Building a Sustainable SEO Strategy for Local Businesses

John:

Google can tell if you’re a real business in the area and you’re operating, you should be able to get customer reviews consistently if you’re doing business in that area. So, the consistency is very important. We’re seeing photos and media in the reviews. It’s kind of a small thing that gives the reviews a little more weight. So if you could ask your customers to take a photo or add something in, it’s another step, so it’s hard to do, but that’s working really well.

Andrew:

Hello and welcome to SE Ranking’s DoFollow Podcast. Here we hold regular talks with SEO and digital marketing experts to discuss how to see your topics and share actionable insights with the SEO community. So subscribe to stay on top of everything going on in SEO.

Today, we’re talking about building a sustainable SEO strategy for local businesses. To help us break this topic down in detail, I’m thrilled to be joined by John Reinesch, who is the founder of Asset Growth. Plus, you can always reach him through his personal website at johnreinesch.com.

Welcome to the DoFollow Podcast, John! Thank you for coming on.

John:

Thank you! Excited to get into this.

Andrew:

Awesome! I always want to jump right into our topic. But before we do that, I want our audience to know a bit more about you. So maybe you could share the story of your professional journey that led you to become the founder of Asset Growth.

John:

Yeah, so I started in SEO maybe like 10, 15 years ago. I just stumbled upon a YouTube video where someone was just teaching SEO and never really had heard of it at that point. I was working at a retail store and just came across the videos. It looked interesting. And then I got a job at a local marketing agency shortly after that in New York, which kind of got my feet wet, got me working on some clients, kind of getting used to SEO.

And then from there, I kind of just worked at a few different agencies for a few years and then realized I could start kind of freelancing and doing consulting work on the side. So I built that up and eventually started a marketing agency which we’ve now sort of rebranded to Asset Growth over the last year. Our main focus is working with self storage facilities and helping them with local SEO and Google Ads.

Andrew:

Got it, John. Thank you. In the context of local businesses, how would you define a sustainable SEO strategy?

John:

Yeah, so for local businesses, what we see is, for SEO, we really want to be focusing on the maps, but also the traditional organic results as well. So there’s kind of two aspects that you want to tie in together. What we see is if you’re able to rank in the top three of both spots, a lot of times the performance of both actually go up because people are seeing you multiple times on the first page instead of just in one spot.

And a lot of times for local customers, they don’t really know the ins and outs of Google. So if they see a brand multiple times, they assume they’re the best one in the area. So it’s one thing we really focus on and for long-term results, really making sure you’re tying in both of those together and then potentially layering in Google Ads as well to get a third or fourth listing really is what we’re seeing drives the best leads for local businesses.

Andrew:

So for example, I’m one of your clients and I want to succeed. And you give me sort of maybe two options of quick wins, right? Short term and long term wins as well. So what are the key differences between these two approaches, these two tactics to having a sustainable local business strategy?

John:

Yeah, some of the quickest wins we see are still with some of the basics in local industries like title tags and meta descriptions. Because essentially that’s like your ad copy for SEO. So we get a lot of mileage out of formatting the title tags in a certain way to get a higher click through rate. A lot of local businesses don’t do that. So you’ll be one of the only ones in your market doing that. If you don’t just focus on stuffing in a bunch of keywords, you want to have the target keyword in the title tag, but then what can you add to the end that’s compelling that gets somebody to click?

Sometimes that might be like a discount that you’re offering. So for storage facilities, a lot of times what we’ll do for the title tag is storage units in the city name, and then we’ll put their discount next to it. So 50% off the first month. And that’s the text that’s gonna populate right in Google. And it’s really gonna make you stand out. And what we see too is if you get more clicks, a lot of times your rankings go up as well.

So that’s one of the quickest and from like a time standpoint as well, it’s not gonna take you very long to come up with an idea and implement that. But sometimes that’s one of the quickest things we see increase clicks and rankings right away.

For the long term, that’s really where you want to layer in everything. So then we get into link building, doing your Google Business Profile work to get you ranking in the Maps, citation building, kind of all the standard SEO tactics.

