The only place to catch my epic selfies with monkeys and my exclusive presentation on advanced SEO tips from the incredible SEO Con Bali is right here in this week’s brand-new episode of Local Search Tuesdays!
Sit back, relax, and get ready to explore game-changing strategies that will take your SEO skills to the next level—all while enjoying a touch of Bali’s tropical vibes.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Welcome back to another episode of Local Search Tuesdays. I’m here in the middle of the rainforest in Bali, and I’ve got a killer episode for you this week.
So I was lucky enough to get invited back to speak at SEO con forum Bali.
And let me tell you, it’s an amazing place. If you’ve never had a chance to go, check it out. I’ve seen some really amazing stuff on the trip. Selfies with monkeys, riding down waterfalls, jumping off waterfalls, swimming with dolphins.
It’s been amazing. But I wanted to, as always, share my slides from my presentation with you. So it’s a little bit longer than a typical episode, but please stick around. Check it out.
I’ve got some amazing tips to help you with local SEO in twenty twenty five.
Advanced local SEO tips for twenty twenty five.
Once again, you know who I am because you’re watching my video series. But in case this is the first time, I’m Greg. I’m the COO at SearchLab, and I’ve got a weekly video series that you’re watching right now. But in case, again, it’s your first time, check it out every Tuesday for awesome local SEO tactics and every once in a while presentations just like this one.
And this is a fun photo of me speaking at MozCon a few years back. I’m lucky enough to get invited to speak at conferences all over the world, but sometimes that means I see some speakers that aren’t as great at public speaking. Usually, it’s some salesperson on a stage just trying to pitch their product or service, and they have no design considerations whatsoever in their slides. So it’s a plain black aerial font on a plain white background, and they pack every slides with bullet points.
And they’ve done studies to prove that bullet points kill kittens, so we’re gonna keep all of the kitties safe. When When I’m a big movie nut, I’ve got twenty six movies tattooed on my body. So every time I do a presentation, I like to share my love of movies along with my love of digital marketing. So once again, I’m on a sci fi kick lately, so we’ve got sci fi movies today in this presentation with a total of a hundred and three references with at least one movie for every year in the last fifty six years.
Typically, I go back fifty years, but come on, we gotta have all the Planet of the Apes movies in there so I can go back a little bit further.
But I’m gonna try to rush through this as quickly as I can since typically these videos are just a few minutes long. I’m gonna try to go as fast as I can. Let’s get it going.
Why are you here today? Do you need a hand with local SEO?
Are you spending too much time looking up at the competition ranking higher in search results?
Local SEO is a tough puzzle to crack, but you can’t really just float along with minimal effort because if you’re not putting in the effort, you’re gonna blend into the background. And if you blend into the background, you’ll be invisible to potential customers. But don’t freak out. I don’t want you to lose your head. I’m here today to help you dig through the massive pile of crap that you’ll find online about SEO to know what’s actually gonna work. It’s almost like I’m giving you a peek behind the scenes so you see how the matrix code works with Google.
The most important thing to remember when you’re thinking about SEO and showing up better in searches is that at the most basic level, Google is just a pattern detection program. So when you’re doing SEO, you’re making your pattern more attractive.
And the algorithm is different for local search results. Google actually has multiple algorithms at play, and the local algorithm does include some of the same factors as a traditional algorithm, but they’re weighted differently. But it also includes additional factors that the traditional algorithm doesn’t even consider, which means if you’re optimizing for local visibility, you’ve got to use different strategies. So how do you know if you need local SEO?
Well, if you do face to face business with customers, whether it’s a physical brick and mortar location or as a service business like a plumber or an electrician, then you need local SEO. So you should pay attention to the annual study called the Local Search Ranking Factor Study, except it’s not really annual because we skipped twenty twenty four. But typically every year, Darren Shaw at WhiteSpark conducts this study where he interviews or sends surveys out to the top forty ish experts in local SEO across the planet, and the aggregated answers give you a really good bit of insight into which factors influence your visibility in local searches.
And you get two pie charts to sum it all up. One shows you the factors that influence your visibility in the map pack or in Google Maps, and the other shows you the factors that influence your visibility in the localized organic results below the map pack. And the local search ranking factor study is really your guide to the signals that matter the most for local visibility. And if you need help understanding how local SEO works or you need help explaining to potential clients how local SEO works, I like to use pizza delivery as an example.
And this video will walk you through it. But, basically, the easiest way to think of it is if you’re doing a search for just the two words of pizza delivery at your business, you’ll get one set of results. And you do it at home, you get a different set of results. Even though you didn’t specify near me or a city name or a neighborhood name, you still get different results based on your physical location, and that’s how the local algorithm works.
