E547: Impactful, unexpected, ROI-driving, and some unusual ways to boost local SEO with Google Business Profile and more.
This is not your standard “add high-quality photos” advice. This is the exact content to make, the language to use, and even a crazy black hat technique that you’ve probably never heard of.
This advice is focused on making the phone ring, not just on getting better rankings.
This stuff will bring you real qualified traffic with local SEO.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/1hn6n2c/if_there_were_only_5_weekly_things_you_could_do/
00:00 Boosting Local SEO 00:33 Reviews Equal Revenue 01:06 Optimizing Money Pages 01:29 Photo Hacks for SEO 01:45 Radius Domination Strategy 02:08 Competitor Price Stalking Strategy 02:40 Psychology and Sales in SEO 03:10 Black Hat Local SEO Advice 05:43 Practical Tips for Local SEO 09:47 Final Thoughts and Conclusion
The Edward Show. Your daily search engine optimization podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
#localseo #localmarketing #seotips #digitalmarketing
"Five weekly things to boost the local SEO. Let's go!" Somebody posted on the Search Engine Optimization subreddit if there were only five weekly things you could do to boost your SEO rankings. "What would they be?" And then in the description, the person wrote, "I own a small home service business. I have a website and 50 Google reviews. What are the top quick things I should focus on weekly for maintaining my SEO rankings?" Blog posts, pictures attached in customer reviews, uploading images to Google Business Profile. What do you recommend? This is my favorite piece of advice. Number one, reviews equal revenue. Don't just collect reviews, turn them into sales tools. After each job, say to the person, "Hey, could you mention the specific problem and the exact solution in your review? It helps others know if we're right for them." So an example is, "The pipe under my sink was leaking badly. John fixed it in 30 minutes and saved me from water damage. These problem solution reviews convert better than just great service or something." Man, that advice is great. Number two, website money pages. Stop wasting time on blogs nobody reads. Create one strong page per service. Include price ranges. These bill trusts. Add timeline. Most jobs done in so-and-so hours. Show payment options. This answers what customers actually care about. Price ranges, timeline, and payment options. Number three, a photo hack that actually works. Before/after photos with prices. Example, kitchen sink unclawed. $149. Upload to Google Business Profile weekly. This pre-qualifies customers and sets price expectations. Number four, radius domination. Pick a three-mile radius around your shop. Dominate it completely before expanding. Use street names in your Google Business Profile posts. An example, just finished a job on Oak Street. Google loves specific location signals. Dominate that three-mile radius around your shop. And number five, another great piece of advice, competitor price stocking strategy. Every week, search your top service like Plumber Phoenix in incognito mode. Call three competitors pretending to be a customer. Note their quote prices, availability, phone response style. Update your Google Business Profile with slightly better offers. For example, same-day service, $50 below market rate. The difference here, we're not just doing, by the way, I've done this myself. It is a great piece of advice. But the difference here, we're not just doing SEO tasks. We're using psychology and sales principles to convert that visibility into actual paying customers. This person gets it. Remember, the goal isn't rankings. The goal is revenue. Every SEO action should directly connect to making the phone ring. You want the real secret while competitors focus on keywords, you'll focus on solving customer objections before they even call. That's how you turn SEO into a sales machine. That top comment, you know, that one didn't have the most upvotes, but I read the top comments, and this actually read most of the comments in this thread, and I felt like that one was the best one. I really, really, really like that one. That's why I read it first. The other comment, the other top comment, some people are calling super spammy. Others are saying this is legendary advice, but this is what it is. It's from this guy, Bill Hartzer, who is a pretty well-known SEO. He says, and I was looking through his blog recently, and all of his blog posts are written by AI, so I stopped reading them. I'm just like, "Oh, well, if this is all written by AI, I don't want to read it." And I feel like it's a pretty bad practice to make all of your personal blog posts written by AI. However, there are people who say that this comment of his in this five weekly things to optimize for a local SEO thread, there are people who are saying that his comment is good. So he says, "Update images in Google Business Profile." That's one. Actually, he only provided four things. Number two, and this one was a really crazy one, whenever you drive to your location, always enter the address in Google Maps and use the driving directions. Number three is, update the homepage on your website, even if it's a small change. Number four, look into doing entity SEO on your current web pages. And entity SEO, in short, it's just kind of looking at the context of a search of a search term, looking behind the keyword, looking further than just the keyword, looking into why somebody is searching that