For sustainability, I think what you want to be careful of is a lot of the things that are more like manipulating Google. Like we’ve seen some people do some tactics that can work in the short term, like stuffing keywords in your Google Business Profile name. It does work and it can work quickly.

A lot of times though, it doesn’t always work in the long term. So that’s one of the things you have to kind of weigh the pros and cons. If you want to take a risk of getting some short-term leads in traffic, but potentially losing your Google Business Profile or having to verify it again.

We try to stay away from those kinds of tactics and just focus on the fundamentals that we know are going to work for a long term. But those are probably the biggest things I’m seeing.

Andrew:

I just have a follow up about the 50% discount for example that you said that you have in the snippet in search. Is this like a one time offer or do you have somehow managed to make sure that it’s relevant each time a person clicks? Like, judicially on a legal level, wouldn’t somebody just say like, okay, I clicked it yesterday, I got a discount, I clicked it today, I want to get a discount again? Or is it like a first time purchase thing? Just wanted to clarify that specific moment.

John:

Storage facilities, a lot of times they do change their promos. So it is something you have to update and that’s easy to forget too. So if like your promo changes to like a dollar move in or another kind of special the next month, you do want to make sure you’re updating all of this. Even with your ad copy too, it’s easy to forget all these little pieces when they’re going.

But yeah, so you do want to keep it up to date. If you go that route, sometimes if you don’t want to have to worry about keeping it up to date, we’ve tried things like just putting in lowest prices or like a more general statement that still stands out. And then you could get a little more long-term flexibility out of that.

But we’re big on testing that copy as well. Because it’s one of the few SEO tactics that you could actually see if it works within a few weeks typically. Like are more people clicking? Are you getting more clicks after you implement that? So we don’t set it and forget it. We do like monthly potentially run a test and change it.

It’s not the most scientific test. We’ll kind of just change it, let it run another few weeks and see if the metrics improved. But yeah, it is something you don’t want to just leave. Your competitors will copy you eventually too, if they’re doing SEO. We see that quite a bit. And then that’s where you have to kind of change it again.

Andrew:

With regard to the long-term game, there are some foundational elements that local businesses should always keep in mind to make sure that their strategy remains effective over time. Could you just go over each one of them, one that you can imagine that right now is not a game changer, but just keeps you going strongly, like, I don’t know, maybe reviews, maybe, I don’t want to put words in your mouth at this point. So just what are the foundational elements that a local business should focus on just to have that long-term success?

John:

Yeah, we’ll start with Maps ranking. So you touched on reviews. That’s gonna be one of the biggest things you wanna do on a monthly basis. Once you do kind of your initial Google Business Profile setup, getting more reviews, which is harder to do, but you have to do it. And ideally with like at least a 4.7 star rating. And the consistency is very important on reviews.

So what mistake I see is some companies will do like a one-time push where they’ll get 10, 15, 20 reviews in a month and then they won’t do anything again. So you really wanna make sure, because Google can tell if you’re a real business in the area and you’re operating, you should be able to get customer reviews consistently if you’re doing business in that area. So the consistency is very important.

We’re seeing photos and media in the reviews is kind of a small thing that gives the reviews a little more weight just cause so if you could ask your customers to take a photo or add something in, it’s another step. So it’s harder to do, but that’s working really well.

And in general for the Maps rankings, just making sure your Google Business Profile is up to date. I know this is foundational, but just getting everything filled in. If there’s a question Google’s asking, a feature you could use like Products or Q&A’s, fill those in and use them. And generally that’s more of a one-time thing. And then really from there it’s, yeah, we’re getting more reviews.

Citation building as well. We still do that upfront as kind of a one-time thing and just make sure all our business info is accurate on all the important directories. I think local specific directories sometimes get missed. In every industry, there’s typically some type of local specific directory. So in storage, we have a website called sparefoot and rent cafe that are directories that list a bunch of storage facilities.

