Connecting with community and promoting yourself
Getting people through the door can be a constant struggle, which is why SEO is so important for local businesses.I know this for real now that I have a bookshop.
But with all the changes Google has made, how do you stand out in the local pack? Is the local pack even a thing anymore?
Today I’m chatting with a Local SEO expert about the latest advice, so stay Tooned.
Tune in to learn:
- What local SEO is, and how it differs from normal organic SEO
- How search intent and local results work
- How to appear on the local pack
- Why your Google Business Profile is so important
- How to appear in the top three of the map pack
- Why the Q&A section of your Google Business Profile is so powerful
- How to manage negative reviews
- How local link building differs from regular link building.
- How to connect more within your community to raise awareness of your business
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About Greg Gifford
Greg Gifford is the Chief Operating Officer at SearchLab, a boutique marketing agency specializing in Local SEO and PPC. He’s one of the most in-demand speakers at digital marketing and automotive conferences all over the world, with dynamic movie-themed presentations packed full of actionable tactics and information. He’s got over 20 years of online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in Local SEO has helped countless businesses gain more visibility in local searches.
Greg graduated from Southern Methodist University with a BA in Cinema and Communications, and has an obscure movie quote for just about any situation.
Fun fact: Greg has faces from at least 23 different movies tattooed on him.
Transcript
Kate Toon: Do you want to know what’s really holding your website back from Google glory? Firewire Digital’s SEO audits show you exactly what’s working, what’s not, and most importantly, what to do about it. No tech jargon, just clear, actionable insights delivered by SEO experts who know their stuff. Like the wonderful Brogan Renshaw, who I had on the podcast last month.
This year, get your website working as hard as you do. Visit firewiredigital.com.au/audit. And for $100, you can have a detailed SEO audit delivered straight to your inbox.
Getting people through the door can be a constant struggle, which is why SEO is so important to local businesses. I know this for real now that I have a bookshop. But with all the changes Google has made, how do you stand out in the local pack? And is the local pack even a thing anymore? Today, I’m chatting with local SEO expert, Greg Clifford, about the latest advice.
So stay tooned.
Hello, my name is Kate Toon. I’m the head chef at The Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And as I said, I’m here talking with Greg. Hello, Greg.
Greg Gifford: How are you?
Kate Toon: I’m good. Now it’s been a long time since we saw, I think last time we saw each other was at Yoast conference.
Greg Gifford: It was, and that was like almost two years ago now, right?
Kate Toon: Oh, it was, but wasn’t that fun? That was such a good conference.
Greg Gifford: Such a blast. And I actually, Didn’t fly home until Sunday after the conference because I had planned on bringing my wife with me and spending the weekend in Amsterdam with my wife.
And she decided last minute, she didn’t feel like coming. So she stayed home. So I had a lovely little weekend in Amsterdam. I actually hung out with a couple of people that I met at the conference.
Kate Toon: Oh, how cool.
Greg Gifford: And we, like, went to some museums and stuff. It was a blast.
Kate Toon: It was so good. And I brought my son with me and we had a, we had time in Amsterdam before and then he came to the conference.
He was so lovely to my son. I just remember one bit. We were on a bus. We were on a bus for a very long time, just talking crap at the back of the bus and that was really fun. But it was just a real giggle, wasn’t it? It was really good.
Greg Gifford: it was such a fun conference. Such a good group of speakers, a really fun time.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I love it. Awesome. Hopefully we’ll get to see each other at another conference in the future. Hey, look, let me tell you who Greg is. I mean, he is the definitive person on local SEO. So I’m super excited that he is here today. He is the chief operating officer at Search Lab, a boutique marketing agency specializing in local SEO and PPC.
He’s one of the most in demand speakers in digital marketing and automotive conferences. All over the world with dynamic movie theme presentation, packed full of actionable tactics and information. He’s got over 20 years, online marketing and web design experience, and his expertise in local SEO has helped countless businesses gain more visibility in local searches.
Greg graduated from Southern Methodist university with a BA in cinema and. communications and has an obscure movie quote for just about every situation. Fun fact, Greg has faces from at least 23 movies tattooed on him. Oh my goodness.
Greg Gifford: Oh my gosh. That’s a really outdated, fun fact. And that’s how you can tell we’ve been chatting this long about getting me on the podcast.
Kate Toon: How many more have you got?
Greg Gifford: Because it’s now 29.
