Good morning, marketers, are you missing out on key opportunities?
Even as "near me" and other types of local intent searches are on the rise, two extensive new studies point to missed opportunities by local marketers. It seems many multi-location brands and local marketers are failing to execute on local SEO best practices — even just the basics — even as the studies show a correlation between brands that are executing well locally and sales growth, new research from SOCi and FreshChalk reveals. If you're not fully building out location pages across Google, Facebook and Yelp and more, directly engaging consumers at the local level, then you're missing opportunities to improve visibility, local rankings and sales.
One of the studies found that nearly 75% of franchise locations were posting content on Facebook. Yet, they were doing little in the way of engaging customers on Google My Business or Yelp. Just 2.3% percent of locations were responding to Google Q&A, for example.
Even if you're not a local marketer, these are good reminders to take stock of your own optimization efforts during the summer doldrums.
I don't care what role you're in now, I guarantee you can empathize with this scenario laid out by DeepCrawl's Sam Marsden at SMX Advanced last month: "It wasn't too long ago that I was getting frequent requests for site traffic data from my marketing director, Jen, who's here. It involved a lot of last-minute screenshots for management meetings. It was quite disruptive, repetitive and an inefficient way of working. Yeah, so, sorry Jen, but it was like, it was quite annoying."
(This gave me many flashbacks.) Sam's solution? Dynamic dashboards in Data Studio. He shared several looks at the series of dashboards he's created to give stakeholders the data they need — and keep his days on tracks. You might find some inspiration of your own in them.
Read on for a Pro Tip from Jim Yu on the growing importance of image content and optimization for mobile search and more.
Ginny Marvin
Editor-In-Chief
