As many smaller websites and independent publishers have found out recently: Google has made many changes to their algorithm and their search results. They are attempting to simultaneously deal with a rise in AI-generated content by website owners and aggressively incorporating their AI into all kinds of search results.
In many corners of the internet (including Google’s favorite corner: Reddit) you can find SEOs, affiliate marketers, and others talking about how SEO has changed, is “dead,” or is significantly more difficult.
There are, as you might imagine, some pockets where it seems like SEO is (relatively and for the moment) unchanged. Perhaps the most prominent of these is local SEO.
In this article, I’m going to walk through why local SEO is still an important tactic for business (and traffic) growth despite all the recent changes with Google and how you can make it work for you (plus, what to avoid!).
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Why local SEO is still achievable (these are the good ole days!)
While lots of search results that had previously been competitive but not impossible for smaller sites or independent publishers to crack now look like this:
Good to get Weather.com’s expert, experienced, authoritative, and trusted take on the best portable AC units.
Local search results still frequently look something like this search result for HVAC repairs in Dallas TX:
Like any good 2024 search engine results page (SERP), there’s at least a sprinkling of Reddit and Forbes, but there are still a lot of honest-to-goodness local businesses in the SERP, and you can see, of course, that the local pack is the first thing searchers see.
I’ve been doing SEO for over 15 years, and a few things made it an incredibly compelling marketing channel when I got started:
- Searchers have extremely high (and often very precise) intent–you can capture blue widget seekers just as they’re actively looking for a blue widget.
- It was extremely cost-effective to rank well for these highly targeted terms and to capture traffic–different niches have always had different “table stakes,” of course, but there was usually at least a pocket of traffic available even to new and small sites if one knew where to look.
- While there was always risk inherent in search rankings and traffic, your investment could often pay outsized, compounding dividends (particularly when compared with paid channels) and transform your website into a highly profitable asset.
While this is still true to varying degrees in different niches, the clock seems to be turned back the furthest in local SEO SERPs. This means that by optimizing your site and online presence for local SEO and avoiding SEO mistakes, you have a greater chance of ranking in SERPs and capturing local customers.
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Local SEO best practices, repeated and scaled
The good news for local businesses is that you don’t need to be taking big risks. The state of local SEO is such that you can still see major gains by executing these simple strategies.
Executing these five relatively simple (if not always easy) tactics can generate great returns for small businesses from SEO.
1. Optimize your Google Business Profile
Optimize your Google Business Profile (GBP) by selecting the right categories, getting key citations, keeping your name, address, and phone number consistent across data providers, soliciting as many reviews as possible, and responding to reviews. It can be difficult to operationalize getting more reviews, but most of the other items on this list are pretty simple.
2. Audit links and on-page elements
Eliminate any major technical SEO issues, and when you’re looking at linking text or headlines on pages on your website, look to avoid being overly aligned with the aggressive use of your target term.
Again that means instead of using linking text or headlines on a page that look like this to target something like “HVAC repair Dallas:”
- professional HVAC services in Dallas
- top HVAC repair experts in Dallas
- trusted Dallas HVAC repair service
- affordable HVAC repair in Dallas
- best HVAC technicians in Dallas
- Dallas HVAC repair professionals
- reliable HVAC repair service Dallas
- quality HVAC repair in Dallas
- expert HVAC repair Dallas
- HVAC repair services near Dallas
You would use something more like this:
- needing repairs for your HVAC in Dallas
- services to fix HVAC systems in Dallas
- looking for help with HVAC issues
- best solutions for HVAC problems in Dallas
- find reliable HVAC repair services
- professional help for HVAC breakdowns
- affordable fixes for HVAC units in Dallas
- quality service for HVAC maintenance
- expert technicians for HVAC repair
- trusted solutions for HVAC issues
While there is an element of local SEO being the land before time, this is one element that has actually advanced, and if you have a very old site or have used a very cheap SEO vendor you might need to refresh on-page elements, external linking, and internal linking anchors.
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3. Build and update location pages
Targeting {town/city} + {service/business type} with location pages for areas that you service (even if you aren’t located there) is very valuable. Again vary the text you use on-page and with links, and look at all of your competitors who are creating similar pages and create something better than what they have.
Often this is a very low bar, but in a competitive market, you may need to put some real time and effort in. In our Dallas HVAC example, Berkeys.com has created a very comprehensive page:
Below the fold, the page includes:
- Multiple videos
- Information about costs
- Information about service types
- Information about HVAC size and efficiency in specific areas of the home
- Information about license requirements in Dallas
- Points of differentiation for Berkeys
- Map embed
The headlines are a little aggressive, but in general, if you go down the first page of results and look at your competitors and see that this is the most comprehensive page (even if it’s not ranking first) you have a rough model and “bar” for your location pages.
Note: Don’t just grab the first result here. It may be a site’s home page, or if it is a location page it may be ranking for reasons other than how comprehensive the content is.
4. Create topically relevant informational content
Lots of targeted informational content can perform well on service sites, like product reviews and roundups, glossary-style overviews, and how-to content about topics related to your core service offerings. These assets can generate links and allow you to establish topical authority and link internally to your location pages.
5. Build links!
A relatively small number of high-quality links can have an out-sized impact when it comes to local SEO because in so many markets, so many ranking sites have relatively few links. Many of the tried and true local link-building methods can be a good start here, such as:
- Making sure you have local citations built where you can, and you’ve claimed any easy-to-claim profiles you can (e.g. Better Business Bureau profile, local chamber of commerce, etc.)
- Local press efforts
- Local partnerships with friendly companies, vendors, etc.
