Creating a local SEO plan starts with putting on your customer hat and deciding how they are finding businesses like yours. What are they searching for? Where do they hang out online? Do they buy quickly or do they research heavily before they buy. Here are some of the processes we go through with every client to help layout an effective local SEO strategy.

It is not unusual for a business to setup a "service area" on Google. The idea is to tell Google where most of your customers live and where you want exposure in the search results. Often, the physical address of the business is not important because customers don't come to you... you go to them. With this in mind, you complete your Google My Business profile and hide your physical address. To you it's less important. But guess what? Google still considers your location for Google searches related to your business products and services.

This is a grid ranking map of a local, well established and well optimized business. Grid maps allow you to check ranking status at very precise points on the map. Green represents a top 3 listing. Those top 3 are the only listings that appear in a Google search. This particular client's physical location is Centerville, Ohio (the red marker). The major clients for this business are in Dayton Ohio, centered on the blue location marker. In December of 2021, location became an even more dominant ranking signal for local area businesses and that may suggest challenges for many. For this business, local ranking in the northern part of Dayton dropped to essentially invisible in a Google search... obviously not good!

Links are still the primary way of improving rank however how links are generated have become a lot more subtle. With Google My Business, location links are embedded in images, reviews and personal maps. Each of the links is an optimization opportunity. There are several ways to generate location signals that let Google know just how far your business reaches into the local community. Just telling Google your service area is not enough... you need to SHOW Google where you work. Here's how.

The process for getting in touch with Google has changed so this blog has been updated. There is no longer a direct number to call however you can get Google to call you and it usually happens pretty quickly. Here are the steps:

One of the greatest ways to affect your Google Business Listings visibility is by submitting your business profile to other business directories across the web. Doing this alone can make the difference on Google between a business with decent visiblity and one that never seems to show up. I just wanted to post this chart because in this instance, this is all that we did. There was no other optimization services provided. It wasn't even one of our websites.

So you've taken a look at your Google Analytics website traffic and it has flat-lined or worse, it has actually started to dive. You're year over year results are showing that you had more traffic last year than you did this year. This might not all be bad news but you'll need to look beyond Google Analytics to figure out what is happening.

Google wants to make sure that your reviews accurately reflect the sentiment of the marketplace. Recently they have stated in their terms that businesses are not to use any review process that moderates the reviews that get submitted. How Google will catch a business using this practice (called 'review gating") is questionable but here is one way Google is approaching the problem.

The first thing we recommend BEFORE jumping in and setting up your Google business listing is to setup a Gmail account that you'll use to access your Google business listing. In fact, we recommend you use this one account as a hub for all of your business and website activity. Every one of our clients starts off like this.

This article is for businesses that are not already on Google MAPS. If you're not sure, you can start here.

Setting up your Google My Business Listing is a fairly easy process. Just doing this COMPLETELY will put you ahead of most small businesses who give this very little thought. Given that your position in the Google Business Listings is so important, here are some helpful hints along with where you should start the process. Even if you already have an existing Google My Business page setup, you may find this information useful.