There’s a lot of noise surrounding your local SEO strategy. Not only will you hear about the nuances of specific websites, but your to-do list can become quickly flooded with tasks that aren’t relative to the big picture. However, none of this will even matter if you ignore your competitors.
How to Conduct an Ambitious Analysis for Local SEO Strategy
There are some important things that a competitive analysis will take into consideration three main factors. It’s important to know what each of these is and understand their importance.
Compare Proximity
Your competition may rank higher simply because they’re located closer to the location that’s being searched for. To see if this matters, look at the top result’s location in comparison to yours. If you and your competitors are Service Area Businesses (SABs), you can’t check the distance between their address and the city center, but you should note the distance between your business and the city center, especially if you’re struggling to grow your local rankings. You may notice that this is happening because you’re located too far away from your set location to be able to rank there, so you’ll need to change your targeted area.
While working on your local SEO strategy, you may wish to conduct a more thorough analysis of proximity. This type of analysis should be done whenever you look at distance, on-page strategy, and GBP, but you still are unable to determine why your competition is ranking so well. With this type of audit, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of all the factors that impact proximity-based rankings within your area.
Assess Google Business Profile (GBP) Optimization
Your local SEO strategy is vital because everyone wants to be within the top three positions of Google’s Local Pack. This is something that your competition will pay a lot of attention to because it appears at the very top of Google’s search results pages (SERPs). When you look at this, there are some important ranking factors that you’ll want to take into consideration. These include the business’ name, the primary category that it’s listed under, and the number and type of reviews it has that are visible on its profile. If you want to view any additional GBP categories, you’ll need to buy a tool to do so. You may wish to consider doing so because while you can see the main ranking factors on your competitor’s GBP, you’ll also want to see how much they’ve invested in the other features as well.
When you discover that your competitors are ranking mainly because of their reviews and location, you’ll need to adjust some of your GBP categories so that you can improve your Local Pack rankings. However, if your competition has fleshed out all the details of their GBP and is posting every week you should know that it may take a lot of effort to outrank them.
Ultimately, the GBP part of your local SEO strategy is meant to update your users by giving them as much information about your business as possible. Although rankings are great, it’s more important to keep your customers informed about your business across all communication channels.
Check out the Local Pack Top Results.
There are typically two types of sites that are linked to your competitors’ websites from GBP. If your competitor only has one location, then you’ll see their homepage. However, if your competitor has more than one location, you’ll see their location page. You should be able to easily distinguish between these because their content will be different. Regardless of which one you discover, you’ll want to review it to see how much effort you’ll need to put into your website.
The Best Local SEO Strategy
Your best strategy will be unique to your market. Therefore, you’ll not only need to consider what your competition has done (e.g., linking, content optimization, physical real estate). Each time you do so, you’ll find that there are more tasks you need to add to your to-do list. This is where the Local SEO Tampa Company in Tampa, FL, can help you. We’ll start with a competitive analysis and then work to ensure that your website outshines your competition. Contact us today to get started.