- Guest posts (again here look for relevant sites, real businesses, and sites that have traffic and rank well for relevant terms, which you can check using third-party tools)
Not only can these types of optimizations still have a major impact on SEO results for local SEO, they can still work quickly as you can see in the screenshot above.
Local SEO pitfalls and risk elements for small businesses
If you own a small business and are looking to take advantage of local SEO, there’s a good chance you’re trusting a vendor to manage the process for you. As with anything: some vendors are great, and some are not. While the right vendor can add a ton of value to your business and your website specifically, the wrong one can get you into all sorts of trouble with Google.
SEOs about to ruin it for ecom sites and local businesses.
— Nelly (@NellyDogman) April 4, 2024
Beyond just “finding a vendor you trust” what are specific areas where a vendor can get your website into trouble?
Link velocity and quality
An important thing to note for small business sites is that Google has different rules for different sites. If you are a large publisher (like Forbes) and your content gets scraped and low-quality links are pointed at your site with aggressive anchors, you can maintain rankings (and certainly have a much lower chance of having your entire site removed from search results).
If you are a small business site with very few backlinks to begin with and your SEO vendor goes out and builds you a bunch of very low-quality links with exactly the same linking text pointing to your site, you could get in a lot of trouble (particularly if the rate at which you’re acquiring those links is suspiciously high–e.g., you’ve added 10-15 links a year for 10 years in business, and then all of a sudden your site gets hundreds or thousands of low-quality links).
How can you help protect against this becoming an issue for your business?
If they’re not sending it already, ask your SEO company for a spreadsheet with the specific URL your link has been placed on, the URL on your site the link pointed to, and the linking text that site used to link to your site.
What you are looking for:
- Is the site linking to yours a legitimate website (ideally something like a blog or resources section on a legitimate business or major publishing site) or does the content on the site look extremely low quality (and like the site only exists to link to other sites)?
- Is the site relevant? Is the theme of the site closely related to your business and what you talk about on your site?
- Does the site get traffic? Do they rank well in Google for the terms they write about and target on their homepage/key pages?
- Is the anchor text or linking text varied from link to link?
The good news is that because your competitors are other small businesses with limited link profiles, you frequently won’t need a high volume of quality links to grow traffic.
Content velocity and quality
As with link velocity and quality, there are different rules for your small business site than there are for large, authoritative sites. If your vendor is charging you $300 and offering to deliver 20 blog posts a month: it is, in fact, too good to be true.
Beware here of large volumes of low-quality content (low quality can be AI, but it can also be human, and high-quality content can be AI-assisted) that’s likely to have poor engagement signals (i.e., a poor experience for visitors to your site when they actually find you in search results or visit your site).
Anchor text (internal and external)
The linking text you use for your pages is an important element of link building, as mentioned above, but you want to vary your internal linking text within your own site as well.
So if you’re an HVAC company and you have a page that you want to have rank for HVAC repair in Dallas and you’re linking to that page 10 times, instead of just using “HVAC repair dallas” all 10 times, you would want to use linking text like this:
- needing repairs for your HVAC in Dallas
- services to fix HVAC systems in Dallas
- looking for help with HVAC issues
- best solutions for HVAC problems in Dallas
- find reliable HVAC repair services
- professional help for HVAC breakdowns
- affordable fixes for HVAC units in Dallas
- quality service for HVAC maintenance
- expert technicians for HVAC repair
- trusted solutions for HVAC issues
It’s important to use more natural-sounding anchor text that’s not just aggressive variations of the core term you’re looking to target.
Aggressive Google Business Profile practices
Your Google Business Profile is of course a major SEO asset for your business, and while you obviously want to increase visibility for it you also don’t want to put it at risk.
Faking multiple locations and reviews can put you at risk of getting a profile banned or suspended. Generally speaking, there’s probably a lower-risk approach to whatever you’re trying to accomplish (e.g. legitimately expanding to a new office or just creating location pages to target a nearby area or town, asking your customers for reviews in a more organized way and incenting your staff to collect them, etc.)
Simple fixes, quick results: A real-world example of local SEO success
Here are some real-world SEO results for a local roofing company website we recently worked on:
Organic traffic more than doubled in a few months, they jumped to #1 for their primary {town name} roofing keyword, and organic traffic (and qualified leads) are up over 3X year-over-year for the same year.
Our efforts started after the Helpful Content Update (HCU) and the 9,7543* core updates Google has rolled out recently (*rough estimate)–what’s the trick?
The actual inputs here were extremely simple–what you might have imagined SEO deliverables to be several years ago:
- Updated title tags and internal linking anchor text
- Built a small number of links per month to targeted pages
- Published a few SEO-focused content assets a month
Their Google Business Profile was already pretty well-optimized or there would have been another lever for SEO growth.
There are lots of other opportunities for growth for this site, but the point here is that some simple clean up and blocking and tackling had a huge business impact for this company and added immediate value to their website.
We work with a lot of B2B SaaS companies. We’ve also owned and operated a lot of publishing sites over the years. While broadly SEO tactics for those sites are still similar (deliverables still include technical SEO audits, link building, and content creation and promotion) if we had had the same deliverables as we had for the project above and applied them to a B2B SaaS site with a similar link profile and level of traffic, the results would not have been as quick or as explosive in terms of rate of growth.
What it all means for small businesses
A thing I’ve heard multiple times from multiple SEOs is some variation of “I wish I’d gone faster and invested more before {insert Google disruption to a tactic that used to work but no longer does}.”
The good old days are probably right now when it comes to your small business and SEO. Simple, executable SEO tactics can allow you to out-compete your local competitors, can bring you high-intent profitable traffic, and you can still carry them out affordably.