Local SEO in 2023: 7 Ways to Improve Your Local Search

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm joined today by Daniel Costa. Dan, welcome to the pod. 

Daniel Costa: Hey, James, thanks for having me back.

James Lawrence: Very, very good. So for those of you that haven't already listened to one of Dan's pods, Dan is currently head of SEO at Rocket, which means that he owns the entire SEO product at the agency. So that's our approach to SEO, our philosophy, manages the SEO team and the results that we drive for our clients. Throughout his career, Dan's worked with brands like Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Foot Locker, Jim's Cleaning Group, Solar Origin, a bunch of other big brands, as well as lots of smaller brands and think particularly relevant for the conversation today, lots of brands where local SEO and local search is certainly really important to them. So the topic we're going to discuss today is local SEO in 2023. So I guess to start with, Dan, why should businesses care about local SEO?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, look, I did a bit of research in terms of up to date stats, in terms of why local is important. I guess to summarise it, if you're not kind of visible on your map searches, you're just leaving money on the table. So, for example, what I saw was 30% of all mobile searches are related to location based keywords. I actually think it's potentially even more than 30%. Then there was another one, 78 percent of people who search for something are looking to visit that business within a day, which I found was pretty interesting. And then 28% of searches for something nearby actually results in a purchase. So, yeah, as I mentioned, if you're not there for all those sort of people that are doing those kinds of searches, it's just a missed opportunity. So I think that's why it's really important.

James Lawrence: Yeah, totally. We've kind of seen just this massive spike over the last, I guess, three, four, five years in terms of local searching. Insert product or service near me, nearby type searches. So I think for any business where you have physical location or locations or where geography might be important for someone looking for someone like you, it's definitely worth listening to this pod. Because even like an agency like Rocket, where technically we can service clients in a whole range of different places, you still see that search terms related to Sydney, Surry Hills, near me, do drive a big chunk of inquiries. And that's a business where we're not exactly like a gym or a restaurant, where we're kind of hyper local, where clients can still engage with us despite not physically coming into the office, which I think is an interesting thing, I guess, in terms of the starting point. GMB profile? Is that kind of where you would logically start?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, I think that's probably the most important aspect to this. It is now called the Google Business Profile. So you'll probably see that that's now what used to be GMB Profile is now being called online. So, yeah, your Google Business Profile, if you haven't got it set up, then should probably go ahead and do that after this. It's a fairly straightforward process. Google; they just ask for a name, address, phone number, that kind of stuff. Images, business descriptions, all those just like main things about your business. And then you need to get it verified. There's a few different verification methods that they offer. I know back in the day they used to do the postcard a lot. I'm not seeing that too much these days. I think they're getting over however much it costs for them to actually send out these postcards to all these businesses. So sometimes they ask for a phone call or like a video recording of your actual location. So, yeah, get set up on Google business profile. You'll see if someone types your brand name in, often to the right of that search result, you'll see the knowledge panel or the Google My Business - Google Business Profile sorry - profile appear there. So it's good for your brand visibility. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, totally. There's a really good, I guess for those of you that want to go deeper into this topic, there's a really good study done each year by Whitespark out of North America and they kind of break local search into two different areas. They've kind of got the local pack on one side and then you've got local organic kind of on the other, which is the different parts of the Google Search engine results page. And in terms of the local pack, they attribute 32% of where you will rank in that section entirely to do I'm going to say GMB. I'm just going to keep saying it, it's going to happen probably 15 times in this part. But your Google business profile, as it's now known but yeah, basically your ability to rank in that local pack is so heavily driven by signals within the GBP as it's now known. So within that, Dan, what would be your just top level recommendations to businesses that want to optimise that profile?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. It's funny, GBP doesn't roll off the tongue as good as GMP does. 

