Local SEO Case Study: Lokale SEO-Strategie offenbart!
Together we look at one
of our local SEO customers, discuss the measures taken
and draw valuable lessons from them. Have fun! My name is Alexander Rus
and SEO is my daily bread. On this channel we chat
about SEO and content marketing. If you want to learn how you can sustainably acquire
customers through your website, then subscribe to this channel right now. This episode is about a furniture chain that
started ongoing support with us in November 2018 . And as always
, we start developing in ahrefs. A short disclaimer in advance:
The focus of this project was not organic traffic, but local
visibility for the individual locations.
But we're going to take a quick look at that in ahrefs now
– let's jump right in. We started here. After a year it was around +50%
organic traffic and as you can see, as is just so often the case while there is
still potential , the results have been
even bigger and steeper over the years. So. The most important thing to discuss with
any SEO project is of course the starting situation, because you can start at -100
, at 0 or in a good situation. Here it was: The client is an extremely strong brand, a
very established player in the niche, but to start with they had what I call a creative
website, which is a website from someone who considers himself an artist and has no
idea about websites and user experience has. For example,
the website was only for mobile. Well, you could open the website on
desktop, but everything was mobile-friendly, accordingly, the
user experience on desktop was disastrous, even though many or most
customers were traveling via desktop. Then:
The website did n't have a single page that was in any way
geared towards demand and could rank for anything.
There was no online shop. So the initial situation
was… let's call it suboptimal. But that is the case with very, very
many customers. Let's get to the process. As always, we don't do this exactly after
years, because that's difficult, but about the process: Phase 1 is always with us: achieve the first goals, that
's the first 12 months. The focus here was: Where is the business impact for a furniture chain?
How can you get money flowing into the coffers? By focusing on
picking up local demand, of course. That is, number 1, what we did.
What was the most important thing? Establish a usable website. That means moving away from Mobile Only and
creating a clean technical foundation so that you can
create any goals in any direction at all. That means that was before we did
any local stuff. Just a website to use
if you are not the website creator. Number 2: Segmentation of Local Pack and
Maps traffic in Google Analytics. Because what was the case with this customer: The customer had already received
traffic via what was then Google My Business Profile, now Google Business Profile
, and that is why it was important to see in Google
Analytics how the distribution is here.
How to do that is very simple. If you look at us now – we're hovering
here on the website – then you can see down here that we've attached parameters here.
Then you can create appropriate segments in Google Analytics and then you
can segment the traffic. Then you no longer only have organic access,
but suddenly also local access and thus much better data and can make much
better decisions, especially if the project is locally focused. And of
course, as with anything with locations or branches, it's all
about people visiting the store. So. Then, number 3:
Optimize Google business profiles. In this case, that means creating
a Google business profile for each location and then matching it –
that's actually a later step, but I'll mention it now – always
create location pages on the website and then these location pages as a website in the
individual Google business profiles invest.
If you now want to know how to
set up, optimise, maintain and develop a good company profile,
then there is a very up-to-date video about it. Number 4: Collect entries for each location. Or let's call it company mentions. In the meantime, the importance has decreased, but
at that time it was still incredibly important to be able to rank in the local area, to make
sure that you have your Google company profile and that there are matching entries in the most important
directories that exactly overlapping uniform data to have.
We did that, there is also a very recent video where I talk about
local backlinks and mentions.
As I said, the importance
of mentions has decreased. That doesn't mean they're
completely unimportant now, but they're less important than they were then. Local backlinks
have now become more important in comparison. Then, #5: Implement Google Reviews strategy. Google reviews were already
an important ranking factor back then and have now become an even bigger ranking factor. A starting point for having a
strategy for collecting reviews is to generate a Google review link
and provide it to the customer, when the time comes that you ask the customer, "Hey, can you give me one?"
Leave a Google review?” to ensure that you send them to exactly the
right place where they can then enter the rating .
That's one step.
This company has gone much further
and has found a super cool solution, which they then also
make available to customers in the branch. And as a result, the number of reviews has
gone through the roof. Which of course is also very important as feedback on how you can
further develop your own company. And the last point, number 6:
build location pages. I have already anticipated. So we built
a beautifully optimized, super comprehensive location page to match each store.
