User First, Google Second: The Local SEO Playbook

One of the most important factors in local SEO is the number of reviews you have.

And if you're getting reviews, your name right, your domain address, those are huge.

I just think you can all.

You always have to put the user first and then Google second.

That's the way I see it.

Like reviews are important not because Google wants them to be important, but because people think they're important.

Yeah, people will go out of their way to put forth effort to give you a bad review.

Right.

Because they're emotionally charged.

Mmm, that's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host Brett Dystrever.

Please subscribe to this podcast on hold your favorite podcast apps leave.

A five star review really does help with the rankings.

And let me know how I am doing.

But this week we're me talking about SEO and local SEO.

Well, you know, the things that local business need to know but sometimes need a lot of help with because it's difficult sometimes.

Google's always changing things and gives me headaches sometimes.

Anyways, I have Josh Thompson with me.

He's a founder of Bright Beam SEO where he helps home service companies scale their lead flow through Google business profile optimization and local SEO strategy.

With nearly 20 years of entrepreneurial experience, including building a financial service lead gen company and starting and selling an addiction treatment center, Josh knew what it takes to grow businesses from the ground up.

So welcome to the show, Josh.

Thank you, appreciate it.

You're welcome.

And the first question asks all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

I've got my coffee right now and I don't know how anybody who's an SEO survives without coffee, but I guess tea baby, if you drink enough.

Do people say tea a lot?

It depends.

I get various different answers.

I get from tea to black coffee to nothing at all, to monster or energy drinks.

Sure, it varies between on which specifically people like, but it's always interesting to figure out what people actually drink.

I've done the black, I've done it all.

My wife got me an espresso and I hate to say that I am straight addicted to it.

I love it.

I never would have thought I would liked it as much as I do, so.

Oh, so you like, you like the espresso shots basically?

Well, yeah, Lattes, right?

Like it's basically a quick latte.

I tried doing the machines, okay.

If it takes me more than like five minutes, it's too much work for the morning.

I gotta get to my computer.

Right.

So that's what I've been doing for the last four months straight.

That's fair.

That's fair.

So I gave a brief summary of your expertise.

Can you give the listeners a little bit more about what you do?

I like to say yes to new things and to helping people.

And 20 years ago, my friend had some problems with substances.

After he kind of went through the rehab thing, he found this really interesting treatment.

I'd already been doing some websites and the financial stuff.

Right.

And so I was like, yeah, let's do it.

So, you know, I helped build, you know, a company that then went under.

And so then I end up starting my own with another individual, and I hired SEO companies.

And then I would be like, I can do this.

I'd start doing it.

And I went through that a few times before.

I was just like, I. I'm just going to do this.

And so SEO became a big passion of mine, and that's what really drove me into SEO.

I sold that.

And just by happenstance, I kind of found my way into the local SEO with some people that I knew.

And I've been like, man, how lucky am I?

Especially with all the AI and everything going on, because local SEO is just by its nature, bottom of funnel where people need a person.

Yeah, it's been.

It's been an amazing journey, and I've been able to learn a lot of things and do a lot of things, but now helping businesses do their SEO has been really fun, and I've been doing this for a number of years now as well.

All right, so what's some of the biggest misconceptions that people have or local business owners have or marketers have for local SEOs, and how does that misconception actually hurt their bottom line?

That's a good question.

And I'm going to kind of flip this a little bit.

I would say the biggest misconception.

It's not really a misconception.

I think there's a lack of either desire or just general knowledge about SEO.

And the reason I point that out is just because I see a lot of home service businesses, they're busy, I get it.

But they don't understand really anything about the different marketing channels and how they work.

And it puts them in a position where they end up spending a lot of money on just basically a prayer, hoping that the guy they're hiring is going to get them where they want to go.

They know they want to get somewhere.

I applaud anybody who's out there, like, trying to test things and get it going, but I Think the biggest problem most of these businesses face is they don't take the a few hours, maybe a couple, maybe an hour a week to really be involved with marketing, understand their marketing and make sure they're managing the marketing.

You know, you have to understand it to manage it.

Right.

So I see that as, you know, a thing.

I think most business owners, especially in the local area, that if they got involved in, would save them a lot of headache and give them a lot of benefit.

And so can you walk us through what separates the companies that do it really well or dominate local search and for those that still remain, well, invisible and nobody knows about them?

Yeah, and just to clarify a little bit, I do mean all of marketing.

I think people in the local area, they don't really know if they're buying ads, what ads, where the ads coming from, or SEO.

Right.

There's all these marketing channels.

Now you come to SEO and how SEO works.

The first thing is that local SEO and general SEO are a lot different.

You know, it's like plumbing in H vac.

