Local SEO Tactics Top 5 Episodes of 2022 – 178

Jesse Dolan: Welcome back to local SEO tactics, where we bring you tips and tricks to get found online. I'm your host, Jesse Dolan, coming at you here with a top five episodes, kind of a year in review. Did this last year, was it episode number 142? If anybody wants to go back for our 2021 year in review. And this year I am joined, I'm not going to do this solo. I'm joined here by my good friend, Colonel E.H. Taylor. If you guys can see him all here in the camera, why don't you say, hi, Mr. Taylor? There we go. This is bourbon for anybody that might be listening, not watching. I'm a bourbon fan, E.H. Taylor, this stuff is great. So, here we are in between Christmas and New Year's, where every issue is a 2023 problem at this point. So, me and the colonel are going to get through this top five 2022 year in review here with you. There you go. Let's get this started off.

It's a quick recap. It was a great year for the show. Hopefully everybody listening out there has made some improvements in your SEO, checked off some boxes in your SEO journey, hopefully improved your business, and we've gotten a lot of great feedback this year with the show. A lot of people, excuse me, reaching out to us, leaving us some good reviews, and I think it was a pretty good year overall with that type of content that we put out there and the success that our audience had. We mixed in a lot of client interviews and case studies here, multiple episodes. I know back here in 2022, we had Keith Evans on episode 120, I'm sorry, episode 175 for his second interview, which was great. Adam Chronister, right before him, we had two SEO experts on back to back interviews.

Adam was on episode 174, which was also great. Terry Samuels was back. We had him on episode 168 here, which is great. Every time Terry's on we talk about schema, and look for some more collaborations and things with Terry in the future. He's one of the best that there is and love having him on the show. We also had TJ from our team on episode 165. So, man, that's a stretch, 165 through 175, there's 10 episodes there. A lot of great stuff. We had a lot of good stuff that we released between those. Earlier, another interview, Adam Leavings, another SEO expert, 148, so a lot of great interviews, which is something that we tried to do a lot more of this year with other SEO experts. If you have anybody you want us to interview, if there's somebody else you're listening to that you think would be a great collaboration to come on our show and cross the stream so to speak, let us know. Reach out to us, localseotactics.com. Now, at the bottom, you can contact us.

And also, I got to go on to the MyDigitalFarmer podcast with Corinna Bench back in July. That was great too, talking about SEO, and that was one of the first ones where I've gone on to another show and talking about SEO. So, that was really fun, and looking forward to more collaboration with Corinna as we go in the future. So, let's get into it. We've got five episodes lined up here for you. These are our best of 2022 by way of stats, responses, downloads, listens, plays, things like that. We compile them, sifted through them and got the best of the best according to everybody else out there. And so, without delay, let's get into the episodes here.

Here we have episode 156, talking on-page optimization tips for success. This episode is great. It dives into how you have to optimize your pages for the intent and the thing that you want to be found for, a combination of that, and that optimization is granular in page by page. If you want to stand out from the millions of billions of pages that are out there, you have to take these things into account. So, here's a quick snippet, a good chunk from episode 156, getting into the meat of things. But, here we're just going to revisit how to optimize an individual page. What are the key things that you want to be looking for on that page? What are the key areas that you want to optimize on that page? This is going to apply to every page on your website that you want to get ranked, your product pages, your service pages, even your homepage to an extent.

Although as we've talked before, you don't really want your homepage to be the main ranking page on your website. That's more of a gateway. However, your homepage will rank for various things, so you do want to keep those things in mind and attack this in that same way. So, one thing that is predicated, overlaying all of this is, you don't want to be spammy. I'm going to go through some areas here that you want to optimize, that you want to work your keyword into, or related keywords, similar things there. You don't want to be spammy, you don't want to worry about keyword density or getting the exact phrase in every single one of these and things like that. We're going to point out the areas that are special on the page that you want to give some attention to. And we say give attention to, it means be intentional. Using the words that are your keyword, that are related to your keyword and being specific.

You don't want to waste these areas with generic texts or texts that really doesn't have anything to do with what you want to be ranked for. So, that being said, again, write in good proper grammar, good readability, not being spammy, and have your intent in mind for all of these. So, with that, first thing you're really going to want to think about here is, what is the intent of this page? Are you creating a page that's promoting your product, or service, or your company, maybe the service area that you're in, where you serve, where pull clients from? Is this a how-to page? Are you presenting information in a how-to, in a step-by-step type fashion? Is this a white paper? Very informational, stats, facts, things like that. If that's on the page, think about how that's going to be presented.