James Lawrence: Hey, I think this could be a decade before we get used to it. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah. In terms of that local pack, it's really important and the amount of real estate it takes up on the search results, it's definitely what you should be optimising towards. In my personal view, I think that reviews are probably the biggest player here. The more reviews you have, the more beneficial it is within those reviews. You should try seek them organically. I know there's these services out there where they'll get you 50 five star GMB reviews in two weeks. I'd probably avoid that. I'd go that natural or more organic approach to getting reviews. Within those reviews, it's also beneficial if you actually have keywords within those actual reviews from customers. Don't stuff them in. So, for example, if you've got like a cycling store, don't ask your customer to say, this had the best short sleeve men's jerseys near me, make it sound more natural. But it's also a good idea to try to incorporate the keywords in those reviews. Also encourage responding to those reviews. Google likes to see that you're actually interacting with your community and your customers as well, even if it's a negative review. Sometimes you'll get just an unhappy person. Sometimes it's good to just respond to that person, clear the air because there might be someone looking at it, and if they see that you've responded, they might be like, oh yeah, that person was just not in the best mood that day. But they'll still go ahead and visit your store. For example, the review user really important can post updates as well on your profile. 

Daniel Costa: So if you're pushing out blogs, for example, or let's say you're an e-commerce store and you've got like a Black Friday sale coming up, you can push that on your Google business profile as well. Again, that shows Google that you're trying to post and refresh content for your customers. So I think those two things are really important. And then just making sure the NAP details are consistent with citations, which we'll probably get into a bit later. But your NAP details, that's your name, your address, and your phone number. Just make sure that's all accurate, even like your trading hours. Make sure that's up to date, matches what's on your Contact Us page, for example, on your website. I think some things we've talked about over the years. If you're going to build a review strategy where you're encouraging your customers to post a review, which you should be doing physically or digitally, encouraging them to upload a photo like photos in Reviews Play. Really strong reviews that get upweighted. So people that are there liking particular reviews, generally just two likes, will then have that review stick to the top so you can find a review that you really like and then kind of encourage customers or stakeholders to like that. Having your area code in your phone number kind of speaks to proximity, I guess. Location. 

James Lawrence: Something we've done a lot, Dan, I guess, is to put UTM tracking in the link of the GMB / GBP so that you can actually track separately within analytics visits coming from there, as opposed to just coming from Google proper. Which can be quite an effective way, I guess, to measure how your actual local business profiles are going.

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. That's a good point. Yeah, UTM tracking is really good, especially if you've got multiple locations exactly. Like if you're a restaurant with five separate restaurants, it's good to have UTM tracking on each of those so you can kind of see which one of those is performing the best on local packs, as an example. 

James Lawrence: And that Whitespark survey we talked about, it tracks over time, the growth or decrease in how important different parts of local / the different components are. And you look at link signals and they're kind of diminishing a little bit. But you look at review signals and review signals keep getting more and more important each year along with the GBP. So think if you don't have that proactive review strategy, it’s just so important for a local business to get out there and this is only speaking about to get things to rank organically. Well is not even talking about customer experience and social proof and the importance that reviews play to people that might not necessarily even click onto your profile.

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. And something that we like to recommend here at Rocket is for businesses that do have or do rely on that local search and that local visibility heavily. If you do have like a brick and mortar, a physical store, is try to incorporate a review culture within the team. For example, when I was at a restaurant the other week, our waiter at the end of the day came back and let us know and said, hey, we're actually running a little competition. Whoever can get the most five star reviews gets a $50 gift card. So even like a tiny little thing like that can get ten extra reviews on the website. And yeah, you can incentivise your staff or whoever with a small gift card, but it's beneficial at the end of the day to get that long term visibility. So that's something I think is important, just building that culture within the office or within the location. 

James Lawrence: Incentivising staff, not incentivising reviewers. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, that's right.

James Lawrence: Incentivising the middleman. What a loophole in terms of citation building strategies? What's your kind of feedback there for local SEO?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, so citations I think, are really quick win for most businesses. Even if you're not too reliant on local based searches, you can do a quick Google just like Top 50 Free Australian Directories. You'll find a list, go on there, just create a profile your business. It helps improve the local authority, I guess, within your region. If Google sees that, you've got a bunch of directories that say, hey, this is X business, the phone number, the address. And this is tying back to what I said earlier. Make sure the name, address, phone number, so the NAP stuff is all consistent. If you've got a different business name on one, then it's slightly like a variation on your Google business profile and then the phone number hasn't been updated, whatever it is, making sure they're all consistent. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, really good thing to do. 