But it’s not just adding keywords in the right places. It’s about optimizing the user experience and conversions on the website as well. Because we know that people are gonna shop around before they submit a lead or buy from you, especially if you skew towards the higher end of being a more expensive product or service. So you’ve got to stand out from the competition because even if you rank number one, people are still gonna look at the people below you.
You need to be appealing and memorable. You gotta give people a reason to come back and convert later because if you’ve got the same generic BS content on your site as everybody else, why would any customer care to buy from you? So you need to use your website content to prove to everyone why you’re amazing and make sure your content is actually about your business and what’s unique about you and what’s unique about your business in the local area that you’re in. And there’s a really easy way to test that content.
If you change the name of the city to a different city and change the name of the business to a different business, could you take that home page content and throw it on another website for another business in another city? Would the content still work? If it would, it’s not really about you, and it’s not really about the local area. And my favorite content test is to just read your content out loud because everything on your site should sound like something you would say face to face to a customer.
And you have marketing blinders on. When you read it and think through the content in your head, you’ll see keyword, keyword, keyword and think it’s amazing, but when you read it out loud, you’ll catch the things that don’t sound conversational.
The second most important thing you can remember about SEO is that if you want to show us a search result when somebody types in a particular keyword phrase into Google, you need a dedicated page on your website about that singular concept, and that page should be the best answer in the local area to the question the searcher is asking. And if you’re writing the best content, you should probably answer some of the subsequent questions that that potential customer might have once they got their initial answer.
That’s the really important thing to remember. And when you add content to your site, you need to do it strategically. It should target concepts that you don’t already rank for. If you’re already ranking really well for a concept, adding more content around that concept doesn’t really help you. You need to add content that will bring you additional eyeballs and additional traffic.
And when you’re writing content, always write for human customers and then optimize the pattern for the Google pattern detection side of things. So as you’re optimizing each page, the most important element on the page is the title tag. It’s the most weighted element on the page, and it’s what populates the blue text of your link as a clickable element in search results. So you should have the same keyword phrase that you have in all the other elements and the same city that you have in all the other elements.
Same keywords, same city in your h one heading. You should only have one h one heading on the page. It should be a bit more conversational than the title tag. Obviously, you need it in the page content, and image alt text is another important one.
Even though Google can now tell what’s in images with machine learning, alt text is still part of the algorithm, and it’s something that most businesses and marketers don’t optimize correctly. So make sure you’ve got the same keyword phrase and location phrase there as well. For your interior pages of the site, make sure you’ve got the same keyword phrase and city phrase in the URL for each page, and then make sure you’ve got the same phrases in the meta description. Even though the meta description doesn’t have any influence on ranking, if they searched for that term and it’s in your meta description, those terms will be bolded in your meta description, and you’ll get more click throughs to your site.
You should also ensure that you have a blog and you should be posting regularly to your blog because there’s a big difference between the kind of content that goes in the main section of your site and the kind of content that goes on your blog.
Main website content is bottom of funnel content. So blog content should be used to target the mid to upper funnel customers. In fact, you can get pre funnel customers by adding informational posts about the local area that don’t really have anything to do with your business because then people will be searching for things and you’ll show up even though they’re not looking to buy what you’re selling. And at some point, they’re gonna need to buy what you’re selling, but now they already know about you.
So it’s like putting up a billboard. And if you’re not quite sure how to do this kind of content, watch this video. This video walks you through exactly how to do it. And before you go and try to rank in other cities, which everyone always wants to do, you got to make sure that you own your backyard.
And watch this video. It walks you through it. But basically, the concept is that if you wanna show up in other cities, you have to out SEO the competition in other cities. And if you haven’t optimized your pattern well enough to show up well where you’re actually located, there’s no way you’re showing up in other cities.
But if it’s a less competitive area, you can use city pages to expand your reach, and this video will walk you through how to do that. But if it’s a metro area or just a lot denser competition, you’re going to have to go more advanced and use content silos, and this will walk you through how to do that. Links are evaluated differently in local SEO as well.
We don’t care about whatever authority score is spit out by your link evaluation tool, and we don’t care if it’s a nofollow link because nofollow links work just as well in the local algorithm as traditional links. All you really need to worry about is getting links from local websites and local businesses, and it’s really easy to do that if you just get involved in the local community. If you need ideas for how to get amazing local links, I’ve got a video here that walks you through a bunch of different tactics that you can use. Customer reviews are also weighted by Google’s local algorithm, and they’ve gained weight or importance, however you wanna talk about it, over the last few years, they’ve become more and more important. So you really need to make sure that customer reviews and reputation management are a part of your cohesive local SEO strategy. But I’m not talking about that testimonials page on your site. That page is pretty worthless.
People don’t trust testimonials. They know you’re only gonna show amazing five star reviews. They wanna read honest, unbiased reviews on third party sites. So you need a proactive review process because it’s not human nature to leave a review when you’re happy.
