“Who has X near me?”

This customer FAQ has become all the more important since 2020, with the public relying heavily on the Internet to help them remotely source goods and services while spending as little time as possible on business premises.

Google gets this, and is taking one step after another to position itself as the intermediary for this foundational query. Becoming the “transaction layer of the Internet” is how my friend and colleague David Mihm of Near Media describes Google’s aims when it comes to online shopping and the role they plan to play in it. As local businesses everywhere have scrambled to implement e-commerce and delivery features, Google has been very busy, too, with its own developments.

Perhaps the simplest of all these opportunities to get started with is Google My Business Products — a sort of virtual window shopping interface that can really spruce up your listings. Located in eligible GMB dashboards and with an output that’s visible on several local search interfaces, this feature could not be easier to use.This illustrated tutorial will walk you through adding your most important products and services to Google My Business Products, building your confidence that you are keeping apace with local search expanding to encompass local shopping search.

Who can and can’t add Google My Business products to their listings?

If you sign into your Google My Business dashboard, and you see a tab in the left menu for “products” you are eligible, with the exception of the products listed here that you can’t upload.

If you lack the “products” link but see that your competitors are using it, it’s likely that they have a Google My Business category you’re missing. Use the GMB Spy Chrome Extension to see all of the competitor’s GMB listing categories so that you can consider adding whatever is necessary to prompt the “products” option to appear in your dashboard.

Google’s documentation of this feature states that it’s intended for small-to-medium local businesses, and that they prefer large, multi-locations brands to provide product data through Local Inventory Ads. It would be helpful if Google would update this page to give a numeric cutoff between a medium-sized business and a large chain.

Meanwhile, if you’re marketing a restaurant, please note that Google prefers you to use the popular dishes and menu functions for showcasing your offerings, rather than the products option. Also for restaurants and service-oriented businesses, be aware that adding items to the products function will delete any meal or service menus that have been created for you by a third party. You’ll need to recreate them with the aforementioned, Google-based menu function or the Services tab in your GMB dashboard.

What can be added as a product to Google My Business listings?

You can list the following as products:

• Merchandise

• Virtual inventory, like software

• Services

There’s a strong argument to be made for listing your services as products, in fact, because they are more visible and have those strong, linked calls-to-action. As far as I’ve seen, Google has no problem with you having both products and services listed, so you can do both!

How to add products to your Google My Business dashboard in 10 easy steps

To keep yourself organized, create a spreadsheet (or make a copy of this freebie I created for you) containing all the products you plan to list, and include a field in it for:

• Product image

• Product name

• Category

• Price

• Description

• Button

• Link

BEFORE YOU BEGIN: Note that the last product you add will be the one that shows up first on your profile. So, save the best for last. Made a mistake? You can delete a product and re-add it as the newest item, which will make it show first, or you can edit a product in some minor way and the edit will also trigger re-ordering of the product lineup.

Now you’re ready to get going!

Step 1: Sign into your Google My Business dashboard for the listing you want to add products to, and click on the Products tab in the left-hand navigation menu:

Step 2. This will bring up a popup telling you how many people saw your listing last month and prompting you to add your products. Click the “get started button”.

Step 3. This brings up the simple wizard for adding your products

Step 4: Begin by adding a 1200 x 900 photo representing your first product. I recommend using original photos and graphics rather than stock photos, and it can make a bold visual statement if you choose to overlay the name of the product in text on the image.

Step 5: Give your product a name:

Step 6: Create a category for the product. If this is the very first product you’ve added to your listing, there will be nothing in the dropdown. As you add more products and categories, though, the categories you’ve previously created will appear in the dropdown and you can select them to apply to the next product you add, or you can create further, new categories.

Step 7. Optionally, enter the price. You can either enter a single price, or use the little grey toggle on the right to enter a minimum and maximum price range. Don’t use letters or symbols in this field or Google will reject them. Our product pricing structure at Moz is complex, with special offers and different pricing for monthly vs. annual customers, so we chose to leave this field blank, but if your pricing is simple and not subject to frequent change that would require you to be updating pricing on a regular basis, it’s a good idea to add it.

Step 8: Add a product description of up to 1000 characters. It’s optional to do this, but you should definitely make the most of this opportunity to talk about the benefits of the product. I included a short explanation of the Moz Pro product, plus a customer’s testimonial.

Step 9: Add a call-to-action button from among the choices of Learn More, Buy, Order Online, or Get Offer. There’s also the option not to add a button, but why forego the chance to bring customers from your listing to your website? In the “link for your button” field, add the URL of the page you want this button to take the customer to on your website. If you want to measure how your product listings are performing, use UTM tagging in the link you enter, and you can track engagement in Google Analytics, though not in GMB Insights, sadly.

Step 10: Take a second look at all you’ve entered to be sure you’re happy with your entry and then hit the blue “save” button. Google will then show you the product in your dashboard:

And as you add more products and product categories, you can see them tabbed in the “Products” section of your GMB dashboard:

And, presto! Within minutes to a couple of hours, you should see your products appearing on your Google Business Profile when you search for you brand name (or brand name + city, if Google is a bit confused):

Customers can click on the “view all” link to see all the products you’ve listed:

Or, they can explore using the product categories you’ve created. Look at how big and bold these category buttons are, highlighting key offerings of your business!

And it will also show up on the Google Local Finder version of your GMB listing, though as far as I have seen, not in the Google Maps version of your listing:

The big question: Should you use GMB products?

Can and should are never the same thing. You’ve just learned whether you can upload your inventory via GMB products and you can definitely do it! But to determine whether you should invest the time in doing this, consider all of the following:

Maybe, yes!

1. Adoption of Google My Business products is so low as of yet, that if you add your products, it will really make your listing fuller than the bulk of your competitors in most markets. This is a definite competitive difference maker.

2. If you’ve got the ability to take good quality photos or have a graphic designer in-house who can efficiently design some imagery for you, product photos add a very appealing visual element to your listings. If you’d like to make a rather plain listing more inviting, this is a great option.

3. If you have an inventory that’s relatively stable, meaning you won’t be having to continuously editing existing product listings to avoid customer letdown when items become unavailable, that’s a good bet. If your pricing on stable products changes, you may want to opt out of showing prices.

4. If you need to drive any additional traffic you can to your website and shopping cart, this is surely an opportunity. Added bonus that this traffic is likely to be qualified traffic, because the searcher is looking for something particular.

5. If you’ve not yet been able to invest in a full e-commerce solution for your local business, consider GMB products a first step towards alerting shoppers that you have inventory for sale, even if you can’t yet fulfill their desire to buy it online.

6. Finally, a “yes” vote on adding products to your GMB listings can be consistent with your company’s culture of empathy. Regardless of where you do business, your community is full of elders, neighbors with serious health issues, and unvaccinated small children who are staying at home for safety’s sake for as long as the pandemic is with us. You can think of GMB products as a kind of virtual window shopping for these valued community members, and if you can connect your product showcase with curbside pickup or home delivery, your efforts are making your town a more caring and better-resourced place to call home. Use the description field and buttons to let people know how you can get your products safely into their hands.

Maybe, no!

1. If your inventory changes constantly, you’ll need to evaluate whether you have the internal resources to regularly edit your product set in the GMB dashboard.

2. If your inventory is large, you may not want to add every single product. Instead, you could add a representative product for each major category of goods, and write the description to make it clear that you have a wide selection of this type of item.

3. Mobile phones can take great pictures these days, but if your photos just don’t look great, it could be off-putting to customers seeing low-quality images. You might want to hold off on adding products until you learn to take photos that create a professional impression of the quality of your goods and services.

4. Some business owners may feel qualms about Google’s increasing involvement between them and their customers, and prefer to work on their own website rather than devoting additional resources to Google My Business features.

5. If your resources are limited, you may prefer to skip Google My Business products for now and go straight to Google Shopping, with its more sophisticated interface.

Overall, most local businesses will benefit from devoting some time to adding Google My Business products. Google has given us every reason to believe they are intently focused on shopping, with two major signs being their debut of the Shopping Graph at I/O this past spring and making it free to upload products to Google Shopping in 2020. We’ve all learned together over the past few decades that when Google zooms in on an area of search, we should at least be paying attention to how their efforts might be put to work for our local brands.

You have multiple opportunities to explore for enhancing the online visibility of your inventory, and right now, Google My Business products are the easiest way to wade into this work. The holiday shopping season is, incredibly, just around the corner, and if you start uploading products today, it will be your listing that stands out as the place that has what local customers want in December.

Is life about to throw you into the deep end of the local SEO pool? Maybe you’ve just opened your business or have slowly realized that your existing business isn’t showing up very well on the Internet. Maybe you just got a new job at a local business that’s struggling because no one on staff has a background in online marketing and the boss is looking to you. Maybe you’re trying to learn new skills to become a stronger candidate for a digital marketing agency job opening.

Splish splash, hang on! I’ve got water wings for you in this column, answering seven of the most common questions Google receives from folks like you searching the Internet for an introductory understanding of what this thing called “local SEO” means, who needs it, how it works, how to study it to benefit a business you need to market, and more!

Instead of expecting you to tread midstream as though you magically already know all these things, we’ll wade in together gently before we start swimming anywhere near the high water mark.

1. What is local SEO?

Local search engine optimization (local SEO) consists of many actions you can take online and offline to make it easier for people in your community to find and choose a business you’re marketing.

It’s simplest to think of local SEO as a form of customer service. In the real world, you take all kinds of actions to make a business visible, accessible, and appealing. For example, you rent or buy a property at an address near your customers, buy a phone number, organize and display your inventory of goods and services, hang bold signage, seek advertising, and train staff to greet people who walk in, answer their questions, and resolve their complaints. You do all of this to connect with customers.

Local SEO has the same goal of connection. It builds a digital mirror image of what you do offline and enriches it with online-only opportunities, as you become an Internet publisher and promoter of your business’ contact information, offerings, reputation, expertise, and customer service amenities.

When done well, your local SEO efforts convince search engines like Google that your business deserves to be visible in their results when people are searching for what you offer in the place you offer it.

2. How do you know if you need local SEO?

What are the rules, guidelines, and circumstances that determine whether local SEO is the right match for your business?

If your business is physically located near customers who need to find it, then it’s likely you need local SEO to run as profitable a venture as possible. However, needing and qualifying for a complete local SEO campaign are two different things.

If you want to be seen by customers in a specific geographic area (like a neighborhood, city, or county) then you need local SEO to become visible online to these people. However, the number of local SEO actions you are qualified to use in promoting a specific business online is dictated by two things:

• The exact model of the business you’re marketing

• Google’s interpretation of how businesses of your model can use Google’s products

Take these three steps to determine your eligibility opportunities:

First, answer a simple question:

Does my business serve customers face-to-face? Or, at least, did it do so prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and plans to resume in-person transactions once it is safe for society to do so again?

If your answer is “no”, because you are operating a completely virtual business with no face-to-face interactions with the public, then a complete local SEO campaign is likely not the right match for you and you should read this article: How To Do Local SEO Without Physical Locations in 2021.

If your answer is “yes”, read on.

Second, identify your model

There are more than 10 different local business structures that Google recognizes:

• Brick and mortar, like a retail shop or restaurant customers can visit

• Service Area Business (SAB), like a plumber or caterer who goes to customers' locations

• Hybrid, like a pizza restaurant which also delivers

• Home-based, like a daycare center

• Co-located/co-branded business, like a KFC/A&W chain location

• Multi-department business, like a hospital or auto dealership

• Multi-practitioner business, like a real estate firm or dental practice with multiple staff

• Solo practitioner business, like a single attorney operating in two areas of law

• Multi-brand business, specific to auto dealerships vending multiple car makes

• Mobile business, like a stationary food truck

• Kiosk, ATM, and other less common business models

Determine which of the above descriptions most closely matches how your business operates.

Third, read all of Google’s guidelines that apply to your model

Give yourself thirty minutes to read though The Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google, making a special note of all of the guidelines that specifically call out the model you’ve identified as describing your business.

These all-important guidelines teach you what you can and can’t do to promote a local business via Google’s local platforms. Failure to comply with Google’s guidelines can result in penalties and removal of your information from Google’s system (a disaster!).

If, at this point, you’re wondering why this article is referencing Google so heavily, it’s because Google’s platforms dominate where local businesses list themselves online and where local consumers search for local businesses. In fact, their market share is more than 92%, making them central to your local SEO activity. There is much more to complete local SEO than just Google, but Google tends to set the tone of how we view and promote local businesses.

To sum up, if you need people in your community to be able to find your business online, your business normally transacts with customers in-person, and your model matches one of those recognized by Google, you likely both need and qualify for a local SEO marketing campaign.

3. How does local SEO work?

If you’ve now determined that local SEO is the right lane for you to swim in, you’ll want to know the specifics of how to actually do the work. Now is your chance to learn how local businesses do SEO and what local SEO includes.

How local search engines work

Google is a search engine. It’s an “answer machine” that exists to discover, understand, and organize information on the Internet so that it can present that information in response to people’s searches.

Google gets information about local businesses from a variety of sources including:

• The Google My Business listings you create for your business

• Your company’s website

• Other websites, directories, and platforms that list, mention, or link to your company

• Information the public submits to Google about your company, such as reviews, ratings, photos, suggested edits of your Google My Business listings, and other forms of feedback

• Unconfirmed relationships with other local business data providers and indexes

Your Google My Business listing is something you get to actively submit to Google, but Google also looks all over the internet for information about your business (this is called crawling), then stores and organizes the information they’ve found (this is called indexing), and finally, provides a ranked display of that information to humans who are searching for it.

