Odd Relationships in Local Search

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!

Seed Audiences: the Most Practical Way to Make Blogging Work for a Local Business

November 6, 2021

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.

7 Phases of a Local Business Reviews Campaign That Makes It Rain

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Even people who do a solid job of getting online reviews tend to make the process tougher than it needs to be, because they do the right steps in the wrong order. That can mean unnecessary trial and error, frustration, wasted time, wasted money, and more bad reviews and fewer good reviews than you might have had otherwise.

Whether you’re the business owner, an employee, or a third party, you have a choice as to how you sequence your work. Examples of good steps that can trip you up if you do them at the wrong time include offering customers a choice of multiple review sites, asking them to upload photos or go into detail, and using software or other tools to lighten your lift. Good ideas? Maybe, but the effectiveness depends on the timing.

What’s the least-bad order of steps? Here are the stages that my clients have had the most success with, and so here is the basic 7-phase process I suggest you try if you want more and better reviews for your business:

1: Dissect what you’ve got

Where have people reviewed you so far? Is there a review site they seem to gravitate to? How many of your reviewers (customers, clients, or patients) did you ask for a review, and how many wrote one spontaneously? So far, who seems most inclined to write a review – the happy customers or the unhappy customers – or is it such a mixture of people that you just can’t tell? Is there one service, product, treatment, or other offering of yours that seems to make people want to review you? You get the idea. Lots of ways of looking at what’s in the net. You may want to spend 10 minutes scribbling down all your observations, big and small.

2: Shrink the goals and expand the efforts

It’s temporary, but whether you’re starting your push for reviews for the first time or this is Rocky II (or III or IV), the goal is the same: see what happens when you point everything you’ve got at getting your customers to complete the quickest, simplest review you can ask of them.

That means a few things. One is that you designate a specific person to ask for reviews – preferably in-person and then with a follow-up email. Another is that you put time into each email request, and tailor it to the person and to everything you know about his or her situation and what makes him or her tick. Also, only ask for reviews on ONE site for now. If it’s not Google Maps (which is usually what I suggest focusing on, at least at first), have it be Facebook or a site that’s big in your industry (where’s it’s usually easy to write reviews). Send along instructions for how to write a review there, and a few days later send a friendly follow-up.

By the way, for a host of reasons I do not recommend you offer incentives for people to write reviews, but if you do insist on disregarding my advice, now’s the time to see what happens. If nothing else, at least you’ll know that under certain circumstances some people will write you a review.

It’s OK if the reviews are terse at this stage. Later on you can reviewers talking.

In general, now is the time to be as hands-on as you possibly can be, and to give people every single opportunity and reason to say yes.

3: Test big differences

It’s not yet time to fine-tune. Try something very different, even if what you’ve tried has worked out well so far. Try having a different person ask for reviews. Try sending people to different review sites. Try a completely different email and subject line. Try to follow up with a quick phone call / voicemail, instead of or in addition to the follow-up email. Even try snail-mail. Either you’ll discover something that works better than you expected, or you’ll find out what doesn’t work and that your original system was pretty solid after all.

4: Weave reviews into more of your marketing

Write friendly, thankful responses to them, for positive reinforcement (even if the reviews have developed a crust).

Send personalized thank-you notes/emails to people who reviewed you.

Stick certain reviews on your site.

Tell people on your site or in any ads (e.g. Google Ads) to check our your great reviews, 5-star reputation, etc.

Here you’ve got two basic goals: make sure just about everyone sees your reviews (at least the good ones!), and increase the likelihood that customers choose you because of your reviews, so that they’re predisposed to write you reviews later, when the time comes.

5: Expand your goals

If you’ve had some success in getting people to write reviews – even if those reviews are brief and only on one site – now’s the time find the edges. Get a little greedy. Ask people who already reviewed you on one site (e.g. Google Maps) to review you somewhere else, too. (They can just copy and paste their review.) Ask reviewers to upload photos, if possible and appropriate. Ask reviewers to go into detail – the more, the better. If you’ve got repeat customers who reviewed you early on in your relationship, ask them to update their reviews to reflect everything you’ve helped them with since the 1.0 version. Consider doing what little you can to scare up Yelp reviews.