So you’ve got to ask those happy customers. So this will walk you through all of the intricate details of being proactive with your reputation management process. But the most important bit is really just to make it easy for people to leave a review because most people don’t know where to go to leave a review, and you need to make sure you ask every customer. You wanna make sure you’re answering every review as well, not just the positive, not just the negative, but everything. And remember when you’re responding to a negative review, your response is not for the person that left the review.
It’s for every potential customer in the future who wants to see how you handled that situation.
And don’t stress out too much about how many reviews you have. Google doesn’t really care how many reviews you have. It just cares that you have more than your local competitors.
And, you know, when you first go to your Google Business Profile and you click on the reviews, it’s kind of that default sort order before you click the filter to see the newest reviews or the best reviews or the worst reviews.
If a review has a photo uploaded along with it, it’s stickier and it stays in that default order for a longer period of time. And if a default or if a review is longer and it has more text, it stays in the default sort order for a longer period of time. And if a review has two or more thumbs up, it stays in the default sort order for a longer period of time. So if you get a bad review that’s showing in that default sort order, you want to bury it quickly so that people won’t see it because anyone that goes to read your reviews will automatically see that bad review. So reach out to someone who has recently left you a five star review and ask them to update their review and add more context and more story and add a photo and let you know when it’s done. And then you can give a couple of thumbs up and boom.
It’ll jump right to the top of the list. Do that a couple times, you bury the bad review.
Now, it’s important to notice that in the UK, Google has now rolled out review alerts for businesses that are caught cheating with reviews. So it’s pretty likely this will roll out to the rest of the world. So at one case, you will see that an alert pops up that lets you know that suspected fake reviews have recently been removed from that business.
And if it’s a more extreme case, Google will actually pop up an alert and let you know that new reviews have been turned off and that business is no longer allowed to get new reviews for some indetermined period of time. We don’t know how long this will be displayed, but for whatever period of time it’s displayed, no one is able to leave a new review for the business, which is clearly not a great thing. So let’s finish up and talk about the Google Business profile for your business. It’s really your home page because it’s the first impression that you make with potential customers.
Plus, properly optimizing your business profile allows you to show more often in those coveted map pack search results spots. So make sure you fill out every field that you can fill out. Make sure also that you’re adding UTM tracking to your website links because Google Analytics attribution is kinda broken, and you’re not really gonna get correct attribution in Google Analytics. Even though it’s all organic searches, it’ll be reported as direct if no referral information is passed, which happens fairly often on mobile.
So watch this video. It’ll walk you through how to add UTM tracking so you get better data and analytics so you can make better marketing decisions moving forward. And make sure that your landing page from your business profile, which for a single business or a single location business is the home page. For a multi location business is the individual location landing page.
Make sure that those are optimized for the most important money making keyword phrase in the city that you’re in. And make sure that your schema markup, your local business schema markup, or whatever subclass of local business you’re using, it’s only located on your GBP landing page, not every single page of your site. Make sure your correct hours are listed. Make sure you upload lots of high quality photos.
Make sure you selected the correct categories. In fact, it’s really important to pay attention to your primary category because the primary category is, according to this year’s local search ranking factor study, the most weighted factor that affects your visibility in the map pack. You wanna make sure you’re choosing the right one. You wanna be strategic, and this video will walk you through how to be strategic with choosing the right category.
And I also like to point out that GBP support kind of sucks. They follow scripts.
Sometimes they don’t understand all of the nuances of Google’s policies. So if you’ve got problems with your business profile, you usually don’t want to go to contact support. The best thing to do is go to the Google Business Profile community forum. It’s not staffed by Google employees, but it’s staffed by volunteers that donate their time.
And once a volunteer has answered things correctly, often enough, they get invited into the product expert program. So if you get an answer from someone with a product expert label or badge, you can trust their answer. And anyone that is at a PE level of gold or above has the ability to escalate that particular forum post directly to the Google business profile team and bypass support to get you help. So it’s a lot faster and a lot more helpful.
Make sure you’re using Google Posts on your profile to stand out and get more click throughs to your site.
I’ve got a whiteboard Friday that I filmed with Moz a little while ago linked right here. You should go watch it. It’s about fourteen minutes long and it walks you through exactly how to be successful with Google Posts. But the real secret isn’t what post template you use or what you write in your post.
The real secret is making sure that your thumbnail is attractive because Google will automatically crop to a smaller version of your image, and you can’t control that crop, and it only displays a few lines of text. And if that thumbnail view is not compelling or enticing, no one’s going to click on it to see your full post. So to help with the image cropping issue, we created a Photoshop template to give you better control to make sure that important stuff isn’t cropped out when Google does the automatic crop. You can download it at the link right there, and it looks like this.
Anything within the white grid is considered safe, and everything outside of the grid shows up once they see the full posts.
