One of the first things you notice about Google Maps and the rest of the local search zoo is that usually there’s no single, isolated reason one business outranks another.  Rather, all kinds of factors come into play: some obvious, some less obvious, lots of maybes, and some that probably nobody knows about.  But I’d go a step further and say you’re in a much better position to get some solid rankings if you know how some factors tend to interact with each other, often in unpredictable ways.

You can’t look at local search ranking factors in a vacuum.  Google sure doesn’t seem to.  Now, it’s not a bad idea to work on your local SEO with a big checklist.  That can get you far, especially if you stick with it.  You only run into trouble when you seem to have done exactly what your strongest competitors have done – and maybe you even did it better – and you still come up short and have no idea why.

So the first thing to know is certain ranking factors seem to have relationships to each other.  The second thing to know is those relationships often are strange.  Not quite Hollywood strange, but counter-intuitive enough to elude most people most of the time.

Now’s probably a good time to stress that these are just my observations.  Granted, they’re based on my having gotten my local SEO overalls grimy for about 71 Internet years, and I’ve seen these phenomena pop up again and again.  I often explain these points to clients and others, and put them to the test all the time.  So I’m confident that you’ll observe at least some of the same things I’ve observed (if you haven’t already), though you may observe different things and draw different conclusions (which I’d love to hear).  In any event, it’s always possible that one phenomenon I think I understand is in reality something else.  Also, I don’t claim to be able to explain everything perfectly. I’m just sharing my lab notes, and hope you put them to use in your local market.

Anyway, here are some of the many odd relationships between ranking factors that pop up in Google’s local search results (Maps + organic):

1. The lower the density of local competitors for a search term, the more geography you can rank in.  Put another way: the more specialized your offering is, the wider service area you can realistically rank in.  That’s simply because for more-niche search terms Google needs to harder to turn up relevant results nearby, so it needs to look farther afield.  That’s true both in Google Maps and in the organic results.

2. The lower the density of local competitors, the faster you can expect to rank for a given search term.  Kind of an intuitive point – of course Google’s less picky when it’s got fewer choices – but business owners lose sight of it all the time anyway.  That’s one reason when you open a new business or a new location you should focus on smaller, more-specialized terms, and on a tighter geography rather than on your whole service area.  You’re not biting off more than you can chew, and are more likely to get some visibility / customers on the sooner side.

3. The stronger the backlinks profile a site has, the higher likelihood that new content on that site – or GMB pages pointing to that site – will rank well early on.  Why is that bigger companies can create a Google My Business page, or add an unremarkable new page, or blast out a so-so blog post, and have it outrank most competitors right out of the chute?  Not necessarily after a day, but maybe after a few weeks – and in any case way sooner than you got any good rankings.

Whenever I see a business that’s visible quickly and without spamming, I almost always find a link profile that’s better than competitors’.  If your GMB page or “service” or “city” page or blog post (or whatever) is attached to a domain with good and relevant links, especially if you’ve earned them over the course of years, you’re more likely to get some solid rankings sooner, even if that exact URL on your site doesn’t  have any links specifically pointing at it yet.

4. The more good links you have, the more forgiving Google is of bad links.  (This phenomenon isn’t specific to local SEO, but rather is omnipresent in SEO.)  Most sites that have been around for more than a couple of years have some shady-looking links, often that the owner of the site doesn’t want and had no hand in creating.  There are always ants at the picnic.  Google seems to know that and take it into account.

The bad news is that’s probably why some bigger brands and organizations often get away with schemes like buying links, setting up a network, or jamming exact-match anchor text into links whenever it can, even if a smaller or newer business would get penalized if it tried to get a foothold that way.  Often the more-established companies have enough decent links that Google looks at the big picture and concludes that the company isn’t completely reliant on the schemes.  If a new site or one without many or any good links tries some scheme and 80% of its links already look fishy to Google, then of course that plan invites trouble, because at some point it’ll just be too much.

Meanwhile, a more-established site could get away with getting the same shady links, because those links might account for 5% of its haul.  Fair?  Maybe not, but that’s how it always seems to go.

