Greg’s talk mixes movie references with sharp, actionable local SEO advice focused on three key drivers: your website, Google Business Profile, and reviews. He explains why it’s critical to master proven tactics now, and that you should own your backyard before expanding, create authentic local content, and manage reviews strategically to boost visibility in both search and AI systems. It’s a fast-track guide to standing out in competitive local markets.
SEO Week 2025 set the bar with four themed days, top-tier speakers, and an unforgettable experience. For 2026, expect even more: more amazing after parties, more activations like AI photo booths, barista-crafted coffee, relaxing massages, and of course, the industry’s best speakers. Don’t miss out. Spots fill fast.
Greg is an experienced Local SEO consultant specializing in the automotive industry. An experienced conference speaker, his movie-themed slide decks are always audience favorites.
Specialties include:
Search Engine Optimization, Local SEO, Local Search Optimization, Social Media Marketing, E-mail Marketing, Web Analytics, Web Design, Graphic Design, and Photography
Greg’s The 3 Dimensions of Local Search talk mixes movie humor with sharp, actionable SEO advice, centering on the three pillars that drive local visibility: your website, Google Business Profile, and reviews. While AI search is shaking up many areas of SEO, it hasn’t mastered local yet, making now the time to double down on proven tactics. Greg (with some help from…also Greg) emphasizes “owning your backyard” before expanding, creating content that’s genuinely local and distinct from competitors, and remembering that Google and AI systems are pattern detection machines – so your brand’s pattern must be clear, consistent, and memorable.
He dives into tactical must-dos like optimizing Google Business Profiles with accurate categories, high-quality photos, and tracking parameters; actively requesting and responding to reviews; and using review language to enhance site content. Greg also shares clever hacks, like pushing down bad reviews with long, photo-rich positive ones, and warns about traps like Google’s strict reinstatement rules. Throughout, he links traditional local SEO wins to emerging AI search opportunities, making his approach both a playbook for current success and a roadmap for staying competitive as local search evolves.
Master the Three Dimensions of Local Search
Focus on optimizing your website, your Google Business Profile, and your reviews. These remain the core factors driving visibility in local search, even as AI and LLMs evolve.
Own Your Backyard First
Don’t try to rank in neighboring cities until you’ve built strong visibility in your immediate location. Solid local optimization is the foundation for broader reach.
Leverage Reviews as Content Gold
Actively request, respond to, and analyze reviews for insights. Use customer language in your site content to stand out from competitors and match how real people talk about your business.
SEO Week 2025 set the bar with four themed days, top-tier speakers, and an unforgettable experience. For 2026, expect even more: more amazing after parties, more activations like AI photo booths, barista-crafted coffee, relaxing massages, and of course, the industry’s best speakers. Don’t miss out. Spots fill fast.
Greg Gifford: There’s so much! Local SEO is needed by so many businesses, and there are a ridiculous number of marketers who need to understand it, but don’t realize it’s relevant to their clients. It’s hard to squeeze everything important into a 30-40 minute presentation. I think I covered most of the biggest issues, but Id encourage anyone who finds the presentation helpful to dig in and learn more about Local SEO. There’s so much buzz around AI Overviews, AI Mode, and other AI search tools, but AI hasn’t really had much of an impact on local search yet. If you’re a local business or a marketer working with you, you absolutely should be paying attention to AI search changes, but don’t stop doing the Local SEO stuff that’s still working today.
Greg Gifford: Not really – AI hasn’t really had much impact on local search results. Sure, some people are using AI models to search, and some businesses are even starting to get calls and conversions – but the vast majority of traffic in local still comes from traditional Google searches.
Garrett Sussman: COO of SearchLab. He has 30 different movies tattooed, like, literally 30 different movies tattooed on him. You should ask him to see them. And was the mascot of SMU and is a regular conference speaker who brings flair and humor to SEO talks. Let’s just dive into it. Presenting The Three Dimensions of Local Search. Please welcome Greg Gifford.
Greg Gifford: Does anybody know what movie that’s from? That was Rockstar, by the way. Okay. How many people love to go to the movies? How many people have never seen me speak before? Oh, y’all are in for it. The glasses are not a gimmick. What’s the first thing that happens when the lights go down at a movie theater? You get trailers. Right? So put your glasses on when you have a trailer. Seriously, put them on. Everybody ready? Are we good? Alright, let’s go everybody.
