A Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO

Welcome to the Free Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO from Courses Buddy!

Here, in the first lesson, we will talk about how local SEO is different from traditional SEO. For all the beginners out there, SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the strategy of optimising signals both on and off a website to influence how the site shows up in search results. When most people talk about SEO, they mean a traditional approach that targets the standard algorithm, but there’s more than one algorithm.

When someone enters a search query, Google is going to try to assess the intent of the query and choose the right algorithm to return the search results.

Google uses its local algorithm whenever a search query has local intent. In other words, if Google has determined that the searcher needs to see search results from a particular geographic area, it will use the local algorithm. Google has access to ridiculous amounts of data about the search queries it receives and it’s figured out that for certain business types even when the user doesn’t include any geographic modifiers in a search query, something like a city, a neighbourhood, or a phrase like near me, or nearby, that user still needs search results in the local area.

Let’s understand this through an example. If you do a Google search for pizza delivery from your office, you’ll get a list of all the pizza joints right by your office. If you try the same search from home, again, with only the words pizza delivery, you get completely different search results. You type the exact same query, but get two completely different sets of search results. That’s Google’s local algorithm in action.

Google knows that you need a pizza delivered from somewhere near your current real world location. So it uses the local algorithm to return your search results. So how do you know if you need local SEO? The simplest way to see if Google is using the local algorithm for your business is to do a quick few searches. Once you’ve done your keyword research, search for a few of your most important phrases. If you see a Map Pack, the map with three results underneath or now, three results next to the map, that’s proof that Google has assessed local intent to that search. Basically, you need local SEO if you’re a business that does face to face business with customers at a physical brick and mortar location or that serves customers in a particular geographic area like a plumber or an electrician.

Local SEO isn’t only about the map pack though. The local algorithm serves search results in several locations. If you click View All at the bottom of the map pack, you’ll be taken to the Local Finder page, which goes beyond just the top three results. Search results in Google Maps are also powered by the local algorithm. The organic results below the map pack are also localised and powered by the local algorithm. The radius for local search results varies greatly between different verticals and even different cities. Typically, the more concentrated the competition, the smaller the search radius will be.

Now, no one knows exactly what’s in Google’s algorithm, not even Google engineers now that Google is using machine-learning. We’ve got to base our local SEO efforts on best guesses. But luckily, there are a ton of really smart people in local SEO who are always testing factors and sharing their research.

Local SEO is incredibly complex, especially if you’re just starting out. Tactics that work for businesses in one vertical won’t necessarily work for businesses in another.

While the base factors are the same, the tactics that you’d use for a personal injury attorney are totally different from the tactics you’d use for a plumber. And to make things even more complicated, the tactics that work in one city or metro area won’t necessarily work in another city or metro area. 

I always suggest paying attention to the annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Each year, the top 35 to 40 world wide experts in local SEO are given an in-depth survey about the various factors that influence local search results. Between client work and experimentation, these experts know that tweaking the signal over here or turning up the dial over here will result in more visibility in local searches.

If you put five talented SEOs in a room and have them all optimise the same site, they’d all do it differently. But they’d all optimise the same elements. The survey results are aggregated, so we get a really solid idea of which factors influence local visibility.

The LSRF results are compiled into two pie charts that outline the signals that are the most influential in increasing local search rankings. One pie chart shows the signals that matter most for showing up in the Map Pack in Google Maps. And the other pie chart shows the signals that matter most for showing up in localised organic results. The same signals matter for both areas, but the weights are different.

Let’s look at the Map Pack and Map search factors first.

Proximity, or how far the search result is from the searcher, is a major factor in Map Pack and Map results. And since that factor lives under the Google Business Profile area, it’s the largest piece of the pie at 36%.

Reviews are the second largest section with 17%, on-page signals at 16%, and inbound links come in at 13%. Behavioural signals, such as click through rate, clicks to call on mobile, and clicks for directions account for 7%, followed by citations at 7%, and personalization factors at 4%.

We see a different breakdown of weights when we look at the localised organic factors. Notice how much smaller the Google Business Profile section is. That’s because proximity isn’t as weighted in the local organic section of results.

The most weighted factor is on-page signals at 34%, followed closely by linked signals at 31%. Behavioural signals clocking in at 11%, then citations at 7%, personalization and Google Business Profile signals are both at 7%, and reviews are at 5%.

What are Keywords?

Well, we’re going to explore what we mean when we say keywords. And we’ll also think about some of the concepts we need to keep in mind when we start to put together our own list of keywords.

Keyword research is very much important for the success of your SEO project and for being found online. Keyword research will heavily impact your on-page SEO and the structure of your website in terms of the content and how the pages are structured, or what we call the information architecture. It will also affect how you talk about your business, about your products and services in day-to-day life, and in your marketing materials both offline and online.

Additionally, keyword research can give us a great insight into your target audiences, into your niche, into your competitors, and also into how your marketplace is changing. Through conducting in-depth keyword research, you’ll develop an excellent understanding of your potential customers and how they’re searching, what they’re searching for, the problems they’re looking to solve, and how you and your products and services can best meet their needs.

As you know, all searches performed by users start with a search query, and these are the words that you type into the search bar. Back in the 1990s, when we were optimising a web page for the search engines, one of the first things we did was enter popular search terms in the field for meta keywords in the source code. 

Search engines at the time were dependent on this field to assess the relevance of a search query in relation to the website content, and meta keywords were a powerful ranking factor.

So, if you entered donuts, best donuts, London, sprinkles, donut boxes into the keywords meta tag, Google would know that your webpage was about all of those things. Of course, as more and more people created websites and the web became more competitive from a commercial point of view, the keyword became misused for the manipulation of rankings.

Finally, the keyword tag became less important as time went on. And in the year 2009, Google finally confirmed that the meta keyword tag was no longer relevant for rankings. Since 2012, Google representatives have been advising the search community to focus on things, not search queries.

The key here is that Google is looking to better understand the context of the page, not just the content of the page.

Moreover, Google is looking to understand the world a bit more like people do. And as we’ve already covered, in the early days of SEO, you just had to place the target keyword on the page as many times as possible and stick it also in the keywords meta tag.

But these days, that’s not how it works. Of course, you need to use those relevant keywords on the page and variations on those keywords-plurals, synonyms, related phrases, etc. But now, it’s super important to understand search intent to build your page around that intent, and also to recognize the importance of your website becoming an authoritative topical help.

Alright, coming back to the definition of keyword, also known as search query research.

In simple words, keyword research is the process of discovering words and phrases that people use in search engines like Google and determining which of these matter most for the objective of a given website.

When we say words and phrases we mean what people search, their query strings typically include more than one word. And using more words gives a search query more context and hopefully allows Google to serve the search a set of results that are super relevant to their query.

Keep in mind that search behaviour isn’t fixed.

