- [Neil] Hey everyone, it's Neil Patel,
and today is another day of "Local SEO Unlocked,"
where I teach you how to dominate the local SERPs.
Today we're going to be focusing on local SEO signals.
Before we get started,
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If you missed the very first lesson,
because it's the second lesson in this course,
you can go to neilpatel.com/training,
click on "Local SEO Unlocked,"
and that's where you'll find all the previous lessons,
as well as the cheat sheets, the PDFs,
the worksheets that go along
with each and every single lesson as well.
So some signals that matter when it comes to local SEO,
and I know we discussed this in the last video,
so I'll go over them pretty quickly.
Business signals, like category, location,
reviews, the number, the quality, the ratings,
off-page signals, like your name, address, and phone number,
citation volume, of what other aggregators say about you.
On-page signals, like your on-page SEO,
the keywords, the domain authority.
Link signals, like other sites linking to you,
and the authority of those sites,
how many social shares you have, your click-through rate,
all those things matter.
So, let's first start off by identifying keywords
for your business profiles,
because it's all about keyword research.
Remember, people are searching Google
to find local businesses all the time.
And this is the foundation of local SEO.
If you do this wrong, you won't get much traffic,
if you do this right, your business is going to change.
So first off you can use a tool called Ubersuggest,
you can find it at neilpatel.com/ubersuggest,
that's U-B-E-R-S-U-G-G-E-S-T.
And using this SEO tool,
you can see keywords that are popular within your region.
When you're using Ubersuggest in the search bar,
you'll notice that there's country selected.
If you click on that dropdown,
you can actually type in the name of the city,
and you'll see the keyword results adjusted
for city-based data.
So make sure you check that out
so that way you can get insights.
Now when you're doing keyword research,
you want to look for keywords that ideally don't have
too much seasonal trends
that are consistent or popular all year round, ideally,
if not, seasonal ones are fine.
And you want to look for ones
that are popular within your region,
and that's why I recommend Ubersuggest
because it can tell you how popular a keyword is
within your city.
So let's now go over the business signals.
At an advanced level, Google looks at two main things,
category and location.
So when you look at categories,
there's roughly 4,000 Google My Business categories
as of 2020, and that number is just increasing.
Google allows you to select up to 10 categories,
but you can only select a one primary category.
So when it comes to choosing these categories,
be as specific as possible, add the least number
of Google My Business categories possible.
Describe your business, not your amenities.
And I want you to be systematic
to make the best category choices.
You just don't want to pick random ones or popular ones,
you want to pick the ones that are best sorted to your needs
of what your business is so you can get more business.
Failing to categorize your business
can have a negative impact on your rankings,
so you want to choose the ones
that best locally represent you.
And you may not find the right category
if you're in a very niche-y business,
in that case, choose what is the best fit,
and that's okay as well.
Now, Papa John's could use the category of pizza delivery
and pizza takeout.
Wendy's, they offer desserts,
but it mainly is a hamburger place,
so it could use like a fast food restaurant,
but I wouldn't recommend using dessert restaurant
for Wendy's, or ice cream restaurant, just to give you idea.
Like even the Wendy's or McDonald's can offer ice cream,
but they're not really a ice cream joint,
they're more of like a fast food/hamburger type of joint.
Location's also important.
You want to add a map of all your locations,
and include the address, the phone number,
and name of each of the locations
in the footer of your contact page,
and please avoid trying to use virtual office locations,
this isn't great, people don't like them,
Google doesn't like it,
you want to use real physical addresses.
And when it comes to business signals,
you also want to put the keyword
in your business title if possible.
You can use Ubersuggest to do some keyword research,
find the primary keyword to target,
find long tail variations,
and include it within your business title.
And as I mentioned,
as you can see in this screenshot of Ubersuggest,
it says KFC near me,
on the right side, it says English United States,
you can click on the English United States
and type in your city,
and then it'll adjust the results to your city.
Some other signals is proximity, right?
People search for pizza near me, sushi near me,
the list goes on and on.
And for businesses, this is crucial,
those near me keywords are very, very popular,
and, is your business close to the location of the searcher?
And this is why the name, address, phone number, right,
they call it NAP, is very important in local SEO.
The future of local SEO,
look, Google's always enhancing their database
of personal information.
I think more and more is going to be adjusted
based off of not just what you like,
but also your friends like,
based on, you know, your Android device,
and we're going about that.
Google is tracking you within reason
and with your permission,
I think eventually as you opt in for more permissions,
they'll know what you like, what areas you tend to go to,
and they'll start showing you places
that are closer to that.
The next factor is review signals.
You know, with reviews sites like Yelp, Angie's List,
Better Business Bureau, Glass Door,
those are all examples of review signals and sites.
And with reviews, you want a lot of positive reviews,
the higher the ratings, the better,
you want to make quantity,
and you want reviews with your keywords in there,
your location in there,
and you want reviews with responses, diversity,
you don't want them all to say the same thing
because the more diverse they are,
we'll also find out if people talk about
a specific product or service,
and a lot of people started talking about it,
you'll start generating more sales
for that product or service as well.
And you can use tools like Podium,
which is what we tend to use,
it's a messaging platform
that helps you increase your reviews
without breaking their terms of service.
You don't want to do things like say,
"Hey, I'll give you a free dessert
if you come to my restaurant
in exchange for a review."
Some platforms are okay with that,
but most of them don't like that,
and that's breaking their terms,
so I would not recommend that.