This is when you want to find out what customers are willing to do and what’s a bridge too far.

6: Consider introducing some automation

This may have been your very first thought, and the first step you wanted to take: “I don’t have time to ask for reviews, so can’t I just use a reputation-management tool?” Yes, now you can try. Now that you’ve got a system that works at least OK, it’s fine to see if you can make it easier with software and still have it work at least OK.

But if you tried software right out of the chute, without knowing what works and what doesn’t, it’s likely that all you would have done is scale an ineffective system or automate failure. And you’d have burned through your list of customers in the process. Make it effective, then try to make it easy. (If you’re at this stage, consider Whitespark’s Reputation Builder.)

7: Keep experimenting

It’s still worth repeating step #3 (the “test big differences” step) from time to time, but now is also a time to fine-tune your requests, try spacing out your requests differently, etc. To some extent you have no choice but to tweak, because the ecosystem of review sites change over time, the review sites themselves change over time, you get new customers, maybe you enter new markets, and you get curious (or inspired or greedy). You’ll always need to stress-test your process.

In any event, you’ll never have it down pat, and you’ll never be 100% satisfied, and there will always be room to improve (which is either pretty frustrating or exciting, depending on your outlook). Word of the day: kaizen.

Relevant posts

How Should You Ask for Online Reviews? The Pros and Cons of Each Approach

The Ridiculous Hidden Power of Local Reviews: Umpteen Ways to Use Them to Get More Business

60+ Questions to Troubleshoot and Fix Your Local Reviews Strategy

Why Your Review-Encouragement Software Is a Meat Grinder

25 Hard Truths of Google Reviews

Is There Anything You Can DO to Get Yelp Reviews These Days – without a Public Shaming?

16 Reasons to Get Reviews on a Diversity of Sites

Why Send Good Customers to Crappy Review Sites?

The Perfect Stack of Online Reviews: How Does Your Local Business Measure up?

Who Should Ask for Reviews: Business Owner or Employee?

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What’s been your process? How well has it worked?

Any tips for any of the steps, or any phases you’d add to those 7 phases?

Leave a comment!

What to Do If Google Auto-Updates Your Google My Business Info and Gets It Wrong

You probably know Google’s tendency to mess with the business info you put in your Google My Business dashboard. Whether Google emptied fields you filled out, or “corrected” basic facts about your business, or injected info that may be 100% wrong, the telltale orange writing in the GMB dashboard is always a hassle and sometimes a big problem.

Google’s “we know better than you do” MO got worse throughout 2020. Around the time it temporarily froze some GMB features, Google started piling on new features at an even-faster pace than it had before. Sometimes Google would fill out those new fields or check those new boxes for you, and often not correctly. Also, Google started more frequently overwriting or removing old info – info you may have put in your GMB dashboard years ago and thought was safe at home plate.

Some of my favorite auto-updates are when Google tells you your business is closed on a certain holiday, and when it insists the entrance to your business is wheelchair-accessible. Not sure the AI is that good yet.

COVID and the lockdowns and related events may or may not have helped Google’s long-term effort to make your GMB page a substitute for your website, but Google has succeeded in making one’s GMB page a bigger chore than one’s website.

Besides rejecting shaky auto-edits, what should you do when Google keeps overwriting your Google My Business dashboard info? Google doesn’t tell you much, but I suggest you update the GMB landing page on your website – most likely your homepage – with the info you want to stay put in your GMB dashboard.

In other words, make at least your landing page (and possibly more of your site) contain all of the info you want on your GMB page.

If Google’s editing your business name, make sure the name you want on your GMB page is in the main body content your landing page (again, probably your homepage), in the footer, on your contact page, and so on. Make it verbatim.

If Google’s editing or rejecting your categories or “services” fields or both, add to your landing page a blurb on each of those services or offerings, with a link to a dedicated page where you describe that offering in more detail. (That’s something I suggest you do anyway, no matter what.)

If Google’s rejecting certain towns or regions in your “service area,” mention those places on your landing page and in your footer.