Is this a story? Is this a list, a top 10 list, a top three list, a top seven list? Three things to remember when, or five things to do before you blank, things like that. Keep those things in mind and have a rough idea and outline of how the page is going to be presented. We're not going to be talking about how to creatively write a page, or how to present a good page in that sense, but it is important that you think about that. Because, if I'm putting together a page that's a how-to, or a top three, or stats and facts about whatever the topic is, I want to make sure that my intent of that page and that description of that page shows through in some of these key areas.

First area to pay attention to here is going to be your page title. More often than not, that's the top link that's going to show in the Google search results. And I don't mean the top, like the number one ranking. When your webpage is showing in the Google results, you're going to see a page title and then a snippet description of content on that page. That page title is going to be the headline for your page on Google. If you have a how-to, or a top three, or whatever the intent of your page is, that should be communicated in that page title somehow. So, when people are scrolling through the results, if you're looking for something that is a guide, I want to see that that's a guide, or a how-to, or step-by-step right in that page title.

You're going to get the click. Even if you're not ranked at the top, people are going to see that you're providing the type of information that they want, and you're going to get that click, and over time that's going to help your rankings and improve your rankings for that particular keyword, that query, and that type of intent. So, think about the page you're constructing and make sure in your page title, you're presenting that forward, mixed in with the keywords. If it's a top three list on how to get ready for the spring for landscaping, not just, hey, spring landscaping preparations, but top three things to do, or a how-to, and things like that. Have that be part of your page title. In addition to that, your meta-description, although not always shown now in the Google search results, is something that can be shown in the search results and needs to have that similar tone and similar context and similar intent shining through.

A pro tip here, when you insert your meta-description on your page, that's something you want to be intentional for. Also, try to have that be within the first paragraph of your page if possible, or somewhere high on the page. We often find that Google will rewrite the description, the snippet that is shown in search results to fit the intent. Maybe it'll pull a better portion from your page, or maybe even rewrite it a little bit. But, we find that if you want to try to force that description, having it be your actual meta-description that you're inputting in the page and be an actual paragraph towards the top of that page has a higher degree of success that you can control what Google's showing there. So, same thing there. Make sure the intent comes through. Make sure the keywords are in there, and here's where you can sprinkle in a few more keywords.

Your page title, you're going to want to keep it short and sweet, very relevant. Your description, you have more of a full on sentence or two that you can use in that area and make sure, again, that that tone really shines through with that. Those are the two main things that you're going to want to put a little energy and thought into, because before somebody even gets to your webpage, that's what they're going to see in Google. So, these are big SEO ranking factors, but in addition to that, they're CTR, or click-through rate, or conversion factors, getting somebody from Google onto your webpage. Just keep that in mind. All right, now we're on the actual page here. We're going to get a little bit more technical going through some of the page structure and how we're going to want to see that laid out.

So, your page title, you're going to want your keyword in your page title. In addition to that, your main headline, your H1, A, should be at the top of the page, hopefully the first thing that's on the page for human beings and Google to be able to scrape and read. You're going to want your keyword and a similar statement in that. Some people like to match whatever my page title is, I want that to be the H1. You can do that. I would have them be closely matched if they're not identical. Sometimes that doesn't make sense for it to be identical at the top of your page. Sometimes you maybe even have your page title B, your H1 within WordPress, depending on your theme and things like that. But, you're going to want to carry the same keywords and the same intent into your H1, so when people hit that page, they know they're in the right spot.

You're communicating to Google that these keywords and this intent of the page is very important. It's your primary headline. Again, if you think about it, newspaper, that's the headline at the top, tells you what this entire page is about, and the content underneath it should be related to that as well. So, make sure your H1 is very descriptive with your keyword and the intent. Likewise, your additional sub-headings as you go down the page should play off that as well. Here's where you can work in that keyword again, like your H2s, your H3s, or related keywords, things like that. Wherever you're using a headline, don't use it just for graphical reasons, if that's even the right word for it, I don't know, but aesthetics and design. Understand that when you're making content on your page, a headline, whether it's an H1, H2, H3, or whatever, you're calling that out to Google, and any bot that scrapes your website saying, this is important.

Again, just like a newspaper, this isn't just regular old text. This is a headline or a sub-headline. It carries extra weight. Make sure that when you're typing that and inputting that into your page, you think about it in that regard. Be very intentional with the words that you're putting into your headlines, your H tags. Now, as you go underneath each headline, you're going to have usually a photo, maybe a video along with the supporting text, and we want that same convention to follow suit. If you had your headline up at the top, right underneath that, if you have a photo, you're going to want to make sure the name of that, the actual file name has that keyword in there and matches that same intent and that same topic of your headline. Same if it's a video, hopefully the URL of that video, if you're linking to it on YouTube, the title of that, just again, some things come through and use those same keywords.

