2023 Local SEO for MultiLocations & Franchises by Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide
Bernard Huang
We hosted Andrew Shotland of Local SEO Guide. Andrew is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to local SEO. And he did not disappoint.
Andrew covered:
Does “near me” in a title tag work for local queries?
Determining search intent
When do you need hyper-local content?
Optimizing GBP & local strategy
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About Andrew Shotland:
Andrew is the CEO of LocalSEOGuide.com, a leading SEO consultancy specializing in Multi-Location and B2B SaaS SEO for over 15 years.
Andrew is the editor of the Local SEO Guide blog, which includes their definitive Local SEO Ranking Factors study. He has been a regular contributor to SearchEngineLand and co-founder of BayAreaSearch.org, the association of Bay Area search marketing professionals.
Andrew has over 20 years of experience in the Internet. He was a founding member of NBC’s Internet group and former GM of NBC.com. He helped start Insider Pages, a pioneering local-social search engine, which was acquired by CitySearch in 2006.
Follow Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/localseoguide/
Read the transcript
Andrew: So this isn't just franchise location, this is any multi-location s e o, but we, we do a lot of work in franchises. So we added the word franchise cause it helps with SEO. All right, so here we go. So first of all, just a little bit about me, actually. Travis told you all about me. But I like to say my claim to fame is I've done SEO for Bing Maps if you can believe it.
About ten years ago, Bing Maps could not get indexed in Google. Cuz it was probably one of the most complicated web applications in the world at the time. And I've also done SEO for The Onion, so I like that, that kind of that breadth.
So we so there's a bunch of different types of searches, and in particular, we look a lot at local searches, and in general, these are the types that we see.
There's this near me search, like pizza near me. There's service plus your town name. So let's say a plumber in Pleasanton, California, and there's just a service like a 24 7 emergency plumber. And for the purposes of this next section, we're gonna talk about near me query. So I, you've all seen these, these kind of clunky title tags that show up in Google, best trendy restaurants near me.
And it, I'd say, around 2015 is when that. It started to really be a thing we could reliably add near me to a title tag and or to a webpage, and suddenly, we'd get an extra few percentage points of traffic. And so we wanted to look at it in 2023 and kind of say, okay, does this still work? Is it still worth doing?
And so we did a big data analysis of this thing. So. There are a ton of near-me queries. This is SEM rush data for various near-me queries. It's millions a month. And this is happening, right, because Google both have, it kind of forces it and Google suggests, and if you're on the phone, it also tends to show you near, like forced near me queries when you do a search from a phone.
So there's a lot of traffic to be had targeting near-me queries if, in fact, targeting near-me queries work. So what we did was we, we we have access to some software that basically can measure the significance, the statistical significance of large data sets. And so we work with TRAJECT data, which is basically a rank tracking or s tracking company.
And so we basically looked at queries in a hundred different cities. Across 10,000 search results. And we wanted to, we put all this data into our system to measure the significance of near me in the results titles. And the way that works is it looks at all the data in a SERP doesn't have all the data about every site; it just has all the data in the SERP.
So the title, the snippets, the URL, and the rankings, and then it kind of comes back and says, this is what's important. It's what's not. And so this is what we found the, the big blue bars or teal bars or whatever that color is that's significance. And the red one means it's not significant. And so the bigger the blue bar, the more significant it is.
So the number one factor, or at least the most significant factor, is the city where the searcher is located in the title. So for near me query, so. And if you look down this list, I'm not gonna read all of them. We'll give this to you afterward so you can go through all of them. But what we really were interested in was how significant it is to have the words near me in the title tag, and what you can see, there's some. There's some significance.
The kind of middle set of results in here are all contains near me or near. And so what we found is that actually, yes, putting near me in the title tag can work, but it's far more important to have the city where the user is located. For near me. So not necessarily where they're searching, but where they're located.
