Local SEO Essentials with Semrush

Key Takeaways

If your business has one or more physical brickandmortar locations, you can't just rely on general SEO. You need local SEO to make sure your business shows up for people looking for your services in your area. Welcome to the local SEO course from Samrush Academy. I'm Rita and in this course you will learn the most essential elements of local SEO including how to optimize your Google business profile, conduct local keyword research and uncover valuable local backlink opportunities to boost your rankings. And we will show you how to do all of these things using the Samrush local toolkit. And it's not just me doing all the talking, though I like to talk to be honest. Like all Samrush Academy courses, this course is built by a team of experts who do this work day in day out. In this particular course, you'll be hearing a lot from Wes McDow. He will share his top strategies for how he helps local businesses show up in search results. Now, before we get started, here's a tip for making the most out of our time together. You might have noticed this course is composed of two types of videos: strategy videos and walkthrough videos. Strategy lessons cover the core concepts behind local SEO. Walkthroughs are where we will learn how to implement those strategies using Samrush tools. We'll be walking through this step by step with a worksheet. Take a moment to download it now. You can find it in the link below this video. When you finish this course, you'll receive a certificate to showcase your expertise. Don't forget to tag Samrush and Wes and me. We will be cheering you on. Now, on behalf of the entire Samrush team, thank you for joining us. Now, let's take your local SEO to the next level. Hey guys, I'm website strategy expert and YouTuber Wes McDow and I am super excited to team up with Semrush once again for this start to finish course. If you're running a localbased business, it pays to be on the map. Like literally, if you can appear right here for people searching for a business like yours, that'll impact just about every aspect of your business, including the revenue and profits you bring in. So, you'll want to pay particularly close attention to this video because I'm going to be showing you exactly what to focus on in what order to make the biggest possible difference to where your business shows up on the map. Because here's the thing, there are literally hundreds of things that you could obsess over in your quest to rank, but time's a limited resource, right? Especially when you're running a business. So, this is going to clarify for you what's worth your time so you can focus on those things rather than on the tedious time wasters. And again, I'll be going in order of importance and impact on your ranking potential. So, if you prioritize these improvements, starting at the top of the list, working your way down over time, you'll start to see results really quickly. Then, you can start chipping away at all the other things. So, when you put them all together, it's going to strengthen your overall ranking profile, making it very hard for your competitors to ever take your position. And of the seven big ranking factor buckets, things like links, reviews, onpage, and citations, by far the biggest bucket that impacts your ability to rank the most is your Google Business profile, formerly known as Google My Business. So, our list of priorities is going to start right there on your listing itself. So, here we go. Ranking factor one is choosing the best primary category for your business. Right now, there are over 4,000 different business categories, and many businesses are going to have multiple options, but if you choose the wrong one, it can hurt you. For example, a yoga studio that sets its primary category as gym rather than yoga studio. This would be considered the wrong category because it doesn't really reflect the specific services that are offered by the business and it might make it harder for potential customers to find the studio when searching for yoga. So, you want to choose the category that not only is the closest to what you offer, but also the one that's the closest to the keyword phrase that you're trying to rank for. Okay. Ranking factor two, keyword in business name. Now, it definitely helps if the keyword phrase you're trying to rank for is in your business name itself, but this can be tricky because Google doesn't allow you to stuff keywords in your business name field if that's not the actual name of your business. Okay, ranking factor three is all about your location. Both proximity of your business to the searcher as well as having a physical address in the city that's being searched. Not a lot you can do about those. Actually, there is one thing you can do. More on that in our next lesson. Next, in the number four position, we have additional Google business profile categories. So, Google lets you choose not just one category, but extra additional, you know, secondary categories as well. And ranking factor number five, make sure that your Google business profile listing is as complete as possible. Okay, so now we're moving out of the Google business profile bucket and into all the other ranking factors outside of your listing that'll also help you the most. Starting with number six, Google reviews. So, the single biggest factor here is your overall star rating itself. In other words, it's more helpful to have fewer but better reviews than to have hundreds of mixed reviews. Quantity is definitely helpful, too, but it's a little further down that list of priorities. It also helps to have reviews with actual text above and beyond a simple star rating. And even better to get some that mention the keyword phrase that you want to rank for. Okay. And at number seven, you want to focus on your website itself, making sure that you're following the correct website page structure and using all your keywords correctly in the right places for maximum impact. Next up at number eight, let's talk about backlinks. So, getting good, reputable, relevant websites to link to yours has always been one of the most powerful factors in ranking your website. It's important to regular organic search results and it's almost as important when you're trying to rank in the map because this is actually a sitewide factor, meaning any link you get to any page on your website will help you rank in the map. And to be clear, this factor is specifically about the quality of those backlinks, not the quantity. And at number nine, we have citations. So a citation is really just any mention of your business online, and it's usually comprised of your business name, address, and phone number, otherwise known as the nap. Okay, so that's what you should be focusing on. But what should you not really be worried about? You know, things like geo tagging photos. That used to work, but it's a huge time suck to do, and it actually isn't shown to be any kind of ranking factor anymore. Also, keyword stuffing your Google business profile listing. So, some people think that the more you can use your keyword phrases and your business description and your services, it's going to help you rank, but it doesn't. So, just write it naturally with an emphasis on good, persuasive, conversion focused copywriting instead. Oh, and Google lets you write these posts as part of your listing, and you're free to do so if you want to announce a promotion or whatever you want to announce, but it's not going to help you rank. But there are two really sneaky things that will help. And in the next video in our series, I'll show you both of them and how you can get a jump on these opportunities that most businesses just don't even know about. So, I'll see you there and I'll show you what I mean. Hey guys, I'm a web strategist, Wes McDow, and welcome back to a new lesson in the course where we're going to get a little sneaky. So, everything I'm going to show you here today is 100% playing by Google's rules. Still, some people see these strategies as a bit controversial, but don't worry, I'll explain everything, and you can decide for yourself if it's something uh you want to try yourself. Now, these two tactics have flown under the radar for most local business owners, but they can make a really huge difference in where you show up in the map. Intrigued? Let's get right into it. But we need to start with one true fact. Your location is one of the biggest ranking factors in local search. And location actually plays three main roles in determining your position. Starting with city borders. In almost every case, without exception, if you want to rank your business in city searches, your address must be physically located inside the borders of that city. For instance, if you're trying to rank for dog grooming Boston, but your address is in Cambridge, you're not going to rank for that Boston search unless there is literally no competitors there either. Next, the city center. So, not only does a business need to be within the borders of a city to rank there, preferential treatment is usually given to the businesses that are closest to the center of that town. And that doesn't necessarily mean the true geographical center point. It's just wherever Google has decided is the most important part of that town. Usually, it's that downtown area where things are the busiest or most densely populated. And finally, proximity to the searcher. So, you know how when you search for a business, whether it's on your phone or even on desktop and you usually see three listings that are really close by? Yep. That's because they prioritize it that way. Regardless of whether you need the closest business or not, that's just usually what they're going to show you. So, now that we know how important location is as a ranking factor and the different ways they factor it in, how can you use that to your advantage? I mean, it's not like you can just move, right? Or can you? Now, if you're a brickandmortar location where customers come into you, this is going to be harder to do and probably prohibitively expensive, too. However, if you're more of a service business where you either travel out to customers or if you just work with them remotely, there's a little loophole you can take advantage of if you do it the right way. Here's what Google says. Service area businesses can't list a virtual office unless that office is staffed during business hours. Now, there are two interesting little things in that sentence. First of all, they specifically use the phrase virtual office, which by definition is unstaffed. A virtual office is pretty much nothing more than an address that a business uses on paper, nothing more. So, this could never really work. But a simple twist of verbiage like a co-working space, however, that could fit the bill very nicely. And depending on your area, there might be one or possibly more than one right where it would do you the most good. And the second part of that statement specifically mentions being staffed as a requirement. So as long as you or a representative of your business is actually working out of that co-working space during business hours as stipulated by Google themselves, you're playing by their rules. Now, how often they would check on you being there, if ever, I have no idea. So all I will say here is you should follow that rule if you want to keep your listing up. And I know you're wondering how much this would end up costing. So, what I found here is that the US average for what you'd pay runs anywhere from about $50 to $350 per month to get yourself a basic membership at a co-working space, which is good enough to satisfy Google's rule. And obviously, this needs to be the type of office where you can physically be there. So, you know, PO boxes and virtual mailboxes are definitely not allowed here. And when it comes to deciding on the location for your new office, it's pretty simple really. Remember, you want to be physically within the borders of the town you want to rank in. And you'd probably want to go a step further and be as close as possible to the city center. And so you don't have to guess. Google will actually tell you where that is. All you have to do is Google the name of the town and wherever the name of the town is placed is where they consider the city center to be. um you might just have to zoom in or zoom out to