Local SEO forums and communities can be incredibly useful sources of knowledge and advice for agencies and local businesses alike, but which ones are worth joining?
This time last year, there was a multitude of local marketing forums, but with the disintegration of Google+ in April 2019, a lot of trusty old favorites disappeared. While some of the traditional forums are stronger than ever, the number of different sources of local chat seems to have dipped.
So, we scoured forums and social media to find which communities have the most active local marketing discussions – with traditional forums and Facebook groups coming up top. Communities were chosen based on the regularity of local marketing-related posts from multiple users. In particular, we struggled to find any significant and active communities on LinkedIn or Reddit.
When updating this resource, we also asked our users and Twitter followers which communities they turn to. But, if there are any that we’ve missed, let us know in the comments and we’ll update this list.
Membership numbers are rounded and last updated 9/30/2019.
Best Local SEO Forums and Communities
Forums
Official Google My Business Forum
Members: 17,000+
In April 2019, Google updated and relocated its Google My Business Help Community. In this new iteration, the number of categories have been cut down, notably removing the spam-fighting forums and taking the responsibility from Local Guides.
This forum is useful for GMB users struggling with issues with their listings or in search of best practice advice, but is not a source for general local SEO chat around trends. This buzzing, busy community sees multiple questions answered per day, so can be a great place to start with any GMB-related queries. For more information on how to use the GMB Community, read Ben Fisher’s guide.
Local Search Forum
Members: 4,800+
The Local Search Forum has been an important source of news and chat since its inception, being a primary source of access to local marketing specialists for those with questions, and the first place many local SEOs visit to discuss top-level changes and ideas.
It has many different sub-forums for different types of queries and discussions, with many notable local marketers frequenting the forum and joining in discussions.
Since being taken over by Joy Hawkins’s Sterling Sky in September 2018, the Local Search Forum has seen a redesign and a huge uplift in traffic. Their daily and weekly summary emails helpfully outline the main topics being discussed right now. The Local Search Forum also has a Facebook group – Local Search Pros.
BlackHatWorld
Members: Data not available
BlackHatWorld is well-known in the wider SEO industry, but it is less famous as a source of local SEO chat. Their Local SEO forum is open to all, and frequented by local business owners and local SEOs with questions.
The forum allows users to share ideas and ask advice from other members – focusing on both black-hat and white-hat techniques. But do your research before implementing changes based on advice here, as black-hat techniques could have negative effects on rankings now or in the future.
Questions tend to be focused on specific challenges posters are looking to solve, and answered by other members of the community. Posts tend not to get many responses each, and focus more on providing answers than broad discussions.
To post or answer questions, you need to have a Moz Pro account – though you can read responses as a non-member.
Facebook
Local Client Takeover
Members: 25,000+
Local Client Takeover is aimed at marketers that are “tired of the hype and want to learn, discuss, and improve upon their wealth generated from servicing local clients.”
The active group sees multiple questions and requests each day, with most posts receiving interaction. While many posts do focus on traditional local marketing topics, some posts are from people looking for services.
Local Marketing Institute Connect
Members: 600+
Local Marketing Institute Connect is a place for local businesses and marketers to connect on local search, local websites, email, social and paid marketing. While it has a lower membership count than some of the other communities on this list, it is frequented by some familiar faces.
Run by the Local Marketing Institute’s Eric Shanfelt, LMI Connect features its own content, the latest industry news and trends, and regular questions from marketers and business owners on local marketing best practices.
Local Search Pros
Members: 160+
Local Search Forum’s little sister has fewer members, but that is not to say it isn’t a worthwhile community to be part of. Membership is open only to local search professionals, with many of the leading names in local SEO regularly posting and contributing to discussions.
The community aims to provide “higher level Local Search information and support to those in the industry”, and with such a high caliber of members, it can be a great source of top insights.
Twitter
But, with Twitter being such an active source of insights from local marketing pros, it’s important to follow the right people.
Google released a major update. They typically don’t announce their updates, but you know when they do, it is going to be big.
And that’s what happened with the most recent update that they announced.
A lot of people saw their traffic drop. And of course, at the same time, people saw their traffic increase because when one site goes down in rankings another site moves up to take its spot.
Can you guess what happened to my traffic?
Well, based on the title of the post you are probably going
to guess that it went up.
Now, let’s see what happened to my search traffic.
My overall traffic has already dipped by roughly 6%. When you look at my organic traffic, you can see that it has dropped by 13.39%.
I know what you are thinking… how did you beat Google’s core update when your traffic went down?
What if I told you that I saw this coming and I came up with a solution and contingency strategy in case my organic search traffic would ever drop?
But before I go into that, let me first break down how it all started and then I will get into how I beat Google’s core update.
A new trend
I’ve been doing SEO for a long time… roughly 18 years now.
When I first started, Google algorithm updates still sucked but they were much more simple. For example, you could get hit hard if you built spammy links or if your content was super thin and provided no value.
