How to Increase Your Local Search Presence

0:03
Hi, I’m Brian Bisches with Alkimer.

0:05
I am the VP of Digital Growth and today I’m here to talk with you about how to increase your local search presence.

0:19
Specifically, we’re talking about the things that are core pillars to local search, each of them playing a key role in your customer’s journey to conversion.

0:31
We have, we have your listings, your local listings, those are your, it’s your business information across all of your locations online and Google, Yelp, Bing, etcetera.

0:42
Your business information, name, address, phone number, very important from a core discovery standpoint.

0:49
Then we have your reviews.

0:51
Those are the reviews tied to those listings, what customers are saying about you.

0:56
These are the the, these are the things that increase your overall trust signal and what people look at to make a decision as they’re choosing where they want to do business, you know, and lastly, your individual local pages for each of one of your locations.

1:12
These are a prime piece in this overall structure that helps convert those customers and gives them additional information as they’re making that decision and preparing to make that final transaction.

1:26
We’re going to cover all of these individually and also talk through how they all work together to increase and improve your local presence.

1:36
Let’s start with just what each represents at the core, foundationally.

1:41
What is the role of these three pillars?

1:45
Listings is to be found.

1:48
If you’re not listed on Google or being or Yahoo or any of the map listing places, customers don’t have the ability to find you.

1:57
So first and foremost, you want to make sure that you are there so you can be found.

2:02
Reviews role is to be chosen.

2:05
Customers even more put a lot of influence on or put a lot into what other customers are saying about you, what your quality is, what your star rating.

2:16
This plays a big role and is a big factor not only for customers, but also for search engines and generative engine optimization and how you get ranked and how you get sourced inside it and then also your local pages.

2:31
We’re going to talk about how this plays a role not just from your ability to promote your services and products, but also how it is a key piece to how you rank and how you perform in local search.

2:44
And its role is to be is to convert, to get you that demand and make sure that you have that ability whenever customers find you to drive them in store to your location.

2:57
So listings, let’s start off with this.

3:00
It is foundational.

3:01
Like I said before, you need to be there to be discovered.

3:04
If you’re not there, your competitors are going to get discovered and you’re not.

3:08
You need to have an accurate and consistent listing.

3:11
You need to make sure your name, address, phone number, as well as your hours is properly listed and kept up to date.

3:18
If you have holiday hours, those need to be up to date in real time so customers do not have a bad experience.

3:24
This is foundational.

3:25
Again, as I had said before for local listings, having inaccurate or inconsistent data can create a bad customer experience, but it also impacts how you rank locally in search.

3:37
So you want to keep these up to date, but at the most part, think of them as foundational.

3:41
These are the things that you need to be like a phone book.

3:44
If you’re not in the phone book, people can’t find you.

3:46
This is your online listing.

3:48
You need to be there to be found.

3:51
Next, we got your reviews.

3:54
I want to pause here and really point out this has a big impact not just on your overall search presence, but how your listings are ranked as well.

4:03
Because whenever Google goes to your listings to determine your rank value, they look at your reviews and they use your reviews as a confidence amplifier.

4:13
They’re going to look at those reviews for trust and authority signals.

4:17
If you have poor reviews, it means Google as well as your customers aren’t going to trust you for top choice or top placement and results.

4:26
So we need to make sure that we’re keeping our reviews, we’re responding to them.

4:31
We’re, we’re, we’re proactively trying to make sure that our customers voices are heard.

4:39
And also we want to make sure that we’re we’re building up the quantity and velocity of the reviews we’re getting because that plays a big role in what Google and AI look at when they’re determining your rank factors.

4:52
And third, we’re going to talk about your local pages and the role they play in your local search performance.

4:58
Much like how search engines look at your reviews as a confidence validation, they’re looking at your location pages as an entity validation.

5:11
What I mean by that is whenever search engines and customers as well see you in a local listings result, they’re going to look at your reviews like we talked about.

5:20
But they are also going to go to and in Google’s case, crawl your local business location page.

5:28
And they’re going to look for things that confirm that that listing has is a local business, has the additional information and has the right schema and structured markup has, has the things that the customer queries are looking for.

5:45
And if that is weak or non existent, it’s going to limit how for your, how far your listings can climb in rank, let alone are it will, it’s going to limit how far your, not only your website and those landing pages can rank in traditional search results.

6:03
It’s also going to limit how far your listings can rank in local results.

6:09
So we want to make sure that we have a very high quality location page.

6:14
We want to make sure that we’re keeping up with our reviews and responding.

6:18
And we want to make sure that we’re there to be found in listings.