In legal, there’s tons of these and really every industry there is. So actually making sure you’re getting listed on those as well is really important. And that’s gonna get you very, very far in the Maps. To rank high in the organic, the biggest things we focus on are website content. So making sure you have the right pages. I think a mistake I see is if you’re operating in multiple cities, only having one service page.

So if we’re like a dentist and we’re doing teeth whitening and we operate in a few different cities. We want to make sure we have a teeth whitening page in all of those cities. So instead of just having one, it’s very difficult to get that one page to rank in seven different cities because it’s just not really going to be relevant. So making sure you have your core pages built out. Usually the first thing I look at and it’s often missed. So that’s going to get you very far.

And then link building is always the hardest part of SEO for local businesses. But long term, you do need to have a link building strategy, and we could get into that as well. But it’s another one of those long-term things you’re gonna wanna be chipping away at every month.

Andrew:

I have a couple of follow ups again with regard to managing directories or listings where your business appears just to have that NAP data be consistent. Do you use some tool because there’s just so many different directories depending on what you’re targeting. Is it national or local? So do you use some tools that help you out just to make sure that it is consistent across the web?

John:

That’s always a good question there. I’m doing it manually versus using the tools. A lot of the tools out there now are nice because they can do a lot of the work for you where you submit your business information once essentially, and it pushes it out to a lot of directories. So SE Ranking has a tool that I use that does that. Yext, Bright Local, BirdEye, there’s a few different ones out there that have that feature, but it is important. If you’re doing this for clients, it just makes it much easier if you’re using tools like that.

If it’s your own business, it still makes it easier. It’s gonna take you a lot of time to build them manually, but you can go that route and try to do it manually if you want. But yeah, the software and tools now make this a lot easier than it used to be.

Andrew:

And another question is a follow up regarding the reviews. 10 years ago when people just realized that reviews are important but still weren’t ready to build a consistent, maybe ongoing relationship with the reviews—and I remember businesses just like you said, they pay somebody, they get, I don’t know, hundred reviews in a week. Like everything is good, but you can sort of see that they’re not active all the time. And right now I feel like businesses are, not businesses, but people are more used to having this consistent review process in place.

So I think it already gained a lot more traction, but like I remember 10 years ago when people were talking about the importance of reviews, it was just like, you know, just checking a box because like nobody was used to the process. I feel like right now it has changed completely.

John:

It has, yeah. And the other aspect of reviews that sometimes gets overlooked, because we’re focused on SEO, is just the conversion impact. A lot of times, and you might not see this anywhere in the data, but when somebody looks at your reviews, they’re a lot more likely to actually do whatever the conversion is, whether it’s a phone call or submitting your form.

If you don’t have any reviews or you don’t have many and your competitors have all the reviews, sometimes you still might get a click. They still might visit your website, but that could be a big reason why you’re not getting the conversions and the leads you want to see is because you just don’t have those reviews built up.

Everyone now will check reviews before they reach out to you, before they contact you. So it goes beyond SEO. There’s a lot of impact from really making sure that’s a core part of your business every month.

Andrew:

In your experience, how much of a change of a factor are Google updates, like search algorithm updates? Do they just up and end your whole strategy every time something comes out or do you focus on something that helps you once again become sustainable? And I realize that this is the topic of today’s event. So I’m guessing you’re going to give us a sustainable answer to this. So once again, just with regard to the storm that Google always stirs up, how do you weather that storm?

John:

Yeah, and think it’s important to stay up to date on those things. I do think a lot of times they get overblown for local businesses. Not to say those algorithm updates don’t impact local businesses, but the style of SEO we’re doing, we’re not really doing like mass content production for like really broad keywords and a ton of link building to that degree where a lot of those websites we see get hit.

Also, we see a lot of affiliate style websites that are just selling advertising that don’t really have another underlying business behind it, they tend to get hit more, at least from what I’m seeing.

So a lot of our local businesses don’t typically have to worry as much. Now there’s always something you could react to, but as long as you’re doing the foundational things and you’re real business, you’re operating, you’re getting reviews, you’re building the right content for your websites, you’re doing those tactics, we don’t typically see clients or really anyone that we work with take a big step back or even minor ones typically, but it’s still good to stay up to date on those things.

