6 Local SEO Stats Every Online Marketer Needs To Know

Trying to make the case for local search engine optimization (SEO), or wondering how you can improve your existing efforts? Columnist Jayson DeMers has you covered.

If you own a local business, you already know how important it is to rank in local search results. Now that the internet has become the primary source consumers turn to for local business information, not showing up in local search is tantamount to professional suicide.

This article will evaluate six important local SEO statistics that should shape your priorities when it comes to local search. For each statistic, I’ve also included an actionable step or steps you can take, as well as resources for further investigation.

1. Local Searches Lead 50% Of Mobile Visitors To Visit Stores Within One Day

Google’s research into local search behavior reveals that local searchers are poised to take action. According to their findings, “50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, and 34% who searched on computer/tablet did the same.” This means ranking in local search has a direct impact on in-store traffic.

Here are a few tips to make sure you’re ranking for local search terms:

• Get your business listed on Google My Business, and make sure your profile is complete.
• Make sure your NAP (name, address, phone number) is consistent across all channels. This includes your website, social media profiles, review sites and directory listings.
• Use local business schema markup so Google can identify and show your physical location.
• Use local keywords in your URLs, heading tags, title tags and content, where appropriate.

2. More Than 60% Of Consumers Have Used Local Information In Ads

In the same study referenced above, Google found that consumers have a clear preference when it comes to having ads customized to their surroundings. They found that:

• 67% of smartphone users want ads customized via city and ZIP code, and 61% want ads customized to their immediate surroundings.
• 61% use the address or phone number in the ad.
• 68% use the “Get Directions” or “Call” buttons.

When targeting your ads for local consumers, be sure to target your ads by location and to use location extensions. AdWords pulls your contact information from your Google My Business settings, so make sure it’s set up the way you want it to appear in your ads.

3. 88% Of Consumers Trust Online Reviews As Much As Personal Recommendations

Local businesses should be aware of the importance of positive online reviews, as highlighted in this stat from BrightLocal’s 2014 Local Consumer Review Survey. Increasingly, consumers are turning to Google to get recommendations and referrals for local businesses.

Some of the top review sites I recommend for local businesses include:

1. Yelp
2. Google+ Local
3. TripAdvisor
4. Angie’s List
5. Urbanspoon
6. Yahoo! Local

A great place to start when deciding where to list your business is to simply search for your business name, as well as for keywords you think your prospects may be searching for. See which review sites are displayed most prominently for these searches, and get to work.

4. Business Address/Location Is The Primary Piece Of Information Sought By Local Searchers

We’ve already talked about the importance of using local information in your ads; however, it’s just as important to make sure you’re including key contact and location info on your website and social media profiles.

According to research by comScore, Neustar Localeze and agency 15 Miles, address and location are the primary pieces of information sought by local searchers. Here are some of the other types of info searchers are looking for:

• Businesses by category (In other words, searchers are looking for a particular type of business but haven’t yet decided which one to patronize.)
• Phone number
• Products or services (Again, they don’t have a particular business in mind, they’re searching for a specific product or service.)
• Hours of operation
• Driving directions
• Coupons and special offers
• Ratings and reviews

Given the desires of local searchers, it’s important to keep your mobile content concise and actionable. Don’t overwhelm your mobile visitors with copious amounts of information; instead, clearly provide the basic info outlined above, and provide links to additional content as needed.

5. 18% Of Local Mobile Searches Lead To A Sale Within One Day

We already talked about how local searchers are more likely to visit a store, but Google found that these customers are likely to actually make a purchase, as well. They also found that one in three smartphone searches occurred immediately before a consumer visited a store and that 15% of in-store activity involved product or price comparison searches.

In other words, capturing the local search market means first dibs for consumers who are in the final stages of the buying cycle, wallets out, ready to buy. Try enticing these consumers to spend money in your store through the use of mobile coupon campaigns.

Bonus Stat: Mobile phones have the highest conversion rate compared to other devices.