Google uses secret, internal calculations (algorithms) to rank the information they’ve indexed. One of your key goals in spending time on local search engine optimization is to persuade Google that your business deserves to be ranked highly when someone searches for something that’s relevant to what you offer. When Google decides a searcher’s query has a local and intent and you’ve convinced Google that your business is a relevant answer, local SEO can help you show up in all of the following displays:

Search engine results are often given the generic name, “SERPs” (search engine results pages) but local SERPs also have these more specific names:

• Google local packs

• Google business profiles

• Google local finders

• Google Maps

• Google organic results

Additionally you can show up in image, video, and shopping results, if pertinent to your business model. Your overall goal in investing time and money in local SEO will be to convince Google that you’re a good result to show to people searching for what you offer.

How do you do local SEO?

So what is the work that actually goes into a local business doing SEO? There are many, many possible tactics and strategies, but a “starter kit” will almost always consist of these 4 basics to get you into the game:

1. An operational local business

You need a business founded on a product or service that local customers want and that is actively building an offline reputation for excellent customer service.

2. A website

While it’s possible to market your business without a website, you should consider one as an essential business asset.

Your website should:

• Present what your business is, does, and offers, centering customers’ needs and customers’ language.

• Include your geographic terms (neighborhood, city, etc) in the website’s tags, text, and links.

• Provide accurate contact information, hours of operation, and abundant cues about how to connect with the business.

3. Local business listings

You need to actively create online listings for your business, such as your Google My Business listing and a variety of other listings (also called “structured citations”) on local business directories and related platforms. Fill out as many fields and provide as much information as possible when creating these listings. Be sure you update your listings any time your information changes (Moz Local can help with this time-consuming task!).

4. Online reviews from your customers

You need to actively acquire and respond to customers’ reviews on your Google My Business listing, all your local business listings that have a review component, and any review platform profiles you’ve created.

You’ll be off to a strong start with the above four basic local SEO components, but as you become more advanced at marketing your business, you will want to explore these additional promotional avenues:

5. Market research and competitor analysis

You’ll want to actively survey your community to refine your understanding of local needs and supplement this with ongoing keyword and trend research to add to your knowledge of the language people use when searching the Internet for what you offer. Your findings can then be used to grow your inventory, service menu, and the optimization of your website for an expanded set of search phrases.

Meanwhile, you will want to regularly search Google for your business, while you are located at your place of business and at different spots around town, to see how you are showing up in their results. Where competitors are outranking you, you’ll want to audit their websites, listings, reviews, and marketing strategies to develop theories of why they’re ahead of you. Your goal, then, will be to emulate their tactics and eventually surpass them.

6. Unstructured citations + links

Unstructured citations are any online reference by a third party to your company’s complete or partial contact information. You can learn more about them here. Links are the clickable elements that take an Internet user from one place to another, and if you’re ready for a more technical explanation, read The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building.

The more often Google finds your business referenced by other relevant sources, the better your chances of them considering your company a good result to show to searchers. The relationships you build with local colleagues, local media sources, different groups in your community and industry can be reflected online when these entities cite your business and/or link to it.

For example, if your business sponsors a town food drive, the charity may list you as a benefactor. Or, if you host an exciting contest, a local lifestyle blogger may pick up your story and link to your website for further details. If the platforms that cite you and link to you have achieved a strong local or industry standing, this will help build the authority of your website in the eyes of Google, as well as expanding your visibility to customers. Finding opportunities for unstructured citations and links is a key part of an advanced local SEO campaign.

7. Expanded media

Each business will need a custom approach to expanding its reach. A social media presence on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram might be right for you and your customers. Or it could be email marketing, video media, podcasting, blogging, or publishing articles on respected third-party sites in your industry or geographic region that will solidify connections with your customers and introduce your business to a wider audience. Experimentation is key.

8. Advanced analysis

Learning to track how the public responds to your local marketing strategies is what will set your company apart from less savvy competitors. Using free tools like Google My Business Insights in your GMB listing’s dashboard, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and a variety of free and paid SEO software, you can discover what works and what doesn’t for your customers.

Profitability is your bottom line goal, and you will get there by becoming a continuously-chosen resource in your community. Customers can come to you via many paths, but the ultimate endpoint is a first transaction followed by repeat transactions once you’ve earned loyalty. Analytics tools help you track stages along those paths (like customers clicking on your listing to find driving directions or to phone you) so that you can improve the experience the customer is having at each step, increasing the chances of a transaction.

Whether basic or advanced, all eight of the above components are ones you will be sustaining, improving and expanding on for the life of your business, in addition to other efforts you may explore as your company grows.

How can anyone know how to influence rankings if Google’s algorithms are secret?

The entire concept of SEO is based on decades of business owners and marketers testing activities to see how Google and other search engines react to them and how the business then benefits from this reaction. From this ongoing testing, we arrive at theories about certain actions we can take that tend to cause Google to make a particular business or other entity become more visible to searchers.

For example, let’s imagine you own a pizza place in Sacramento, California with a one-page website that simply lists your menu items. You don’t rank very well for “gluten free pizza” even though it’s on your menu, and you seldom receive orders for this item.

You decide to create a second page on your site to tell the story of how and why you make this type of pizza, and you carefully include keywords like “gluten free pizza crust” and “Sacramento” in the page’s tags and text. A month later, your orders for this item triple, and when you check, you find that Google is now bringing up your new page for local customers seeking “gluten free pizza”. You’ve successfully taken an action that has influenced the search engine to the benefit of your business.

All local SEO and organic SEO basically comes down to this sort of experimentation, however complex a given strategy or tactic may be. Decades of such testing and clues from Google have enabled local SEOs to summarize Google’s local algorithm as having three main components:

• Proximity: the distance between a searcher and a business

• Relevance: the result that is the best match for the intent of the searcher’s query

• Prominence: how well-known and well-cited a business is, based on what Google has learned about it by their crawl of the Internet

In practical terms, if I search for “gluten free pizza” while located in close proximity to the pizza place example, and Google finds the page you’ve created about this menu item with lots of relevant text on it, and Google has also found a lot of other websites referencing your gluten-free pizza (making it a prominent local resource), then your restaurant has a good chance of being shown to me as a result.

So, while the hundreds of factors that make up Google’s several algorithms are secret, you’re standing on established ground by doing all you can to work on the relevance and prominence of your business so that Google returns it as a result to searchers within Google’s concept of appropriate proximity.

4. What are the benefits of local SEO?

Once you dive into local SEO in earnest, you can expect to find treasure.

If the goal of local SEO is to make your business easier for customers to find and choose on the Internet, then the most obvious benefit for your company will be increased profitability. Customers reward businesses that make things easy for them, and a greater number of transactions should ultimately result from your work. But, the total array of benefits is enormous! When done well, local SEO can increase your:

• Customer service quality

• Knowledge of your customer base

• Sales

• Repeat sales (customer loyalty)

• Bookings

• Rankings

• Publicity

• Foot traffic

• Website traffic

• Phone calls

• Texts

• Chats

• Reviews

• Form submissions

• Brand awareness + positive reputation

• Email subscriptions

• B2B relationships

• Word-of-mouth referrals

• Power for civic good

• And so much more!

The amount of benefit you can expect to enjoy from engaging in local SEO will depend on:

1. Your budget of both time and money

2. How far that budget takes you vs. how far your market competitors’ budgets are taking them

3. The maximum growth potential defined by the size and characteristics of your local consumer base

A very small business in a very small town can make a modest investment in local SEO, easily surpass a few disengaged competitors, and reach pretty much every local customer who is on the Internet, plus new neighbors and travelers. As the competition and the consumer base becomes greater, local companies will have to increase their investment to see optimum return.

5. How local is local SEO?

Google indicates that lots of folks are asking about this, and I’m having to make a best guess that what business owners and marketers are wondering about is how big the radius of their visibility in Google’s results will be if they invest in doing local SEO. For example, if a business is located at 123 Main Street in Somewhereville, will they only show up for searchers who are walking along Main Street, or for people anywhere in the town, or for people beyond the town’s borders, or for several adjacent cities, or even the whole state?

The answer to this common question depends on Google’s idea of the intent of the searcher coupled with the competitive level of the market. For instance, Google might only cast a very small radius of results if someone searches for “coffee downtown Portland”:

But if I change my search to just “coffee portland”, Google expands the radius of the results being returned to a much larger area:

Meanwhile, if I signal to Google that I’m not searching for something quick and nearby like “coffee”, and instead search for something where my intent might cover the whole state, like “wedding venues oregon”, Google again expands the results to show me quite a large region:

In general, queries with a very “nearby” intent or queries happening in a dense city with many competitors located near one another will typically return a tighter radius of results. By contrast, queries that could be reasonably fulfilled by the searcher driving further, or that are seeking a rare good or service, or that take place in a rural area with few businesses tend to receive a larger radius of results.

Please note my use of the phrase “in general”, because there are so many exceptions. Moreover, Google’s own products deliver varied results. For instance, I’ve noticed that Google’s local finder often delivers a tighter radius than Google Maps. Meanwhile, Google’s organic results can behave quite differently than their local ones. And, it’s foundational knowledge for you to know that Google delivers different results to each searcher, based on their physical location at the time they search, the exact search language they use, and their search history.

One of the commonest local SEO forum questions comes from business owners located at a specific place on the map and wanting to expand the radius in which they show up for users’ queries. For a deep dive on this popular topic, read I Want to Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works.

6. How do I check my local SEO rankings?

This is an excellent foundational question. First, you must know that local and localized organic rankings are not stable. As mentioned, above, Google orders results for each searcher based on:

• Google’s perception of the searcher’s intent coupled with an algorithmic calculation of which results are most relevant to that intent
• Google’s knowledge of where the searcher’s device is located at the time of search
• The density of competition for the search term
• The searcher’s history of previous searches.

• The time of day

Because of this, consider it a myth and a mistake when people talk about being #1 for a search term, because local rankings are so highly customized and can literally change from hour to hour. The best you can aim at is a general sense of your visibility for a particular search phrase for people located at different points on the map at different times of day.

The most bare-bones, manual approach to understanding your visibility is to search for a phrase while standing inside your business and note the local and organic rankings. Then, physically move out from there, searching from a block away, a few blocks away, the other side of town, the city border, and beyond the city border. It can be an educational experience to try this, but it’s not one that’s practical to replicate on a regular basis.

For the sake of convenience, many platforms have developed location emulators and local rank trackers that can approximate the results you might see if searching from different geographic locations. It’s important to note that no tool can claim to be 100% accurate, because of how highly customized results can be for each searcher, but as we’ve covered, you’re looking for a general idea of your visibility rather than set-in-stone numbers. There are many popular emulation and localized rank tracking options. Consider these:

• For free, you can use the GS Location Changer Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to set the location of Google search to a specific locale to see local pack rankings that come up in that area.

• On the paid side, both Whitespark and BrightLocal have sophisticated local rank tracking dashboards, and LocalFalcon is also lauded for its nifty visual interface. Mobile Moxie has a 7-day free trial of their rank tracker so you can give this type of analysis a test drive.

• Moz Pro customers can use the beta of Local Market Analytics to see localized organic rankings mapped out with innovative multi-SERP sampling.

You’ll want to track your rankings on a regular basis, but always remember, it’s “conversions” that deserve the lion’s share of your focus. Learn to think beyond how your business ranks to how that visibility is resulting in clicks on your listings, clicks-to-call, requests for driving requests, reviews, chats, questions, leads, bookings, and sales!

7. How can I learn local SEO?

Having read this article, you’re ready to move out from the shallow end of the pool into more exciting waters. The important thing is for you to find resources for further local SEO learning that are worthy of your time and won’t steer you wrong. I suggest these as your next 4 laps:

1. Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide

This free, eight-chapter guide has been praised by readers as being not just about the “how” of doing local SEO, but the “why”. Studying this guide will get you into a strong mindset for engaging in holistic local search marketing in an authentic way that takes your business and its community into account.

2. Go where the advocates are

Specific organizations, media outlets, and publications are making names for themselves through pro-local business advocacy. Get to know these entities and rid yourself of the feeling of “going it alone” as a local business owner:

• The Institute for Local Self Reliance publishes some of the best local business/local community reports on the web with statistics you can work into the narrative of your business’ story.

• The American Independent Business Alliance can get your community started with a formal Buy Local program, if one doesn’t yet exist in your city, and they offer events you can attend virtually.

• Near Media is an emerging outlet featuring thought leadership from top local SEO industry experts in strong support of independent business owners, with a growing library of articles, podcasts, and video media.

• Plan to virtually attend a LocalU seminar for presentations by local SEO experts on the latest tactics for local search marketing success. This popular conference circuit is special for its all-local focus.

• Ask local SEO questions for free at Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum to help you better market your business

3. Make a regular local SEO industry reading schedule

Local search changes continuously, meaning your opportunities for marketing your business consistently alter. Bookmark these publications and make time for a weekly reading session:

• Read the Local SEO column here on the Moz blog for in-depth coverage of local search marketing and strategic local business insights.

• The Sterling Sky blog offers excellent takeaways from their ongoing tests, discovering what works and what doesn’t in online local business marketing.

• Search Engine Roundtable’s blog has some of the fastest reporting of emerging Google features, updates, and bugs of any publication out there.

• Streetfight covers both small businesses and enterprises, with a strong focus on developing technologies.

• I’m also a longtime fan of the good minds behind the Whitespark blog for the sound advice they give

• It may seem obvious, but read your local newspaper to keep tabs on the business scene nearest you

If you get tired from reading so much, many outlets like Moz, Near Media and LocalU offer audio and video media, as well, so you can kick back and listen for a bit. Also, multiple platforms have popular newsletters that round up the latest happenings for you so that you don’t have to seek them out yourself. And to follow local SEO industry experts on your favorite social media platforms; here’s a starter list of Twitter accounts you might like to check out.