The good news is that to the extent you have some links that took a little effort to get and are from relevant sites, then you don’t need to worry much about penalty if you’ve got some junk links in the mix.

5. The more you develop your homepage – which is usually your GMB landing page URL – the greater the range of terms you can rank for on the local map.  As I’ve found for many years, not only are you most likely to rank well on the local map if you use your homepage as your GMB landing page URL, but your homepage also is most likely to rank for a big bucket of search terms.  Other pages on your site tend to rank for a smaller, more closely-related groups of terms (if you play your cards right).  For most businesses, the homepage tends to have most or all of the good links.

That means a few things.  One is that’s probably why so often your homepage will outrank other pages on your site for terms you want those pages to rank for.  The other is that your homepage tends to have just enough link oomph to rank for at least some of the terms you want for, as long as the content is relevant.  That’s where most business owners trip at the 5-yard line: their homepages are lean on info on the services and service area, and read more like brochures.

6. The better your site performs organically, the more likely your GMB page is to rank well (somewhere, for some terms you care about).  Most of local SEO is organic SEO with a few twists.  If you’ve got several sites and aren’t sure which one to glue your GMB page(s), my suggestion is to pick the one that gets the most visibility in the organic results, preferably for locally relevant terms.  (By the way, that’s why some people get mileage out of the old tactic of using a page on a BIG domain – think Facebook or Yelp or Google Sites – as their GMB landing page URL.  That GMB page piggybacks off of the prominence and link mojo of that domain, and Google’s too unsophisticated or lackadaisical to do anything about it.)

7. The more you’ve worked on your local citations, the less likely you are to see any benefit from further work.  Especially if you’ve got other factors already working in your favor, and especially if your citations are a total mess, you can see a bump your Google Maps / GMB rankings after you’ve squared away your listings on the basic sites.  Beyond that?  Not so much.  Many business owners do some work on their citations, see a little boost, and think, “Cool!  I worked on 20 listings and saw results, so I’ll crank out 200 listings on other sites and should get 10 times the results.”  It never works out that way.  There’s a point of diminishing return in citation work, and in my experience once hits it real fast.

8. The better a page performs already, the more easily you can get it to rank for a related term, or in a nearby area, or both.  I can’t explain it, but time and time again I’ve noticed a “snowball” effect in which you identify a page on your site that already ranks well for certain local search terms, you add a bit of content that’s at least loosely relevant to the terms that page ranks for, and sooner or later that page ranks for those new terms, too.

So let’s say you’re a dentist and you’ve got a page that’s mighty visible for “cosmetic dentist” or a similar term.  The chances are good you could get that same page to rank for the term “dental veneers” or “teeth whitening” (or both) with less strain than you could get separate, dedicated, more-targeted pages to rank for those terms.  I’ve found this most likely to work on pages that tend to be broad, like the homepage, “state” pages, and sometimes “service” pages.  It can help widen the variety of terms a page ranks for in the organic results, and in some cases it can widen your visibility in the 3-pack / Google Maps.  Often it’s not that hard to branch out if you attempt it on a page that already does OK.

9. The more reviews you get, the easier it is to get more reviews.  That can be a good thing or a bad thing.  When you’ve got many negative reviews, people are more likely to pig-pile you.  Or, when you’ve got many good reviews, the people who become your customers / clients / patients are more likely to have picked you because of your strong reviews, and are predisposed to write you a review when the time comes.

10. The longer Google Maps spam is around, the harder it is to get Google to correct it.  I don’t know if that’s because older spammy GMB pages tend to have piled up more reviews (which do seem to help spam stick around), or because the business is more likely to have listings on the sites that Google uses to confirm the info it has on a certain business, or because Google has enough behavioral data on the GMB page (what terms it ranks for, who clicks on it, where those people are located, etc.).  I suspect its some combination of those factors, plus some factor(s) I wouldn’t even guess.   In any event, there is a sad “fake it ‘til you make it” reality that benefits the slickest spammers and well-meaning unintentional rule-benders alike.