I think a lot of people assume they're the same thing, but local SEO is more focused on the Google Map being the priority, whereas the kind of the searches generally are not as important, although they do play a big part.

But the target is getting up on Google Maps.

If you're on Twitter a lot, you start to think that everyone in the world is an expert because you're following experts.

I just think most business owners either, and I'm talking about the SEO companies, I just don't know if they care or love SEO.

I think that's really the most important thing that you can do as a business is if you're going to hire somebody to do a job, you want to make sure that they're still involved.

And if you can figure out a way to figure out if they like it, are they educating themselves?

This just changes too fast to have somebody who's doing things that they did yesterday, they're still doing them today.

I would say that in my estimation, the people who do well for their clients are people who still are educating themselves about SEO, especially today.

I mean, things have probably changed more over the last year than maybe the last decade with all the AI.

And it's going to keep changing.

Would you put like Google business or my business or whatever they're calling it?

I don't remember now anymore.

Would you put that part of local SEO as well?

Because that kind of like bridges that gap and is Waze a part of that?

Because I know Waze is part of Google.

Technically, they bought the company, but they feel like there's still two different, like beasts.

Would that be part of the local SEO mix as well?

Yeah, I guess when I say Google Maps, I mean the Google Business Profile.

That's what's linked to Google Maps.

I know there's so many terms for this same thing.

Google Maps, Google Business Profile.

That is the initial and the core of local SEO.

Exactly.

And so your website is very important, but you're going to do different things with the website.

When your focus is the Google Business Profile and the Google Map rankings, you know you're going to do different things with link building than you're going to do if your focus is general traditional SEO over the other side of it.

And then as far as the ways, and I haven't seen that really, I don't see a lot of that being something that people talk about or is really changing anything specifically.

No, it's fair.

I mean, I feel like Google really hasn't really done much with Waze.

I think they bought them like, what, decade ago or something like that, and they just really haven't done much with it.

Great app for, like, users, but they haven't really done much to it beyond buying it.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

What about the content creation?

Does that also play a part now with local SEO of like making sure you have videos, blogs or whatever you can actually produce or hiring someone to produce that stuff?

Does that now start to play a little bit more of a more prominent role in local SEO besides the link building and besides trying to be on Google Maps?

Let's just break it down a little bit.

I mean, one of the most important factors in local SEO is the number of reviews you have.

And if you're getting reviews, your name right, your domain address, those are huge.

But where content really comes into play is in two things.

Number one, content, especially on your website, is really important for giving Google the information about what to show you for and what not to show you for.

Right.

So especially when you're trying to rank for secondary keywords and, and things that you don't primarily do, you still want to try to drive some business there.

That's really important.

So your website becomes this template area to showcase your authority through content.

On top of that, though, user signals will always.

And if, if anything, they're getting more important.

User signals are always going to be important part of the mix.

I think Google is looking at things like TikTok, Instagram and saying, hey, look, these guys are figuring out ways to give People what they want without really keywords and all this stuff.

Right.

It's just engagement.

So anything that you can do to make things more engaging, for instance, Google business profiles, you can put videos up and Google will autoplay those videos in certain when you're on certain apps or on certain browsers.

So that can be really engaging.

Right.

Video is always engaging.

And then I just think you can all.

You always have to put the user first and then Google second.

That's the way I see it.

Like review are important, not because Google wants them to be important, but because people think they're important.

And so I think anything you can do to showcase, you know, what you do quickly or show people from your business, build trust.

Right.

Make people more comfortable with the fact that you're coming to their house, those are all going to be really good ways of converting, getting sales and driving these positive signals to Google.

And talking about reviews, I know it's probably the hardest thing to do is actually get good reviews.

The bad reviews are pretty easy to come by because everybody, everybody expects you to have good service.

But when you don't have good services, when people go, all right, I'm going to, I mean, we all do it.

I mean even I do it and you do it.

Like, how do companies actually get the good reviews?

Because bad reviews are easy to come by.

Yeah.

People will go out of their way to put forth effort to give you a bad review.

Right.

Because they're emotionally charged.

Well, that's going to depend a lot on what kind of business you're in.

A lot of local business, businesses have the luxury of having a good amount of volume if you're doing 100 jobs a month.

The way I see it is if you automate that kind of stuff, there's a lot of great tools for automating it.

You're going to get probably 25 to 30% of those people who will leave you a review.

That's really the best approach.

If you have the volume, then it's kind of a set it and forget it.

And then, you know, you work on your customer service angle to help customers elevate from just a customer to a fan or just even, you know, doing a good enough job to where people, you know, they, they're excited to say something when they're prodded.

If you don't, then you gotta pound the pavement.

Right.

You gotta hit people up.

You gotta do extra, extra work.

You know, if you're a newer business, you have to really, really get involved in, in asking customers.