4. Hire a local SEO to teach you

In some cases, it’s the right fit for local businesses to outsource all of their local SEO work to agencies. Not every business owner is going to have the time to become an expert in this form of marketing, on top of running their company.

That being said, if you can learn to do some or all of your brand’s local SEO or train your employees to do it, you’ll be acting from a place of ultimate knowledge, power and control. If this sounds appealing, you may want to consider hiring a pro to tutor you for accelerated learning.

My advice would be to find a small local SEO agency with an excellent reputation and inquire if their consulting services can be customized for you into training sessions with one of their talented team members. Ideally, you’d set up virtual meetings in which the tutor can visually walk you through tools and tactics, using your business as the workbook. Expect to pay well for this specialized training, knowing you’ll be using what you learn for years to come.

5. Learn from experience — it’s a good teacher!

Provided that you adhere to the guidelines of the third-party platforms on which you’re marketing, it’s your own experimentation that is likely to teach you the most about local SEO. In fact, many of today’s most-recognized local SEOs started out as business owners who became excited by what they realized they were able to do online for brands.

There are excellent free guides to get you started, amazing software to support your journey, and experts who freely share their advice on blogs and social media. All of these will strengthen you. The most essential takeaways will be ones that match the right technology and outreach to your specific customers. When you’ve mastered applying what you learn, and commit to ongoing experimentation, you’ll be ready to swim with the best of them.

Image credits: David McKenzie, Kenneth Lu, Aguamont, John Haslam, ThinkPanama and Lis í Jákupsstovu

The MozCon 2021 video bundle is now on sale for anyone who couldn’t make it to the conference, and today I’d like to give you a taste of what you stand to learn from some of the most relevant and exciting presentations, which you can put to work for the local businesses you’re promoting.

Get the MozCon Virtual 2021 Video Bundle!

1. Studies begin to surface Google Posts strategies

Google Posts have existed for about five years, but it’s only recently that we’ve started to see studies done that identify winning tactics utilizing them. Joy Hawkins was our one strictly-local expert at MozCon 2021, and she used her speaker spot to set out a smörgåsbord of Google Posts tips for viewers based on her agency’s testing. Here were some of my favorites:

• Offer and COVID-type Posts received the most clicks in 2020, and posts featuring specials are clear winners.

• Don’t use stock photography, but do use text in your images to increase engagement.

• Have fun with emojis in your posts — they increase clicks!

These are just a few of the takeaways you’ll derive from Joy’s session, with the overall understanding that, while posts don’t appear to have a direct impact on local pack rank, they can influence local justifications for 60 days at a clip, and, of course, boost traffic to your website!

2. Local customers need information, even amid disruption

I picked up a running theme in the outstanding presentations by Shannon McGuirk, Cyrus Shepard, and Ross Simmonds: the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely not decreased the public’s need for information from the Internet. Each speaker approaches this phenomenon from a different angle:

• Shannon’s company lost 50% of its revenue in the first couple weeks of the pandemic and had to transition from long-term content planning to a more reactive style of marketing that is able to move quickly with the times. Just like virtual businesses, local ones are encountering a scenario in which it’s harder to plan promotional activities, especially when there are fewer available local journalists to outreach to. Shannon’s presentation offers up, in extremely transparent detail, how her company has learned to survive amid disruption.

• Cyrus explains how the patents Google is investing in surrounding user behavior set goals for businesses to be the first click, the long click, and the last click for searchers. With the right content, your local business should be the resource the public chooses first from Google’s results, stays on longest, and then doesn’t need to navigate away from because their needs have been met. As Cyrus explains, “User satisfaction is the #1 ranking factor!”

• Ross explains why you need to think of your brand as a media company, and predict what will be important to your community so that you can invest in relevant content. This is a guiding principle in Moz’s Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide in which we urge local business owners to see themselves as publishers.

3. Sorry, but your local business website has content decay

It may feel a bit like you’re sitting in a dentist’s chair hearing this, but thankfully, Kameron Jenkins from Shopify has a remedy for this scenario, in which traffic to your website’s older pages and posts naturally deteriorates over time. If your local business relies on content publishing to generate traffic and revenue, content decay is a big problem (and a continuous one) because your articles are always getting older. The solution to this is to have an ongoing content refresh strategy in which you identify and update aging articles to keep them relevant.

But the larger your content library is, the harder it can be to accomplish this task. In fact, Kameron found that 25% or less of content marketers’ time is spent on content refreshes. The good news is that a combination of free tools can make it much easier for you to start reversing decay. To wit:

1. The free “landing pages” report in Google Analytics lets you set a date range to see which of your content assets are losing traffic over time.

2. Google Search Console is also free and lets you see which assets are losing search positions over time.

3. Back in Google Analytics, the Goal Conversion Rate and Completions columns show you which of your assets have the highest conversion rates, helping you prioritize refreshing older assets that have the potential to deliver the most conversions if you update them.

If you purchase the MozCon 2021 video bundle, you’ll see all the screenshots in Kameron’s tutorial, and she will walk you through considering how to refresh a page to give it a new competitive advantage with original research, fresh quotes from experts, improved internal links and more! Any local business that has seriously embraced publishing as core to their online marketing strategy should see meaningful benefits from learning to refresh decaying content instead of letting it sit unmanaged.

4. A touch of expertise can make a ton of difference in a local context

Many speakers at MozCon consult with large enterprise clients and are always having to look hard for tactics that can set brands apart in ultra-competitive markets. The great news for local businesses and their agencies is that our markets are, by nature, limited to local geography, meaning that nifty tactics can provide enormous wins for us within a set city or region!

Check out Joyce Collardé’s side-by-side comparison of a client on the left using video schema markup vs. a brand on the right without schema. Imagine how your local business can command more screen space, with just a touch of technical know-how:

She also has a ton of great tips for B2B models, many of which are, of course, local!

Meanwhile, Lily Ray’s phenomenal presentation is a must-watch for any local business in an industry that has a direct impact on people’s lives and finances (think doctors, dentists, financial advisors, etc.). Lily demonstrates the massive changes that have taken place in organic search engine results since Google’s 2018 “Medic” update, favoring brands that meet Google’s criteria for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). If your business is in a your-money-or-your-life (YMYL) category, learning to bake E-A-T into your content and marketing strategies can give you a significant lift in your local market.

Rob Ousbey mentions a favorite tool of mine for finding local linktations: Link Intersect. Then he turns this idea on its head with a new Moz alpha experiment called Topical Link Finder to help you find topically-relevant link opportunities for keywords your competitors are ranking for. Moz Pro and Moz community members are invited to play with this tool, and I think it could be a great advantage for local businesses seeking industry links. While you’re at it, check out the alpha of the On-page Keyword Grouper to help you determine when to break up a topic into multiple pages instead of putting it all on a single URL.

Finally, Casie Gillette’s reference to Recordit that lets you custom create GIFs immediately brought to mind Darren Shaw’s recent discovery that you can use these instead of static images on Google My Business Products if you save them as a JPEG instead of a GIF. Don’t go overboard, but subtle animation could really help your local business’ products stand out!

5. Buck local trends and dare to be different

Multiple MozCon 2021 speakers warned against running a business on assumptions. There are always news trends in marketing and shiny new things in the way of tech and strategy, but what actually matters is what works for your customers. For example:

• Casie Gillette, mentioned above, made a great point in reminding us that there’s a widespread narrative that “print is dead”. Tell that to Yankee Candles, whose print catalogues played a key role in their 122.9 million sales in 2020. It wasn’t long ago that almost everyone assumed the milkman was a thing of the past. Not so! Takeaway: don’t just latch onto fads. You may read that your local business needs to invest hours a week on social media marketing, but if your own customers are telling you that what they really want is home delivery, or better-trained staff, or a cleaner store...put your money there and give it to them!

• Moz’s own Dr. Peter J. Meyers reminds us that our brick-and-mortar competitors may not be the same as our competitors in the organic SERPs. You’ve got to study the results that come up for the searches that matter to your specific customers to see whether you’re right about who is actually competing with you there for important phrases.

• Wil Reynolds advises bringing a small ego to the SEO process, and a willingness to be wrong and question everything. He urges brands to make marketing decisions on the basis of data, summing it up deftly: The less you understand your customer, the more you spend to acquire them.

It’s my take that local business owners have an advantage over their virtual counterparts, because you live where your customers do and may even have been absorbing the culture of your town or city your whole life. In the local context, tech is there to make talk easier, and your highest-level takeaways from the MozCon 2021 video bundle will be a new level of confidence and expertise to make you a more thoughtful, equipped communicator.

Your online-only colleagues have to take these skills into a vast arena, competing with everyone in the world to be heard. But for you, marketing a local business, an educational investment in yourself and your team can give you an extraordinary boost along the worthy journey of becoming a local household name.

Editor's note: Beginning at 1:49, when Claire mentions "referral traffic", it should be "referral information". 

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Do you have a Google My Business listing or do you work with clients that have Google My Business listings, and do you want to know more about the value of the traffic that Google My Business drives to your website?

Well, if you do, this is the Whiteboard Friday for you. So I'm Claire Carlile, and I am a local search expert at BrightLocal, and today I'm going to speak about UTM tagging for Google My Business. 

What's a UTM tag?

So you might be asking, "What is a UTM tag?" If you are, you wouldn't be the first person to ask that question.

So UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module. But if you just think of UTM tags as tracking codes that we add to the end of our external links that tell us more about where that traffic came from and how it got to our websites. So when someone clicks on a UTM tagged URL, details of the source, the medium, and the campaign that that website visit comes from get transferred over into Google Analytics.

Why add UTM tags?

So why would we want to add UTM tags to our GMB URLs? Well, without tagging, all of the traffic will end up in the Organic bucket. So that's fine, but what it won't tell us is whether that organic traffic came from the regular organic results or whether it came from Google My Business URLs in the business profile or in Google Maps.

Another reason is that many mobile apps and browsers don't give their referral traffic into Google Analytics, and that traffic is just going to end up in the Direct bucket. We're marketers. We're very used to having to demonstrate our value and the value of our services. So this is a great way for you to illustrate the value that you're adding to your client or to your organization.

We also often need to secure a budget. So whether that budget is for more of our time or it's for photos or videos for Google My Business, it also lets us understand the value of various Google My Business features so we can say Google Posts is more valuable to this client than Google products, or Google products refers less traffic but at a rate that converts higher.

Also, we'll get the Google Search Console data for those UTM tagged URLs. So we'll see the query data. We'll see what queries are actually driving impressions and clicks on these UTM tagged URLs. 

Where can you tag?

So let's think about what we can tag. We hear a lot about zero-click search, but that really isn't a new concept if you've been working in local search for a while, because from the business profile a potential customer can click to call a business, they can download driving directions, they can look at photos, they can read reviews, they can look at services, all without clicking through to the business website.

But that said, we do actually have a lot of opportunities in GMB to link back to our website and to drive traffic to the website. So what you have in GMB will be dependent upon your primary category. 

But most businesses will have a website link. They might have an appointment or a menu URL. They might have Google products. They might have Google Posts. You might be using the new follower offer, which not a lot of people know about and even less people are using, and it might actually die and end up in the Google graveyard, but it only takes 10 minutes to set up. So if you have the type of business that could attract a local following, then it's worth adding because you can see: Does it actually drive value for the business? What does that traffic do when they get to your website? What content are they looking at? Where are they moving, and how are they moving around? Is the traffic from GMB actually driving revenue? Are they buying things when they get to your website? Then we've got all of our conversions and micro conversions that hopefully we have set up so we can measure in Google Analytics.

So do we get click to call? Do we get click to email? Do they download a resource? Do they click through to our social media profiles? Do they fill in a form? Do they sign up for our newsletter? We can find out all of these things when we add UTM tagging.

UTM tagging tips

So I'm going to give you some UTM tagging tips because I think the most important thing is to be very, very consistent from the outset, because it's quite easy to get this wrong. 

So consistency being key, think about how you're going to separate out your words. I like to use a dash. Some people like to use an underscore. Whatever you use, just make it very consistent. 

Then we have uppercase and lowercase letters. So I always stick with lowercase letters, the reason being that Google Analytics is case sensitive in all of its reports. So if you're using a mix of uppercase and lowercase, Google is going to report upon that separately. If you don't get this right, you're going to be dealing with a lot of messy and bought data that you're going to have to sort out outside of Google Analytics, and you really don't want that. 

So another thing is if you get your source and your medium in a muddle, then that traffic is just going to end up in the Other bucket, which is pretty much totally sad times. So a way to avoid that is by thinking of the source as where the journey started or where that traffic came from and the medium as the method of transport. It's how that traffic got from A to B. 

Who manages the data?

So before we think about which URLs on our website we're going to tag up, we need to think about who is managing the data and reporting in our organization or in our client's organization, because the UTM tags and the framework that you set up need to play nicely and sit within their framework. You don't want to be robbing clicks from them if they're trying to demonstrate the value of something. 

Now you might find that when you work with small and medium-size businesses, no one is managing the data and reporting, in which case happy days, this will work absolutely fine. 

Which URLs do you tag? 

So which URL will you tag?

Well, there are some questions here. Do you have one location, or do you have many locations? So if it's just one location, you probably tag up your homepage. If it's many locations, you're going to be linking to your location landing pages. 

If you're using Google products, then you'll be wanting to link to your products or your services pages.