Daniel Costa: But yeah, the citation, it's around that local authority. You could say they are a form of link building. They're not your traditional guest posting as a typical link building strategy would entail. This is really important. If there's any local element to a campaign, I'm 100% doing some sort of citation work for and it’s just so practical. Regardless of the technical proficiency of anyone listening to this pod. 

James Lawrence: Anyone can do it, and it's just a time task. So whether it's something that's worth you, the listener, spending the time on or whether it should be someone in your team or a junior, but just looking up all those different directories where you can get a link and then, crucially, making sure that the data in each of them is congruent because it can be so detrimental, where you might have slightly different business names or an old address and a new address. And Google is trying to deal with so much data that having incorrect name, address, phone number can be highly detrimental to visibility and local search. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, 100%. 

James Lawrence: So I think the listener understands, okay, we're talking optimising the GMB, getting those categories filled out, review strategy. When Google gives you that opportunity to engage with it, take it, do posts relevant to whatever initiatives you've got going on. We've talked a little bit there about link building, and I don't want us to go down the local link building kind of route on this pod, but what about the actual website proper? Because obviously well, maybe not obviously - we know that what you're saying on your website can have a massive impact on how you then rank for local SEO search terms. What are the big themes there that you often see prospective clients coming to us just not doing well?

Daniel Costa: We need to be looking at the website and optimising there as the main part of the strategy. So, for example, if we're approaching an SEO campaign here at Rocket, optimising the content on the website metadata, other on site elements, that's definitely the priority. And then the Google my business, citations, that's all kind of supplementary. So, yeah, to complement the local work that we've just spoken about, you need to make sure your website follows your usual SEO best practices. So do some keyword research, whatever your core business offering is, or different services you offer. For example, I like to use a tool called Mergewords. If you go to Mergewords and you just copy and paste five services and then ten locations, it'll automatically spit out all the different variations possible for that location plus service. You can put that into Google keyword plan. Or if you do have a paid tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs, put it in there. Just do some local keyword research. You'll find different locations, have different ways of being searched for that same service. Make sure that's incorporated into your content. Let's use an example with Rocket. We created an SEO Agency page because we saw that there was a lot of demand and a lot of search volume around people typing in SEO Agency in Sydney. So we did keyword research around SEO plus Sydney, came up with a new page, new URL. We've got metadata that's unique to SEO Agency in Sydney, and we're starting to increase our visibility for local based keywords through that keyword research. So, in terms of the onsite, go about it as you would any other page, even if it's not local based intent. But this time just make sure you have the actual location or the suburb name or the region name incorporated into your titles, your headings and the content itself. 

James Lawrence: Yeah, and it's interesting in that Whitespark survey. In some ways, I think five to ten years ago, onpage was probably having a diminishing impact in terms of local SEO, but it's definitely coming back now. And you see that the survey that on page signals are starting to jump back up again. And in that survey, exactly what you've said, Dan, is the dedicated page for each service is the number one thing to do, and then the second is internal linking across the entire website. What would your advice be there? Because we've seen some pretty spammy content built out over, I think, classic in the trades where you'd have kind of plumbing and electrician and you'd have every single suburb in Sydney, thousands of pages with the same structure, the same copy, except for the service and the suburb being changed out. And obviously with AI and generative content, very easy to do that. But what would you advise in terms of doing that in the right way? In a way that Google's going to like it?

Daniel Costa: Yeah, it's a tricky one because it's so easy to come across as spammy. And I think the trades industry is the perfect example. If you type in Plumber Sydney, or Plumber in Surry Hills, go onto their website, you can almost guarantee that they've got 300 other location pages and at the end of the day, look, it does work. That's why obviously people are still doing it to this date. So there's an element of it that does work. And I'm all for creating multiple location pages. The way I like to approach it is it's not good enough anymore to just have the same content and then just swap out the suburb name and then just rinse a repeat across all of them. So now it does depend on how many regions, how many suburbs you want to target. I typically like to start with just like a top 10, top 20 suburbs to target. And then what we like to do is we like to create content templates. So just a rule of thumb, I like to have one different template for each three locations.