[Voice Over]: Buzz? Unbelievable. Buzz? This is incredible. Buzz, where the heck are you?
Right here, buddy. You’ve got to see this. What are you two biggie’s glasses? They let you see into the third dimension.
What? Let me see the Wow. Here, let me show you. This is like 3D.
Howdy, boys. I’m in 3D. Woah. Woah. What did even know, Woody?
Rex, you’re not in 3D.
Well, of course I’m in 3D.
Greg Gifford: Oh, this is so embarrassing. So I actually did the first cut of that intro on a couple of gummies last Friday night and it was like three and a half minutes long. And I showed it to my wife and I was like, what do you think, babe? She’s like, that’s kinda long. You’re gonna lose people. So, I am gonna share that online just because I spent hours doing it. But this is The Three Dimensions of Local Search. I am Greg as they already introduced me. I always like to point out that I have a weekly video series between three different agencies. I have now been doing a weekly video series on local SEO for 10 years. And throughout the presentation, I will have links to videos from the series. So, if there’s a slide and there’s a blue link in the bottom corner like that with a thumbnail, that lets you know there’s a video from my series that dives into that con or to that concept or that idea or that problem a little more in-depth. So, when you get the slides later, you’ve got some things to go back and reference. And that’s a fun picture of me speaking at Mozcon pre-COVID, also to the same walkout song. But now I feel like I need to update it because I don’t have tattoos on my fingers or hands or the one – so, it looks really weird.
But I speak at a ton of conferences. Two years ago, I spoke at 32 conferences in seven different countries. But most of the conferences that I typically do are vertical specific where I’m speaking to get leads, not speaking to help. And a lot of them are pay to play. I’ve paid over $25,000 to speak to 15 people before because I know I’m gonna get leads. But most of the time in the pay to play situation in these vertical conferences, they send salespeople instead of product experts. And the salespeople, let’s face it, they’re not really that great at public speaking. So there’s typically a podium on one side and they stand behind the podium the whole time. They talk really fast in a really quick voice like this. It’s really hard to understand what they’re saying. So that part’s bad.
But even worse, they don’t have any design consideration. They don’t do fun stuff. Like, I do fun stuff in my videos. I shoot in front of a green screen and my not so evil twin comes out and I’ll have conversations with myself. But these guys don’t do fun stuff like that and they don’t use designers. So the background of the slide is plain white. It’s black aerial font, and they pack every slide with bullet points. And that’s no fun to watch. And they’ve done scientific studies that prove that bullet points kill kittens. And we’re not gonna kill any kittens in today’s presentation. And, obviously, I’m obsessed with movies. Every time I do a presentation, there is a movie theme. Typically, I go back and I include one movie for every year in the last 50 years, but 3D has been kind of spotty. So, I have 103 references today, including one 3D film for every single year that 3D films have been released theatrically since like 1953 or ‘52. Sorry. There is attribution to the side so that if you’re curious about a movie or something looks cool, not only will you learn a lot about local search, you’ll have some cool stuff to go back and watch later. Are we excited? Let’s dive in.
Greg and…Greg: Sorry. Where to a point Sorry. This has happened a couple of times. Like Charlene what do I do here? Like I don’t Come on dude. Waiting. Dude it’s the clicker. Why are you wearing the glasses still? Whatever dude. These look cool. Just maybe get going with the presentation man. Okay. Okay. Okay.
Greg Gifford: So if if you do business with customers face to face then you need local SEO. And there are three primary signals. So the three dimensions, get it? That influence your visibility. That’s your website, your Google Business profile, and your reviews. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today. And they’re still pretty isolated from AI Overviews and from AI search systems. So with local, we’re still kinda trucking along doing all the things that we’ve always done because local just really isn’t understood by the AI systems yet. So, we don’t have to worry about it as much. We know it’s coming. But today’s gonna be more about what you do now to win now until this eventually gets to local and changes the perspective of what we’re doing. We know it’s coming, probably soon, but that doesn’t mean we should ignore trying to help our clients win today with what we know works today. And they’re releasing all these numbers about how much search is being done on ChatGPT. It’s like 1% of Google. So we don’t wanna worry about it too much. And they’re still gonna need to learn about you in the future. Right? They’re still gonna have to have a way to get this information about your business entity to be able to recommend you if it’s an AI agent or whatever it might be.