see it properly. So, if you were to get a basic co-working space membership near that city center, it'll cover almost all your bases. It'll likely even help you with that proximity to searcher issue since, you know, statistically speaking, when you're in a more populated area, you'll naturally be closer to more people who are likely doing more searches. If you follow that strategy, you're getting a pretty serious advantage over your competition while still playing completely by the rules. My next hack, however, is all about taking down your competitors who aren't. It really sucks when you do all the hard work of optimizing your business for local search the right way only to be outranked by businesses that seem to be cheating. And one way your competitors might be cheating the system and outranking you in the process is through something called namespamming. If you watched the last video, you know that the way you name your business inside of your Google business profile can help you rank. Specifically, if you add keywords that you want to rank for to your business name, and you also know according to Google, your business profile name should reflect your realworld name. But that doesn't stop people from keyword stuffing anyway and actually getting away with it. Just check out this map result when I searched for kitchen remodeler. Take a close look at the first result. Forever remodeling. Sounds legit, but wait a minute. Kitchens, bathrooms, dot dot dot. That doesn't sound right. And sure enough, when you click through to their website, those extra words aren't a part of their website URL, their logo, or anything. And here's the results I got when I searched Locksmith Denver. So, the first result is actually an old client of mine, and that's the real name of his business. So, he's good. But check out the next two. Job done. locksmith, Denver locksmith, Highlands locksmith, Denver. Pretty suspicious, wouldn't you say? If you go to their websites and social profiles, lo and behold, those aren't their actual business names. And of course, maybe your competition's playing by the rules, and this isn't even popping up as an issue that you need to deal with. But if you find yourself in a situation where you're being outranked by listings that are getting a little, shall we say, creative with their names, all you have to do is report them to Google. It really is true what they say. Snitches get riches. And the way you would do this is super easy. Just copy the name of the business and then paste it into Google. Then a panel like this should pop up over the right side of the screen. right under their information, you'll see a link that says suggest an edit. Just click that, then change name or other details, and then you'd remove the spammy parts. Now, it's important to note here that you're not actually making that change. You're just making the suggestion to Google and they'll investigate if that change is valid and if so, they'll apply it, leveling the playing field, giving you a shot to outrank them fair and square. Okay. Be sure to come back to me in video three of our series where I'll show you how you can use Semrush to find your best, most profitable keyword phrases that you'll want to rank for in those local searches. Because if you skip that, you'll just be guessing, which is where lots of local businesses leave a ton of money on the table. See you there. Welcome back to the next video in the course, How to Outrank Your Competition in Local Search. I'm web strategy expert Wes McDow and in this video we're going to get a little bit tactical and actually get to work finding your best most profitable keyword opportunities that you should be targeting in local search. The thing is what you think you want to be found for might be right on the money, but if it's just based on your best guess and not on actual research, you might not be reaching anybody at all. And there are a few reasons for that. First, the keyword phrase that your hunch tells you to pick might not get enough monthly searches. That can happen when the words that you use in your business as an expert in your field don't match up with the words that your customers, who are, let's face it, maybe less knowledgeable would use when they search for a business like yours. For instance, you may be the best pest control service in town, but if everyone's typing in exterminator instead, maybe pest control isn't your best option. Or maybe the phrase you want is just way too hard to rank for and you'd be better off optimizing for something else that will get you way better results. And that's where keyword research comes in. And it's actually pretty easy to do when you follow me through the steps in this video. Step one is where you're just going to write out all your services, products, or offers that you'd ideally like to be found for in your local area. So, if you're a home cleaning business, you might offer standard house cleaning, post construction cleanup, moveout cleaning, deep cleaning, and maybe exterior window cleaning, too. Or if you're an accountant, you may do tax prep, bookkeeping, payroll, and tax projections. So just write it all down in a list. And then once you have that, it's time for step two. Use Semrush to uncover your best keyword opportunities. To do this, I'm going to show you two different methods you can go about this. So first, we'll be using the keyword magic tool. You'll just find that over in the left sidebar menu. And then you'll take your first service and plug it into the keyword field. And since this is for local SEO, you'll want to add in your city name either before or after. Next, you'll just let it work its magic, finding more keywords for you based on that initial seed keyword that you put in. And here's the list. You'll notice there are a bunch of columns here, but I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the really important ones that you'll want to pay especially close attention to. First, we have intent. So, people do searches for all kinds of reasons. Everything from, you know, searching how to do something themselves, general information, trying to find a specific website that they're looking for, and yes, to find a business like yours. So, what you want to look for here are intents that are labeled either C, which stands for commercial, right? they're looking into different brands or services and T for transactional, meaning they're pretty much ready to actually pull that trigger. The other two really important columns here are volume, which shows how many monthly searches each phrase gets, as well as KD, which stands for keyword difficulty. So, that's represented by both a number between one and 100. And it's also colorcoded for really easy skimming. And just like you'd think, green means it'd be an easy keyword to rank for. Yellow's slightly harder, orange is worse, and red is just really, really hard. So, the trick here is to find the right balance between a difficulty score that's easy enough to try for and a search volume that's high enough to be worth the trouble. What I like to do here is some basic filtering to help me out. So, first I'm going to toggle over to related, which is going to do exactly what it sounds like and show me related phrases that I may not have thought of, but maybe my customers would be using. Next, let's eliminate the ones that might just be too difficult by setting that in the easy to possible range. You know, anything from 0 to 49. Then, under intent, I'll just choose commercial and transactional. And because I only want localbased terms, I'm going to tell it to include the city name. And here's where it gets super local in terms of intent. So I want to only see search terms that generate local map pack results. Now to get that, I'm going to go to advanced filters, SER features, and choose local pack. Now I'm left with only these really super targeted, highly relevant keyword phrases. But depending on your situation, there still might be a ton to choose from, right? Well, if I just order them by highest volume, I can see pretty visually what my best bets may be. All I need to do is start at the top and look at these colored circles. And right here, I see these greens, and they have a pretty good healthy volume. So, I think these would probably be my top choices. So from here, I would just go ahead and write these down in either a spreadsheet or a simple Word or Google Doc because we're going to need them a little later on in the course. And once you've done all that, then you just rinse and repeat this process for the rest of your services. So you're left with a small handful of really golden keyword phrases written down for each of them. So that's the really in-depth way of researching your best keyword opportunities. But I want to show you one even easier way that you can do it. This method's going to help you see who's already ranking where you want to be, then reverse engineering the keywords that are working well for them. Super easy to do with Semrush. But before we can use it, we need to see who's ranking at the top of the map for your business category. So, obviously, just head over to Google, type in your initial best guess for what you think customers are typing in when they're looking for you, your type of business, then just see who's at the top of the map listings. But you do want to be sure that they're there organically and that this top result isn't actually a local business ad. So pick the first organic result and click on website. Then just copy their URL and head back over to Semrush. Specifically, we're looking for domain overview on the left sidebar menu. Then just paste your competitor's URL in the box, choose your country, then search. Then you'll scroll down to where it says organic research. And here's where you'll see a short list of keywords. We're going to click the blue view details button. Now you've got the full list. Depending on who your competitor is, you may have a ton of results or maybe just a few. Now to whittle it down and prioritize our options, we're going to go to the positions dropdown and choose top three. This will show only the search terms that they're being found in the top three for. Then go to SER features dropdown on SER local pack. Now we have a crystal clear picture of the exact terms that they're seeing success with that you can use to compete against them. I just order them by highest volume first, then choose the best ones based on search volume and difficulty score. Write down the ones that you want to shoot for. And now we're ready to move on to the next video where we'll be optimizing your Google business profile, the single biggest ranking factor when it comes to local search success. I'll see you there. Hey there. Welcome back to the next lesson in our series on outranking your competition on local SEO. And this video might be the most important one in the whole course. So, we already learned that your Google Business profile contains all the very top ranking factors that are going to determine your placement in the map rankings. And here's where I'm going to walk you through getting that 100% optimized so that it can do you the most good. So, we'll maximize each individual element. But more than that, this lesson will show you how to fill out your profile as completely as possible, which is in itself a really big ranking factor. And I'm sure a lot of you watching already have your profile set up to some degree. But again, these are all the optimizations that you can make so it can work even harder for you than it does now. And if you're a brand new business or you just don't have a profile set up yet, we'll quickly start there. So, all you need to do to claim your business profile is head over to business.google.com. Then click on manage now. So, you are going to need to be logged into Google. If you're not, it's going to prompt you to do that. From there, you're just going to type in your business name. Then, you're going to click on continue. Okay. So, here they're going to ask you what type of business you have. So, if it's online retail, basically people are buying through your website, you would check this. But that's not what this course is about. This is mostly about local businesses. So, if you're a brick-and-mortar location where customers can visit your business in person, you would check this box. Or if you're a