11. The faster you get good rankings, the more likely your rankings will swing up and down.  It’s nice if you saw a bump just from changing the name of your business and/or Google My Business page, or moving to a different address, or doing basic work on your local listings and site.  But that may also mean your competitors can knock you off with similar ease.  Or it may mean that for one reason or another you’re in one of Google’s test buckets, in which it rotates seemingly random local businesses into the results, presumably just to see who clicks.

I’m not saying that poor results mean you’ve got a brilliant long game that just hasn’t worked out yet, and I’m not saying that sometimes stubborn problems don’t  have simple solutions.  Quick wins may lead to lasting gains, and you’ll take all the good news you can get.

I’m just saying this: easy come, easy go.

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To what extent have you noticed those kinds of interactions?  Do they seem to have helped or hurt you or your competitors?

Do you think something else is going on?

Any other “weird relationships” you’ve noticed between ranking factors?

Leave a comment!

For most business owners and others who try it, blogging is a frustration factory.  The way they go about it, it’s a time gobbler, a grind, and a disappointment until they give up – 47 blog posts and 0 new links, 0 visitors, and 0 customers later.

What’s wrong with the way small / local businesses blog?

I’ll be the last one to say blogging isn’t effective.   It sure can be.  This blog is a vital organ of my business, and that’s true of some of my clients’ businesses, too.  But certain pieces need to slide into place first, preferably on the sooner side.

The big trouble is that blogging (as it’s commonly done) is at best a tough way to earn links, build an audience, and pick up local rankings for semi-competitive terms.  As in it’s ineffective at all 3 most of the time.  Why?  One issue at a time:

Your post probably won’t get links because (paradoxically) your site probably doesn’t have much of a backlinks profile at the moment and won’t help you outrank posts on more-established sites, and because it’s unlikely you have an attentive following in your email newsletter or on social media. For any or all of those reasons, people won’t find your post, and so nobody will link to it.Even the few people who stumble across your post probably won’t find your other posts relevant, or find them at all. Even if they notice that you have other posts, they may not have an urge to read those posts now, and (usually) won’t have an occasion to return to your site.  So you’re left with one visit per reader, rather than months or years of return visits per person.Even if a blog post ranks for a certain term you care about, it will be crowded out by and need to compete with competitors’ homepages, general directories, and industry and local directories. Those competing sites and pages tend to rank for a wider variety of search terms, whereas you’ll be lucky if your post ranks for a couple of terms you care about.  You’ll find it hard or impossible to replicate a success, and you’ll find you need to work too hard for too little.

If it’s much tougher sledding than you expected, you won’t stick with it to the point of seeing any benefits.

You might have tried or considered a swing-for-the-fences approach, in which you write giant posts that involve a lot of research, design, and maybe outreach.  That kind of approach has worked for some local business owners, and may work for you.  But the odds are long.  It’s not likely to work out the way you hoped, in which case it was just a big waste of time.

You’re in a bind.  You want to or think you need to blog.  You don’t want to skip trying to make it work only because it’s tough, but you also don’t want to go on a fool’s errand.  So what in tarnation are you supposed to do?

In my experience, there are only two practical ways to give your blogging mission a high probability of success – by which I mean it helps your business become more visible to the local people you’re trying to reach:

(1) Maintain a long stream of quick blog posts on niche, specialized, almost obscure topics – like on the kinds of questions only a few of your customers/clients/patients ever ask you – and crank out a lot of those posts month after month.  The idea is this: on any given day, maybe 10 people search for an answer to the geeky little question you write about.  But your post is the only one around that meets that exact need, so by Gum that post will capture every last one of those 10 searchers.

(2) Or you can start with a “seed audience.”  That’s my term for an early, small group of readers, all of whom are people you already know to one degree or another.  Those people form a core or nucleus – a seed – of what will grow into a bigger audience over time.

If you want your blog posts or other “content” to help you get more local customers/clients/patients – directly or indirectly, sooner or later – a seed audience is what’s most likely to work.  Let me explain more.

Who’s your seed audience, and what are you supposed to do for them?