Sometimes you will find something that will impact the strategy, but when we used to work with more B2B clients and more like national brands, we used to see a little more impact because some of the strategies we were doing on those were more like content production heavy versus like these local intent keywords that are very like someone’s really looking for a local business. Those are the type of keywords we’re targeting versus informational ones where we find that’s where a lot of those algorithm updates tend to hit.

Andrew:

What content works best in local SEO strategies? Maybe it depends on the business, but I just want to figure out with regard to your experience.

John:

Yeah, we’ve really stripped down our content process over the last couple of years for local businesses where we used to be more blog heavy, now really what we do in phase one is make sure we have the service plus city pages all built out.

So for every service they offer in any city they offer, we actually create landing pages and sort of like service pages for those. So we’re combining the service with the city. So for storage, for example, we might have a storage units in New York City page. And then if they offer climate control storage, we might actually have a separate page for that.

And then same thing with RV or boat storage, combining that with the city. And if they offer that product or service in another city, we’ll do the same thing and create a new page for those.

We find those convert the best and it’s kind of like the highest intent keywords we try to capture first. Assuming you have those built out, then we do shift into some blog production. We don’t put a ton of budget to it, but the blogs we tend to do, like the main purpose for us, for local businesses is typically it makes backlink building a little easier. Because we could drive some backlinks to those blog posts that are a little bit easier to secure backlinks versus the service pages.

And then we could do some internal linking on those two, like linking back to the specific service pages. We don’t tend to get a ton of traffic or like really drive a lot of like keyword rankings from, from blogs for local businesses, but it does have some purpose. And we’re still trying to evaluate the impact of this on building local relevance in an area on like, if you write blogs about that city that you’re in, we’ll do that occasionally, but we don’t see a ton of impact from that anymore.

One tactic for blogs that’s actually working well, it’s an old one, but we’re doing this for storage companies. We’re starting to write articles on like the 10 best moving companies in their area. And really then we could just reach out to every moving company we featured on the list and ask them if they want to link to it because they got featured. So that’s like an old strategy that’s sort of making a comeback in local industry. So a lot of those requests aren’t going out as much as they used to. So this is one thing we’ve been experimenting with the last few months.

Andrew:

Do you create events that the media would cover? Do you build up additional demand in your service, for example? Maybe write specific articles that say like, OK, maybe you wanted to store your stuff somewhere like one place and you just tell them that, OK, this is a solution, sort of like an artificial demand generation. Is that any part of your strategy?

John:

We sort of have a take on that with creating some pages that have a lot of data and statistics on them. We find some of those build like natural links. So if you were doing an article on like, we should use New York City again, like New York City population statistics and make an article on that. If you can get that to rank, a lot of people that are writing articles will Google that term and then just link to you as a source.

So we have experimented with that a little bit for storage and for some of my actual own agency too. It can work still. We do see, yeah, once those start ranking, you kind of create it once and it does pick up natural backlinks over time. You just sort of have to find the right keywords that you can potentially compete for. And then if there’s enough searches happening, that’s kind of the main sort of like almost PR kind of angle we take the content is mostly like statistics and data type articles. And then those do still work pretty well.

Andrew:

With regard to customer reviews, I want to go back to that again. I just really want to focus on what tricks or tips that you have to help get quality, authentic reviews. Once again, based on your experience, what works best?

John:

So, a lot of it is just consistently asking. When we work with clients, a lot of them will ask maybe once and kind of get discouraged that nobody left a review and then they’ll wait like another two months before they do it again.

So a lot of it is just making sure it’s a part of your business and you have a process built in, whether it’s your manager at the location or somebody’s responsibility is to ask for reviews from every customer. So that’s kind of the first thing, just make sure you’re doing it consistently and over a long enough time, you will get reviews and don’t get discouraged.