6. 50% Of Mobile Users Prefer A Mobile Browser To A Mobile App

There has been a lot of talk about mobile optimization, mobile apps and responsive design since Google’s move to include mobile-friendliness as a significant ranking factor for its mobile search results. However, brand-new research from BrightLocal reveals that half of mobile users prefer using a mobile internet browser to mobile maps (40%) and mobile apps (only 10%).

If you haven’t already optimized your site for mobile, you may have seen a significant drop in your search rankings and traffic since April 21, 2015 (the launch date of Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm update). If you’re not sure if your site is mobile-friendly, try Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to be sure.

Bonus Stat: According to the BrightLocal study, 38% of consumers are impressed when a local business has a mobile-optimized site.

Final Thoughts

The importance of ranking in local search is undeniable. As we’ve already seen, local searches lead to in-store visits and sales. Translation: High local search rankings = increased traffic and revenue.

Ensure your site and content are optimized for local SEO, and get your business listed on local review sites. Include contact info in a prominent location on your website and social media profiles, and use location extensions for paid ads. Finally, make sure your site is optimized for viewing on mobile browsers.

Did any of the stats above surprise you? Why or why not?

Did Hummingbird Just Kill Your Local SEO?

That said, Google’s Hummingbird algorithm, along with all of the other awesome updates Google has made over the past year, has forced me to reevaluate how I approach a local SEO campaign.

First, some background on Hummingbird: Google wants to do better at matching queries to results, particularly as voice search becomes more popular and people start asking their phones complex questions instead of typing simple searches. According to Danny Sullivan:

Google said that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.

Danny provides a great local search example to illustrate the change:

“What’s the closest place to buy the iPhone 5s to my home?” A traditional search engine might focus on finding matches for words — finding a page that says “buy” and “iPhone 5s,” for example.

Hummingbird should better focus on the meaning behind the words. It may better understand the actual location of your home, if you’ve shared that with Google. It might understand that “place” means you want a brick-and-mortar store. It might get that “iPhone 5s” is a particular type of electronic device carried by certain stores. Knowing all these meanings may help Google go beyond just finding pages with matching words.

So how do you apply this to your Local SEO strategy?

Invest In FAQ Content

The FAQ has been the go-to SEO strategy since time began (circa 1998). Over time, your sales staff probably answers the same set of questions from potential customers over and over again. These are the same queries that customers type (and now speak) into search engines. By adding the most popular questions to your site, either in a dedicated FAQ section or on a blog, you now are more eligible to rank for these queries.

“But wait,” you say, “most of these types of queries are not necessarily local, right?” That’s true. There’s nothing inherently local about the phrase, “how to get rid of mold spots on ceiling,” and the current Google SERP for that query shows a lot of national DIY site results.

But if you think about Hummingbird’s goal to “focus on the meaning behind the words,” you’ll see that sooner or later, Google is going to start to put the fact that you have mold spots on your ceiling together with the idea that you might want to remove those spots and that’s where local businesses that target these queries can gain an unfair advantage over the eHows and DIY.coms of the world.

Invest In Content That Provides Unique Information (Pro Tip: Use Data)

The problem with the FAQ strategy mentioned above is that any mold-removal company can throw up an FAQ that targets a bunch of juicy queries. So you’ve got to go the extra mile and start putting up content that both answers questions and is not easily duplicated by that low-brow SEO your competition is using.

Even when you think you have nothing to say, you can still use your proprietary business data to come up with interesting stuff. For example, if you are targeting people in the market for body sculpting, how about looking at all of the data you have on your patients and doing a post like How Long Does Vaser Lipo Last?

Invest In “Fresh” Content For Your Target Service Locations

Like everything else in local, this is easy to say and hard to do. But I have seen no better tactic for improving local rankings (particularly for service areas where a business has no physical locations) than regularly updating a site with content relevant to those service areas. And there are plenty of ways to skin this cat. You could:

• Make a cool local UGC map like this Chicago Bike Accident Map.
• Add customer reviews and and tweet-like staff activity updates to relevant location pages.
• Simply just allow user comments on your pages, like this shameless experiment.