The queries people use, the length of those queries, and the context in which the searches are made is constantly changing. And because of this, keyword research is never a one-and-done process.

For instance, the boom of mobile search. Mobile devices now account for approximately half of web traffic worldwide. Google tells us that a third of mobile searches are related to location.

Meanwhile, Google coined the term micro-moments to describe when people turn to their smartphone in what they call I want to know, I want to go, I want to do, and I want to buy moments. As local search marketers, these micro-moments are key opportunities. Understanding these moments, anticipating them, and having content on our website that will meet the needs of the searcher means that will capture more leads, make more sales, and positively influence people’s perception of our brand.

You will be surprised that COVID-19 has affected what people search for and when, the way that they search, and the way that they look for products and services. We’ve seen massive peaks in search volume. Search volume being the number of people searching for a given term, usually over the period of a month. Shoppers aren’t just turning to Google for things they want to buy online. They’re also using Google to find where what they want to buy is available nearby.

Google tells us that searches for local plus business have grown by more than 80% year over year, including searches like local businesses near me and support for local businesses. And searches for “who has” plus “in stock” have grown by more than 8,000% year on year.  Other world and national events will also affect search queries and their associated search volume. 

Staying abreast of how world events affect how people search and the words that they use is essential for each and every business that wants to make the most of the opportunity to appear in the SERPS.

Let me create a scenario. Imagine you’re at home, and for some reason your hot water isn’t working. You ask yourself, could this be a problem with your…What’s this a picture of? What did you say? Which word did you use?

Well, do you know, if you’re in the UK you probably said boiler. And if you’re in the US you probably said hot water heater or furnace.

When we think about keywords, we need to keep geography–whether that be national or regional–in mind. Which words and terms do the people in the area that you wish to target use when they search for your product or service?

Knowing about seasonal trends will be important for you as you make a dent in your keyword research process. Is the demand for your products and services affected by the season? In this case, it’s likely that the number of people searching for your product or service will also vary according to the season. 

Some search queries will be more popular than others. And the number of searches over a given time frame is commonly referred to as search volume. Also, there are a few things that we need to keep in mind when we think about search volume.

The first is that search volume doesn’t equal the number of clicks that you would get if you ranked number one for that keyword. How could it?

The other thing is that most tools give an average monthly volume based on 12 months. So if there is a seasonal element to a keyword this won’t be reflected in the number. For instance, there could be a search volume of 46,000 for ice cream near me, but 75% of those searches will take place in June, July, and August.

Commonly, there are two main sources for search volume data. We’ve got Google’s Keyword Planner, and we have other tools that use a mixture of Google’s Keyword Planner and clickstream data.

Clickstream data is collected via browser extensions, plug-ins, and other applications you install on your computer. 

Each of these sources will calculate volume differently. And you can expect to see sometimes huge discrepancies between tools. We suggest you don’t need to focus on those discrepancies. Instead focus on search volume directionally. 

We use tools to help us make informed decisions about what people are searching for and to give us an indication of which search phrases might be more popular than others. Some searches will be hundreds of thousands a month and others will be made just a handful of times. 

If you’re an agency or a freelancer and you’re working with a new client, sometimes the keywords they want to rank for and the actual keywords that their target market is searching for are very different things.

Google told us in 2017 that 15% of the searches they see every day are new.

That’s a huge chunk of daily searches that are long tail, never made before queries, from searches looking for answers and solutions. It’s likely that there are potentially thousands of search queries that will be relevant to your business for which keyword tools will never have data for. So we need to keep in mind that the search volume of individual keywords is becoming increasingly obsolete as we endeavour to build our content and SEO strategy around topics rather than keywords.

Generally, the higher the search volume the greater the competition. And the effort required to achieve organic ranking success. 

The search intent is the primary goal the user has when writing a query string into a search engine.

Let’s take a look at what are considered by many to be the five common types of search intent.

First is Informational Queries.

The searcher needs to find information. They want to find an answer to a question or to learn something. For example, how to crack your lower back like a chiropractor. How to treat a dog ear infection without a vet. Informational queries will often contain these words. Why, what, when, where, how, guide, tutorial, tips.

Second is Navigational Queries.

The searcher wants to go to a particular website or resource on the internet. For instance, Courses Buddy blog or Psychology Today. Navigational queries will typically include a brand name or a branded product or service name.

Next is Commercial Investigation.

It is when the searcher wants to compare products or services and find the best one to suit their needs. For example, iPhone vs Android smartphones or E-books vs printed books, etc. Commercial investigation queries will typically include these words. Versus or vs., comparison, reviews, best, and compare.

Fourth is Transactional Queries.

It is also referred to as commercial or high intent. The searcher wants to buy something or is ready to take an action, such as make an order or make a call. E.g., buy roses, walk-in chiropractor. Transactional queries will often contain these words. Cheap, price, coupon, buy, order, purchase, affordable.

Lastly, the queries that we’re really interested in as local search marketers are local queries.

Fifth is Local Queries.

The searcher wants to find something local to them or in a specific geographic area. For instance, a dentist near me, buffet near me, chiropractor near me, etc.

Indeed, it’s worth noting that Google doesn’t only show local results for search terms that contain a specific city or geographic area or the words near me. If the intent behind the search query is ambiguous, and/or if Google thinks that a query could include an element of local intent, it will show a Map Pack.

You need to keep searcher intent in mind when you’re choosing your keywords. It’s always a good idea to take a look at the SERP for any keyword that you think might be relevant to your business, so that you can work out what Google thinks is the intent behind the query by looking at the types of results that it shows on that page. 

Now, let’s have a look at the customer journey.

Customer Journey

Let’s look at a few of the models of how the customer journey can be broken down.

A marketing funnel, sometimes called a conversion funnel or a sales funnel, is a system designed to attract and convert customers to your business. The top of the funnel, the middle of the funnel, and the bottom of the funnel, refer to the stages in the sales funnel.

The top of the funnel is the awareness stage, where you have your widest and most general audience. And the middle of the funnel is your potential customers’ consideration and evaluation stage. They’ve accepted that they have a problem to solve, and they’re working hard to research options and to find a solution to that problem.

And then the bottom of the funnel is a much narrower audience. But this audience are highly qualified leads that are ready to buy, hopefully from you.

During the awareness stage, buyers identify their challenge or an opportunity they want to pursue. During the consideration stage, buyers have clearly defined the goal or challenge and have committed to addressing it. They evaluate the different approaches or methods available to pursue the goal or solve their challenge. In the decision stage, consumers are ready to buy or take action.

So, the goal is to compile a list of available vendors or service providers, make a short list, and ultimately make a final purchase decision. No matter what kind of purchase or service we’re looking for as consumers, all of us follow a relatively similar path when deciding what to buy.