But for storage, what we see is a lot of times when the customer moves in, so they don’t even actually have their stuff in yet, but they’ve paid for the unit. It’s a good time to ask right then and there. A lot of times that they had a good experience just purchasing it and going through the customer service process. Some of them will leave a good review and the timing is kind of nice as they’re moving into it.

So that’s usually when you get a new customer in general, if you feel like it makes sense to ask, it’s worth it. There are tools, the tools are hit or miss. Sometimes they help. Some of the tools will automatically like text or send out an email to customers and then they fill out a form first. So if they leave a negative review, it might not actually get posted to Google. So you could sort of filter through it. There’s different tools like that.

But I find the key thing is just making sure you’re asking consistently and somebody at your company owns that process and they’re responsible for making sure they’re asking enough customers. It shouldn’t really be your agency or your consultant you’re working with. It really should be, and they can help and give guidance, but you really need someone in your business every day working with customers that their responsibility is to ask and try to get the customer to do it right then and there when they’re talking to them.

Andrew:

Is it a normal practice to ask people to include a couple of keywords in that review?

John:

So that’s always tricky and we do try to do that. Sometimes like the way you ask that you can do it and say like, hey, mention your treatment or the product you purchased in the review. You can sort of guide. I find you have to, if you know the customer well and you have a good relationship with them, those are the ones I would ask the more specific like, hey, can you take a photo and then maybe talk about the specific treatment or service in the review? That can work.

If you feel like there’s a high likelihood they may not leave the review, I think it’s good to just try to get them to do the review and not add an extra step.

But when you can do that, it’s worth trying. And sort of if you just kind of guide them to mention your city name or the product, a lot of times they’ll do that then.

Andrew:

Yeah, I guess people are maybe not just as excited to get a storage unit than just getting a puppy. So, yeah, I realize that connection there just doesn’t feel like they’ve maybe won something or just don’t feel that they’re as excited. But yeah, definitely, it’s good to always try to get reviews from people.

The next question is with regard to just mobile devices. People are finding businesses on the phone most of the time. Is there anything that you take into account specifically with regard to mobile devices to help businesses rank mobile devices, whatever you have to comment with regards to using mobile devices, AMP pages or whatever you have to comment on that. We would love to know what helps you get the job done in local SEO.

John:

Yeah, mobile is obviously critical in local majority of even in self storage. Now we’re seeing that are booking storage units are calling or is coming from mobile. And a lot of times it’s easy to overlook that in the design process with your website. A lot of times we focus on the desktop, on the layout, but we don’t actually always pay as close attention to mobile, which you should be paying even more attention to it.

So what we found with some clients is the ability to rent a unit on mobile was pushed solo down the page because the other customer reviews, the other modules were stacking on top of it. So we had, think we were using Microsoft Clarity for heat maps on that. And we could see that like 90% of people were not scrolling to where the actual part to rent the units were.

So for conversions, it’s really important to make sure whatever your main conversion is, it’s ideally above the fold, as high up as possible on mobile, and it’s also easy because in storage, a lot of the checkout processes, it’s come a long way over the last few years, were very complex and really lengthy. It would be forms that might be like 50 fields and really on mobile, streamlining that when it’s possible. I’m just making it really easy to check out and purchase a unit that started to happen in storage, which has been good.

I think in other local industries, if you just have an inquiry form or a phone call option, just making sure that’s really easy to do. And then really look at your design is like the key information you want somebody to see easy to get on mobile or is it pushed all the way down? That’s the biggest impact we see. And a lot of times when you look at your desktop design, it looks very good when it goes into mobile, there could be some small mistakes that you’re not noticing if you’re not really paying attention.

So some of those heat map tools are nice to help evaluate it, but you can also use Google Analytics and see like conversion rates on mobile. If those are lower than desktop or vice versa, that can cause you to dig in a little bit more, but most mostly mobile for optimization. We’re really just looking at the design and the layout of the pages.

Andrew:

When your clients try to understand the value of your work, what metrics or what KPIs do you focus on to help them understand where you’re going in the right direction? Do you also have to do a lot of educational work with regard to helping your clients understand what SEO is all about? So there are just two parts. Let’s talk about educating your clients. And the other part is the metrics that you sort of point out once they know what you’re talking about.