So the three dimensions I’m gonna talk about today, as far as we know, will still be incredibly influential. ChatGPT just started showing some reviews in some tests, and AI Overviews are starting to show reviews for local businesses as well. But I always like to boil things down to simple concepts because you come to this conference, you hear all of these a list speakers, and you write all these notes, you record all these things, you have your AI transcriptions when you go home, and then you’re kind of overwhelmed because it’s like so much to remember. So I boil things down to simple concepts so when you’re digging back through the slides later you’re like oh yeah I remember that. And it’s really important to remember with local search especially that Google is really just an advanced pattern detection system. And so are the AI systems. Right. So it’s all about pattern detection. So we don’t really want to get lost in let’s put a keyword in this spot or let’s make the title tag 70 characters. Forget the basic stuff. Remember the pattern. Right. You’re trying to improve your pattern so that whichever system is trying to learn more about you can easily find that information and see how you’re different from the competition. So you need to pay attention to the annual local search ranking factor study except they didn’t really do one last year.
But the idea is, let’s say we had the five best SEOs in the world on this stage and we all gave them a homepage and said optimize this page. They’d all do it differently but they’d all touch the same things because we know that the algorithm is looking at the title tag and the H1 and all the other things. So, with this study, they send out a really in-depth survey to all of these top experts. Typically, it’s about 35 to 40. And then they aggregate the answers, and you get a really cool pie chart along with the full data results that show you the signals that matter for showing up in the map pack or in Google Maps. And I dropped the little 3D glasses on there to show how big the chunk is for the three dimensions that we’re talking about today. And then you get another one that shows you the factors that influence localized organic because a lot of people think that local SEO is just the map pack, but it’s a different algorithm. And the ten blue links are also powered by this local algorithm. So, this is a really good guide for what you need to do in the future because we also know that user behavior isn’t, I need a product or service, I get on Google, I do a search, I buy from the first thing that I find. The more expensive your product or service skews, the more research people will do before they purchase. For a very long period of my career, for 12 of my career, I was automotive-specific. Now I’m not specific to auto but I still get a lot of auto clients because I’m very well known in auto. The latest data from Google, which was not really that late, it was like two years ago, but two years ago, the average car buyer in the United States conducts 27 separate sessions of research before they’re far enough down the funnel to give their information through a chat, an email, a form, or showing up at the dealership. So, we know that people are gonna be seeing your competitors regardless of where you rank. So, it’s about improving your pattern so that you stand out. You look better than the competition. And people remember you because of that so that they know, alright. When I’m further down and I’ve figured out more about what I wanna buy, I’m gonna come back to these guys because these guys are awesome. And the three dimensions help you do that.
So basically, think of it this way. You’re not gonna convert people the first time they come to your site unless you’re selling something really cheap and commoditized. You gotta give people a reason to come back and convert later. They’re not going to convert today. Also, people love to copy what their competition is doing. People have talked about this multiple times this week. If you have the same generic bullshit on your site as everybody else, why would anyone care? Why is anyone going to buy from you? And nobody’s really talked about information gain but this is a really key concept, especially in local because the algorithm works so differently from the traditional algorithm. And this is gonna be huge for the LLMs as well. So you’ve gotta stand out from competitors. How do you do that if you have the same bullshit content that says, hey we sell blue widgets just like everybody else that sells blue widgets. Why would anyone care? It helps you provide better information to customers and to the AI systems in the future when that starts to influence the kinds of leads and customers you’re gonna be getting. And now we all know, sure, there’s a shit ton of bad content, just like the really bad eyes in this movie. Like, it’s horrible bullshit. Right? Information gain is how you win. Everybody else is churning out a bunch of bullshit. So make your bullshit better and actually share information that answers the questions customers are asking. So make sure that your content is actually about your business. Also, it’s really funny that team Jacob was shark boy. Right? Super weird. But most people, their content is not about their business. It’s about what they sell. It’s not about how they sell it. Right? And it’s not about the local area. And there’s a really easy way to test this content. Take the homepage of your website. Change only two things. Every time the business name appears, you change it to a different business. Every time the city that you’re located in appears, you change it to a different city. Could I take a plastic surgeon’s website that’s right here in New York, change the name of the practice in New York to Beverly Hills and the name of a practice in Beverly Hills and put that content on the homepage of that site in Beverly Hills? Would the content still work? If it would, it’s not about that guy’s practice and it’s not about being located in New York. It’s a really easy test to run.
