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3 main problems with most keyword research methods, especially for local search:

• They tell you what searchers search for, but not what customers search for
• They rely too much on third-party tools
• They give you analysis paralysis

Most people’s keyword-research strategy is this (more or less):

• Use the “Keyword Planner” in Google Ads
• Use a third-party tool (e.g. SEMRush) to sniff around
• Type search terms into Google and see what autocomplete belches out
• Type a term into Google and see how many millions of search results Google touts for that term
• Study competitors to get a sense of the keywords they abuse like rented mules

That approach – or some variation on it – isn’t terrible.  It has its place in the world, and some good resources (like this and this) can walk you through it.  It’s better than nothing, and usually it’s a good way at least to get your sea legs.  But it’s still stuck with the problems I mentioned a minute ago.

How do you pick?  How do you avoid analysis paralysis?  How do you tell a high-volume search term from one the most-relevant or best-converting term?  What if you don’t want to use only third-party tools?  How do you tell what customers really care about?

You need crunchier intel – either in addition to or instead of what you dig up with conventional methods.  At the very least, you need intel that can serve as a tiebreaker, to help you decide which specific search terms (or families of search terms) should be your highest priorities.

Below are 10 straightforward ways to research the local search terms that matter to your business.  I’m irritated by tutorials that are so step-by-step you never even finish reading them, and sometimes I over-explain things, so I’ll keep these points brief.  (Please let me know in the comments if any could use more explanation.)

1: Your reviews.  You don’t want more people to find you; you want more people to pay you.  In most cases, your reviews were written by people who paid you.  Mine those reviews.  Pay attention to the exact words those people use (especially if you know that they first found you online, rather than came to you through a referral).

2: Competitors’ reviews.  Similar reasoning as in point #1.  In many cases your competitors’ customers are the same as or much like yours – in terms of needs, knowledge, search habits, and so on – but they just hired the wrong company!

3: Non-competitors’ reviews.  I’m talking about businesses in your industry that aren’t in your immediate area.  You don’t wrestle with them in the local rankings, so you never or rarely see them, but you should go out of your way to study their reviews.

 

 

Whereas probably only a couple of your local competitors are good, if you look farther away you can find plenty more businesses high up the food chain.

4: The “Acquisition -> Search Console -> Landing Pages” area in Google Analytics, or the ‘Performance” -> “Queries” and “Pages” section of Google Search Console.  Read my post on the topic.  You’ll probably find that you rank for (and get clicks for) terms you didn’t know you ranked for, because you don’t track them or check on them.  You may also find terms for which you already rank well, but want to get additional pages also to rank for those terms.  There’s no end to what you can find in there.

5: A “feeler” AdWords campaign.  The idea is you set up a Google Ads campaign (search network, not display) strictly to get data.  You don’t expect it to bring you a single customer, so maybe you run it only for a couple of weeks before pausing.  You scour the “Keywords -> Search Terms” report to see which exact terms people actually searched for, which often aren’t the exact terms you bid on.  You mine the data in “Reports -> Predefined reports (Dimensions) -> Locations -> User locations” to see exactly where people searched from – where the “hot spots” are.  If you get some business from your Ads campaign, great.  The data alone is worth at least few hundred bucks.

6: Google My Business “Questions & Answers.”  Not everyone who asks a question in there is a customer, but most of those people aren’t just casual browsers, either.  Look at competitors’ Q&A sections, too.

7: Names of Google My Business categories.  Just log into your GMB dashboard and sift through the list.  The phrasing of categories isn’t arbitrary.  When you research the terms a competitor uses, you learn from people who may have less intel or worse intel than you have.  When you research the terms Google uses, you learn from a Borg cube with more data than you can imagine.

 

8: Names of categories used in local directories and in directories big in your industry.  I’m talking about Yelp and YP, but I’m also talking about HealthGrades, Avvo, Houzz, TripAdvisor, and similar sites that cater to specific industries.  They’ve probably thrown more time and money at research than you have, and they have more data than you have, so at least see what phrasing they use.

9: Customers’ emails to you, especially their initial inquiries. Or call logs, if you record and transcribe calls. (A great point that Tony Wang mentioned in his comment.)

10: Wildcard searches.  Check out my 2015 post on wildcard searches.  (Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a variation on the typical strategy of “type stuff into Google and see what autocomplete shows,” but at least you’ll probably see some search terms your competitors probably missed.)

What do you do with good search terms you dig up?

For starters:

• You’ll probably want to create a page on each specific need or search term you unearthed (although that mostly takes care itself if you have an in-depth page on each specific service and/or product you offer, as I always suggest)
• You’ll probably want to mention those needs / services / products on your homepage.
• Consider adding to existing pages a section on whatever high-payoff search term you just learned about. You might phrase it as an FAQ, and put your answer right underneath (maybe with a link to a whole page on it).
• Encourage more reviewers to go into detail. Don’t push keywords on them, though.  Most people will mention relevant search terms naturally, when their reviews are more than tiny blurbs.