And then, the text that's underneath that. Again, you have your headline, photo or video, and now text, should all be about the same topic, have the same context and intent, and should contain your keyword within that as well. We would definitely want to see the keyword being in the first sentence or two of that supporting text, so Google's seeing it right away, and human beings are seeing that right away too, kind of catch you, make you aware that you're in the right spot, and connect the dots with that. Now, as we go through the text, and this is going to be generally speaking on the entire page, not just this first paragraph right after your headline, you're going to want to flex any special text that you can on the page.

So, here we're talking about bold, italics, underline, things like that. If you think about it, you have all this content on the page, you have this text on the page, the body text of your page, of your post, whatever it is, of your article. If you put something in bold, that means that it's special. You're calling it out. If you put something in italics, that's special, you're calling it out, things like that. So, leverage that for your exact keyword or for related keywords, things that are around it that you want to build context for. Make sure you're taking advantage of those. You're telling Google that this is special, it's bold, things like that. Another area that you're going to want to leverage on these pages is lists, whether they be bullet pointed lists, numbered lists, things like that. Again, as Google's reading this page, they can see that your list is special. It's not regular text. It's a list. Put your keyword in that list. Put related keywords in that list.

If there's steps, if you have a big article or how-to, if there's a bunch of paragraphs and steps, make sure you have a summary that just, here's the five steps that we're going to break down in order. There's lots of ways to incorporate lists and bulleted lists and number of lists into your content, and you want to take advantage of that, and make sure your keyword is in those. As you get further down the page, FAQs maybe towards the bottom, we like to mix those in towards the bottom of pages usually, a great way to expand on content, maybe even provide some internal linking to other parts of your website. If you have some FAQs where you're answering questions about the topic that your page is developed around, maybe you have another page that continues on to something related, and that's part of an FAQ.

You can embed, excuse me, you can embed internal links within those FAQs, and it's a very natural process to read, and those internal links are also something that's going to be important for your website. That's how you start to maybe silo pages, draw intent, and provide relationships between those pages to Google, so as it reads your content and crawls your page, it can spider out and find more information and develop that backstory, that context, if you will. So, try to embed those somewhere in your page where it's relevant. You don't want to overdo it, just sprinkle it in a couple here and there where it makes sense and where it adds value. If you think about it as a reader, would this be a great place to jump over and continue this slot? That's on a related topic. Again, that's why we prefer FAQs for doing that. It's just an easy way to do that there. All right, back here with the colonel.

We'll set you up here for episode number 152, easy website updates to improve local SEO for Google Maps. If you paid attention to our show and if you're in the SEO space for your business working on this, you know that Google Maps is important. In this episode 152, we talk about using specific pages to link to your GBP instead of your homepage. Great tips in here. Check out the meat at this episode right here. Another thing you're going to want to do here is, have all of your expected location information, I guess, is the best way to phrase it, and contact information on the page. So, if you're a service area business, you're not going to be having your address on the GBP page of your website. You're going to hide that. You're just going to say, this is the area we serve, or maybe mention the actual city.

If you're a retail store, of course, you're going to list your address. All businesses, you're going to have business hours, phone number, maybe an email address, directions if you're a retail store or if people come to you. So, just think about that contact information, that location information. What would be expected for your clients and your customers to see on that page? What are they going to be looking for? What's useful? What's valuable in that regard? Make sure that's included on your page. Again, there's no particular spot to put this. Just work it into your content. Make sure it looks good. Make sure it's in a spot where people would be looking for it. Some people like to put that all at the very bottom of your website, in the footer, as long as it's well laid out and accessible and just flows with the page, there's nothing wrong with that.

We just want to make sure that, that location information, that contact information, all of it is on this GBP page. And also, that should match up with the information that's on your GBP. Whatever phone number is in your profile, make sure that's the phone number in your webpage. Hours of operation, make sure they match up with what's on your webpage. If you are showing your address, make sure it's the same address that's in your profile and match up with your webpage. So, get all that location information and contact information on your page as well. Now, you're also going to want to have a couple lists on this page. And when I say lists, I mean actual ordered or unordered lists. Not just typing out this stuff in a sentence, but having a bullet pointed list on your webpage of a few different things here.

