Boost Your Local Business with These Proven Strategies

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show E-Coffee with experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Kristina, who is the Director of Operations at Build Media Group with us. Hey, Kristina.

Hi, Ranmay. Thank you for having me.

Lovely. Kristina, before you move forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey so far? How did you land in the digital marketing SEO place? Then we’ll take it forward from there on.

I’ve come from a content creation background. I used to work for a company called A2Z Forex back in 2014, if no longer than that. I used to create news for the Forex market, everything related to financial markets and cryptocurrency. That was my background. Then when I moved to Canada, I was hired by Vlad Raskanu. Shout out to him. This is the best boss ever, the guru of SEO who taught me everything. He took me on as the first employee of Digitally Savvy. That’s how my SEO journey started. I learned everything from him, and worked on a couple of clients. I would say five years fast forward, now I’m leading up the agency, and we work on several businesses and helping them grow as well.

Lovely, lovely. Quite a journey, I must say. Because home services and construction, are the space that digitally savvy specializes in, not competitive industries online. What are the unique challenges these businesses face and attracting leads compared to other sectors, so to say?

It’s a bit of a unique situation, I would say, for both of these industries. For home services, the locality is the main focus for us because when you do SEO for any other industry that is not local-specific, I would not say it’s necessarily easier, but you don’t need to think about different local-specific techniques and strategies. It’s like, for example, GBP or G&B, how it used to be before, and other things related to how people would search for services in their areas. Whenever we approach the strategies for home services businesses in any of the markets, we typically try to analyze what is in the market. Also, the seasonality plays a lot of importance in there. For example, right now, there is a shoulder season. We are going into the hot season in a lot of the US That means HVAC is booming, and we switch our focus away because HVAC doesn’t need any more advertising. We are moving towards perhaps advertising or boosting some other parts of their business that say what are software, if they also provide plumbing, and things like that. It’s adjusting based on the locality and the services. But when it comes to construction SaaS and any SaaS business, this is a little bit more, I don’t want to say complicated, but it does require a little bit more thinking and structuring because typically these businesses, have a very niche offering.

For example, it can be a very broad construction project management software, or it can be very specific, like construction accounting software. This is where we have to study their offering, really study their product, and try to almost reverse engineer what their lead base would look for. Because a lot of times the decision-makers, don’t even know what they need to look for. That’s how we’re helping them to have the keyword research nailed down and create those pages for those keywords.

Absolutely. Then you mentioned about GBP. Profiles are crucial for local businesses. What are some of the advancements in advanced optimization techniques you would recommend going beyond the basics for GBP profiles?

Interestingly, you ask it right now because we’ve been going deep into GBP lately, considering that ranking organically for local businesses is a good thing. But at the end of the day, if somebody is looking for AC repair in Phoenix, the first thing they’re going to see is a local pack. This is where we want our businesses to show up. We’ve been going in deep into not just optimization of the GBP profile is something basic that we do, but then we approach it from three different fronts. Our GBP strategy will work on a profile, obviously making sure it’s completed, and optimized, making sure that we have all the services posted there. The weekly posts where we either put our clients’ offerings or just some news about what’s going on their side of the business. Then plotting pictures on the website, on the GBP profile, helps a lot.

Helps it to be fresh. The real pictures, yeah.

Exactly. That also builds credibility. You can see the technicians performing the job. That helps people feel safer for people who come to their homes to perform that service. Now, another big part of it is the work on the website itself. Aside from the GBP profile, we also work on the website a lot. What we found is that the correlation between what is on your website and the GBP profile should match exactly. We should have the same name, and the contact information should match. It would be ideal to have a map on your website as well. Playing your work is what helps a lot. Then obviously, creating pages for service areas, creating pages for services that you provide with a local copy, mentioning the city, mentioning brand name, and just showing up and showing off your work. Then lastly, it would be completely off the website and the GBP profile. We work a lot on building signals back to our client’s websites and the GBP profile with the help of citations. Making sure that our business is present on all the possible necessary directories, data aggregators, and everything that would help Google understand that we are providing a certain service in service in a certain area.

It’s a holistic approach, I would say, to local SEO.

Absolutely. Uniformity of NAP at different platforms, again, gives more credibility to your business, as you mentioned. Talking about local SEO, for companies with multiple locations, managing GBP listings effectively can be daunting. What strategies would you recommend for Steemie, lining this process and ensuring consistency?

It is challenging. What we found works the best for us, I don’t know how businesses would have managed on themselves. But as an agency, we found it best to take advantage of certain tools that help to have it as a hub that has all the locations, the local in there. We can automate postings. We can automate certain geo-grids running and keeping an eye on trends, and how competitors are performing. That allows us to keep an eye on how consistent the citations are as well. One of the tools that we utilize a lot is Local Falcon, and Bright Local as well. A lot of these tools help us to understand how our GBP is performing. It is possible without the tools, but I would say makes our lives easier.

Absolutely. The content, as we know, plays a major role in local SEO as well, as it does in other aspects of SEO. How can companies create locally relevant content that attracts leads and also boosts search ranking at the same time? How do you guys go about doing it?