Now I know what you’re thinking. “Hey Andrew, that’s a lot of text to wade through just to learn that I have to create better content.” Truth be told, Hummingbird hasn’t changed Local SEO much (yet), except perhaps by accident.

You still need to fix your citations, get links, get reviews, build “unstructured” citations and make your site accessible. Hummingbird just gives us content-crazy SEOs yet another excuse to push businesses to invest in making their sites better.

And if that’s not good enough insider info for you, and you’re desperate for some cutting edge Google Local SERP news, I recommend you peruse Nyagoslav Zhekov’s post on how Google may have just decoupled local and “pure” organic results and, in the process, shifted Local SEO’s emphasis back to citation building.

Sometimes, Local SEO truly is for the birds.

Google’s Matt Cutts: More Pages Does Not Equal Higher Rankings

In a new video released today by Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, we learn that the more pages a web site has, does not necessarily mean you will have better rankings.

Matt Cutts said, “I wouldn’t assume that just because you have a large number of indexed pages that you automatically get a high-ranking. That’s not the case.”

He goes on to explain that the more pages you have, the more chances you have to rank for different keywords. Plus, the more pages you have, the more likely you have more overall links and PageRank, which do directly impact your rankings. But the number of pages on a specific site, does not have a direct ranking benefit.

Matt said it at the end again, “just having a number of pages doesn’t give you a boost.”

Study: Google Adds 1,200 Search Sites & 750 ISP Client Networks In Less Than A Year

A study published by researchers at the University of Southern California unintentionally discovered Google has dramatically increased the number of sites and ISPs it uses to serve client queries.

According to the findings, between October 2012 and July 2013, Google increased the number of locations serving its search infrastructure from less than 200 to more than 1,400, as well as growing the number of ISPs it uses from a little over 100 to more than 850.

From the study:

Most of this expansion reflects Google utilizing client networks (such as Time Warner Cable, for example) that it already relied on for hosting content like videos on YouTube, and reusing them to relay – and speed up – user requests and responses for search and ads.

“Google already delivered YouTube videos from within these client networks,” said the study’s lead author and USC PhD student Matt Calder, “But they’ve abruptly expanded the way they use the networks, turning their content-hosting infrastructure into a search infrastructure as well.”

After creating  a way to track and map Google’s servers, the USC research team’s original intention was to study the relationship between Google’s server locations and its clients. The researchers claim they “just happened” to be researching Google’s search infrastructure when the company made its move to expand its search sites in ten months time.

The study was presented last week at the SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference in Spain. The research team behind the findings said Google’s strategy has a number of benefits, “Users have a better web browsing experience, ISPs lower their operational costs by keeping more traffic local, and Google is able to deliver its content to Web users quicker.”

Facebook Offers A Peek At How Graph Search For Status Updates Works

It’s been less than a month since Facebook expanded Graph Search to include status updates and posts, and the feature still isn’t available to all users.

Nonetheless, Facebook search engineer Ashoat Tevosyan shared an “under the hood” look at how it works — and why it took so long to become reality.

There’s nothing incredibly newsy in the post, but it’s educational from a search perspective. Here’s a bullet list of facts and figures from the post:

• Post search has been two years in the making, and began as a hackathon project when Tevosyan was still an intern
• There are a billion posts every day on Facebook, and the posts index currently has more than a trillion posts
• Post data such as time, location and tags are stored differently in posts, check-ins and photos — making the search project more challenging
• At 700 terabytes, the posts index is the biggest of all Facebook search indexes
• Graph Search currently uses more than 100 ranking features to figure out the best match when doing post searches

There’s more in the full article that might interest you, and it’s not incredibly technical (which is good for readers like me!). Unfortunately, there’s no word on how the rollout is progressing.

6 Benefits of Using Infographics

As someone who is constantly surfing the web, either for work or just because I’m an addict, I’ve become a big fan of infographics. And, I’m far from the only person who’s found infographics to be an educational, entertaining, and useful tool. Within the last decade infographics have become an increasing trend. In fact, from 2010 to 2012, infographic search volumes have increased over 800%. Suffice it to say, that’s an outstanding trend. But, what exactly are infographics and should you use them?