The reason we want to do the bullet pointed list is because, when we use it as a list, if you think of Google being a bot, being a program and algorithm, it's scraping and it's reading the information on your page and it's processing it. When we do things like put items in a list, we're making them more special. If that's proper English or grammar, I don't know, but we're making these things more special than the regular text that's on the page by putting it into a list, by putting into bullet points. So, you're going to want to put a bullet pointed list of the primary services that you provide on this GBP page. How is that formatted? What does it look like? Is it one column, three columns? How many things are in there? Completely up to you, and defined by what it is you're providing for the products and services at this location.

If you're a multi-location business and you're applying this, you're having multiple GBPs, multiple inner pages, each GBP should only link to one page and vice versa. Only one GBP should be linking to each page in that regard. If you have different products and services at your different locations, make sure these lists are unique to those locations and they're truly accurate. Same thing here, if you are providing products and services, you'll have a spot in your Google Business profile to list those products and services. These things should match up. Not that it has to be explicitly identical, but the things you're listing in your services and products for your GBP should be the things you're listing in these bullet pointed lists on the page that GBP links to, to sync that up. So, in addition to the products and services, I mentioned there's a couple of lists that we want. Another one of them is the cities and locations that you serve.

If you are a service area business, or even if you're a retail or a storefront business, if you go on site and serve clients at their locations, you're going to want to make sure you mention those cities, those suburbs, those zip codes, those counties, those states, whatever your territory in your region, your scope is, call that out on this webpage that your GBP links to. Again, you're going to have a spot in your GBP profile where you can list your service area and make references to this within your Google profile. You're going to want to sync that stuff together, be talking the same things there. If you are a retail location and you don't go out and serve clients at their location, that's fine. Think about this on your webpage. Think about the communities that you serve. How far will people drive from their suburb or from their city to you? You probably have that already in your head. Make sure you put those references, those geographic locations into a list on your page. Now, don't go crazy here.

One of the things with ranking your Google Business profile is, if you take, let's say Minneapolis, Minnesota, again, we're up in Minnesota, I always use Minneapolis. If you go to Google and you do a search for Minneapolis, Minnesota, Google's going to show you what it considers Minneapolis. You're not going to want to try to list cities that are too far away. You're going to have a hard time ranking in cities other than Minneapolis, if that's where you're located. We're not going to be doing St. Cloud, which is a couple of hours away. You're not going to put suburbs of St. Cloud on the same page. You're not targeting St. Cloud. You really got to work in your own backyard and work out from there from a geographic standpoint.

So, put your list of your services and products on your GBP page, I actually phrased that probably bad for everybody, on the page that your GBP links to. We refer to that internally here at Intrycks as the GBP page on your website. List your products and services on there in bullet points. List the city's location, whatever it is, geographic references that you serve, or go to, or the community at broad on your website as well. And that's going to draw, now not only the keywords for the products and services, but also the locations. So, as people are doing auto repair in Minneapolis, radiator repair in Minneapolis, all that's coming together on your page. These keywords are all on your page there, and they're in a natural listing, so to speak. They're in bullet pointed list. You're not just cramming these keywords in content and making it look artificial. This is a pretty natural way to go about it.

Another thing you're definitely going to want to do that we see a lot of people missing on this is, you're going to want to link to your Google Business profile from this page on your website. So, whereas your GBP, again, like we said earlier here, you can link to your website, i.e., this webpage we're talking here from the Google Business profile, we want to do it the other way. We want to link on this page back to your Google Business profile. A couple ways to do that, you can embed the GBP on there, have a map that's shown, even just literally putting a link. Check us out on Google, or leave us a review on our Google Business profile, whatever it is. You can go into your GBP dashboard and find the link that you can copy and paste right into your website to be able to do this.

So, you can get a little sophisticated with it if you want, or you can just paste the link in there with some text and direct people. Either way, we just want a link from your webpage to your GBP. That's what we're looking for here. Last thing on here that we want to talk about is, make sure you are putting reviews from your GBP, as in copying and pasting them onto your webpage. There are different widgets and gidgets and plug-ins that you can get that'll automatically pull those in and list them on the page. You can use that, but that's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is actually taking the text, inputting it onto the page, creating an area that says, reviews, testimonials, or what our happy clients have to say, whatever it is. Pick three, five, seven, however many you want, depends on the design of your page, but put those on your webpage.