The buyer decision process breaks down the buyer’s journey and the decision making process from the awareness and problem recognition stage, which is where the customer recognizes what the problem or need is and identifies the product or service that they think is required, through to the purchase decision stage. This is where they’ll take the step to purchasing the chosen product or service that will offer a solution to their problem.

Surprisingly, this process was first introduced a century ago by John Dewey. And it’s still the foundation of understanding buyer behaviour and for marketing funnel creation.

The process starts with problem recognition. I don’t like my crooked teeth. So they search for crooked teeth. At this stage the potential client is acknowledging some kind of problem. Next is the information search. What are the options for straightening my teeth? And they search to fix crooked teeth. At this stage potential customers are looking for information about methods to straighten their teeth.

Evaluation of alternatives. During this stage consumers evaluate all of their product and brand options according to the attributes which have the ability to deliver the benefit that the customer is seeking.

And in this case that might be, how straight will this option make my teeth? But they might also be considering, which is the least expensive option? Which option is covered by their insurance? Which option is the fastest? Or which option is the least painful?

In the purchase decision stage they decided, I’m going to get braces from an orthodontist in London. So they search for orthodontists in London. This is the stage of the buying process where the potential customer makes a decision about which dentist they will choose. And then finally we have the post–purchase decision.

How do I keep my braces clean? They search for how to clean braces.

So, in Dewey’s model this part of the consumer decision-making process involves reflection from both the consumer and the seller. And in terms of keyword research I like to think of this also as a stage when a business can target search queries from customers that have already bought from them, but also attract sales and revenue from customers who might have chosen a different provider.

Targeting local keywords is a piece of cake for local search marketers. When it comes to local keyword research, we usually work with this combination of words. One or more core terms, and then usually, one or more keyword modifiers, which may or may not contain a location modifier. The core terms are going to be related to your business category keyword or your service product keyword.

Take this as what the business is and what the business offers. For instance, a dentist that offers general dentistry and aesthetic dentistry, a lawyer that specialises in divorce law, or a vet that has a canine and feline practice. Modifiers are words that people add onto a base or head term when they’re looking for relevant search results.

They can include adjectives, shopping terms, verbs, questions, and anything else that’s going to return them a relevant result to what they’re searching for. Modifiers usually appear before or after our head terms. 

Comparison modifiers like best, versus, top, and reviews. Who it’s for– families, kid friendly, seniors, animal friendly, wheelchair accessible.

Question modifiers like what, how, where, and why. Zeitgeist modifiers, so the keywords that are new or growing in terms of volume such as Black-owned businesses, and reflect the spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

Wildcard modifiers–so less frequently search modifiers that you might not have already thought of or mapped out but are potentially relevant to your business. We’ll talk about them later. And finally location modifiers, in London, New York, Southwest, near me, nearby, etc.

Considering which modifiers are relevant to your business is important.

This will in part depend on your positioning. If you’re targeting the budget-end of the market, you wouldn’t want to use a modifier that suggests luxury. And if you’re offering a high-end product or service, you won’t be targeting modifiers like cheapest or low cost.

As local SEOs, we’re indeed, very much interested in those location modifiers. After all, we hear to market products and services in a specific location.

You might have heard of the terms implicit vs explicit local keywords. When you make an explicit local search, you clearly define that you are looking for something in a specific location, such as emergency therapist London. Google knows that I want to see search results for emergency therapists located in or London.

An implicit local search does not define a location but Google can figure out that you most likely are looking for something local to you. For instance, if you make a search for just career counsellors, yoga coaches, plumbers, or dentists, or restaurants. Despite the fact that Google will often show local results even when a search doesn’t include a location modifier, it’s still important to include these modifiers as part of our keyword strategy. Because Google can serve slightly different results for each of these phrases, even when all of the searches are made from the same location. 

Many businesses concentrate their time and effort on searches at the bottom of the funnel. And this is a place where consumers are ready to buy and where they’re making comparisons of providers. They’re reading reviews, they’re looking for pricing information, and then they’re making a decision about who to actually choose.

The local keywords that we just covered are commonly transactional in nature. The searcher here knows what they’re looking for and where geographically they want to find it. So these searches are pretty much ready to buy, and it’s your job to convince them that you’d be the right choice.

As a local business, should you be targeting searches that are a little further up the funnel? The simple and sweet answer is, it depends. In terms of optimising a site for important search queries, most businesses should focus on optimising for their transactional high-intent bottom of the funnel terms first, before they think about other opportunities.

But once they’ve done that, there are many instances where buyers in the information search and alternative evaluation stages of the consumer decision making process could be targeted for a range of business types. As you can imagine, visitors that have been targeted higher up in the buyer journey won’t convert at the same rate as visitors that are lower down in the funnel.

Nonetheless, when you’re in a competitive space it does make sense to target potential customers who are in an earlier stage of their journey. And you can get them into your marketing funnel, usually, a website, and work your marketing magic. For instance, you could offer them free content, such as a guide for sign up, or you could use a retargeting platform such as Facebook, Instagram, or Google Ads to continue to reach these people across a range of touch points.

Most shoppers begin their research on a search engine. So making sure that you provide content at all stages of their buying process means that you could make it into their consideration set when they’re ready to buy.

Lastly, you can use your content to guide them towards choosing your product or services over the alternatives. You could quite likely earn links and mentions from other websites if you have really great content.

Here, we’re going to explore the importance of understanding a business inside out. And then we’ll get into the nuts and bolts of writing a keyword seed list. Before we get trapped with finding keywords and with gathering some keyword metrics, let’s make sure that we have a really solid understanding of the business. 

Who are you? What are your business goals? What products and services do you offer? Why are they unique, or better placed, to serve your potential customers than your competitors? What are your unique differentiators? Who are your customers and potential customers? Have you developed personas for your customers? What are the goals and problems of your clients and potential customers? How do you already effectively reach your clients and potential customers? And how can you develop your own business, or work with a client to develop their business if you haven’t explored the answers to these questions?

So, when you are onboard with a new client, you’ll give them a list of questions like the above. And if they already have relationships with third party agencies, it’s quite possible that they already have some internal documentation that will cover these types of questions. But if that’s not the case, then you’ll schedule a call with them, and you’ll send them these questions in advance. And lastly, you need to make sure that you’re speaking with the right people in the organisation.

You can talk with a few if the team is bigger. You need to make sure that you’re getting to speak with the people that answer the phone, the people that interact with customers and potential customers every day. Because these are the ones that know the language that the customers are using to describe their problems and the solutions they’re looking for, and the products and services that they need. Instead of expecting them to answer the questions in a document or in email, you’ll explore these topics on the phone.

And then you can make your own notes. That way, you’ll be able to open up new lines of inquiry and new areas of exploration based on their answers. Once you’ve ensured you have a solid understanding of the business, the potential customer, and their goals, you’re ready to start working on your keyword seed list. The list often starts by posing this question.

