2022 Local Search Factors Explained

Hi, my name is Phil Risher with Flash Consulting, and today we're going to look at the local search factors for 2022 and how you can rank your local service business based on the ranking factors that Google's putting out. So Advice Local is a company that interviews people like myself, SEO experts, and local search experts, and they come up with these ranking factors on what everyone's working on and what we're seeing as far as what Google is, is looking at from a rankings perspective. And these are the things that they want to see. So what I'm going to do in this video is go through each one of these and discuss how your company can implement strategies so that you're doing what Google wants you to do so that you can rank in 2022. So the first thing that we're going to talk about is citations. So what exactly are citations? So Google is a search engine and they pull from a bunch of different aggregators. And you've heard of like Better Business Bureau and Yelp and Bing and Facebook, they all have different profiles on there. And so what you're doing is you're actually building out these citations that's validating the information that's out on the Internet, specifically the name, address, and phone number. And you're building credibility with Google because the information that you're providing to the Internet, you're basically saying, hey, this is the factual information. And Google is building trust and saying, okay, I can trust them because their name, address and phone number matches up across the board. So to give you an idea, we use this local search audit that we run. It's free to you can. You can run one too? If you go to our website, there's a place you can run a local search audit. But this is a company that we just recently started working with. If you see they currently have 17 citations built out. The Google trigger that they have is about 70 to 100 citations that they want built out that the name, address, and phone number are matching on. So one thing that we do is we build out the listings and then we manage the listings on a monthly basis, which this helps ensure that we're matching this criteria for citations. The other factor, that's 17%. So. So that's the second highest in this grid, aside from your Google Business Profile is getting Google reviews and most importantly, relevant Google reviews. And the reason it's good Google, obviously, for their algorithm, you can see they really want us to do this, but it's really good for social proof for people looking for your business. They want to See other people's experience of working with your business. So it has benefits outside of just your algorithmic ranking factors. It also is proof of concept for other people. So what are some ways that you can see how many reviews your competitor, competitors have? On this local marketing report that we run, we can obviously see where our competitors are ranking on this and what their review count is. And this allows us to, you know, say, okay, how are we in the current market? Obviously they're the number two. Here has 631. So we really need to be pushing to get these reviews. And so I made videos before you can click and check out our channel, but we have a video on how to get Google reviews. Basically, if you go to your Google my business here on the back end, it's just google.com business. You can log into your Google business profile. There's a link here for reviews. And so we recommend sending that out or making like a card that looks something like this where you can like you have a QR code and people can leave you reviews. And I highly recommend getting at least over 100 reviews and then pushing. We have some clients that are, you know, know, into 2000s range. And if you're looking at a company and you see one that has 50 and one that has 2000, you're probably going to call the one that has 2000 first. And that's the mindset behind this. So reviews is a big part of it. If you have any ideas or want to discuss ways to get Google reviews, this is one of the things that we're really good at and we can help with the next one is getting backlinks and backlinks. There's a white hat which is like a good way to do it, and then a black hat which is, you know, buying links and that kind of stuff. And so this is one that I would say it can get a little dicey between. People say it's good, people say it's not good. So the way that we work when it comes to linking out is we obviously want to build out these citations which allow us to get links back to our website. But more importantly, it's these two things. Your on page SEO and then your backlink strategy. So we want to create content that people feel like they should link to. So these are this versus that. Say you're an H Vac contractor, Kohler versus Lennox or Trane versus Lennox. Those type of content pieces are really good not only for on page SEO, your search engine optimization, using keywords to build content, but also to get Links back from other maybe blogs or companies or websites that find your content. You can also reach out to maybe Lennox and say, hey, here's a great content piece that you might want to share from one of your top dealers. And and they would link back to you on their website. I've also made another video about getting into news articles like Forbes and cnbc. And so that's another strategy that you can utilize, especially if you're like a realtor or an attorney or something like that. That's a really good video to check out to build those backlinks on page SEO. So we use Google Analytics and what Google Analytics allows us to do is to see how we're ranking on different keywords. We can see the queries people are searching and then we can see the pages that are built out which then allows us to build more content that gets us links. And on page SEO, these other two