If you have an appointment URL, then you will be linking through to maybe the Contact Us page. If you have booking or appointment functionality on your website, you'll link to that page. 

Now, unsurprisingly, the menu URL will link to your menu page. 

If you're using Google Posts, have a think about where will you link to. If it's a special offer post, is there a special offer page that it will link to? When that special offer expires, what will you do with that page? Will it continue to resolve, or are you going to 301 it somewhere else? Plan all that out beforehand. Actually, you need to make sure that you check the URL that you're wanting to link to. Are you linking to the correct version? If you're on https, which I hope you are, you won't want to be linking to the http.

You need to look: Does that page resolve? Can you see everything on that page? Does that page give a 404, in which case obviously we're not going to want to link to it? Does that page go through a series of redirects? Now, a series of redirects is going to strip the UTM tagging off of that URL, and we really don't want that. 

How to tag

So once you've checked which URLs you need to link to, you're actually going to tag those up.

So for the source, I'm using Google. Some people like to use GMB. But whatever you choose, again, make sure it fits within this framework and be consistent from the outset. For medium, I'm using organic. Then for campaign, I'm using that field to describe the location of that link within Google My Business.

So it might be the primary website link, menu, products, or the appointment. If you're using the new follower offer, you have this. Then with Google Posts, I like to be a little bit more granular so I can see what type of posts might be working the best, and I can also track any changes when Google starts moving posts up and around inside the business profile.

So we've got the what's new post, the offer post, and the event post. Finally, for Google Posts, using the campaign content field to describe the actual content of that post. So if you work with a business which has lots of unique and interesting content, you might just need to describe that content, so summer-21-sale, free-giraffe-rides, curry-night-may-21, or you might just like to use the date there in the campaign content field.

So top tip is if you're using Posts, you have access to Posts, I hope you're using them, then using a Google Sheets add-on called Postamatic, which is brilliant, it allows you to schedule your posts, and it also automatically adds UTM tagging within this format. So it's very much recommended.

So you're going to tag up your GMB URLs and those links with UTM codes. So you might use something like Google's Campaign URL Builder, which is something that I used to use when I first started tagging up business profiles. But since then I've been working on my UTM Tagging Guide with the Google Sheet, which is basically my gift to you with love.

So you can use that to keep everything nice and tidy and everything in one place. It auto-generates the tag. So all you have to do is just drop your URL into the sheet, and then it will give you the UTM codes for those URLs. It's a good way to keep a record of what you're adding, and that might be Google Posts, if you're not using Postamatic.

It might be your Google products. You have a record then, and you can understand what type of content resonates, what doesn't, and what you could do better with your content. So you will find that guide and sheet here, on this URL. 

So that's it for today. I hope you found that useful and hopefully see you here again soon.

I’m new in town and have never heard of your business before. I’m looking for an explanation that’s as quick and easy to read as a street sign.

You have just a few seconds to convey to me what your local business offers and why customers like it. Then I’ll take a few seconds to determine whether what you’ve said matches my needs.

From this moment forward, we either walk the next steps of the consumer-brand journey arm-in-arm, or I wing off in another direction looking for a better match. I could become a loyal customer for decades, or I might never think of your business again.

That’s how important and fleeting the moment of opportunity can be when a customer encounters a unique selling proposition (USP) highlighted by a local business. In Chapter 3 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide, we reference how a clear USP underpins SEO, and it’s a topic that deserves a deeper dive. For new neighbors, travelers, and residents in search of new goods and services, the USP is a sign you can hang in many places.

In this article, we’ll actively practice writing compelling USPs for real-world local businesses based on six simple components. Further, I’ll teach you to see a brand you’re marketing from the viewpoint of customers on the basis of user generated content (UGC).

First, what’s a USP?

A unique selling proposition in marketing is a brief statement that’s typically defined as distinguishing a brand and its offerings from its competitors. It’s not the same thing as the catchphrase found in slogans and jingles (e.g. “Reach out and touch someone” or “Just Do It”), which, while memorable, may only vaguely hint at what a business is or does. Instead, a USP should clearly define whether what a business is, does, and has matches the intent of the customer, and the art involved is in learning to convey a lot of meaning in very few words.

If you learn best from real-world examples, here’s an independent grocery store that has put its slogan and mission statement on its website homepage:

If we were tasked with creating a USP, just from this information, we would write something like this:

Shop the oldest and largest organic grocery store in Marin County to actively support our community’s health and sustainability.

If I happen to be looking for a market with a big selection of organics that’s been trusted by locals for many years and I want my dollars to work towards sustainability, my intent will have been perfectly matched by this USP.

Local businesses have an advantage over virtual competitors in that circumstances auto-generate one of the “unique” aspects of the company message: being present in a specific town or city makes your brand a unique resource for people there, as opposed to selling to the world at large. Pair locale with local rarity for a smart combination. The “selling” aspects of this type of content should inspire actionable language on your part; words like “shop”, “experience”, “visit” are mini calls-to-action embedded in the USP. Think of the “proposition” as making an offer you hope the right potential customer can’t refuse because it ideally matches their intent.

There are just 19 words in our sample USP, but it contains multiple intent signals, and now we need to learn how to break those down by type so that you can develop your own messaging for the local brands you market.

Surface QUAAAC components for your strongest USP

Image credit: Hedera Baltica

I recently learned that one of the great secrets to QVC’s multi-billion-dollar success is to get shoppers to ask the question, “Is this me?” and then answer with a, “Yes”. USPs should work just like this! You’ll have noticed that we turned the slogan and mission statement toward the customer in our example USP above, in hopes that they will see themselves in the details. In other words, we’re hoping the customer will ask, “Is this me who wants to shop for organic groceries at a time-honored store, and contribute to sustainability?” and find themselves saying, “Yes”.

Choosing the right details to highlight, when you have a limited amount of space, really matters! Let’s get our ducks in a row with a practice session of writing USPs together, breaking down our options into six basic components:

Quality

If our example grocery store decided that it was the high quality of their inventory that should star in their USP, based on what they’ve learned matters most to their customers, we could write a proposition like this:

Shop all-organic groceries, many sourced locally from our community’s best farmers, for peak quality you can taste!

In other instances, customers’ search for value underlies their quest for quality. They want to know what the highest quality is that they can afford on their budget. In that case, a USP might emphasize cheapness, deals, discounts, or specials. Brands like Imperfect Foods aim to deliver inventory that’s of good quality, if not flawless, and that’s easier on wallets, as made clear by their USP:

Get sustainable, affordable groceries delivered weekly to your door.

The skill required here is to match the economic realities of your customer base to the best quality their money can buy. Whether the inventory is luxury goods or the most affordable deals, nearly all customers want good value.

Uniqueness

If your business model relies on providing something rare, uniqueness might deserve emphasis in your USP. For our grocery store, we might say:

Tired of reading labels? Shop trustingly at Marin County’s only 100% organic grocery store.

Perhaps my favorite example of a USP based on uniqueness comes from Redwood Yurok Canoe Tours, which reads:

Come and explore the powerful Klamath River on a spiritual adventure that will take you back in time, hearing only the quiet chatter of wildlife as you glide along the water’s surface.

This Indigenous-owned business is offering an experience you literally cannot get anywhere else in the world, and it’s a great illustration of building romance around rarity.

Availability

Simple availability can be an easy USP starting point for almost any business, because so many customer searches begin with the question, “I wonder if X business offers X good or service.”

I often recall seeing storefront signage for a business that had started out as “Pens Unlimited” and then presumably appended the slogan “More than just pens” to its messaging as they expanded, leaving me guessing about what the company actually offered. If your inventory is highly varied, it can be a challenge to fit it all into a business name or slogan, but a slightly longer USP can help. Our grocery store might highlight availability like this:

Shop organic produce, dry goods, supplements and award-winning prepared meals at Marin’s largest natural foods store.

As another example, the website of this SMB shoe store may not be state-of-the-art, but their USP immediately answers the question of “I wonder if they have X?”:

Shoe store offering fashionable dress, comfort, boots, and athletic shoes for men and women.

If a potential customer wanted to know if this particular shop had comfort footwear, this USP does the job.

Authority

This is a proposition that works well when customers need a resource they can trust based on the availability of expertise or the proof of longevity. Our grocery store might say:

Shop Marin’s only grocery store owned by a sitting board member of the Organic Trade Association — locals have trusted our organic commitment since 1969.

Certifications can go a long way towards conveying authority. I found information of this kind buried deep in the loam of a Washington plant nursery, which could be brought forward to their homepage as an authority-based USP like this:

Shop plants with three Master Gardeners and two Certified Professional Horticulturists on-site to help you grow your dream garden!

Affinity

Some of my personal favorite USPs send signals of brand-consumer affinity — they convey that the local business operates on the basis of certain values shared by customers. Our sample grocery store is fertile ground for authentic proofs of community building, and could write a USP like this:

Be the change! Shopping with us benefits your whole community, from free organic meal programs for students and elders, to our Deep Green Energy commitment, to profits shared by all employees.

Meanwhile, outdoor outfitter Patagonia takes a similar approach with this USP:

Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.

And sometimes, a USP can blend more than one element. The gorgeous website of The Red Door catering company has signals of both authority and affinity that could be stirred together for an inspirational, aspirational message, like:

MBE-Certified, Women-Owned, ICA member caterers prepare local, organic feasts for your unforgettable event.

Convenience

When ease is paramount for customers, convenience-based USPs can send a good message. Our grocery store might write:

Try convenient online ordering, curbside pickup, and prepared meals, or walk in just minutes from any downtown neighborhood to our organic grocery store.

Sometimes, location is all it takes to convey convenience. I love this ultra-simple USP from Deer Valley Grocery, which happens to have a beautiful waterside destination location:

“Enjoy breakfast and lunch lakeside.”

It can’t get shorter or sweeter than that.

I hope this practice session was useful. Now, we need to determine the most effective components for a particular local business you’re marketing.

Let customer content inspire your USP

Sentiment trends in your reviews, Q&A, and social media comments can point the way to what your customers value most about what your business does. These forms of user-generated content (UGC) can be a big help in determining which elements could be most effective if centered in your USP.

Start by searching Google for your brand name so that your Google Business Profile appears on the left of the screen (if your brand name search doesn’t work, add your city to your query. If that doesn’t work, you may need to learn the basics of local SEO first so that you build enough authority for Google to associate branded searches with your local business listing). Click on the “View All Reviews” portion of your profile and look at the Place Topics Google has surfaced in the oval tabs at the top of your review display.

Place Topics are an accessible, free form of basic sentiment analysis, highlighting topics mentioned most frequently in your reviews. If we had no other information about our grocery store than this, we could write a customer-centric USP along these lines:

Done with Whole Foods? Shop sustainable, fresh produce, our scrumptious salad bar, and healthy vegan choices at our Mill Valley market.

The great thing about Place Topics is that when you click on them, they sort the review corpus to show only reviews that contain the chosen topic. For example, when I click the “produce” tab, this deepens my understanding of exactly what customers are saying about the fruits and veggies at this store:

If we decided produce was uppermost in our customers’ minds, we could refine our USP like this:

Shop “the best produce in Marin” — unlike Whole Foods, we’re 100% organic and locally-owned!

Definitely dig deeply into your reviews to find out what really resonates with your customers. Moz Local customers have the added advantage of our sentiment analysis and trend features to help you go beyond Google and understand dominant review topics across multiple platforms.

If a local business has active social media profiles, customer likes and comments can also provide insight. Looking back through our grocery store’s Facebook posts, I caught the moment early in 2020 when a simple inspirational post received an unusually high amount of likes and loves, and comments from customers saying how much they missed the store and wished delivery was available:

Happily, the business was able to utilize this moment of community interaction to announce the debut of their curbside and delivery service:

A major change in operations, which so many local businesses underwent as a result of the pandemic, could be a strong reason to temporarily alter a company’s core USP for the purpose of quickly disseminating new information. For example, the market might have publicized this message:

Your organic groceries are now available via curbside and delivery in Fairfax and San Anselmo through our new shopping cart.

Other sources of USP-inspiring UGC could include FAQs the business receives via Google Q&A, phone calls, and form submissions — very good reasons to be empowering relevant staff to actively track this type of sentiment. Meanwhile, searcher behavior (if not content) could further refine your USP messaging. Consider using Google Trends or keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer to discover popular search terms related to what your business offers, and that could be effective if incorporated into your proposition.

Where should you publicize your local business USP?

Image Credit: Chris Hottentot

One you’ve put in the work of crafting a strong USP, be sure you are nesting it in as many places as make sense, including:

• Website masthead

• Website homepage

• Website about/mission page

• Website contact page

• Website location landing pages

• Website footer

• Website title tags

• Website meta description tags

• Website Header tags

• Alt tags (if appropriate to describing images)

• Blog posts

• Email campaigns

• Email signatures

• Google My Business description

• Google Posts

• Google Q&A (if it answers an FAQ)

• Descriptions on all local business listings and review profiles (use Moz Local for a quick data push!)

• Carefully-worded review requests in hopes that reviewers will talk about aspects of your USP that matter most to them

• Social media profiles

• Social media posts

• Digital ad campaigns

• Guest post profiles

• Storefront or in-store signage

• Billboards

• Radio and television ad campaigns

• Print news campaigns

• Mailers, circulars, and other print assets

• Business cards

• Company vehicles

• Employee apparel

• Company swag

With such amazing, multifarious applications, it’s easy to see the worth of investing time and care into developing a meaningful USP. You might adjust the wording slightly, based on medium, and you might even create several propositions for different purposes, seasons, or testing periods.