I would say it's it's, it's really hard for business owners.

They don't like to do it and after a few weeks of trying really hard, they realize it's really hard and it's annoying to do right.

But it is so important.

You have to keep making it your number one priority.

I like to hit up my clients very often and just remind them, let's get reviews.

If you can get customers to write long reviews, that's great.

If you can get customers to put pictures of the job that you did in their reviews, I like things where you as the business can't manipulate it as easily.

Right.

If a customer is taking action on Google's platform by doing more, that's going to be a big signal because you can't just do it yourself.

If I can go do it myself on my business profile, well, everybody can.

So getting customers to take those bigger actions, I think that's a really big signal to Google and will continue to be because it's not as easy to get done from the business owner's perspective.

And talking about like multiple locations, specifically maybe for home services, it does face a unique SEO challenge.

So what strategy do you recommend for consistent local rankings across different service areas without cannibalizing your own search presence?

Oh, that's such a good question.

I do a lot of research.

I like to look at cities and just look at people.

It's a difficult question.

There's going to be a give and take on each side.

Do you want to potentially pick up a few more customers in another area, but you're going to lose out on the clout?

It really comes down to reviews.

I guess that's what I'm saying is do you want one place in your local area that has 5,000 reviews or do you want five places with 500?

What I'm seeing is a lot of companies that are doing really well, not only in like a major city, but also in the secondary categories.

In a major city, they just have an explosive number of reviews when compared to their competitors.

So if you can have one location that has 10 times the amount of reviews as everybody, that's gonna do really well.

But it's, you know, but then people do really well with multiple locations.

So it's, it really has to be a game that you have to think out.

It's gonna depend a lot on your, on your niche, the, the services that you offer.

And I would just say I try to take these things, I try to test things out and then I just, you have to take it with a grain of salt a little bit that you might have to change later.

It's just going to be a case by case basis based on the city, based on the customer, what they offer, the services.

I don't think there's any one, one set answer, but this is also just evolving so much.

I've been, I've been reading and looking at so much in this space that I don't feel like I have a solid.

This is what you do.

It's too specific on the cases by case basis.

I, I would say, would like the.

AI or LLMs help with that a little bit more with that type of a thing because I mean canalization is going to, I feel like it's going to happen not because you want it to, just because like you said, it's a cost benefit analysis.

How much business do I want and how much do I want to cannibalize my own search?

Right.

Well, the interesting thing about cannibalization in Google Maps is if you do a lot of looking around, you'll see that like a roto rooter in New York and in New Jersey are both ranking really well.

So they don't cannibalize in the same way.

At least right now.

Right.

Everything can change.

It doesn't seem like they cannibalize each other in the same way as search does.

Google does, in my view, try to keep each individual location separated out.

Right.

So it treats them almost like they're totally different.

Right.

So I think that helps.

As far as AI though, do we want to get into the whole AI?

I mean, that's a, that's kind of a whole nother conversation.

But I would be more worried about reviews and review numbers over anything else.

And if I had the choice, if it was going to really limit my ability to get reviews on two profiles, I probably would stick to the one.

Unless they're in like other states or something.

Right.

Where that it's more obvious.

Right.

So speaking of voice search, because it was the hay day thing before AI and I feel like they're kind of merging together now.

Do you see it actually helping with local SEO?

It's saying like using Alexa or still Google home to actually find them a plumber or find them something.

Do you see that still working out or is this kind of like it's nice to have but it's not really going to move the needle at all.

No.

That's really interesting.

I mean, yeah, voice search was supposed to be this big thing, right.

And it, everyone talked about it for a long time and it, it Kind of fell off.

I actually think where this goes, or at least what I see as a potential, is that AI agents, once that becomes this thing, then you're going to be doing that, right?

You're going to say, hey chat, give me an estimate with the top three roofing companies in my area.

And then chat will go do the search and the top three that it comes up with are going to be the ones that it schedules onto your calendar for you.

I see that being a possibility.

So I think that that way of talking and that way of, of searching, I've actually been doing a lot of testing with those type of searches, but more within like chat or the Google AI interface because that's how I see people naturally interacting.

If we start to get to that point where voice is going to be the primary driver of some of these searches, the top, the best, those kind of terms.

Where I see it right now though is look, all these AI interfaces, they're going to pull from two things.

Search, which is going to be based on how much authority do you have, backlinks, all that is going to be the way to get up in a search.

And then two is going to be based on the Google or the Bing map pack, where the number of reviews you have is going to get you up in the search.

So I think as this changes the underlying game of having website authority and having reviews on your Google business profile, that's going to be the primary fuel behind everybody going in and just adding best plumber in their city to their title in their H1 and everything so that they show up for that search.