Over the years, their algorithm has gotten much more complex. Nowadays, it isn’t about if you are breaking the rules or not. Today, it is about optimizing for user experience and doing what’s best for your visitors.
But that in and of itself is never very clear. How do you know that what you are doing is better for a visitor than your competition?
Honestly, you can never be 100% sure. The only one who actually knows is Google. And it is based on whoever it is they decide to work on coding or adjusting their algorithm.
Years ago, I started to notice a new trend with my search
traffic.
Look at the graph above, do you see the trend?
And no, my traffic doesn’t just climb up and to the right. There are a lot of dips in there. But, of course, my rankings eventually started to continually climb because I figured out how to adapt to algorithm updates.
On a side note, if you aren’t sure how to adapt to the latest algorithm update, read this. It will teach you how to recover your traffic… assuming you saw a dip. Or if you need extra help, check out my ad agency.
In many cases after an algorithm update, Google continues to fine-tune and tweak the algorithm. And if you saw a dip when you shouldn’t have, you’ll eventually start recovering.
But even then, there was one big issue. Compared to all of the previous years, I started to feel like I didn’t have control as an SEO anymore back in 2017. I could no longer guarantee my success, even if I did everything correctly.
Now, I am not trying to blame Google… they didn’t do anything wrong. Overall, their algorithm is great and relevant. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be using them.
And just like you and me, Google isn’t perfect. They continually adjust and aim to improve. That’s why they do over 3,200 algorithm updates in a year.
But still, even though I love Google, I didn’t like the
feeling of being helpless. Because I knew if my traffic took a drastic dip, I
would lose a ton of money.
I need that traffic, not only to drive new revenue but, more importantly, to pay my team members. The concept of not being able to pay my team on any given month is scary, especially when your business is bootstrapped.
So what did I do?
I took matters into my own hands
Although I love SEO, and I think I’m pretty decent at it
based on my traffic and my track record, I knew I had to come up with another
solution that could provide me with sustainable traffic that could still
generate leads for my business.
In addition to that, I wanted to find something that wasn’t “paid,” as I was bootstrapping. Just like how SEO was starting to have more ups and downs compared to what I’ve seen in my 18-year career, I knew the cost at paid ads would continually rise.
Just look at Google’s ad revenue. They have some ups and downs every quarter but the overall trend is up and to the right.
In other words, advertising will continually get more expensive over time.
I didn’t want to rely on a channel that would cost me more next year and the year after because it could get so expensive that I may not be able to profitably leverage it in the future.
So, what did I do?
I went on a hunt to figure out a way to get direct, referral, and organic traffic that didn’t rely on any algorithm updates. (I will explain what I mean by organic traffic in a bit.)
I went on my mission
With the help of my buddy, Andrew Dumont, I went searching for websites that continually received good traffic even after algorithm updates.
Here were the criteria that we were looking for:
Sites that weren’t reliant on Google traffic
Sites that didn’t need to continually produce
more content to get more traffic
Sites that weren’t popular due to social media traffic
(we both saw social traffic dying)
Sites that didn’t leverage paid ads in the past
or present
Sites that didn’t leverage marketing
In essence, we were looking for sites that were popular because people naturally liked them. Our intentions at first weren’t to necessarily buy any of these sites. Instead, we were trying to figure out how to naturally become popular so we could replicate it.
Do you know what we figured out?
I’ll give you a hint.
Think of it this way: Google doesn’t get the majority of their traffic from SEO. And Facebook doesn’t get their traffic because they rank everywhere on Google or that people share Facebook.com on the social web.
Do you know how they are naturally popular?
It comes down to building a good product.
That was my aha! moment. Why continually crank out thousands of pieces of content, which isn’t scalable and is a pain as you eventually have to update your old content, when I could just build a product?
That’s when Andrew and I stumbled
upon Ubersuggest.
It used to be a simple tool that
just showed you Google Suggest results based on any query.
Before I took it over, it was generating 117,425 unique
visitors per month and had 38,700 backlinks from 8,490 referring domains.
All of this was natural. The original founder didn’t do any
marketing. He just built a product and it naturally spread.
The tool did, however, have roughly 43% of its traffic coming from organic search. Now, can you guess what keyword it was?
The term was “Ubersuggest”.
In other words, its organic traffic mainly came from its own brand, which isn’t really reliant on SEO or affected by Google algorithm updates. That’s also what I meant when I talked about organic traffic that wasn’t reliant on Google.
Now since then I’ve gone a bit crazy with Ubersuggest and released loads of new features… from daily rank tracking to a domain analysis and site audit report to a content ideas report and backlinks report.
In other words, I’ve been making it a robust SEO tool that has everything you need and is easy to use.
It’s been so effective that the traffic on Ubersuggest went from 117,425 unique visitors to a whopping 651,436 unique visitors that generates 2,357,927 visits and 13,582,999 pageviews per month.
Best of all, the users are sticky, meaning the average Ubersuggest user spends over 26 minutes on the application each month. This means that they are engaged and will likely to convert into customers.
