November 2023

In today's digital landscape where everything is changing at incredible speed, one thing remains constant: the importance of local keywords for your business. If you're a business owner trying to stand out locally, this article is your ultimate guide to understanding and harnessing the power of local SEO keywords. We'll delve into what they are, why they matter, and how to make them work for you. Get ready to upgrade your online presence and boost your business visibility right where it matters - in your local area.

In this tenth and final lesson on Local SEO, we'll talk about what numbers are important to track for business and how to do it. In the previous lessons, we covered all the important signs that affect relevancy in user searches and how your business appears in local search results. But knowing how to optimize your business for Local SEO is only part of the battle; you need to know how to measure your results if you want to keep your business - whether you're referring a client or your boss, it's important to know what to present and how it should be presented.

In this ninth lesson on Local SEO, we'll talk about other signals that affect local search visibility. In the previous lessons, we covered all the important signals that affect local relevance and how your business appears in local search results. In the second lesson, we talked about the annual Local Search Ranking Factors study and then covered the most important signals in the following lessons. In this lesson, we'll look at the other factors - although they don't carry much weight, it's important to understand how they all fit together in Google's local algorithm. Remember, you'll stand out when you do what everyone else ignores.

Sure, we could have included them in the Google My Business course, but we try to keep these lessons short and digestible, and if I had included them, I'd have to go on for even longer, and you'd start wondering when I'd stop writing, and maybe even start wondering if you should just commit to the course, which we certainly didn't want to happen, because this information is really amazing. Seriously, these features are powerful and most businesses and marketers don't use them at all, so we felt it was worth dedicating an entire course just to these elements.

Your Google My Business profile - or GMB - is your business listing on Google, where you can let Google know specific information about your business. It's a direct communication with Google about your business. The information is displayed to users in various locations. The most common location is the table box that appears on the right side of the search results when someone searches for your business name. Your GMB information is also displayed if you appear in the map pack or as a result on the local search page, which appears when you click on "more places" at the bottom of the map pack. Your GMB information also appears whenever someone searches for your business on Google Maps. But as I said, the most common place your information appears in Google My Business is in the GMB profile, which is the information box that appears to the right of the search results when someone searches for your business.

Reviews are not only important for potential customers, but are an important factor in Google's local algorithm. Remember - Google's local algorithm has always been entity-based, and customer reviews are basically entity data coming from your customers. Think about how you decide to visit a local business - first you read their reviews. Right? You want to see what others think. Studies have shown that people now trust online reviews as much as they trust a review from a friend or family member. If a business has bad reviews, you're much less likely to go there (especially if the business doesn't even respond). Google's algorithm uses reviews in the same way - if a business has bad reviews and the business doesn't respond to them, they are less likely to show up higher in the search results.