There’s another test I’d love too. You gotta read your content out loud. The algorithm wants conversational content. The AI systems want conversational content. We have marketing brain. We read keywords and think this is badass. I’m not talking about read through it in your head. I’m talking about you grab a person. You have them sit right next to you and you read the content out loud because then your ear will catch the weird things that your marketing brain says this shit’s awesome. And real people are like, no way. It’s not.
Greg and…Greg: Oh. Tell them the story about the car dealer. Dude are you gonna keep doing this? Well, I mean I’m already here.
Greg Gifford: Alright. So this car dealer story is really funny. I was speaking at a conference in Vegas and I used car dealer examples because it was a car dealer conference. The guy says, hey, I’m a Ford dealer in Dallas. That’s the example I always use because Ford is the densest market or Ford in Dallas is the densest market in the world. There are 20 Ford dealerships in the Dallas market. They sell more pickups in North Texas than the rest of the world combined every year. It’s insanely competitive. This guy was like, I’m a Ford dealer. Help me. I wish I had taken a screen capture of this guy’s content, but I was an idiot and I didn’t because he didn’t work with us. His content sounded like this. If you wanna buy a Ford pickup in Dallas, come to our Ford pickup headquarters. So we sell more Ford pickups in Dallas than anybody else that sells Ford pickups in Dallas. So when you’re ready for your next Ford pickup, come to our Ford pickup headquarters in downtown Dallas. We’ll give you a great deal on your Ford pickup. The agency that wrote that for them was like, hey, guess what guys? You’re gonna rank number one for Ford pickups. And every customer that went to the website was like, what the fuck is wrong with these guys? You don’t catch that if you don’t read it out loud.
So second important simple concept, and this is really hard for the people that have never done local. We don’t have to worry about writing the best content on the Internet. You just need to have or well, first of all, you wanna show up, you gotta have a page about the concept. We all know that. But you don’t have to have the best answer in the world. You just need the best answer in the local area to the question that that person is asking. If you want to have the best answer, again, think information game. Answer some of the questions they’re gonna have after that first question is answered. Make it easy for them to make that decision and push them down the funnel instead of expecting they’re gonna click to the next piece of content. So, this is really important. You gotta have a blog. And a lot of people are like, oh, you don’t need a blog. It’s social fluff. It’s not important. But you gotta have that blog because you – most people are writing extreme bottom of funnel content. You need that mid to upper funnel content. When people are trying to decide what they need, they have a problem but they don’t know what the solution is. That’s where you wanna capture them because the sooner they get eyeballs on your site, the more likely it is you’re gonna capture that customer later on down the road. And this is where a lot of SEOs are gonna freak out because everybody right now, we even had talk about the vector mappings that don’t have the content not related to your core concepts. It’s different in local. If you create local informational posts, it helps build local relevancy and it helps show up before people are looking to buy what you’re selling. It’s like a billboard. Right? It’s that pre-funnel content. So it’s something like, hey, our team loves to go out and grab pizza every Friday for lunch. These are the five best pizza spots in Hell’s Kitchen. That content will show up for people that aren’t looking to buy what you sell but they start to see that you’re really involved in the local neighborhood and the local community. And this is also the kind of content that AI systems love these lists, which means you get citations in the AI systems, which again, potentially leads more customers to see your content before they’re ready to buy. But now they know about you, so it’s awesome. If you need ideas for how to do it, here’s an awesome video. There’s also a transcript if you don’t wanna watch my goofy shit. Ten ideas of localized content that you can use and springboard off of to make your own localized content. Now, I’m not gonna start talking about schema and try to make the argument because everybody’s like, oh it’s really good. And everybody else is like, oh come on, don’t know that yet. Like who knows? But it’s not that fucking hard to do so let’s just add schema to everything. Right? Like why wouldn’t you do the stuff that’s really easy that could potentially really pay off in the future?
