The One Where We Discuss Local SEO With Levi Williams-Clucas

WTSPodcast

In this week's episode, we chat with Levi Williams-Clucas, SEO Specialist at StrategiQ, about local SEO and the importance of reputation, reviews and trust.

Where to find Levi:

LinkedIn

Twitter

Resources from the episode:

BrightLocal Academy

BrightLocal blog

StrategiQ blog

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Episode Sponsor:

This season is sponsored by Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog develop crawling and log file analysis software for the SEO industry, and wanted to support the WTSPodcast as listeners to the show. They’ve just released version 16 of their SEO Spider software, which includes - improved JavaScript crawling to help you identify dependencies, such as JavaScript content and links, automated crawl reports for Data Studio integration, advanced search and filtering, and the app is now available in Spanish, French, German and Italian. You can check out the latest version at Screaming Frog's website (screamingfrog.co.uk).

Where to find Screaming Frog:

Website

LinkedIn

Twitter

YouTube

Facebook

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Episode Transcript:

Sarah: Hello, and a very warm welcome to the Women in Tech SEO Podcast. I am Sarah McDowell, an SEO content executive, and I will be your host for today. Joining me I have the wonderful Levi Williams-Clucas, who is an SEO specialist at StrategiQ, and they will be talking to us today about Local SEO. Welcome to the show, Levi.

Levi: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.

Sarah: Thank you for giving up your time and agreeing to spend Wednesday afternoon with me. Have you had a good day?

Levi: I've had a great day. Yes, it's been nice and sunny outside, and I've been able to pet my cats today, so very happy.

Sarah: Sounds like a wonderful, wonderful Wednesday. To kick things off, I want to ask you how you got into this wonderful world of SEO, and how you ended up being an SEO specialist at the agency StrategiQ?

Levi: I've always been into marketing, and I did my degree in marketing and was ready to go as soon as I came out of uni. It didn't work that way and I ended up having a bunch of random temp jobs, and then got my first proper agency job at StrategiQ as a Digital PR. I decided it wasn't for me and thankfully my manager noticed an interest in me for SEO and suggested it and shout out to Chris Green if anybody knows him.

He suggested, "Would you like to move into SEO?" I thought, "Yes, I'm going to give that a crack." I've been happy as a pig in the mud ever since really. It's my calling.

Sarah: I love that saying "Happy as a pig in mud," I've not heard that one before.

Levi: Oh, that's one of my favorites.

Sarah: That's awesome that within your agency, then someone who worked with you was able to identify a whole area that you would be interested in. I think that's really cool.

Levi: Yes.

Sarah: Cool. What one bit of advice would you give other women starting out in the industry?

Levi: I had to go think about this, because there's a lot of things that I think I would like to give as advice to women in the industry, but I think my main one is not to change who you are or what you believe in, to fit into something that other people say you should be or should believe in. How you look, sound, how you identify, really doesn't have any impact on how good you are at your job, and how well you can learn what you need to do to succeed in your role.

You should really remind yourself of that when you feel like you've been treated otherwise, and prove those people wrong. I have, I'm here, I'm covered in tattoos and piercings, and I have a very successful career despite being judged on a regular basis about things like that, so absolutely don't change who you are to fit someone else's agenda.

Sarah: I absolutely love that advice and I could not agree more. You have to stay true to yourself. Don't you?

Levi: Yes, absolutely.

[Quick Fire Round]

Sarah: You agreed to come on the podcast to talk about Local SEO and yes, I'm very excited to be speaking with you about this today. Let's start with the basics, what is Local SEO?

Levi: Generally speaking, it's just optimizing what I like to call your online entity, so your website and all the other things connected to it, to be visible in search results that's either in a specific area or about a specific area. I think it's important to include about a specific area as well, because that can make a big difference to search results if you're adding a location modifier to a search.

Sarah: Now, just something to clear up as well, is that technically speaking, local SEO, we're talking about your online local presence with online directories, but because of that, the monopoly that Google has, with more so focusing on Google, is that right to say?

Levi: Yes, I think there is opportunity in local SEO with things like Bing Maps, and a whole bunch of other search engines that you can use, but yes, absolutely, more often than not, people will go straight to Chrome or Google search on their mobile devices, or something similar to look for their local things. Arguably, they provide the best local results as well, so generally speaking, yes, Google.

Sarah: Would you say then, if you're putting a plan of action together, your focus main priority is Google, and then once you got yourself into a place where you're happy we then move on to look at other opportunities?

Levi: Yes, I'd say absolutely look at your user-base first. If you've got perhaps an older generation user-base, or a B2B, you tend to get more of the Microsoft, I can't remember which one the Microsoft is now. You tend to get more of the other search engines that are being used instead of Google.