If Google has gotten your “COVID-19 info” link or “Appointments” link wrong, make sure your landing page includes at least one easy-to-find link to that page.

You get the idea. I’ve found that updating the landing page of your site is the best way to override Google’s auto-updates of these fields:

Business nameCategoriesService areasCOVID link“Appointments” linkServices

As you might guess, updating your landing page is not a surefire way to get your info to stick and for Google to lay off the auto-updates. If your important listings are a mess, or if customers or competitors persistently submit Google Maps edits on your GMB page, you may still have difficulty getting your preferred GMB dashboard info to stick.

What if Google is messing with the address, phone number, or business hours you put in GMB? You should still update your landing page to reflect the info you want on GMB, but I haven’t seen that work as consistently. That may be a citation/data-hygiene issue: You’ll probably need to update your other, non-Google listings before Google will stop with the auto-updates. Similarly if GMB gets your website / landing page URL wrong. That’s more likely the result of having the wrong URL on your other listings, or it may even be a canonicalization problem.

If Google’s aim truly is to make it unnecessary for searchers to visit businesses’ websites, then it only makes sense that Google’s first priority is to vacuum up the business info on your site. But some businesses’ sites have a ton of pages or are hard to crawl or both, and most business owners are pretty bad at keeping all pages up-to-date. So it only makes sense that Google also narrows its focus to what’s on the landing page URL of your site.

We tend to work on local SEO in stages or in a slapdash way, so it’s easy to forget about what’s on your site when you’re looking at what’s in GMB, and vice versa. So Google’s auto-updates and overwrites may be a simple problem, and may have a simple solution

One upside of possibly needing to work on your homepage / landing page to get the auto-updates off your back is that you may pop into the local pack for more search terms, and are even more likely to expand the range of terms you rank for in the organic results.

TL;DR: make sure whatever info you want on your Google My Business page is also on the landing page URL of your site, in crawlable text (not an image or video or animation), and worded plainly.

To what extent are stubborn GMB auto-updates a problem for you now?

What have you tried, and how well has it worked (or not worked)?

Leave a comment!

Will Google Remove a Google Maps Review After the Owner of the GMB Page Replied to It?

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Yes, Google may remove Google Maps reviews that the owner/admin of a Google My Business page wrote a public reply to. Responding to a review doesn’t seem to validate it in Google’s view, as in, “Well, if business owner replied to it, it must be legit.” Your response to a review doesn’t fossilize that review for eternity.

Every now and then a client gets a bad review from a non-customer, a real customer with a bogus or irrelevant complaint, a slimy competitor, or another questionable source, and the question I get is: “Should I report the review to Google or should I reply to it?” If you’re wondering the same thing, I’d say you should do both. Report the review and reply to it in a circumspect way (if you think you’re better off with a response up for all to see).

In the past I’ve suggested first trying to get a bogus or irrelevant review removed, and then replying to it only if Google doesn’t take it down (which is what happens more often than not).

But recently Google has removed a few reviews that (a) the owner of the Google My Business page replied to and that (b) I flagged for removal. In those cases it took a couple of months, but it was still a good outcome. Here’s an example of what that looks like when it works out.

WILL Google remove every review you report? No – not even close. What hurts your business doesn’t hurt Google’s business. For the same reason that Google didn’t auto-filter the review right out of the chute, the chances are high that Google doesn’t consider the review unfair enough to remove it manually after your reporting it.

What does all of that boil down to? Two things:

You can go ahead and flag reviews that you already replied to. Of course, one possible danger is that the reviewer writes you another, angrier (or more bogus) review on Google Maps or elsewhere (or both). In general, I’d say that’s an acceptable risk. You can reply to damaging reviews even if you’ve already flagged them. You’re not making the review stick by responding to it. Does your response tip the scales at all, so that the review is more likely to stay put? That I do not know. I know only that Google may remove a review that’s been replied to.

How much success have you had any in getting Google to remove reviews of your business that you replied to?

How about reviews of other people’s GMB pages – reviews that they replied to and that you reported?

Any tips?

Leave a comment!

P.S. Do you know of anyone who’s already written on this (so I can give any due credit)?