Your very earliest readers will probably be a motley (Crüe) crew of people, all with different relationships to you.  To some extent that’s out of necessity, because you don’t have many other would-be readers yet.  But the mixed bag of people also happens to be useful in this case, because you’ll get a better sense of whom your audience can be or should be, and whom you should focus on.  You want feedback from various people.  Your seed audience should probably be some combination of these people:

Past customersCurrent customersLeadsPeople who refer customers to you, or vice versaPartnersEmployees / staffRecipients of pro bono workYes, maybe even friends and family – especially if anyone is involved in anyone else’s business or professionOther people you think may be interested

Either you keep a list of specific people to send your posts to individually, or you whip up an email newsletter (like with Mailchimp or Aweber –  or consider Tidings) and invite them to join it, or do both.  Preferably you do both.

In either case, your action item is the same: look for opportunities to direct those people to your blog posts – posts you’ve already written and posts you haven’t written yet – at a time they would find your information helpful and welcome.

If you don’t read any more of this post and don’t need more of my color commentary, just do that one thing and your blogging will be much more likely to bring you visibility / links / customers.

What does the seed audience do for you, exactly?

First of all, you need to do something for them: send them a blog post that answers a question they asked you, or that helps solve a problem you know they’ve got.  You can send them posts you did years ago, or new posts that you know to be dead-on relevant to their problems or goals.  Keep in mind that the seed audience consists of people who (to varying degrees) already know you.  This is the equivalent of the old-school practice of mailing newspaper clippings to someone.  Except those clippings are bits and pieces you wrote.

As long as the posts (or other content) you share with your seed audience is timely for them, over time the people in your seed audience will help grow your audience in several specific ways:

They are one of your best sources of ideas – between the questions they’ve asked you, concerns they raise, what you know about their situations. If what’s in your head is the only source of topics to write about, pretty soon you’ll run out of topics to write about.  See what’s in other people’s heads.They’ll provide your earliest shares on social media, when nobody else will (because nobody else knows about your posts yet).They’re likely to send your post to people they work with, or to their friends or family.They’ll give you feedback on your work, especially if you ask.You’ll get great keyword ideas, just by paying attention to how they describe what you do, how they describe their challenges and what they want, etc.Depending on exactly who’s in your seed audience, they may be more likely already to have some buying intent. So not only is there a chance they might hire you for something if you sent them a helpful post at the right time, but it’s also possible there are other people exactly like those people (e.g. past customers or leads).  In that case, consider focusing more of your posts on that little part of your seed audience.They may give you an early and merciful clue as to whether you should continue blogging at all. If after a while you can’t engineer your posts to be useful to people you already know, it’s not as likely you’ll figure out what kinds of perfect strangers your posts are meant to help if your audience gets bigger.  You need to know at least roughly what kind of person your posts are supposed to help.

How do you develop a seed audience?

This one’s as simple as it sounds: you email your posts to anyone you can, whenever the topics that you wrote about have come up.

You can also point people to your post if the topic comes up while you’re on the phone (or Zoom) with them.  That assumes, of course, that it’s a post you’ve already published, and that it’s named in such a way that you can tell someone the name of the post, and he or she can Google it and pull it up without much strain.

Consider creating posts for an audience of one.   Not in a creepy way, like, “I know what you’re thinking now, Bert.”  I’m saying if, for example, a past customer or employee asks you a stumper question, write a blog post on it.  Do some research if you have to.  Go to town.  Possibly give the person who asked you the question a shout-out or tip of the hat in the post.  I do that all the time.  In any event, send it to him or her (and ask for feedback), and send it to future people who have the same question or a similar one.  If nothing else, it’ll save you from having to answer the same question again and again.  More likely is that over time that post also starts bringing you some decent traffic and maybe even a couple of links.  That’s because it’s on a question or concern that someone actually has.

Get some practice at building an audience one person at a time.  Most will appreciate the timely post, many will stay tuned for more, and some people will bring others into your teepee.

By the way, I’ve found it extremely useful to keep a running list of posts.  That makes it quick and easy for me to send someone the link to a relevant post I did.

