Like most desires in the world of digital marketing and advertising, approval is required to market a concept, budget, or resource need.
It can be a huge disappointment to have the intuition that just being turned down deserves your full attention because you can’t prove the impact.
There is an old saying that “the devil is in the details”.
In reality, the opportunities are all in the details.
Good analytics and, more importantly, how you track and report your local search performance can help you find this avenue.
Local search isn’t just focused on delivering non-branded keywords to sales and leads.
Also consider how effective your branded local visibility is at driving traffic to your site.
1. Start small
We know that Google has a large share of the overall search engine market.
What you may not know is how well it works for you.
Local listing ownership and small optimizations may already drive a significant amount of traffic, phone calls, route requests, and website traffic.
To measure the latter, you can implement UTM variables in your website’s URL links.
URL tags are easy to create with Google URL Builder.
Make sure to note down the search engine source, the “organic” medium, and the campaign ID.
You can edit your website address from your listing information area in Google My Business.
You can now measure your local listings traffic in your Google Analytics campaigns and correlate it with your leads, goals, or website revenue data.
Also, feel free to do this exercise for Bing Places.
So?
Google My Business is great at showing engagement at the location level.
Connect Google My Business to Google Data Studio and see improvements over time.
Here you can understand the following for each location:
- level of engagement.
- Sentiment increase or decrease due to star rating over time.
- Performance of local listings in non-branded local searches.
You now have something to stand for!
Create visibility within specific segments of your brand’s online user behavior to show its impact and direction on revenue.
chance
Understanding how your Google Local Listings are performing gives you evidence that you want to:
- Spend more time optimizing your listing, adding photos, videos, and informational details.
- Understand the need to maintain your site through the continuous addition of Google Post custom content to promote your company’s events and offers.
- We warrant that review generation services are necessary to increase the number of positive reviews on Google Local Listings and other third-party sites where Google collects reviews. You may also need a brand reputation management solution and resource time to monitor sentiment for your listing.
2. Roll the ball
Now you’ve potentially shown the power of the biggest competitor in this arena.
It’s time to indicate that other local vehicles may be driving to your site.
Local listing audit tools such as BrightLocal, SEMrush, and Moz help you understand how prevalent a name, address, and phone number (NAP) presence is across the web and, more importantly, whether it’s accurate helps.
Sending traffic to the wrong destination does no good.
In addition, this report provides domains of trusted list sites.
This allows you to filter website visitor referrals to source only those domains.
This helps us understand the quality of those visitors passing through the site.
chance
Your Google Local Listings reviews were primarily revenue and lead generation reviews, but this particular listings review focuses on accuracy and traffic.
Accuracy itself contributes to overall local search success for a domain.
If you lack both of these, we recommend using a local listings management feed delivery service.
These are provided by the same services mentioned above.
This allows us to not only correct inaccurate information, but also broadcast web information more broadly to draw potential traffic back to your site.
This process also helps us monitor reviews to better manage our local reputation.
3. Think Local
Does your organization have connections with other organizations?
These are partnerships, sponsorships, charitable events, etc.
Often this is an association with a website that receives much more traffic than yours.
This means it can be a traffic driver for you.
Inbound links themselves hold a local-specific relevance to search engines, but there may be more benefits here than you know.
chance
Again, filter traffic by those domains you linked associations to and see leads or revenue.
This is likely to be low. But look at user behavior.
Is your bounce rate low? Have they looked around the site to learn more about you?
Now is the perfect time to bring this curious audience into your Google Analytics Audiences.
If you choose to reach your site from these sources by definition, you can target them with display and YouTube ads in the future.
This is a great way to keep their minds fresh given that you are locally related and correlated from locally linked sites.
4. Look inside
Up to this point, we’ve seen how we stand in terms of lists and in terms of locally relevant links.
We now consider internal location-specific pages, their performance, and how to analyze them going forward.
No location-specific pages?
I need these.
Google must list your address on your site in order to associate it with your local listings, even if you don’t serve customers at your location.
Plus, it saves time for confused delivery drivers and job seekers who may be late for an interview!
First, look at your landing pages in Google Analytics and filter to just your location pages. Do this especially for organic search traffic.
The reason it’s here is because if your traffic percentage is significant, invest in all of the above elements of local search optimization to combine them to give your landing page an additional benefit.
Then look at all the referrers that show the location page as a landing page to understand the difference.
chance
What to look for:
- Do users typically navigate through location pages to service/offering, company profile, home page content, or do they leave the site?
- Will these users end up as converters for the site?
- Implement goal tracking on your site for phone number clicks, email clicks, etc. Are these visitors meeting these goals?
Do you find yourself lacking positive behavior for these items?
Second, you already know what should be displayed on the pages of these locations to provide users with necessary contact information, company information, or internal links to other relevant site content. There may be
Assess and understand needs
Hopefully, this exercise has allowed you to see what value your local SEO efforts have delivered in terms of locally relevant links, traffic, conversions, and revenue.
Also, you can now visually prove this to groups who can approve your upcoming journey.
With a little patience and lots of data, you’ll be able to see successful local searches.
Other resources:
image credit
Featured Image: Author, June 2020
All screenshots taken by the author in June 2020