service business where either you travel out to customers or you just work completely remotely, you would choose this option. And by the way, you can choose both. There are some businesses that have multiple facets to them. Think of a restaurant that people come in and you also make deliveries. or in the case of the business we're going to be talking about in this lesson, it's a rental car company where people can come in and rent a car, but they also will pick you up at the airport in the car. So, this is what's known as a hybrid business. And just click on next. And then you would choose the most relevant business category. In our case, I'll just start typing in car rental and car rental agency. That's probably the closest thing to it. And then click on next. And here's where you'll put in all of your business information. Once you put in your address, if you have any kind of a unit number, you could put it on this same line, but it's generally recommended that you add a different a new line. So, you'd put in here, you know, unit 4B, for instance. It just helps Google format it a little bit better. And then from there, you'll click on next. You'll put in your phone number and your website if you already have one. And then click on next. Okay. So, now it's going to ask you to verify because that's really important. They have to know that you're actually the person in control of the business. So, it's going to prompt you. It prompts us here first by a way to verified by phone. Now, that generally doesn't work. They'll try to do it. Then, they'll ask you to put in your address for a postcard to be mailed to you. So, that's generally the way that's going to work. So, just go ahead and get everything verified. I'm just going to click on verify later here. And it's going to ask you for all this information as you set it up. But for the sake of me being able to walk everybody through this information together, regardless of if you have an existing or a brand new profile, I'm going to recommend you skip all these steps for now. Then we can all start together from here. So if you just set it up or if you've had it for a while, just make sure you're signed into Google with the email that you used when you set up your profile. Then all you're going to do is Google my business. And that is going to bring up this little panel right here. And I'm just going to click on view profile. And we're just going to go bit by bit here. So you've got all these choices here. We're going to start with edit profile. So the first thing that you can edit is your business name. Right? So is your keyword phrase in your actual business name itself. Now this one comes with a big old caveat, right? You are not allowed to just add keywords that you want to rank for to the name of your business in your Google business profile. For instance, if your business, like this one, is called Glende Motors and you're trying to rank for the search term luxury car rental Los Angeles, you can't just list it as Glende Motors luxury car rental Los Angeles. Unless that's the actual name of your business. It's a no-go. they can remove your listing and you don't want that. But what you could do to move the needle for your ability to rank is think about possibly legally rebranding to a new name that does include your keywords or at least some of them. For instance, here I feel like this reads extremely clunky with Los Angeles. We may not be able to include that. So, but we could probably rebrand this to Glende Motors Luxury Car Rentals. And if you were going to change it legally, that means changing it everywhere, including notifying the government, and legally changing your business name, changing it with your phone and utility companies, any existing citations that you already have around the web, as well as updating your logo, website, and signage. Now, only you can answer if that's worth it or not. So, the pros are you will likely rank higher in the maps, which could lead to more business, but the cons include things like your business name might sound a little spammy if you don't do it right. You know, as in the example here, we had Glend Devvin Motors Luxury Car Rentals Los Angeles. Sounds spammy, right? Not to mention the fact that, you know, this may not be as big a ranking factor in the future. So, if you were to go this way, I'd highly recommend making sure that it sounds good and like a real business name. You know, it's much harder to do that when you try to shoehorn in the name of your town as we saw there. So, I'd recommend against going that far with it in most cases, but I'm just going to click cancel here. We don't want to actually do that for this business. Okay. Next, we have business category. So, you've done the research to see who's searching for what terms. Now, what we want to do is pick the category that's the closest. And one really easy way to do this is just to type in your keyword phrase along with your city name into Google and just see who shows up in the top spots. From there, you can easily see what they picked as their primary category, which should give you a pretty big clue about what's working best. So, right now, it's set to show first service. Probably not what we want. So, I'm going to click on the little edit button, and I'm going to get rid of show first service. So, we have car rental agency. That's probably our best bet. Click on save. And then after you've chosen the single best category as your primary, now is your chance to go for some other keywords by choosing up to nine additional ones. Just make sure they're actually relevant and you'd be able to see some extra search volume coming in as a result. So, in the past, SEO experts have warned about the dangers of what they called category dilution. You know, the idea there being that the more categories you choose, the less impact each one's going to have. But that's really turning out to not really be a thing, at least not anymore. However, there is such a thing as what we call category confusion. So, if you were to choose a bunch of categories that are unrelated to what you actually offer, not only is that not going to help you, it's actually going to hurt your ability to rank for what you want to rank for because Google gets confused and doesn't really know what you do at all. So, we want to keep them relevant and we never want to mislead people with our categories. So, the way we're going to choose those is click on the pencil icon again. Now, we're going to click on add another category. you know, maybe car leasing service if that applies. And we might be able to go for that chauffeur service because they do pick people up at the airport as well. So maybe if people are searching for that, they'll kind of come to the website and be like, "Oh, I actually do want this." So I'm just going to choose that. And I think that's probably enough. And next we have the description. So So this is super important. You definitely just want to write a benefit-driven description of your business, including the problem you solve or what you offer and try to emphasize the results that you get for your customers. And I should say there is absolutely no need to keyword stuff here. It's not going to help you anyway. It's not a ranking factor. You could put car rental, you know, luxury car rental Los Angeles as many times as you want here. It's not going to do a thing to help you rank. However, it is going to be a good conversion factor. Okay. Next, we have opening date. So, I'm going to click on this. If you haven't filled this out yet, you should because this is something that's really nice for people to see that you've been in business for a little bit. If you have, if you haven't, you know, don't lie about it. Just put in your actual opening date. Over time, it's going to show how many years you've been in business, and it's going to look better every year. So, just put the year you were founded and the month and the day, and you're good to go. All right. Phone number, straightforward. Just make sure it's always up to date. Website, you if you have a website, and you definitely should if you want to rank this, this is where you would put that. Okay, so now we have kind of a biggie. This is location. So, we went over the various ways that your address affects your rankings in lesson two. But here's where you can input your physical address andor your service area. So, um, this one is set to a physical location because it's a rental car storefront. But if you're a service business with a service area, you would add that in right down here. And remember how we said that this is kind of a hybrid business where there's a storefront, people can come in to rent the car, and there's also the service where they go to you to deliver your car. So, what we want to do here is just put in any service areas that we have. So, so I'm just going to type in Los Angeles and probably set it to Los Angeles County. So, you can do counties, cities, states, zip codes. You can get really granular and you can add up to 20 of these. So, it is really important to mention here that even if you're a service business and your address won't be shown, you still need to enter it right up here so that Google knows you're a real business. That's how they verify you in most cases. and whether your address is shown to the public or not, this is still the address that Google factors in when it comes to all those location-based ranking signals that we talked about earlier in the course. So, in other words, if you're a service business, while they do let you specify your service area, that service area in no way affects your ability to rank within that area. It's just there for customers to see if you're willing to work with them where they are or not. So, we'll put in all your service areas. And, you know, again, don't pat it out. Be realistic because it's not going to help you rank anyway. And in the spirit of giving you all the information so that you can make your own choice here, I do want to mention that Google doesn't want you to list your physical address if you're a service business, right? If you don't expect people to come to you, they don't want you to list your physical address publicly facing. However, you may have noticed that quite a few businesses do, possibly your competition. And the reason why is businesses that list their addresses generally rank higher than ones who don't. Now, I'll just leave that information with you and leave it up to you if you'd like to include it or not. just weigh out the risks versus rewards and make up your own mind to see if it's worth it to you even though technically it is playing a bit outside of the rules. Okay, so next we have business hours. So you definitely want to set these. It helps. So if you don't have any main hours, you can have this checked, but most businesses have working hours, right? So I'm going to click on open with main hours. And then it lets you choose every day. So Monday, you know, 9 to5, Tuesday, so on and so forth. And obviously you can change these. You could change it to six if you wanted. You just go one by one and make those changes. And if you have any specific holiday hours, holidays coming up, this is where you can go in and make those changes so that you know people don't get surprised if you're not open when they think you should be. Okay. Now going down to more. So here's where it lets you choose these extra business attributes that may be beneficial to certain customers and help you to stand out. So, these are going to be different for each business type. Things like identifies as Asian-owned, blackowned, LGBTQ plusowned, and these are things that can show up right here in this knowledge graph over on the side. So, if you can identify with any of those things, you might want to include those. So, I'm going to go back down here just to show you all the different ones. So, there's things in the accessibility department or amenities. Um, it's going to be different for every business, like I said. You know, restaurants will have a different set of these than insurance agents would, for instance. And this can actually help you rank higher for certain people if they're searching for a specific attribute, like, you know, if someone's searching for some place that's wheelchair accessible, for instance, that could help you rank a little bit higher for that