As I get more aggressive with my Ubersuggest funnel and start collecting leads from it, I expect to receive many more emails like that.
And over the years, I expect the traffic to continually grow.
Best of all, do you know what happens to the traffic on Ubersuggest when my site gets hit by a Google algorithm update or when my content stops going viral on Facebook?
It continually goes up and to the right.
Now, unless you dump a ton of money and time into replicating
what I am doing with Ubersuggest, but for your industry, you won’t generate the
results I am generating.
As my mom says, I’m kind of crazy…
But that doesn’t mean you can’t do well on a budget.
Back in 2013, I did a test where I released a tool on my old blog Quick Sprout. It was an SEO tool that wasn’t too great and honestly, I probably spent too much money on it.
Here were the stats for the first 4 days of releasing the
tool:
Day #1: 8,462 people ran 10,766 URLs
Day #2: 5,685 people ran 7,241 URLs
Day #3: 1,758 people ran 2,264 URLs
Day #4: 1,842 people ran 2,291 URLs
Even after the launch traffic died down, still 1,000+ people per day used the tool. And, over time, it actually went up to over 2,000.
It was at that point in my career, I realized that people
love tools.
I know what you are thinking though… how do you do this on a budget, right?
How to build tools without hiring developers or spending
lots of money
What’s silly is, and I wish I knew this before I built my first tool on Quick Sprout back in the day, there are tools that already exist for every industry.
You don’t have to create something new or hire some expensive developers. You can just use an existing tool on the market.
And if you want to go crazy like me, you can start adding multiple tools to your site… just like how I have an A/B testing calculator.
So how do you add tools without breaking the bank?
You buy them from sites like Code Canyon. From $2 to $50, you can find tools on just about anything. For example, if I wanted an SEO tool, Code Canyon has a ton to choose from. Just look at this one.
Not a bad looking tool that you can have on your website for just $40. You don’t have to pay monthly fees and you don’t need a developer… it’s easy to install and it doesn’t cost much in the grand scheme of things.
And here is the crazy thing: The $40 SEO tool has more features than the Quick Sprout one I built, has a better overall design, and it is .1% the cost.
Only if I knew that before I built it years ago. :/
Look, there are tools out there for every industry. From mortgage calculators to calorie counters to a parking spot finder and even video games that you can add to your site and make your own.
In other words, you don’t have to build something from scratch. There are tools for every industry that already exists and you can buy them for pennies on the dollar.
Conclusion
I love SEO and always will. Heck, even though many SEOs hate
how Google does algorithm updates, that doesn’t bother me either… I love Google
and they have built a great product.
But if you want to continually do well, you can’t rely on one marketing channel. You need to take an omnichannel approach and leverage as many as possible.
That way, when one goes down, you are still generating traffic.
Now if you want to do really well, think about most of the
large companies out there. You don’t build a billion-dollar business from SEO,
paid ads, or any other form of marketing. You first need to build an amazing
product or service.
So, consider adding tools to your site, the data shows it is more effective than content marketing and it is more scalable.
Sure you probably won’t achieve the results I achieved with Ubersuggest, but you can achieve the results I had with Quick Sprout. And you can achieve better results than what you are currently getting from content marketing.
What do you think? Are you going to add tools to your
site?
As marketers, we’ve all experienced real-life marketing project management nightmares. You know — the projects that should have taken two weeks to complete, but instead dragged on for most of the year. Or the article that stumbled through numerous, unnecessary rounds of approval due to poor version control. Or even worse, the high-budget video that was scrapped entirely because of a lack of strategic alignment from the get-go. Marketing departments face a sea of challenges when it comes to getting work done quickly and efficiently. And unfortunately, these instances are common enough to feel like the name of the marketing game. But “it is what it is” is no way to create successful, integrated campaigns that make an impact on your customer — and your bottom line.
That’s where the right marketing project management software comes in. It brings your entire marketing department together to build and execute omnichannel campaigns quickly and at scale.
What is marketing project management?
Think about all of the elements that need to come together to create a cohesive marketing campaign. First, you need to determine the mission, the corresponding goals, an approved messaging framework, and a strategic approach. You also need to create the core pieces of content to drive that message home, as well as the social media posts, visual and creative assets, and maybe even press releases, all of which will be used to distribute and promote the campaign effectively across multiple channels.
Beyond that, your team needs to manage each task and ensure everything ladders up to the larger campaign. There are a lot of moving parts to manage, and without the ability to see how each of these pieces relate to the overarching plan, it’s easy for things to get lost in the shuffle. This is where marketing project management comes in — the process of wrangling all of the people, tools, and activities needed to deliver and distribute a cohesive marketing campaign. For easy and effective management, you need a software solution that will be the behind-the-scenes micromanager of your marketing efforts — making the difference between an efficient, well-oiled marketing engine and a total hot mess.
Why use marketing project management software?
Your marketing team is full of different personalities, roles, and skillsets. The members of your creative team likely thrive with a more flexible approach and push back against clearly-defined processes and structure. The marketing analytics team lives and dies by logical outcomes and hard numbers. Your marketing project management software should help these cross-functional teams work together toward the same goal — creating great content and executing effective campaigns.