Now, here for privacy or how you work with your clients, it's going to be up to you. Do you use their names? Do you link to their profiles? How much exposure you want to give to them? Do you have to ask their permission? Things like that. What we're wanting to do here is make sure we're calling out a spot on the page for reviews, or actually using the actual text from the Google Business profile, from the actual reviews left, copying those, putting them onto your webpage to, again, tie that content in with Google and have it all work really good together. So, like I said, there's other things we're going to build on with this later. I guess, if I'm trying to impress one thing on you here it's that, you should have an inner page in your website, not your homepage, that your GBP is linking to, and you want to do things in concert on your GBP and this webpage.

The things you're talking about, the things Google gives you to fill out, the fields, the options, things like that in your GBP. You want to be talking, and creating, and listing those same things back on this webpage that you're linking to. Link these things together and have them be kind of married together. What you're going to see when you do this is, yes, the actual webpage itself should start to get a little bit better ranking, but the overall goal here is, we're trying to power up your GBP page and have that thing start to rank for some of those services or products that you put into that list that weren't there before.

Your business category, the primary keyword that you now have in your H1 in your page title, things like that, you'll start to see maybe quickly, depending on your geographic area and the competition, maybe more over time, but you should definitely see some ranking improvements doing a few of these little tricks here. All right, hopefully that helps you guys and gals out. All right, so that was a good one. You can listen to all these episodes in their entirety. Here we're just giving you the best of a mashup, some snippets and the good chunks of these particular episodes. Take a sip here. Let me talk to Colonel Taylor again, help us get through this best of series.

If anybody hasn't tried it too, this is one of my favorites. If you're a bourbon fan or a whiskey fan, if you're new to it, I wouldn't jump right in. It's a little hot, high in the proof, but good stuff, and I was just looking for a reason to sip on some here, so this is perfect. All right, let's talk about the next episode here, number 144. What is schema, and why is it so important? Terry Samuels has been on for a number of interviews. And I mentioned him earlier here, what was it? He was on here episode, let me find the notes, 168 from this last year, and he's been on previous before that. This episode 144 is not something that features Terry Samuels, but we do talk about schema. Bob, Sue and myself are talking about what is it, and why is it important?

It's a great primer, and if you haven't dug into schema yet, definitely check out our Terry Samuels episodes, but check out this one here, episode 144 for a quick primer on why you should pay attention to schema. Schema, Sue, to your point, is extremely technical. It's right now, at least today, end of 2020, one of the more technical parts of your website and of SEO. We've had an expert on Terry Samuels a few times interview on this show here. And first thing, I want to refer everybody to episodes 76 and 77 of our podcast. Go to localseotactics.com and search for those.

It was one interview that we did with Terry and it turned into a two-part interview because we got long on time, so we released it in two different segments. But, the entire episode is really about this question, what is schema? It's a basic introduction to schema, and so we're not going to do a deep dive into those exact same answers and in those topics, because Terry lays it out really good, but I think we need to highlight it and then demystify it for everybody a little bit here.

So, the point you made about business owners not knowing about this, I think is pretty valid. And one of the reasons for that is, you can't see the schema on your website. It's not a new image, or a headline, or animation or something else on page for you to see. Schema is all in the background. If anybody wants to see some of this, know what it is, go out to schema.org, S-C-H-E-M-A.org, and schema is really a common protocol that was developed by Google, Microsoft, a lot of the big search engines in a way to standardize some background communications on your website, for lack of a better way of saying it. And what it does is, it calls out certain elements, functions, features of your website. Example, Bob, that we use all the time in telling people is, if you have an event on your page, maybe you're a local bar and you're going to have a band playing or a block party next week, if you were to look at the page as a person, you can see a picture of the band, date, time, ticket price, everything else.

We can read that as humans and understand that. There's a date, there's a time, there's a ticket price, and we can put it all together. This is an event that's happening. Google reading that though, as a bot, reading the text and the information, they will see these elements. There's a date, there's a time, there's a ticket price, but they don't have that convention that this is an event, you know what I mean? That's a big assumption for them to make that these things mean it's an event versus a log, or a history, or something else. So, what schema does is, in the encoding on your website, on the backside, in this example, you call it out as this is an event and now those things that are inside of that are on that page now have the context of being an event. So, now Google can say, here's an event, here's the event date, the event time, the event location, event ticket price, who's involved in the event? Things like that.

So, schema is, and you're thinking about the word schema, it's an architecture, it's a design element, and it gives some context to information and that's what this does, but it's invisible to all of us on a website. We don't see it when we visit a page. It's only there for search engines to see. So, on a basic level, that's what the function of it is for, is to communicate to search engines and other bots, if you will, what pages are about, what the website is about, industry references, again, events, special things like that.

