This is the info/breakdown provided for those who joined us at Cozy Bar on November 19th.

Biggest Challenges w/ Local SEO

Getting your First Few Clients in a Particular Niche

  • Lack of authority in the niche
  • No case studies

Solution:

Focus on your conveying your skill/knowledge instead of your experience. Explain how you are a “boutique” agency that is just now getting started with growing, so you will be able to fully dedicate yourself to their campaign.

  • Most businesses tout their devotion to client satisfaction. If they themselves are a small business, they should understand and connect with the thought of you working just as hard for them as they work for their own clients.

Clients that Cannot Get Proper Review Frequency for their GBP(s)

Either they are not asking their clients, or they don’t actually have a process that isn’t ad hoc. Sometimes clients ask you to verify them additional GBPs, making the issue even more difficult as each GBP needs to compete on new review frequency.

Solution:

Check their review frequency within your initial audit. If they are not doing well, bundle in a review acquisition software from the beginning.

  • Check out Yext’s new solution for this, as it is very inexpensive if you just need Google integration. Other solutions can be quite pricey but more comprehensive, such as BirdEye.

Establish from the very beginning: they are responsible for getting reviews, or at least providing you exports of closed clients so you can have a team member manage the email campaigns for them.

  • For clients that don’t comply, shift your focus on reporting to only Search rankings so that you are not showing them lackluster maps rankings each month.

Tools and Strategies for Local SEO

One of the biggest “overhead costs” for us agencies are our softwares. They can be inevitable but there is a solution for those who are planning more long term solutions.

The first suggestion is of course to wait until Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals before paying for annual subscriptions. One of my “secrets” is that I don’t always use the most mainstream solutions for my tech stack. There are a few tools that I must use because of the quality of the outputs or the size of the database they are based on:

  • Ahrefs or Semrush
  • SurferSEO – Content Editor

Other than that, I like to use as many Free and Open Source Softwares as possible. I find that many people miss out on the cost savings from these because their brands do not market themselves. However, I have avoided many different recurring costs by simply using some of the following tools:

  • OBS – Instead of Loom, Screencast-O-Matic, etc.
  • Joplin (Self-hosted) – Instead of Evernote, Notion, etc.
  • Kimai Time Tracker (Self-hosted) – Instead of Toggl, Time Doctor, etc.
  • Discord – Instead of Slack, Teams, etc.
  • Proton Suite – Instead of Google Workspaces, Microsoft Suite, Dropbox, etc.
  • LibreOffice – Instead of Microsoft 365
  • ShareX – Instead of any of the many screenshotting tools (Windows Only)
  • TrackRight – GeoGrids, Search rank tracking, and reporting.

Overall Strategy Breakdown for Local SEO

I don’t think that this is much of a secret, but SEO even when focusing on local ranks or Maps ranks is still just content and links.

There are many people that overcomplicate their campaigns because they see some marketer pitching a shiny object to them with a new tool, gig, or spam tactic. There are different temporary methods to boost rankings that come and go throughout time. If you are a freelance marketer, you may be inclined to add any of these items to your campaign to “value stack” your proposals. However, agencies that grow past 7 figures are not focused on anything other than the core of what is pushing rankings. If you are building a business for the long term, you should avoid spam tactics in favor of mastering your core deliverables with content production, linkbuilding, and proper onpage seo.

Links

For example: link building with shitty sites can work for a while, but the ranks will ultimately fall off if the referring domains does not last on their own (organic traffic). In the efforts of mastering link building, I (as well as many other successful SEOs and agencies) have already pivoted to public relations work. This is not to say that link building methods like Guest Posting no longer work, it is just that the algo updates will decimate all the sites that dip a bit too low in quality.

  • Utilizing link vendors can be pivotal for new agencies, however, you must make sure to vet these vendors to ensure that they actually care about the mentions they are generating for you. One important way to do this is to check if the referring pages from your built links are actually getting any traffic on their own. If none of your links are from pages with traffic, you should not expect any rank gains to actually last.

Content

Content creation is truly an art when you think about all of the experience/research that is involved with generating pages that are truly better than the competitors. Using tools like SurferSEO can help bridge the gap between your SEO knowledge and the writers that you hire to fulfill this work for you. Learn to master tools like this so that you can enjoy a quick and convenient way to produce content that ranks. My “secret” with content creation is simply the fact that I pay much more than others do for their content. Not only do I use SurfeSEO content editor configurations, but I only hire writers that are licensed professionals in their given niche.

  • You get what you pay for. If you spend time editing your content after your writer produces it, you have not yet mastered your process for content creation.

Citations

This might be controversial, but I completely stopped using manually created profiles and directory links outside of industry-specific or premium citations.

I use Yext for almost every client, utilizing the top package for citations and data aggregators. If you speak to those who are into blackhat methods, you might have already heard that these premium citations are a power method of verifying new listings. Simply put, I only build citations where Google and other search engines actually go to get info. They don’t care what random, no traffic domains have to say about your client’s business. So I stopped worrying about everything that doesn’t index.

Reporting

I use TrackRight for most of my reporting right now. I am currently working with the dev team to master this area, so that there are a few different styles of reports, depending on where the given client is on their journey. For example, you might report on rankings and geogrids more in the first year of the client’s campaign, whereas you should shift to clicks and conversions in their second year and onward.

For now, you can use this example to build a template for monthly reporting.