Everybody also wants to rank in the cities next door, and they want to get customers from a wider area. And your client’s gonna go, well, I had a customer that drove from two hours away, so why can’t we rank there? Like, okay, because it doesn’t work that way, bro. But you gotta own your backyard first. And what that means, if you don’t have a solid enough optimization foundation that you are showing up well in the city where you’re actually located, you’re not gonna show up in the next city over or two cities over. Google’s smarter than that. So own your backyard first and then you can expand to nearby cities. If there’s not a lot of competition, you can create city pages. This video will walk you through how to do it. I’m not talking about it today because I’m trying to squeeze in a lot and I’m like, not even at – wait. I’m at slide 44 of 121, and I’ve got 12 minutes left. So we’re gonna go fast today. If you’re in a more competitive or metro area, you’re gonna need to be a lot more advanced and use local content silos. This concept’s been around for a long time. The first time I wrote about this on Search Engine Land was 2014. This used to work like gangbusters. I could do this in 2014 and like overnight have results. Now it’s like anywhere from 12 to 18 months. But it still works. It’s awesome. So check it out. And links are different as well when we’re talking about local search. Bro, links aren’t one of the three dimensions.
Okay. Okay. I forgot. So instead of links, let’s talk about your Google Business Profile. So with the Google Business Profile, there’s been a lot of flux in recent months. Questions and answers just got removed. It’s something we’ve had since 2017 and out of the blue Google’s like, guess what? We’re just not gonna show this thing anymore and even though we’ve been telling you for years and years and years it’s really important to your business. And then last week, Google posts disappeared and everybody lost their mind but we found out it’s a bug and actually as of I think yesterday it has been restored. So hey. But Google’s making a lot of changes. Google’s really trying to fix the spam and local and make it a better product. And, it is your customer’s first impression of your business, not your website. If they find you through a non-branded search, they’re probably gonna find you in the map pack which means they’re gonna see your business profile first. If they do a brand search, they’re gonna see your business profile first. So, it’s gotta be awesome. If you’ve optimized it well, you will show up more often in the map pack. So, you should be bending over backwards, uh-huh, to make sure your profile’s awesome. So, fill out every single thing you can fill out except for the little field that says area served. That is just for service businesses to draw the red line. It has nothing to do with ranking. Make sure you add UTM tracking because attribution is broken.
Google Analytics will give you a ton of traffic that’s listed as direct, that’s actually organic. We’ve done this and overnight seen a 40% lift in organic traffic. Not from magic SEO but because Google Analytics is that fucking broken. And you want better decisions so you need better data. So make sure you’ve got that in there as long as you’re still getting traffic from Google. It’s really important. As we see the influence of AI changing the way that people search we’re gonna see a lot more brand searches which is all the more reason you’ve gotta have that UTM tracking in there to track what’s going on with those searches. Also, with schema, everybody gets local business schema wrong. It should only be on one page of your site and that’s the page that your Google Business profile points to. So for single location businesses, that’s the home page. For multi-location businesses, that’s the service page or the location page for that individual location. That’s the only place the local business schema should go. Make sure your hours of operation are correct and that they are listed obviously on the site marked up with schema and that they’re up to date. Please don’t listen to Joy’s openness update that says that it’s a ranking factor to be open 24 hours. It’s not. Please just list your actual hours. That is a feature, not a ranking factor. Upload a lot of high quality photos because customers can upload photos with reviews or at your location. The algorithm prefers the high resolution professionally shot photos. So you wanna upload a lot of those so that yours will show first in the gallery before customers. Make sure you select the correct categories. In fact, your primary category, the one that you choose in the first slot, is the most influential factor, not proximity, that controls how you show up. Proximity doesn’t kick in until all of the other ranking factors have sorted the list.
So be strategic. It’s not always the one you think it should be. So watch this video if you’re confused there. Make sure you understand the new reinstatement process that has been rolled out worldwide. I have a podcast that’s a Q & A about local SEO and the running joke on our podcast is that if you move your mouse or breathe on your keyboard, you’re gonna get suspended lately because it’s almost that bad. When you get this email that says you’ve been suspended, it won’t tell you why and it will have a button that says request reinstatement. Don’t fucking click it. Because when you click it, the 60-minute timer of doom starts. Most of the time, you’re an agency. You’re not even near the business. You only have 60 minutes from the time that timer starts to collect all the documentation that you need to prove that you’re that business and to shoot your reverification video that is very specific about what you need. If it’s not done in 60 minutes, that’s your fucking one chance and it’s gone. You get one chance to re-appeal. If you fuck that one up, your business profile is toast and you will never get it back and nobody can help you. It’s really scary. So one appeal and then you’re gone forever. So I did a video that walks through exactly what needs to be in your verification video when you shoot it. So please watch this so you’re familiar with what needs to be there before you get suspended. Or if you get suspended, watch this before you click that button. Now if you’ve got problems with your business profile, do not go to support. They suck. You can go like I have called because I have ways to call that most people can’t. But you go, hey, look. You’re gonna tell me to try a B & C. I’ve already done those.