search. Okay, so now clicking out of business information. I know there was a lot there. Um, next, let's talk about photos. Now, according to Google, listings with photos get 35% more clicks through to their websites than businesses who don't. It's even been shown that by adding photos that are super relevant to your business type can help you because Google's AI can essentially see what's in the photo and it helps to really tie your business to your category. So, to add photos, you're just going to click on add photo. Now, there's a few of these you want to pay very close attention to. So, let's start with cover photo. You're definitely going to want to add something really nice here. This is the going to be the main photo in most cases. And you want to go for something really high quality, ideally sized to be 1024x 576 pixels. And you want it to be nonstock. You want it to be a custom photo. Snapshots are okay. It doesn't have to be super professional looking, but stock photos, they can actually take those down. They know what a stock photo is because they can see it on other people's websites. So, they will take those down in most cases. That's why it's really important to be custom. And then from there, let's talk about the logo. So, that's really important, too. That's going to generally show up as a little circle in your listing. And you want that to be sized about 720 by 720 pixels. And then, in terms of just normal photos, bring in as many as you have that are relevant. Start adding photos of your services, your products, your team members, the interior of your space, your exterior, and those interior and exterior shots are going to be really important if you're a brickandmortar business. Okay, moving on. Let's go to products and services. So, we'll just start with products. So, basically, I'm going to click on get started, and you're just going to try to fill this out as best you can. That's going to help you rank for people looking for specific products or services. But again, there is no need to keyword stuff these. You just want to add a relevant image, pricing, and short descriptions for each of them. So that's for a product. It's very similar with services. So it's just going to depend what you offer. But I will say this, product listings are more prominent than service listings. Now, let's take a look here on this what's called the knowledge graph over to the side. There's no products or services listed here yet, but if there were a product, it would be shown right here with images. It doesn't really do that for services. So, if you're a service business and you have access to product listings, meaning it's here for you. Sometimes it won't be here. Depends on your category. But if you have access where it says edit products, I highly recommend that you use this instead of services, even if you provide a service. Now, Google's actually on the record as being fine with that. So, you're technically not breaking any rules by doing it that way. It just gets you a little extra visibility. Okay. Next, let's talk about bookings. So, this is basically letting you set a link right to the place on your website where people can schedule something with you. Super powerful if that's one of your main calls to action. So you just click on add a link and then you link them right to your contact page or if your website is linked to like a Calendarly account where they can actually get right on your calendar, you would just link right to that page from here. Okay, now let's talk about Q&A. So over here, those are going to show up as well. If people have questions, those will show up here and you can answer them. So I'm going to click on Q&A. And generally speaking, if there are no questions, it's a good idea for you to get the ball rolling. Think of this almost like an FAQ section where you can answer, you know, your top three to five questions that people are always calling you about or emailing you about. Then just answer them completely here. So, I'm going to click on ask a question and you would ask it here, right? No, can you pick me up from LAX? Then you'd click on post and then you would answer it and then just click on post. Easy as that. You would do that for your top three to five questions. Okay, moving right along. Now, there's another really important thing, and that's add updates. So, this is a way they let you post about events, offers, or any just updates that you want to share. Now, I highly recommend taking advantage of the offer one, and always running at least one offer, even if it's just for new customers. So, you would just put the offer title right here. You'd set the start date, you'd set the end date. Now, the end date, um, you can set it to one year in the future. So that makes it easy to just kind of have an offer always running. You don't have to change it every week. Just change it once a year. You can even put it right back to the same thing. You can even use the same offer year after year. You just have to remember once a year to update it. And then you would add a photo. Highly recommend adding a photo. That gives it a little bit of extra visual punch in the knowledge graph right down here. Now, once we're done setting everything up in your actual Google business profile, we can actually take things a step further with Semrush's listing management tool. So, this is going to help you publish your business info in over 70 directories in the US and over 40 in other countries if you're not US-based. So, this way you can have even higher visibility and rank even better. So, here's how it works. From the left side panel, you need to find local tab and click on listing management. Now, I'm just going to type in the name of the business. So, if your listing is already live on Google, it should pop up here for you. I'm just going to click that and make sure all of your information is up to date here. And then just this is missing a phone number. So, we'd put that in. Just update the phone number and then click on check. So, obviously there's some work to do. So, we can take advantage of this here. We would just click on try it now. So now we just want to make sure everything is accurate here within Samrush. So this is actually in Woodland Hills and you can choose, you know, to hide your address if you want to do that or we deliver to local customers and make sure the brand names in there. And from here we can choose categories. So all we really need to do is choose the same primary category and secondary categories that we already chose within the Google business profile. In our case, it was car rentals, car rental agency, I should say, and show first service and car leasing service. Make sure everything's right. Then you're just going to click on start distributing info. So, while that's going, I want to show you one more thing here because I think it's a really good idea to do a little bit of recon up front just to see how you're ranking currently so that you can track your progress over time. And sure, you could just Google your keywords and see where you rank in the maps, but the problems with that approach are, you know, one, Google results are always a little different from person to person. So, if you've already been to your website a bunch of times, which you probably have, it's likely to artificially inflate your own rankings for you, meaning you'll show up higher for yourself than your average customer would see it. Problem two, you'd only see your ranking position from wherever you do the search from. And since obviously not everyone's searching from the exact spot you're sitting in right now, you want to go a step further and see where do you stack up from various spots around town. So, while I know there are a lot of steps involved here, it really is pretty easy to just go through each category and complete each action item. And it's generally really good practice to keep everything updated and very current over time. So, you know, do things like add new photos as you get them, add new offers and promotions from time to time as well. When you do all of that, Google knows that you're a real business that's active and you care enough to keep your customers updated. And that can go a really long way in how they treat your listing. Okay. But in our next lesson, we're going to talk in detail about the next really important step in local rankings, which are Google reviews. So, I'll tell you all my best secrets, what you need to get right, and most importantly, exactly how to do it. So, I'll see you in lesson five. In this lesson, I am going to share how I create a Google business profile for my local bilingual kindergarten kiote kind. Okay. So, the first thing that we want to do is we want to go to the Google business profile page. The process for getting a Google business profile is quite simple and it's very much step by step. So, I'm just going to go through all these steps one by one so you see how this is done. The first thing I will do here is add the name of my business. Okay. So, as you see here, I typed in the name of my business and the business category. I can later add other business categories. It's going to ask me several questions. You're going to answer those questions based on the specifics of your business, like entering your business address. And here it's asking me if there are any other businesses that are the ones that um associated to mine, but in this case there are none. Do I provide deliveries or home and office visits? That's a no. Our website Now, we can add more categories. This is important for you to do because it'll allow more people to find your business online. I'm going to skip for now. Google still has to verify my account. So, Kiote is not publicly visible as you can see right here. But that's it. That's really all it takes to set up a uh Google business profile. As you can see, I am an admin, so I have access to a bunch of features here to edit my profile, to read reviews, add photos, etc. So, I can always come here and make that happen or I can do it from Simrush. And that is exactly what I am going to show you how to do in the next few video lessons. So, join me and follow along and I'll see you in the next one. In this lesson, I am going to share how to connect your Google business profile to Semrush. So here we are in the local toolkit. Specifically in the local dashboard to connect your business to the local toolkit. You are first going to click on add new location. In here you can either add the name of your business, your website or phone number. In this case my business name is Kiote Kupe. It shows up right here. So I'm just going to add it. Please note that if it doesn't show up immediately, you can do an advanced search and add your address and phone number as well as your website and that will increase your chances of finding your business profile and connecting it to Samrush. Okay. So, what it's doing right now, it's it's gathering data from this profile and adding it to the local toolkit. You'll notice that my online presence is currently very poor, which is not surprising giving that I just literally created this profile for Kiote Kinup. So, there are a lot of things that I need to fix and improve, including adding reviews, etc. So, I'm going to go ahead and continue my setup. And then here, you have a choice of either setting it up with Google or setting this up manually. If you want to be able to make changes in Samrush then will reflect in Google, you want to click on setup with Google. So, I'm going to do that. That is most definitely the preferred setup. Now, close your eyes. Please don't look at my password. I'm just kidding. I'm going to just log in to my account. Just you need to make sure that you're an admin of the Google business profile account that you're trying to add to Samrush. So, I'll click continue. Click allow. Great. We have all this business information including the categories that I added in Google. I don't have any pictures. I have a very short description. I had also in my Google business profile added some hours. So now I'm going to distribute this business information. I'm going to create a new folder. And now Samrush is creating this location. Success. Okay. And now some very final steps here before we are done connecting our Google business profile account to the Samrush local toolkit. You can have Seamrush auto reply to positive