I'm no expert on this but this is roughly what I've learned about local over the last 3 years.
First, there is no cookie cutter formula. And I've seen a lot of sites using a lot of different strategies over the years. There are guys who completely break most the rules outlined in this thread and dominate in their respective industries (which I'll get to later). But what you really wanna do first is run through a bunch of keywords manually. I've run through hundreds of keywords, including long tails just to see what Google is throwing out. I try to figure out:
1) Is G throwing out a lot of the local packs?
2) Is it throwing out mostly organic?
3) Is it throwing out yelp? youtube videos (is anyone targeting YT)? a mixture of of packs and organic? Which is dominating?
Then, this is the *ideal* way to go about it.
You build a great homepage. There are businesses that have put hundreds if not thousands of hours into tweaking their homepages over years and years. So when a new marketer comes in and wants to throw together some shitty $300-$500 design most of the time it's not gonna work.
And truth is, it doesn't even need to look that well. The home page can be 90% text but it's the organization of content, interlinking, formatting, etc that takes a lot of time.
Then basically, this is how it goes -
1) You want a massive site. Something a lot of the top competitors do is fluff out their websites with hundreds of pages of geotargeted content then link the counties on their home page. So the link juice flows back to all those geotargeted pages and it makes your site huge. I have seen business owners spin 90% of these pages who've been ranking #1 for 8 years now. I've seen other guys do them manually. So I'm personally not gonna say which to do. I've tried both strategies. And I can say that writing 300+ pages for town after town after town about the same basic topic..... even when done manually with The Dragon..... many of the pages look repetitive and wind up reading very similar.
On the other hand, doing a proper spintax for 1 local site can take a full weeks worth of time (if not more). I have some local spintaxs that if I posted on here people would vomit. Like for just 1 site. I spent roughly 1 week on the spintax. Then a year later I did another spintax for that site. Then another year later I did another shorter spintax. And when you combine all 3 portions together it's nauseating just to look at. At least for me. Cause on day 6 & 7 of doing these things I wanna jump out a window. That "trauma" never leaves your mind. So when you do the 2nd spintax it's even worse lol.
The interesting thing is though, when they're done properly (which is NOT easy) they are literally not much different than just doing all the geocontent manually. Sometimes it seems my spun content is actually more unique then my manually written articles. Cause when I'm spinning I'm intentionally thinking of different ways of wording things. When I write manually, many times I repeat sentences into the mic cause I feel it's my "right".
Either way, you want geopages. And geopages are probably the single hardest part of building any local site (imo). It's the 1 thing most business owners don't do. And the 1 thing that tends to really distinguish you as an authority site.
2) Good on page - Theres so much that can be said about this. And admittedly, some of my pages have horrible onpage. Loading times in 2.2s. Uncompressed images, keyword stuffing, etc. But generally you want your site loading fast around the .7-.8ms range. Just under 1 second. Keywords in the title, meta, header, etc. Grab related suggestions from Google search and add those to your home page. Space things out. Bullet things. Add 1 or 2 pieces of amplified content to keep users on your page. I tend to use just 1 really well done video for this. I do some fast, provocative editing and good scripts. I pay people to do the intro voiceovers then do the rest myself. So I know when someone presses play chances are they are watching that entire 10 minute long video. I also use a bit of humor and indirectly make fun of my competitors. As long as its done intelligently, using real facts and data people will like you for it. It'll also help build rapport with your audience (if done right). There are so many other things that can be said about onpage but that shit's all over this forum.
3) Register in G local - Obvious. Fill out your whole profile. Do a nice job on it.
4) Outsource Citations and Map Citations - I always pay someone else to do this. There use to be a guy on fiver I'd use to get my first 50 done. But there are other guys who will do over 300 for like $80 and they do a great job.
5) Backlinks - A very controversial topic. I personally think web2.0 are useless to do anything other than dilute your stronger links. You can build your own network which I'm just experimenting with myself. I see some businesses that have been rankings nearly a decade with very small but powerful PBNs. Other guys where 40% of their links are from the BBB, another 30% of their links are paid directory links, then some smaller links and they dominate their niche. Overall what I'll say is this. The last thing you want is most your links being bought packages from forums. So try to build some type of whitehat foundation. Then afterwards start adding in your stronger links. And just keep going till the site hits #1.
6) Reviews - A truly never ending feat. We started off buying reviews 3 years ago when glowing reviews was around and regardless of what people say that helped us A LOT. The ROI on those first 30 reviews or so was HUGE. These days we've gotten much better at overdelivering, knocking down our price a couple hundred bucks and using various other methods to get people to leave reviews. It's actually not hard once you learn it but it took us like a year just to learn and get consistent at it. The way I see it, EVERY SINGLE REVIEW is a small piece of gold being added to a businesses bank. And business owners need to realize that. They need to understand the lifetime value of just 1 review. How much it's really worth. And once they / you understand this it suddenly becomes much easier to get them.
However, I still have to say, I got blackhat in my roots when it comes to reviews. I only do legit reviews after a site has been around for a bit. One thing I recommend, which is not professional but works like a charm is to BOOST a new site with fake reviews. Buy a bunch of local proxies for a new site. You gotta find good proxies from your area. Then I will use 20-30 proxies, set up gmails and yahoos (or buy them), add pictures and everything then not touch those accounts for a couple months. I just keep renewing the proxies on those accounts. Then I come back at a later time and use those accounts to leave reviews on G local, insider pages, merchant circle, yahoo, anywhere I can except for Yelp. Just keep in mind I only do this as a booster to help get traffic. Once the traffic comes in then you use your real customers to do them for you.