In the same way, maybe you just had a brand-new website that was developed and paid a lot of money for it and it looks great. It doesn't mean that your web designer is aware of schema. Right now, at least in the digital marketing world and design world, this is very much something that's leveraged from an SEO standpoint. It's not mainstream yet like keywords might be, or things like that, or mobile friendliness as a convention that matters. So, there's a pretty good chance that unless you've had somebody employed for SEO specifically and that SEO is up-to-date and practicing schema and utilizing schema, there's a pretty good chance this is not on your website. Now, if you're using WordPress and you have a plug-in like Yoast or something else, there's plug-ins that have come out over the last year or two that incorporate schema, but there's a difference between, like you always say, free with a headache or headache free.

You can use some plug-ins that are out there to do some basic schema for you, but you're going to get out what you put into it. Again, going back to Terry Samuels, our favorite expert and guru on all things schema. If you hand code stuff and do research, you can leverage schema to the Nth degree way more than any free plug-in or application can, or even a builder online. If you go do a Google search for schema generator, you're going to find a bunch of tools online, some free, some paid, but that's still all automated. And the real power from schema comes into the research you can do about what is this business, Bob, as a business owner, Sue, what's your history? The information you can find from research, and then incorporate that onto that page for schema, depending on whatever your topic is. Tools aren't going to find that.

Right now today, it still takes a human being to draw these connections like, hey, that's Bob, where it says Robert, that's that same Bob, or Susan, that's still that same Sue. And using schema in an automated way through a plug-in or tool, hey, it's better than nothing, but I'm just, I guess, giving this context, so people know that that doesn't mean you're doing it to its fullest extent, just because you have it. And with that, I guess, I'd offer up to everybody, if you're unsure about this or if you have a question about, are you leveraging it the right way, is it on your website or not? To reach out to us. This is something that we can very quickly take a look at your website and tell you that A, if you have it, B, are you leveraging it right?

On a scale of one to 10, are you a one or are you a 10? Where are you at? Just because, for the layperson and pretty much everybody, unless you're experiencing schema, you really can't answer that question. So, I think this is a very important topic for everybody because right now this can be a huge tiebreaker. All right, Colonel Taylor and I are talking here about the top five episodes 2022. We've got episode 161 queued up next. Can you use a virtual office address to set up GBP listing? So, the answer is yes and no. There's dos and don'ts. Check this episode out. We dive into how to navigate that. Usually it's going to be a no, but there are some instances where it's a yes, check it out. If we do a search in Google for virtually anything that's going to trigger the map pack.

So, any of you listening, watching, whatever, pick some local product or service that you usually get and near me or name your city, whatever, do a search. And you're probably going to find that those three listings that Google shows in the map pack are going to give you some triangle that spreads a little bit of geographic area. Depending on your service, how dense the competition is, that could be hundreds of yards, it could be tens of miles. But, the thing is, usually those are the top three that Google's showing you. If you were to zoom in on any one of those dots that are making that triangle on the map, you're going to find a lot of other businesses that are in the same business category or profession within that space, or even closer to one of those dots. And what Google's doing on purpose is, there's definitely a layer of which ones are more authoritative and more trusted based on a lot of signals.

What if two of them are right next to each other and pretty equal? Google's usually going to show one of them and provide you a larger geographic area. So, a little hidden thing is, not only do you want to be running an awesome business and be optimized to show up in your GMB, GBP and everything else, but you also want to be the only business doing what you do at that address, so you don't get filtered out. Google's going to usually show one business at that address on the initial three pack. If you scroll down through the results, you're going to find a lot of businesses at that address, but only one of them is going to make it in the top three.

So, that backdrop being said, can you use virtual offices? Can you use Regis in these places? Yes, technically now you can if you do it the right way. But, before I would spend my money on that and think that it's going to work for SEO exposure and ranking and visibility, you should look at that address, really zoom in, in Google Maps or even go there, and see if there's like businesses doing what you're doing there, and then it's kind of a decision. You have another option, can you go somewhere else?

You might need this for your business period. If this is not an SEO decision which, of course, this is what we're doing, this is our episode here for this topic on local SEO tactics, so this is an SEO driven conversation. That's where it's slanted to. And I should temper it, meaning that, only one business will be shown at that address typically for filtering in the map pack. It doesn't mean you can't be that one business, but what it definitely means is, you're going to have a hard row to hoe. You're going to have to do a lot of work for your content, for your brand, getting reviews.