Kate Toon: Oh my God. Six more.
Greg Gifford: Yeah.
Kate Toon: Okay. Well, I can’t see any of them. There’s none on his face. So, um, you’re saving the head. For like, someone special, like Harrison Ford?
Greg Gifford: I was gonna not ever do my head or my face or my neck, and I still today say I won’t do my head or my face or my neck. I’ve seen some amazing tattoos on head, face, neck, but I just don’t think they look good there.
Kate Toon: No, it’s a challenge, isn’t it? And you know, I don’t know. It’s interesting. I’ve only got, I’ve got a little penguin on my wrist and I’ve got a lizard on my bottom. Uh, which is a very amusing story because when I got really overweight, it became a gigantic crocodile. And now it’s gone back to being a little gecko again, but it’s very blurry and I never see it.
So I don’t really think about it, but there you go. If you ever need to identify my corpse. There’s a lizard on my bottom.
Greg Gifford: There we go.
Kate Toon: What a weird thing to say at the start of a podcast. What am I talking about, Greg?
Greg Gifford: We’re going off in a totally different direction than I expected.
Kate Toon: I just talked about identifying my corpse.Good God. Well, look, let’s move on to, uh, from corpses to the big question. Is local SEO dead? Ha ha. See, I can turn anything into a segue.
Greg Gifford: There you go. I like, I like that segue.
Kate Toon: It was clever, wasn’t it?
Greg Gifford: It was good. It was good.
Kate Toon: Let’s not answer that question really because I’d love to start with the absolute basics, to be honest. What is local SEO and how does it differ from normal organic SEO?
Greg Gifford: So the big difference is that Google has multiple algorithms at play. And when most people talk about SEO, they mean optimizing so that they show up better in Google’s traditional algorithm. But Google’s local algorithm works differently and includes additional signals.
And basically the difference between the two is with the traditional algorithm and regular SEO. If you rank number one, you rank number one everywhere across the globe with local SEO. If you rank number one, you only rank number one in a specific geographic area. So it’s more for the easiest way to think of it is if a business.
Does face to face business with customers in one particular geographic area, what they actually need is local SEO, not regular SEO.
Kate Toon: Yeah, I think that’s really important that people understand that there are different bits of the algorithm working towards different goals and different bits of the algorithm suiting different businesses.
I guess the problem is for a lot of, you know, especially these days, lots of people don’t have a shop front. Business. Now, I would argue that really, you can game it, you can cheat it, but at the end of the day, local SEO is for people that you could physically go and meet, you know, that have a physical shop front.
Yes, you can have a service area and all of that, but if someone is typing in bookshop Umina and suddenly a digital bookshop in New York comes up in the results, it’s not satisfying the user query. Do you, do you agree with that? Yeah.
Greg Gifford: Yeah, it’s 100 percent about user intent. Uh, the example that I usually use to explain how the local algorithm works is pizza delivery because everybody understands.
Everybody’s ordered a pizza at some point in their life, whether or not you are a business owner or have worked in a business or done anything with digital marketing, everybody’s ordered a pizza. So if you’re at your office location, let’s say you have a brick and mortar storefront and you’re there and you search just two words, pizza delivery.
You get a list of all the pizza spots right there by the, by the office. But then you could go home and do the search at home with the same two words and get different search results. And it doesn’t really occur to you that that’s odd, because clearly you need pizza delivered from somewhere nearby, and Google has satisfied the intent of your search, even though you didn’t specify pizza near me, or pizza Dallas, or pizza Sydney, or whatever.
Google knows where you’re located by Your IP address or your cell phone signal or whatnot. So it can constrain those search results to your physical location, even when you don’t specify and it makes sense that you’re going to get different results in different areas because you need the pizza delivered from somewhere nearby.
So that’s the easiest way that I think. You can explain how local works because everyone understands. All right, cool. I need a pizza. Let me get the pizza from somewhere close. You don’t want to order a pizza from the other side of the country because that guy has a better website.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it’s going to, it might take quite a long time to arrive, but you have a few things I want to dig into there.
Let’s talk about intent and what we type into the search engine. So. People would generally think that a local search would come up if you typed a location or the ubiquitous near me, you know, there’s a few pizza restaurants called pizza near me thinking that’s going to make it work better. But as you said, Google is now intelligent enough and sophisticated enough to know that certain words, search queries, even if there is no local intent deserve a local result. I’d say locksmith is one emergency plumber pizza delivery. You don’t even need the location word there for Google to work it out, right?