are more general. So personalization. So let's say you know you're a consulting company and or let's say you're a carpet cleaning company but you only do commercial carpet cleaning, right? So you might build content on your Google My business that's personalized towards that. You also might build out products that are more personalized towards specific things that you might serve. And so it's not much of a factor, but that's something that they consider the other thing is behavioral. So people actually interacting with you. This is really important like from a reviews perspective, behavioral. Some people might value years in business versus ranking. So like this company's 15 years in business, but this company's 10 years in business only 4.3 stars. Where this company's three years in business and they have 4.7 stars and they rank 90. So maybe someone would go with this company over this. This is more of a behavioral thing that is just how people are using Google. And so this leads us into the most important thing which is your Google business profile. And it's why these things are so important to be filled out. So if you see like even just the years in business to someone who doesn't use it behavioral like that other people do use it. And so it's very, very important to be building out your Google My business. So how can you do that in the info section of your Google My business? The reason that this is an ongoing thing and it's such a big part of that ranking factor is because Google actually goes in and it will update your Google My business because it's trying to give as much information as possible, but it actually might do the wrong thing. And I'm going to show you they actually just did it to us. So I'm going to show you how this works. So in here you can classify what services you offer. So if you're carpet cleaning, upholstery cleaning, tile and grout, if you do new flooring installation, right, you can put that stuff in here, then you can fill out your service areas. So who you serve, we have a bunch of different cities and states because we serve a wide area. But for this instance, where just our local niche is in here, your hours is important because you want this to be consistent across the board. But most importantly, this right here are your services. And this is what can make or break your Google My business. And it's in the past six months, Google's been focusing on your services and adding in services that you do, taking out services that you don't do based on what they find about you on the Internet. So here's a perfect example. And air duct cleaning, clearly we do not do air duct cleaning. Carpet cleaning, we don't do carpet cleaning. But what they found was on our website, we talk about air duct cleaning and carpet cleaning. So they put it on here that we do this service, right? But let's say, for example, that they took off something that we did. Like they took off review generation, which I just told you that that's a big part of what we do because we want to help get reviews, then we might be missing out on that business. So this is just one example of why this is important, that someone should be doing at least a monthly SEO audit. Because this happens on Yelp, this happens on Facebook, this happens on Google. And then Google pulls all this data and when your information is not accurate, what's going to happen, it's going to mess it all up. One of the other things that's really important for your Google My business profile is actually posting content. So if you go here to your posts, you can post content that people will see and you will get views on this and clicks on this. And why is this important? I created a video, you can check it out on our channel and Google actually indexes this content and it will show it in its search engine results rankings. So they might show here that there's a post that mentions best carpet cleaning service or something that you've posted about on Google. It will index it and show it inside of these search rankings. So it's really important to be posting on your Google my business. I don't know these companies at all, but If I were to imagine they're not posting on their Google my business, yeah, they don't have any posts. And so this is a low hanging fruit for them to be posting. We recommend posting at least two times per week and they have some nice pictures, you know, maybe their, their crew doing things, reviews, that type of stuff. But that's a really, really good way to start getting more visibility on your business. And then when you do that in conjunction with making sure that you're optimized on all those platforms that we talked about, this is what Google wants you to do to rank in 2022. And at the end of the day, I always like to tell people, Google is a search algorithm that people trust. And so it's the number one referral partner out there. Because if people didn't trust Google to give them good information, they wouldn't go to Google. So Google is going to do everything that they can to do their due diligence in their homework to provide the best outcome for that person. They don't want them to have to search through 10 or 20 different carpet cleaning companies to find a good one. They want to give them the best carpet cleaning company and say, here you go, just call this person, we got it taken care of for you. So what we do on our end is we do everything so that Google knows that we are the best carpet cleaning company or we are the best H Vac company and they recommend us. And so if that's something that you're interested in, you know, set up a time to talk with us, we'd be happy to help you. If not, you know, set these things up and hopefully you have a good game plan so that you're ranking on these factors so that you can Crush it in 2022. Thanks and I hope you have a great day and see you in the next video.