What's the worst local SEO advice you still see repeated?

sharifawan

sharifawan

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Every niche has advice that stopped being true, and nobody updated it. Local seems to have more than most.

Mine is "post to your GBP daily". Not that it's harmful, but it's given as a ranking instruction when nobody I've spoken to can point to what it actually moved. It's become the thing you do so the checklist has something on it.

Second one, and this is the one that costs people money: treating volume as the goal. More listings, more posts, more of everything, without anyone asking whether the extra ones do anything.

What's yours?
 
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Yeah @blumen geotagging is a classic. Such a waste of money. For me it has to be the 300+ citation packages. Agencies still sell these like they are magic but 90% of those spammy directory sites never even get indexed by google anymore. You really only need the top 10 or 15 core ones and the rest is just noise to make the client report look pretty.
 
do-21000-google-maps-citations-for-gmb-ranking-and-local-seo.webp


Still, some people believe it's a ranking factor.
 
Stuffing services and city names into the GBP name is another one

People still recommend it like it’s a normal optimization even when none of that is in the actual business name. Maybe it gives them a bump, but now you’re also building the listing around something Google explicitly says not to do
 
Proxy_Soxy said:
Stuffing services and city names into the GBP name is another one

People still recommend it like it’s a normal optimization even when none of that is in the actual business name. Maybe it gives them a bump, but now you’re also building the listing around something Google explicitly says not to do
Click to expand...

That one deserves more attention than it gets, and the cost people name isn't the main one.

Everyone talks about suspension risk. The quieter problem is that the business name is the field everything else copies. Aggregators pull it, other directories pull it from them, and six months later the stuffed version is sitting on entries nobody touched. Now the real name and the keyword-stuffed name are both in circulation, and neither agrees with the other.

So even when it works, you've made every other listing you own inconsistent with the one you optimized. And unpicking it means going back to entries you never created.
 
Someone gave me advice when building links you should prefer on the number of link and I tried but then I asked for some suggestions then I got to know the quality of the link matters more than the quantity of the link after that I tell everyone the same advice I got on second time.
 
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