With the goal that when someone lands on the location page, they feel like
they know everything about that branch. From who is in charge, photos,
payment options to offers… Endless information. As I said, this is different for every
company. I have already
shown examples from other companies where there are similar elements. Like I said, just do it in a way that makes you
feel like you've been to this store before. It's so easy to break the ice perfectly. So what was the result? In terms of local organic traffic,
or shall we say local and organic traffic, an increase of 50-70% more depending on the season.
So. Then, in our number 2 phase,
which we always call further development: It's a bit difficult now
to say "the next 12 months", because in the end it's the strategy
that you just carried on with. The focus here was to continue the local
strategy and expand it with an informative content strategy. That means, firstly, we then updated and expanded
the keyword research and the editorial plan again to just uncover all the,
let's say, informative keywords and to see the potential (does it make sense
to build something here?), where you then also try to link this to the
fact that conversions or store visits actually occur.
As I said, I would never do an
informational content strategy at one site. But if I'm a
chain, it definitely makes sense to do it because I
just cover more ground too. And number 2: Based on this keyword research , we
updated and optimized existing content. Especially the location pages,
which were so important for conversions. By the way, there is a video on content optimization that shows what steps we tend to take
and what potential there is.
Then we did top-of-the-funnel content marketing, which was actually anticipated anyway
, which means we created a lot of buying guides and then also content for
customers – i.e. customers who are already customers. Like product maintenance etc. If you don't know what
top-of-the-funnel content marketing guides are, we have these page type templates
that explain exactly how that page type should look, what to use must pay attention
to what is important and so on. You can buy the whole thing as a package
on our website, matching the business model behind the website.
So. Then, number 4 and the last point: it got to the point that
the competition had more authority, which means we started building
high-quality links. To do this we built linkable assets on the
site, meaning something super attractive, a really cool content asset,
where we saw the potential of the topic to be linked by key influencers
in and around the niche.
Then we did outreach about it. If you have any questions about how something like this
works, there is a video about it. That means “enchanting link targets”. The title
alone almost forces you to look at it. And the result in the second phase was: Greater traffic increases
in even less time, and just extremely or very good
local rankings for all stores, which was ultimately
the most important factor in terms of business impact. So
what can we learn from this project now? What are the most important things for me
in such a local project: In many cases, local search queries have a clear intention to buy and
are therefore extremely lucrative. That means whenever you
find something like "industry + location" or "performance + location" – it's
crystal clear what the user wants. There is 100% transaction and buying interest. Accordingly, it is not the
same as with many other things: "Hey, what is the search intention now?
What does the user want to achieve?” It is usually like this: A visit to the store will follow if you
rank here and if you break the ice.
Then: Not only the Local Pack, but also the local
organic search results offer potential. That means the Local Pack is of course
the most important thing, is the most visible, is connected to Google Maps.
This is what comes up most prominently in a local search query.
But don't forget the potential in local search results either, because many
don't click on the Local Pack either. Then, very, very important,
this is very often forgotten in projects with a local focus: In Google Analytics, it is incredibly important that you separate organic traffic
from local traffic. It doesn't exist by default, which means it's all
thrown in there in organic traffic. That means you can't
make any decisions at all. So you really want to separate what is
local traffic via Google Business Profile, via Maps and what is traffic just
via the classic blue links? And last but not least: Start with an extreme focus and use it to
finance larger-scale attacks, or don't start broadly and fail. That's not so relevant in this case
, but it's like this for many companies: Lots of small, local
companies come to us and they want to start super broadly
with an extremely small budget.
This is a [ __ ] strategy that can never
work because you need a lot of budget to rank broadly and
do many things at once. It is much better to really
select a core where you make the most money, which is really important for
your business, and invest your budget here and then, when things are going well and
the profits are fully paid off, you can reinvest these profits into an expansion and
broadening into a larger-scale strategy. Very important. This is so often done wrong in SEO. Of course, if you're an established player,
you have a budget, then you can do whatever you want, but if you're small,
then you have to target your budget. We often have small companies
that want to rank well across the board. Nothing will ever happen there. It's a drop in the bucket versus
you put it where it gets results. And with that we're already at the end. Thank you for watching and see you next time..