Daniel Costa: So let's say, for example, you want to create nine location pages. You should have three different templates within those templates. It's a similar thing. You're going to write similar headings, similar content, but they're going to be unique enough from each other and then you can kind of interchange those templates across multiple locations. So I think that's kind of the fine line between having the exact same content across 500 pages versus having a handful of templates being shared across a handful of pages. If you want to go that route of each month, you write a new piece of content for a new location page. That's probably the best way to do it. You're just going to be there for a while trying to write unique content for every single suburb within those pages as well. Have local pictures. I've seen some websites where they'll have a local shopping center, for example, and it helps just create that local trust. And someone who's actually searching in that suburb is like, oh yeah, I know that shopping center, or I know that pharmacy. Whatever it is, having that as well is a good idea. FAQs again, I think are good. If you can say, let's say a plumber, for example, what plumbing services do we offer in the Surry Hills region, for example, we've worked on this project or that project, or if you're a restaurant, you might talk about the best bottle shop to go to is P V around the corner because it's got a great range. It's actually bringing in content that is genuine, specific, useful, rather than just creating generic pages that are. 

James Lawrence: Ostensibly just spam, right? 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, that's right. 

James Lawrence: We're kind of chatting. It's kind of two interesting areas here, I think. One is the local SEO myths. So the first one was that geotagged photos uploaded into the GBP helps. It doesn't. The second were keywords in the GBP description. Don't sit there spamming every single keyword into the description. Google knows that. The third one is keyword stuffing in owners response to reviews. So you get a review, you and then you write back saying, thank you so much. We're the best cafe in Liechart. The reason we're the best cafe in Liechart is because customers like you think we're the best. Don't do that. And then the same again; stuffing keywords into your Google Q&A. So it's just I think a lot of this stuff just makes sense, doesn't it? It's best practice, it's treat you know, like you want your users to actually engage and create. And then what about negative ranking factors, Dan? Just the stuff that absolutely don't do. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah. Look, I think it ties back into the sort of last point I made in terms of having identical content. Definitely don't do that. Or like when I say identical, don't have the exact same headings of content and just swap out the location. That's just not going to work these days. I would also look at making sure that the content you're having is consistent. Let's say for example, you're creating a location page and you're listing your services. Make sure that that's consistent with what's on your Google Business profile. For example, don't say that you do this this on your location page, but then Google business profile says you do something else. Try not to hide any addresses or locations as well. I know sometimes there's cases where you don't necessarily want someone to visit your office or your location. I'd still keep it in there. Maybe I'll just say located in Sydney, New South Wales, for example. You don't need to list the actual address. I wouldn't respond in a bad mood to any negative reviews as well. Again, going back to what I said earlier, sometimes people decide in the best mood they might be upset, leave a one star review. Just try to be professional, understanding, respond to them. Again, other stuff I mentioned earlier, make sure all your NAP details are consistent. You don't have any outdated trading hours and numbers, for example. Just make sure it's all pretty straightforward, as you said. Just make sure you just follow the prompts on your Google Business profile. Make sure it's all up to date. Same thing on the directories in the content as well. Just make sure that you're not doing anything to mislead a user, especially around areas you're servicing. 

James Lawrence: One that we didn't cover too much, but is really important is to make sure that the primary category of your GMB is actually accurate. I think often that one will be one where clients will have set up a GMB years ago. Didn't correctly label the category. That's a massive one. So just making sure that the category is the most relevant one for yourself. Making sure there's no duplicate listings of similar business or the same business at the similar or same address. And then yeah, just reviews. Right. Low reviews. It was quite funny back in the day, the algorithm didn't take into account the tone or sentiment of reviews. There was a pizza shop owner in New York who realised that by jacking up his negative reviews and getting some velocity there, he'd rank better on Google. They pretty quickly fixed that. So if you're kind of oscillating between a one and a two star review as your average, you're going to get penalised. So try to get it up there above that four, but nice one, Dan. I think that anyone who's got a local business that listens to the pod can hopefully take away at least one practical thing to implement to generate better rankings and traffic from their local SEO in 2023. 

Daniel Costa: Yeah, for sure. There's a lot of quick wins with local SEO and a lot of them are very practical, where you can set up your Google business profile yourself, get directory set up yourself. So, yeah, it's one of those things that I feel like anyone can really do. 

James Lawrence: Beautiful. Thanks, mate.