So that when somebody says that, so it's, it's, to me it's doesn't really change the game too much at this point because the guy with the highest authority that can rank for these keywords at the turn of a dime is the one who's going to be able to do that and show up and eventually get that, that business.

And so since local SEO or just Google's algorithm is always changing, what do you see?

Local SEO or in the next five to 10 years, where do you see like the future trends going?

Well, as far as people who already are in local SEO, just by nature, it's hard for me to see a lot of, I mean, if AI comes in, what's AI going to do?

Just display the map for you that's already displayed?

I think the one concern in that, in that scenario is that we actually get more segmented.

Right now you're saying that Bing becomes, Bing becomes a bigger Piece of this.

Even though people don't know, no one wants to use Bing, but they want to use chat, they just don't know it's Bing.

Right.

So Bing becomes a bigger part.

It fragments things which is I think usually good for a market.

It, it makes it so that multiple people are getting business where in a Google only environment.

Right.

It, it, it kind of solidifies the top few.

So it's not necessarily a bad thing to have more variety in that sense.

But I think where I see the most interesting change is in all of these people who are inter, who are, who are national financial advisors, insurance agents.

Sure there's some local ones, but a lot of those are nationalized right now.

I think over time, especially as my biggest worry of how do I know you're real?

Like how do you know I'm real?

In, in five years you could be AI and I wouldn't even know it.

So I think as that becomes the case, AI video, AI phone calls, AI, people are going to start to get more nervous and they're going to say I want somebody local that I can talk to.

And so all of these businesses that do their national business that you don't really need somebody locally are going to move more towards the Google Map and Google Local because more people are going to be concerned that they want to make sure they're talking to somebody who's real.

And that's only going to happen if they're face to face.

Well, to be fair, I can already do an avatar through Descript.

That would do everything for me.

Right now it's already happening, right?

I mean YouTube's you're going to be able to duplicate everything in the YouTube library in a day with completely different faces and different words.

I don't know what that does to the world, but I do think when it comes to stuff that like financial and, and consultants and all that, it makes me think there's this potential here where people are going to just be like, the only way I know you're real is if I meet you.

So in person could be the new thing again.

Yeah.

As weird as that is, right.

It's the video scares me more than anything.

I'm not so much scared about search because people have to find a service.

I'm scared about the fact that video can be so easily created and replicated and these people you follow online could be completely fabricated and you wouldn't even know it.

That's very weird to me.

So for our listeners who want to take action immediately after this episode, what is the One local search audit item they should check today that could reveal maybe something they could change or a quick win they could actually do.

Well, look, I would actually say that even though what I'm going to say is the answer, you probably don't want to do it yourself.

People do not understand how finicky and fragile a Google business profile is.

Anytime you change your name, you can be suspended.

Anytime you change your categories, you can be suspended.

Your name, your address, your phone number, your website, those are such big drivers of business.

But if you, I, you see these stories all the time or I do, I went and added LLC to my business.

I didn't want, I took it off, I got suspended.

You cannot change these things.

There are back door methods to changing this stuff that are much safer.

So I don't want to say get an expert, do what you want.

But that's my forewarning with that.

The most important things on your business profile, especially for somebody new or somebody who is not getting business, is making sure you have keywords in your business name.

There's ways to do that so that it's legit.

But if you call yourself John's and you're a roofing company, John's Roofing company is more likely to get the search volume than John's or John's Company.

Right.

So those keywords in your name, if they're not there, that's going to be affecting you.

And then number two is just your primary category.

Google is adding categories all the time.

Maybe not all the time, but a lot of people don't know that they're in the wrong category.

So making sure your business is listed under the right category is a huge driver and such a simple fix that has a major impact.

That's a really good thing to check and just make sure is correct.

Gotcha.

And people listening to this episode, they're wondering where can they find you online to learn more.

Yeah, so I'm @brightbeam SEO on Twitter or I guess X.

My website is brightbeam SEO.com I try to provide a lot of downloads.

We have a download right now on our homepage that's basically how do you do this yourself for local businesses?

So you can download that and go through that if you're interested in kind of doing it yourself.

And Josh, brightbeam SEO.com is my email.

I love talking about business.

You don't have to feel like you're going to have to do business with me if you have things you want to bounce or talk about or just questions.

I love talking about this stuff, so feel free to reach out.

All right.

Any final thoughts for the listeners?

I think we gave a lot of thoughts.

Hopefully they're solidified enough.

So.

No, I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

And thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brewing, Sharing knowledge on local SEO.

Yeah, yeah.

And thank you for listening.

As always, please subscribe to this podcast and all your favorite podcasts.

Me?

Absolutely.

A five star review.

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Let me know how I am doing.

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All right guys, stay safe.

Get to understand your local SEO, your Google business page, and everything else in between and see you next week.

Later.