In this week’s episode, I share some amazing tips from the experts at the recent LocalU conference in Dallas. As always, I grabbed the other speakers and experts at the event and had them share a single, quick digital marketing tip. Check it out, it’s an awesome list of Local SEO tips!
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
So the local filter, it is still a thing, it’s evolving. You have to know about it. Gonna give you a little tip on how to identify if you are being filtered and who is filtering you. Geogrids; we all know about geogrids. Here’s what you do. You pull up a geogrid showing your rankings for a keyword that you suspect that you’re being filtered for. Beside that, you pull up the geogrid of competitors in your market, and you start cycling through them for that same keyword. Once you come into the competitor that’s filtering you, what you’ll notice is their ranking grid is the exact opposite of yours. So the areas on your grid where you have a blank, uh, pin that’s not ranking, they will have pins that are ranking, and vice versa. Go try it.
All right, my SEO tip is for Google Business Profile search queries. Use the API to pull search query data from Google Business Profile insights into a platform like Google Data Studio and you’re gonna get so much more keyword insight data than you could ever get in the platform. So definitely be using the Google Business Profile API.
All right, one my biggest tips for 2023 is to double down on video. So a lot of people, they create content for their website, lots of cool pages that get a lot of traffic. You should have a video that corresponds with every single page on your site that gets conversions. So basically, in that video, summarize what’s on the page. Make it short, make it quick, but something that people can watch if they don’t wanna read the whole thing. This will usually result in getting a lot more video traffic if you put the video on YouTube first and then embed it onto your website.
So if you’re a local business and you’re making videos, you’re probably making these five mistakes. The first is you’re probably not making videos for the people that come to your restaurants or your plumbing business. And if you’re not making the videos for them, who are you making the videos for, yourself? If they’re not gonna watch… If you’re not gonna sit down and watch your own video, don’t put it up. Don’t make something that someone’s not gonna watch.
Mistake number two is not embracing vertical videos. On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, vertical videos are the present and the future. And there’s about 100 billion views every single day online with vertical videos. So if you’re not part of those conversations, you’re gonna lose this business.
And the third mistake most businesses make with videos is not having great titles and thumbnails that are clickable. It’s not clickbait if it actually delivers the promise, so get as crazy and emotional as you can on those titles and thumbnails.
Uh, tip number four, a lot of businesses don’t understand how SEO friendly videos are. YouTube videos show up on YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world, and Google. So they’re all over the place. If you go to google.com, you’re gonna see videos everywhere, and if your videos aren’t surfacing for your local business, then you’re really missing out.
And the fifth mistake people make is they think they’re gonna get instant results. This is a process. Get 1% better every single week. And just suck at first. Your first 100 videos are probably gonna be really bad, so you just need to keep on going, every week make them better and better and better.
So one of my long-term stealth tips for local SEO is your tag… I should say your logo code for your website. This is something that people miss all the time. As part of general, good, technical SEO, you should have good alt text for your images throughout your website. But something that people commonly ignore is the alt text for their logo. And you can include your core, local search keyword with your brand name in your logo, especially if you have created an image that either includes a tagline of text at the bottom or it includes, like, as in- information what your business is at the bottom. So it could be, like, auto repair. So if it’s Acme Auto Repair, then you could include auto repair at the bottom and not just the logo for Acme. In this way, your internal links throughout your website will really build a whole lot of relevancy for that keyword for the home page, and it’ll help you rank better for it. This is a stealth tip. It works great. And lots of your competitors aren’t doing it.
You do have to have an actual image as your logo and not as a background of a div and not as some weird, little text arrangement. Use it as the alt text. It works great. Make sure all those logos link back to your home page.
So everybody says that for… to rank the best on your Google Business Profile, you need to have the right category. Wrong. I’m actually got a example of businesses that are ranking with their categor… primary category being set incorrectly, and they’re ranking for their keyword terms. Why? Because they use services. Make sure you accept those Google services that Google, Google always suggests, and you will be able to rank.
Go to your Google Business Profile, look to see if there’s any pre-defined services that you can add, and add them, because they definitely have an impact on ranking. They’ll help you cast a wider net, rank for more terms. So go add those terms and rank better in two to three days.
Utilize AI and tools like ChatGPT as tools not as employee replacements.
Google has a product called Small Business Advisors, and it is, like, $40, and it’s for Google to go in and basically tell your business what Google products you should be using. I have seen numerous businesses try to use that to get Google Business Profile support. They’re not supposed to do that. However, some of the support staff don’t really understand that and are giving support for the Google Business Profile up, for example, on, uh, getting reinstatement requests. The problem is is that I have seen numerous businesses, uh, that do that, and they have ha… lost their profiles from doing that way. So if you have a suspended profile, please, please do not use the, uh… What is it called? The Small Business Advisors on Google. That’s not what it’s intended for. And, um, it could really, uh… You could really actually lose your profile instead of helping get your profile reinstated.
Local service ads. If you’re doing local paid search at all, you should be looking and making sure that your business is or is not eligible for local service ads. They’re extremely, extremely valuable. You convert. It’s like a call-only ad. It drives… And you only pay when somebody actually converts. Number one tip for local services ads, make sure that you’re targeting extremely tightly. You don’t wanna put your geo too big. Number two, we wanna make sure that we’re scheduling those around your business hours when people can actually answer the phone.
