Semalt Expert Tells About Local SEO Challenges Your Business May Face
While you can learn about what local SEO is and how we can help you optimize for it, we have something different for you in this article. Here, we will be discussing some common local SEO challenges we've experienced and how to solve them.
Understanding The Basics Of Local SEO
Local SEO can be difficult. And that is coming from experienced professionals who have had to deal with it for many years. Mastering it as an effective tool for enterprise requires both the knowledge of National SEO, Google My Business SEO and then understanding how Google understands the search queries you optimize for in different markets.
This exposes your optimizing strategy to an infinite number of challenges for your enterprise.
Local SEO on its own is a strategy we use to make the website more visible in the local search results of Google. If you own an enterprise, you want your most loyal consumers to be those that are in your immediate environment. There are many benefits to being optimized for local SEO.
What Are The Most Common Challenges You Should Expect When Optimizing For Your Local Audience?
Prioritizing Local Internally
As strange as this may sound, many multi-location organizations do not consider location as a priority for the digital marketing organization. In cases where we worked with retailers, we discovered that most of these organizations are typically focused on marketing at the national level. Since locations were annoying to deal with, they got the least amount of investment.
This move seems like they make sense because dealing with so many locations can be complicated. But we must remember that these locations are what we should be focusing on when it comes to SEO.
When we speak to our clients, it is difficult to get them to focus on the local market. Our solution has to be to show them how much money they can make when they prioritize "local". Showing a client why focusing on the local audience is more profitable requires a lot of data. And to pull it off, we highlight areas where the brand is strong and weak.
We study the competition who are strong in areas where your brand is weak so we can figure out how they dominate it. We are particularly looking for markets and categories with a small number of winning competitors. This information can be influential as it signals that there is an opportunity for your brand.
Once we have carefully sorted out the categories and markets with profitable opportunities, we use your search volume data to see how ample the opportunity is. If the opportunity is big enough, we then convince our clients to invest.
We start with a small market and gradually grow depending on how successful the scheme is.
Having A Single Source Of Truth For Location Data
With the introduction of local listing management such as Uberall and Yext, location data isn't as tricky as it once was. However, we still have situations where we run into businesses with multiple locations but no source of truth for their location information.
As a business, you need to have this in place. Your business should have one primary source for its location data.
Optimizing Store Locators
Outsourcing your store's locators to third party vendors has both advantages and disadvantages. In many cases, we've seen things go wrong as a result of this.
For your SEO, having an effective store locator is a basic linked set of State, City, and Location pages that can be easily accessed by both users and bots.
We try not to build your store locators a locator page using a search box to find the location. This seems to be less effective and ranks lower. Instead, we use linkable state> city > and location architecture.
Brands also make the mistake of budgeting to build a locator on their site but leave nothing for the content.
Having a basic location page with the business name, address, contact information, product and services category, etc., isn't a bad idea. However, it may be considered more effective to have a location page with top quality and unique content that has relevance to both the location and the topics you are trying to rank for. The combination of both elements makes it perform better in SEO.
Google My Business Optimization
Google My Business is one of the most manageable hurdles you will cross when optimizing for local SEO; however, there are so many ways businesses go wrong and make silly mistakes:
● Duplicate listing
This is one of the most common mistakes entrepreneurs make on GMB. Duplicate listings can affect your SEO significantly, and the minute you delete it, you will notice improvements in your keyword ranking.
● Watch your GMB listings
Your GMB listing is not consistent. Every day, users add something new. When Google trusts another source of information more than you, Google will overwrite your data. Ensure you set up and maintain your GMB account. You need a system that regularly checks and monitors changes that occur on your GMB pages.
● Scale your GMB posts
These posts are short announcements you can attach to your GMB profile. We consider them to be an inexpensive way to generate high converting visitors to your site. These posts could be videos, images, or texts. When you want to make posts for multiple locations, it is wise to implement a system for creating GMB-ready marketing collateral so your new promotions could be posted.
Building A Local Search Presence For Service Area Businesses And Marketplaces
Not all local enterprises have a location. Brands like Yelp, Zillow and others fall into this category. It is also common to see service area businesses, like cable companies, plumbers etc., that all target local search queries. However, these companies are not optimized enough to appear in Local Packs.
This is because they have no physical location in their target markets. At that point, they are being cut off from a lot of potential consumers, clicks and conversions. They are basically flushing more cash inflow down the drain.
While this won't work for every brand, having a business with the suitable business model and creating a "store within a store" using any of your partners brand's locations is one way to get local pack visibility.
You may not have heard of this, but FedEx OnSite services are located in Walgreens. Sometimes, when the value of the leads gets so high, you begin to consider opening several physical locations in certain areas so you can rank well in your Local Packs.
Conclusion
These are only a few problems you will face. There are several other factors, mistakes and omissions you can make that will make your enterprise local SEO a lot more complicated.
As with marketing as a whole, the best way to stay on top is to create the proper channels, be creative, test, measure and integrate to move beyond its challenges. We can help you win your local market with top quality services.
Is there something off about your local SEO enterprise efforts? Are you finding it difficult to trace and fix what went wrong? Why don't you hire professionals to get the job done? Our services are affordable, of top quality, and you get to make a good ROI at the end of the day.
Contact us today to book an appointment.
Interested in SEO? Check out our other articles on the Semalt blog.