This month’s event was originally scheduled for this spring, but then a little pandemic cropped up and throw things for a bit of a loop.

The topic was local SEO, and the speaker was Lincoln Rinehart from Adept Marketing.

Lincoln kicked off with a definition of local SEO:

Local SEO is optimizing your website and online presence to ensure visibility when users conduct a search with geographic intent.

That “geographic intent” piece has moved well beyond the “searches that include ‘…near me.'” Because, well, Google’s gotten smarter than that. For instance, a search for “lawn mower repair” is likely to have geographic intent. Depending on the industry/sector, this sort of thing can happen all the time!

At the same time, local SEO isn’t really a singular thing that an organization should focus on:

• It’s part of an overall SEO strategy (including technical SEO)
• It has content marketing implications (of course!)
• It may lead you to focusing on things like user reviews…which have a halo effect of benefits beyond just SEO

The Google algorithm is really trying to triangulate on a few different things, all of which can be assisted with different SEO tactics:

• Proximity—is the business near the user’s location?
• Relevance—does the business offer what the user is searching for?
• Prominence—is the business known (inbound links from quality sources) for what the user is looking for?

There are lots of tactics that play into this, including establishing and maintaining Google My Business (GMB) for the company and its locations, soliciting reviews (with some specific focus), link building (with the right sites), and, of course, the site structure and content (such as dedicated pages for each location for multi-location businesses).

No good presentation would be complete without recommending some resources, and this was a great presentation!

We recorded the event (almost all of it; we whiffed on pressing the record button for the first few minutes!):

Our October 2020 event will again be virtual, and it will be a bit of a dive into the evolution of browser technology and the ramifications for digital marketers and analysts.