Here are six reasons you need marketing project management software and how it will transform the way you work.
1. Coordination
Without a clear way to track and manage timelines, deadlines, and next steps, coordinating campaigns can feel a lot like herding cats. The right marketing project management solution should provide a holistic view of every task and deliverable, so you can see exactly when and where things are getting off track.
Request a demo to see how NewsCred’s content marketing platform can give your teams full line of sight into every step of a campaign.
2. Collaboration
You can’t build successful integrated marketing campaigns without seamless communication and collaboration. But using email to send comments back and forth is a great way to lose track of critical feedback. A good marketing project management software should enable collaboration — allowing you to build flexible workflows to manage task approvals and giving your team the ability to provide and track feedback in the same place so no one misses any edits or comments.
3. Transparency
Marketing project management software gives your department the ability to monitor team processes, assess campaign progress, and identify potential bottlenecks. The result is the transparency you need to make informed, effective decisions that will minimize waste, improve operational efficiency, and maximize campaign performance.
4. Marketing resource management
A good marketing project management tool should also provide a digital asset manager to help you manage all of your marketing resources. The ability to store relevant brand, content, and visual assets will help your team leverage what’s already been created and reduce duplicative efforts, saving your marketing team both time and money.
5. Organization
Marketing campaigns have a lot of moving parts — they’re essentially the product of a comprehensive laundry list of “to-do’s.” Marketing project management software helps you keep track of every task and deliverable in one place, so you stay organized, efficient, and productive.
6. Productivity
Too often, marketing teams spend the majority of their time and energy wrangling tasks and responding to fire drills. A good marketing project management software provides calendars, alerts, and a clear view of what needs to happen next, helping everyone on your team stay focused on what’s most important. Bonus points if the tool provides operational efficiency analytics, like NewsCred’s CMP.
Types of marketing project management software
Social media management software
Social media management platforms like Hootsuite and Sprout Social allow you to schedule posts, measure content engagement, and understand social campaign performance. However, for sophisticated content marketers producing a lot of content for different channels and running integrated campaigns, social management software only solves one part of the content creation and distribution process.
Workflow and project management software
Workflow and project management software solutions (think: Basecamp, Smartsheet, Trello) allow teams to plan projects, track tasks, schedule distribution, and allocate resources. While these capabilities are critical to your marketing efforts, these tools don’t offer marketing-centric functionalities around ideating, digital asset management, or analytics that marketing teams need to create effective integrated campaigns.
CMPs
A content marketing platform (CMP) is a software solution that enables marketers to drive awareness, leads, and revenue through content. Some CMPs also offer project management capabilities to help marketers manage content production and campaigns. NewsCred is an example of an end-to-end marketing project management solution that provides data-driven ideation, analytics, and marketing resource management capabilities to help marketers ideate, create, manage, and track content production and campaign performance all in one place.
Interested in learning more about how NewsCred’s CMP as a solution for marketing project management? Request a demo now.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published on bizjournals.com.
Corporate leaders often pride themselves in their capacity for pattern recognition. But somehow, even as tech startups are remaking entire industries, many management teams remain slow to meet the fight. How is that even possible?
One reason, perhaps: As a group, CEOs cling to hierarchical, top-down structures. Information is hoarded at the top and divisions work in silos.
In short, it’s bureaucratic, and often why big companies cannot move quickly.
It’s the kind of “command-and-control” system of leadership that we often associate with the traditional military. Soldiers just follow orders, and information is given out on a ‘need to know’ basis.
So it may seem strange that in an effort to create a more dynamic culture I make every member of my executive team read a book by a 4-star U.S. general, as well as recommend it to anyone else who wants to become a better leader.
In short, it’s the story of a quantifiably better leadership approach in fast-moving, complex and ambiguous environments.
Running a modern business is obviously a very different challenge than rooting out insurgents in Baghdad. But when you think about it, the military has been forced to adapt from conventional strategies and tactics to guerilla warfare as the modern battlefield has changed. In business, we say “adapt or die” as a figure of speech. For the military, that’s a very literal proposition.
After Gen. McChrystal faced such challenges personally, for instance when he led the special operations forces to hunt down and kill Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of al-Qaida in Iraq, he began to recognize the military needed to completely remake its approach to a much less conventional enemy than it had been trained to meet.
He then went on to create a quantifiably better and more dynamic leadership style.
That’s why the book has become a lodestar for me as we a company builder trying to foster a culture of trust, speed, teamwork, and transparency.
The first lesson from “Team of Teams” is the need to push decision-making to the edge of your organization. For many leaders that might seem like a recipe for disaster: “Wait, you want us to let junior people make big decisions?”
It does seem counter-intuitive at first, but think of it in a different way: who really knows the most about your business — the workers on the front lines or executives in the boardroom several steps removed?