We do have things like Bing, which we do always keep an eye on just in case the user-base uses that more but generally, we would normally go for Google first unless the data says otherwise.

Sarah: What would you say are some of the fundamentals of local SEO?

Levi: It's as we said, Google My Business and the alternative versions I think it's Bing Businesses for me or something like that, it's got a silly name. Those business profiles absolutely the most critical part in my opinion. Local links, also important. I think that they are a fundamental that get missed quite often, people think they're not that valuable, but they really are. Locally-focused content.

If you're talking about being local to somewhere, but you can't say anything about the area, are you really that local? Do you really know much about the area? Also, consistency, and that comes across in all your citation building and directory building, but also, just generally across your website, being consistent is so important for being trustworthy as a good result in the local area.

Sarah: With consistency, a buzzword that I hear a lot when people talk about local SEO is your NAP, isn't it? Where you've got consistency with your name, address and postcode? I suppose that's just, if you've your core data is correct that anywhere that you can be found, that's one way that Google and other online directories can qualify you in a way, I suppose?

Levi: Yes. It's a really good way of making sure that obviously, if you've got consistency across everything that your business name is connected to, then people are going to trust your brand more. Also, it makes it easier if somebody spelled something wrong, or they're not quite sure how to spell your brand name, but they might know the phone number, or they might know the address of the business.

Having that all connected up and consistent just makes it so much easier to create this lovely web of information that's all the same, and encourage that trust within the brand.

Sarah: I'm getting the vibe. You've already said about trust, but reputation, reviews, trust, all those things has a fairly big impact on local SEO?

Levi: Yes. Personally, I know there are people that would argue against this, but personally, it's the most important part. Google is slowly becoming more and more like a person in how it treats search results and how it decides what is valuable for a user. If you look at it from a user's perspective, if you've got no reputation, if you've got no reviews, if you've got no news about you, you haven't done any press releases with good news, or anything, if you've got nothing about you, really, online, people aren't going to trust your business.

In turn, Google's not going to trust your business. The same goes for a bad reputation. If you've got loads of bad press about you, lots of bad reviews, poor trust signals on the website, that's not going, that's definitely not going to benefit you, basically. If it's all good, then it's going to benefit you.

Sarah: I'm getting the vibe here that reputation management is key, isn't it? You need to have an idea of what's being said about you, and have a plan for that. Also, you need a plan for gathering reviews, because people do their research, don't they? They look, and they look at reviews, see what people are saying, and then that, are we saying that all of that reputation reviews, all goes in towards trust?

Levi: Yes, absolutely. Yes.

Sarah: Wonderful. Even if legitimate, can you have too many reviews too frequently? Could that look a bit weird, or a bit spammy?

Levi: I think it depends on the business. Classic SEO response, it depends.

Sarah: You have to get it in during this podcast.

Levi: Yes. Unfortunately, it does depend on the business. You'll have some businesses that will get reviews for every single customer that visits, just because of the nature of the business. Things like hairdressers, places like that where it's very visual, and you can see an immediate result from the business' service, you're much more likely to get quick reviews, all in one go. To be honest, I've never seen an example where there's been too many reviews, particularly with Google My Business, or Trustpilot, or those platforms that you see a lot.

I've never seen that as an issue. I think if you were spammed with lots of negative reviews, that would definitely be an issue, but most search engines would pick that up as being spam. It probably wouldn't cause a problem. I'd be interested to know if anybody's had any problems from getting hundreds or thousands of reviews, all in one go.

Sarah: Do you know if Google-- When it comes to the legitimacy of a review then, can Google know when it's not a real review?

Levi: I don't think outright, but there are certain things that people tend to do when they're leaving sneaky fake reviews to harm someone. Google seems to pick up on those quite well. Certainly repeated, one star reviews, all in one day, when they've never left a review before, for example, or Google will pick up on those patterns that come out of specific accounts.

Also, if anybody's reported a review from that person before, you do tend to get, "Is this review any good for you?" I think it picks up on it, but obviously, you're still going to get fake reviews and things that come trough that Google doesn't realize and sometimes refuses to get rid of as well, which is insanely annoying.

Sarah: I've seen in guidelines before that you can't incentivize people through reviews, can you, either? Technically speaking, that's against the guidelines. Then I have seen people being sneaky. I'm just thinking, for example, if you were a restaurant, on your receipt, couldn't you add that you give to the customer, you could put, "Leave this review and be in a chance of winning a free meal here."

There's no way of Google-- I've always wondered about that, about incentivizing. Is there any grey areas of how you get away with that, or just don't do it, to be on the safe side?