First and foremost, we talk with the client. We make sure to understand what is the high-level ticket services for them, and what it is that they want to go after, for example, if it’s AC repair or if it’s drain cleaning, or anything related, and that will bring them the biggest margin. This is what we are going after. Then obviously doing the keyword research. Based on that, we would create either a service area page or a service page itself, maybe also mentioning the service area. Within that page, some of the crucial elements that we want to be covering are the headings. We want to make sure in all the headings, we mention the city name, we mentioned the service type, and also the brand name. So Google can associate all of these three and tie them together. And then obviously creating as many pages as needed for this. And then the link building, nobody canceled link building. It helps us a lot with that. And what we’ve started doing a lot is not just simple link building, but very high local quality high-quality local backlinks. Those are coming from some local directories like a chamber of commerce or local organizations, maybe local charities or schools or businesses that are willing to link back to our clients.

These are helpful. They might not be as authoritative as some other ones, but having that locality element in them helps a lot.

Absolutely. Moving on from a local SEO perspective, in fact, local businessand es, online reviews play a very important role. What is your take on that? How do you guys approach online review systems Are you savvy for your clients?

Reviews. I would say this is one of the biggest factors when it comes to ranking on GBP. The majority of the clients that we work with, utilize certain tools that help them attract reviews. Now, this can be a podium, service type, or any of the tools that automate. Whenever the technician comes out to perform a certain service, then once the service is performed, the automatic message is sent out with the request for a view. It’s fresh because the person just left your house. As soon as you get that message, you’re feeling almost obliged to leave that review, and that helps to build the review base a lot. We always work with clients to help them set that up on their website. Then another big part of it is not just getting good reviews, but also replying to them as soon as possible. We handle that for our clients as well. Thanks to the service side, we can understand what service was performed for a certain client. We can then refer to that service in our reply, thus naturally mentioning that keyword in our reply That also definitely helps a lot because typically, Google highlights those replies if it matches the search intent of a particular searcher.

That helps to show up for really highly relevant keywords.

At the same time, it is also important to respond to not-so-great reviews so that no business is perfect. If you get a five-star or five-star rating, the customer still can doubt the business manipulating reviews. Anything between a 4.2 to 4.3 to from, let’s say, to a 4.7, 4.8-ish looks more realistic versus all five stars. If you have had a bad experience and then, let’s say, the business responded and fixed it up, then for me, as a customer, It then gives me some confidence that while no business is perfect, even if they mess it up, then they fix it as well. We have had experiences wherein we respond to reviews that are not so great, and after fixing it up, then we ask the same clients to share their experiences in terms of how was the issue handled. This, again, has worked. Again, it depends from business to business, location to location, but this is something that we also do as a practice.

Yeah, 100%. Important to address negative reviews because then also people, whenever they land upon your listing, see that negative reviews are not being answered, which means the company doesn’t care about the customer. We want to make sure to address this 100%.

Absolutely. Lastly, Kristina, we have a lot of AI automation and all that stuff going around in our space. Overall, at an industry At the high tech level. How do you see AI and automation impacting local SEO in particular in the coming years? How do you feel can businesses leverage marketing automation in the local SEO space?

To Just piggyback off of the last question, review replies. This is something I’ve seen being automated with ServiceMet, and they have a function to automate review replies. I don’t particularly like it because AI is not perfect. It can make mistakes.

Exactly. It is not customized to answer the exact customer’s concern.

Exactly. It sounds a bit robotic because, at the end of the day, it is a robot. It’s reviews, it’s something. There’s a lot of automation. There are so many different programs that are going on, and obviously, a lot of them are helping us in some way. But I don’t think for a day, taking over the jobs when it comes to local SEO, definitely, human touch always needs to be here. Perhaps when it comes to copy creation, this is where we utilize AI a lot. Be it a copy creation or just pulling up some quantum briefs and how optimized a certain page for local SEO is, this is helpful. But when it comes to actually putting out the content to go live, it always passes a human eye. At least in our agency, we always have somebody to look it over to make sure that nobody’s taking over the world with that copy. It’s interesting. It’s also sad in one way because it takes away the job from the content writers, and it’s good for the agencies because we were able to cut our expenses a lot by relying on AI. But it’s nowhere close to being as perfect as a human can write.

Absolutely 100% I can’t agree with you more there. Great, Kristina. Before we wrap this up, you have gone up the ladder. You started with content, now you are heading the ops. Your journey is quite an inspiration in itself. What is that piece of advice that you’d want to give our audiences today who are trying to make a mark in the digital marketing space who are starting?

I would say it might be a bit counterintuitive, but I feel like learning from mistakes, not being afraid to make mistakes, and always experimenting is something that’s how I was taught. It felt like getting your hands dirty as soon as possible with a client or an account or a certain task is what’s going to teach you a lot. Because having a theory, having a savvy theoretical background is great. But as long as you’re not putting that knowledge into actual practice, it’s tough to succeed. I think not to be too afraid to make mistakes because, at the very beginning of my journey, I wasn’t afraid to make mistakes, but it was definitely because it was my first job in Canada and I was very proud of it. I was stressed when I was making mistakes. Right now, I make mistakes daily, and this is how I grow and this is how I learn. Making mistakes.

Lovely. Thank you. Thank you so much, Kristina, for that piece of advice and the valuable insights you shared today. Once again, thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. Appreciate it.

Thank you so much Ranmay.