautiful. There really isn’t a bad beach you can go to in Noosa! The only thing that could have made the beaches better here is a nice cold Iced Capp from Tim Hortons.
Due to the previous night’s beautiful sunset, I wanted to see another. I had overheard some locals talking about Tinbeerwah lookout as being the place to go to watch it, so that’s where I headed! A little further off the main drag than Laguna Lookout, Tinbeerwah lookout is situated atop a mountain in Noosa which means a short hike is included in your sunset viewing! But the view is worth it. You get a complete 360-degree view of Noosa and its surrounding land and you can watch the sunset uninterrupted by any trees or hills.
So that pretty much sums up my trip! There were other things I wanted to do in Noosa such as strawberry picking and the Eumundi markets, but unfortunately due to COVID-19, these attractions were still closed.
That really just means I have to go back! If this hasn’t convinced you to come to Queensland I really am not sure what will… but, enjoy the summer while it lasts in Canada!
Follow Brittani on Instagram!
Studying at Griffith Dental School
Griffith Dental School has state-of-the-art, special-purpose dental facilities and modern laboratories, including a commercial dental lab in a new $150-million purpose-built Griffith Health Centre.
As a Griffith dentistry student, you’ll have the opportunity to undertake community placements in state schools, rural and remote communities and in Indigenous and aged care. Completing Griffith’s Bachelor of Dental Health Science and the two-year Master of Dentistry program provides the education and skills you need to apply for registration as a dentist!
Program: Bachelor of Dental Health Science/Master of Dentistry
Location: Gold Coast, Queensland
Duration: 3 years & 2 years
Entry Requirements for the Griffith University Dentistry Program
Entry into Griffith Dental School’s Bachelor of Dental Health Science (and Master of Dentistry) program is directly from high school. Students may also apply to the program during or at the completion of their undergraduate degree.
1. From high school
Average of 94+% from top Grade 12 subjects required. Grade 12 (or equivalent) English is required. Biological science, chemistry, physics, and maths B are strongly recommended as they are considered assumed knowledge.
2. From university
Cumulative GPA of 3.0+ / 4.0 (or equivalent).The DAT (Dental Aptitude Test) is not required when applying to the Griffith Bachelor of Dental Health Science / Master of Dentistry.
#griffith university#griffith dentistry#griffith dental school#canadian dentistry students in australia#study dentistry#things to do in australia#explore australia
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How to make the most of “Winter” break in Australia
My name is Brittani and I study at Griffith University Dental School. If you are thinking of coming to Queensland for your schooling (whenever borders open!), then allow me to convince you why you should!
Queensland is a beautiful state with a million things to see and do, one of which is the trendy beach town, Noosa. Considering the average winter temperature in Noosa is about 20–22 Celsius, I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to spend your semester break anywhere else.
So, here’s my mini road trip to this beautiful place!
Day 1: Sunshine Coast, Noosa National Park, Noosa
Leaving from Brisbane at the wonderful time of 5:30 a.m. was not as fun as I anticipated it might be—but it was worth it! Not only did I get to watch the sunrise as we drove, but weeks before I set out on my mini road trip, I came across a little café that sells the most delicious looking muffins ever, located in Sunshine Coast. Naturally, I decided I had to have one—even though they open at 7 a.m., are an hour and half from Brisbane, and sell out very quickly. Hence my early wake-up time! Their muffin flavours change daily and I was praying that the day I went, it would be a delicious flavor. I was not disappointed. Behold, the beauty of my butterscotch brownie raspberry muffin from The Velo Project Café.
After this delicious pitstop, I headed north up to Noosa Heads. First stop: Noosa National Park! This is a must-do for anyone visiting Noosa. The scenic nature walk has breathtaking views of glittering ocean, white sand beaches, and beautiful rock formations. A few kilometers in, you can stop by the famous Noosa fairy pools! These are small pools located in the rock formations that have become very popular for their picturesque waters. Between the fairy pools, beaches, and nature hiking paths, you can spend the entire day at Noosa National Park and feel like you didn’t see it all. 10/10 would recommend.