Because, I think you usually see this question you're bringing up is when people are starting a business, or getting a new location. So, the context for me in this conversation with everybody is usually, I'm going to, can I, will it work? And so, you're starting with something. You haven't worked at this co-working space for five years and you're looking to invest in SEO. That's just not the head space. So, doing some of these things as soon as you can, as much as you can, the reviews, the optimization on your GBPs, advancing beyond everybody else and then, of course, last but not least, a ton of work on your website. It's got to be critical of this. This is a address driven, GBP driven, Google my business driven question, but your website comes into play for that ranking. And if you're definitely faced with a couple of things that make this an uphill battle, like the proximity and address filtering with like businesses, and the fact that you're in a remote or virtual office environment to begin with makes this a little more challenging for you, so you better be hitting it on all cylinders.

I guess, that's my general overall take. But then, something, this isn't anything I've tested, or Bob tested, or we have firsthand experience. This is more from the SEO industry overall. A rule of thumb people say if you have to do this is, take the address of your virtual office you're looking to use, plug it into Google, and see if it returns search results literally calling it a virtual office. If it's Regis, or bobsoffice.com or whatever it is, if it's being marketed as a virtual address, the likelihood of Google knowing this is a virtual address is very high and that may be a disadvantage to you. But, instead, if Bob, at bobsoffice.com, which is not a real thing everybody but, I guess, it could be maybe, if Bob is not marketing it as virtual office, co-working space, whatever, overtly but does allow it, then it's a little bit more of a hidden thing, and Google may not realize that it's a virtual office, co-working space, and thus you won't get discredited for that a little bit and that would be to your advantage.

So, if you have the ability to look at multiple virtual offices or options like this in your geographic area, try to find the most covert stealthy one and choose that if possible. Otherwise, just pick your poison, which uphill battle you want to face with going this route. Best route is always get your own unique address somewhere and use your house if you have to, hide your address or show it, either way. You guys, do I need to dive anywhere else or do you guys have any questions on that? I presented a full circle on that topic in general, but what do you guys think? Does that help what everybody's looking for you think?

Sue Ginsburg: I think it does now. What comes-

Bob Brennan: One other thought... Go ahead Sue, I'm sorry.

Sue Ginsburg: I was just going to say, what comes to mind is when you're thinking about these dense, downtown high-rise buildings, how does Google view that? Is it Regis being a collective workspace, whatever you call them, versus a high-rise building that has 42 floors and it might be a little harder, or are those the same things in Google's house?

Jesse Dolan: Same thing there Sue, same thing there from an SEO perspective. I'm a law firm or an accountant, whatever, and I want to be downtown, if I can choose, I don't want one of my competitors being in that same high-rise. I want to move down the block a little bit, because it doesn't matter if the thing I'm talking about from the filtering, proximity, name, address type stuff, that's not unique to being a virtual office, that's at that address. It could be a legitimate business park somewhere or a high-rise like you're saying, but that dense businesses, you definitely want to be away from your competitors, and I mean literally digital competitors too. Even if they're similar business, but different, if they're showing up for your keywords at that address, I would want to be away from them. Definitely different scale of conversation if I'm a tenant in a high-rise versus a virtual office somewhere.

Sue Ginsburg: Super interesting.

Jesse Dolan: Same concept applies there though for distancing. What were you going to add, Bob?

Bob Brennan: Maybe this is gray hat and goes against, but if you have a friend who's a realtor and has, literally, his or her own realtor office and you're something that, I don't know, let's say an auctioneer or something where nobody's going to really come to your office. In theory, you could set up a Google, if your buddy's okay with it, in their office. That's an extreme situation. It does not play nice with Google's rules, but business is never cut and dry.

Jesse Dolan: That can be okay with Google's rules, Bob. I would say literally between you and your buddy, if you just on the back of a napkin, a sublease, something like, you just need to make it official somehow that this is going to be my address and you use that to set up your GBP, go for it. I would do that in a heartbeat over a virtual office.

Bob Brennan: Because, there's a ton of businesses out there, formal or informal, that offer when you think about it, pretty different services. And in some cases, it's legit. Tires Plus is an example, not Tires Plus, I'm sorry, Batteries Plus, where they sell batteries, but then they repair cell phones, and there's no real connection there. So again, they're setting up another entity within Batteries Plus that provides that service.

Jesse Dolan: And literally to your point, we've worked with clients in this space. We know, and have seen it firsthand, they will have a listing for the Batteries Plus, and then they will have a listing for the phone repair entity that's part of their company, but somewhat separated at the same address, doing exactly what you're talking, two GBPs at the same address, different company, but different brands and entities and most importantly, like different business categories and services within GBP, so they're not conflicting or cannibalizing at all.

