Local SEO Does NOT Equal Small Business

Local Is Necessary

Image courtesy of Mr.TinDC

We talk a lot about local here at SyCara Local. It is part of our company name for a reason! So what is local SEO? It includes helping search engines find your business and involves monitoring and updating your contact information across the different directories online. We believe local SEO should be done in addition to traditional SEO. A local SEO professional should not only be concerned with traditional SEO work but should add local SEO tasks onto their already-challenging set of tasks.

One misconception about local is that it’s only for small businesses, and national brands have no need for it. This couldn’t be further from the truth. National companies desperately need local marketing, as we discussed back in a March blog post on the recent local marketing awakening and a May blog post on big national brands needing online marketing. A Search Engine Journal article by Melih Oztalay also discussed this phenomenon. Oztalay says there is now a significant “need for digital branding, marketing and advertising to the store, office, franchise or building level.” What this means is a company like Starbucks for example, the largest coffeehouse company in the world, needs to make sure that its 23,305 stores all have sufficient marketing and updated listings.

“Map listings should be actively managed. Passively watching them does not result in visibility,” Oztalay explains.

One way to do this is to make sure store listings aren’t duplicated and the contact information for all your locations is updated. This includes the Name, Address and Phone

Number (NAP), website URL and more. Map listings need to be accurate so they come up correctly in search results. For example, if someone searches on Google Maps for a Starbucks on Scottsdale Road and the phone number and address are wrong, this can discourage customers from walking through your door and you lose business. These are the facts: 88 percent of local searches end in a purchase, according to a statistic from a Search Engine Watch articleby Angie Schottmuller.She cites a Google Movement study that makes the point that being found online is almost equal to watching somebody walk through the door of your business to buy your product.

Local goes beyond updating store information. Other great local tactics are to respond and monitor customer reviews on websites like Yelp, use local social media marketing to connect with local customers and making sure each local store has current marketing materials, Oztalay suggests.

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Citations are also extremely important in local SEO. Citations happen anytime your business is mentioned online. They drive local search results and are typically not included in a national SEO campaign, according to a Digital Elevator article by Daniel E. Lofaso. Lofaso also mentions using “geo-specific keywords” in a local SEO campaign. Local keywords also tend to be less competitive, easier to rank and have better conversion rates. For example, small Houston pizza restaurants will benefit more from a person searching for “pizza in Houston” than someone just searching for “pizza.”

“For small businesses, these keywords are far less competitive and typically easier to rank for. At the same time, these keywords can also be more effective as far as conversions are concerned. Those who are searching for ‘pizza in Houston’ are far more likely to walk through the door than someone who is simply searching for the term ‘pizza,’” Lofaso says.

Reasons to Go Local

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Sometimes national companies simply don’t want to push their marketing to the local level, because it can stretch their budget and workload, says Oztalay. Other reasons might be not wanting to be involved with organic marketing or wanting to focus more on paid advertising. Still, companies should make the choice to go local. Traditional yellow pages phone books are no longer effective for most local businesses, and the money that was once allocated for this type of advertising likely needs to go partially toward digital local efforts. Local SEO simply brings more customers through the door, Lofaso says, and national brands need to jump on the local bandwagon.
Another big factor that is bringing local to the forefront is Google. The search engine has been displaying its Google Carousel of local results prominently at the top of the page before even paid search results, according to Oztalay.

“The map of local business listings with the corresponding locations appear along with the customer ratings and reviews with yellow stars that stand out to any local consumer. Google Carousel is making the local consumer decision-making process much easier,” Oztalay says.

Image courtesy of Google

Google Carousel gives local businesses the opportunity to to appear in the first position on more searches, according to a Search Engine Watch article by Jim Yu. He cites that cites BrightEdge research that says Carousel impacts 14 percent of keywords across all industries.

“Travel and hospitality businesses are the most affected, with carousel results appearing on 33 percent of their keywords.Restaurants are a close second, with 27 percent of keywords receiving carousel results,” Yu says.

But what is Google Carousel? It’s that black box at the top of a page of Google search results that kind of looks like a film-strip of photos of businesses you can flip through. Yu explains that the carousel has eliminated previous local listings packs. Google Carousel contains up to about 20 results and appears primarily in results for sports, entertainment, education, travel, hospitality and restaurant search queries. It gives searchers a more visual view and lets businesses advertise organically in a larger, more interactive way. Clicking on a carousel result leads to another page of search engine results with a “branded search query for the business in that particular location,” Yu says.

SyCara Local Can Help

SyCara Local is focused on helping companies with 10s, 100s or even 1000s of brick and mortar locations manage their local SEO and keep their listings accurate. We help you get people to your website and business. We show you where you’re ranking in organic and map search listings, ensure your listings are accurate across 16 different directories and show you which authoritative websites are sending traffic your way. SyCara Local also tells you where citations are occurring and helps track keywords.

We want to help business owners save valuable time by doing the busy work for you. In the past, we talked to local marketers from all different industries, and our research found that when marketers do their job manually, they spend about 30 percent of their time gathering data and 20 percent of their time analyzing data. That leaves them with only 50 percent of their work day to actually fix problems and add value. We know our assistance can help save you the time and energy it takes to perform local SEO and leave you time to work on other parts of your business.

For more information on how to establish local SEO for your business, contact our support team for a live demo.