Levi: Personally, not necessarily for safety, but for integrity I'd say don't do it. I am a firm believer in, if you are doing a good job, and you say to people, "Please, can you leave me a review?" They will happily do that without an incentive, as long as you've done a good job. If you're incentivizing people to leave a review, they're more likely to leave something that's slightly fabricated, or is presenting a better experience than what they genuinely had.

In my opinion, it's better to have fewer genuine, really genuine, real reviews, than it is to have a few more, slightly over the top, exaggerated reviews, just for the benefit of getting them. If everyone puts five stars, it looks fishy as well. You're better to have those genuine reviews.

Sarah: Yes, definitely. I've had these conversations in the past where business owners want to get rid of bad reviews, so they're only sharing new ones. That just doesn't-- It's part and parcel of having a business, isn't it? You're going to receive bad reviews. You're not going to please everyone, that's just impossible.

Levi: Yes, and how you deal with that can also be a huge indicator to helping people choose to go with your business in the future. If you deal with it well, and somebody sees that, and they go, "Actually, that seems like a really good business, they just had a bad day." They're so much more likely to purchase from you, than if you just remove, or you're defensive, or if you deal with it poorly.

Sarah: Just ignore it altogether and hope it will go away. How is best to measure or track your local SEO efforts?

Levi: I use a tool called BrightLocal, they are good friend's of mine, just because they have an amazing tool. It's actually quite difficult to track. Ranking improvements and visibility improvements within local, I've found that local specific tools are the best ones to use, as there's a whole bunch of them. All of the names have escaped me right, but BrightLocal is the one I use, just because it's often quite difficult to pick up Google My Business rankings within subs and generic rank trackers.

You will get a little bit in AccuRanker, but it's not super accurate, although I do love AccuRanker for everything else. Then, things like, if you're wanting to track reviews and things like that, there are systems within BrightLocal for doing that. Then, I also use UTM codes for tracking how people click into the site, that I then follow on GA, and just see how people are actually getting to the website, making sure that those UTM codes are well labeled, so that I can see them into the campaign section. That's about it, really. I don't do much else.

Sarah: UTM codes, because I suppose if you don't set them up, then you might be missing traffic that's actually coming from a Google listing. You're not attributing correctly traffic that's coming from people's like they're seeing you in the search, so to speak.

Levi: Yes, so it'll probably come through, and GA is a brand search, or however you have your filter set up. It will come through, the traffic will come through, but you won't know at all whether it's come from GMB, so it's really important to add those UTM codes where you can.

Sarah: You don't want to be putting all your efforts into local SEO and not tracking it properly.

Levi: Yes, exactly. That's especially important if you're using the services and products feature. We've added tracking to products before, and had it set up so that it says it's from GMB product click, and we've been able to attribute revenue directly to Google My Business, which has been fantastic for reporting, and also just being able to justify the work that goes into what some people think is quite a minimal, relatively easy job to do. That's a very key point for using the product feature on GMB.

Sarah: Yes. Good. Very, very good point. I'm going to pick your brains on a bit more advanced questions around that GMB, Google local. Can profile health on GMB tie into the wider SEO algorithms? For example, if you've got a poor profile, could this hinder your national SEO?

Levi: In my opinion, yes, but there is a caveat, but not having it set up, and not having it optimized isn't going to damage your visibility necessarily, but having it will improve it. Think of it like your life is fine before you bought that really awesome kitchen peeler that's electronic, and it goes really quick and it's great. After you buy it, you're like, "Oh, I can't believe I ever lived without this. This is amazing. I never have to peel my potatoes by hand again." Not having that peeler wasn't damaging your life, but having it has greatly improved it.

That's generally how I see it for wider strategies is like having a little gold mine sitting there that you're just not using. Then you suddenly use it and you're like, "Oh wow. This is actually really amazing. I've been missing out on it." Not having it isn't going to damage you necessarily.

Sarah: I liked that analogy there with the peeler. I've also seen Google monetize local results in the Map Pack. That's a hard word to say in their Map Pack. Can you give examples of how Google has monetized these, and how do you feel like Google will continue to do this in the future?

Levi: I know there was a lot of talk about the subscription, monetized Google My Business accounts a little while ago. That fell through, that never happened. I think probably because of the amount of anger that came from the SEO community on that, and also the local business community. I know that that would damage a lot of local businesses to do that, to present paid accounts higher up in local results. However, they do have a PPC, paid advertising within maps that are clearly marked as ads. We are seeing those more regularly than before.

At least, I've noticed it more regularly than I used to. I don't think necessarily Google are going to make it worse. I don't think they are going to introduce that huge monetized Google My Business profiles or premium profiles I think it was