Greg Gifford: Exactly. And that’s basically because Google has access to, I don’t even know what the number is, some ridiculous number that our brain can’t even comprehend of search results, and what’s happened when people have done those searches.
And Google can tell by, you think about what you do, if you do a search and you don’t get what you’re looking for, You add more words onto your search query. So you may start with pizza delivery, and if you get something wrong, then you’re like pizza delivery near me or pizza delivery nearby, or pizza delivery, my town or whatever.
Google can see all of that over time. And so Google has figured out which verticals and which types of business truly have local intent, even when people don’t explicitly state that in their search query.
Kate Toon: I love that. And I think that’s right. You know, people are more likely to add more words to their search query than they are to click through to the second page, or even to scroll to the bottom of the page, you know, so we’re very impatient people, I guess the other factor is most people realize now that Google is mobile first.
But, and you might have a statistic up your sleeve as well as those tattoos. Large proportion of local searches happen on mobile phones, which is another indicator, right? So I would say more than on desktops, right?
Greg Gifford: I don’t really have a stat because it’s kind of different. It’s different in different parts of the world.
Kate Toon: Yeah,
Greg Gifford: It’s also different for different verticals. So I work with a lot of car dealerships just because for 13 years of my career, I worked at agencies that only worked with car dealerships. And, you know, a car is typically the second most expensive purchase that someone makes in their lifetime. So people do a lot of research before buying a car.
Kate Toon: Oh right, yeah. So it depends on the vertical. Yeah.
Greg Gifford: Yeah. People might start on mobile when they’re kind of asking some simple questions. But when you get further down the funnel, and you’re about to buy that car or that truck or that SUV, you want to see the big photos online. So people tend to swap over to desktop, even if they started in mobile, or just staying on desktop if they started in desktop.
But for other things, like I’m looking for a locksmith, I’m probably on mobile because I’m probably locked out of my car or my house, and I’m not sitting there at a desktop computer. Um, you know, if you’re looking for, um, a hospital or a doctor, a lot of times that’s an immediate use. I need this right now.
I’ve got to go find this right now. I’m looking for a restaurant. I probably want to go to a restaurant for dinner at some point soon, I’m looking for a dry cleaner. Some point soon, I’m going to go to the dry cleaner. So Google’s figured out these types of businesses. And we’ll just automatically default to that local algorithm
Kate Toon: And then use your geolocation on your phone to tailor it as well. And, you know, there is, there are stats around that say that, you know, X percent of local searches result in a visit to the store within the next few days. And I’ve noticed that with the bookshop.
Greg Gifford: Yeah and 70 something percent of searches when they have local intent end up visiting that store within 2 days.
Kate Toon: Because they’re checking the opening hours, they’re checking the address. They want to make sure that when they get there, which is one thing that irks me, we’ll come on to this in a minute, your Google business profile, not keeping your opening hours up to date. You know, that someone has actually gone to the effort of finding them out. Then they turn up and you’re actually closed.
We’ll come back to that. Cause I’d like to talk about SERP features that are unique to local SEO. So once Google’s decided that you’ve got local intent, there are certain features that are kind of unlocked. Uh, one that includes the local pack, but then also You know, if it’s very specific, one lucky business might get the knowledge graph panel and the side as well.
Let’s talk about local features. Let’s talk about the local pack first. How can we appear there?
Greg Gifford: So the local pack is on mobile. It’s the map with the three results underneath on desktop. It’s the map to the right with. The results to the left. Uh, most people assume that only shows three businesses. It actually shows more than three.
So below the three businesses listed, you can click, it’ll either say more places or more locations. It depends on what part of the world you’re in. When you click that, it takes you a page called the local finder page that looks just like Google maps, but it goes beyond the top three. And it shows you everything in the local area that matches the intent of what you searched for.
So that’s the first big thing. That’s the kind of indicator that the local algorithm is at play if you see that local pack. And it’s also at the top of the search results on mobile and desktop because google understands most of the time when you’re looking for a local business You’re going to want to go there.
So you want to have that visual indicator up high in the search results to let you know that it’s nearby. And then that is all your placement there. And what shows up is based off of that knowledge panel that you just mentioned. That’s actually called your Google business profile. A lot of people still call it Google my business because it was called Google my business for like 13 years. They changed the name of it. A year or so ago.