Cuz near me implies it's near me. We also noticed that having overly long title tags was a slightly negative factor. You'll see a lot of SEO tools and SEO gurus say, Hey, you need to have a very, like, you can't have a title tag over, let's say, 65 characters or something. But that's. In general, we found that to be false over time.
It's it's only if you want the whole title tag to display in a search result on a desktop, pretty much. But what we found is you can have super long title tags, and they ranked us fine. Not for every query, but they're fine. But for near-me queries, it seems to be a slight negative. We also just tried things where we changed the title.
So like, we took a home care services company, and we added the city and state to their title tag. And what you can see is that they instantly improved their rankings. These aren't necessarily for near-me queries, but they totally make sense. It's kind of a duh, like, yeah, add the geo information to your title tags and you're good.
When but when we also when added the t the city and state identifiers and the page title, we saw an instant bump in rankings for near-me queries. So again, not necessarily that you have to use near me in the title tag, although it couldn't hurt, but you definitely have to add the city, and you should probably add the state.
So for this little study, the takeaway is really that the best title tag contains a city and a state in it. Using also the words near you. Don't say near me; you can say near you; you can just say near the city. One thing to note for near-me queries, it's very hard to overcome searcher location.
So so, if you're 10 miles away from the searcher, They're doing a near-me search. You're, and there's a lot of competitors in between you and them. You're less likely to rank for that versus if you're if you're very close to that searcher. So you have to take in so, so, we have this conversation with clients all the time where they're like, oh, I wanna rank for number one of X in the city.
And we're like, Hey, it's a big city. You're gonna rank number one for that close to your location, but the farther away you get from your location, you're less like, it's gonna be more challenging because someone else is gonna rank for that cuz they're closer to that location. So targeting your meet queries can work, but it may not be effective if the target user is not currently in your city.
There are also some very obvious ways to set up your pages to target your meet queries. So, as an example adding internal linking to the page you're targeting with near in the anchor text using near in the copy of the page. And I'll; this is like the canonical or a canonical version of a near-me page.
This is a what we'll call a national near me page on Door Bet DoorDash. You can see the title tags are restaurants near me. The u r L is restaurants near me. The H one is restaurants Near Me. It has some geo-targeted information in the middle. But Google is gonna see probably Mountain View, where I see Pleasanton.
So that kind of stuff is not necessarily relevant. And you can see at the bottom right, or actually, yeah, the bottom right. They're like totally like spamming the anchor text with near me. TripAdvisor also has a page like this. That was probably the first. The big page I saw on Google for a big site that did this kind of thing.
And it's funny; it's the same page as it was seven years ago. It just looks a little, the colors are different, so you should check those out. All right, so now let's talk about how to use a multi-location SEO strategy to capture more clicks and, and so So as I said before, like when it comes to local search, you have to figure out how to target what the intent of the queries are, cuz that's gonna inform what kind of pages or content you have to target, have to use to target.
So, as an example, roofing Florida, or Roofing Tampa, Tampa, Florida, those that kind of. Query signal, local intent. I'm looking for a roofer or roofing in this in Florida, right? But roof replacement or replace a roof or whatever those are, those may be local, but they're more national. Meaning Google is probably gonna think, hey, maybe you're just looking for like a video or information on how to replace a roof or how much it costs, that kind of thing.
So you have to, before you decide on your strategy for your site, you have to figure out what the intent is. Is this local or national? And do I need to create pages for it? Which kind of pages? So at a high level, this is the ideal multi-location website. You've got national pages to capture national search intent.
You've got local pages to capture local search intent. So let's just say it's home services company roofer. So you'd probably have a national service page, meaning like roof repair.com. You'd have national content like. How do you repair a roof? You might have a national near me page, like that DoorDash page, so roof repair near me.
And then, to capture the local intent, you'd have this classic state city location page and maybe a local service page to capture all the different types of searches. Someone looking in a state, someone looking in a city, someone looking in a specific location, and someone looking for you might have multiple services, so you might want to have a page for roof repair, you might wanna have a page for gutter repair, that kind of thing.