For the uninitiated, infographics “are graphic visual representations of information, data or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly”. In other words, an infographic collects data, organizes it, and turns this information into an easy to understand visual, such as a chart or map. So, why and how can these graphs be beneficial?

Studies have found that 90 percent of the information that we remember is based on visual impact. Include that tidbit with the fact that we live in an age where 1.5 billion pieces of content, 140 million tweets, and 2 million videos are created on a daily basis, and you can easily understand why a simple visual aid can make your brand stand out.

If you’re still on the fence regarding infographics, here are six other benefits of the popular resource.

Infographics are more eye-catching than printed words, since they usually combine images, colors, movement, and content that naturally draw the eye.

Since most of us have increasingly shorter attention spans, we tend to “scan” material as opposed to actually reading text. Furthermore, we tend to remember information that we’ve seen more so than read.

Infographics are extremely shareable for use around the web. For example, an infographic published on a WordPress blog or website usually provides an embed code. This code allows an automatic link from the original site to yours. They are also easily shared on social networks and have a better chance of becoming viral compared to ordinary text.

Infographics can be used to reinforce a brand, simply because they are so visually appealing. If you design an infographic with consistent colors, shapes, and messages, along with your logo, you’ll have an effective means of “Brand Awareness”.

A well designed and aesthetically pleasing infographic will drive people to your site since they are more likely to “share” and “click” on it. Also, this can help with Google’s “Page Rank” algorithm, which is  important for SEO.
Finally, infographics are a fun and engaging medium that can generate a unique connection with visitors to either your site or a location that has featured your infographic.

It’s not everyday that you can utilize something that is not only visually pleasing , but also has the capability to spread your brand as it goes viral throughout the internet. If you’re still looking for some other examples, along with tips on how to design and develop an effective infograph, we suggest this article from Forbes, along with this wonderful piece by Jayson DeMers, “The Definitive Guide to Writing and Promoting a Viral Infographic”.

Matt Cutts At Pubcon 2013: Moonshots, Machine Learning & The Future Of Google Search

This morning, the head of Google’s webspam team Matt Cutts gave a keynote speech at Pubcon in Las Vegas. The keynote comes on the heels of a scathing day — 1 keynote from Jason Calacanis, who said that Google rules everything, that they were essentially evil. On Twitter yesterday, Matt asked if Jason wanted the polite response, or a thorough one.  All of us here in attendance are hoping for “thorough.”

Matt starts with the state of the index talking about where will Google go in future.

He’s proud that Google as doubled down on ‘moonshot’ changes, specifically:

Knowledge Graph Google has been trying to understand entities — not just the searches. So essentially they are trying to learn about “things not strings.”

Voice Search

Conversational Search

Google Now Matt is proud that today, sometimes you don’t even have to search to find information you need.

Deep Learning Google is looking more into the relationships between words. Google will be able to read at a higher level and interpret the relationships between words. Works well with voice search when a user asks Google, “Who is the Prime Minister of Turkey?” then searches again for “How old is he?” and Google can reply with the previous context.

Core Quality Changes

Hummingbird This change targets better natural language translation. Search is more than just matching words — instead it’s looking at specific words that are more meaningful for intelligent scoring. For instance, a voice search for “what is the capital of Texas, my Dear” the “my Dear” isn’t that important — Hummingbird will be able to detect this. While Hummingbird affected 90% of queries, it was a very subtle change that most users didn’t recognize but will help users get more pertinent results.

Panda Softening This is something that Google has looked into to help bring some sites and content back.
Detecting/Boosting Authorities Not done by hand, but applies by topic areas. Webmasters can keep deepening their content on a topic to further their authoritativeness on a specific content area.
Smartphone Ranking Doesn’t have flash? won’t display a site that has flash to you then.

Webspam Changes

Penguin 2.0 & 2.1 Penguin 2.0 was released – not that intensive. Black hats said wasn’t big, so Google then released turned it up in 2.1. More changes will be continually coming, so buckle up.

Spammy Query Algorithms Items like porn and payday loans will be targeted for better results. Right now the SERPS aren’t great, but they will be working on it.