Once the sun goes down, it gets dark very quickly. This is the perfect time to have dinner on Hastings Street, Noosa’s main drag! Filled with tons of restaurants and cafes, clothing boutiques, gelaterias, and hotels, this street is always full of life. All the trees are lit up at nighttime as well, making it a beautiful evening activity!
Day 2: Whales, Laguna Lookout
I had pre-booked an excursion for this day: Swimming with humpback whales! I can’t believe that’s even a thing, but it is! Unfortunately, I didn’t get to swim with the whales due to various circumstances (like the whales displaying aggressive behaviour that day), but I did get to see some beautiful humpbacks breaching off the coast of Mooloolaba (about a 30-minute drive from Noosa) and it was an unforgettable experience. Also, unfortunately, I did not manage to get any photos of these giant whales because I apparently am not fast enough with my camera… but I highly recommend this trip for anyone wanting a bit of an adventure!
After a long day of driving and seafaring, I thought it would be nice to wind down by watching the sunset. A popular place to do this is Laguna Lookout. You lookout over the waters of Noosa to see the sun set behind the mountains in the background. It was beautiful!
Day 3: Noosa Botanical Gardens, Beaches, Tinbeerwah
I love picnics, so of course I had to find a good picnic spot to attend while in Noosa. I came across the Noosa Botanical Gardens located on Lake Macdonald, complete with a Greek-style amphitheater that looked like the perfect place for a picnic. And it was! I went in the morning around 9 a.m. and the sun was glistening off the lake. The amphitheater was empty and all you could hear was the birds chirping. I enjoyed my croissants and jam by the lake, and I don’t think life gets much better than that!
After that, the sun was starting to warm up, so I thought the obvious choice was to go to the beach. There are many beaches to choose from including Noosa Main Beach, Tea Tree Bay, and Alexandria Bay. If you want a beach close by with lots of amenities and restaurants, Noosa Main Beach is your best bet (although it can get a bit busy). Tea Tree Bay is quieter and more secluded, but even more beautiful in my opinion than Noosa Main Beach. You do have to do a short hike into the national park to get there though, but it is free! Alexandria Bay is much further to walk to than Tea Tree Bay, but it has very calm waters and is also beautiful. There really isn’t a bad beach you can go to in Noosa! The only thing that could have made the beaches better here is a nice cold Iced Capp from Tim Hortons.
Due to the previous night’s beautiful sunset, I wanted to see another. I had overheard some locals talking about Tinbeerwah lookout as being the place to go to watch it, so that’s where I headed! A little further off the main drag than Laguna Lookout, Tinbeerwah lookout is situated atop a mountain in Noosa which means a short hike is included in your sunset viewing! But the view is worth it. You get a complete 360-degree view of Noosa and its surrounding land and you can watch the sunset uninterrupted by any trees or hills.
So that pretty much sums up my trip! There were other things I wanted to do in Noosa such as strawberry picking and the Eumundi markets, but unfortunately due to COVID-19, these attractions were still closed.
That really just means I have to go back! If this hasn’t convinced you to come to Queensland I really am not sure what will… but, enjoy the summer while it lasts in Canada!
Follow Brittani on Instagram!
#griffith university#griffith dental school#dentistry students#overseas education#study in australia#study abroad
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SEE: LIMA, PERU
Welp, here goes nothing! I am finally getting the chance to sit down and type the post I have been dying to write about for the past month. I am so excited to finally share my story with you all!
Back in May, I discovered an organization called MEDLIFE while searching through the many organizations we have available to us at my school, Oakland University. I was hoping to find an opportunity that would give me involvement and leadership.
MEDLIFE- Medicine, Education, and Development for low income families. This description promptly fascinated me so I decided to do some research on the program. Basically, the organization holds these awesome trips that take place predominantly in South America and Africa to help communities who are underprivileged. I applied for the trip and was blessed with the opportunity to go! Here is a little bit of insight on what my experience with MEDLIFE was like.