reviews or you can choose to reply yourself. In this case, I am going to choose to reply myself and continue. Step two here is Seamrush submitting my information to relevant directories. So what this does is that it adds your location to directories in accordance with the terms of service. And this usually takes a couple of weeks. So just know that. I'm going to click continue. And now finally, this is the most congratulatory message in this process. The local toolkit is now available to us. So we now have access to all the tools of SERS local. Congratulations me and congratulations you for finishing this video lesson. Here is my profile. Now let's learn a little bit more about how to use some rush to optimize it and continue to get more clients through local SEO. See you in the next one. Welcome back. In this video lesson, I will show you how to review and optimize your Google business profile using our local toolkit. So here we are once more in the Sunrush homepage. I am going to navigate to our local toolkit. Once you're here, you will see the links to the various profiles that you are managing using the local dashboard. I am going to click on Kiote Kind, which is the profile that we are currently optimizing. Now, note here that I just created a Google business profile for Kiote, which means that uh it takes a little bit of time for Google to review this profile. So at this moment we are waiting to get all the data in here to show growth progress. But that doesn't matter. We can still use SEMrush both view and update our business information. So we do this by clicking here. Now this opens an editor that allows you to do quite a lot of different things in order to add information that will help optimize your profile. Okay. Okay, so now we're in this big beautiful window that allows us to update our profile and add a bunch of information. See is also quite helpful in letting us know which parts are more important. So for example, adding a logo uh increases our chances of our listings being viewed. It says listings with logo fields receive 99% more more page views. And then um listings with photos receive 60% more more page views. So, if I had to prioritize uh what to work on first, I would say these two make a lot of sense. So, I'm going to go ahead and do that right now. I will add a logo and some business photos to this profile. Amazing. So, you can go in here and add a bunch of additional information. You can update your description. You can go in here and add contact information. It's uh great if you have a social media profiles like Instagram or X. Um and again here SER tells you how many more views you get if you add this additional information to your profile. Um placement like where are you um your hours and then uh more information here around attributes and payment methods. If you are a store uh particular that could be really helpful. Okay. Okay. So, for now, I'm just going to update the logo, cover photo, business photos as I add it in here. And I'm going to click save and exit. And in doing that, I am officially then adding that information to my business profile in Google. That concludes our short tutorial on how to review and upgrade and update your Google business profile using our local toolkit. See you in the next one. Welcome back to the next lesson in our series. So, remember way back in video one where we talked all about the biggest factors that influence which businesses show up in the map listings and in what order? Well, you may recall that reviews play a pretty large part there, particularly those four and five star reviews. But let's just pretend for a second that reviews don't factor into your rankings at all. They'd still be pretty important, right? Because those star ratings and the sheer number of reviews that you have make a pretty big difference in which of these listings someone would be enticed to click on. In other words, the reviews that you get on Google will not only help you be found more often, but they'll also help you stand out and above your competition. So, yeah, they're pretty important to get right. In this video, I'm going to give you all my best tips to get more of the good ones. And stick around till the end of this lesson because I'm actually going to show you a really cool trick that you can use to make sure that your very best reviews, you know, those five star ones show up first. Essentially pushing any negative reviews you may have or get down. Now, the first thing you might want to do here is just take a quick inventory of the reviews that you currently have just to see how much work there is to be done in this step. And Semrush actually makes this super easy with their review management tool. So, you're going to find that under the local SEO tab on the left sidebar. So, just click review management and then you'd simply enter in the name of your business. As long as it's already listed in Google, it should pop up for you. and it's going to show you a few really important stats. Things like your overall star rating as well as how many reviews you currently have. So, now let's talk about how you'll get more reviews, specifically those four and five star ones. So, first, and this should go without saying, you have to actually earn them, right? No hacks or tactics or tips I'm going to share here today will help you get five star reviews if you deliver a one or twostar product or service. I just want to make sure we're all on the same page there. So, okay, you're a highquality business offering a five-star service. But even so, the way to ensure lots of great reviews all comes down to making it as easy as possible on your customers to actually give you one. because I really do believe that people are inherently good and they want to help a business that helped them, particularly when it's a small local business. But people are still people. And I'm not going to say they're selfish, but they can certainly be protective of their time. So, to help make it super easy on them to leave you a review, you want to grab a direct review link that brings them right to the screen where they choose a star rating and can write their review. And the way to get that is to just Google my business, then view profile, read reviews, then click the blue get more reviews button. From there, they're going to give you a short link that will take people right where they need to go. So, you've got the direct review link, but how do you get it to your customers in a way that will make them actually want to use it? It's all in how you ask and when you ask. So, the very best time to ask for a review is right after you've helped them and you know that they're extremely satisfied. The less time that passes, the better your odds are at capitalizing on all the goodwill that you just built up by providing them with excellent service. Not only are they more likely to leave you a review at that point, but when it's recent, it's fresh in their mind, right? Meaning, the content of that review is much more likely to be detailed and contain all the little things that make a review really come alive. And in the end, that's going to make that review much more persuasive. And the other side of this equation is how you ask. So, this is pretty much going to depend on how you work with customers. So, do you interact with them in person? If so, ask them face tof face as soon as you're done working with them. If you work with customers remotely, you can ask via email, but actually the very best way to ask in this case is over text message. And the reason that works so well is all about the numbers. So, the average open rate of emails is right around 20%, but the average open rate for an SMS campaign is 98%. And by extension, response rates for text messages are also much higher than emails. Just make it personal and then give them a reason to leave that review. Even if that reason's nothing more than, you know, it's really going to help us out as a local business. Again, people really do want to be helpful. And if you make it easy on them by texting them that direct link, you're going to get some really high response rates. So, that's the best strategy for getting those reviews consistently over time. But there's more to the story. When potential customers are looking at those reviews, they're not only looking for what your past customers are saying about you, they're also paying attention to what you're saying back. And that's why it's so important to respond to every single review you get. When you get a good one, awesome. Just respond back without a template. Make it personal. Thank them for being a customer and let them know how much that nice review means to you and for your business. That simple response is going to signal amazing customer service. And responding to reviews can also help, you know, undo some of the damage done by any potential negative reviews, too. So, let's say the worst thing happens and you get a terrible one-star review. You know, you've basically got four possible ways that you can handle it. One, you could ignore it. That's a mistake because it just lets it hang the hair without the benefit of your side of the story. Plus, it makes your business look like you just don't really care. Not a great look. Two, you can lash back. Also, not good. So, while I totally get how satisfying it can be in the moment to give the negativity that they're giving you right back to them, fight that impulse. It's just going to make you look unprofessional and like you're not really willing to make the situation right. You know, take a look at this real owner response to a onestar review that was left. Does this look like it's deescalating the situation? No. It's actually making things a lot worse, right? This owner just comes across as belligerent. And whether he's right or not, a response like this is very likely to do more damage than the original one-star review would on its own. So that brings us to option three, to respond in a measured way that addresses what went wrong and more importantly that you're willing to fix it. So if the complaint is from a real customer, just let them know how sorry you are that this happened and what you're willing to do to make it right. Even if you think that they're in the wrong, even if you know this customer can't be salvaged, you should still do this not just for that person, but for the benefit of all your future customers who are reading this interaction. And trust me, they're reading it. People can't resist this kind of drama, right? So, use that to your benefit. And if it's a fake negative review from a competitor or an ex employee or any non-C customer, which happens by the way, it's weird, but it happens. You should still respond to that in a really calm manner, just saying that you're really sorry, but you don't have any record of them or their experience and just to, you know, provide more details so we can help you out. And they're probably not going to respond back to that. And if you suspect that this review is fake, that's when you can use option four. You can try to have it removed. And I say try because you're pretty much at the mercy of Google here. They do have a process to request review removals, but you can only use it if the review in question goes against certain Google policies, such as harassment, hate speech, if the review is off topic, or if it's fake, things like that. So, if you have a review that you think might qualify for any of those, just read Google's documentation to see exactly which policy do you believe the review violates, then you just click the little blue button to get the process started. But really important to know here, you can't get a review removed just because you disagree with it or don't like it. And even if you can't get a bad review removed altogether, you're still not out of options. First, you can try to bury that negative review with more positive ones. More often than not, the most recent review is going to sit at the top of the list. So, when you get a bad one, all you really need to do is put a few five-star reviews above it. Now, to do that, you can either ask for more new reviews. You already know how to do that. But what can work even faster is to simply ask your best customers, friends, or family who may have already left a good review just to update it slightly. All they really need to do is change a few words