John:

Yeah, you do have to educate. I think that’s a big part of it because SEO can sort of be mysterious to a lot of people. Like a lot of times it could mean a lot of different things to different people. Sometimes we’ll work with someone and their mind SEO meant something different. So it’s really important as you send work over, you’re also kind of explaining, and giving some context and also sifting through like what’s gonna move the needle and what’s not.

So I do think everything we do when we present to a client or send them something, there is a level of education as we’re showing them the work we’re doing. So a lot of companies will be very vague and they won’t be very transparent. That’s something we see pretty commonly in storage for marketing. So we take the opposite approach where we actually show everything, all of our templates, all of our processes, even if it’s a lot for a client to take in, we’ll still simplify it and just give them the high level of what these things mean.

So very important, especially for client retention. If your clients don’t really know what you’re doing and they’re not sure, that’s a very good way to lose clients quickly over time is just even if they’re not, they don’t have to be experts. They just kind of need to know what you’re doing, what the impact is going to be. So very important to educate as you’re doing this.

As far as metrics, I like to start with business metrics, always first. And for storage, that’s going to be move-ins, how many people are moving into units and phone calls really. Those are the two things we want to see. I guess online rentals, online rentals and phone calls kind of lead to move-ins.

So we always like to start with that, is what we’re doing actually impacting those metrics. Sometimes with SEO, that’s not gonna happen within a few weeks or a month. So then that’s where we have to start looking at some other metrics. Like typically the first thing that we’ll see move is keyword rankings. So we do track that in the Maps and the organic, especially if they’re not ranking at all. Fairly quickly, you can go from page 10 to page four or page three. So we’ll track that and you won’t see a business impact from that, but there is some movement to show we’re going in the right direction.

Then we’ll typically look at like organic traffic over time, sometimes impressions too, just to see are those metrics moving in the right direction. But ultimately as quickly as we can, we want to get to the point where we’re seeing the business metrics improve and then really focusing on that. Are we getting, only are we making more money over time from the SEO efforts?

Andrew:

What are the biggest pitfalls that can stop all the processes that we have built? Is it just not showing up one of the days and just sort of thinking that it’s a one time, set-it-and-forget-it approach? Is that one of the biggest mistakes that people can make or is there anything else that you’ve noticed people struggle with getting their local business more visible in search?

John:

I think you know that it is the set it and forget it. I think it’s kind of a mindset thing as well. Part of like, if you don’t really understand how SEO works, that’s where the education comes in to get clients understand what’s realistic for results, how does the process work and to get them to buy into it. I find if someone doesn’t believe in it, like at a core level, it’s very hard ultimately to make that work long-term, because they’re just gonna be quick to pull the trigger at the first chance they get when they don’t see dramatic increases.

So you really need to do a good job of setting expectations, explaining the process. Because I think sometimes people are quick to cut it because SEO is more of a long-term in nature kind of thing versus turning an ad on and you immediately get some traffic right away. So that’s a big mistake I see.

And the set-it-and-forget-it is another one. There’s a lot of companies or other vendors I’ve seen that sort of like teach clients that it is more of a one-time thing. Because it’s sort of just like an easy upsell for them because their core business is actually something else. It’s we sell software or we make websites, but we’ll also do your SEO for a little bit of money.

Those usually don’t work well because those companies aren’t really built to do the service there. So if their core business isn’t doing SEO services and that’s just an add on, I’d be very skeptical and I would ask them a lot of questions, really dig into their service more and what exactly they’re going to be doing. Because we get a lot of clients that work with companies like that and then they kind of have a negative mindset towards SEO because it didn’t work. They thought they were going to get more than they actually got.

So some of it’s mindset and some of it is knowing that SEO is not a one-time thing that you just build into your website and you never do anything again. It’s sort of evolving and it’s more of the consistency over a long period of time where you’re really going to get the results. So yeah, kind of explaining that and getting everyone bought in on the same page is pretty key.

