Assuming you have already done everything covered in the basics, meaning you may had to force your client to rebuild their site structure, there are a few extra topics for local rankings that need to be covered.
Identifying Pack-Based Keywords
The local listing packs are constantly moving up in search results. It knocks out almost all the little guys unless they are inside the pack. You have to determine whether you are going to rank a site in the national listings or the pack listings.
Remember that pack-based listings kill the national listing. The QDD (query deserves diversity/host clustering) algorithm kicks in frequently. In other words, if you are ranking #3 in the national results over the pack listing, and then you start to rank #5 in the pack, you lose your #3 national ranking. It is awful.
Almost every city, state keyword has pack listings. A few cities have abbreviations that everyone uses to search with, like NYC. These are hit and miss on whether they contain pack listings.
On Site
Local on-page is covered with Yoast’s local plugin. If you are not on WordPress, just add the correct schema data to the footer. Include the properly formatted NAP – name, address, phone on each page. Make sure the NAP completely matches the Google+ business page.
Some clients like lawyers want to rank for very specific terms in an area. The keywords get jumbled a bit, and overlap. We like to see a structure like this in a single city:
namelawyercity.com (Title tag and body focuses on “Lawyer/Attorney City”)
namelawyercity.com/car-accident/ (Title tag and body focuses on “Car Accident City”)
namelawyercity.com/traffic-ticket/ (Title tag and body focuses on “Traffic Ticket City”)
For lawyers who cover multiple cities, as such:
lawyername.com (Title and body focuses on the brand of lawyer, and if he has a focus area)
lawyername.com/city/car-accident/ (Title tag and body focuses on “Car Accident City”)
It is harder to build link juice for lawyername.com/car-accident-city/ even though the keywords are in perfect order. If the lawyer has several practice areas in the city, building juice to the city page will help the others rank easier.
What about someone like a therapist who only focuses on something like “marriage counseling in nyc”?
We are suggesting to build both for “therapist nyc” and “marriage counseling nyc” – in other words…
therapistnamenyc.com/
therapistnamenyc.com/marriage-counseling/
Off Site
In addition to the normal link building…
Citations, citations, citations. We are still testing the best tools for citations and citation building right now. Considering how easy it should be we really want to just provide a one-size-fits-all solution.
Social presence? Google+ is all that matters for ranking. (If you want in the pack listing.) Keep in mind you may open a can of worms if a client is trying to rank in multiple cities. You can build like a franchise, but the last time we tried it ourselves we ran into some issues. It becomes an issue with how many locations you have versus how many you can verify, etc.
Reviews? This is the big one. It was ridiculously easy to fake reviews to get to the top during the first year of pack listings. Now it’s almost a FCC fine/threat if you have fake or leave anonymous reviews on Google+. What is a great therapist to do when all the clients want to stay anonymous? How do you do it without blatantly paying locals to do it? We’re still testing that, but we have a few ideas.
Physical location? Nothing you can do about it, although it still seems to matter. The best advice we have so far is to get someone who lives close to the city center to allow you to use their address for the business. You can track them down and pay them, we did it over 2 years ago and the listings are still live and well. More impressive is that we didn’t spend a dime afterwards for 2 years, and it ranked third the entire time.
Working with Local Clients
You have to manage their expectations. That is the real task in dealing with and keeping local clients. Many see numbers out of AdWords like 800 searches/month for a keyword and want to build a business exclusively on SEO. In their head, they can get all 800. You have to be the expert and give them a reality check involving a combination of PPC, SEO, reputation management, social media, etc.
Yes, we have ranked local sites without an issue… but the traffic is so small, it takes forever to build up a six or seven-figure local business. You have to be realistic in numbers with what your services can generate for clients.
On the other hand, some clients are totally ego-driven and care nothing about the numbers. They understand it’s “search marketing” and “want to be able to be found”. To them, search volumes mean nothing. They just want to Google some phrases and see their name pop up. They don’t care if it’s organic or PPC. That’s just how they think. These clients are a lot easier to work with, have the money to spend, etc. They usually have only a few customers themselves who pay them a lot of money.
They also know the long-term value of the customer, and have a great funnel and system built for prospects. To them, 20 visitors out of the 800 searches per month is worth it. They know they can nail 5 of them in the next 6 months, repeatedly. Over a year they can add 60 new clients. And if those 60 are like some chiropractors’ $2500 average per client, that’s an extra $150,000 in revenue for them on top of their other marketing.
We don’t take clients anymore, but that is the type of client we suggest you find.
Panda/Penguin Violations?
Tons of great black hats moved into lead generation at a local level. They are creating near duplicate sites and ranking without problem in local areas. It seems that Google gave a bit of love to local mom and pop shops and lifted the Panda/Penguin penalties for their geographic area. We still consider it a best practice to follow our guides on it, because we don’t know when Google will adjust that dial back.
We’ve found this to be true across the board. Sites with penalties or really poor URL structures rank like 2010 so long as they have a local business claimed with Google+ in their exact city.
If you want to go into black hat lead generation, just do what worked in 2011:
1. Use an exact-match or partial-match domain.
2. Get a handful of links, let’s update it to post-Panda/Penguin and be contextual about it.
3. Verify an address, then hide that address from actually showing up by using a “service” area. Consider “suite” addresses.
4. Do some nice on-page keyword stuffing with a ton of variance. We hate to use the word “SILO” because it has so many different meanings; but do some RCS. If you are in pest control, have something that talks about ants, termites, rodents, etc. Have individual pages for each particular thing so it’s not just a one-page lander. Make it look real and relevant internally.
Rent or monetize however best suits your profits.
The cool part about this method is that you are in control of the “business” – so if a client screws you, you can go to their competition. You can rinse, repeat, and scale this method out for now.
How will Google stop it? Credentials for professionals, business licenses, photo verifications, you know the drill, RCS!