What do you think your potential customers are searching for? This is an excellent place to start and build on in the early stages of keyword research. 

The better the keyword seed list, the greater the opportunity to generate a comprehensive keyword portfolio in the next stages. You won’t necessarily be targeting your seed keywords, you’ll use them as seeds as you germinate your full list. 

What’s your website about? Well, it’s about your self-storage facility and your self-storage units. So your target customers might search for storage, self-storage, self-storage facility, self-storage units, storage units, storage facilities. What size unit do you rent?

Well, your target customers might search for small self-storage units, 2 by 2 self-storage, 5 by 5 self-storage, 10 by 30 self-storage, large self-storage units. What are the features of your storage space? Your target customers might search for secure self-storage, 24-hour self-storage, climate controlled self-storage, self-storage with on-site staff, self-storage with managed reception, 24/7 access self-storage. What types of items can people store with you?

What price modifiers might all target customers use? Well, we think your prices are very fair and a good value, but you’re not positioning ourselves as cheap or budget. And price isn’t such a factor for your customers, who focus instead on your security, facilities, and location. But these terms, however, might be relevant, affordable and value for money.

The question is, are there any seasonal variations in keywords? Well, spring and summer are very busy, because house moves often happen in the summer, and foreign students often like to keep their belongings with you over the summer holidays. But you’re not sure if this affects how people search in terms of the phrases they use. Are there any comparison keywords?

Well, we often find that people will compare the benefits of self-storage against container rental, or storage pots. And when people are deciding which company to choose for self-storage, we know that your reviews are important. And you make sure that you show reviews and testimonials on your website. Your target customers might search for storage containers versus self-storage, storage pods versus self-storage. 

Are there any common questions your target market might ask? Price is the most common question and then questions related to size, and what can be stored. Also,  what you can do in them. Your target customers might search for how much does it cost to rent a storage unit? What can you store in a storage unit?

What can you fit in a 5 by 5 storage unit? What can you fit in a 10 by 30 storage unit? Can you sleep in a storage unit? Who is your service for, and does this affect the keywords that people search for? Well, your customers vary from businesses, to homeowners, to students, to wine enthusiasts. Your target customers might search for self-storage for students, self-storage for wine collectors, self-storage for business. Are there any zeitgeist modifiers? 

As you dig deeper, and start pulling keywords from your data sets and from keyword research tools, you’ll need to start being a little bit more organised and methodical. 

Knowing the marketplace inside out means that you also know where your potential customers hang out online. And this could be forums, Facebook groups, or elsewhere. Digging into these spaces can open your mind to topics and keyword ideas that didn’t get covered in your initial seeding.

For a while in SEO, you might have found that a client’s idea of who their competitors are can be quite different to who their competitors actually are in the search engines.

So, you need to consider both sets here. So include the hyperlocal businesses that the client often names that maybe don’t perform that well for your seed keywords and also the national businesses that do perform well and get great organic visibility. In the same way that you’ve been through a client site and made a list of the products, and services, and location served, do the same with those competitors.

What words do they use to describe their products and services? Are these the same as the ones that you’ve listed in your seed list? If not, and if they’re relevant, add them to your keyword research spreadsheet.

You’ll likely have a Google Business Profile listing, so make sure you take a look at the types of keywords that searchers are using that surface your GMB listing. It will look something like this.

People Also Ask

The People Also Ask feature, also known as the PAA, is a SERP feature that shows questions related to the searcher’s query. You can click on the SERP feature to read the answer to the question and also to click through to the page from which Google is scraping the answer.

You’ll find a great tool to use for the People Also Ask feature with AlsoAsked. When you make a search, when you scroll to the bottom of the SERP, you’ll see a list of what Google considers to be related searches. And Google suggest results are auto populated searches that show other searches that are made by users with up to 10 results showing at a time. Now, make searches using the seed keywords, and take a look and see if Google suggests anything that you’ve not included in your seed list.

Another free tool that gives this functionality is Answer The Public.

The content on a website has always been one of the most important factors in SEO. You can’t show up as a search result for a keyword phrase if you don’t have related information on your website. I like to boil things down to simple concepts. Here’s the easiest way to think about how on-page signals influence visibility and searches.

If you want to show up as a search result when someone enters a particular search phrase, you need a page on your website about that concept.

Read our Beginner’s Guide to SEO

Now, technical SEO elements matter here as well. You need to pay attention to core web vitals and user experience signals, you need clean concise code, you need to be sure you don’t have broken links or missing images, you need your site to load quickly. But we’re here to talk specifically about local SEO, so let’s talk about the on-page elements that are different from traditional SEO.

Your NAP information should be clearly displayed on every page of the site. NAP stands for name, address, and phone number.

This isn’t just an SEO tactic, it’s important for your user experience as well. If someone wants to call you or know where you are so they can get directions, it makes sense to display your NAP info front and centre, so it’s obvious to everyone.

It’s important to use the right local business schema markup on your NAP as well. If you’re not familiar with schema markup, it’s code that’s used behind the scenes to help classify information on your site. There’s a specific type of schema markup for local businesses with specific subtypes for most verticals. 

You shouldn’t use the local business schema on every page of your site. The easiest guide for where to use schema is to think about how your Google Business Profile is set up. You want the schema markup to be on the same page that your GBP points to. For single location businesses, that’s typically going to be your home page. For multi-location businesses, you’ll usually put the schema markup on your individual location pages.

You should always display a local phone number. If you’re using call tracking numbers, this can get a bit complicated, so let’s run through a few scenarios. If you’re using dynamic number insertion, also known as DNI, JavaScript will fire once the page loads and change the phone number to a tracking number based on the traffic referral source. As long as your actual local number is the default number that’s coded into the page before the JavaScript fires, you’ll be OK. 

If you’re instead using a block of tracking numbers and you’ve dedicated one number to your website, you’ll still want to show your local number somewhere on the page. In these situations, you’ll typically show the tracking number at the top of the page and your actual local number down in the footer. Make sure that your schema markup includes the local number, not the tracking number.

Your content needs to truly be about your business and the local area. Most businesses only worry about their content being unique, which isn’t a great target.

Anyone can write unique content, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the content will be relevant or useful.

Remember, the simple concept about having a page about a concept, it’s also important that the page is the best answer to the question that the searcher is asking. Since the local algorithm constraints result in a particular geographic area, you don’t have to have the best answer to the question on the entire internet, you only need to have the best answer in your local area.

If you’re writing content that’s the best answer in the local area and you make sure it’s localised, you’ll be unique without having to try.

Don’t make the common mistake of thinking that local content means mentioning your city every few sentences. You’re a local, so your content should reflect that. Mention local landmarks in your directions or talk about local events you’re involved with or mention your city in natural conversational text, that’s when you’ve got actual localised content.

The best content tip I can share with you is to read your content out loud. When you read the content out loud, you hear the awkward phrasing. 