and it's going to give that review the recency bump up top, effectively pushing the negative review down a spot. And if you wanted to take this tactic a step further, here's a really cool trick you can use to make sure that your very best reviews stay up at the top for as long as possible. So, if you have a really particularly good review that tells a really compelling story of how you've helped them or helps overcome a really common objection, what you can do is reach out to the person who left the review and ask them if they wouldn't mind updating it by adding a photo to it. That not only pushes it up to the top because of recency, it'll actually stay up there for a lot longer because Google does prioritize reviews with photos. And before we wrap this video up, it's important to know this about negative reviews. Embrace them. A few negatives sprinkled in with your glowing five-star reviews are actually a good thing. And here's why. They're authentic. They make the rest of your better reviews more believable. People are naturally going to be a little on guard when they see a business with tons of perfect five-star reviews and nothing else because it doesn't seem real and just doesn't seem quite right. But if you have a, you know, 4.7 4.8, that's actually the sweet spot. So, embrace them, keep them, and respond to them in a way that makes people see that you're a real human business who cares about your customers, and you're going to do just fine. All right. In our next lesson, I'm going to show you what you need to do on your website to line up perfectly with your Google business profile and amplify its effects so you can not only rank higher in the maps, but keep more of the traffic you get so that more of your casual visitors actually turn into what you really want, customers. I'll see you there. In this video lesson, I am going to share some really cool AI features that can help you optimize your Google business profile. We're going to first navigate to our local toolkit and then go to the GBP optimization tool. Now, in this tool, you'll see your various uh local profiles and in this case, we're going to select this local group. uh the first view that you see here so insights from GBP is actually the same data that you see in the local dashboard. So your Google search views, your map views, your views distribution, etc. But for this particular lesson, we are going to focus on this tab right here called posts. So posts are a great way for you to keep your profile updated and also include additional information that can help you rank in local search. So in this case um you can see that SER has several posts here. This one's in draft. This one has been published. We are going to be using AI tools to create a post. Now why would you create a post? Maybe your business is closing for the summer. Maybe you have a new product or a new feature that you want to promote. Now why would you want to create a post? Well, it helps you with local search, but also it helps your customers understand things that have changed in your business. Maybe you have a new product. Maybe you have new open hours or closing hours for the summer season or the holiday season. This is all information that you can communicate to your customers and clients by using posts. Now, in our case, we have a wonderful thing to communicate which is that we have an updated local SEO course, more specifically a local SEO essentials course that we want our customers to take. So I am going to go back to our GBP optimization tab and in here I am going to click on AI writer. I'll select a location first. AI writer basically works like claude or chatbt or any of those other well-known LLMs. You can add a prompt in here and it will generate a post. Okay, I just added a prompt and click on generate post. So, Serush has now generated a new post for my local business. You can of course edit it. I'm not a big fan of this many emojis. Um, we also want to make this uh more attuned to Seamrush voice, etc., etc. But the important thing is that this helps you uh really speed up your writing. And you can also add a button. In this case, we probably want them to learn more. And I'm going to add the URL here to the course. You could also add an image. Wonderful. And then you can either publish the post now and it will immediately publish on your Google business profile or you can schedule the post. Great. So this is how you can use AI features to create posts that post and keep your customers updated in uh your Google business profile. Now let's use other AI features to manage our reviews. So in this series of tools in the lefthand menu I'm going to click on review management. So the first thing that you see here is a lot of information about reviews. So we have how many reviews we've had by star rating as well as the average star rating for this business. And then as you scroll down, you'll see that there's a list of all the different reviews that we have received to this Google business profile. So you have the option here of either replying in thread. So you can go in here directly and make replies on behalf of in this case this is the Samrush profile. So on behalf of Seamrush. So this makes it really easy. You don't need to log into your Google business profile. You can do everything from SEMrush or you can also activate AI features that allow you to reply to reviews. I am going to click here on this AI replies section and click on edit. So there are two profiles in this local group. We have Affinity Toast Masters Club and we have Seamrush. In this case, we have chosen to autorely all new reviews in English with a friendly tone. You can change the language. You can also change the tone to professional, energetic, or calm. Also, in here, you can decide to only reply to negative reviews. Or maybe you want to only reply to positive reviews and handle all the negative reviews yourself. Regardless, you can turn these AI features on or off depending on your own preferences. And then just click on this button to save your changes. Okay, so that completes our tutorial where I showed you two powerful AI tools that can help you keep your Google business profile up to-date for your customers. See you in the next one. Hey there, welcome back to the next lesson of our local SEO training course. And this video is all about optimizing your website for local search success. specifically, how should it be organized and what should go on your key pages so that everything lines up perfectly with all that hard work we've already done on your Google business profile and to help amplify your ranking potential. Now, there's a whole lot you can do here from an SEO perspective, but I want to start this lesson out with one really big warning. Don't overdo it. Almost every YouTube video you'll see about onpage search engine optimization will encourage you to make a page something like this. Now, I don't know about you, but a page that's all SEOed out like that might get the click, but it isn't really giving me any reason at all to stay. So, here's what I want you to remember as we go through everything in this lesson. Always write and optimize for your customers first and for Google second. Okay? Google's getting smarter every day. And you don't need to do all the keyword stuffing and information cramming that you used to. If your page hits on all the right information and is interesting enough to get people to stick around longer, you're going to do just fine. So, now that we're on the same page, let's get right into it. So, remember way back in lesson three when we found your winning keyword phrase or possibly phrases? Well, this is where we're going to be using them. Now, depending on your business, you may have one general product or service you're trying to rank for, or you might have a few. Going back to one of our examples, if you're a Chicago based accountant, you may want to rank for general accounting services as well as bookkeeping and tax preparation. So if you have multiple offers like that, it would make sense to organize your website into multiple service or product pages. That way your homepage can talk about the big umbrella keyword, which would be accounting. Then your bookkeeping service page can rank for that term and so forth. Because if you tried to rank for all of them right in your homepage, that's just going to confuse Google. So, let's keep your various offerings separated by keywords or keyword groupings. And when I say grouping, I really just mean to group like keyword phrases together. For instance, your homepage might have the primary keyword accountant Chicago as well as Chicago CPA or accounting firm in Chicago. So these are all really close variations on the same idea. So they would belong on the same page. So starting with your first page, which is likely to be your homepage, you're just going to go through the following checklist. And then you'd want to do the same for your additional product or service pages one by one. First of all, you should have your primary keyword phrase picked out for your page. Now, this is the one you identified as being your single best ranking opportunity. Got it? Good. So, you're going to want to use that in a few key areas here, including in the pages title tag. And that's what's going to show up right here in the browser tab. So, right here, just just says primary keyword. So, that's where that would go. You also want to use it in the main headline, also known as the H1. So that's usually just the big headline at the top of any page. But here's where it can get a little tricky if you're not careful. So remember, you want to write for people first. And when you add your keyword phrase in a space as prominent as the H1 here, it can feel a little utilitarian. So just do your best to try to work it in in a way that reads naturally. And if it really doesn't work, that's okay. We can move on to the next space to put it. And you'd also want to use it in at least one H2 or H3 tag. So this is a good example of an H2 headline. They're basically the sub headlines on your page. And it really helps if you can work it into one of them. And again, try to make it natural. You're also going to want to use it a few times in the body copy sprinkled throughout the page where it makes sense. I've got one here and here and right here. So, something to keep in mind here as you add in your keywords, generally speaking, the higher up on your page that you can include them, the harder they're going to work for you. However, it's also really important that you put them where they make the most sense to include them. So, I'm going to leave it up to you to use your best judgment and again, write for your customers first. You're also going to want to include it in whatever the main image on your page is. So, this is at the very top. This is the hero section. you want to include it in the alt tag of your main image. This is the highest most prominent image here. And alt text is really just the text description that you can give to your images. And you'd usually control that in the media section if you're using WordPress. And if you're working on a non-homepage, like one of your service pages for instance, it would really help to use your keyword phrase in the URL string. For instance, let's say you run a cleaning company called CleanPros and you'd like to rank, you know, one of your service pages for window cleaning Miami. You'd likely want to name that page cleanpros.com/windowcleaning Miami. And you'd want to separate all those words with hyphens. Now, obviously, that doesn't really apply if it's the homepage, but it works great for all those other service pages you want to rank. Okay, so we're still working on that first page. And after you've worked in all those primary phrases in those key areas, it's time to round it out with your secondary keywords. These are the ones that you found in your research that are also going to be good ranking opportunities for you, as well as some closely related words and your city name. And for each of these, I also like to go bit by bit through the page and find little opportunities to include them wherever it makes sense to do it. Again, making sure it still reads well and doesn't feel off in any way. You know, no stuffing, no stilted language, but if it makes sense to include the phrase, you know, CPA in Chicago, add it in. And just