6:23
What this looks like all together.

6:25
And we’re going to take this from a a search perspective.

6:28
We’re going to look at the impact to your impressions and really your local impression share.

6:34
All three of these things combined make a big difference.

6:38
For example, if you have a weak local page or local pages and you have weak reviews, low quality, not a lot of them, your listings performance is going to be suppressed, which means local and your local impression share is going to be very low.

6:55
If you have a strong local page and weak reviews, or vice versa, weak local page and strong reviews, you’re going to rank around that mid pack, which means you’re going to get about a decent to mid portion, moderate portion of the local impression share.

7:15
However, if your local pages are strong and your review and reputation management is strong, you’re going to see your listings in the top results, meaning you’re going to get the, the bulk, the high, a high amount of that local impression share.

7:32
That’s what we want to strive for.

7:34
But it takes all of these things working together and, and top and A and a focus on making sure that the right things are kept up to speed and optimized the way that they need to be for this performance.

7:55
So just a quick summary and to kind of pull up on what do we mean by the right things at a very top level.

8:04
It’s pretty straightforward.

8:07
Does it, like I said before with your listings, you want to maintain accurate business information.

8:14
If you you don’t want your phone numbers to be wrong, you want the name of the business to be wrong, etcetera.

8:19
Consistent information.

8:21
Also a big factor.

8:23
If you say this is my phone number on Google, that needs to be your phone number on your local page, needs to be a phone number on your on being ours.

8:31
The same thing, address, name, all of that needs to be consistent across everywhere that you are listed.

8:38
That makes a big difference.

8:40
And then the third being the user activity.

8:43
Search engines are going to look at our people clicking into your listings.

8:47
Are there?

8:47
Are they clicking get directions?

8:51
Are they going to your website or are they clicking to call?

8:53
Those are what we mean by activity.

8:55
If you can make sure that those 3 three things are are managed well and in good quality, it’s going to that that is going to be how you optimize the most that you can out of listings.

9:10
Then moving on to reviews.

9:11
There are also three things that you want to make sure that you are that you’re doing well, quality, quantity and velocity.

9:19
Quality meaning what is your rating, your star rating versus your local competitors.

9:24
You want to strive to be a higher rating than your local competitors.

9:29
Quantity means exactly what it says.

9:32
How many reviews do you have at a per location basis?

9:37
If you have multiple locations in a single area, what’s the average of those location?

9:42
What’s the average review count of those locations versus your competitors in the area?

9:47
And velocity means a steady influx of reviews.

9:51
Search engines don’t like to see spikes and reviews because it makes them feel like you might be gaming the system.

9:57
They want to see a positive trend, ideally upward, but an ongoing influx of reviews that tells them that people value your service.

10:07
They continue coming back and then what?

10:09
And what you’re offering is, is credible and worth them sourcing and results for your customers.

10:18
And then third, your website, the three things you want to focus on there are performance, meaning how fast is your page load and things like that.

10:27
Your structure.

10:27
As I had noted before, schema is what I mean by structures, but especially with local businesses having the appropriate and well optimized local business structured data markup on your location pages is big and even bigger now in the world of AI systems crawling your page.

10:49
Because they really look at that to validate you as an as an online entity, to validate you as an online entity that supports a brick and mortar business.

11:02
But also schema for FAQs and reviews and how to, if that’s content you should have on your page and have the right structure, data markup to support it, because that’s the type of content that these systems are looking for.

11:15
And then overall content, one, the content that I just noted, the more natural language solution in content that you can provide, the better.

11:25
That’s going to really help with your, your AI system results that your Geo, your AEO.

11:31
But then your overall content needs to be needs to meet specific standards.

11:38
At the very least, you don’t want to have thin word count.

11:41
You want to make sure that you’re listing your name, address, phone number, and you’re providing the right relative information to the services that you offer to help your customers understand not only what you offer, but to answer questions around specific things relative to what you offer.

12:02
So as you’re looking at these three, these three top pillars, make sure that you’re focusing on the 9 things or three per each pillar and doing the best you can within each.

12:14
If you do that, that is going to drive your overall local search performance.

12:19
So now we’re going to look at an example of what this looks like in real life, both the good and the bad, and we’re going to use a real world search.

12:28
We’re going to look at real world businesses.

12:30
We did blur them out.

12:32
You’re not able to see which ones we’re talking about, but just, you know, trust me, they are.

12:38
They are three very reputable businesses and we’re going to look at a local search for coffee near me specifically on Google and see what that looks like from a search results, a head to head view of this of this search.

12:53
Before I do that, I want to real, I want to stop and make sure that we understand what the value of doing this is.