Instead, you want to use tools like podium
to increase your reviews,
and they have a free version of their application as well.
And this allows customers to easily leave reviews
with a click of a button.
You don't have to send people to all these URLs,
or complex places, or give them these complex instructions,
literally, Podium makes it all simple with a single click,
and that's why I love it.
And we've seen businesses reviews skyrocket, you know,
going from little to no reviews
to thousands of reviews,
just because of the tool, and as I mentioned,
they have a free version as well.
And the key that we've seen
when it comes getting a lot of reviews
and a lot of high-star reviews
is by providing excellent service,
setting expectations,
and going above and beyond them.
Determining the right timing, right,
on when you want to ask for a review,
typically after they've experienced your product or service,
you don't want to wait too long, like weeks after,
and you want to reach out with the right message.
So now let's dive into some off-page signals.
So some of them are IYP or aggregator,
and name, address, phone number consistency.
So, data aggregators compile data about each business,
such as, you know, registration records,
chamber of commerce, et cetera.
Having all this, making it available,
making sure that people know
that you guys are a stand-up business,
and you guys have renewed your incorporation,
or whatever your business address is, or your lease,
this is all good.
Now, IYP is an online version
of traditional yellow pages directory,
which is very popular.
Assuming some of you may have not known what IYP is,
which is fine as well, but just think of like yellow pages,
that book, right, the old school book
that they used to give out years and years ago,
but now it's just the online version of it.
Now, when it comes to name, address, phone number,
and there's also name, address, phone number,
and website, right?
You don't want to not have a website,
having one will drive you more sales.
And these are the main four basic important things
when it comes to your business for search engines
like Bing, or even Google.
And when you're leveraging them,
make sure they're consistent.
You don't want your website to have a different name,
address, phone number, then your Google My Business,
or than another directory site out there.
By having it all consistent
when Google crawls this information all around the web,
it'll help you rank better if you're consistent.
Now let's dive into some on-page signals.
Look, when it comes to SEO,
Google pretty much wants a website to be SEO-friendly,
and optimized for their crawlers.
And I'll go into a little bit more in depth on that
in future courses, but those are the main two things,
and you can use a Ubersuggest site audit report.
So if you go to neilpatel.com/seo-analyzer,
and put in your URL there,
it'll tell you what you need to fix
from an SEO standpoint to be optimized and friendly.
So other on-page signals, your name, address, phone number
needs to be there.
I know I've said that probably 10 times now,
but I can't emphasize that enough.
You want to have keywords in your title,
you want to optimize for your authority,
and of course you want to use SSL certificates
because Google doesn't like ranking non-SSL sites as hot.
So now let's dive into some link signals.
Links are pretty basic,
it's other websites linking to you.
The more websites linking to you, the better,
the more websites linking to you that are related
and within your local region, the better,
the more links that have maybe the name of the city,
or your business in there, or keywords, the better as well,
and links are like votes,
the more of them that you get, the higher you'll rank.
The next factor is social signals,
and if people have a great experience at your business,
you want them to share everything on the social web,
even though that doesn't help you directly,
indirectly, it helps your SEO,
because it helps get your brand out there,
and brand signals indirectly help with SEO.
So ask people for tweets, social shares, Instagram posts,
even if search engines can't crawl them, it's okay,
it does help in the long run,
and that also all helps with behavior signals as well,
because if you have a strong brand,
people are much more likely to click through it
when they see your listing on Google,
actually go to your place,
not click the back button when they're on your website,
and even click that call button with your phone number
so they can get ahold of you.
So, some metrics to also watch out for is bounce rates.
You don't want people bouncing away,
Google metrics will tell you your bounce rate,
and the more people stay on your site, the better,
that's called time on site.
And the more interactions you get
with your Google My Business panel for bookings,
you know, click to calls, driving directions,
the better as well.
And there's literally, you know,
a lot of case studies out there and I have one for you
that's a hundred million dollar-plus example
of a case study, and that is Yum Brands.
For the second consecutive quarter,
digital sales increased by over $1 billion
versus the previous year
to set a single quarter record of $4 billion.
That's a huge case study.
As I mentioned, I have tons and tons of more of them,
but this just shows you the power of digital marketing.
And here's another one, KFC,
this is case study number two,
they're getting a lot of traffic.
And as you can see, it's mainly coming from search, right?
75% of their traffic is search,
going to similar, which is huge.
And the number of listings for their 920 locations
grew to almost 50,000.
All the information such as opening hours
were updated efficiently,
and KFC saw an increase in online visibility,
which led to a 60% increase in clicks
on directions resulting in a 16% increase
in revenue from local search.
Then there's Whole Foods,
Whole Foods has localized their social media,
each store has its own social media pages,
and the replies of hundreds and hundreds of customers
every single day.
They even have call now buttons,
and this has caused people to engage with Whole Foods,
and that's also caused them to get, you know,
social traffic, search traffic, and even direct traffic.
So as I mentioned, there's a lot of examples,
from Yum Brands, to Target, to Home Depot,
the list goes on and on.
So make sure you go to neilpatel.com/training,
click on "Local SEO Unlocked,"
and you can go to video two,
and you'll find all the worksheets, PDFs,
and everything like that underneath that.
Thank you for your time.
If you have any questions, leave a comment below.
If you enjoy the video, like it, share it,
tell your friends about it.
And if you need help with your local business,
check out my ad agency, Neil Patel Digital.
Thank you very much.