Here’s how it worked out for McChrystal, who ran the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in Iraq from 2003-2008. When he arrived in Iraq, the U.S. military was on its back foot, struggling to launch effective missions due to slow, centralized decision-making. After realizing that the existing processes needed to be abolished rather than improved, he implemented a “Team of Teams” approach that entrusted decision-making to commanders and soldiers on the ground. After all, who had a better handle on the local conditions and prospects for success — generals hundreds of miles away from the action, or soldiers who were risking their lives every day on the front line?
The effect of this radical change was a massive increase in the number of U.S raids from one per day previously to dozens per day. McChrystal went from approving every raid to ceding all raid decisions to his troops. The “Team of Teams” approach also resulted in quicker decisions. Rather than waiting for a decision from the top that may have been based on outdated intelligence, raid teams were able to make their own well-informed calls on the spot.
The second radical takeaway for business leaders from the book is the practice of shared consciousness. That is what happens as a result of high transparency and visibility. Without a steady flow of accurate information, teams won’t be able to fuse together into a network and make good decisions based on a common purpose.
For McCrystal, that meant throwing open a daily planning call that had been limited to the top brass so it included around 7,500 personnel globally. He regarded this as perhaps his single most important change because it freed up officers from passing information down the ranks and resulted in faster better decision-making.
In the corporate setting, the lesson here is that there is no such thing as too much communication. At NewsCred, we share board decks and financials and have special days for teams to communicate what they are working on. I also send a weekly email to the whole company with whatever is on my mind. This builds a culture of shared consciousness that allows all employees, no matter how junior, to make decisions without always needing top-down approval.
How do McCrystal’s principles apply in our field of content marketing? As marketers we are feeling the winds of technological change more than most, making it even more crucial to embrace the transformation that breaks down silos and speeds decision-making. Content teams have a big opportunity to orchestrate content across silos and teams to create a unified customer experience.
Decentralizing decision making by empowering people with information and authority can make a good organization even better.
If you own a local business—especially one that’s trying to increase influence and exposure in your local market—you’re always looking for effective marketing strategies to put yourself in front of prospective customers who are most likely to use your products and services. Unfortunately, many companies overlook one of the most potent tools to achieve this and other core business objectives: a Google My Business profile.
What is a Google My Business Profile?
A Google My Business profile is a Google tool that lets you directly influence the way local consumers connect with your business online and substantially improve your local SEO. That’s important because about half of all consumers who conduct local searches (things like “restaurants near me”) visit a store that same day.
As HubSpot notes, a Google My Business profile will help you manage the way local consumers see you in Google Search and Maps, including things like your business name, location, and hours. It also helps you monitor and respond to customer reviews. Simply stated, if you’re new to local SEO, your GMB listing is probably the best place to start.
Why Is GMB So Important For Your Local Business?
In the first place, if your business is primarily or exclusively local, you need to find effective strategies to advance your local SEO. Why? Because most people find local businesses through local searches. Second, Google My Business can substantially increase the power of your local SEO. Consider, for example, these metrics from HubSpot:
Almost half of all Google searches are seeking local business information
Approximately 72% of consumers who do a local search will visit a local business within 5 miles of their homes
More than 97% of consumers learn more about local businesses online than through any other source
88% of consumers who do online searches for local businesses on smartphones either call or visit that business with 24 hours of the search
8 Best Practice Strategies To Optimize Your Google My Business Profile
Optimizing your Google My Business profile is one of the best ways to increase your influence and success in your local market. As Bright Local notes:
Simply put, every business needs a Google My Business listing. It offers a wealth of business information to Google and local consumers and offers a rich local search presence. The details you provide in your Google My Business profile are used in a number of different ways by the search engine, from populating the highly visible knowledge panel which appears to the right of the search results and filling out the local pack to populating Google Maps, providing voice search results and assisting with Google app search results.
Equally important, optimizing your profile isn’t rocket science. There are several smart strategies you can leverage to make your Google My Business profile stronger and more influential, including the following 8:
Get the NAP on your Google My Business profile right:
NAP is short for the Name, Address and Phone Number for your business, and getting it right is crucial to optimizing your profile. That sounds simple, but remember that your business changes over time and has possibly had different addresses or numbers in the past. You need to make sure that all your online business citations are consistent with the one you include as part of your GMB.
Claim your business short name:
If the name of your business is “John’s Auto Parts,” local customers might refer to it as simply “John’s.” Google calls that your “short name,” and you need to claim it for it to be exclusively yours. One of the best ways is to include your location as part of your short name (as in “John’s Springfield”). Including your name is also useful if your local business has multiple locations (you could use “John’s Springfield” for one location and “John’s Worcester” for another, for example).
Another great feature of the short name is that Google adds ‘/review’ to the end creating a direct link to your GMB review profile which simplifies the process when asking customers for reviews. No more frustrated customers searching for how and where to leave you the reviews!
Write a compelling business description:
Google gives you 750 characters to describe your business, so you need to make them count. Don’t include promotional talk in your description (Google doesn’t allow that) but do tell people about your products and services and what’s unique about what you do. It’s also a good idea to include something about your company’s mission and history.