like before, the higher up on the page that you can get to these, the more they'll count. So, I have it once here in, you know, the sub headline, and you can put it again in um an H2 or an H3. And remember, you've got multiple secondary keyword phrases most likely and all these related phrases. So, you can use them in your various H2 and H3 tags throughout the page. And a great place to include these is in an FAQ section. You can see I've got a primary keyword in the first one and maybe a secondary keyword here. It's just a really natural place to work it in usually. And then once you've done that, you're going to want to find all the rest of the images on your page. And you're going to want to give each of these alt text that coincides with those secondary phrases as well as those closely related words that make sense to use. Now, it can always look a little off when you try to add your city name over and over again in a page. So, I do have a little trick up my sleeve for adding your city name a few extra times. And that is going to be right here in your testimonial section. So all you need to do, and this looks really natural, is include the city and the state on the line right after the person's name. Looks perfectly natural that way, and you get a little extra local credit. Okay, so that's going to handle your keywords, but there are definitely still a few more things you need to add if you really want to get your onpage SEO dialed in just right. So the next thing you want to add is your business name. address and phone number, otherwise known as the NAP. So, make sure you're using it exactly as it shows in your business profile. And all you really need to do is put it down in your footer so it shows at the bottom of every page on your site. And ideally, you'd embed a Google map of your business location. And I'd recommend also including that right down in the footer. And just to be clear, this is not a static image of a map here. It's an actual interactive map from Google that has your business information embedded in it. And then you would just embed that whole map right here. Now, this isn't going to be necessary to include if you decided to hide your address on your profile, like if you're a service business that travels out or works remotely, but you can definitely still include your business name and phone number in that case. Now, there's one more thing you can add to put you over the top from a ranking standpoint, and it can help keep people on your page longer, too, which is just yet another ranking signal to Google, and that is including a strategic video on your page. The thing is, it doesn't really matter what the video is about. It could be a business overview. It could talk about the problems you solve and how you solve them. It could even be a testimonial supercut or going over your top FAQs. Whatever the video's content focuses on, it should be uploaded to YouTube because remember, Google owns YouTube. And then you just want to embed that video from YouTube right onto your page. Then you're just going to want to make sure that you've titled that video with your business name and your primary keyword phrase for that page you're going to put it on. And then in the description of that video, be sure to include the full NAP name, address, phone number for your business. When you use all that metadata on your video that's on YouTube, which is again owned by Google, and you embed that video on your own site, that's a really strong link that you're creating between the two properties, and you'll just enhance your ability to rank locally. Okay, so that takes care of what you can do on your website to help you outrank your local competition. But there's still another really important aspect to complete local SEO, and that's getting other websites to link to yours. We call those backlinks and getting mentions of your business around the web, otherwise known as citations. They're both still pretty big ranking factors, and we're going to tackle both in our next and final lesson. I'll see you there. Okay, welcome back to our final lesson in the series, how to outrank your competition in local search. So, we've already covered a lot of ground in what you can do, what you can really control in terms of helping you rank higher in the Google map pack and be found by more potential customers in your area. And now there's one more thing we can do that's pretty easily under your control, creating citations. And one thing that unfortunately isn't, which is building back links to your site. But don't worry, I'll still show you how to stack the deck in your favor to really help encourage others to link back to your website. Now, if you remember back in lesson one, I showed you the biggest ranking factors when it comes to ranking in those local map searches. And both of these elements do play a part. Not as big a part as your Google business profile, reviews, and everything you did on your website, but you'll still want to do what you can to maximize everything you can if you want to outrank your competition. And that does include citations and backlinks. So, let's start out nice and easy with creating citations for your business. Now, if you don't know what a citation is, it's pretty much just any mention of your business online. And usually, it's going to consist of that business name, address, and phone number. Remember, we call that the nap. And citations usually will come in the form of a directory listing or even a social media profile. And the good news is they're generally pretty easy to get. And there are a ton of websites and directories that you can go to to grab a citation. And the game really is pretty simple. You want as many highquality citations as you can get within reason. Now, keep in mind, citations really aren't the ranking factor they used to be. They really only account for about 7% of your overall ranking power. So, you know, don't spend a crazy amount of time finding these opportunities and building them out. And in general, you want to be listed in online directories in two main categories, your industry and your location. For example, if you're a veterinarian in Las Vegas, you'd want to be listed in as many veterinarian or even pet specific directories and as many Las Vegas or Nevada specific directories as possible. Now, let's talk about the harder piece of this that unfortunately counts more as a ranking factor. That's backlinks. So, a backlink is just a link from another website to yours, and it's one of Google's oldest ways of figuring out which websites would rank on top. So, think of them essentially as votes for your site. everything else being equal, if there are two competing businesses, one has 10 back links and the other has 50 or 100, Google pretty much says, you know, this website has way more people who think it's good enough to actually link to it, so it probably deserves to rank higher. Now, that's a simplification, of course, since we know that there are lots of other factors at play here, and the quality of the websites linking to yours matters a lot more than the quantity. But that's the general gist of why they're important. And ideally, you'll want to try to get more backlinks than your competitors if you can. Now, I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Getting good quality back links isn't easy. And I don't suggest that you spend a crazy amount of time on getting these either. But in the rest of this lesson, I'm going to give you some of my best backlink building tactics just to try to make it a little easier on you. And the first thing you want to do here is get a really clear picture of how your backlink profile stacks up against your competition because maybe you're already doing just fine and you don't need to focus too much on this part or if you're falling behind, you'll at least be able to see by how much and then get some really great ideas for where to get those links so you can catch up. And the way we're going to find this out is using Semrush's backlink gap tool. So looking at the left side panel under competitive research, just click on backlink gap. You'll enter in your website URL and up to four of your top competitors as well. Then you'll click the button to run the report. And once it's done, you can click on charts to visually see the gap between your backlink profile and each of your competitors. And if there is a gap, you'll want to work to narrow it if you want to outrank them. So once you know what you're up against and roughly how many links you should be trying for, I've got three different strategies you can use to try to narrow that gap. And my first strategy is just to target the links that your competitors already have. The general idea being that if they got a link from a certain website, chances are you can get one, too. And when we're basing this on a pool of multiple competitors, not just one, we could, with some hard work, get enough links to outrank them all. All you'll do here is stay on that backlink gap tool and scroll down below the charts. Here you can see a really comprehensive list view of all the websites that link to all your competitor's websites as well as the ones that link to yours. So to clean this up and get a really nice list of all your best opportunities, I'm going to make sure the best filter is checked. This is just going to prioritize the websites that link to more than one of your competitors first. The idea there being the more of your competitors a website already links to, that probably means it's going to be easier for you to get that link to. Now, let's apply one more filter that's going to get rid of potentially spammy websites that if they were to link to you, they might do more harm than good. I'm just going to click on authority score and input a minimum value of 20. So, you may want to be even more cautious and set it to 30. But keep in mind, in general, the higher the authority score of a website, the more valuable the link will be, but the harder the link's usually going to be to get to. Now, we're just going to click on export, which will create a nice clean spreadsheet for us that you can work from and keep track of. And all you're going to do is just go to each website link to see what kind of website it is and how they're currently linking to your competitors. Then you just want to go one by one over time and reach out to that website either manually or they may have some kind of automatic submission process. It's going to be different from website to website and some are going to be a lot easier to pitch and get a link to than others. It's all pretty much a numbers game when you do it this way. Okay, now for strategy number two, pitching yourself as a guest on podcasts. This is an amazing way to build your credibility in your niche and earn those quality backlinks in the process. Since anytime you appear on a podcast, they're almost always going to ask you before you even record where you want to send people, whether it be to your social media or your website. And since local rankings tend to favor locally sourced back links, I'd recommend starting by reaching out to appropriate local podcasts first. I know local real estate podcasts generally love to feature local businesses on their shows. So, I would just start there and then pitch yourself to any podcast that's based in your local area where you can add some relevant value and then start going after more national or even international shows that are dedicated to your industry or niche. And believe me, there are multiple podcasts for just about every industry you can think of. But when you reach out, make it personal. Don't just use a template. They can spot that from a mile away. And don't pitch it as a value ad for you to appear on the show, okay? Pitch yourself as the value ad for the show's audience and let the host know why your topic would benefit their listeners and you'll have a much higher success rate. Okay. My third strategy, the one I like best, is to focus a whole lot less on outreach and a whole lot more on creating really helpful, unique, linkable content. So, this is going to be a much more sustainable strategy in the long run because it's actually a lot less work to create a few really good content pieces that people can't find anywhere else, then just run some traffic to them and let the links build naturally over time. And even