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.
 
Local SEO is easy to rank. Just put some keywords here and there and boom!
 
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...
You need a DBA to do that. And having keywords in the GBP business name does help. One of my Rank & Rent GMBs is ranking for "City Plumbing service" just because of the name and some reviews.

To OP, GBP posting, GEO-tagged images. They don't work anymore, but people still add these in their checklist.
 
For me it’s stuffing keywords into review replies. People still write those long awkward responses thanking the customer for "the best transmission repair in Austin" thinking it helps local search. tbh it does absolutely nothing for rankings and just looks incredibly spammy to actual customers reading them...
 
Probably chasing search volume. Im doing some local SEO work right now and honestly some of the lower volume “price” keywords make way more sense than broad keywords with big volume.
 
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