What I think you’ll learn from practicing perfecting your USP is that, like so much else in marketing, it comes down to great storytelling in a limited space, with eyes firmly set on engaging customers with a message of readiness that deftly meets their needs.

Don’t forget to grab your ticket to see Joy and our other incredible speakers, July 12-14!

Secure Your Seat at MozCon Virtual

Video Transcription

Hi, Moz fans. It's Joy Hawkins, and today I'm going to be giving you a preview of the presentation I'm going to be doing later this year at MozCon. It's all about Google My Business posts. 

So if you are unfamiliar with posts, there are currently four different types of Google My Business posts. There are what we call the update posts, which is kind of your typical post that has an image and some text. There are what we call offer posts, event posts, and then last year Google actually released a new one called COVID posts. Now typically all these posts share some similarities, but they're all a little different. 

1. COVID Posts perform well

One of the things that we looked at in the study, that I'm going to be going over at MozCon, is which type performs better.

So specifically we wanted to know: Do they get more clicks? Do they get more conversions? We identified that two of the types definitely outperform the other two. So I'm not going to reveal both. But I'll tell you that one of the two was the COVID post type. The reason for this I believe is that, unlike the other three types of posts, COVID posts get their own special spot in the knowledge panel.

So I've done my best to highlight this here. On the left here, you'll see that at the bottom there's usually the post carousel, and it's underneath reviews, questions and answers, and products. So it's kind of like shoved down in the search results. Now COVID posts on the other hand, which are featured over here on the right, they show up right at the top, right underneath the business information.

So they're very visible, and it's a really good place to get a quick message across. The only downside, of course, is that they don't have photos. So keep that in mind when you're figuring out which type to use. 

2. Average CTR = 0.5%

Now the second thing that we discovered was that the average click-through rate on all the posts in our study was half a percent, so 0.5%, which means that you need about 200 views on a post before you're going to get a click.

Now don't let that discourage you. Keep in mind that that is only tracking clicks that happen on the actual post. So, in reality, people could be calling you more, they could be clicking on your website more, lots of other things. So there are still a lot of reasons why you would want to consider doing Google Posts. 

3. GMB does not equal GA

The third thing on my list here is keep in mind, when you are tracking the results from posts, that what you see inside Google My Business Insights is not going to match what you see inside Google Analytics.

Now in this industry, often we use what are called UTM codes, which help you track things better in Google Analytics. If you're unfamiliar with how those work or how to use them with Google Posts, I'm going to link to an article down below that will explain all of that. But the main thing that you've got to remember is that these numbers won't match. So don't expect them to match. If you do, you're going to be very frustrated. Don't go down that rabbit trail. Just remember that they are tracked differently and you're going to get different numbers. So pick one and stick with it. 

4. Justifications = 60 days

The fourth thing is in regards to justifications. Now if you're unfamiliar with that term, you're like, "What are justifications," Miriam Ellis recently did a blog post here on Moz about this topic, and she explained it really well. So I'm not going to do what she did and explain it. Check out her article, and that will give you all the information you need. 

But just in case you're not familiar and you really don't know what I'm talking about, I did my best — I'm not an artist — to draw it over here. So let's say, for example, you're on Google and you do a search for local SEO, and my agency, Sterling Sky, shows up in the search results.

If we had a post recently that mentioned local SEO, Google might grab that little snippet, the words essentially and stick it right there in the local pack results. This is what we call a justification. So they're really cool, and it's a great way to get more words and more messaging in front of your possible consumers. Now the thing to keep in mind here is that post justifications only look at posts that were done from the last 60 days.

So your older posts won't be looked at. So you've got to have a post strategy that is pretty frequent. 

5. Seasonal Posts = one of the worst

The fifth thing was that we wanted to look at content types. So people often ask me, "Joy, what should I post about? Like what am I supposed to put in the content in Google Posts?" It comes up a lot as a question.

So we, with our study, basically organized all the different posts we looked at into different categories. Then what I'm going to show at MozCon is the winners and the losers. So one from the losers, that did not perform well, were posts about seasonal topics. Now that shocked me to be completely honest. But what I'm talking about here is let's say you have a dermatologist and it's coming close to Christmas.

So you use like Christmassy wording and Christmas emojis and like Christmas stuff to try and make the post kind of be more relevant. These did not perform well. So it kind of surprised me, but that was one from our losers list. 

6. Use emojis! 

One from our winners list was emojis, point number six. So emojis are great. Some of you may be excited by this. Some of you might roll your eyes.

If you love emojis, this is one of the strategies that we saw that actually helped performance on Google Posts. So make sure you use emojis if you are trying to get people's attention. Posts with them outperformed posts without them. 

7. Update Posts = 6 months

Finally, the last tip I'm going to share with you today is in regards to the update posts. Now if you're not familiar with the term "update posts," I kind of made it up because there was no name for the traditional post inside Google My Business.

So it sent updates, so we just called it that. But this was the type of post that, if you remember when Google first launched this feature, you would do a post and it would last for seven days, and after seven days, it would get deleted from your knowledge panel. So it was essentially invisible, which was a little annoying because you don't want to have to go and post every seven days. Because you can't schedule a post natively inside Google My Business, it was a bit of a headache to try and keep up with this as a business owner.

So the good news is that several months ago Google changed this, and now these posts actually stay on your knowledge panel for a long time. But I wanted to know exactly how long they stayed on there, so I tracked some and came to the conclusion that they stay on your knowledge panel for six months. So essentially what that means is if you made one update post, never posted again, it would stay there for six months and then it would disappear, which is a lot better than seven days.

So keep these tips in mind when you are coming up with your post strategy. Obviously to get a lot more, feel free to check out my talk at MozCon upcoming later this year. Some of the things that I'll be talking about there — there's a lot that I didn't cover — I'll be addressing if posts impact ranking, which is probably the number one question that I get asked, and I'll also be going through a lot more of the winning and losing strategies that we found from the study.

Thanks for listening, and if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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“They weave a web of reciprocity, of giving and taking. In this way, the trees all act as one because the fungi have connected them. Through unity, survival. All flourishing is mutual...all are the beneficiaries of reciprocity.” — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Local business communications options are rapidly expanding, and customers are trying to reach out to your business for help in many ways. Simultaneously, any local business you're marketing has multiple options for initiating welcome outreach. Where can we look for inspiring models and methodologies to help us build communications bridges with the communities we serve?

The model of nature relies on abundance and connectivity. Instead of standing alone, one tree is connected to all the others in its forest via fungal bridges, through which trees provide carbohydrates to mushrooms, and they return the favor with water and minerals. Reciprocity in our digital marketing scenario consists of a business offering something people need while throwing open as many doors of communication as possible. Meanwhile, the consumer contributes their money, time, feedback, loyalty, WOM referrals, and even user-generated content.

It’s a very different model than artificial scarcity, which underpins monopoly, arbitrarily limiting things humans need and creating hardship instead of sharing. Think of agonizing automated phone trees vs. well-trained live customer service representatives, and you’ll feel the difference in your gut.

Do you find nature’s model to be the more inspirational of the two? Let’s apply it! Google says searches for “local” and “business” grew by an astounding 80% last year as communities earnestly sought reconnection in changed circumstances. Customers truly want a relationship with your business.

Let’s look at technological bridges for facilitating relationships with people you want to serve. We’ll chat with respected experts including David Mihm, Aaron Weiche, Claire Carlile, and Ellen Dunne and equip you with tips for becoming the most connected local business in town.

8 ways to connect with modern local business customers

Evaluate each of these local business communications bridges to find the best fit for each local business you're marketing.

1. Texting & messaging: winning right now

91% of consumers are interested in texting with you. To learn more about this mode of customer communication, I caught up with my friend Aaron Weiche, whose new business texting and messaging app Leadferno could lead the way in making this technology accessible and simple for local brands at every level. 

When I asked Aaron to describe the goal of his startup, he emphasized that “win right now” is a key objective for brands considering SMS, and summarized three basic concepts:

“Conversion: Our goal is to make having conversations easy and fast. Having an always visible CTA during your web experience attracts more conversations. By offering text messaging to website visitors, they gain a known and trusted channel to ask questions, gain confidence and convert to a customer.

Efficiency: Leadferno lets you manage your SMS and Facebook Messenger conversations in one place (GMB messages by fall 2021), giving the business one interface for multiple channels. We’ve layered on time-saving tools like shortcuts to saved replies, scheduled messages, and conversation reminders to shave minutes from conversations for both the business and the consumer.

Organization: Businesses miss so many leads in their email or voicemails by not being able to organize them, track their status, assign them, or ensure it’s tied off. Leadferno brings a set of tools and cues so that you stop missing leads and opportunities to help your customers.”

Aaron added:

“Today’s consumer has growing expectations in timing as they have many options at their fingertips (or search results). If you want to win that business, you better have tools to win right now…or your competitor will.”

I concur that now is the right time to start messaging with local customers, and Aaron offered these stats, which underscore this interesting moment of opportunity:

• 78% of consumers wish they could text businesses

• 66% of consumers would actually pay more for something if it was supported by a mobile messaging channel 

• 69.4% of consumers are extremely likely or likely to interact with a business for customer service via text. Another 24.4% were a maybe with just 6.2% being unlikely.

Finally, Aaron offered some tips for brands to be successful with this communications bridge:

“Embrace text messaging as a two-way channel, not another blast or campaign. While these might have their place, consumers really want quick answers on a channel they already use more than any other (phone or email). Texting is where the customer is…go to them! SMS offers a quicker conversation for both sides. Text messages are quickly seen and read, allowing for short cycles of responses. Use SMS to help prospects and customers faster.

Market that you offer text messaging as a channel. While I feel we will arrive at SMS as an expectation when we see any phone number, you want to use it as a benefit to working with you now. Placing 'you can text us' on your website, landing pages, and traditional marketing lets customers know you have an easy channel to access you.”

Considering the statistics surrounding texting, I’d say that nearly every local business should simply be saying “sign me up!” at this point.

2. Google My Business Messaging: built-in visibility

Aaron mentioned that Leadferno will start supporting Google My Business Messaging later this year, and it’s an option you should be carefully considering now. 

With Google’s dominance of local search, anything they develop has built-in visibility, so I reached out to my friend Claire Carlile to see how early adoption of this function is working out for local business clients of Claire Carlile Marketing. I was eager to hear whether the clients she’s implemented this for were actually getting leads from it, and what the volume of messages looked like. She explained:

“Yes, they are getting leads! I have stores, attractions, therapists, campsites, and event providers with messaging currently turned on. Volume of messages is very variable. One client, a wine store, can have a few a day, and the others maybe only a couple a week.”

This sounds both intriguing and manageable for almost any business, but I asked Claire to share some field notes with me based on her early experience with this feature, and from client opinions while using it, because it might not be right for every local brand. She mentioned:

“Ultimately, if the client is keen and has the resources to manage messaging, we've found that it's worthwhile to turn it on. I'd be reticent to turn it on for a customer who was consistently struggling to manage communication channels, as it's a poor customer experience to message a business and not get a reply. All clients have personalized the message that is seen when you click through to message a business — something like 'please do message us here and we'll get back to you as soon as we can. If your enquiry is urgent please call on...Thanks!'”

Claire offered some additional words to the wise:

“One client had messaging turned off by Google because they did not respond within a 24-hour timeframe. The UI is potentially confusing for both business and people using messaging — it's easier for a business now that they can turn messaging on and off via the GMB app AND the GMB dashboard on a desktop. I've found that if you enable notifications in messaging in the GMB dashboard on a desktop, there don't appear to be any notifications.”

So, we’ve learned that Google hasn’t perfected the UX of this feature, but that it can deliver leads for the right businesses with adequate resources for responsiveness. Now is a good time for brands you’re marketing to weigh whether inviting Google into conversations with customers will be a win.

3. Live chat: recreating in-store assistance experiences

Like many of you, I’ve been keeping a close eye on the intriguing rise of Shopify, and I was thrilled when Senior Product Lead Ellen Dunne made time to talk with me about trends and tactics surrounding Shopify’s live chat feature. 

I started by asking her for some basic statistics about the benefits of implementing website-based live chat, and was fascinated by what Ellen shared:

“During the COVID period, we saw chat volume increase 85%. As a result, merchant sales revenue attributed to chat increased 200%. A great example of this comes from London homeware brand Earl of East when they had to close the doors of their retail store. They learned a new approach to foot traffic: thinking digitally. They realized that if customers would leave their website because they didn’t get a question answered, it was the same as a customer walking out of their shop. They added chat to their online store, and saw the value of having knowledgeable staff chat with customers to make sales and turn a one time shopper into a loyal customer.

There is a strong consumer trend to shop local. When customers can reach a merchant in a chat and connect with a human, an authentic connection is made. The customer is 70% more likely to make a purchase, then to refer friends, come back for subsequent purchases, and so on. The customer relationship is so essential for small/local businesses and we have really seen chat as an invaluable tool for accelerating those relationships and driving sales.”

As for top tips for maximizing the potential of live chat, Ellen noted:

“It’s not surprising that there is a direct correlation between response time and sales. 10% of customers who initiate a chat from the online store will make a purchase, which is already an impressive conversion rate. That number goes up to 17% when the merchant responds within five minutes. Timeliness is key. Next, understanding that chat is a really effective sales tool is important! Ask the customer the right questions to get a better understanding of what they are looking for so that you can make specific product recommendations and share products right in the conversation. Don’t be afraid to offer a discount if the customer has a high cart value or you feel like it might nudge them to make the purchase now. If merchants can recreate the in-store shopping experience for customers through chat, it works really well.”