Andrew:

What about social media? What kind of a tool is it for you with regard to local businesses? Is it a tool for just having an engagement or is it a big way of capitalizing on specifically local visibility when using social media? How would you integrate social media into SEO strategy? What is the best way? Well, I realize that it depends on SEO, but with your experience, how would you suggest?

John:

Yeah, social media is an interesting one for storage. We kind of, and just local in general, we like to have clients have at least like a base level of activity on their profiles just so they’re not completely empty.

Depending on budget, the larger clients we work with that have a big brand with a lot of locations all over the US, they tend to have some more budget to actually invest in social media the right way.

I find the smaller local businesses, they sort of have to get a little scrappy and kind of do it themselves because they’re not always going to get a big ROI hiring an agency to do their social media.

So I do find depending on the client’s budget and their brand, it could make sense to invest there. What I’m really high on right now is like short form video for local businesses. We don’t actually offer that, but we’re starting to see the people that can do that right. They have a big advantage and there’s not a lot of competition there because it’s very hard to do that correctly and in an engaging way for local businesses.

So if you have the resources or the skill set to experiment with that and really do that in the right way where you’re making videos that are entertaining and you could kind of build up the audience. We have seen some companies do extremely well with that. It’s something I’m still trying to learn about and look into, but I found it’s very hard to do that right and at a high level.

So for some businesses, they probably be better spent focusing on SEO and advertising first. But once you kind of get those things dialed in, your business is growing. I do think it is good to get a head on, because especially with the next few years, that’s only going to get more important.

Andrew:

Besides the occasional AI generated social media post, is there any actual way to strongly benefit from using AI in the local business? What we’ve been talking about today, I only think, you take a picture, you talk about the actual stuff. Is there any way to speed up the process, streamline it using AI in your experience?

John:

Yeah, yeah, think there is. We’re starting to use AI more and just into our own internal processes. I think it does, if you give it the right information, it does speed things up.

So if you’re optimizing a page, sometimes you can write in your own title tags, meta descriptions, and then sort of ask AI to also give you additional ideas that you may not have thought of. I like when it gives me multiple options instead of just telling it to do one thing. If it’s going to write a title tag for you, have it do 10, and that can jumpstart your process on actually like refining. You definitely can use it and you should.

Also for brainstorming ideas, it’s pretty helpful. We can kind of go back and forth with it. If there’s a new marketing angle or idea you’re working on, I find that’s pretty effective. And then also feeding it data too. If you’re looking at your reporting and you want to try to get some extra insights, actually feeding in all the data and seeing what the AI tools are going to give you. A lot of times, you get a few ideas that you might not have thought of.

So local businesses should be looking at it and they should be starting to see like where can they incorporate that into their process. I would just be careful of just having AI do everything. There are some local businesses that will just basically, yeah, try and have AI do everything, have very minimal oversight. They’re not feeding it anything to make the result better. So you definitely have to work with it, but it is something that can really improve efficiency right now for sure.

Andrew:

Alright, John. My last question is, if you wanted our listeners to walk away with just one take away from this discussion about building a sustainable local SEO strategy, what would it be?

John:

So for sustainability, it’s again, having just the right mindset and thinking long-term in nature, how this is a long-term investment that’s going to continue to grow and compound over time when you’re working on your SEO. So really have that mindset going in, and then that’s going to guide the decisions you make.

If you have more of a short-term mindset, you’re looking for the quick fix. All the decisions you make on your campaign are going to be backed to that, which is going to impact the results and change what you see long-term.

So it really starts with just having the right mindset behind it. And then your decisions you make will be ultimately the right ones that’ll get you the most results over the long term.

Andrew:

Thank you, John. I’m going to do the outro and say that today John Reinesch shared with us his insights on how to build a sustainable local SEO strategy. I hope our listeners are inspired and are already coming up with ideas on how to make the most of John’s insights.

Thank you, John, for making the time to be here with us and share your insights with your expertise with our community. And to our listeners, thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to the DoFollow Podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode.