By MiriamEllis

Posted by MiriamEllis

Image credit: Sharon Mollerus

A new client comes to your digital marketing agency and says their competitors are stuck to the local packs like mussels cleaved to coastal rock.

“How do we edge our way up in Google’s local finder, and find our place above the tideline? We don’t even know where to begin,” the local business owner says.

The rough truth is that Google’s local search engine results often don’t make sense at first glance, or even at second or third glances. Local brands are left to puzzle out how to achieve maximum growth when they’re consistently being outranked by sticky competition for their core search phrases.

Methodology

About a year ago, I decided to run a study in which I’d track a local finder for a single query — “breakfast (X city)” — to see if anything brands or the public did over the course of 12 months would shift the top eatery out of its #1 spot. I chose a small SF Bay Area city where I’m not physically located (to remove the influence of proximity from the mix) and repeated the same query across time to see what we might learn from trying to explain the results at the end of the test period. I did my searches manually and tracked them in a spreadsheet.

My anonymized data and takeaways are at the service of your agency as you work to increase local clients’ visibility so that they can achieve optimum growth.

Visualizing a year of movement in the local finder

Google’s local finder results are paginated in sets of ten. In the following chart, you’ll see the top 10 competitors as they stood in January, moved throughout the year, and finished in December. A total of fifteen brands saw some visibility in the top 10 local finder results over the course of the year, and each brand is represented by its own color.

Takeaways

1) Nothing anyone did in 2020 shifted Brand #1 (which I’ll call Tansy) out of its top spot. No amount of links, reviews, photos, posts, category changes or any other activities over the course of year unseated Tansy.

When I see a results set like this, I suspect a sluggish market in which no one is making a strong enough marketing effort to surpass a business like Tansy. If you find a sluggish market, your client can become a winner with the right strategy.

2) The higher a business appeared in the local finder, the more stable it tended to be throughout the year. The lower a business appeared in the local finder, the more erratic its position was as the year moved along. One notable exception to this was dramatic eight-spot April drop the business that started out in position #2 experienced. My theory was that this outlier may have been tied to changes at the business at the onset of COVID-19. But other than this, the lower levels of the top 10 local finder results are very volatile, …read more

Source:: Moz Blog