What are the alternatives?

With the exception of the one good, realistic alternative I mentioned at the beginning of this post (writing lots of quick posts on super-niche topics), the alternatives to the “seed audience” strategy have serious drawbacks.  Here are the common tacks business owners and marketers try:

Strategy 1: Swing for the fences: trying to write monster, “ultimate guide”-type posts.   This one is hard to ease into, harder to sustain, easy to burn yourself out on and stop, and runs contrary to most people’s naturally short attention spans.

Strategy 2: Hamster wheel: writing 17 unplanned, slapdash posts every month, sticking with it for 3 months, and giving up.

Strategy 3: “Build it and they will come”: the posts are solid, useful, and well thought-out, but you didn’t write them with a specific person or specific people in mind, and so you don’t send them to anybody.  You assume that just because you wrote it Google will find readers for it.

Strategy 4: Mass production: pay a third party to belch out posts that are so bad even you won’t read them – but that you’re certain will help your rankings because “Google likes fresh content.”  You need basic quality-control.

Can other approaches work?  Yes.  Will they work?  Probably not. With enough effort you can probably get any blogging strategy to advance your goals at least a little, but at what cost to the other things you need to accomplish in a day?  You can always tweak your strategy later.  For every one business owner who gets the skyscraper technique (for all its merits) to work, there are 20 who couldn’t make it work.  We don’t hear from those people much.  Also, what works for a marketing agency or for a non-local business has a good chance of not working for you – for your local business.

People who say you definitely should or definitely should not blog are missing the point.  Sure, you should have content that informs and helps anyone on your site, but who says that needs to be in the form of a blog post?  In most cases having very detailed “service” pages and other pages (and don’t forget the homepage) is your best way to do that.  Videos, too.

That’s why I’m working off the assumption you’ve already got your pages pretty much down pat, and that you want blogging to help you get even more visibility.  I’ve also assumed you don’t want it become your new full-time job.  A seed audience is the best way to go about that.

Recap

Again, the idea of the seed audience is simple: Make use of every opportunity to send your posts to people you already come into contact with.

Send a post whenever it’s helpful to the other person.  Pay attention to the questions and concerns of the people in your seed audience, and write more posts that help those people with those challenges.  I guarantee you there are more people like them, and in time those people will become your larger audience.

Preferably your seed audience includes past or current customers, but it doesn’t need to.

I find it very helpful to keep a list of posts (like this).

At first you grow your audience a person at a time, but eventually it’ll mostly grow itself.  That is when you’ll be able to draw a thick line from blogging to more traffic, links, customers, and other good stuff.  The big thing to realize is those are benefits you see after your blogging effort starts to work, not before you’ve gotten it to work.

A seed audience isn’t mutually exclusive with other ways you might grow your audience.  It’s complementary.  It will make your other plans more likely to work out.  Give it a try.

Side note

By the way, I speak from first-hand experience with the seed audience approach.  Not only because some of my clients have used it to good effect, but also because that’s how my blogging sprang up from the dirt.  My earliest readers were people who got my email newsletter (and those people had found me through a variety of odd little channels).  My earliest posts were simply what I thought those people would find useful.

To this day, half the reason I write many of my posts is so I can lay out a thorough answer once and simply send a link to the post every time that question or topic comes up again.  The benefits are too many to count.

Further reading

Should You Make It a Page or a Post? – me

8 Lies About Content Marketing You Probably Believe – Joel Klettke

Should a Small Business Have a Blog in 2021? – Colan Nielsen

Poll Results: Do Local Businesses Need Blogs? – Rosie Murphy

10 Bootstrap Ways to Grab More of Your Service Area in Local Search – me

Hit Blog Post but No Local Traffic or Rankings? 7 Ways to Make That Post Help Your Local SEO Effort – me

100 Practical Ideas for Small-Business Blog Posts – me

100 More Doable Ideas for Small-Business Blog Posts – me

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What’s been your strategy for growing your audience?

What’s worked well and what hasn’t?

How have you been able to turn that blogging (or other “content”) effort into more business?

Leave a comment!