And then you have to fake. So that's the kind of set, generally recommended setup. There are lots of little nuances in there, but in general, if you have a site like this, you can do pretty well in multi-locations. One of the things we've noticed over time is a lot of sites have store locators that are search-only, meaning you find a store and you go in; it's just a search box.
There are no clickable links to get to states and cities. We looked at the top 50 retailers in SEM Rush, and those that had search-only locators tended to rank for about half as many keywords as those that had locator-plus location pages like clickable, a clickable hierarchy. And that's probably because of internal linking factors.
Internal links are important for SEO, and not having a clear navigatable path to get to these location pages is probably a negative factor. And so, before you do anything, I would make sure you have a crawlable store locator. This is an example of a client site where we fixed this problem.
This is a H Refs data. And what you can see is that the Orange line shows before and after. We fixed internal linking to location pages. And you can see, just crank things right up. It doesn't happen every time, but most of the time. So. The first thing we wanna do is check the intent of the search queries.
How do you check for local intent? And we're pretty simplistic about here, local intent. So if the city, if the query, the search result has a local pack, or it has city state results, like in the titles, in the search results, if it has those, it has local intent. If there's local. Data, like a state or a city in the suggested searches, and that dropdown in the middle it probably has local intent.
If it doesn't have those, it probably doesn't have local intent. If the search query has local intent, then you need local pages. If it doesn't, then you don't need local pages. So I'll show you an example. Last year we did a project with a big car national, like find a car, buy a car site.
And they came to us because they wanted to rank better for cars, for sale queries, for all different kinds of cars. So like the 2022 Honda Prius or Toyota Prius for sale, that kind of thing in Las Vegas. And their question was, how do they do that? Cuz they were planning on making a page for every location in the country for every model, make and model.
And so we figured out there were 16,528 make and model year, relevant make and model year queries. And then. You know, if you just took the top 200 cities, you can say, okay, that's a lot of pages, right? And as we know, when you create a lot of pages in SEO, they better be good pages. They better be relevant, or you can actually damage your site.
So we proposed we do a project where we look at five cities and see if see what the intent of these queries looked like. What we found was across, what was this? This is about 80,000 queries. What we found was every brand except for Honda; less than 5% of the results were local in intent across all these search results.
And we used 5% as, like, just an arbitrary cutoff. And so, What we found was most of the time when you're doing the searches, 2022 Toyota Prius for sale, what you saw was sites like edmonds.com, national sites, or the manufacturer like toyota.com. So not a lot of local dealer sites. And so And so what we decided was, okay, this, these are national queries.
You need to have national content. You don't need a page for every location. You can make a page for every location because someone who types the city like. Cars for sale, x cars for sale in Las Vegas might be more likely to get might be more likely to get a local page, but nine times out of 10, they, they didn't.
So so, we said, Hey, let's, let's just create national pages here. We saved them a lot of time and money, and in fact, that's what they did. And if you look at their traffic right now, it's their for-sale traffic is up significantly. Not because we're geniuses or anything. They just like had the right strategy.
We have the right methodology. Oh, and here we go. This is the, this is the data. So when they launched these pages, their traffic went up about 25%. So pretty good. Another quick way to figure out local intent is just to look at the results in a, in a, in a SERP, and you can see just by who ranks that it's local or not.
So as an example, this is a home services company we did some analysis for, and you can see on the left for na for national results. You get sites like Pinterest and HOWS and Amazon, but when it's local, you get stuff like Angie and Yelp and HomeAdvisor. So. You can pretty much eyeball intent just by looking at who's ranking for stuff over like a handful of queries.
By the way, I just, I have to keep mentioning trajectory data here. Traject is our data partner, and they give us all this data for free, so I'm obligated to say they're awesome, even though they are awesome. So basically, the takeaways for this figuring out intent is essentially you need to do this work before you launch your site or launch your pages.