Let’s skip ahead. This is a bug. Well sir, have you tried A? Yeah bro, I tried A. Next you’re gonna tell me to try B but I’ve already done that. Well have you tried B? They’re awful. Instead, go to the Google Business Profile Community Forum. It’s not staffed by Google staffers but it’s staffed by volunteers like me that know the product that will help you. And once you’re in the program and answering questions while you become a product expert and once you get to gold level or above, you have the ability to escalate a thread directly to the Google Business Profile team and skip support. So this is the way that you really get help if you have problems with your business profile.
Now reviews, last part of the dimensions we’re gonna talk about. They’ve gained weight. They’ve become more and more important. Google’s really paying attention to all of this user generated content. And review sentiment is going to be very important when people are asking the AI systems for the best insert business type here. So you’ve gotta pay attention to reviews. So you’ve gotta be proactive. Watch this video. This is probably the most important video leading into the future of every video that I had in here because it’s not human nature to leave a good review. If you’re happy, you’re not gonna leave a good review. If you’re pissed off, you’re gonna leave a bad review. So you have to ask every customer for a review actively. And then you have to make it easy for them to leave a review. And that video walks you through multiple ways to do that. Make sure you’re answering every single review as well. Not just the good ones, not just the bad ones, but all of them. Also, I used to edit my own videos. And this one’s fun because I talk about answering a review that’s really bad and the owner’s pissed. So my face turns red and smoke comes out and does a cartoon whistle. It’s really cool. So watch that one. Validate my shitty video editing skills. So – and remember, when you respond to a bad review, the answer is not the person that left the review. It’s for every future potential customer that’s reading your reviews that wants to know how you handled a shitty situation. So answer it correctly. And the number of reviews that you have doesn’t actually matter to Google’s algorithm. What matters is that you have more than your local competitors and a higher score. That’s what’s important to the algorithm. That’s also what’s gonna be important to the AI systems.
Okay. Here’s a cool thing. You know the default order when you first go to a business profile and you click to look at the reviews and you did not yet click the button to say, I want the newest or I want the best or I want the worst. Everybody’s familiar with this. Right? Joy did some really cool research last year but she didn’t really take it to the next level. If the review has a photo uploaded along with it, it’s stickier and it stays in that default sort for a longer period of time. If a review has more text in it, it’s stickier, stays in the default sort for a longer period of time. That’s a little problematic because bad reviews tend to be a lot longer than good reviews. And you can give a thumbs up to a helpful review. If a review has two or more upvotes I said updates. Sorry. I can’t type. I was doing these last minute. I finished these Sunday morning. I was way too ambitious with my video shit and this to worry about the spelling in my slides apparently. So more thumbs up, stickier, stays longer. That’s where she stopped. I said, what if we combine them all together? If you get a bad review that shows in that default sort, everybody sees it whether they’re trying to see bad reviews or not. So if it happens, reach out to someone who recently left you a good review, ask them to add more context to their story, more text, upload some photos, let you know when it’s done, then you have a couple of people at the office give it a thumbs up and that thing pops to the top of the list. You can bury those bad reviews like within 10 minutes. It’s super awesome.