Kate Toon: They changed it a few times haven’t they, Google Places, Google Local, Google.
Greg Gifford: Google Plus for business, Google places for business, Google plus local, Google plus local for business. It’s been all kinds of just silly. It’s one of the Google, Google is going to Google. Google likes to change the names of things for no reason.
Kate Toon: It really does. Yes.
Greg Gifford: Other than like, Hey, it’s a new product. Cause the name has changed. Right. But, um, yeah, so that, that panel is actually not the same thing as a normal knowledge panel. Because it’s got all of that additional local business information in there. So it’s going to have photos of the business. It’s going to have street view. It’s going to have a Google map, little widget there.
It’s going to show you the name of the business, the operating hours, the address, the phone number, the website. It’s going to show you the category. And you can, if you’re not going to dig into the code or use a plugin, you can only see the primary category, but there’s up to 10 category slots that you can fill in.
Um, it’s going to have a questions and answers widget. It’s like a community discussion feature. It’s going to have Google posts, which are basically kind of free ads that you can display on your profile. Uh, it’s going to have your customer reviews, which are absolutely huge and your review score. So it’s got all these other elements.
And then it’s got things called justifications, which are. little text snippets that will pull out of your reviews or out of Google post or whatever to display on your profile as well. So it’s a really rich, robust first impression that you get to make with your potential customers. And it’s really important that you optimize the heck out of that profile because that’s how you show up more in the map pack, having a well optimized profile, following best practices.
Allows you to show up more often in that map pack.
Kate Toon: I wanted to get into that a little bit more. So the map pack, obviously, Google has dropped a pin in its head. Where is the centre of a certain area? And then there’s concentric circles around it. And one would think the closer you are to the centre of the circle, the higher you’re going to rank in that local pack.
Obviously, you can buy Google ads now in that pack as well. Is that true? Because, you know, Often the ones that are ranking in the top three are not closest to the imagined centre of the circle. So what other things influence your position in those? Because yes, you can click to the next ones, but no one’s doing that, Greg, are they?
It’s the top three or nothing. So what can we do to improve our chances of appearing in that top three?
Greg Gifford: That centre of the circle, the, the SEO nerdy term for that is the Centroid. That pin that Google drops in the geographic centre, which typically everyone assumes will be downtown if it’s a metro area, but it’s never downtown.
It’s the geographic centre. It’s basically like you said, Google draws a circle drops a map pin in the centre. That’s the centroid. And in the past, the closer you were to the centroid, the higher you ranked. So if you were lucky enough that your business happened to be very close to that centroid location, you would outrank everyone.
Google started to adjust that over time. And now it’s a lot less about the distance that you are from the centroid. And it’s more about the distance that you are from the search results. So Google knows your location. Google knows the locations of the various search results, but it’s not just. location and a lot of people get confused when we start talking about anything related to SAO.
You’re like, oh, it’s all about your content. And people like, well, I’ve got better content than everybody else. Why don’t I rank? Well, because it’s also about links. And then people say, well, I have the best links. Why don’t I rank? Well, because it’s also about customer reviews. Well, I have more reviews than everybody else.
Why don’t I rank? Well, it’s about your business profile. So it’s all the different factors, obviously, but a big part of it is that proximity. How far is the search result from you when you’re doing the search, but it’s also optimization. It’s the website and how the website’s optimize the links pointed at the website, your Google business profile, and how that’s optimized and your customer reviews. So it’s all of those factors and the micro factors when each of those areas. that are going to affect your visibility there.
Kate Toon: Yeah, it’s like a, it’s not a Venn diagram with three circles. It’s like 36 circles. And he is in the middle. Let’s talk a little bit about Google business profile.
So you mentioned the big list of all the elements. And for those listening, you can head to the recipe for SEO and get a full checklist of all of those. Um, one of the big things that comes up for a lot of people is the photos. You have an option to have as many photos as you like, and often you get.
Stuck with a photo that isn’t the right photo. So for my bookshop, for example, I took this business off over from someone else. And for a very long time, despite me doing exterior shots, even getting my customers to upload exterior shots, a really old. exterior shot from an old review was the hero image and it’s taken so long.
It’s, I just checked it this morning and it’s gone. And I’m so happy on this podcast to say that it’s still in the little tiny wrap up with the five mini ones, but the main images change. Is there anything we can do about that? Because obviously we can delete our images, but we can’t delete customer review images.