Reviews are EXTREMELY important. I really can't stress what they do for ROI and conversions. Reviews bring your business to LIFE on the web. At least 60-70% of the calls we get the first thing the customer always says is, "I was online, saw your reviews and was very impressed". People don't realize it, but great reviews act as an ICE BREAKER for people to CALL YOU. It's almost like they need to call just to compliment you on your reviews. And this is 1 area I pride myself in. In our main industry, we have and will always have more reviews than every single one of our competitors in our state. It makes our competitors mad. And we have 1 asshole who won't stop trying to catch up but we always keep our pace a bit faster than his. If he does 3 reviews in a month we do 5-6. The's the only bad thing I can say about having the most reviews. There comes a point where you're no longer doing them for money... but it becomes more of an ego thing. Like we no longer count our competitors reviews we mark the dates down in excel. We keep track of the frequency. Cause competitors will get slick and the second our reviews slow down they'll drop like 5 in 2 weeks. But sometimes I'll let them gain an edge. Like rather than do 5 like they did I might do 3 to let them get 2 reviews closer to us. I notice when you do this their ego tends to deflate a bit, they start slacking like, "yeh, we're catching up"! Then we wait a couple weeks and slam them back twice as hard. It's almost like "review boxing". You let your opponent punch you twice, tire them out a bit, then bob and weave and uppercut.
7) Yelp, Angies List, Yahoo, Yellow pages, etc - To keep it short, make sure you have nice profiles. Like on Yelp we have an awesome profile same as angies list. And ideally you also wanna dominate in these areas as well. But we leave angies list for our competitors. Same with yellow pages. Those are probably the only 2 places we haven't dominated mainly cause it's just not possible to dominate every place on the web. We know our competitors get more leads of Angies List than we do. But we're cool with that cause we get more leads on Yelp, G Local, Yahoo, etc. And also keep in mind that it's wise to drop PBN links to your Yelp page. Use it like a parasite. Our Yelp page just popped up on page 2 of Google for the first time in 3 years. When I saw that I started dropping PBN links to it. And now I'm trying to get that page up on page 1.
8) Youtube videos - Lots of well made geo-targeted YT videos will help a lot. You don't need 100's but it's nice to have like 30-50 videos somewhere on page 1 for long tail keywords and even a few primaries. We have a random video on page 1 for one of our most competitive primaries. I have no idea why cause I never built links to that 1 video. But for 3 years now that video has been bouncing between positions 8-12. It's always on page 1. Always on the bottom. But it's got that sexy huge thumbnail and for some reason never drops off page 1.
There's a lot of other things you can do. But in the end I'd say the most important thing you can have is your site and most of your long tails in the top 3, G local rankings and lots of reviews. We use to dominate like that and the leads were pouring in. You can rank for all your primaries but when you have all those long tail pages in the top 3 that's really when the money starts to pour in.
Until 1 day our sites just dropped, most our local packs got pulled and our main link supplier vanished. Ever since then we've been trying to gain our position back as one of the top 3 authority sites. For some reason, it's nowhere as easy as it use to be in 2013/early 2014. We've been making progress especially this last week but it hasn't been easy. And we have keywords ranking on page 1 but we're not the authority anymore. Our 8 year old competitor with 500 pages of spun content took the #1 position back. I still don't know how the fuck the guy does it. We've changed most of our spun pages to manual content. We've been doing some heavy backlinking. Only thing I can think of is his actual theme. His site loads 3 times faster than ours. Its 670kb while we're around 2.2mb. And we're gonna bring those #'s down but I'm having a hard time believing our site speed is playing that big a role. We were able to outrank him 1-2 years ago. Maybe Google takes site speed more important these days. Maybe it's something else but I can say for a fact Local SEO ain't easy.
You do this shit for a couple years, get good results, make a lot of money, feel like you know the game. Then shit hits the fan, Google throws you in circles and you become a mouse chasing its tail. Or sometimes thats how it feels.
The best advice I can really give is never give up. And try to put things into perspective.
A lot of guys on here think in terms of "ranking for local keywords". Which isn't hard. It's really not hard to grab a few top positions for a few low search keywords. But really dominating an industry online, being able to run a full time business from it, keep a consistent volume of high leads coming in everyday.... that's another story altogether. Like there are days where we get a good volume of calls. Mondays are always the best day for us. We tend to get more leads on monday and tuesday then every other day in the week combined.
And that's something that's always driven me insane. Like this monday for our main site got 22 clicks and 7 calls. Tuesday we got 4 calls. Wednesday we got 2 calls. Thursday we get 18 clicks and 0 calls. Today we got 1. Saturdays and Sundays are always slow for us too. We may get 1 or 2 calls this weekend max. And it's days like yesterday that drive me fucking crazy. Like... "I've been doing this 3 1/2 years and there should NEVER be 1 day in the entire week where we go without getting calls". At the same time, I look at my rankings and think, "40% of our primaries are in the top of page 1... we even got 1 primary ranking nationally... youtube videos... blah blah blah" so our rankings aren't that bad. But WHY THE FUCK does traffic always take a nose dive on thursday?
I know most people get their checks on friday/saturday and they don't clear till the end of the weekend. So they're ready to spend on mondays. But still. I know my top competitors are getting calls on thursdays. Even if it's just a few their phones are definitely ringing. And that's what keeps driving me forward.
-BB