Any great, less-obvious local keyword-research methods I overlooked?

Which methods have worked best for you?

Any questions about how to use what you find?

Leave a comment!

In what is at least a test, Google now asks Google Maps reviewers to select attributes they like about the business they’re reviewing.  When I went to post a review yesterday, Google asked how I liked the “Quality,” “Value,” “Responsiveness,” and “Punctuality” of the business.

I haven’t been able to replicate that for other businesses, including for other businesses I’ve reviewed since that review.  So I also don’t know whether there are other attributes (e.g. “Reputation,” “Convenience,” etc.) that may show up under the “What Do You Like About This Place?” header, or why certain prompts might show up for one business and not the other.  I’ll need to see more to say more.

The prompts are very Yelp-like.  For many years Yelp has asked reviewers structured questions like those (e.g. “Price” or “Good for Groups”).  Google could use that info in all kinds of ways, most obviously in the search filters in Google Maps. It’s also possible that Google doesn’t care much whether reviewers click the attributes, as long as they see the prompts. In that way, maybe Google simply wants reviewers to sprinkle in more crunchy bits of detail.

Regardless of whatever way(s) Google wants to use those prompts, it’s probably a good idea to have your reviewers spoon-feed that stuff to Google.

 

Then there’s the “Tip: Let others know about the service” prompt, which may be a test or a new feature.  Thanks to Colan Nielsen for the intel (see his comment) and for the screenshot.

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Have you seen the “What Do You Like About This Place?” questions when you post a Google review?  If so, when did you first notice it?

Any theories on how Google is most likely to use reviewers’ answers to those questions?

Leave a comment!

If you’ve never done so, log into Google Analytics, then go to “Acquisition,” “Search Console,” and “Landing pages.”  There you’ll find a mashup of (1) Google Analytics data on landing pages and (2) Google Search Console data on how specific pages perform in the search results.  Whether you do local SEO yourself or you do it for clients, you’ll the usefulness of that data in pretty short time.

You’ll need to integrate Google Analytics and Search Console first, but that’s easy, and you may have done it already.

I haven’t heard my fellow local SEOs talk about this tucked-away area in Analytics.  Not sure why.  (Maybe they did and I missed it.)  It’s an area I overlooked until more recently than I’d like to admit.  People outside of local search have discussed the Analytics – Search Console tie-in a bit (and Search Console alone to a greater extent), but not how it can benefit your local SEO campaign.

In case you’re wondering, the info you see in Search Console is not the same.  You can see a page’s click-through rate and number impressions in Search Console (“Performance” -> “Pages”).  But those metrics aren’t paired with the useful page-specific metrics you see in Google Analytics, like bounce rate, pages per session, and conversion rate, etc.   You can get similar insights by looking at Search Console and Analytics separately, and not using the integration, but that’s a hassle.

The big, obvious benefit of the Analytics – Search Console mashup is that the metrics are in one place: you don’t have to flip between Analytics and Search Console.  That’s convenient.  It also lets you sort and filter your data easily, if you want or need to.  That’s good whether or not you do local SEO.

But the GA-GSC integration is uniquely useful if you do local SEO, for reasons that include:

• You can see how many queries contain a city name or other place name. That means less speculation on which terms your visitors typed in, and gives you a better sense of where they’re located.
• You can identify which specific pages are chopped liver in the search results. (High impressions + low CTR.)  That will tell you which title tags and description takes may need a facelift.
• You can tell whether your “city pages” amount to a hill of beans, or not even that. You’ll determine whether to continue or scrap that strategy.
• If you’re multi-location, you can see which “location” page gets the most or fewest clicks (and impressions). Of course, you can map that to whatever you know about which location does worst or best in terms of getting new customers.
• You can compare what you see in the Analytics-Search Console mashup to the data you see elsewhere: AdWords “search term” reports , Google My Business “Insights,” and any rank-trackers you might use, to name a few examples.
• You can see how many of the queries that get people to your landing pages in the organic results also cause the local 3-pack to show up. Do you appear both in the organic results and on the map for that term?  If not, should you make your GMB landing page a little more like the one that ranks in the organic results?  Lots of questions to ponder, depending on what you find.
• It seems to have more-complete data than what Search Console alone has. If you go into Search Console (under “Performance” -> “Pages”) you may see performance data only on a few pages.  Whereas the “Search Console” -> Landing pages” VIEW in Google Analytics may pull in data on more of your pages – more pages than you’d see data on if you just stayed in Search Console.