Your content needs to be conversational. Everything on your site should sound like something you’d say face to face to a customer who just walked in your front door. When you read your content out loud, the marketing blinders come off and you hear awkward phrasing that you wouldn’t necessarily catch otherwise.

You should also include reasons why you’re a better option. No one buys from the first result that they click on in Google search results. You know that potential customers will be checking out your competitors as well, so make sure you wow anyone who comes to your site. If you’re memorable, you’re more likely to capture those customers on return visits in the future.

Don’t include the same boring marketing fluff that you see on every website. No one really cares that you treat customers like family or that you have the lowest prices and best customer service around.

Think about what really makes you unique. Why are you so amazing that anyone who knows you wouldn’t even consider going to a competitor? That’s what you should have in your content.

The important question is how you optimise your website. Once you’ve got your awesome localised content written, it’s time to optimise for the local algorithm. Google is like a curious toddler. It knows a little about a lot of things and it’s intensely curious to learn more. Optimising your content helps Google understand exactly what the page is about, so you’re more likely to show up better in search results. On each page of your site, you’ll need to optimise the following elements, making sure that you’re using the same keyword phrase in each element.

Start off with the title tag. It’s the most weighted SEO element on the page. It’s the text that shows in the tab above where you enter the URL in your browser and it’s also what usually populates your blue link when you show up in a search results page. Make sure you’re using the keyword phrase that relates to that page concept and include your location keyword phrase. In the UK, that’s going to be your city and regions and ceremonial countries abbreviation. Outside of the UK, you really only need to use your city.

You should never put your business name first. You’re the only business named that, so you’ll always rank number one for that search. Don’t waste valuable optimization space. If you want to include your business name, put it at the end of the title tag.

The H1 heading is the second most important SEO element on the page. It’s the big thick headline above your text area. You should only have one H1 on your page. If you’ve broken your text up with other subheadings, make sure you’re using H2 or H3.

Remember to use the same keyword phrase you used in your title tag and include your location keyword phrase as well. Keep your H1 short and to the point, but make it as conversational as possible.

Your content is obviously important. But if you’ve written the best answer in the local area, you’ll already have your targeted keyword phrase in there. And if it’s truly localised content, you’ll already have your location keywords in your text as well. So you shouldn’t need to do any extra optimization.

Image alt text is the next area to hit and it’s something most people don’t touch. In fact on most sites, image alt text doesn’t even exist.

If you’re not familiar with it, alt text is an element of the image embed code. Basically, a behind the scenes description of the image. Years ago, Google wasn’t able to tell what was in an image, so alt text helps Google understand how your image is related to your content.

Now, Google has machine learning systems that can interpret almost exactly what’s in an image, but alt text is still a part of the algorithm. Image descriptions should be short and to the point, but you should include your targeted keyword phrase and location keywords wherever possible to help boost locational relevance signals.

You should also be optimising the URLs of your pages. Most website platforms allow you to set custom URLs for your pages. So whenever it’s possible and when it makes sense, you should include targeted phrases and location keywords in URLs. For example, the used car inventory list on a car dealers website typically has a URL that’s something like domain.com/searchused.

It would be so much better to have something like domain.com/used-cars-london. It’s a better signal to search engines and it’s easier for humans to read and understand.

Keep in mind if you’re watching this and you’re inspired to optimise URLs, you need to be careful. When you update URLs, you’ll need to update any internal links or those links will be broken. Most platforms will automatically update menu links, but it’s important to update any contextual or image links in your site as well. 

You’ll also want to check for any external links pointed to the pages that you’re changing. If you’ve got an inbound link pointed to a page and you change the URL, you lose the value of that inbound link since it will be pointing to a page that no longer exists. You’ll need to set up 301 redirects to keep the value of those links.

It’s also important to use your targeted keyword phrase and your location keyword phrase in your meta description. The meta description is behind the scenes code that populates those three or four grey sentences under your blue link when you show up in Google search results. Keep in mind, the meta description has absolutely nothing to do with the ranking algorithm, so spamming keywords won’t do anything here. But since it populates your link description, you should think of it like an ad and write something compelling that will get more users to click through to your site, including your location keywords will help show that you’re a local business and potentially increase your click throughs.

It’s also incredibly important to have a blog. If your site is run through WordPress, it’s easy since the blog is an integrated part of your website. If you have some other CMS or backing system that doesn’t include a blog element, you’ll need to talk to your website team or marketing agency and get one set up. It’s best to have your blog set up in a subfolder, so it’s something like yourdomain.com/blog.

The content that goes on your blog is totally different from the main site content. Primary menu pages on your site are sales focused pages meant to drive revenue. Blog content is more informational. You are an expert in your vertical and have tons of knowledge you can share with the local community. Having a blog, allows you to share useful information that doesn’t necessarily fit in the primary menu structure of your site.

Boiling down to a simple concept, your main site is about sales and your blog is about discovery. Your blog also allows you to add more localised content. Your blog doesn’t need to be all about you and your business, that would be boring and no one would care. Share information about the local area and make your blog a local destination. If you only write about what you sell, your content is only going to show in search results for the narrow portion of the local audience who’s looking to buy from you right now. If you expand and share useful local information, your content is relevant to a much wider audience.

For your local blog posts, share anything useful about the local area, community news, local events, local interviews, these are all great topics. If you’re sponsoring a local event, you can write about that event before it happens to share the info about it and then write a recap after the event to tell people what happened. Write about favourite local restaurants, or bars, or anything in the community. 

As you continue to write more local content, you’ll build more local relevance, which helps you show up more often in local searches.

Well, it’s time to talk about local links and why they’re an important part of your local SEO strategy. Links have always been the most weighted ranking factor in Google’s traditional algorithm and they’re incredibly powerful in Google’s local algorithm as well.

Links are basically like popularity votes. Ideally, the best sites will have the most inbound links pointed towards them since other sites will link to the worthy content.

Google’s local algorithm looks at links differently than its traditional algorithm. Most local business websites operate on a much smaller scale. In fact, most local businesses only have a few hundred linking domains. Sometimes not even a hundred.

In the traditional algorithm, it’s important to acquire links from sites with high authority that are relevant to your business. Because local businesses operate on a smaller scale, the algorithm values links in a different way. A link could be relevant because of the subject matter, or because it comes from a local website.

In local SEO, a link from a local business or website carries a ton of weight. Sure, industry relevant links are still important and still carry value, but local links move the needle more than anything else. In local SEO, we don’t care if a link is follow or nofollow.

If you’re newer to SEO, there is a special directive that can be included in the link code that tells Google to simply crawl the link without passing value. That’s called a nofollow link. Traditional SEOs avoid nofollow links. But in local SEO, they’re just as valid. Yes, you heard it right. Nofollow links still work in local SEO. We also don’t care about the perceived authority of a site.

Every link tool includes some sort of authority metric that relates the associated value of the site the link is coming from. Big sites with lots of authority have a higher authority score, and each link tool has a different name for that value.

While the traditional SEOs are out scrambling to try to get links from really high authority sites, all of us locally just kick back and laugh as we rake in the easy links from low authority local sites. Typically, local sites don’t have much authority.

They don’t have a ton of other inbound links, they don’t have tons of awesome content, and sometimes the sites even look a little ugly. Traditional SEOs would say their crappy links. Because of that fact, local links are harder to reverse-engineer.

As you acquire more local links and gain more visibility in local searches, your competitors will analyse what you’re doing. When they run your links through a link tool, the links will all appear to be low-value links. And since your competitor doesn’t have local SEO, they’ll think your links suck and they’ll move on to other areas, never realising what they’ve missed.

Now if you get involved in the local community, building local links is actually incredibly easy. Many businesses can find local link opportunities related to things that they’re already doing in the community or through local relationships they already have in place.

When you’re ready to go out and build some local links, always start by checking your competitors’ links. If someone’s linking to your competitor, it’s likely very easy for you to get a link from the same site. This shouldn’t be your only strategy, because you need unique links to pull ahead in search results. But it’s a great starting strategy to level that playing field.

Even though you’re doing local SEO, don’t get stuck in your local bubble. Remember, you need unique links to win. Check out similar businesses in other cities, even if they’re on the other side of the country and you’d never compete with them. Sometimes, you’ll find amazing ideas that you never would have come up with if you’d only looked at sites in your local area.

Indeed, citations are a crucial part of local SEO. Citations are mentions of your businesses NAP information, name, address, and phone number on other websites. They’re your online ID.

Third party backups of your business info that help prove to Google’s algorithm that you’re a local business at your actual address. There are actually two kinds of citations, even though most people only consider one.

People typically equate citations with directory listings. That’s the first type of citation, called a structured citation. Your NAP is listed in a structured format, typically, with your business name on one line, your address on another, and your phone on another.

The second type of citation is called an unstructured citation. An unstructured citation occurs when your NAP info is mentioned in long form content, like a blog post, or news article, where your name, address, and phone number are all mentioned, but spread out through the content. 

Now, they’re nowhere near as important. As the algorithm has gotten smarter, citations have become less weighted. Now, they’re basically a foundational element, something that you need to get right in order to show up in local searches, but not something you need to put ongoing effort into. 

Citations are much more important for showing up in the map pack. If you don’t have your citation set up, correctly it’s very difficult to show up in map pack results. You want to aim for consistency.

Whenever Google’s algorithm sees your NAP information listed on another website, it’s expecting to see the same information. Any mismatched, or incomplete, or duplicate information sends a bad signal to Google.

Google is smart enough to understand address abbreviations. You could ignore all the outdated posts out there that claim that your citations need to be consistent down to each individual character. The algorithm understands that ST and street are the same thing. Other than that, your address needs to be your actual address.

Google ignores suite numbers. So don’t try to cheat by using a suite number to make it look like you’re in a different location. Don’t try to use virtual offices to fake an address. Always use your real address.

There are certain sites that every business should be listed on, while other sites only matter for certain verticals. In today’s world you should submit your NAP info to the primary aggregators. And after that, you really only need to worry about the citations that potential customers might see.

The easiest way to see which citations matter most for your business is to do a quick Google search for your business name. Go through the first three or four pages of search results, and make sure that any site listing your NAP is displaying the correct information. If you do have problems, or if your business has moved, or changed phone numbers, you’ll need to fix all of the bad data in the ecosystem.

You can handle everything yourself, or you can just pay a service to handle everything for you. Some businesses and marketers prefer to handle things manually. All you need to do is enter your business name, and pull your citation profile. You can check for inconsistencies, and then go manually fix the data on those sites.

Reviews aren’t just important to potential customers, they’re a weighted factor in Google’s local algorithm. Remember, Google’s local algorithm has always been entity based and customer reviews are basically crowdsourced entity data.

Think about how you decide where you’re going to shop when you’re looking for a local business. One of the first things you do is read their reviews. You want to see what other people think and what experiences they had at that particular business. If a business has bad reviews, you’re much less likely to go there. Google’s algorithm uses reviews the same way. If a business has bad reviews, it’s less likely to show up higher in search results.

It’s not just about your total review score, the number of reviews matters as does the overall sentiment of what reviewers have said. In fact, if certain keywords appear in your reviews, you’ll be more likely to show up in searches for those keywords.

Google also considers review velocity. If you get a few reviews here and there, that’s a natural pattern. If you get a massive number of users on a single day, and then no reviews for weeks or even months afterwards, it’s an unnatural pattern and Google might look more closely.

Don’t worry if you don’t have a perfect review score. In reality, one or two bad reviews helps you look more real.

No one expects any business to have a perfect review score. In fact, people won’t trust a perfect review score because they’ll assume it’s fake. Everyone knows that sometimes, the ball gets dropped or sometimes people are just grumpy.

A few bad reviews here and there is a natural pattern and will actually help you win more customers. When you start to see consistent bad reviews that mention the same problem, there’s something to worry about.

In fact, several studies have shown that you don’t want a perfect review score. The sweet spot is a review score between 4.2 and 4.6. In that range, you’ve got a good score overall, but a few bad reviews here and there. No one will think your reviews are fake and you’re more likely to attract customers.

Potential customers will actually seek out your bad reviews.

Think again about when you’re deciding on a local business or even reading reviews on a particular product, what’s the first thing you do when you look at the reviews? You change the sort filter so you can read the bad reviews. You want to read about the bad experience people had and how the business responded.

The most important step for getting awesome reviews is to simply care about customer service. If you’re providing an awesome customer experience, you’re going to get good reviews. If you’re shady and don’t care about your customers, you’re going to get bad reviews.

Some business owners are scared because if they put effort into reviews and reputation management, they’re worried about getting bad reviews and they’re typically businesses that know they’re going to get bad reviews. If you fix internal problems and focus on great customer service, you don’t have to be worried about getting bad reviews.

It’s also important to acquire reviews on different sites. Google reviews are the most prominent since they show front and centre when someone searches for your business, but you need reviews on other sites as well. It’s not natural for all of your customers to leave every review on Google.

Google’s algorithm expects your reviews to be spread among multiple review sites. Besides Google, you need to get reviews or recommendations on Facebook, any industry specific review sites and whichever review site feeds Apple Maps. In the US, that’s Yelp.

Even though Yelp is primarily used for restaurants and hospitality type businesses, Apple made a deal with Yelp. So the reviews that show for businesses in Apple Maps come from the businesses Yelp profiles, not from Google. You don’t want to have a great score with a lot of reviews on Google only to show on Apple Maps is having a handful of reviews and a two star rating. How many customers will pull up their iPhones for directions only to decide not to do business with you when they see your low review score.