Finally, I wanted to take the time to ask what it is about Shopify’s offerings that are contributing to the popularity of the company and of features like its live chat. Our search industry can be very choosy about praising software, and it stands out to me that I’m continuously hearing praise for Shopify from so many colleagues. Ellen mentioned these benefits and strategies winning favor with their customers:

“1. Chat where people shop. We believe that chat is a tool to help merchants convert more of their hard-earned traffic into sales. Shopify Chat is free, and can be set up on a merchants’ online store in just a few clicks. It also pulls in all chats from channels like Facebook and Apple business chat so all your conversations are in one place.

2. Focus on conversations that lead to sales. Make it easy for you and your team to focus on conversations that lead to sales by using frequently asked questions and reply templates to speed up response time. Automated order lookup through our chat bot can handle conversation volume, which frees up a merchant’s time to focus on pre-purchase conversations that have a high likelihood to result in an order.

3. Give visitors a personalized shopping experience. You can see what customers have in their online shopping cart while chatting with you, and the total cart value. You can use this context to help you prioritize a fast response, anticipate a customer’s questions, or give them additional guidance that you know might be helpful on sizing, materials, etc.”

If the local brands you’re marketing have made the O2O leap as a result of the pandemic, don’t overlook live chat as part and parcel of e-commerce. Holding customers’ hands, even at a distance, is a generous and smart strategic choice.

4. Email & email newsletters: consistency is key

Email was invented in the 1970s, and I’ll take it as a given that any local business owner or marketer reading this knows that responding to customers’ support request emails in a timely manner is basic to customer service at this point. But what we hear less about is the power of communications initiated by the brand, namely newsletters.

I know I’m not alone in having read more brand emails during the pandemic just to understand what was happening with businesses I support, and I wanted to sit down with Tidings founder David Mihm to ask my good friend for the latest happenings, stats, and tips for seeing success with newsletters. David said:

“I highlighted a number of (I think) interesting stats in my Whitespark Summit presentation last year — probably the most interesting was Mailchimp’s analysis of the impact of send frequency on open rates:

To me that suggests at LEAST through the end of the COVID pandemic, and possibly beyond, that businesses should be staying in touch with their customers on a once-a-week basis for maximum impact. That finding is validated by a much older Marketing Sherpa consumer survey."

He added:

"My top tip is to be consistent with your sending routine. Per the Mailchimp stats, the most effective businesses send emails to their customers at least monthly, and in many cases weekly. Email is most effective when it keeps you top of mind with your customers (in addition to being a direct transactional channel). Search for the 'mere presence effect' in psychology. Simply sending a once-a-year birthday email, and maybe a Black Friday discount, doesn’t really keep you top of mind. Beyond that, I’d say make sure you’re sending engaging content. What that content is varies by industry, but for many the 80-20 rule of thumb holds. That is, 80% of your emails should be educational/informational, and 20% of them should be promotional. There are a number of studies that back this up. Promotions might be the primary reason your subscribers sign up to hear from you, but if all you do is bombard them with discounts (which might also impact your bottom line), you could see a drop-off in engagement.”

While I had David with me, I also asked what has made Tidings successful, and he explained its customer-centric benefits:

“Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to share great content with your subscribers via email. For those local businesses who are active on social media, we pull in your existing social content by default, but even if you’re not active, you can just drop in bookmarked articles as you come across them and build a really engaging newsletter in seconds. We integrate with the major small business email Service Providers (Mailchimp, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign), so you can just send to your customer segment(s) directly from Tidings — you don’t need to migrate your lists or set up new forms on your website.”

I’d sum up by recommending that if you’re considering starting a newsletter, be sure any tool you consider offers the types of conveniences David just described, and that you build a bridge readers love crossing to get to you!

5. Phone: pain points and pet peeves you can solve with people

You know what automatically raises my hackles like the spines on a disgruntled hedgehog? Robots, phone trees, and automated messaging blocking my access to human beings when I call a business for help. Microsoft found that being trapped by automated phone systems was the #1 cause of customer frustration linked to churn. Unless I’m dialing after hours or the business is one you wouldn’t normally contact by phone, anything other than fast access to a live person signals to me, as a customer, one or more of the following negative sentiments:

• This business doesn’t care about me and my experience contacting them.

• This business is too big to speak to me and has doomed me to shouting at a senseless robot.

• This business is too small/understaffed to answer their own phone.

• This business is inaccessible.

• This business is hiding from the public.

• This business replaced a bunch of their staff with robots, costing my fellow citizens their jobs and me the information and pleasure of learning what it’s like to interact with their team.

In short, I’m not reaching out to do business with a robot, so why am I being greeted and gate-kept by one?

Pet peeves and pain points abound, and the least digestible aspect of this is that it’s a problem brands have created for themselves in defiance of the basic tenets of good customer service (not to mention, good manners). In Why is Customer Service So Bad? Because It’s Profitable, Harvard Business Review found that:

“American consumers spend, on average, 13 hours per year in calling queue...a third of complaining customers must make two or more calls to resolve their complaints and that ignores the portion who simply give up in exasperation after their firstcall.”

This study suggests that by putting as many hassles as possible in the way of customers, companies have to pay out less in redressals, and if they have enough market share, they aren’t worried about resulting reputation damage. Most distressingly, data indicates that women, Black, and Latino customers are treated to the worst customer service hassles.

This may be someone’s idea of how to run a good business, but don’t let it be yours. Local businesses and monopolies are on opposite sides of this equation, and a well-trained phone staff can be an incredible differentiator between a business you’re marketing and its more uncaring corporate peers.

I’d bet my hat (and my hackles) that there isn’t an average American citizen right now who can’t readily empathize with consumer loathing for bureaucracy in phone UX, especially after a year of trying to reach government resources for vaccinations, DMV, unemployment, and a host of other stressful scenarios. Rescue your customers from that awful feeling of being disregarded by employing people to answer your phones — with excellent customer service as their absolute mission.

6. Google Questions & Answers: leads gathering dust

This pie chart capture from my original 2020 survey of US grocery stores tells the sad story of Google’s experimental Q&A feature, located within Google Business Profiles. The 50 top-ranked supermarkets I studied across the country had received 1,145 leads, requests for help, and other timely inquiries in the form of Q&A, but 86% of the markets were simply ignoring this content. My earlier research on restaurants surfaced similar neglect.

Some of my peers are starting to chalk up Q&A as a failed bridge Google tried to build because of lack of brand adoption (not to mention a preponderance of useless non-answers being provided by the public in the absence of any official response). I think there’s still reason to explore use of this overlooked feature for three forms of communication:

1. To post company FAQs as a means of having answers to common questions visible right on your Google listings. Even if you get zero queries from the public, you can do a one-and-done session of adding and answering your own top FAQs and walk away feeling good.

2. To capture leads. Walking away from Q&A queries that are clearly leads is as senseless as ignoring someone at your real-world customer service desk.

3. To demonstrate responsiveness. Google’s bridge may not be ideal here, but if you meet your customers on it with timely replies, you’re building the right kind of reputation.

I think one of the biggest challenges preventing businesses from using Q&A to its full potential is simple lack of awareness that the public is out there asking questions. Need a solution? Moz Local alerts you every time you get a new question on any of your listings, supporting your development of a reputation for superlative accessibility.

7. Google Posts: publication without blogging

Blogging isn’t right for every local business, although sources estimate that there are 600,000,000 blogs on the web and that 85% of B2C marketers utilize this form of publication. 

Read Chapter 5 of The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide to determine whether blogging is right for any local business you’re marketing. If you decide a formal investment in this type of content isn’t a good match for a particular brand and/or its audience, microblogging in the form of Google Posts could still be a win for you.

Google Posts are a communications bridge you initiate on your end — either using the Moz Local dashboard or the GMB dashboard. They’re a form of publication that’s so easy to write, so there’s no reason not to experiment with them. They can do wonders for intent matching when you focus on topics customers are searching for, but to find out whether people are actually crossing the bridge you’re building with Google Posts, don’t miss Joy Hawkins’ tutorial on how to track them in Google Analytics and Google Search Console.

Focus your Google Posts on attention-grabbing topics of interest to your customers, use images (including images with text in them), and be sure they feature strong calls-to-action.

8. Telesupport: next best thing to in person, or, sometimes, even better

Check out Crate & Barrel’s virtual customer services and consider whether this type of telesupport is a good fit for a local brand you’re marketing. PCMag ran a good piece recently on the best video conferencing software, and after a year of celebrating family events over Zoom, think of the segments of your consumer base who have now gained a new comfort level with video-based communications.

We’re still in the early stages of this. A recent Biteable survey found that just 19% of businesses are using video as part of their customer service solutions, though 32% are now using filmed media for sales. Local brands looking to differentiate themselves have a limited time window for becoming early adopters of this technology in order to develop a reputation for multimedia accessibility before their competitors do.

Surveys indicate that the shopping public is eager for the return of in-store local business experiences when safer days arrive, but our taste for online convenience will not be soon forgotten. If there are elements of a business model you’re marketing that can be supported by video — like consultation, complaint resolution, or showcasing — there are many customers who would like to catch up with you online rather than fighting traffic to get to you. Even in more normal times, all of us have sick days, busy weeks, and downtime when we’d just prefer to stay comfy at home. Telesupport makes consumer-to-brand connection possible when it wouldn’t be otherwise, making it an opportunity worthy of exploration.

Customer service = conversation

Image credit: Mike Goad

Customer service — that make-or-break foundation of all local brands — really boils down to how good you are at sparking, facilitating, managing, and resolving conversations. If you can think like a glorious tree and span your neck of the woods with accessible communications bridges, you can go far towards resolving one of the oldest challenges in commerce.

As a local SEO, I read more consumer reviews than most people do, and an ever-present theme is that many customers fear businesses are in some way trying to rip them off. I see all kinds of anxiety and anger, often groundless, emerging in the way unhappy customers review businesses. I picture these reviewers sitting remote from the business, alone with their device and their unresolved complaints. Somehow, they’ve been left to brood on dissatisfactions, rather than encouraged to trust that if they speak up, they’ll be helped.

Let’s bring some photosynthesis into this age-old, stale situation. Imagine this same customer welcomed across many bridges: texting, messaging, live chat, newsletters, microblogging, humans on phones, humans on film, and all questions answered. It’s all as simple as talking + tech, and if you get it right, reciprocal benefits will follow. 

Earn customers’ trust by showing that you’re always ready to talk, and they’ll grow your business for you.

Local search marketing is a very strenuous hike. 

When you hire an agency to help with the varied tasks of local search engine optimization and offline-to-online marketing, you’re hoping to take an experienced guide along with you on the journey from trailhead, to setting up camp, to making the most of your company’s stay in your neck of the woods. 

Top of mind for your local business will certainly be increasing revenue. You know you’ll need better or broader local and localized organic rankings for this, perhaps more reviews, more clicks-to-call, more form submissions, more qualified website traffic, or an improved conversion rate to get there. But, I want to encourage you to start the search for a local SEO agency with a long-term relationship as the goal, rather than swift wins on specific metrics. 

The best agency for your local business will be the one that’s there for you when things go right and when they go wrong, for many years to come, because you’ve made a mutual commitment to traveling together and are both sharing the rewards success brings. This article will equip you with tips for finding that kind of agency, warn you of danger signs, and help you to take your local business on the best possible trek into the future.

Your responsibilities to the local SEO agency you hire

Fundamental: be sure you’re hiring a firm with local SEOs on board rather than just a general digital marketing agency. But, beyond this, you need to see that your partner is making a real commitment to your business in order for you to trust them and act on their advice. The other half of the relationship equation will be the commitments you are prepared to make. These five responsibilities belong in your backpack:

1. Know Google’s guidelines

Before you begin your search for an agency, mark out 30 minutes on your calendar for slowly reading through the Guidelines for representing your business on Google. It’s as fundamental to what you’re about to do as looking at a trail map would be before heading off into Yosemite. If you don’t read the guidelines, you’ll be in danger of asking your agency partners to do things that would get your business into trouble with Google. More alarming, without knowledge of what Google allows local brands to do on their platform, you will have no idea if an agency you hire is engaging in activities that violate the guidelines, putting your company at risk of suspension, listing removal, and reputation damage. 

Don’t skip this step. You don’t have to be an expert in all the minutiae of weird scenarios businesses encounter when seeking guideline-compliance, but you do need a rough understanding of what Google permits, so that you and your chosen agency start from the same entry point of making smart marketing decisions with business longevity in mind. 

2. Be honest about past mistakes

If, through past ignorance of Google’s guidelines, you come to realize that your business made mistakes in its marketing, tell your agency partners. This could include mistakes that resulted in actions on Google’s part, such as listing suspensions or review removal. Or, it could include mistakes that Google has not yet noticed, such as creating listings for ineligible entities like P.O. boxes, or having staff post positive reviews of your business.

Your agency will have the task of cleaning up, either before damage has occurred or after it’s already happened. It can be embarrassing to admit mistakes, but unless you make your marketers aware of any errors and problems you know of, they can’t help you with them, and they may cast a long shadow over your business if left unaddressed, undermining success. 

3. Do your best to deliver on your end

I’ve consulted with every type of local business from beekeepers to bookkeepers, and one of the most frustrating barriers to getting agency work completed is when clients fail to meet deadlines for deliverables. This widespread problem that can seriously strain business relationships because delays in delivery then delay expected successes. The client can end up blaming and quitting the agency for not meeting benchmarks, when failure is actually due to the local business missing deadlines. In fact, it’s a red flag to good agencies if a potential client has changed marketing firms repeatedly within a short timeframe, because enough time can’t have been given for the results of their local SEO work to bear fruit. 