And you need to have a system that's flexible. So as Google changes intent, cuz we know Google will change serpent intent over time that you can pivot. So you wanna monitor this stuff, and the minute we start seeing local pages in the search results, then you're gonna wanna start to generate those pages.
So let's talk about some, just some random things about multi-location seo that you can do. So, location pages are like the ones on your site and are kind of the main lever you could pull. We did a project for a big retailer. About a year and a half ago, when they wanted to generate a dis, they wanted to identify a billion dollars more in revenue from local search.
And so, we looked at 10 million SERPs across 40 e-commerce, their top 40 revenue categories in 5,000 markets. And we analyzed all the location pages of the competitors that were outranking them. And what we found was that Those sites tended to outperform others. The key thing they had was links to national categories and services.
Everything else was kind of, A little noisy. But that stood out. So as an example, target at this time ranked really well across the country for video game stores near me. And what we realized was every one of the location pages linked to a video game category pitch. So their location page didn't target video games; it just had a link.
And so, We implemented this on the on the client site, this and a lot of other things. And saw extraordinary growth from them. Then they were a big brand, and so they just have to kind of sneeze, and they can see extraordinary growth. But this project became their top performing s e o project like ever.
So some other things you can add to your location pages. So category links if you can. Get market-specific content. So like reviews or neighborhood info, sometimes points of interest can help topically relevant images. Strangely enough, for that truck driving school we worked with, we found that all the other guys that were winning in local packs had pictures of trucks on their location page.
So we added a picture of a truck to their location pages, and it actually worked. Then if you have location plus service pages below your location page. So let's say it's like plumbers in Houston, and then you have, like, I don't know, unclogged sink in Houston, that kind of thing. Then you'll wanna have links to those pages from your location page.
Pretty obvious. Another thing that comes often, particularly for franchises, is whether or not you should have a national website or websites, one website for each location. So a very common setup for franchises is there's a national franchise, let's say I don't know, kfc.com, and then there's a there are local websites like K F C, Houston, K F C, New York.
And so the problem with having multiple websites is it's complicated to manage; it's expensive to manage. Standardization is harder. And you're like herding kittens, which you're already doing with, with multi-location. So one of our clients came to us and said, Hey, we wanna, we think we, we, we may wanna merge these things into one national site, but we don't wanna kill our s e o.
So how do we figure that out? So basically, what we did was we looked at all the keywords they wanted to target. I think, let's just say it was like a hundred thousand keywords. And we looked at, in every case, does the, who ranks better, the national site or the the local franchisee sites. And what we found was for, and these are all non-brand queries for every for almost every query, the national brand site.
Outranked significantly outranked the local franchisee sites almost every time. So that gave us enough confidence to say, I think if you merge these things correctly into the national site, it'll be a net net positive or at least a net neutral. You're not gonna lose travel. So this is the kind of analysis you need to do to kind of figure that out.
We can't say this will work across the board every time you have to look at the data in every case. Cuz there may be. Some odd factors make it so that the local sites are outright the national site. So here's an example of how we did this for a site called AFC Urgent Care. I think they have, like, I don't remember how many; I wanna say they have like 2000 sites, maybe or something.
2000 locations. Maybe. I'm, maybe that's a little high. But we merged it about two years ago, and what you can see is over time, the organic traffic to them has, has grown. Part of this is because it's just. Transferring the traffic from the local domains over to the national domain. But after, I'd say that effect wore off after about six months.
And no, you can see right now I actually, I haven't updated this thing, but as of January, they were up to, like, you know, kind of the highest level of organic ever. So so, we're big fans of this kind of consolidation, and it makes things a lot easier on the business side for them to have one domain.
So so, just to recap this section, so things you should avoid, like spending time making local content where there's no local intent. Oh. This one I didn't even get into, but we've seen some data for service-area businesses for non-service-area businesses like retailers, where they create location pages where they don't have a location.
It tends not to work. We had a tire retailer client that had a page for every city in the country, even though they didn't have locations in those cities. And those pages get almost no traffic. Basically, our rule of thumb is this, if you have a page and a service that's eligible for a Google business profile, then you can make a page.
If not, you probably shouldn't have a page for that. All right. I'll get a little deeper into that. I think I did this slightly out of order. So when we're getting into hyper-local targeting, You really can. You wanna study how where the potential is in your area, and it could be looking at a city and breaking it down by neighborhood or zip code.
Because as I mentioned, Google doesn't just rank you one spot all over the city. It's every mile or two; it ranks you differently. So you wanna figure out where the areas of opportunity are in that very specific market. So many of you have probably seen these geogrids. There, they're, there are great ways to look at a business and see how you can where you are in a market in different areas and then how you can progress.
So example, this is a client where they were ranking really well in the middle in their physical, physical location. And then we basically added hyper-local pages to their site, and suddenly, they were ranking all over the city. So it really paid off for them. It doesn't work quite this way every time, but this one really did.
So basically, in this case, what you can see is in the case of mosquito authority, right basically you can add a page that that targets, you know, the wherever, so Alliance Ohio or something. And you can instantly, not instantly, but you can improve your ranking. And so sometimes when you're looking to squeeze out a little extra few clicks for, for a client, like you've done everything like this is a great way to go, oh, here's a little more extra we can do.
Let's go after this very niche area. So but there's a, there's a downside to hyperlocal pages. So so, as an example, Home Depot tends to have three hyperlocal pages on its location pages, home services, truck rental, and garden center. If you click on those, they all go to Subpages for a city.
And if you just looked at the s e m rush data, you would say, oh wow, these are great. When they launched them, they suddenly were generating about 50,000 clicks a month which is pretty good. But if you scrub out all of the brand queries, queries containing the word Hope Depot, it only equates to about 8,000 clicks a month.
If this data's accurate. And we see this across the board, especially with sites that have decently, you know, strong brands. When you add these pages, The majority of the traffic cannibalizes existing traffic and fools you into thinking they're really cranking. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't build these pages because.
Even though the truck rental page might not get a lot of SEO traffic, it's a very highly qualified page. And people wanna know about truck rental, so you should have the page regardless. But you need to be cognizant that this may these pages may not be a source of significant net new traffic.
And I think a lot, we see a lot of people kind of ignore this or, or not realize this when they, they launch these things. Let's see. I'm not gonna blow through that. So let's go to just some G B P stuff. I'm not gonna go into extensive, like, here's everything you need to know about Google Business Profile.
I'm gonna go into some very specific things that we've noticed specifically. Behavioral sign, behavioral, I can't even pronounce that. Behavioral signals are something we've been testing for a while. So what? Because it's the one thing that's like Theoretically outside of your control. So you can control links, you can control reviews, you control your images and on-page stuff.
But how can you get people to click on you more or search for you more? Well, it turns out it's not outside of your control if you're sneaky. So we got tired of Let's call them black hats or more aggressive SEOs kind of eating our lunch by using methods that Google would frown upon.
So we did a test. We built a bot that can basically do localized queries and turn it on to a website. So basically, this is a self-storage company in San Diego. And starting the week of April 6th, we had our bot go in from appearing to be indifferent. Locations in San Diego and click and basically search the word storage and then click on our client's G B P in the local pack.
And we did that. We figured out how much, how many searches per month. We, you know, in, on average, these queries were getting. And we did, basically, a lower number than that. Like we didn't wanna we didn't want suddenly to be an overwhelming number of storage queries clicking on this guy. Like, if there's a hundred a month, let's say we did about 10.
For this guy. And within 30 days, they went from number two in their location for storage to number one. And. They didn't do anything else. They didn't get more reviews, they didn't get more links, and they didn't do anything. It's purely because of this behavioral bot thing. So we prove that, and this is a data point of one.
But we did it across enough locations and enough keywords that we're like, yep, this, this kind of works. It's gonna vary by geo and by industry in competitiveness. So low competition, relatively low search queries, and low comp low. I don't even know. Maybe not even in smaller markets, but in some markets, it seems to work better than others, but it's definitely a thing.
Let's see. What else can we tell you? Definitely, I would optimize the crap out of your services. So go into G B P and add, add, add as many services as you can. We see it have us; we see it has an impact. Oh, I'm not gonna go through all these. You can read these at your leisure. One of the things that's important with Google Business profiles is Google tends to automatically overwrite your data often.
So this is a client that has thousands of locations, and we created a Slack bot that basically called, we call it, to squirrel, that basically will every day report on changes to Google business profiles for location groups. As you can see, on Wednesday, May 17th, this client had 2061 Google updates, meaning Google changed the data on 2000 of their GPS.
And so, in this case, we just downloaded a CSV and looked at what all the changes were. Basically deleted the ones we didn't like and kept the ones we liked. I uploaded it back to G B P in about a minute, and the updates were, were accepted or rejected. So if you're working with a lot of locations, our recommendation is you need to have a system like this because.
Or else you, maybe you get an email that you missed, or it goes to, like, a shared email. Or you just miss it completely, and you need to stay on top of this. So self-serving shameless promo, the link at the bottom goes to our site squirrel ai. We're in alpha testing for this thing. It's a totally free thing, but if you want to check this out for your clients, just hit up the forum and contact me, and we'll send you an invite, and you can use it for yourself.
All right. The last thing I wanna talk about is ai cuz it's trendy, and we're trendy. So so, can you use AI for SEO? Of course, you can. And we're big proponents, or at least proponents, of using AI for templated pages, specifically location pages. We don't think you should be. You should be testing it, but I think AI, using it for resource content, is a lot harder.
Versus, hey, like, find a plumber near me in, in Las Vegas pages. So but you need to have a system that's kind of bulletproof or as bulletproof as it can be. So I'll talk you through how we do it. So what we do is we train our AI model on well, ranking documents. Meaning well ranking pages. So if it's, if it's local plumber pages, we're gonna find the top ranking pages in every market for the keywords we wanna target.
We're gonna put them into our model. We're gonna train the ai, say this is what a good page is like. We might supplement that data with clear scope. Data, right? Because they also have like, oh, here's how you know, 50 other pages. What, what's relevant? Then when you create your prompts, you need to chunk them, meaning break them down into sections of the page.
So you wanna write, like, write a paragraph about. Emergency plumbing or unclogging toilets or whatever the hell it's gonna be. And you need to kind of iterate on those prompts to get the right answer that you want. So it can take some time. So I would say, like, a couple of months ago, we created about 10,000 location pages for a client.
I would say it took the machine learning engineer probably three days to come up with a format that we liked. Okay. Based on, like, just doing all this stuff. We also added we took proprietary data from the biz. And we also use Google search console data. So what are these pages already ranking for? Can we goose those things?
And again, we put those, those pa those words into clear scope and just kind of get some data on that. And then the big lift on these things is basically checking them. So we have human beings; we run them through fact-checkers and grammar checkers and plagiarism checkers and AI detection checkers.
But then the last step is we have humans review them. So for these 10,000 pages, I can't remember how many days it took a team of three people to edit them, but it was several days and several mind-numbing days, right? Cuz it's location pages. But you can't do that. So the. The cost of doing location pages with AI is significantly lower than having a human who's a good writer.
Write them and make them unique for each one. It may not be worth it every time because maybe, you know, you should always start with just insert location here and start that way cuz it's easy, fast. But sooner or later, you're gonna wanna differentiate these pages cuz they'll just tend to perform better.
And that's when you need human beings. I've just been doing a lot of thinking about what AI for local is gonna look like, and I'm, right now, it looks like, you know, if you look at Google's stage, it just looks like, Hey, here's a local pack, and some links and some crappy recommendations written by a bot.