keyword. Entity SEO is great. So the original posts were commented on Bill Hartzer's post, which I just read and said, "When you say location, are you referring to my shop? I work out of my home, but my address is listed as my business location. Should I do this at all times of the day when I'm driving home, even from familiar places? Like, should I actually put the address into Google Maps, even when I'm driving home from familiar places?" And Bill Hartzer said, "Yes, that's the address that Google knows. I'd use driving directions whenever you think of doing it. Whenever you can remember to do it, have others do it as well, with their phones. By the way, I know someone who provides a service where you pay them, and they will drive to your location, along with their 100+ phones, all doing driving directions. This is a little extreme, but there is a reason they are doing this and providing the service. It works. It shows Google that the location is worth noting, so to speak, as people are driving to the locations, also posting your website homepage, even with a small update is helpful. But the 100+ phones going to location. The reason I like the first response over this response is because a first response was very practical advice that anybody can do that really works. And this is, first of all, I actually wonder how well the 100+ phones works. I feel like Google will see such a crazy uptick in velocity of phones all doing the same pattern that it will look suspicious. And Google has very advanced algorithms for detecting this. Maybe one or two might work. But also, if you're logged into Google Maps with your own profile, and you're using your driving directions to go home, Google is going to know that. So, the advice to me doesn't completely make sense. If you have other people do it, that makes more sense. And it does make sense that having people interact and using driving directions and then actually driving to the location, that that would actually boost visibility of a Google business profile. That actually makes sense. But is it practical? Is that practical advice? No, it depends on each person or each business and their bandwidth, so I'll let you decide. I still thought it was interesting enough advice to include it. However, then there was somebody who said, "Don't do this, it's outrageously bad advice. Here are the things to do weekly." New but relevant blog content, social stories and posts linking to the blog content which links to service pages, refresh the service page content on a cyclical basis, a page a week or something, then regularly monitor the site hygiene. Do you have a logical internal link network? Do service pages link to blog posts and vice versa and blogs to blogs? Make sure they're topically related. Make sure no internal links are broken. Make sure they're not URLs that redirect to. Do your images include descriptive alt text? Do your title tags, H1s and on-page copy, match what the page is trying to do. Make it helpful and relevant. And that's more straightforward advice than, you know, drive to your location with a hundred phones that are all doing driving directions. However, the driving directions thing, it's interesting. It is a very interesting piece of advice I had to include it. Here's the last one and this one almost made the top. This almost had the most upvotes in this thread. Here are the five things I focus on weekly for local SEO coming from someone who's helped many home service businesses rank. Number one, Google Business Profile Optimization Update posts weekly respond to all reviews, add new photos of completed jobs. This signals to Google your active and legit and this is very similar to the first one that I read. Number two, location specific content. Create location specific content. Write one blog post per week about problem slash solution specific to your service area, like common your service problems in your city. So insert whatever your services and insert your city. Common your service problems in your city. Number three, local link building. Get listed in local directories and reach out to complimentary businesses, not competitors for collaboration opportunities. Like if you're a plumber, partner with local realtors. That's great advice. Number four, customer review management. Follow up with every customer for reviews and always respond thoughtfully. Ask them to mention specific services slash locations in reviews when possible reviews. Reviews are so, so, so important. And number five, technical SEO maintenance. Check Google search console weekly for errors, optimize image all tags, ensure site speed stays good. The basics matter. I talk about site speed sometimes on the show. I recommend not relying on site speed tools. Instead, test it yourself, have other people who you know, test it, test it across devices and across different networks, not just with your home Wi-Fi, but also with your cell network, test it in different places, have other people test it. That's much better than just actually relying on site speed tools, which lie all the time from my experience. But I thought all of these responses were great, especially the first one and the third one. The second one was interesting. And that is five weekly things to do to boost local SEO rankings. And this is episode 547 of my daily digital marketing podcast, 547 days in a row. What? 547. That's crazy. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. I'm going to talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.