Pick the right Google My Business category and subcategory:
This is an important component of local SEO, so you need to get it right. For example, if you sell pizza, you might choose “pizza restaurant” as your category so that people looking for “pizza” or “pizza restaurants” can find your business in local searches. The subcategory is also important, especially if your business does more than one thing. For example, you might have a supermarket that includes a pharmacy, in which case “supermarket” would be your category and “pharmacy” would be your subcategory.
Use photos to your advantage:
Google gives you lots of options for the photos included in your profile. You can use both interior and exterior shots of your business, as well as 360-degree views. The photos you choose are important because 60% of local shoppers say local search results with strong images capture their attention.
According to Google, businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions to their location from users on Google, and 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses that don’t have photos.
Best practice is at least 3 images each of your exterior, your interior, your team, and the products you sell.
In fact, new research shows a very strong link between Google My Business photo quantity and search performance. To wit: The research found that businesses with more than 100 images on GMB get 520% more calls, 2717% more direction requests, and 1,065% more website clicks than the average business!
Monitor and respond to reviews:
The reviews that prospective customers see are important—on average, consumers read at least 10 reviews before they trust a business—and they trust these reviews more than word of mouth from friends and family. So, it’s not enough to wait for customers to write reviews—you need to be proactive with a consistent process to request them. You also need to monitor and respond to those reviews—for example, a policy of simply thanking customers who leave positive reviews.
Publish posts regularly:
Posts within your Google My Business profile are essentially mini-blogs which give consumers important information and updates about your business.
More importantly, by posting to your profile it does two things for your local SEO.
It feeds the important keywords and phrases vital to your business directly to the AI of Google’s algorithm. Building the crucial association of your goods and services with your business.
Regular posting drives up engagement. Google measures how much you as a business owner engage with your profile. The more you as a business engages with your profile, the more serious Google takes your business.
Good posts will increase your visibility and rankings in local searches—and they can be highly influential in a customer choosing your business over one of your competitors.
Optimize your Google My Business profile Q&A:
The Q&A feature of your profile can be enormously helpful to your business, but you need to make it work for you. Google gives you the ability to create a storehouse of both questions and answers within your profile. This is to ensure that the answers consumers get are the ones you want them to. Use the customer data you have to make sure you include the right questions—and the best answers.
In Conclusion
Previously, we’ve discussed and put together a 10-point Local SEO Checklistto get your business ranking at the top of local search results pages.
Optimizing your GMB profile is right at the top of that list.
These are just some of the ways you can optimize your Google My Business profile, and in the process, increase your exposure and influence in your local market. Although the optimization process (as noted above) isn’t rocket science, it can be complicated and confusing, especially if this is your first go at it. Fortunately, there are experienced agencies who specialize in local search strategies and can help.
To learn more about the ways our local SEO and Listings Optimization services can help your business rise to the top of local searches to help your business grow, contact us today.
Want to know how to get a suspended Google My Business listing reinstated? Here’s everything you need to know to get your all-important listing back, by GMB Product Expert Ben Fisher.
Joe awoke one morning to find that the phones were not ringing for his business. He then had some people calling in from billboard advertisements, but they were calling to ask for directions.
After a few moments of confusion, Joe checked to see if anything had happened to his business listing on Google.
Sure enough, this business was no longer on Google Maps. Gone! All those hard-earned reviews… poof! It was as if the business no longer existed.
The kicker? This was a real business. There was clear signage visible from Street View, there was a professional Street View created by a trusted photographer. The warehouse was huge.
You could even find them as a legal business entity with the secretary of state. They had another listing for a separate business entity that also had all the legit checkboxes, like a separate phone number, entrance, and LLC.
We’ve looked at your account and it looks like your business is not eligible to display on Google Maps per our quality guidelines. Check out our guidelines for representing your business on Google to see what types of businesses are eligible to be on Google Maps.
So Joe sends an email back, with photos of the building, entrance, signage, billboards and more facts.
Here’s what Joe said…
“We paid Google to have a photographer come in for the 360 tour and pictures a couple years ago.
I’m attaching pictures of our building, showroom, service truck, and even a billboard we have down the street advertising our business.
PLEASE HELP GET US BACK ON GOOGLE MAPS AND GET OUR REVIEWS BACK ONLINE!”
Joe ended up calling me at Steady Demand, and after looking at all the evidence and seeing that they had one listing still live, I asked: “Who else is managing the listing?”
In particular, I asked him which manager was not on the live listing but was on the suspended listing. At first, he said, “Oh no-one, I think. Just my GM.” I asked him to humor me and take a look.
Lo and behold, there was the answer: a manager from, without being too cryptic, a reputation management company that, shall we say, “flies and has a facial feature”.
I said, “Okay, let’s remove that user. Now we can proceed with a reinstatement.”
Seven days later the listing was reinstated on Google Maps.