But I think ultimately where it's going is it's gonna be this kind of like a version of I V R where you put in a query. And the search engine just starts asking you questions about what, honing in on what you're looking for, and then and then finding you a local site or local business that actually has what you're looking for.
That I, I can't imagine it won't. So either, Hey, go to Amazon and buy this, or, Hey, go to Kohl's in Salem, Oregon and buy this. I, I, that seems like the logical endpoint for, for local searches like this. And obviously, they'll wanna get in if it's Google, they'll wanna get in the middle of the purchase somehow.
So to me, it doesn't look any different than SEO. People also ask type stuff where you're trying to anticipate what questions the bot's gonna ask, and can you have content that addresses them? In short, I think ai, seo o for AI chatbots, and stuff is, is pretty, gonna be pretty similar to AI for Google as it is SEO o for Google right now.
I don't know. Of course, we're trying to figure that out now, given the systems that are available, they change a lot, but so far, we're not seeing a super significant difference in queries. And how and what ranks. That's my little guru take on AI for local. All right, so I'm not gonna go through the key takeaways again; you can look at that in your ledger.
I'd rather just move right into me shutting up and listening to you guys. Let's so let's open it up for, I dunno, Travis. IsAre there any questions? Awesome. I haven't really been left.
Travis: Yeah, we got a couple of questions to kind of kick it off and also drop in your questions in the q and a box. But the first question is, should businesses post regularly to their Google Business profiles?
Andrew: We think they, I don't know about regularly. But you should definitely have a post in there. What the one they're really easy to do. So, in fact, again, shameless promotion, that squirrel tool that we built has a way to automate Google business posts to location groups. So you just pop in a promotion and an image, and it just posts them.
So And the reason why they're good to do is most of the time, your G B P shows up in Google. When someone's searching for your brand, they already know you exist. That's like probably 90% of the time you show up. So they're more prone to click on you. But the Google business profile itself is just not super sexy.
So having like a video on there, having a post on there that's like, Hey, sale today, or whatever it's gonna be, you're gonna get an extra click or two out of it, and it really gives minimal effort. And those clicks will convert. So we do this like, so we work with Sam's Club. So we do a post for them; I think it's like twice a month or whatever their event is.
So right now they're, they're, they're having some sale and so we'll put a post up. And again, these posts don't do much, but they generate enough clicks based on the effort that it's worth doing it. And for some of our clients, Even if they get a handful of clicks from one, they often get a conversion out of it.
So it pays for itself. Nice. That said, you need to have a pretty, pretty good system because you don't wanna be going back to your client every week and be like, Hey, can I get an image? Like so just make 10 images at the start of the year and use those, and they're easy to do. That's my take on the post.
Awesome.
Travis: And then we got a question from Anonymous. They run a real estate management company in a city struggling to show in the top five for the query real estate management companies in Citi. They have an updated Google business profile with many citations from other listings. What should they try, or what should they try to improve their rankings?
Andrew: Very hard to say without looking at the search results on your site. But so so I think without knowing anything, I would first look at who's ranking at the top and try to reverse engineer why we think they're ranking. And it's probably some combination of their physical location and the content on their website.
And links to their site. There may also be a review factor in there or something, but I don't know; again, we'd have to look at it. But a B2B query like real estate management, I can't imagine. Well, I don't know. I'd have to look at it, but I, I wouldn't be surprised if it's all links, but, Th that's something like, hit me up.
I'm happy to, Hey, we're on the book, like You Want a Stress Free Strategy session, book a call with me, and I'm happy to spend 15 minutes looking at your thing and seeing if we can quickly figure out B2B seo, by the way, is the best because the competition is. In general, it is a lot lower. And if you're aggressive, you can really move the needle with content and links.
Local b2b is all the same thing. Like there just aren't as many usually aren't as many competitors doing stuff. Awesome.
Travis: Super helpful. And then Brian asked, what tool do you like for making geo
Andrew: grids? So the two tools, the two leading geo grid tools, there's one called Local Falcon and Bright Local, also has a Geogrid.