Outside of the US, Apple Maps review stars could come from several different review sites. It’s different in every country and even different between verticals. So to find out which site matters for your business, search for a few of your important keywords on Apple Maps. Check out all the businesses that are listed and see where the reviews come from.

You might see TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Foursquare, or some other sites listed as the source.

Yelp will always be the default. So if you don’t have reviews on the site that typically feeds your business type, Apple Maps will show your Yelp score instead.

How to Get More Reviews

Getting more reviews is a challenging task. It’s not really human nature to leave a good review.

Asking every customer is the key to get more reviews. But you also have to make sure they don’t have to work too hard to leave the review. Most people have no idea where to go on Google to leave a review for your business.

Make it easier for customers by setting up a reviews page on your site. Something like yourdomain.com/reviews. That way, every staff member knows where to send customers and it’s an easy URL to remember.

On that reviews page, start with a short message thanking the customer for doing business with you and asking them to rate their experience with you. Below the message, list several options for review sites so they’re able to leave a review on the site they prefer.

Each link should send the customer directly to your profile on that site so they can quickly leave a review. This is a much better process than simply asking for a review and hoping the customer can figure out where to go on Google, sort out how to log in, and find where to click to leave their review.

A proactive follow-up process will also help you get more reviews. If your customers check out at a register, display a sign with the same message and a review URL or, better yet, a QR code that links to your review page.

You could also print out business cards or even branded postcards with a thank you message and the link to your reviews page. If you want to be even more aggressive, you can follow up with an email request and include the same link. You need to monitor all of your review sites so you know when new reviews are received.

When it comes to responding, it’s important to respond to every single review, good or bad. If someone takes the time to say something nice about you, you should take the time to write a quick thank you response. It makes the reviewer feel even better about you and it lets others see that you pay attention to every customer. 

With negative reviews, you need to respond as quickly as possible.

When you’re writing your reply, understand that it’s not really for the person who left the bad review. It’s for every potential customer who reads your reviews and wants to see how you handled that bad situation. Your response needs to let everyone else know that you care. Don’t make the common mistake of pasting the same generic reply to every bad review.

Be honest in your reply. If someone dropped the ball, admit it and let everyone know how you came back and made things right. Being honest and real goes a long way.

Don’t fake reviews. It should be common sense, but it still happens all the time. It’s against Google’s Terms of Service and could result in a suspension or even removal from search results.

You are going to learn about Google Business Profiles or as it’s often still called Google My Business.

Your Google Business Profile or GBP is your business listing on Google where you’re able to feed Google specific information about your business. It’s a direct interface with Google’s entity information about your business. It’s also what allows your business to show in the map pack or in Google map search results.

The information is displayed to searchers in several locations. The most common location is the knowledge panel box that appears to the right side of desktop search results or the top of mobile results when someone searches for your business name. Your GBP information also appears if you show up in the map pack or as a result in the Local Finder page, which shows up when you click More Places at the bottom of the map pack. Your GBP info is also displayed whenever someone searches for your business in Google Maps.

Your Google Business Profile is your new home page. It’s the first impression you make with potential customers in your local area.

If someone needs your phone number because they want to call you, it’s listed right there at the top of your profile. There’s no need to click through to your site. And if someone needs your address because they want to get directions, it’s right there at the top of your profile too. So they’re not going to go to your site in this case either. Your profile lists your hours of operation, your customer reviews, and shows photos of your business, all the things that customers used to visit your website to see.

You’ve got to have an awesome profile to attract more local customers. An awesome profile also helps you show up more often in all of those local searches that you want to show up for.

Before you do anything else, you need to be sure you’ve claimed your location. 

Most businesses will already have this covered. But if you’re not sure, it’s easy to check. Head over to google.com/business and log in. If you’ve claimed it at your location, it will be listed here. If not, you’ll need to go claim it. Simply click the Claim this location link on the GBP profile.

If your location has already been claimed, you can submit a request to claim ownership. Before you go down this route, make sure that you check with your staff members, possibly even past staff members to see if anyone claimed it on their own Google ID. Once your GBP is claimed, it shows up in your GBP dashboard. To optimise your profile, fill out everything you can.

List your actual business name. Don’t try to stuff in extra keywords. Your listing can get suspended if you get caught stuffing keywords. Make sure it’s the same business name you use on your website and in your citations. Make sure your address is listed correctly and that your map pin is in the right location.

Like we mentioned in the citations topic, suite numbers don’t matter to Google, but they’re important to humans. If you’re really in a suite, make sure you list it so that customers can find you.

If customers come to your location to do business, that’s all you need to worry about. If you’re a service-based business that visits customers at their location, like a plumber or an electrician, then you’re what local SEOs refer to as a service-area business. You should clear your address and fill out the service area field. You should only fill this out if you conduct business with customers at their location. If you’re a business with a displayed address, it won’t matter what you enter in the service area.

It’s important to list a local phone number. If you’re doing call tracking and have a dedicated number for your GBP listing, enter that number in the primary number field. That’s the number that shows up in your GBP profile, so it’s what customers will call. Use the alternate number slots to list your actual phone number. That way, Google will see that it matches your citations and you won’t have any consistency issues.

Enter your URL in the website field. Typically, you want to link to the home page. But if you’re a multi location business, you may want to link to that locations page on your site.

You need to upload lots of high quality images of your business. Your GBP will show both photos you’ve uploaded and photos uploaded by the community. Your photos are more likely to be shown first if you upload high resolution professionally shot photos.

Don’t take a set it and forget it mentality when it comes to your photos. You should upload photos often, so you’re sharing current images of your business. You can also upload videos. If you’ve got commercials, GBP is a great place to share them. The file size limit is a maximum of 30 seconds of video and/or 75 megabytes of file size. You should also be using Google posts and you should pay attention to the questions and answers section. 

Finally, you should get familiar with your GBP dashboard. You’re able to edit your information, add photos, add new users, and read and reply to reviews. Any editable information has a pencil icon displayed to the right. If you want to track your performance, click on the Insights link. The insight screen will show you the most popular searches that users use to find you, and then a breakdown of how customers actually found you.

Direct searches are searches where users typed in your business name. Branded searches are searches where users typed in a brand related to your business. Discovery searches are when users search for a generic keyword phrase, or product, or service.

You can also see a timeline of the most popular times users searched for you and a breakdown of the actions they performed on your GBP. You can see how many users clicked through to your website, how many requested directions to your location, and how many called.

Google posts is an important feature of Google business profiles that often gets overlooked. Google posts are powerful, but most businesses and marketers don’t use them at all. They’re a great way to stand out from competitors and win more local customers.