[00:17:59] Greg Gifford: You know, you would think Google would make it a little bit easier when they let you edit every other element of that business profile. And Google very much says, Hey, this is the customer’s first impression of your business. And it’s really important that you have a great first impression, yet-
Kate Toon: You can’t change it.
Greg Gifford: You can’t choose which photo is going to be displayed as the primary photo for your business.
Kate Toon: Yeah
[00:18:21] Greg Gifford: Now there’s a lot of stuff online where people will tell you if you, if you want to hack it, you can do these. Follow these steps here. You could do this thing over here and it’ll influence it and it’s not reliable. It doesn’t really work. Unfortunately, there is no way to select what your primary photo is going to be.
Also, unfortunately, you can only get rid of photos that you uploaded. So customers or even non customers, they don’t even have to do business to be able to do it. They can upload a photo along with the review. If they do that, that photo gets added into your gallery of images, but they can also just be at, or even near your location and pull up your business profile and add a photo to the gallery there.
If someone does that, and the algorithm decides that that’s the picture it wants to display. But you don’t want that picture there. The only way you can get it to change is to track down who that person is, tell them what’s going on and pay them to remove it or ask them nicely to remove it. And then hopefully they will.
But you know, also people don’t always use their real name on their Google profile. And depending on the business, I could come into your bookstore and buy a book and you wouldn’t have my contact information.
Kate Toon: Yeah, don’t do that. Don’t be putting pictures of your bum up on my Google profile, Greg. I know that that’s something you’re thinking of doing. It’d be great.
Greg Gifford: I actually had a really fun presentation that I did years and years and years ago. Talking about a bunch of things that were broken with with at the time. It wasn’t called Google business profiles, but with the I think it was Google plus places or something at the time, but a bunch of different elements were broken because they just rolled out the new interface.
And one of the things that I went through is I showed all of the just awful pictures that were showing up for various businesses that did not match the business whatsoever. And it was really funny because all these businesses were basically complaining to Google. I need to change this and Google is like, meh, sorry.
Kate Toon: Yeah, not gonna do nothing. Let’s move into talking about the other information. So we’ve talked about opening hours and I really think it’s super important to stay on those, you know, go in, you know, even if you’re like closing the shop on Saturday, cause you’re sick, you know, update that, make sure you have all the public holidays in there.
Obviously you have your phone number, your address. Questions and answers I love. And I’m not. saying this is a hack, but it’s a cute thing to do to maybe ask some people, you know, to ask really good questions like, hi, Kate, do you have a book club at the bookshop? Why yes. Yes, we do, Greg. And it’s wonderful.
So you can see some questions and answers there because they’re, you know, they’re going to show up and that’s a great thing to do. Do you recommend that? Or is that too sneaky?
Greg Gifford: Yeah. You know, you don’t even have to ask other people to see those questions. You can just ask them of yourself.
Kate Toon: Put them in yourself, yeah. I always feel a bit. I feel that’s too evil, Greg.I figured you should at least.
Greg Gifford: No, no, no. It’s not evil at all. Google actually encourages you to do it.
Kate Toon: Okay.
Greg Gifford: The way to think about it and, and this is key, it’s just like an FAQ page on your website. Let’s use your books, your bookshop as an example, is it realistic to expect that any person that gets to your website that might have a question?
Is going to go right to your FAQ page, read through the 40 questions and answers there to see if a similar question has been asked answered? No, people want immediate answers. Now, they’re not going to do that with your question and answer section on your Google business profile either, but it’s really cool how Google built it.
Because as you are typing your question in, if a similar question has been asked and answered in the past, Google will auto complete your question as you type it and pop an answer up onto the right side, mid typing of your question. So that person that is getting that immediate answer, they’re getting an answer faster than if they were talking to you on the phone or faster than if you had an AI chat bot on your website, because talking to you or talking to any sort of AI system, they’re gonna have to complete their question before they can get an answer. And this, they’re getting an answer before they’re even done putting their question in. And that’s why the Q& A section is so powerful.
Kate Toon: I love it. I mean, look, I could talk to you about this all day.
I just want to cover a few more features in the Google My Uh, sorry, see, I still do it Google business panel. And then I want to come back to the organic sort of main steps. Obviously you can add products and offers and all kinds of things like that. One of the contentious areas obviously is the reviews and I love reviews.