There’s also been a lot of studies that have confirmed that Google Posts that don’t use stock images and use original images get up to five times more click throughs. You should also be paying attention to the questions and answers widget on your business profile. It allows anyone to ask you a question, and anyone can answer that question for you. And the scary part is the general public thinks that the q and a widget is a chat program and that there’s somebody at your business on the other end waiting to answer those questions.
But because it’s really a community discussion widget, the questions can receive multiple answers, and whichever answer has the most upvotes is the answer that’s displayed as the primary answer. And then the user has to click the link to read the additional answers. So you wanna make sure that your owner answers are always upvoted to be the primary answers.
You’re allowed to ask your own questions as well. A lot of people don’t realize this, but Google encourages it. So take those commonly asked questions that you’d put on an FAQ page and load them here because no one’s gonna go to your FAQ page and read through the questions to see if theirs is maybe there and maybe has an acceptable answer. They want immediate answers, and they’re not gonna read through them on your business profile either. But it’s really cool how Google built this little widget. Because if they’re typing a question in and a similar question has been asked and answered in the past, Google will automatically display an answer to their question before they’re even done typing it in. So they’re actually gonna get an answer faster than what they would get talking to a human or even an AI chatbot.
Google has also rolled out a new reinstatement process worldwide, and you need to make sure you understand the details and all of the implications. So please watch this video. In case you get suspended, you’re gonna wanna understand what’s gonna happen next before you start the process. Because as soon as you start the reinstatement process, the sixty minute timer of doom starts. And you only have sixty minutes to get all of your supporting materials together and submitted to Google, and if that timer expires, that was your one chance and you’ve blown it.
And you’re gonna be in a bad spot. So the final bonus of what I want to talk about today is our local SEO scoring matrix that we use for people that we talk to at conferences and demos with potential customers.
It’s basically a mini local SEO audit, and it scores the four areas that influence visibility in local searches, which is the content on your site, how that content is optimized, the links pointed at your website, your Google business profile, and your reviews, and how you respond to those reviews.
It’s important to point out that the matrix scores on tactics, not on strategy. This makes it more universally helpful because if it was too much on the strategy side or if it was really generic like a HubSpot site grader, it’d be very easy for people to argue with those results and say, oh, you don’t know anything about my business or the strategy that we’re using.
These scores don’t mean anything. But because it’s basic elements of tactics that anyone that knows SEO would agree are important, then it’s more helpful. And strategy won’t matter if you don’t even have the right tactics in place in the first place. So using this matrix was a huge game changer for us.
As soon as we started using it before every demo call with potential clients, it immediately more than doubled our close rate for all of our demos. But the four areas in there are then weighted to approximate the importance of each area to Google’s algorithm, and when you add them together, you get a score anywhere from zero to a hundred points. Although, you can get negative points because there are some elements that if they are incorrect, it is either likely or definitely hurting your visibility, so you can lose points. The sweet spot, though, is mid sixties to low eighties.
It’s effectively impossible to score a perfect score. Fact, the highest score we’ve ever seen was an eighty three point six, and that was one of our own clients. The lowest score we’ve ever seen was a negative seventy one and a half, and the average score out of a hundred points is only eighteen points.
Because, basically, most people aren’t doing SEO correctly, and there’s a lot of opportunity to help. So if you’d like to check out the matrix, I’ve got a couple of links here. The generic matrix will work for any local business, and then we have versions for the verticals where we work more often. So I’m showing you the generic version that will work with anything.
That’s probably the one you’ll wanna use. But, also, the generic version that will work with anything. That’s probably the one you’ll wanna use. But also the automotive version so you can see how we adjusted the scores and looked at some vertical specific elements on the site to then make it a little bit more useful.
So you could adjust it for whichever verticals you might work in as well.
And it’s really great at pointing out obvious opportunities for improving that digital pattern to show it better in local searches, but it’s also a great guide for your team for swinging through and doing an initial optimization and fixing all of those problems quickly so that you can get results even faster. I know I sped through that today. Hopefully, no one’s brain exploded and for everyone that hasn’t seen scanners, the guy’s head literally explodes.
But the truth is out there about how to succeed in local search results, and hopefully now you’ve got the key to success so you can break out of your shell and do even better optimization so that your sites or your client sites will live long and prosper. That was advanced local SEO tips for twenty twenty five. If you’ve got questions, please shoot me an email. I’m happy to answer them. Or if you’d like a copy of the slides, I will shoot them over to you. And as always, at the end of the slides, there’s a list of all the movies by order of release date. Thanks so much for watching today.
Thanks for sticking around to watch the entire thing. It was really cool, wasn’t it? So as always, that’s all the time we have left for today’s episode. So you know what that means.
Put your hand on the screen right here.
We totally just high fived because you learned something awesome. Thanks for watching, and we’ll see you again next week for another episode of Local Search Tuesdays.