If you or your staff have agreed to provide certain materials, such as spreadsheets of business information, content for new pages on the website, photos, or access permissions, do your best to deliver on time. 

Empathetic local SEOs understand that local business owners are some of the busiest people in the world, and an occasional delay is understandable, but if it becomes a pattern, it’s time to reassess the relationship. For example, if the business repeatedly fails to deliver text content to the agency, it may be that the business needs to expand the number of services for which it’s paying its marketers. Maybe the agency needs to provide a copywriter for the business so that work can begin moving ahead again at a good pace.

4. Base expectations on your expert’s appraisal of what’s possible

The internet is crowded, and unless your business model is unique in its geographic market, it’s going to take time to see maximum ROI from your agency partnership. Some local SEO tasks can literally provide same-day boosts, but for others, it will take many months to see your investments start to pay off. 

Every marketing relationship should begin with a realistic appraisal of what experts at the agency believe is possible for the unique business — within a rational timeframe. This is the opposite of expectations like, “I want to rank #1 within two weeks.” Rather, it’s the foundation of a strategy that could take multiple years to fully roll out, meeting important benchmarks on a monthly or quarterly basis along the way so that growth is measurable and meaningful. It’s your responsibility to ask the experts you hire to map out what you should expect, based on your business model, your market, your market competitors, and the agency’s past experience.

5. When dealing with Google, expect change

Your agency’s backpack contains all kinds of specialized knowledge, but they don’t control the forest. It’s Google, with their near-monopoly on local search, that rules their powerful platform, and they are continuously altering the terrain in both small and large ways. New rules, new features, emergent bugs, ongoing algorithmic updates, and new competitors setting up shop or upping their marketing games mean that you and your marketers can always expect change.

It can be extremely alarming when Google alters something and your business experiences a drop in phone calls, traffic, visibility, or reviews. Communicate with your agency, and then extend a little patience while your marketers investigate the change and develop a list of actions, if any, that need to be taken. 

Warning signs of an undesirable local SEO agency

As mentioned, local search marketing is a very strenuous hike, and what you don’t need in a traveling companion is an ill-equipped partner. There are three points of discovery at which you must assess whether an agency is a benefit or burden to your local business: before hiring, mid-relationship, and post-relationship. Watch out for these red flags:

Before hiring

Beware of any agency that cold-contacts you. You may receive phone calls or emails from marketing agencies claiming that something is wrong with your website or marketing that they can fix. You may be contacted by people claiming to have a special relationship with Google, or even to be from Google! People may follow you on social media and then try to sell you services. 

While good agencies do engage in legitimate advertising, the best local SEO agencies may get nearly all or all of their work via referrals from happy clients, industry peers, and the reputation they’ve built, preventing them from relying on cold contacts. Rather than responding to anyone reaching out to you out of the blue, it’s better for you to do the finding of your future marketing partners through your own research. 

A good way to start this process is to look up questions you have about local SEO in Google, see who has written answers that make sense to you, and then learn more about the author from their website, other articles, and social media profiles.

Beware of any agency that promises you any kind of results. “I can get you #1 rankings,” is a huge red flag of a shady firm, because honest SEOs know they can’t make promises about platforms (like Google) that they don’t directly control. 

Beware of any agency that doesn’t meet your standards of accessible, prompt, professional communication. If a marketing firm is hard to reach before you hire them, expect this to continue even when you’re paying them, and never begin a relationship with a partner who is dismissive of your communications, unclear to you in their communications so that you don’t understand what they’re offering, rude, or inconsistent in their claims.

Beware of agencies that only sell packages. While some services can be packaged up for general use by most local businesses, all local brands are unique, and good agencies should be offering you a customized strategy. 

Related to this, be cognizant of the size of the agency you’re considering. In my experience, small-to-medium local businesses are best served by small-to-medium agencies, rather than becoming just a number in an enormous client roster of a major brand. For example, a big website hosting company may offer a local SEO package, but you’re unlikely to have a unique identity to the people working at a brand this large, and shouldn’t expect to receive best-quality, personalized service when being fit into shoes thousands of others are wearing. 

Finally, and crucially, beware of any agency that indicates they will engage in a practice that you’ve learned violates Google’s guidelines. This is one reason it’s so important for you to equip yourself with that essential reading, so you can walk away from this headache before it begins.

Mid-relationship

It’s quite common for local businesses to have to work with more than one agency before finding an ideal fit. Sometimes, a relationship can start well, but changes in personnel at the digital marketing agency, changes in expectations, or growth of the business beyond the agency’s skill set can require reassessment of whether the partnership is still the best choice for the business. 

Take note if your agency becomes less communicative, fails to respond to emails or calls, or cancels meetings. If you notice a pattern, ask what has changed, give the agency the chance to correct course with you (including booking more of their time or offering you extra help to make up for past failures), but then consider moving on if dissatisfaction isn’t remedied. I’m personally such a local business fan that I’ve always considered it a tremendous honor to be brought into a good local business to advise them. Evaluate at regular intervals whether you feel like you and your business are being honored by your marketing partners.

Finally, pay attention if benchmarks are repeatedly missed. For example, if your marketing partners tell you that they typically expect investment in review outreach to have doubled the rate at which you’re receiving reviews within one quarter, and four months go by without any improvement, request an explanation and weigh it well. Local SEO is experimental and demands patience and leeway, but if stated goals are consistently not met, your agency may not be up to the task at hand.

Post-relationship

If changes on either side of the relationship make it necessary to part ways with your agency, the ideal scenario is a mutually-respectful adieu in which the marketers wish the client well on the next phase of their journey, and the client has done nothing that would make it awkward to potentially work with these partners again in future — if they’d like to.

I’ve seen from a distance some shockingly unprofessional business breakups, with accusations hurled on both sides, websites being held hostage, scathing reviews being left, foolhardy online revenge attempts, and even lawsuits. Unless something has happened to warrant legal action, it’s best to walk away with everyone’s dignity intact. There are many reasons why clients and agencies may be mismatched, but only edge cases warrant making a public scene that risks reputation damage to both houses.

When a top quality local SEO agency can’t fulfill a client’s expectations or needs, a respectful environment may prompt them to refer the business to another firm they know and trust. When a client grows beyond what an agency can provide but has been happy up to that point, polite openness can greatly ease the parting. Rather than burning a bridge, try to keep it open so that good feelings on both sides exist for any future potential work together. 

Almost any agency will be sorry to see you go. You can remain an all-time favorite client of theirs if you agree to write a testimonial about whatever was good for your business in working with them, and they will love you forever if you refer other local brands to them that you think would be a good match for their services. If you stay friends with your former marketers, they may CC you when they see an opportunity for your business, and it’s definitely a plus for your brand if your marketers tell their big circle of colleagues, friends, and family about the great things your business offers. I’ve personally become a loyal customer of some of my best clients!

7 questions to ask a local SEO agency before you hire them

Before inviting a marketer or marketing team to partner with your business, you’ll need to walk a mile or so with them. Conduct a thorough interview of one or more prospective agency reps, and document their answers to these seven questions, so that you can do a comparison to identify the best possible match for your needs.

1. Are your marketing practices consistent with all of Google’s guidelines?

A good agency should be expert in the Guidelines for representing your business on Google, Google’s guidelines for user-contributed content — including reviews, and Google’s search quality evaluator guidelines, and should agree to adhere to them to avoid negative outcomes for their client. If you’re not convinced that a marketer you’re interviewing is conversant with Google’s policies, present a hypothetical question to them and see if their solution matches the guidelines.

For example, if you ask the marketer whether you can get a Google My Business listing for a virtual office, they should tell you “no” and point you to the guidelines that forbid this. If a marketer knows the guidelines but suggests that you can get away with a violation because Google is asleep at the wheel, walk away. The marketer may be quite right, by the way, but they’re not a safe bet for your brand’s reputation.

2. Based on what you already know about my business and market, are my goals realistic?

Provide a clear, concrete list of goals to the interviewee. Be specific about how many more search terms you want to rank for, how many more reviews you want, how many more phone calls, form submissions, leads, sales, etc. you want within a set timeframe.

Before having an interview with you, a motivated agency will have conducted a modest amount of research on your business and its market. They may have run some reports. But don’t expect them to have done a full workup before being hired. What you want to hear at this stage is whether they feel your goals sound reasonable or are obviously unattainable, based on what they know so far. You want to hear them say that they will be able to provide a more reliable answer once they’ve put in the work as your hired partner. But also look out if they promise you everything off the bat — they could be overselling you just to get the job.

3. How much time will you invest in researching my market before creating my strategy?

You won’t be hiring a local SEO who is already marketing a direct competitor in your city, so this means your partner will need time to learn about the community you serve. And, unless you hire a specialty firm that only works with your category of business, the agency will need time to learn about your industry. Beyond this, they will need the time to study the specifics of your unique business: its goods and services, its staff (including any in-house staff that may be contributing to marketing), its policies, history, and more. 

Time for all of this must be built into the informal agreement or formal contract. You should expect to be billed for it, and need to know how much time the agency considers reasonable for an initial period of study, with the understanding that they will be continuing to evaluate your brand and your market opportunities across time in order to continuously create strategy.

At the bare minimum, unless you are hiring an agency solely for some small one-and-done service, your work with them should begin with a full business audit and a complete competitive audit so that strategy is based on data rather than guesses.

4. What will you need from me?

Give the interviewee the chance to set clear expectations about the deliverables they will need from you and the time they may need to speak with you and your staff. Within this framework, establish what types and amounts of communications will be involved.

Some local business owners want their marketers to take care of everything behind the scenes and only come to them with reports of problems or growth. They may be outsourcing this work due to genuine lack of time to learn about local search marketing. Other clients hire an agency to train them and their staff to become more self sufficient at many marketing tasks, in-house. These scenarios cover an extremely wide spectrum of communications needs.

Be upfront about whether you want bare minimum communication, a regular schedule of strategy sessions, or formal training, and have the interviewee explain to you what commitments you’ll need to make on your end to facilitate this.

And, of course, now is the time to request a full explanation of costs. Agency pricing structures differ tremendously, from itemized price sheets, to packages, to monthly retainers. Be realistic and firm about your budget, and see whether what you can invest is a good match for what the interviewee can provide in your joint pursuit of meeting goals.

5. May I see an anonymized client report?

Every local business will have different expectations and needs concerning the reports their marketers deliver, but across the board, all brands need to be sure they will receive reports that are intelligible rather than simply overwhelming. Before you hire a local SEO, ask to see one or more anonymized, real client reports. Look at them thoroughly. Now is the time to ask questions about anything that’s in the reports that you don’t understand. 

Some clients want exhaustive reports that capture every iota of traffic and every search language permutation on every day of the week. Others prefer to see only high-level data with action items for the agency or client. Whatever your needs, be sure the style of reporting the marketers offer is a good match, both in terms of content and frequency, and that customization is possible if you need something that isn’t being provided in the samples.

Feel free to ask the agency about the tools and software they use, and to do your own research of the quality of those products. You are also free to ask if the agency is white-labeling tools or has proprietary technologies. A good agency will be open and honest with their clients.

6. Can you show me the growth you’ve created for three other clients?

Due to NDAs and client privacy, this information may also need to be anonymized, but you want to see a convincing account of growth for more than one client. Be on the lookout for whether the agency reports on vague metrics like doubling traffic, or concrete ones like doubling leads and revenue. If there’s a particular type of growth your business is pursuing, you can ask the agency to show you wins they’ve gotten in this area.

If the agency keeps a public roster of their clients, ask if you can be put in touch with someone at a few of these businesses for a quick chat. Ideally, you’re hoping to hear a glowing recommendation from an existing client of the company you’re considering hiring.

7. What is your history and involvement in your own industry?

Consider it a fundamental part of your interview process to go online and research the reputation of any marketer you might hire. Look particularly at the degree to which they are involved in education in the local SEO industry, because you will be hiring this person or team to educate you. 

Deeply-invested local SEOs will have a history of writing about this marketing discipline. They may have a blog, or contribute to industry blogs, have a podcast or videos, and speak at or host conferences. Look at their website, their social media profiles, reviews if they have them, and note what their peers and clients are saying about them.

In addition to doing your own online research, now is a great time to ask the marketer a little about their own history. Why did they get into local SEO and what do they like about it? Do they have a philosophy that they can share succinctly and does it resonate with your company’s culture? Throughout the interview process, be keenly alert to how well any prospective partner communicates with you and the level of comfort they create, because it will set the tone of any future relationship. 

Mutual, sustained growth: so happy together

After a long hiring journey, you’ve chosen your agency and have now set up camp together. You’ve become sharers in one another’s fates, and that’s exciting! Unless your local business is taking a complete hands-off approach to marketing, you’re about to learn a lot about local SEO. There are three things you can do to get the most from this business investment:

1. Ask questions

I’m hoping that the agency you’ve engaged doesn’t communicate in jargon, but if they do, nip this unhelpful habit in the bud by being completely fearless about asking questions. Never, never be timid about this. If your marketer says, “We can increase CTR with a more compelling USP, but we need to focus on largest contentful paint first,” and you don’t hear the next three things they say because you got lost trying to parse this out, state clearly:

“I’d prefer you avoid acronyms and jargon as much as possible so that we’re speaking the same language, and I’ll try to do the same when explaining my industry to you.”

If there is anything your marketer says or sends you at any time that isn’t clear or contains words and phrases you don’t recognize, you’re the smart one for asking them to back up and explain until you’re completely comfortable with what’s being proposed, reported, or discussed.