So, you know, one of the things that, um, the first thing when I got the bookshop was I went through and I answered all the one star reviews. Cause the bookshop didn’t have a good rep. So I answered them because I think most people. Go first and read the one stars. And what’s really important is how the business responds to those one stars.
If you’re rage typing replies, then you’re never a customer of our shop. I know this is you, Maureen. I know this is you, Maureen. I love it. It’s great drama, but you shouldn’t do it. So how you reply to the negative reviews is important as how you reply to the positive reviews, right?
Greg Gifford: I would say it’s more important because like you said, people don’t go and just Sit there and browse through the reviews to see what might be there.
They’re gonna go immediately. And look at your bad reviews, because it’s the same thing if you go shop on Amazon, you don’t go read through the hundreds and hundreds of thousands or whatever of positive reviews. You might read a few, you might read the AI summary of what the people say, but you do click over and read the bad reviews and start reading the bad experiences that people had.
Think about, you go look for a restaurant, you’re going to look at the bad reviews, see if people had hair in their food or whatever. So responding to those bad reviews is key because a, you want to make sure that it’s clear to future potential customers. that you care about giving good customer service and that they’re going to have a good experience at your establishment.
And B, that they understand that if things do go wrong, you will care and try to make sure that they still have a great experience. So it’s not just about you care about good customer service. It’s you care about your customers as well. And the big mistake most people make. Is they just write some generic response.
It’s like, Oh gee, I’m sorry, Jim. We strive to give great customer service. My name’s Greg. I’m the manager. Can you call me at 8675309 and tell me more about what happened? A lot of businesses will answer like that. And they think it’s the right thing to do because a lot of reputation blogs and videos will tell you to do that.
That’s actually really wrong because to the general public it looks like you don’t care because they literally just typed out. Here’s my bad experience I just had.
Kate Toon: They told you.
Greg Gifford: And you turn around and put the ball back in their court and go. Well, if you want me to fix this, you have to reach out to me again and tell me again what you just told me. It’s dumb.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Greg Gifford: Plus most people understand with like your bookshop. They wouldn’t expect that you would have someone’s contact information, but with a doctor an attorney. Uh, car dealership, uh, dry cleaner, even they know that if you’re doing business there, that business has your contact information. And if you’re in 1 of those verticals where the general public understands that you probably could call that person, why would you on the review response go, hey call me, bro.
Kate Toon: Yeah.
Greg Gifford: You should be on your review response instead, truly responding to what happened in that situation, and letting the general public know how you tried to make things right.
Kate Toon: Yep. Love it. And, um, you know, one of the issues that’s going on at the moment, and I know you’re aware of it, it’s a known bug, is that a lot of reviews are disappearing, and coming back. Is there any update on that? Mine have all come back.
Greg Gifford: They’re all coming back, yeah. If you’re out there and you’re listening or watching this and you still have some reviews that are gone, they’re probably going to be back very shortly. Uh, it was a bug that happened and it lasted for about four days that a bunch of reviews just disappeared.
And what Google eventually came out and said was the reviews didn’t actually get deleted. They were still there. They were still in the database as attached to the business. It was actually a display problem. So in the back end, the reviews are still there on the front end on the business profile is just showing, you know, a couple of hundred fewer reviews than we’re actually there.
So it was very easy for Google to just say, Oh, here’s the bug. Let’s. Put those reviews back. Google does also remove reviews algorithmically because they’ve been detected as spam. And a lot of times you won’t be able to get those back, but this bug thing that just happened, you should have all your reviews back from that.
Kate Toon: And I mean, look, it does take a long time to move the needle, especially as. You know, we, it’s taken us nearly 30 reviews to get from 4.8 stars to 4.9 stars. So, you know, it takes a lot, you know, how long it will take me, it gets progressively harder, I think. So how long it’s going to take me to get back to the five, even though we really only have five negative reviews from four or seven years ago, it takes a long time to move the needle.
You can report reviews that you’re unhappy with. Sometimes you have to report them a few times or get multiple people to report them. I have managed to get one negative review removed. Um, yeah, anyway, we’ll stop talking about Google business there because we could talk about it all day. That is obviously all related to your Google business profile, which is free, which you should invest in, which you should take time in, which you should make sure it’s comprehensive and glorious.