So those are good. We actually make our own using the trajectory data, but they don't look as cool as theirs. It's just like a hack together, geogrid. So but you can, anyhow, so those are good. I, I can't remember what the, what it costs to run a, a report, but let's say probably like two bucks or something like that.
Travis: Nice. And then Jenna asked, do you recommend putting geo modifiers in a franchise name in order to rank better for Google Business Profiles? Specifically for sabs, not brick-and-mortar locations?
Andrew: Yeah. So you mean, like, instead of calling yourself Speedy Plumber, call you Speedy Plumber Houston, something like that.
Thanks. So, yeah. Yeah, it ab so, so spamming your business name has been a tried and true method for ranking better in local packs and in organic forever. And the guidelines, if I'm up to date on them, Google basically says, use quote unquote, your real-world business name. And so if your real-world business name is.
Speedy Plumbing Houston, why not use it on your on your G B P? Just make sure the landing page that's connected to your G B P calls your location. Speedy Plumbing Houston. Awesome.
Travis: Perfect. And then John Henry asked, should near me pages using geolocation to personalize content based on the user's location, maybe images and not copy.
Andrew: So, Hello, John Henry. If it's the same John Henry, I think it is. Yeah. So they, oh my God, I'm, now I'm nervous. John Henry asked me a question. I'm sorry. I got all flustered. What is it? Should I put images on the location page?
Travis: Yeah, I can reread should near me pages using geolocation to personalize content based on the user's location and maybe images and not copy.
Andrew: Oh, you mean, like, if I'm near the Statue of Liberty, should I have a picture of the Statue of Liberty? That's, yeah, that's what I think. So I, I can't say we've ever tested that. It's kind of interesting. It makes sense cuz we use p o I data often, especially for certain kinds of, like hotels.
Absolutely. And for we're working with a conference, a conference marketplace like, like, like corporate event marketplace right now. And we're creating pages that are like, find a private meeting room near Grand Central Station. And so certainly having a picture of Grand Central Station with alt text, you know, the images called Grand Central Station.
Pretty confident that will help you rank for that query. Perfect.
Travis: And then Brian, this might be the last question, but Brian asked I didn't fully follow the action steps from the cars for sale example you gave earlier. Sure. Can you go over this
Andrew: briefly again? Yeah. So, so what we found was for make, model, year, for sale page queries, you did not need a local page.
You just needed a. 2022 Toyota Prius for sale page, a national page. Because nine times out of 10, Google did not show local results for those queries. If we saw over time that Google started showing local results like a Las Vegas page, that's when we might say, you need to create one of these for every city in the country.
So 2022 Toyota Prius for sale in Las Vegas. Or in New York, but right now, for that particular query, by the way, that date is now like six months old, so maybe it's changed. But right now, we didn't see any benefit to adding the location pages because Google wasn't showing those in search.
Travis: Awesome. Okay. Super helpful. Yeah. That's all the questions we have, Andrew, but everybody, thanks for your time today. Thank you so much, Andrew. And can I give you some time to share anything else you wanted before we get home on their day back?
Andrew: Yeah, so so we've built this tool called Squirrel. It's very weird.
It's it's an SEO productivity tool built entirely inside of Slack. So if you hate Slack, this is not the tool for you. But we use it; we've been using it on our team for about a year. We liked it enough; they were like, I bet other people would like it. So it's totally free. There's a lot of Google business profile connections and Google search console things you can do.
And every month, we're adding new tools. So in August, we're gonna add the ability to generate Looker Studio reports based on your GSC and g P data. So it'd be really powerful. Right now, it has a connection to the search console indexing monitor URL inspector. So you can upload 2000 URLs and instantly see what's going on with them.
You can automatically do Google Business posts. There's a whole bunch of other freaky things in there. So please check it out. We're looking for people just to kick the tires and tell us how much it sucks or how much they love it and give us ideas for new, new products to put in there. So check it out.