Six things missing from your competitor research

30-second summary:

There are ways to save and optimize your SEO budget, here’s howStart with creating an “at a glance” report comparing your competitors’ key metrics. Find interesting trends to look further into!Analyze and monitor your competitors’ online sentiment and customer satisfaction. How can you become better than your competitors?Identify your competitors’ marketing priorities by looking at their competitors’ PPC tactics. Note their branded keywords they are bidding on: what do they consider their competitors?Research your competitors’ branded questions by analyzing “People Also Ask” and monitoring tweeted questions from their customers and brand ambassadorsAnalyze your competitors’ social media marketing tactics: what can you learn from these and which should you avoid?

1. Competitors at a glance for domain analysis

You can never have just one competitor in the real world. In some niches, you’ll end up with ten or more competitors that need your attention. Where to start?

This is the section I usually start my competitive report with: competitors at a glance which is a chart letting me easily compare my competitors.

What should be included in this section?

This section includes any metrics that would allow you to spot some key trends:

How new or old is this competitor?How many backlinks has your competitor managed to acquire?What’s their website traffic?How large is the website?

Seeing all these numbers side by side often allows you to see important niche patterns or spot some interesting cases to explore further. For example, you can identify a new competitor that nonetheless gets a lot of organic traffic. Or you can find a competitor with fewer backlinks that managed to build solid web visibility. These are both good cases to learn from.

Here’s an example of how I use an “at a glance” method for my competitive research that is also color-coded based on how successful each competitor is (green showing very good numbers).

Source: Screenshot made by the author

2. Online sentiment and customer satisfaction

How happy are your competitors’ customers? Is there an opportunity for your product here? Is there a particular feature or aspect that makes your competitors’ customers unhappy?

Knowing why your competitors’ customers are unhappy helps on many levels, from learning the mistakes you need to avoid, to developing a better product that covers a niche gap.

So why do so many competitive reports fail to include this section?

And that report is pretty easy to generate. Sentiment analysis and monitoring are doable with some advanced social listening that dives into the segmentation of consumer sentiment.

Source: Awario

3. PPC keywords

Most competitive reports include organic keywords and positions but how about PPC keywords?

Whether you are planning to invest in paid ads or not, knowing your competitor’s PPC keywords will help you understand what they are focusing on. It’s a smart way to understand high and low competition keywords without having to spend your own dollars.

When looking through my competitors’ PPC keywords, I always pay attention to their branded keywords. Firstly, it shows the competitors they as a business take seriously. And second, this may inform my own PPC decisions as there’s a solid case for bidding on branded keywords because they tend to have high intent and are often cheaper.

Here’s an example of a branded keyword report from Ahrefs. Notice the ‘Traffic’ column estimating the number of clicks a particular PPC keyword is bringing to the target site:

Source: Screenshot made by the author

4. Branded questions

Niche question research is useful on many levels but have you ever given a thought on how useful it is for your competitive research? Questions people ask about your competitors will give you valuable insight into:

Your competitors’ drawbacks (and how you can practically fill that need gap in the market)Your customers’ failures (and how to avoid them)Your target customers’ journeys (and how to best approach them)

When it comes to understanding your niche buying journeys, Google’s People Also Ask results, also known as ‘intent questions’ help you understand and visualize all the different paths consumers are taking when making their buying decisions.

Source: Screenshot made by the author

Always take note of the “People Also Ask” results when searching for your competitors or their products. These help you better understand your target customers’ interests and research styles throughout their buying journeys.

Source: AlsoAsked

You could also use some freemium-based tools to keep track of questions your competitors’ customers are asking in real-time, use Twitter question search which can also be monitored through a free app called Tweetdeck. Create a new column in your Tweetdeck to monitor this search term:

[competitor ?]

Make sure there’s a space in between your competitor’s brand name and the question mark.

Source: Screenshot made by the author

5. Your competitors’ promoters

Who are your competitors’ most vocal promoters? Can you get them on board to promote your brand instead? Or how did your competitors manage to win their love?

Your competitors’ friends are not your enemies. These are people who may fall in love with your product or agree to collaborate on similar or better terms.

