Data Driven Local Search | SMX East 2019

Editor's Notes

1. This gets thrown around a lot these days The SEO community is GREAT at sharing data and experiences and I’m so grateful to work in such an open industry that thrives on learning But the problem I see is that people take other people’s data and experiences as Bible – and they assume it will work for them The only way to truly be “data driven” is to pull your own data, test your own stuff and see what works for YOU and YOUR space
2. Winners are doing something right, you can learn from them Set expectations – SEOs in the room, how often do you get questions like “why am I not ranking for this keyword?” or “I want to rank in this city but I don’t have a storefront there. Make it happen” It’s REALLY hard to talk a client or a boss down from expectations like that, right? We try to explain why it’s not possible – but they don’t listen, they just want results. They don’t want to hear excuses. People don’t like to be told that they have unrealistic expectations. But – they react very differently when you can SHOW them that they have unrealistic expectations.
3. This is your foundation. If you don’t have the right keywords from the start, your analysis is dead before it even begins Garbage in garbage out. Spend time here!
4. This is a simple correlation plot - it has the ranking factors all down the diagonal and all along the top Read it like a matrix – the darker the color where two factors intersect, the more closely correlated they are. I know – correlation isn’t causation. But personally if I spot a few factors that correlate highly with rank, I’m going to put my time and money toward those before I follow any best practices that are published out there
5. This is a tree map – it’s visualizing how frequently a particular domain shows up in my data set The bigger the box, the more prominent a particular site is I’ll show you how you can use this in a few minutes
6. You can learn a lot about the user intent behind a particular keyword if you pay attention to these. These are all clues to inform your strategy if you know where to look. Dan is gonna talk more about that next.
7. This is especially helpful for setting expectations like I talked about earlier. Got someone who expects to rank in the 3-pack but is more than, in this case, 20 miles outside of the search radius? Sorry Bro. Tough luck. Let me show you why I love this visual – what youre looking at here is distance from search on the x axis, and rank on the Y axis Look at that pattern – you can CLEARLY see how proximity opens up after the top three, then the top 5, then the top 10
8. Reviews are GOLDMINES! It’s free customer insight into not only what YOU do well and can improve, but they highlight your competitors weak spots too! Use that to your advantage
9. I will never use an industry average to set client expectations ever again
10. There are HUGE differences across categories HUGE variances across cities Even huge differences across categories within the same city! If I used that 1.6 mile average to set expectations with my financial consulting client in Chicago, I’d feel HORRIBLE! I would have TOTALLY misled them
11. Not telling you to keyword stuff your business names, but… c’mon Google. You’ve gotta be better than this
12. Again, correlation isn’t causation, but this is pretty interesting. Maybe owner engagement is a ranking factor