Advertorials/Native Advertising Google has cracked down on publishers selling ads that blended in as editorial with dofollow links.. You shouldn’t be paying for links that pass pagerank.

Spam Networks They’ve got a pretty good list, just working their way down them. Matt joked that he should talk a poll to determine who to axe next.

Communication

Google has done a great job of increasing the communication with webmasters, especially:

New videos for malware/hacking
Concrete examples in guidelines
>100 speaking events, Hangouts on Air, webmaster office hours
How search works website
Future of Search

Machine Learning Google’s goal is to provide the world information.  The word “search engine” isn’t anywhere in their mission statement. They want to be able to give answers to specific queries.

Mobile Mobile is coming faster than anyone expected. 40% of YouTube videos are now served to mobile devices. If you haven’t thought about mobile, it’s time to start thinking about it.

Social/Identity/Authorship Matt starts with “Facebook did a great job of social and knowing who people are.” Then talks about the fact that signal is not just likes/+1s/Tweets but in the long terms; social signals are a sign of authority. You are someone worth listening to — search engines will think you are worth listening to as well.

Webspam Trends

Hacking Next 6 months – it’s going to look like we aren’t working on much. Now working on next generation of hacking. Queries like “buy viagra” still looks bad because people are breaking the laws.

Hot Topics Items like child porn, international issues and really nasty queries are being addressed.
No Toolbar PageRank scheduled for rest of year The pipeline for updating PageRank broke this year and PageRank stopped updating. Google realized that it wasn’t that bad and stopped updating as people seem to pay too much attention to the metric. It’s something they will reassess at a later time.

Advice

Mobile Get ready, you need a mobile plan.

Request Autocomplete New item in Chrome that allows users to auto-fill forms. Saves users time by using the standard to pull in all information and increase chance of conversions.

Ad-heavy pages above the fold Some tweaks are coming to “turn up” this algorithm. Users shouldn’t see a barrage of ads above the fold when they visit a site.

Tightening Authorship Matt mentions that a tightening of Authorship may provide better results. Google is looking for a 15% reduction to ensure that the quality of the authorship is still high and relevant.

Rich Snippets The ability to have and use rich snippets may be taken away for low quality sites in the coming months Smarter on JavaScript Google is now fetching, rendering and indexing items called by JavaScript. Google is getting smarter and understanding smarter libraries.

Now to the Q and A section:

Matt talks about +1′s specifically and that they are a short term signal, but very bullish on long term signal of authorship.  Next Matt talks about Negative SEO. Worked on Negative SEO for years. With Penguin, it not only removes sites, but can actually have a negative effect on the site. Disavow tool announced last year, use as a last resort. Use Webmaster Tools, find links and disavow at link or domain level. Webmaster tools is now giving better backlinks, not just A-Z, so use Webmaster Tools to help identify, can see 100,000 links.

In response to Jason Calacanis’ claims from yesterday, Matt polls the crowd on whether or not to go into the matter. Crowd wants to hear the response. Matt talks about the initial version of Panda and whether or not they should have rolled out slowly. Matt says that this wouldn’t have been good and cites multiple articles showing the degrading quality of the search results. Google needed Panda. A Googler made a personal blocklist to block specific sites and nearly 200k users installed — people did not want these content farms.

In response to Jason’s claims that Google wasn’t a good partner, Matt talked about the fact that no companies have partnerships with Google. There are YouTube partnerships, not Google search partnerships. In aggregate, Mahalo simply wasn’t a quality site and they came to an impasse at a personal meeting. This wasn’t even a webspam issue, it was a quality issue and nobody received special treatment.

With the Mahalo issue behind, Matt talks about press releases. “If you are paying for PageRank, you probably aren’t doing something right.” Google has identified “a lot” of the top Press Release sites and ignores the links but doesn’t penalize those who are using them.

On infinite scrolling issues, Matt recommends using some type of paginated versions as a safety guard to index all content. On the growing size of the Google bar, Matt mentions that they are aware of the size and pixels being taken up by Google.