But other than that, what can we do on our actual websites? We won’t go through every detail, but on our websites to, you know, sorry, I’m babbling.
Greg Gifford: No no, you’re fine.
Kate Toon: Sorry. So I’ve got, you know, I’m looking right now on Google, we’ve got the business panel coming up at the side. We’ve got the map. And then the first organic result is your site.
And that’s my site. Now obviously backlinks help here. Local links from local areas of my right. Am I right? But what about content?
Greg Gifford: So really the local algorithm, it’s kind of a different spin on everything. Links still matter. Content still matters, but you do them differently. With links, you actually want to get links from local businesses and local websites.
So you kind of want to ignore everything that you’ve heard on other podcasts videos or in conferences or read about link building saying you only want the big authoritative sites that have a lot of authority score, whatever the score is for whatever tool you’re using. In local, it’s actually opposite.
You pretty much want the low authority sites because the best link you can get is a link from a church. It’s relevant down to a particularly tight neighborhood level, and it’s typically pretty hard to get a link from a church website. It’s not easy to do that. So when you get it, It’s relevant now to a neighborhood level and it’s difficult to get.
So Google really rewards you for it, but churches don’t do SEO. So if you put that church website through any sort of SEO tool, it’s going to say, oh, avoid this link. You don’t want to link it. So it’s a bad quality site. It’s not. It’s just, it’s a website that doesn’t do a lot of SEO, but that doesn’t mean that Google thinks it’s a bad quality site.
So these link tools are going to mislead you when you’re doing link building for local. Um, and then from a content standpoint, you most people understand that with content, you have to have content that answers the questions that customers are asking. The easiest way that I like to explain it is that if you want to show up as a search result, when somebody types in a phrase into a search engine then you need a dedicated page about that singular concept on your site. And we’re doing local, so it doesn’t have to be the best page on the internet. You just need the best page in the local area about that topic. That’s it. So that means, let’s say you’re a business and you’ve got five, you’re a locksmith, you’ve got five different services that you provide.
But you’re in four different cities. You’re a franchise, so you’ve got one website, but four locations in four cities. That means your website, instead of having those five service pages, you would actually have, how many, I said four different cities, so you would have 25, because the five pages on the main menu of your site would just be about each individual topic, but no location information.
And then each of those five pages you would rewrite so that they’re unique and useful, but then each of those five pages you’re going to have in a little silo around that location. So let’s say you’re a locksmith in Sydney, you’d have those five locksmith service pages all optimized around the topic in Sydney, the topic B in Sydney, topic C in Sydney.
And then you’d have another one for Melbourne and another one for Perth or whatever it would be. So you have to optimize for a singular concept and singular concept is Keyword phrase, location. One location, one keyword phrase. So that’s where it starts to get really complex from a content play, because if you’re in multiple cities, whether you actually have locations, or you’re just trying to target nearby cities that you service, you start to have to create a whole lot more content than you would doing regular SEO.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And I think if you’re only in one location, it does get a little bit easier. You can have a really comprehensive contact page that goes beyond just name, email, and whatever. You can have maps on their local bus routes, local milestones and areas. You know, one cute thing I like to do is talk about the cafe that I like best to get coffee when you’re on your way to the bookshop, you know, And you can be writing round up articles of 10 lovely things to do in Umina, which is where I live And obviously the first one is your own business, you know?
Greg Gifford: Yeah, exactly.
Kate Toon: Yeah. And I really think, you know, people, so how do I get these links for me? Cause obviously I’m so lucky now to have this bookshop because it’s letting me use all my superpowers as a ecommerce SEO and a local SEO on an actual business myself.
It’s like the ultimate Petri dish. The way that I found best to build links is just to be a really active member of the community. So I’m sponsoring events. I’m donating vouchers. I’m turning up at things I’m getting mentioned in the news. I’m getting featured on – we just sponsored the local netball team and they’ve given us loads of social and loads of backlinks.
It’s not a crafty link building scheme. It’s just being an entity in your local community.
Greg Gifford: It’s doing all this stuff we used to do to get noticed in the community before we had the Internet and everybody got shut their boxes and didn’t want to talk to you.
Kate Toon: Exactly. It’s the little signs in the local supermarket saying ‘dog for sale’. It’s that kind of Grassroots, homegrown stuff.