Bob Brennan: And I'm not saying it's, again, at the end of the day, you got to put your head on the pillow, but ultimately you can find a way to get yourself spread throughout a major market in that manner might just work.

Jesse Dolan: And here we end up at episode 147. Take a quick sip. I'm going to get through this whole thing here before we're done, I promise. Episode 147, the benefits of local SEO. This is a good overview of what is the local SEO. There's SEO broadly, and then what do we mean when we talk local, and why does that matter to you? Which it does. If you're a business serving a geographic area in your own backyard, your own city, metropolitan area, the local part of local SEO really matters. Check out this episode number 147. We're going to get into the meat and the potatoes of what we're talking about there. A couple things to think about when we think local SEO, again, the geolocation part of it here is where we're drilling down into is, what does that even mean?

In my example, I'm using the cities, Austin, Texas, Minneapolis, but it doesn't have to just be a city. You've got cities, towns, unincorporated areas, smaller towns, things like that, but then also you have counties, or down in Louisiana, parishes, you have states. Definitely, if you're serving a number of cities or areas within a state, I would definitely also optimize some pages on my website for the state, not just for the city to draw some relevancy to that as well, particularly if your service is something that isn't just within a three-mile area of where your business is located, so go after the state. A region, whether it's Midwest, deep south, West Coast, we have these slang references to the overall regions. Now, I'm talking larger United States regions there, but within your state, I'm in Minnesota here, so we have the North Shore up on Lake Superior, that's a region.

You can optimize for that. If people are searching for that, then you can optimize for that and be found for it. Neighborhoods, particular developments, neighborhood pocket areas, whether they're actual names or even slang names. If you're not sure if something even registered, it's like, is that a real neighborhood designation, real quadrant for my city? Google search for it. If you do a Google search, let's say for Minneapolis, Minnesota, Google should give you a result that shows where Google has a graphic on the map that defines the Minneapolis area. It understands Minneapolis, and this is the geographic zone for it. So, whatever your slang, things you're thinking of, just do a Google search. And if Google can understand what you mean and show you some results, then you're good there. So, a couple more zip codes, that's a definitely defined area of the zip code, something Google's very aware of, and also area codes.

So, the important part where to underscore that is, usually when somebody's searching for something in that city, but they're not located physically in that city, it's not originating from that city, there's a bit of urgency or a bit of, they don't know the local area, they don't have a little black book of contacts or know the good old boy network or the good old girl network, if that's even a phrase, should be a phrase, and they are going to do a Google search. From a marketing standpoint and applying local SEO to this, we definitely want to be found for those searches. There's somebody who needs something and doesn't know who else to contact. That's your opportunity to make a great first impression to capture that business and not have somebody else get the business, of course. So again, that's an example of a search containing the geographic keywords but not originating from that geographic area.

The good part about local SEO is, if you're doing it right, you should be able to get traction on both of those. You don't have to optimize with keywords of near me on your website. If you let Google know where you're at and where you serve, then it should be able to ascertain that you do serve this area and you'll show up for near me searches or just flower shop searches when it's in the area that's relevant to you. Likewise, somebody does a search from Chicago, maybe they're looking to get flowers delivered to their significant other in Minneapolis, because they're away, if they're searching for flower delivery Minneapolis, again, if you're doing it right, you should show up there as well. So, that's a quick distinction on two different ways that local SEO comes into play for us and some things that we have to be aware of, because there's a slightly different intent and maybe purpose for both of those different searchers. Again, the good news is, if you're doing local SEO the right way, you should be accomplishing that.

All right, everyone, I hope you enjoyed that. Me and Mr. E.H. Taylor, the colonel, have definitely enjoyed this episode hanging out together, and I hope you have too. We got a lot more stuff coming up in 2023. A lot more interviews coming, some exciting news that you're going to be seeing. We've got Kyle Roof coming up, we've got Terry Samuels coming up, we've got Terry's wife, Elizabeth coming up, a lot of other stuff too. It's going to be a great year.

Thank you everybody that has tuned in and supported the show, left us reviews on Facebook, on Apple Podcasts, on Google, everywhere else. If you haven't done so yet, and if you are so compelled to do so, keep us going in the future. Let us know we're doing a good job and help edify us and show everybody with a good review why you appreciate the show, and let us know as well. Go on out to localseotactics.com, scroll down to the bottom, click the link for reviews, and we make it easy, we give you the links to all the places, and that is much appreciated. And, eventually we do read every single review on the show, so give you a little shout-out. Appreciate you stay tuned into this one a little bit longer episode. We mashed a bunch together here, so happy New Year's everyone. Take care. We'll see you next year.