better, the kinds of links that you'll attract are going to be much more valuable than just about any other type you'd get in any other way. They're earned naturally and they're seen as a sign of trust and authority by Google. So, what kind of content am I talking about? What can you create and put on your website that would earn these kinds of natural editorial links? There are countless options here, but a few of my favorites would be an ultimate guide. You know, what could you write an extremely thorough start to finish guide about within your industry? If you're a gym, maybe it could be a complete breakdown of every major exercise broken down by muscle group. Or if you're a dentist, it could be the ultimate oral health guide. The trick to this is you want to make it extremely thorough so that over time it's going to earn more links just based on how much information it contains. According to a study by Back Linko, long content receives 77.2% more backlinks than short articles. Or you could put together a really comprehensive curated swipe file or resource list. So if you're a local marketing agency, you could put together all the best Facebook ad examples that you've ever come across for people's inspiration. Or if you're a wedding planner, you could create a list of all the prevetted vendors that you've worked with and recommend in every category. And this one works great if you're a B2B business, and that's publishing any kind of unique research, data, or statistics on your industry. I'm personally constantly scouring the web for data points to support what I talk about in my videos, and that goes in every niche out there. So, if you were to do a poll or report on anything that you found in your own research, other people in your industry will likely be able to then find that research, cite you, and yes, link back to it in any articles that they write. And don't forget here, even those casual mentions of your business name, even when they don't have a link, can still help build your authority with Google. So, I love this tactic. And if you have the type of business that could use any kind of calculator or tool, those can generate a crazy amount of backlinks. For example, mortgage calculators or even a pricing tool that can help people trying to calculate a ballpark range of what it might cost to get what they want or a fitness calculator. You know, just use your imagination here. Once you figured out what that would be, you can actually buy pre-made calculators or create your own using onlinebased software programs. You can actually even use the AI tool chat GPT to create the code for something like this that you can then just pop right onto your website. So, whatever content type that you choose to create, if you do it right, it's going to begin to get noticed and attract those links naturally. But fair warning, it can take a while. So, here's one last tip that you can use to help supercharge your results and get a jump start. I recommend spending as little as$1 or$2 dollars per day running simple Facebook and Instagram ads to that content with a simple engagement objective. So, that's going to put it out there to the right people over time. you know, as Facebook starts seeing who's responding to it, it's going to get more and more targeted, and that means more and more people will start to find it and find your website. And yes, it's going to reach a lot of people who maybe aren't in your local area, but that's okay. you're still building your site authority with Google because there's going to be so much more engagement on your website and a certain percentage of those people on your site are going to link to that content in their blogs and on their websites really rounding out your entire backlink profile in a way that looks very natural to Google which is in turn going to futureproof your SEO from penalties because you're playing by their rules. Okay, I want to thank you for following me all the way through the end of this training. I wish you all the best in ranking your local business ahead of your competition. Now, get started and I'll see you at the top of the map. Hi there. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how you can update your business information across a wealth of different online directories. In order to do that, we are going to go to our local toolkit and then we are going to go to listing management. Now in this tool, you can see all the different directories that your business is connected to. So as you can see, you can scroll down. If you click on one of these specifically, let's for example take a look at American Express. you can see specifically what locations are connected, ensure that the addresses match, and then um also you can opt out if you wanted to disconnect this directory. Now, another thing that's important here is to review anything that shows up in red because these are typically errors that you want to correct in order for your business to show up correctly. So in this case, for example, Affinity Toast Masters is unavailable. This business is currently not available. You might want to change that if that fits the strategy of your business. So on and so forth. You want to review anything that's in red for all the directories that are listed. Now, other things that are important features of the listing management section is this tab right here called duplicates. So maybe there are multiple people in your organization that are creating profiles in directories. Maybe the people that were creating profiles have now left your company and so you have duplicate profiles in various directories in various places on the internet. This allows you to identify and suppress duplicate profiles. So um as you can see actually the summer profile here has very few issues with duplicates but uh these are some possible duplicates that this is now identifying in this tool. You can also see anything that is being processed right now in terms of duplicates and profiles that have been suppressed in the past because they were duplicate listing pages that were now redirected to the real actual listing in each of these directories. Okay, so with that I complete my quick tour of the listing management tool inside the local toolkit. Take a look at it, find where you're showing up in what directories and adjust any information that needs to be adjusted so your business is always showing up consistently with the right information across directories on the internet. Okay, that's all. See you in the next one. In this video, I am going to show you how to use the local toolkit to figure out how your business ranks in Google map searches. So, in order to do this, we are going to go to the local toolkit and to this tool called map rank tracker. Okay. So, the first thing we want to do here is we want to add a campaign. You're going to enter the name of your company and the location if necessary. I am going to create a campaign for Kiote Kind. This is a brand new Google business profile. So, it doesn't have a lot of information, but still I want to see how it's currently ranking for some important keywords like stuff that people are searching for in my local area. So, daycare center is a keyword that was automatically added to this campaign and Seamrush recommends a bunch of other keywords here that I actually really agree with. So I'm just going to add those childc care services after school care infant care preschool program or in the early learning center. I'm going to add also bilingual daycare because that's an important part of what Kiote does. Okay. Then the next thing we want to do in this campaign is we want to set up the map grid. meaning we want to see what sort of um geographical area we want to cover with this campaign or we want to track the visibility of this local business for. So the default here is 45 pins and so you can see here it's like a radius of 1.5 kilometers around the location of Kiote Kind. But of course depending on your credits and the type of account that you have you can add more or less. You can increase the range to let's say seven kilometers if you want to and suddenly you're covering the entire city of Vienna mostly or Vienna metropolitan area. But in this case since Kihod Kinup is quite a local business like parents want to put their kids in a daycare that is really close to where they live. I am going to actually make it even less than 1.5 km and make it just one kilometer range uh with these seven pins which is what we're going to see um shows us the tracking later for how we're ranking for various keywords. So now that campaign is set up, but since we are uh a brand new sort of Google business profile creator for Kiote Kinup, I want to show you what a campaign looks like with a lot of data, something that has been set up before. I'm going to go in this list view. You can see all the different campaigns that have been set up here. I'm just going to click on this one. Stay city apart hotels in Birmingham city center. So what we see here is a view of this map uh similar to the one that we saw when we were setting up the campaign, but this is a fully executed campaign with map rank tracker. And so what you can see here in this map is that for this keyword hotels near me, this particular hotel or the stay city of park hotels in Birmingham shows up in the second position in this pin right here. So in this area, but as you are moving away from the location of this particular hotel, so for example, if you're like out here near City Health Campus, for example, we are in the 20 plus position uh for this hotel. So the other thing that this allows you to do is to see who is showing up in the first position. Um by geographical proximity here, it looks like Summerfield House. So you can go into this profile. You can take a look at their average rank. You can even go into their Google business profile from here to understand like what is it that they are doing in their profile that is helping them um rank higher and take some of those ideas for your own profile. So back to mine here. Uh you can also see for all the different keywords that you set up in your particular campaign. In this case, we selected apart hotels near me as a keyword. So you can see where we are ranking in this geographical area for that particular keyword and who is beating us at those rankings. So we're doing well for searches that are happening around jewelry quarter. And then for searches that are happening around Brinley Place or the Gast Street basin, uh we are ranking 20 plus and seven here. And so this gives you a really specific breakdown of how your particular brand is performing in local search for a geographical area of your selection. In addition, it also this feature also gives you an average ranking, an average share of voice, and it tells you whether you're good, average, poor in general when it comes to local search in this area. Okay, so that completes my tour of the map rank tracker. Honestly, one of my favorite features in the local toolkit. See you next time. What a journey we've been on together. Throughout this course, we've gained powerful knowledge to transform your local SEO strategy. We explored how local search factors defer from traditional SEO and why they matter for visibility. We have mastered the art of Google business profile to capture nearby customers. We tackled local keyword research techniques to ensure we're targeting the terms your community actually uses. And we examined the critical role of local citations, reviews, and backlinks in establishing your neighborhood authority. And of course, we learned how to accomplish all of this efficiently using Seamrish's powerful local toolkit. The strategies you've learned will help you put your business on the map, literally. Now, let this not be the end of your Seamish Academy journey. Below this video, I've included links to complimentary courses that make for perfect next steps. But first, it's time to put your knowledge to the test with a final exam. Once completed, you will earn a well-deserved certificate of completion. We encourage you to share it proudly on LinkedIn and other platforms. Tag Samrush so we can celebrate with you. Thank you so so much for investing your time and energy into mastering local SEO with Samrush Academy. We can't wait to see how you'll apply these skills to elevate your business in your community.