13:02
In this case it’s over 1.1 billion non branded local searches for coffee shops.

13:10
When I say non branded, I mean people are not searching Starbucks or like Scooters or Seven Brew or you know the various names that you can think of.

13:23
They’re just searching for a coffee shop near them and various terms related to that to find the closest or best or most convenient location to them.

13:33
So this is what we’re talking about when we say local impression share its customer demand that is looking for a service and in this case at a very large demand volume.

13:45
So as we I wanted to keep that in mind and you know, and think about what the impact here is as we go through this.

13:52
So let’s jump into the search coffee near me.

13:57
So whenever I did this search, I wanted to point, I want to point out that this is a very heavy competitive market around me.

14:06
There are 34 coffee shop locations.

14:09
21 of those were single location businesses.

14:14
And what I mean by that is a local business or mom and pop business.

14:19
They just have one business in the area.

14:21
Three of them were multi location brands.

14:24
The brands that you may know as you go from state to state, they’re always going to be there.

14:30
Of the of those three, they made-up 13 locations.

14:33
Brand A had seven of them, Brand B had three and brand C had three as well.

14:42
So let’s come back to the slide and look at the results because this is important.

14:46
And if you remember, I showed you earlier that breakout of if you are weak on local pages week on reviews, you’re going to be weak in your listings results.

14:57
And vice versa, if you’re strong, you’re going to be strong in your listings rank.

15:01
This is that same chart only now filled in with actual real world results.

15:07
So if we look at Brand A first, they were actually the closest to me.

15:13
Proximity does play a role, but it’s not the only factor.

15:17
And in fact, if you’re not doing the things right, it’s really not a top factor at all.

15:25
Their rating was the lowest average per store or per location at 64 or at 3.8 star rating.

15:35
They had 64, which was also the lowest average reviews review quantity per location.

15:42
They do not have local pages, so if you go to their listings and click the website link for that location, it there, there is not a location page that exists to support it.

15:55
And their average rank of those seven locations was 32.

15:59
What that means is a very low local impression share.

16:04
If you’re ranking on Page 3 and beyond of listings, you’re not going to be seen or found next.

16:13
Looking at local brand B, the distance was the furthest away from me on average at 3.9.

16:19
However, they did have the highest star rating at 4.5, slightly better than what I’ll show you in with the third one, but still the highest.

16:29
They had the second highest review quantity at 66, but again they did not have local pages from which the listings could connect with their average ranking across those 3.

16:45
Result across those three stores was 21, which means a very moderate to low presence in local search and in 3rd local brand C they were in the mid level from an average from a distance away from me at 3.4 miles on average.

17:05
Their overall rating average per those locations was 4.4, which was just slightly set in second place below brand B.

17:15
Then if you look at the last three fields, they were close to double the, you know, just under double the quantity of reviews on average per location.

17:28
There they had local pages for each one of their locations and their average listings rank was 6 including the number one rank for this search was one of their brands.

17:41
What that means is a very high local impression share.

17:45
So if we think about those 1.1 billion non branded coffee near me searches, this brand is being seen in almost all of those searches to some degree where the other ones not so much if at all that is lost opportunity.

18:03
So lastly, I want to just summarize what we kind of went through today and that is your local search relies on all three of these key pillars.

18:15
Your listings need to be there to be to make sure that you can be found.

18:19
You don’t want to have missing listings or broken listings because that is lost opportunity for customers to find you.

18:26
Make sure that they’re there, make sure that they’re solid.

18:30
And then from there, you want to make sure that you are that you’re maintaining good review quality, that you’re responding to customers, that you’re proactively soliciting reviews because proactive review generation tends to receive higher star ratings as well, as opposed to waiting for somebody to reactively review whenever they’re mad.

18:57
When you get a review proactively, it’s usually post transaction and customers are in a better mood.

19:02
And that’s one way to increase your, your quality and your score, but also that helps increase your volume and your velocity.

19:11
And then third, your landing pages, make sure that you have good structured markup, that they perform well, that they actually exist, and that you were providing customers with the right content and search engines with the right content to to improve your local search results.

19:29
If you do all of these things together, you’re going to see some very solid performance in local search.

19:39
And remember, there are people out there that are searching for you.

19:42
You need to think to yourself, am I missing any of that demand?

19:45
What can I do to improve?

19:47
The answer is the combination across all these three things are the foundational pillars necessary to make sure that you’re there.

19:56
So I’m going to close with that and I hope that everyone got something out of today and was able to leave today knowing a little bit more about local search.

20:08
Thank you.