Checking your competitors’ backlinks is the most popular way to find their promoters but it seldom includes people behind those links

Social media is another great place to look for your competitors’ promoters.

6. Social media content

Are your competitors using social media to find and engage your customers? There are some lessons to learn there as well.

You can run a solid analysis of any Facebook page engagement metrics which you can use for your competitive report:

Source: Screenshot made by the author

Conclusion

Competitive research is much more than tracking your competitors’ organic positions and checking their backlinks from time to time.

It can give you a lot of insight into your target customers, their struggles, and buying journeys, it can teach you to build a better project and identify niche gaps. Finally, it can help you identify mistakes to avoid and build a stronger business. Good luck!

Ann Smarty is the Founder of Viral Content Bee, Brand and Community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. She can be found on Twitter @seosmarty.

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The post Six things missing from your competitor research appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

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Thin Local Rankings: Why and How to Think Thick, Not High

November 4, 2021

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Business owners, SEOs, and others refer to good local search rankings as high and bad rankings as low, but they don’t look at whether their rankings are thick or thin. If you just turn your head to the side 90 degrees, you’ll see weaknesses and opportunities you probably missed before. You’ll see ways to thicken up your local visibility, and that will be glorious for business.

What’s a “thin” ranking? The short answer is it’s the same problem as when a baseball team doesn’t have a “deep bench,” and loses a game every time something goes even a little wrong. You want visibility / rankings that can withstand a lot going wrong, because if you’re in business for long enough and if you depend on Google visibility enough, that’s exactly what will happen.

The longer answer is your business probably has thin rankings any time one or more of these describes your situation:

1. Only one page on your site ranks for anything, and the rest of your pages limp along. In this case, the least-bad situation is if your homepage hauls in most of your rankings – as it often the case – because it’s most likely to rank for a range of terms. But if a subpage brings you most of your rankings and/or traffic? That’s thinner ice.

2. Only one location ranks well, if your business is multi-location. There’s no reason to expect them all to perform the same, and some cities or towns or neighborhoods are easier than others. But if there aren’t big differences in your local SEO strategy from one location to the next, then the one location that’s chugging along may be this close to squeaking along the way your other locations do.

3. You’re eligible for “practitioner” pages or “department” pages, but your Google My Business page for one of them or for the main office is the only one that ranks on the map. Let’s say you’ve got a single-location dental practice with 3 dentists. Each dentist is eligible for his or her own GMB page, and the practice can have one. Would you believe that’s a total of 4 – 4! – GMB pages that might rank for this or that?

4. You rank only in Google Maps / the local pack, and not in the organic results. In my experience, the Maps / 3-pack rankings are more volatile than the organic results are. Keep in mind that many organic results are location-specific, and have been for many years. (So I’m not saying you need to rank in the organic results across the country or in other countries.)

5. You rank only in the (localized) organic results, and not in Google Maps / the local pack. Of course, the map is pretty visible, and you want to be there, preferably with some organic rankings, too. By the way, as you may noticed, your organic SEO (i.e. on-page content / optimization and links) is a huge factor in how you do on the map.

6. You rank only for terms that are identical, similar to, or part of your business name. Unless you perform only one service or sell only one widget, then you are the panda bear of the local search results – always one bad meal or extra-slow mating season away from extinction. Especially if that “business name” is not your real business name at all, but rather a keyword-rich one that’s designed just to help your Google My Business page rank, then you’re vulnerable to a competitor’s editing out the keyword or term. You’ll probably continue to rank for that term, even if it’s no longer part of your name, but in time you’ll probably drop.

7. You rank only for geographically explicit search terms, where the city name or other place name is in the query. Most searchers won’t actually specify where they want to see results, because they know that Google knows where they’re located and will show nearby results by default. Use Google’s Anonymous Ad Preview Tool to see how you hold up in various places for the same search term

8. You rank only for geographically broad search terms, which consist of a service or product (and maybe other modifiers, like “near me”) and no place name. If these are your only rankings, your rankings are too location-sensitive, in that Google’s showing you in the search results mainly because the searcher is close to you and vice versa. In that case, you need to grow the tentacles a little.