DAY 1: Arrived in Lima. Lima is a huge district in Lima, Peru, filled with many smaller cities in it. We stayed in Miraflores, the wealthiest city within the district of Lima. It is a beautiful, vibrant place along the Pacific Ocean. The views on the drive to our hostel were unlike anything I have ever seen before.
Our hostel was not the worst, but it definitely was nothing like places I’ve stayed at before. The downsides were: wifi that only worked occasionally, so it was very hard to reach family and friends back home, and very small rooms with minimal space.
The first day we spent roaming Miraflores, shopping and forming a feel for our home for the week. The streets were clean and busy, the buildings were tall and the culture was captivating. After checking out a few shopping stands, and caffeinating with a much needed Starbucks run, we visited the Cathedral Basilica of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist, which is a breathtaking, Roman Catholic cathedral built in 1535.
From there, we went on to visit the one and only, Larcomar, an enormous shopping center and tourist site located right on the ocean. The mall is known to have every store you can imagine, as well as tons of fun places to eat and game.
On the way back to our Hostel, we stopped in the Indian Market Miraflores, a vast marketplace, full of amazing Peruvian souvenirs and gifts. I loved everything, I honestly could not stop shopping. If I could go back right now, just for that market, I so would.
So, Kennedy Park is a park honoring President John F. Kennedy. The park has street vendors and artists galore. But wait.... it gets better. The park is home to many residential cats. A park.. filled with popular paintings and street art, food, shopping, and well, cats... What could be better?! At night, the park is lively as ever, and still feels safe to shop and explore around. Not to mention, it is surrounded by a vast array of restaurants, cafes, shops, and about every other thing the capital of Peru could offer you. The sellers are so kind, and the products are one of a kind because you can’t find them anywhere else, yet all for a low cost. If you happen to come here after Peru wins a game of fútbol.... Well lets just say you’re in for a fun time.
Eventually, the afternoon came to an end and we all wanted to get some rest from our long day of traveling. But that didn’t stop us for too long. Our next stop was near Kennedy Park, the so-called Calle de las Pizzas (Pizza Street), a whole street that in fact does include a couple of pizza places but that also turns into a party boulevard after the sunset. We ended our night at this incredible place, being lured in by deals on food and drinks from the restaurant workers outside! The atmosphere was extraordinary. I loved every minute of our time as a group here and of course, the pizza was bomb.
DAY 2: Scheduled on the second day was our reality tour. The reality tour was meant to introduce us to the villages we were going to be volunteering at. It was remarkably eye-opening. The smell in the air from the garbage being burned was unbearable, the "houses” were shacks and the bus ride up to the top of these communities was scary nonetheless; but it made me appreciate life back at home. Stray dogs were everywhere and the difference from the city life to village life was very clear.
What amazed me was when our tour guide brought us to the top of the mountain-like landfill. A climb over 200 steep stairs to see a wall that the villagers built. The people living in San Juan de Miraflores, the poor community, were paid by the rich who live on the other side to build it. The wall represents that the wealthy people do not want to contribute to any development; they choose to separate themselves from those who should be included in their community, and they choose to forget about the horrific mess happening on the other side. The wall reads “In Lima we adore the cement that pardons the memory.”
DAYS 3 & 5: Clinic Days! Throughout the week we are assigned either clinic day or project day. Clinic means we will be setting up and working at mobile clinics in different areas. The clinics we run are: toothbrushing, hygiene, pharmacy, dental, doctor and triage. Throughout the week, I was given two assignments each day. Toothbrushing consisted of a line of super cute kids, waiting patiently to learn how to brush their teeth! They got to keep their toothbrush and were so excited to receive one. The mothers were extremely appreciative and although there was a language barrier, their gratitude was undoubtedly expressed. After toothbrushing, we applied fluoride to their teeth, and the kids would proceed to the hygiene station where they could wash their hands.