By the way, here’s another fun area in Analytics: “Acquisition” -> “Search Console” -> “Queries” -> “Term cloud” -> “Impressions.”

We all know Google’s propensity to kill off useful features and to make useful data harder to get at, so feast on this while you still can.

 

Anyway, you don’t need more advice from me on why you’ll find that data useful, or on what to do with it.  Just go check it out.  Again: Google Analytics -> “Acquisition” -> “Search Console” -> “Landing pages.”

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Any useful resources other people have written on this (especially from a local SEO angle)?

When did you first stumble into the Analytics – Search Console integration?

What are your favorite insights to dig out?

Leave a comment!

It’s hard enough to keep a lid on competitors’ Google Maps / Google My Business spam.  That’s even harder if you don’t know what to expect, or or if you give up because you assume you’re doing it wrong. It’s easy to get your spirits crushed.

As with Google reviews, you know Google isn’t too concerned about Maps-spam in general.  You probably also know at least the basics of what I call spam patrol: You identify competitors who have violated the Google My Business “quality guidelines,” and you submit edits in Google Maps, in the hope that Google will correct or remove those competitors’ spammy listings.  (As I always say, if competitors are to outrank you, might as well make them work for it.)  The post I linked to describes the basic process, as does this great guide.

You’re probably less clear on what to expect if you start or continue an anti-spam effort.  How long will you need to do it?  How often?  Will it get easier?  When will Google approve your edits? What will Google tell you?  When are you wasting your time?  And so on.

Here, in no particular order, are a few things I’ve observed about Google Maps spam and the kind of anti-spam effort you might undertake:

1. Google has crowdsourced pretty much all of its quality-control to you, me, and any oaf who can set up a Google account.  Anyone can lay a hand on anyone else’s page.  We’re all prisoners in gen pop.

2. To the extent rules ever are enforced, Google also has crowdsourced most of its enforcement to Top Contributors / Product Experts at the Google My Business forum.  Those people are volunteers, with the patience of oysters.  I suspect more people have set foot on the moon than are paid to keep Google Maps clean.

3. Google will never approve all of your edits, no matter how right you are. You’re lucky to get a third of your edits approved.

4. Google never seems to take leaps of faith on edits submitted by users who have consistently submitted edits that Google ends up agreeing with.  The spammer gets the benefit of the doubt.

5. Google won’t tell you when your edit is rejected.

6. Google won’t tell you why your edit was rejected.

7. Google won’t tell you when to expect a decision on your edits.  Sometimes it takes 30 seconds.  Sometimes it takes 2 months.

8. Google doesn’t automatically or instantly approve edits it had already approved before being counteracted by a spammer.  If I keyword-stuff the name of my business, and you get the keywords removed, and I add the keywords back, you may have to wait again for Google to approve your edit (assuming Google approves it again).

9. There’s no discernible penalty for repeated offenses on the same Google My Business page.

10. Nothing prevents the same offender from putting up the same spammy page in a different Google account.

11. Google doesn’t give you a way to dispute a rejected edit.  You can plead on the GMB forum, but again, that’s staffed mostly by volunteers, and competitors can crank out spam faster than those volunteers can review it and possibly take action on it.

12. Google doesn’t give you a “comments” field or another way to provide evidence to back up your edits.  Google does give you the option to upload photos as evidence, but those photos will be publicly visible under whatever name you use on your Google account.  Also, maybe you just want to provide a link to the business’s state Secretary of State filing, for example.  No can do.  (There is this new-ish form, but I have not seen or heard that it helps at all.)

13. Google doesn’t tell business owners and other spam patrollers that their edits are anonymous. Because of that, many business owners don’t send in edits that they’re right to submit, for fear of reprisals.

14. By the same token, if you’re NOT spamming and competitors submit malicious edits on your Google My Business page, you won’t know who’s done it.

15. You don’t have much or any extra sway if you use AdWords to advertise on a phrase that’s being spammed by competitors. Determined spammers often can get for free what you have to pay for.  Whether they get any customers out of the deal is another question.  The spam often doesn’t pay off.  Just the same, Google lets them step on your Capezios.

16. In my limited and imperfect testing, advertisers are more likely to get away with Maps-spamming.

17. If you fix a keyword-stuffed or fake name of a business, the performance-enhancing effect will linger. The page will still rank – at least for a while, if not long-term.  My hunch is that if a Google My Business page with a spammy name ranks for long enough, it gets enough clicks from searchers that Google concludes it must be a relevant result.  There’s a fake-it-’til-you-make-it effect here.