Because the user from the reputation management company was performing map edits on a regular basis, this behaviour was flagged as suspicious by Google and this led to that user’s account being suspended (if you’re an agency managing client GMB profiles, I’d recommend avoiding making too many map edits on a daily basis).
That’s how easy to get your listing suspended on Google My Business without even knowing why, and that’s why I’ve put together the little guide below, which I hope answers all your questions about why your GMB listing has been suspended.
What Is a Google My Business Suspension?
In short, a Google My Business (GMB) suspension is what happens when your free listing on Google and Google Maps is no longer visible or under your account control, and its validity has come under question from Google.
A quick ‘word to the wise’: Whatever you do, if Google suggests creating a new listing, do not do it. You could lose all of your reviews and any ranking power you had will be gone. As long as the listing and account are in within guidelines, then you will get reinstated, no matter what support says.
How to Tell How Serious Your GMB Suspension Is
There are two kinds of Google My Business suspension. To find out which you’ve got, search for your business on Google Maps. If it’s not there, you’ve got a hard suspension. If it’s still there but you can’t access it, it’s a soft suspension.
Hard Suspensions
This is very bad. In this case, the listing has been removed from Google and from Google Maps, and is in a state where it can lose its reviews entirely.
Soft Suspensions
More often than not, this has to do with a user on the account. Soft suspensions usually mean that the listing is “disabled”. It’s still visible in search but you no longer have the means to make changes to manage it. The listing is in an unverified status at this time and very vulnerable to user edits for removal.
What Can Trigger a GMB Suspension?
Algorithmic Sweep
Sometimes Google does what is called a “sweep”, like what we saw back in June of 2109 when suspensions increased significantly.
This was an algorithmic sweep of sensitive business categories that were highly susceptible to fake GMB listings, like locksmiths and plumbers. I have even seen a listing get suspended after doing a move reinstatement, right after doing a verification. Frustrating, yes, but also computer-controlled!
The algorithmic sweep is the most common suspension cause and also the hardest to troubleshoot. It could result from anything from having your hours set to 24 hours to not setting your address properly.
Account Issues
Sometimes an account manager or owner has had their own account suspended. Maybe it’s the representative of an SEO company that has a user account and submits a ton of spammy map edits, or maybe it’s a user that does other things that violate other guidelines.
When an account gets a suspension they will usually have all listings in the account receive a suspension. I need to note here that I very often see accounts that have multiple bad listings (10+ virtual offices or spammy listings) get suspended wholesale.
If you’re managing multiple GMB accounts and most are suspended but one or more aren’t, then your account is not at fault. It will instead be a manager on a listing that is on a suspended account. If this happens to you, you either need to do what I call an “owner swap” (basically removing the current owners and replacing them with a new Google account, preferably connected to Gsuite) or you need to remove all managers before attempting a reinstatement.
Manual Suspensions
Manual suspensions happen when a Google employee has personally decided that you should not be on Google Maps. This is usually after being reported via the spam redressal form.
The way I look at this is very simple: for the most part, you are guilty until proven innocent. If there is some slight doubt on the part of the Google employee, you will get a soft suspension: you’ll still be on Google Maps but will have to go through the reinstatement process.
Note: During this time, your listing is vulnerable to removal by any user. If there are enough signals suggesting your business should be removed (which I’ll go over shortly), you will get a hard suspension and your business will be removed from Google Maps. Spammy business names and having an address at a virtual office are common reasons for a hard suspension.
Commons Reasons for GMB Suspension and How to Rectify Them
Below are some common reasons for a suspension. In all instances you will want to file for reinstatement.
Before reading on, here’s a small but important tip for you:Get it right.
In some cases, you’ll have just two chances to get reinstated. Have other professionals look over your listing. First go to the Google My Business Help Community and ask someone to review your listing details (provide business name, the address the business was verified at, and a screenshot of your GMB info tab). Then submit as much proof as possible on the reinstatement form.
P.S. Do not gripe about how much money you are losing or who cannot pay bills. It’ss distracting to anyone trying to help you and, trust me, we know your pain. In addition to this, Google doesn’t care about that or how much you spend on their ads; they are looking for facts.
With that out of the way, here are those common reasons for GMB suspension:
Listing yourself as open 24 Hours when you’re not
Make sure you are not listed as open 24 hours if you are not staffed in the office for 24 hours. Change your hours to something that is reasonable like 9AM – 5PM. It doesn’t matter if you have a call centre responding to calls at all times; Google basically wants to know when your physical door is open.
Adding keywords to your business name
Make sure your name reflects what is on your signage or with the secretary of state. It’s what people know you’re business as. It’s what’s written on your business cards and your office pens. Remove the keywords; pretty simple.
Having your address at a virtual office or co-working space
Avoid this altogether. I get it, it is cheap. But it paints a huge target on your back for competitors looking to get your listing removed, and Google is just no good at policing it. Most of the time you will have to move. If you want to stay, be prepared to show a mountain of evidence. I have reinstated a ton of them, but they are not easy at all.