Greg Gifford: It really is, and that’s the best way to do it. And it’s shockingly effective, and so many people freak out when you start trying to do those things. Um, you know, a really cool thing that you could do, and this is a little bit more advanced. You mentioned, you know, the coffee shop you want to go to on the way to the bookstore.
You could also put up a blog post on your blog on your website that is these are the five best bookstores in the town that you live in, which seems weird, but of course, you’re going to list your own as as the best one, right? But why would you list for competitors? The reason being? You list those competitors and they’re going to see that you got listed, they got listed on your site.
They may link back to you, they may not, who cares. But when people start looking for best bookstores in town, that becomes a blog post that shows up. And people looking for best bookstores aren’t going to only go to the local pack and read the reviews there to see what’s best. They’re going to look at any of those roundup type posts and if you’ve got one and you’ve listed yourself as number one, then that’s potentially a thing that you’re going to get to show up.
That they’re not looking specifically for you, but they find you. The other big part of it is, with the rise of these AI powered search systems, a lot of those will pull that content, and now if you get an AI overview for the best bookstores in your town, that AI overview could very likely just pull that list off of that blog post that you put up, even though it’s your own website, that then lists you as the best bookstore in town in the AI overview, which would be amazing for you.
Kate Toon: Yeah, well, you wouldn’t believe it. That’s on our list to do. We’re going to do that. There’s a large corporate bookshop in the town over that’s owned by a big conglomerate and we’re an Indy. So I’m determined, determined to beat them. That’s my sole mission in life.
Greg Gifford: Awesome.
Kate Toon: It’s amazing how much good SEO you can do out of spite. I just say that out of love is good. Spite is good as well. Um, look, Greg, I could talk to you all day. That was an absolute, we didn’t do any of the questions on our list, but I feel that it was really practical and useful for small business owners wondering what to do, you know, like really take advantage of that.
Google business profile, some great advice there around photos and the questions and the reviews, and then in the content, just taking a really honest approach to it and creating content that’s relevant and useful. I mean, it’s not rocket science, is it, Greg? But it’s amazing how many people get it wrong.
Greg Gifford: You know, it’s really not. And that’s one of the things that I’ve been talking about a lot lately is everybody’s so distracted with AI and chat GPT and mid journey for photos and all these other things that they’re trying to do all this crazy new stuff. And they’re just forgetting the basics of either you’re a business owner or you’re a marketer working for a business owner, what really matters is.
Do you have the ability to solve the problem that your customer is looking to solve? This is literally the thing that you’re selling. You are selling a solution. Whether it’s a product or service, you’re solving a problem that someone has. Do you have the solution to that problem? And is it going to be an easy transaction for that person?
That’s literally all it takes to show up. Well, everybody’s so worried about let’s go create a bunch of BS content with AI, or let’s go do all these other little silver bullety type things. And everybody forgets. If you just do the basics, you’re probably still going to win anyway.
Kate Toon: That is literally the theme of 2025 on this podcast. Every guest I’ve had on is like back to basics, back to basics, ignore the noise, ignore the AI to a degree. Involve it, use it as you want to, but it’s not the be all and end all. So thank you for staying on theme with the podcast, Greg. It’s lovely to talk to you. Um, I so appreciate it. It’s been-
Speaker 3: It’s so great to talk to you, it’s been too long.
Kate Toon: too long and I hope to see you at an event very soon. If you want to find out more about Greg and Search Labs, I’ve included links to all his various bits and bobs, well worth following on social media as well on LinkedIn. Um, and if you can catch him speaking at a conference, he really is a fantastic speaker. So thank you so much, Greg.
Greg Gifford: Thanks for having me.
Kate Toon: So that’s the end of this week’s show. If you have SEO, head to my I love SEO group on Facebook. I also wanted to tell you about my free SEO challenge. It’s called SEO SOS. It will be kicking off again in a couple of months. So head to the website, join that it’s completely free and lots of fun. I like to end the show with a shout out for one of my lovely listeners.
And today it’s Kakaka111111111111. Thanks, Kate. Learning so much from this podcast. Thank you for taking the time out to do this. Well, thank you Kakaka111111111111, thanks for listening. And thanks to everyone else who’s left us a review. It only takes a few minutes. If you have time, I would super appreciate it.
And we’ll give you a shout out on the show. So don’t forget to head to the show notes for this episode at the. www. therecipeforseosuccess. com where you can learn more about local SEO and also check out useful links and all Greg’s bits and bobs. So until next time, happy SEOing.