2. Communicate dissatisfaction and satisfaction openly

Don’t let resentment quietly build over dissatisfactions you have with your agency. If something isn’t meeting your standards, please speak up early and often so that your marketers aren’t in the dark about how to best serve you. As a local SEO, I watch this silent curse fuel the majority of negative online reviews and think to myself how much distress could be avoided if customers politely voiced complaints at the time of service. In your relationship with your marketer, your frank feedback when something isn’t right is essential!

On the flip side, when a goal is met, take a moment to thoughtfully thank your local SEO. I’ve had lovely clients send me gifts as an extraordinary celebration for services rendered. That’s extremely kind, but a simple, “This really went well and I’m very happy with your work,” is an amazing psychological boost to the marketers who are working so hard for your brand’s success.

3. Grow your own local SEO knowledge

You’re paying your marketers for their expertise, but your business can only benefit if you develop a working acquaintance with local search marketing that enables you to brainstorm initiatives with a confident command of the terrain. 

The best local SEO firms will do all they can to study your consumer base and geography, but they will never know your business or community quite like you do. If you can pair your deep market intelligence with some study of what’s possible online, you will become a much stronger company leader. Don’t know how to get started? Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide and excite your marketers at your next meeting!

To round up, hiring a local search marketing partner is the first step toward the business growth you desire, and you’re expecting to learn a lot. What you might not know is that your agency is likewise planning to learn a lot from you. Local SEO is one grand experiment, and smart agencies learn from every single client. It’s through working on your website, listings, reviews, social platforms, and other assets that marketers make thrilling discoveries, hone skills, and experience gratifying professional success. 

It’s this mutual hunt for success, in fact, that safeguards and inspires growth in the client-agency relationship. Teaming up can turn the very strenuous hike of local SEO into a navigable pathway strewn with exciting rewards. With commitments to earning trust over time, finding the right levels and styles of communication, learning together, and a basic grounding in reciprocal respect, this is a partnership you can build your local business on, and from, for years to come.

Image credits: Franck Michel, Nathan Gibbs, Lisa Pompeo, Paula Reedyk, and Jason Pratt.

Tweet your questions and comments about local SEO hiring using #MozBlog!

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday, guest host Alex Ratynski goes through five important steps that local businesses can take to configure Google Analytics efficiently. Check it out below! 

Video Transcription

Hey, Mozzers. My name is Alex, and I'm the founder of Ratynski Digital. We are a local SEO consultancy for small and medium-size businesses. Today what I want to talk about is how to configure Google Analytics for local businesses.

Now Google Analytics is a super powerful and efficient tool when used properly and when configured accurately. This tells us important information about our website, our visitors, what pages are performing well, perhaps even what search queries we're coming from, especially when it's connected with Google Search Console. A lot of important information that can help us to make valuable business decisions for our online marketing or SEO efforts.

1. Exclude bots and spiders

Now there are five important steps we're going to talk about today for how we can configure our Google Analytics account the most efficiently. The first one is to exclude bots and spiders. Now this is important because some studies have found that upwards of 25% of all traffic is bot traffic. Any of us that have really gotten super granular into our Google Analytics account, I'm sure we've actually seen some of those examples of very obvious bot traffic.

So the way we can actually do this is Google actually makes a nice little tool within Google Analytics. You go to Admin > View > View Settings and there's a nice little box that says Bot Filtering. What this does is it pulls from the IAB, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and it actually makes sure that it pulls from the list of known spiders and bots and makes sure we're to filter against that.

2. Filter spam and personal traffic

The next step we want to filter spam traffic and personal traffic. Now the reason for this is inaccurate data is worthless data, right? If we don't have accurate information, we're really going to struggle to make accurate business decisions regarding our SEO efforts or our online marketing. I can't tell you how often I run into business owners who have wildly inaccurate numbers and they're trying to make decisions based off of it.

So it's super important that we get as accurate information as we can. There always will be some margin of error, but anything we can do to minimize that the better. The way we can filter out our own traffic is to go to Admin > View > View Filters and then Add Filters. What we want to do is make sure to filter out our own IP address, perhaps the IP address of our team, our home office, our physical main office location, things like this.

The way we can do that is to search "What's my IP" in Google. You'll actually be able to find your IP address, and then from there you can actually exclude it. 

3. Set up goals

Number three, setting up goals. Goals are super important because setting up goals actually helps us to track our success, right? It's success tracking. So we can set up goals by going to Admin > View > Goals and then New Goal. 

Destination based goals

There's a variety of different goal types that we might be able to set up, and it really depends on the business and what you're looking for. But one of the most popular ones is a thank you page or a destination based goal. 

For example, imagine you're an HVAC company who's trying to acquire new customers and you want to see how is your website performing, which pages are bringing the traffic, and what's kind of the URL path or the goal path if you will. 

So a way we can track that is by using a destination-based goal. We want to make sure that after somebody fills out a form, they actually are sent to that thank you page, and every time somebody interacts with that thank you page, they land on it, it can actually be counted as a goal. This is really helpful to kind of see the success of what we're looking for, whatever it is, our business goals, what we're trying to achieve that month or that quarter that we can track that accurately.

Event based goals

Now another type of goal, there are more than two, but we're just going to talk about two today — destination based goals versus event based goals. Event based goals are a little more advanced to set up, not too tricky, but a little bit more so than destination based goals. Event based goals have nothing to do with a specific page or URL, but actually, as you might guess, the actual event that happened.

So, for example, if a user fills out a form or they click a specific button, those are examples that can be tracked to an event based goal. Now there are some pros and cons to each. A destination based goal, if you have any specific parameters within the URL and it doesn't match exactly, you might not be able to be counting for that goal.

A way around this is you can change it from "equals to" to "begins with." Another option, it's probably a little bit more of a better option, is to learn regular expressions. That can help us to kind of filter out those different options and get us more accurate information. With event based goals, another little caveat that we want to watch out for is to make sure that we have proper validation set up.

So, for example, if a user starts to fill out a form but doesn't actually fill it out, when they first click that button, it might have been tracked as a goal, even though they didn't actually complete that goal. So there's a couple extra steps we want to make sure that we can figure out before we kind of publish it and leave that. That way we can get accurate information.

4. Connect GA to GSC

Number four, connect Google Analytics to Google Search Console. Now we have these two powerful resources of reporting and information, and we want to make sure they can talk to each other efficiently. As we all know, Google Search Console has a lot of valuable data regarding our organic search, what specific search queries, specific pages, how they're performing, the average position, lots of information like this.

We want to make sure that it's connected to our Google Analytics account. Now a way we can do that is by going to Admin > Property > Property Settings and then there's a little choice there for Search Console. Now before we do this, always make sure that you actually have your Google Search Console account set up. That's always step one. So if we can get that set up, then it's going to be a lot easier to connect those two.

In fact, you can't do it unless you've set up your Google Search Console. So make sure that's set up and then make sure you can connect those. 

5. Use UTM tracking codes

Then last but not least, use UTM tracking codes. UTM tracking codes are a really powerful way for us to track the effectiveness of specific campaigns, where did our users come from, our website visitors come from, and what specific sources or mediums or campaigns were effective in that regard.

An example of this is you can add a UTM tracking code in your Google My Business link profile so that any users that come from Google My Business, in your Google Analytics account you'll be able to accurately see that categorization of website visitors that came specifically from Google My Business. Now this needs to be done regularly, not in the sense of Google My Business, but it needs to be done regularly for each campaign.

So if you're a smaller, local business who maybe has a limited amount of time or budgets for whoever might be working on this, maybe it's better to focus on just some of the larger campaigns, anything that's a little bit more permanent or any specific large campaign. Perhaps you're doing a local event or you have a special promotion a couple times a year. Those might be events that we really want to track the effectiveness of these campaigns and using UTM tracking codes.

We can actually set this up, for anyone who's interested in setting up their UTM tracking code, you can use Google's Campaign URL Builder. We will make sure to link to that exact page here in the notes below. But there's a couple of different components of a UTM tracking code. Now we're just going to focus on three today, those being the medium that they came from, the source, and then the campaign name.

So an example of this might be the medium being email, the source being whatever specific newsletter was sent out, and then the campaign name would be what you actually want it to show up as in Google Analytics, how you want that campaign categorized. So those are the three different sections of what might be included in your UTM tracking code. You can enter all that in within Google's Campaign URL Builder. There's also a variety of other URL builders. But Google provides one that makes it nice and easy for us. 

Pro tip: learn Google Tag Manager

One last pro tip. Learn Google Tag Manager. There's a bit of a learning curve to Google Tag Manager, but it's definitely possible. I guarantee you can do it. When you learn Google Tag Manager, it makes a lot of these other things a lot easier, especially with setting up things like event based goals and connecting some of our different accounts, like Google Search Console and Google Analytics even.

Google Tag Manager is a super powerful tool. That's all we have today for this week's Whiteboard Friday. Please feel free to reach out, ask any additional questions on Twitter at @alexratynski. You can also reach me at ratynskidigital.com. Feel free to send me an email. I'm more than happy to speak to the Moz community. I absolutely love everybody who's here.

Really appreciate your guys' time. That's all for this week, and until next week when there's another edition of Whiteboard Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

 Tweet your questions and comments about GA using #MozBlog!

Ahead of the show, we talked with Joy about her research into Google Posts, what she loves most about her work in local SEO, and what she’s looking forward to at MozCon Virtual 2021. Check out the interview below!

And don’t forget to grab your ticket to see Joy and our other incredible speakers at this year’s MozCon!

Secure your seat

Question: 2020 was quite a year, how did the Sterling Sky team adjust? What were some of your favorite projects?

Joy: We were really fortunate. Because we have clients in so many industries, we didn't have a huge number of cancellations when COVID first hit last year. We had a couple of rough months, but most of our clients that did pause their services ended up unpausing after a few months.

We actually saw a lot of growth in the second half of last year and were able to actually hire six more staff in 2020, two of which had lost their previous jobs because of COVID. So overall, I feel really blessed and saw a lot of good come out of a bad situation.

Question: What do you think was the biggest challenge for local SEOs this past year? What changes or trends stood out to you?

Joy: There have been a lot of technical issues and bugs to deal with when it comes to Google My Business. They launched a ton of new features to try and adapt to the ever-changing environment, and I find whenever that happens, stuff breaks.

Question: Local SEO is constantly changing. How do you and the team stay on top of algorithm updates and changes?

Joy: We track everything. I make a habit of trying to know everything that is going on in the industry, and part of how I do that is by moderating the Google My Business forum and our own forum, the Local Search Forum. I also find the local SEO community is really active on Twitter, so often new things get shared there.

Question: You founded Sterling Sky in 2017. Could you describe what it was like founding and building an agency? Was there anything that surprised you?

Joy: When I started, I thought it was just going to be me, and maybe a few others. I never envisioned having this many staff (19 currently) or clients, so that has definitely been an exciting piece that I never planned.

I remember when I hired my first full-time staff in 2017, I wasn't even sure I had enough to pay him and had a plan to cut my own salary if needed. Literally, the same month he started, we had an influx of new clients that was unexpected, so it all worked out perfectly.

Question: You are extremely well-respected in the Local SEO industry — what steps did you take to get to where you are today? What recommendations do you have for others looking to elevate their personal brand in the SEO space?

Joy: Never be afraid to help people or share things that you've learned. I started in this space by writing articles. It started as my own blog (which morphed into the Sterling Sky blog), but then I started writing for other publications and becoming a lot more active on social media. Forums played a huge role in how I learned and shared knowledge. I also made a habit of attending conferences and meeting the people I looked up to. I'll never forget the first time I met Mike Blumenthal and how intimidated I was. Networking in this space is really important and MozCon is definitely one of the best places to do that.

Question: What is your favorite part about local SEO work? What is the hardest part?

Joy: I love the challenge. It's like solving a really difficult puzzle. I've always loved strategy board games and doing SEO often feels like that.

The awesome thing about working with SMBs is that changes can get implemented quickly and you don't have tons of hoops to jump through to get stuff approved. Seeing the impact from our work quickly and watching clients' leads increase is insanely rewarding.

I'd say the hardest part is dealing with algorithm changes. A huge majority of the time, algorithm updates are a good thing for our clients, but it's definitely frustrating the times when you feel Google gets it wrong.

Question: At MozCon, you’ll discuss a study you and your team conducted where you analyzed more than 1,000 Google Posts. Why Google Posts? What sparked your interest in this topic?

Joy: Google posts are something I get asked about on almost every webinar I'm on. People always seem to be wondering what they are supposed to post about. I think I get asked if posts impact ranking several times a month.

Question: What insights are you most excited to share with our MozCon audience?

Joy: I think people will be surprised to see what types of posts performed best. It definitely wasn't the outcome I was expecting. Based on posts that I see regularly on Google My Business listings, I'm not sure everyone is aware of what types of content performs best.

Question: Why should Local SEOs invest in a Google Post strategy?

Joy: It's a really easy win. You can drive more traffic and conversions with posts with minimal effort. It's one of those low-hanging-fruit strategies that every business should utilize.

Question: Who in the MozCon lineup are you most excited to watch this year? Anything else you are looking forward to?

Joy: There are so many to choose from. Wil Reynolds has a way of always blowing my mind every time he talks, so I'm definitely excited to hear his. Dana DiTomaso is another of my favorite speakers. She's one of the smartest people I know in this industry. I'm also very excited to see Noah Learner's name on the list. I actually met him at a past MozCon and couldn't get over how much energy he had. I'm not sure where his energy comes from, but I need to find out. I heard him speak recently at one of our LocalU events and was really impressed at his knowledge and ability to analyze data.

A big thank you to Joy for her time! To learn more about Joy's upcoming presentation, see details on our other speakers, and to purchase your ticket, make sure you click the link below!