Changing your address
This one is not as easy to understand since it should always trigger the re-verification process within Google My Business. But in some cases, the listing will simply get suspended. Make sure you document the previous address and, of course, the new address. Provide this during reinstatement.
Creating multiple listings for the same business
Remove the fake listings from your dashboard and then try to remove them yourself in Google Maps, or document the URL and admit your fault on reinstatement.
Creating multiple listings at the same address
Same as above: get rid of any fake business listings or be prepared to show legal proof there is another business at the location.
Interlude: Story Corner
I talked to a guy today. He was totally mystified as to why all 16 of his listings were suspended. After providing me with a spreadsheet of the listings, I could see why.
He had all 16 listings at his home address. All of them were keyword stuffed, except the real one. He explained that with his business license he could operate all over the state, so in his eyes it was totally “normal” to have a listing for every county. (If I had $10 for every time I heard this…).
After I went over the guidelines, he realized that, in total, he only qualified for two listings. If this is you or your client, you have been warned!
In a different instance, I had a client that had their Google My Business name being edited by a competitor every day. Even though the name legally had keywords in it (as in, it was their registered business name), they got so fed up that they just gave up and let the pending edit sit there. They “had better things to do”.
Well, unfortunately, one day the edit stuck and, bam, the listing was suspended immediately. When I asked the business owner if they had any of the required proof for reinstatement they were caught off guard and found their business offline for over a month.
This last example was one of the reasons I ended up developing a My Business Listing Assurance program as part of Steady Demand’s offering.
What Can Cause Suspensions to Be More Common?
There are plenty of activities that can increase the chances of suspension, even if they’re not the direct cause. Here’s a bunch I’ve noticed recently, in no particular order:
Rogue account managers, or a user that has made too many spammy edits
Keyword stuffing in business name (and being reported for it)
Repeated edits to a listing in a short period of time (it’s best to wait 60 seconds between edits)
Changing from a Storefront to a Service area business (this has recently become very common)
Address or hours not matching with those on your website (especially in the case of a location inside a virtual office)
Pin marker being in a suspicious location (I once saw a reinstatement get declined because the pin was on a garage, and had to do a video proving the location was in a duplex behind the garage)
I’ve helped reinstate more than 150 locations just in the past two months, and along the way, I have witnessed many very common errors and some that were just mystifying. My key tips are:
Make sure your business information is always up to date in the state business directory, city license or state bar.
Hire a Street View photographer to refresh your signage.
And don’t try to game the system with tons of listings. It’s just not worth it.
One last note: I talk to businesses every day that feel they deserve to be listed in every city they serve, and I say the same thing almost every time: this is a business decision.
If you will earn more revenue by having a presence in a metro area than the cost of staffing an office and registering the entity legally, then do it! If not, then don’t. I really think it is that simple.
One of the best things about the internet is that it’s global. Just punch in a search, and you have an entire world of information at your fingertips. And, this is awesome, no doubt about it. But sometimes, you want a specific product or service, and you’re really looking for something you can find in your area. That’s what going local is all about on the consumer’s end. And, for the supplier of a particular product or service, it’s about reaching these consumers.
When you work with an SEO company, the goal is to make your company visible. A professional SEO service will find out what your target demographic is searching for, and they’ll optimise your site so that it shows up when you search for those terms. And, if you have a local business, you don’t want to spread your audience across the whole world. You want to reach out to a focused demographic that will find you in your area.
So, for instance, when you’re looking to outsource SEO, and you have a local company in Sydney, the best way to find the ideal SEO service for you is to search “SEO services Sydney,” for example. But why? Even with a local company, you could get a solid return from an SEO expert halfway across the world, right?
Well, yes and no.
Theoretically, an SEO professional should be able to do a fair job of mechanically optimising your site for a given list of keywords. They’ll also make sure to provide quality content, backlink, and excellent site speed. All of this is important, but there’s more to it than that. To take your site to the next level, you also want it to appear on local listings. You need to appeal to the local market, and this is a bit of an art form in itself.
First of all, not all links established in your site are created equal. When you have a local business, you want to include local links or those that are relevant to your target demographic. Most huge companies will automate their link-building process and generate them more or less randomly. But, with a local SEO company, you can be sure to have higher quality local links, such as those for your local chamber of commerce and including your business information on search engines.. This helps to legitimise your business and dramatically boost visibility.
Another huge element of SEO is content creation. Fresh, unique content is regularly evaluated by Google algorithms, so it’s important to get new articles, blogs, and other information on your site. When you work with a local company, they’ll be able to speak to the people in your area. They’ll be aware of the nuances of your community, so the content can be tailored rather than generic. Local references give you a local edge and boost your market strategy.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Local SEO:
Increases local search rankings;
Boosts conversions in local advertising channels;
Helps mobile users find your business through search engines, directories, social media channels, and voice searches;
And ensures that your business shows up on Google maps and other navigational apps.
If you’d like to know more about how to boost your site visibility or make the most of local SEO, feel free to contact us. At Local Web, we know how to speak to the Sydney community and we are dedicated to providing you the highest quality of SEO service.