Shadowing the doctors was another favorite of mine. The doctors had us take blood pressure and would explain to us the diagnosis for each patient so that we had something significant to take away with each one. I loved being able to see up close and personal how genuinely the doctors cared and how happy they were to be able to give them care. From this station, the patients would take their prescription and head over to pharmacy.
At pharmacy, patients would receive their prescriptions provided by MEDLIFE. This is something that is absolutely irreplaceable for a community like San Juan de Miraflores. Anything from tylenol, to vitamins, to ointments and insulin were provided to them. Though this seem to be short-term care, quick fixes, MEDLIFE works with patients and establishes a follow-up program; keeping track of their medical history to continue providing care and medicine for them each time the families return to the clinics. They also go to the homes of patients who are not stable or mobile enough to comethemselves, to deliver medicine and other necessities to them, such as milk or bread.
Dental... well, I’ve always asked myself who are these crazy people that sign up to work on teeth for their entire life!? But after working this station at the mobile clinics, it shed some light for me on why it is an interesting field. I worked with the dentist, taking notes and suctioning the saliva for them. Gross, but... surprisingly fun!
Day 4: This day was project day. Our chapter’s project was to build two staircases for the citizenry in San Juan de Miraflores. Since they are living on what used to be landfills, the hills are extremely steep making it difficult for the residents to reach their homes. Not only is this construction important for their physical health, but staircases are also necessary in order for them to receive land titles from the city. Land titles are difficult to obtain without staircases because in the event of a natural disaster, such as an earth quake, legally the community needs a safe way to evacuate. A land title also provides an address, which then can give them legal electricity, plumbing and access to other important needs.
On my project day, our job was to bring large, tall, heavy blocks of wood up stairs (remember the 200 steep stairs I mentioned before.. yeah, that times 4!). The wood was being used to separate cement for the stairs our group was building the days before us, and it needed to be taken up another set of stairs. It was the hardest work I have ever done, to be honest, and afterwards we had a break and then spent the rest of the time painting the stairs we built. Though the work was demanding, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Day 5: Inauguration day: the day we commemorate the staircases. It started off working the mobile clinics, and afterwards we made our way back into the hills and celebrated. We had finished painting the staircases, the families decorated them in balloons, and after a few speeches of gratitude from both community members and group leaders, we broke a bottle of champagne at the ends of both the staircases, and were given pop and a meal cooked by the residents to celebrate. Everyone was smiling. I swear, the happiness and joy in the air could be felt from miles away.
Day 6: Our final day was bittersweet. Sad because our time was coming to an end, but also happy because the day was incredible. We left the hostel at 3 AM I believe, and headed to Ica, the capital of the Ica Region of Peru. Our adventure began four hours later, when we arrived in Paracas and started with a boat tour of the Islas Ballestas. The Ballestas Islands lie off the southern coast of Peru, near the city of Pisco. The uninhabited islands are home to sea lions, pelicans, and Humboldt penguins. On the way, we passed the Candelabra geoglyph, an enormous hillside etching of mysterious origins. It is a given you will fall in love with Peru.
The next thrill of the day was located about an hour away: Huacachina, the desert oasis village in Ica, Peru. Our mission was to ultimately sandboard but the way up was somethin’ else. The dune buggies run across the high, rolling sand dunes surrounding the village and we made our way to the top of one, we got on our boards and went down the dune! On our stomachs.... HA! You thought my first time sandboarding would be my last? You thought wrong. The sand was awesome, and sliding down was fast and absolutely exhilarating. The climb back up was always a rough one, but BEYOND worth it once you were able to board again.
My trip to Lima was the experience of a lifetime. It was inspiring, rewarding, exhilarating, and it pushed me to step out of my comfort zone, make friends, try new things and see new places. I hope to go back to Peru one day and visit Lima, and other regions of Peru too. I hope my MEDLIFE trip summary gave you some advice on what to expect if you’re interesed in going on a trip like this and I hope I helped you discover something you would also love to do.
-I
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