How do you improve your local rankings on Google?
You can improve your local rankings on Google with these tasks:
- Build a great website
- Have a great Google Business Page
- Focus on the RIGHT kind of content
- Build links and citations
- Generate branded search.
It’s important to note there are two areas we want to improve if we’re running a local SEO campaign: map pack results and local results.
As a small business owner you could spend an unlimited time working in and on your business.
Let’s imagine for a minute you run a physiotherapy clinic.
You could spend time on marketing – attending events and tradeshows, building facebook ads, posting on social media, creating videos, writing content or any other number of activities.
Or maybe you’re working on your operations. Automating recurring tasks like billing or appointment scheduling. Or training new hires or implementing new processes. The list is endless.
But as you know, not every task has an equal level of impact. And different tasks become more or less important depending on where your business is today.
For example if you just opened your doors and are looking for your first clients; sales and marketing is probably at the top of that list.
If you’re swamped with clients, building systems or hiring more staff might be more important.
Local SEO is similar. There is virtually an unlimited number of things you could do.
- Keyword research
- Link building
- Citation Building
- Citation clean ups
- Generating reviews
- Adding service pages
- Optimizing your Google Business Page
- Writing blog content
- Producing videos
- Updating header tags
- Writing compelling meta descriptions
- Fixing page speed
- Posting on third party platforms like Reddit or Facebook
- Adding local schema
- Auditing your search index
- Posting on your Google Business Page
- Adding new photos to your Google Business Page
- Adding location pages
And many of these tasks, like link building or posting on your Google Business Page have no limit. Do you build 2 links per month or 15? Are you writing 3 articles per month or 30?
And this is why, most business owners struggle to run DIY campaigns and they struggle to understand whether their local SEO contract is providing value.
What are the most important local SEO tasks?
- A Solid Website
This doesn’t mean expensive or fancy. Your website has two jobs:- Convey to the user what your business does and why they should choose your business over a similar business in the area.
- Help search engines (mainly Google but in the coming years this will include AI platforms) understand your business.
So what exactly does this mean – your website needs to be solid. SEO optimized. H1 tags, URLs, site structure, internal linking, SEO titles should target the right keywords on the right pagesFully built out.
If you offer commercial window washing you may want a page for commercial window washing, high rise window washing, retail window washing and so forth. If you operate in 6 different cities you want a page for each of those.
Built to convert. This isn’t complicated, but you want lots of call to actions. A prospective client should never have to search to find a way to contact you. - A Great Google Business Page
The Google Business Page is designed to rank in the local map pack.
- Mostly this means reviews and lots of them.
- Ideally a business name with the keyword and city in the title.
- Fully built out category pages. This means include all of the categories.
- Images of the business, work done, the team
- Posts are optional.
- The Right Type of Content
Focusing in on the pages that drive high intent traffic is the key here. Don’t start with blog content and I personally wouldn’t bother with AI slop. I’m not convinced that it moves the needle for SMBs in any meaningful way.
I touched on this above but most websites do an OK job of targeting their main target keywords. For example, if you’re a therapist, your homepage is probably doing a decent job of that. But when you start diving into sub-niches such as therapy for trauma or EMDR therapy, that’s usually when their are gaps.
And beyond that if, you’re a service area business or a business that can service clients in a large area (eg: a lawyer) you want to target surrounding towns and areas. If you take this one step further you can see how we do this in the footer of our website, those city pages rank well.
Once you tackle these pages your next task should be going back and re-analyzing those pages to see how they’re performing. These likely won’t drive a ton of traffic, what I would focus on instead is how are they ranking. If they’re ranking poorly revisit the content and see if you can improve it.
Only after that do I recommend adding supporting blog content. There are some exceptions to this rule where informational content can be highly valuable but generally, this type of content will be less valuable than those location and service pages. It’s also important to note, AI assisted is fine, but you need to understand what makes content rank in the first place and how to correctly write that content to get the most out of it. - Links Building
Link building is a difficult task. You can go on Fiverr and buy 1000s of links for $50. Or you can go to marketplaces and buy a single link for thousands of dollars. Which is correct?
This is a difficult question to answer and most SEO’s will oversimplify it by saying something like if a website gets traffic and has a domain authority (a third party metric that measures the strength websites) over 40 that’s a good link.
I find this approach to be somewhat misguided. Traffic quality matters. You can drive a lot of traffic for low quality, spammy keywords like “how much is Brad Pitt’s house worth”. I don’t consider that be a particularly compelling case to build a link from that site.
You can easily manipulate domain authority with 1000s of links from Fiverr.
On the flip side of that a local business that is niche relevant to your business that only generates organic 100 visitors per month. I would be very interested in that link.
The other argument will be from white hat SEOs who will tell you, you should earn all your links eg: you write a piece of content and someone naturally links to your article. For most small businesses this type of link building is a pipe dream.
We know links or put more simply, domain authority (a crude metric) is very important ranking factor. Balancing this is difficult but it is a crucial task. If you’re DIYing your campaign I would work hard on links I know are valuable. However, the tighter your criteria is the more work and resources you’ll need to put into acquiring these links.
A few that are rock solid that any business owner can get. Being a guest on podcasts. Links from other local businesses. Links from charities you support.
Citations are also a worthwhile activity here, but they shouldn’t be mistaken for link building. - Generate Branded Search
This is a relatively new topic for most of the SEO community. There are those that have been ahead of the game on this front but they’re rarely working in local SEO.
For a local business, branded search is any search that includes your business name or name. For example Salt Water Digital, Salt Water Digital SEO, Salt Water Digital Marketing, Salt Water Digital Vancouver, Salt Water Digital How To Rank Higher In Map Packs, Daniel Thompson, Daniel Thompson SEO and so forth.
There is undeniable evidence that as a brand’s search grows, their SEO results improve.
So how do you generate branded search?
Organic social media is one of the best ways to do this. The times our branded search was the highest was when I was active on X.
I was personally posting about local SEO, business and entrepreneurship on X. Users would Google me or my business after reading something and my branded search spiked.
For local businesses, local advertising can be exceptional for driving branded search. Lawn signs, door hangers, billboards, bus stops and so forth.
Drive organic traffic. A user may initially find your business through a Google search such as Local SEO Calgary. The user clicks through and reads about the business. If they’re thinking about hiring us the next step is searching “Salt Water Digital” to go look at our Google Business page reviews.
Ultimately, as your business grows, so too will your branded search. I haven’t posted on X in almost a year and we’re starting to creep towards our branded search high water mark. More people are simply searching for us as we’ve grown.
Local SEO is a complicated maze and a huge percentage of agencies (who are supposed to be experts) aren’t even getting it right, so it’s no wonder the average business owner feels lost.
How Much Should Local SEO Cost?
Local SEO should cost between $600-$1200.
There are exceptions. We have clients who pay as little as $300/month, but those campaigns include no link building. And we have clients who pay upwards of $3000/month but those campaigns are both content and link heavy.