Posts consist of an image or a video paired with a short text description up to 1,500 characters. They show up at the bottom of your GBP panel on desktop searches, and on mobile, they’re blended in with the search results under the post’s link of your GBP.

In both locations, Google displays a thumbnail of the post where the image is cropped and only the first few lines of text are displayed. When the user clicks on the post thumbnail, the full image and text description are displayed.

Posts should always be promotional. Sharing social fluff doesn’t work here. Remember, your GBP is your new homepage and it’s typically the first impression you’re making with potential customers. You should be using posts to wow them and convince them to click through to your website. Posts will also help you stand out from competitors. Remember, most businesses aren’t using posts and we know that local customers do research and look around for local options. If you’re using posts and your competitors aren’t, you’ll stand out and be more likely to convert those local customers.

Posts using the standard template stay live for six months. If you use one of the templates with a date range, they’re only live during the date range you enter when you create the posts. If you have more than one post live at one time, they’ll be displayed in a swipeable carousel, with the most recent post showing first.

The full post almost doesn’t matter. No one will see your full post if your thumbnail isn’t compelling enough to get clicked on in the first place. It helps to approach posts like ads. Make sure that the cropped image and small amount of text displayed in that thumbnail are eye-catching. The ideal image size is 1200 by 900 pixels.

Uploading images is incredibly frustrating because the cropping widget is inconsistent. The crop is set to slightly above the vertical centre, but it’s not always in the same location. It gets even more frustrating. The thumbnail size is slightly different between desktop and mobile. When important image elements or even text gets cropped out, your post won’t perform as well. 

You can also upload a video instead of a photo. In the thumbnail view, it shows a still image with a little play button. And when clicked, the video starts to play. Videos for posts have the same file size restrictions as videos for GBP, which is up to 30 seconds in length and 75 megabytes in size.

Optimising the text that shows in the thumbnail view can be difficult as well. Choosing the right post template is the key. You want to maximise your message in the small available space. Different templates allow for different amounts of visible text. The What’s New post template will show four lines of text. The other templates include a separate title line and date range line, which means you’ve got less actual description text available.

You have the option to include a call to action or CTA button on your posts. And you should always use the button. If you’re sharing a post to try to convert customers, you need a way to get those customers to your site to convert, so you need to use the button.

Keep in mind, though, including a CTA button results in less visible text in the thumbnail view. Even though the button shows at the bottom of the full text description, it shows as a link at the bottom of the thumbnail view, replacing that last line of text.

Pick the right template for what you’re sharing.

Upload an awesome image and write a compelling description, and you’ll be able to attract customers who haven’t even been to your website.

Now, we need to talk about the questions and answers section on your Google Business Profile, which is another often ignored element of GBP. You should pay close attention to the questions and answers section which shows just below your address and phone number in your Google Business Profile.

The Q&A section allows anyone to ask a question about your business, and any random person can answer that question for you. Most businesses have no idea that Q&A even exists since it doesn’t show anywhere in the GBP manager or Google My Business dashboard if you’re calling it by the old name. Customers think that it’s chat or instant messaging. But the Q&A section is actually a community discussion feature of Google Maps.

The questions have an upvote feature. If a question gets at least three upvotes, it will appear natively in your GBP panel instead of the standard link for questions and answers. If several questions get more than three upvotes, the question with the most upvotes will appear there. Answers work on an upvote system as well. The answer with the most upvotes appears as the primary answer to the question.

Businesses are allowed to ask their own questions. So you should upload your own common questions and also answer them. Think of the most common questions that you hear from customers. Those are the questions that you need to ask yourself in the Q&A section. Think of it like a pre-site FAQ page. No one’s going to head to your site to read your FAQs, so get them loaded into your GBP panel.

When users start to type in a question, Google will auto-complete the question and auto suggest answers based on past answers and customer reviews. Loading in your common questions helps you answer those questions as they’re being asked, which provides a much better user experience that helps you stand out from your competitors.

Pay attention to the answers as well. Make sure your answers have the most upvotes so they always show as the primary answers. If another answer overtakes yours, get a few employees or friends or family members to go upvote your answer.

Ask your own questions, answer them, and then upvote your answers so you control the conversation and make a better first impression with potential local customers.

Hey, we appreciate your effort to the end of this course. In this final lesson in the Free Beginner’s Guide to Local SEO with Courses Buddy, we’re going to be talking about the other signals that influence local search visibility. In the previous topics, we’ve covered all of the major signals that influence how your business will appear in local search results. 

In this final lesson of Local SEO, we are going to go over the smallest slices of pie. Even though they don’t carry much weight, it’s important to understand how everything fits together in Google’s local algorithm.

Behavioural signals are basically a bucket for real-world engagement. The various ways that Google can tell when real world users are engaging with your business. For example, engagement with your GBP listing would fall under the behavioural signals category. The more people interact with your GBP, the better the behavioural signal will be.

Mobile clicks-to-call and clicks-for-direction are a huge part of this. Clicking to read reviews, clicks to view photos, clicks on posts, clicks on Q&A, any time someone interacts with your listing, it’s an engagement metric that Google can track.

Location check-ins would be another example of real-world behavioural signals that would prove engagement to Google. Google can even track users in the real world to see when they’re at your location. How do you think they get the info for the most popular time to visit graphs in your GBP panel?

Your click-through rate in search results is another behavioural signal that potentially affects your visibility. Google says click-through rate has no effect, but a ridiculous amount of research has been done that proves that there’s at least minimal influence.

It makes sense if a user pogo-sticks or clicks through to a search result and then quickly returns to the same search results page and clicks on another result. It’s pretty clear that they didn’t find what they were looking for.

Many experts theorise that there’s potential for much more emphasis on behavioural signals in the future. Google has even filed patents about using real-world visits to a location as a ranking factor. So it’s at least something that they’re thinking about in the future.

It’s easy to manipulate links and reviews and content, but it’s incredibly difficult to fake real-world signals. As Google finds better ways to track actual users and their engagement with your business, it’s likely that these behavioural signals will gain importance.

Personalization is another one of the smaller factors influencing your visibility in local searches, although it used to count for much more. In the past, Google would personalise search results based on the past search history of the device the search was being conducted on. In other words, if you’re searching on your phone, the past searches you’ve made would influence the search results you’re seeing now.

It’s a much less weighted factor recently, though. While there might be small differences in search results based on personalization, it’s less prevalent than it used to be. Google even says that it doesn’t personalise search results anymore. So it’s likely that we’ll see this signal continue to decrease in strength or even disappear entirely.

And that’s it!!!

We hope you enjoyed this course and learned a lot about local SEO with us. 

Don’t forget to blossom!

https://www.nutshell.com/blog/local-seo-for-beginners

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/local-seo

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/local-seo/getting-started/

https://www.semrush.com/blog/what-is-local-seo/

https://mangools.com/blog/local-seo-guide/

https://backlinko.com/local-seo-guide