There is no point in showing up in online searches in Perth if you are a window cleaner in Sydney.
If you are an electrician in Melbourne, there is no point chasing leads in Brisbane.
Having a good local SEO presence is vital for local service providers.
It is amazing how big an impact Local SEO can have on a tradie’s business. Take these stats for example:
Local Search Intent: According to a Google report, 60% of smartphone users have contacted a business directly using the Google search results (for example the “click to call” button).
Local SEO helps ensure your business shows up in those searches. So when Tom, Jane or Mary down the road are looking for the service you provide, whether that be gutter cleaning, renovations, construction or carpentry services, your business will be right there in prime position.
A good illustration to explain why local SEO is important is this little fishing analogy I came across the other day.
When you go fishing, there is no point researching every single fish in the sea. You are not trying to catch a Blue Whale, you are not chasing deep-sea octopus, you are just focused on the actual fish that are within that little 1 square kilometre in your fishing ground.
So all you need to do is get the exact right lure, bait and technique to get that Flathead that is 100 meters away from you and is looking for a feed.
Likewise, Local SEO ensures your marketing budget is hyper-focused on individuals from your community and neighbourhood who are searching for your exact services.
Case Study: Sydney Gutter Clean
So let’s get digging into the Local SEO of a leading Sydney gutter cleaning company and see the exact reasons why they are absolutely dominating their local SEO, and what you can do to replicate their success!
First, let’s look at the key factors:
Company Name: Sydney Gutter Clean
Domain: https://gutterclean.com.au/
This is a great, but often overlooked key step, having keywords and your primary location in the domain.
Should you have your region or city in your domain?
In most metropolitan markets, we recommend having your city as your primary location. So that means companies based in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, should have their city as the key location. Places where it is more suitable to have your region as your key location include the Sunshine Coast, Gold Coast, Central Coast and Blue Mountains.
Google Reviews – It’s Like Red Bull For Your Local SEO
Are you ready for the key tip to make your Local SEO explode?
This is your maxim to live by:
“Make it easy to review your business on Google”
If you have a satisfied customer, make sure they don’t have to jump through hoops to be able to share the love.
If they provide you with some kind words, this is absolute gold. It improves your reputation in the industry. People love reading reviews. Every single person that I know under the age of 30 reads Google reviews before they go to a restaurant. This is the same for when they engage the services of a company. They want to read unedited reviews from past customers.
So make it easy for satisfied customers to review your business.
Check out this link that Sydney Gutter Clean has added to its homepage:
Notice where it goes, directly to the page for people to add a review.
Bonus tip…it’s a big one!
Ok, so this is a tip that you will not find anywhere online, and maybe I shouldn’t share it, but I’m feeling generous today.
Encourage your customers to include their suburb when they submit a review.
For example, instead of a customer generically saying, “The gutter cleaner came to my home” without including a suburb, encourage your customers to include a specific location.
One example would be to say; “The gutter cleaners came to my home in Bondi”. This will help provide you with a super valuable location marker that Google will use to help boost your local rankings. The more diverse the suburbs that are included in your reviews the more suburbs you will rank in.
Location Pages – The Cornerstone of Your Local SEO
First, let’s see what Sydney Gutter Clean is doing.
So they have a nice array of local pages. Each one is optimised for a suburb or region.
To supercharge the SEO value of these pages, there is one little change that should be done straight away.
Instead of linking to each page with just the location in the internal link, I would include the service and location keywords.
For example, instead of just “Inner West”, I would change the anchor text to “Gutter Cleaning Inner West“.
One of the benefits of having your primary location domain in your keywords is that you can have your secondary region keywords as individual optimised location pages.
In this case, Sydney Gutter Clean is able to focus on these specific regions, each with a massive population. Also note that instead of having 100 locations in each suburb, they just have one for each significant region.
Why not have one page for each and every suburb in Sydney? Well, it comes down to how much you are willing to invest in creating content and the volume of search traffic for your services.
Creating a new location doesn’t happen automatically, You have to create the page, create the content, format it, and then publish it. Like many things in life, there is normally a speed bump that will occur that makes the jump a little bit more time-consuming and frustrating. So it is only worth creating new location pages if you know for sure that there is a decent volume of people searching for that service in the suburb.
How can you know this?
There is a plethora of SEO tools that can assist. Here is an example using SEMRush:
Notice that only the regions and not specific suburbs are showing any decent search volume. So if you are limited in your advertising budget, just focus on the specific regions and not every single suburb.
Embedded Google Map
Simple to do, yet produces decent results.
Google Maps is a Google product, so it should not come as too big a surprise that if you embed an optimised Google Map onto a location page it will give you a little Local SEO boost.
So are you ready?
Are you ready to maximise your online advertising spend by focusing on hyper-targeted searches for your local neighbourhood and community? The great thing about investing in your Local SEO is that it will add to the overall success of your SEO and digital marketing. By obtaining more Google reviews, you will be increasing the conversions you receive from potential customers.
When you focus on “Gutter Cleaning Northern Beaches” this will help with all “gutter cleaning” related SEO keywords.
So stop delaying!
Get onto your Local SEO and start boosting the success of your business.
