How to Analyze and Improve Local SEO?
If you want your business to succeed, you must focus on to improve local SEO of your business. Now more than ever, when the whole world is on lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, businesses need to improve their performance on local searches. To do so, they must first be able to measure the performance of what they are already doing. This will help identify their strengths and weaknesses, and point out the opportunities ahead for their businesses.
Knowing the strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities will influence the next course of action(s) towards your local business. In this article, you will learn how you can best analyze and improve your local SEO.
Google My Business Insights(GMB)
A report by Joel House SEO Brisbane Agency, which specializes in local SEO, provided us with stunning local search insights.
- 46% Google searches have local intent.
- More than 75% searches come from mobile devices
With 46% of all Google searches having a local intent and over 75% of these searches coming from mobile devices Google My Business is a good place to start your performance analysis. GMB is a free tool designed to help businesses that operate in a particular area manage their online presence. This makes GMB a good source of local SEO information.
Using a UTM parameter you can track your website's clicks to determine your traffic. And through Google My Business information section, you can edit your website’s address. This will help you evaluate local listing traffic in Google Analytics campaigns in relation to goal, lead, or website revenue data. You can perform this exercise for Bing too.
GMB + Google data studio
Now, what next? With Google My Business showing you the engagement at location levels, now connect GMB to Google Data Studio to monitor your improvement over time. With this, you can now understand
- The level of engagement for every location
- How opinions are changing over time for every location?
- How are local listings displayed for non-branded local searches performing?
So how does this help you? Google My Business insights will give you the proof that you need to determine whether
- You need to dedicate more time to optimize your listings, videos, photos and any other additional information
- You need to dedicate more time to maintain your website by continually adding customized Google Posts to promote the events and offers of your business.
- There is action needed to get more positive reviews on your local listing and any other third-party websites that Google gets reviews from.
Local Listings improve local SEO by high standards
After you understand the most important performance metric, it is time for you to analyze your local listings. A listing refers to the entry of your business information such as name, address, contact, and website on an online directory like Yelp, Google Maps, and Facebook.
Using local listing audit tools such as SEMrush, Moz or BrightLocal can help you understand how huge your name, address, and phone presence is on the internet. More importantly, these tools will help you determine the accuracy of your local listings. Your business will not gain anything if traffic is taken in the wrong direction.
Additionally, these tools will provide you with the domains of the most influential listing sites. With this information, you will be able to filter your referrals to ensure that you only get your traffic from these powerful domains. This will give you a better understanding of the quality of your traffic.
So how is this helpful? The focus is mainly on the accuracy of your local listing. This will play an important role in ensuring the success of your local searches. If both traffic and accuracy results are unsatisfying, it is important that you implement a local listing management feed distribution service. This will help you to correct the inaccuracies and also to widely broadcast your website info to attract potential traffic to your website. Through this process, you will also be able to monitor reviews and manage the reputation of your business at local levels.
Connect with Other Local Businesses
If you do not have connections with other local businesses, it is important that you start focusing some of your energy in that direction. These connections can be sponsorships, partnerships, charitable events, and so on. The focus should be specifically on websites that attract more traffic more than your website does. This is an effective way to drive more traffic to your website.
How is this helpful? Here you can filter your traffic by the websites you link with as well as study user behavior on your website. This is in relation to your website’s bounce rate. You will also be able to find out if the users were interested in finding out more information about your business on the website.
By understanding specific user behavior by domain, you will be able to determine how you can specifically target these audiences through display and YouTube advertising in the future.
Staying connected with other local businesses is a good way to ensure that your business stays relevant at local levels.
Internal Evaluation
Last but not least, you need to study the performance of your internal location-specific pages. If you do not have location-specific pages, it is a high time you invest in them. Even if you do not offer services at your location, Google requires you to mention your address on your site.
Study the Landing Pages specifically those that filter to your location in Google Analytics. You should only target the Organic Search traffic while at it. This will mean something, especially if there is significant traffic.
Also, remember to study all the sources that lead to a location page becoming a Landing Page.
How will this help you?
- You will find out if the users go past the location page or if they bounce from the site.
- You will know if the users convert on the site
- You will be able to track goals on the site for email, phone number clicks etc., and whether these visitors are able to complete these goals.
If you notice negative behavior on the things mentioned above, then you will know what to do to influence positive behavior on the location pages.
Conclusion
Local SEO is a branch of SEO that plays an important role in the success of a business. And especially right now, when user behavior has changed significantly, local SEO is even more important than it was ever before. If you use Joel House you will be in a better position to win with local SEO.