So then about a month ago I was at SMX Munich and I was talking about using the user generated content from your reviews and the Q & A section to write better content on your site. And literally a week later, Google got rid of Q & A. So good job on the pointless presentation bro. Yeah. Kinda sucked. But you can still do it with reviews. So we have blinders on. Right? We don’t understand really, most of us, how customers are looking for these solutions. They don’t care about our marketing bullshit. Multiple people have said that this week. They have a problem. You have a solution. That’s the way we have to think about it. And part of the solution that they’re looking for is where they need to buy the solution from. So why wouldn’t we be paying attention to how these people are talking about us. Right? We put this one in for you, Talia. I don’t know where she’s sitting but there you go. See? I told you. So we’ve gotta offer an authentic experience on our website that matches the experience and reality of doing business with that business. More people will find you if this happens. You’ll show up more often in search. So the best way to do it is to look at reviews and use the language that people are using because it’s telling you what these people think about your business and about buying from your business. So analyze your reviews, look for patterns and trends. Do certain phrases continue to pop up over and over again? Do people mention pain points? Talk about things that suck. What are they celebrating? Or are they offering tips to future customers and telling them to order a specific item or talk to a specific salesperson? Use that language on your site. I’m not talking about posting in the review. I’m talking about using the same phrases and the same ideas to talk about what you do instead of all of your marketing bullshit. So, use a tool to download your reviews. For those of you that do local SEO, you’re insane if you don’t have PlacesScout. It is by far the best local SEO tool out there. So, can use a tool like PlacesScout, download all your reviews, drop them into ChatGPT, ask it to sort them into topic buckets and summarize the recurring themes. It’s super awesome. Give them the cool thing bro.
Okay. I’ll give you the cool thing. I got two minutes left. So we have this thing that we call the local SEO scoring matrix. It’s a small SEO audit that I designed for this really specific kind of small conferences for car dealers. So it’s basically an audit that scores the three dimensions plus links. So it looks at the content on your site and how it’s optimized, your inbound links, your Google business profile and how it’s optimized, and your reviews on Google and Yelp and how you respond to those reviews. Now it’s important to point out that this scores on tactics, not on strategy. Most people use those interchangeably. But strategy is which direction are you going and tactics are the steps that you take to get there. Okay? The reason that we keep it basic tactics is because you can’t argue it. Let’s be honest. What happens when a customer brings you a HubSpot site grader report? What do you say? That’s a piece of shit. It’s generic. It has nothing to do with our strategy. They don’t understand your business. You could ignore it. But this is basic SEO tactics. The first question in this thing is, do you have a city in the title tag? It could be a business across the street. They could put Honolulu, Hawaii. This would still give them full credit because the tactic of having a city in the title tag is all we care about. Not the strategy of, is the right city there? Because it very quickly uncovers bad tactics and strategy won’t matter if your tactics suck. This was a huge game changer. I was just using this at conferences. We started using it for every demo call that we did with potential partners. Overnight. Overnight. Literally. Our close rate more than doubled because now we’ve done an audit before the call and we’re talking in real terms about the problems that we’re seeing. This thing takes 10 minutes to do but it looks like you spent hours. It’s awesome.
So, the four areas are then weighted to approximate the weight of each area. Get a score anywhere from 0 to 100, although negative points are possible. If there are things that you’re doing that are likely or definitely hurting your visibility, you can lose some points. So, the highest score we’ve ever seen is only an 83.6. It’s effectively impossible to get 100. This is one of our own clients. The highest non-client score was 65. The lowest score was -71. This guy was paying $5,000 a month for SEO. It was really bad. The average score is only 18 out of 100. So I’m gonna share both versions with you. I’ve shared these before in the past. If you’ve seen these links, these are new. This is the Google Sheets version. It’s super badass. We have a version for specific verticals that can dive into things that really have to happen on certain vertical sites. So the generic version will work with any business. And then I’m sharing the auto dealer version just so you can see how I’ve adjusted it. You can make those same changes. This is a Google Sheet. This is gonna make you make a copy so that you can make your own copy. It’s really cool stuff. Come on dude. You can give them more. I’m a little over time. Can I take 30 more seconds? Do you guys care for something really cool?
So I just did a presentation at Brighton SEO two weeks ago about using Google Sheets as an SEO. I created a Google Sheet cheat sheet. Download the Google Sheet cheat sheet right there. It’s super badass because it’s got an app script in there that lets you create an auto updating roll up report. Every time you use that audit sheet to do an audit, you drop a copy into a folder. Every morning at 3am, this script goes and looks at everything in the folder and auto appends everything so you get a big list of all of your results that updates every single day. And then you can get some really cool data out of this thing. So check it out if you have problems figuring out how to configure it. I’ll help you.
That was it. Thank you so much for joining me today. That’s my that’s my email address. If you ever have questions, I will answer them. I have an open email policy. I will always help people answer questions. You can get the slides from the team. Make sure you check them out if you’re a movie fan because all the movies are listed at the end by order release date. Thank you.
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