9. You rank only for local one-box terms. In this case, either you’re gunning for terms that have very few competitors (smart), or Google has assumed that people who type in those terms are searching for a specific company when in fact they’re searching only for a specific thing and don’t care who offers it.

10. You rank only in a small geographical area or in one city. This problem requires none of my color commentary.

11. A page – or a blog post – on your site that ranks well only ranks well for one solid search term or for a closely related family of search terms. In other words, your best-performing pages are one-hit wonders or maybe two-hit wonders.

12. Your only rankings of any kind are in Google. Good thing not too many people begin their searches in Apple Maps, Yelp, Bing, and the thousand various directory sites, because you’re not even a chalk outline there.

You get the idea. On one level, the problem is obvious: too many of your eggs are in too few baskets. But the real problem is that having “thin” rankings means it’s very easy for you to drop off, or to get knocked off. If you have some good rankings but you don’t have many rankings, you’re probably one algorithm update or one tough competitor or one determined spammer from uniformly bad rankings. One way to read my quick-n’-dirty list is as an actuarial table that tells you the likelihood of a disastrous drop-off in Google.

There’s a psychological component to the problem, too. If you rank well only for a few terms, especially if they’re high-priority search terms, you probably won’t want to change much or anything, because you probably don’t want to touch anything that messes up the gentle balance. More likely than not, you just don’t want to bungle things.

It’s great if you have solid rankings for the terms you care most about. That’s the 80/20 rule, and I’m a big fan of it. But the point is you can probably bump yourself up for even more high-payoff local search terms, and you can hedge with some that are less competitive but still profitable.

How do I suggest you thicken up your thin rankings? By working on these items, for starters:

Crank out service pages. Both for major services/products and for for more-niche offerings. These will help you expand not only your organic rankings, but also the range of terms you rank for on the map.Make spin-off pages whenever you can. Be sure to add plenty of internal links to those pages. Along the way, you may get yourself a few one-box results.Work your homepage more – way more. Don’t just focus on one service, product, or city.Consider changing your GMB landing page URL(s). If you’ve got a multi-location business and some locations are getting beat up on the Google map, point their landing page URLs to the homepage rather than to a “location” page.Use”practitioner” or “department” Google My Business pages (if applicable) to the fullest. Pick a different GMB category for each (if possible), optimize each person’s or department’s page on your website for different specialties / search terms, and use that page as your landing page URL on the corresponding GMB page. In other words, “divide and conquer.”Use Google Search Console to study which pages rank and for what specific terms. In particular, look for pages that get lots of impressions or clicks for terms you care about, and add content to those pages that’s relevant to other terms – possibly similar terms – that you also care about. Clearly, Google already digs the page in some ways, and possibly will dig it even more after you put in some additional work.Encourage reviewers to go into detail in their reviews, particularly in Google Maps reviews. The hope is that they mention specific services or products, or certain qualities of them.

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How “thick” are your rankings?

What have you done that’s helped, and what have you tried that hasn’t worked?

Any first-hand experience with being too reliant on a few terms, and then dropping off for those terms?

Leave a comment!

What Parts of Your Local SEO Can Competitors NOT Steal?

November 4, 2021

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On your way to your seat at the Local Feast, they follow you around like a bad smell. You toil to build a great page or resource on your site, and two days later they’ve copied it. You put research and brain cells into your title tags, internal links, GMB categories, and citations, only to spare your competitor all that effort. You get hard-earned reviews from happy customers, and then your competitor’s “customers” happen to write reviews on the same experiences. In addition to stealing everything but your cattle, they may spam the map and diss you whenever anyone is listening. Google won’t do much about any of it.

Copycats can get far, but only so far. It’s like in chess, where a bad player can copy a grandmaster’s every move until the game-ending move. In general, competitors who rip off your local SEO strategy will stop only once it backfires or otherwise stops working. Between you and them, it’s a war of attrition. You can outlast them. The only question is how much they bleed out of you in the meantime.

What many business owners and SEOs don’t seem to realize is that, although you can’t stop competitors from ripping you off, you can make their strategy much less effective. You do that by putting extra effort into certain parts that competitors can’t haul away – what I like to call “protective moats” around your business.