18. The less info is on or associated with a GMB page, the harder it is for Google to determine whether your edit is correct, so Google is even less likely to fix the page. That’s especially the case when the “website” field is blank.  Google’s bots or staff can’t look at the site to confirm or falsify what’s on the GMB page, so you’ll usually end up with a hung jury.

19. Google seems not to know or care what kind of address a given address is.  To Google, nothing is inherently odd about a personal-injury law firm that shares an address with an Arby’s, or an excavation company with a fleet of 12 Komatsus in a high-rise apartment building.

20. In your Google My Business dashboard, you can’t reject edits definitively or easily. When you log in, you may see Google’s “suggestions.” Often those are from other users’ (probably competitors’) edits on your listing. You can reject one at a time, but they keep popping up. That’s a royal pain, especially if you manage many GMB pages. (Thanks to Justin Mosebach of Improve & Grow for mentioning this one in his comment.)

21. Review spam is the least-monitored of all types of spam, and often the most damaging.  Spammy Google My Business pages may outrank you, but they can’t tell lies about you.  Unpoliced Google reviews can do that and much more.

22. You’ll need to patrol the map and make edits for as long as you’re in business.

 

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Any first-hand experience you’d like to share?

What are other hard truths you’ve observed about Google Maps spam? (I know I forgot something.)

Leave a comment!

There’s no shortage of info on the “ultimate” local SEO audit, and on all the checklist items big and small that people insist should be in your audit.  But there are two intertwined problems:

a. Good SEOs aren’t necessarily good at doing audits.  Most audits are overblown and disorganized.

b. Their audits often are tough for clients to act on, mostly because of how the recommendations are presented.

Whether you do your own local SEO and want to check everything out for yourself, or you’re in-house, or you’re a full-time professional SEO, your first concern should be whether you’re looking at all the moving parts.  An excruciating checklist for the website is fine, but not if you skip (or skimp on) the other parts that matter.

If you want to bake a pie, the place to start is not necessarily with granny’s super-secret recipe that took 50 years for her to perfect, if only because it’ll probably take you 30 years to get it right (if you ever do).  You’d probably prefer just a solid, straightforward recipe that you can make well today and tweak until it becomes your secret recipe.

I’ve done a lot of local SEO audits, and more often than not my clients act on the recommendations and get results.  In either case, they always understand my recommendations, partly because I structure my audits in a simple way.

Here are the 10 basic sections I usually put in a local SEO audit:

1. General comments.  Exactly how it sounds.  Any commentary you have that isn’t an action item should probably go here.  My “general comments” section is maybe half a page long.  In it, I also specify any quick wins, to the effect of, “If you do nothing else today, here are the 5 most-urgent suggestions to do.”

2. Google My Business.  Where you give your recommendations on your client’s GMB page(s), and maybe on features you think he or she should use (e.g. “Posts“).  Here’s also where you should identify any duplicate GMB pages and tell your client what to do about them.

3. Other listings (AKA citations).  I put the citation audit in a separate spreadsheet, separate from the main write-up, so this section is pretty lean.  I include any color commentary here.

4. Anti-spam.  I identify specific competitors who are spamming the local map, I explain what they’re doing, and I offer general suggestions on “spam patrol.”

5. Reviews.  In a separate spreadsheet I’ve got a “review audit,” which shows the top 8-12 review sites that matter to the specific client.  The spreadsheet also outlines my suggestions on where to focus on getting more reviews and on how to prioritize.

6. Link opportunities & strategy.  My audits include research into specific link opportunities that are realistic for the client (based on his/her answers in a questionnaire I send), and I include those link-opps recommendations in a separate spreadsheet.

7. Website: site-wide and technical.  This is where I put my suggestions on internal linking, standardizing title tags, site structure, how to improve page speed, and much more.  My audit includes several sections of website recommendations, and this the first section.

8. Homepage.  I’ve found that the homepage is important enough to call for a whole section of the audit, partly because I tend to have a lot of suggestions on the homepage.

9. Other pages.  Here’s where I put any recommendations on existing pages other than the homepage: “Services,” “Products,” “Locations,” “Service Area,” etc.  I also weigh in on concerns like whether the site has blog posts that would be better off as pages.

10. Pages to create.  This tends to be a long section, because most businesses’ sites don’t have nearly all the pages they should have, so I end up recommending many specific new pages.

Most audits I do consist of those 10 sections – give or take one or two, depending on the business.  As you can see, I didn’t tell you all the things I suggest go into each bucket, but rather the main buckets I suggest.  What you put in each bucket depends on what works for you.

Also, I always include a follow-up call to discuss any recommendations my client may want to discuss more.  I don’t consider that a section of the audit itself, but it’s an important part of the service.

Any sections I missed?

How do you structure your local SEO audits (either for a client or when reviewing your own SEO campaign)?

Leave a comment!