What are some of those protective moats? Here’s what I would consider the short list:

Your best links. Even if your competitors know of the specific good links you have doesn’t mean they (a) know how you pulled them off, (b) would be willing or able to put in the work you did to make those links possible, or (c) would see the same results. Of course, cheap-o directory links or links that require nothing more than payment/donations/dues are easy for your competitors to replicate (not that they’ll help either of you much). But your finest, hardest-to-get links? You probably have at least a few that took you (and maybe a helper) serious work to get, or that were the byproducts of years of work that you did without even thinking of the link. Your competitors would have a very hard time landing those, and collectively they’re probably one of the major factors that have helped you in the local search results so far. Your offerings: services, products, or treatments. Just as some competitors are too lazy to market without ripping you off, they probably didn’t learn their trade as well as you have, and therefore can’t help customers/clients/patients in all the ways you can. You offer services or products, or perform treatments, or handle cases that they can’t. Is it possible they could claim to offer those things and then do a bait-n’-switch on customers? Yes, but then they’ll lose business, get torched in the reviews, lose more business, divert energy away from marketing the services they do offer, and possibly get into legal trouble. The fulfillment part matters. Meanwhile, your great range of offerings will help your visibility for niche or long-tail search terms, on top of giving you extra side-door ways to rank for the broader, most-competitive terms. (Relevant post: “Spin-off Pages: a Bazooka for Your Local SEO.”) “Practitioner” or “department” Google My Business pages. If you’re a dental practice with a pediatric dentist, that dentist can have his or her own GMB page. With a little work on it and more work on the site (particularly on the landing page), that GMB page can rank for a whole range of “kids’ dentists” terms. The dental practice without the pediatric specialist has no such advantage. The same is true if you’re a law firm with multiple attorneys, each with somewhat differing specialties, and one attorney specializes in immigration law: He or she can have a GMB page that ranks for “immigration lawyer” terms on top of whatever terms the main practice’s GMB page (or other attorneys’ GMB pages) rank for. If you primarily sell widgets, but you also have a distinct area of your store where you repair widgets and another where you rent out widgets, then one or more of those could justify your having an additional GMB page for each department. Unless your competitors have the same kind of staff or the same department, they couldn’t have those additional GMB pages – or the additional visibility. Your location. Even though it’s not hard to create and verify a Google My Business page at a bogus address, it may be logistically impossible or prohibitively tough for your competitors to verify GMB pages at your location. Even if they could get their own map pin right in your building, there is a good chance they’d be filtered out of the local map. Awards, certifications, and publicity. Certain distinctions often bring with them visibility for you on sites that may be big in your industry or your local market, and that themselves rank well in Google. They may also bring you good links, referral traffic, unstructured reviews, bragging rights, and branding power, which often the raw materials of effective SEO. The fruit salad you earned may be the results of focused and intensive work, or the results of many years in the trenches. Your competitor can start at the beginning, the way you did, but because a third party had to give you your props, there is nothing for a competitor to grab. Videos. If a video features your smiling visage, shows your business or branding, features your customers, or in general demonstrates how great you are, not only is it hard or impossible for a competitor to lift or edit, but also no competitor would want the video that results. Videos are inherently hard to rip off, which may be one reason that even all these years it’s still not all that hard to get them to rank for pretty competitive local search terms. (Of course, the main benefit of a good video is to make your site more persuasive by embedding it on your site.) Persuasive reviews. Competitors can easily write or buy sock-puppet reviews, or fake their reviews in other ways. But those reviews usually won’t appear credible even on the surface, and will look even shadier when would-be customers look up who the “reviewers” are – none of whom seems to be a real person whose life can be researched a little through Google-fu. Competitors can copy reviews, but they can’t copy authenticity.

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There are always ants at a picnic, and you can assume some of your food will disappear or start marching away. But if you pack enough food that the ants can’t or won’t eat, you’ll have plenty for yourself.

What are other aspects of local SEO that competitors can’t pick up and drag off?

Any first-hand stories about competitors who aped your strategies?

Leave a comment!

Now is the best time to stitch your search marketing loopholes before 2022

November 4, 2021