It’s getting harder and harder to rank in local search results – more businesses than ever have basic citations covered, no one is handing out free links, and social media is just downright noisy. What’s a business to do?Dana will show how to build a marketing strategy by planning your tactics around that signal, and how to show Google that you’re a thriving business that deserves those great rankings.
Presented at Engage PDX, March 9 2017.
We’re going to focus on the Engagement slice of the pie. How do you optimize for engagement?
A sample Google ads profile.
A sample of Google My Activity.
A sample of Google Voice & Audio.
A sample of Google Timeline.
Some things are easier to get at than others, but all of it is possible to collect and report on (see the link at the end).
Knowledge Panel
You can see how more reviews, more popular times data, results in a better knowledge panel. Also, see inside seems to change the panel details.
We’ve seen examples where if you visit somewhere in a strip mall or with another business very nearby, the “credit” goes to the place with the better reviews.
Here’s a recent example from my own timeline.
Why did that happen? Engagement. Also a bad map pin. Notice how the pin didn’t even show on my zoomed in map earlier?
Email newsletters and transactional emails. And why think about email? Gmail, of course.
I heard there’s this new email service called Tidings. You should check it out.
Lots of people have boring transactional emails. Don’t do that.
How are you doing at engaging your audience on social media?
From RivalIQ, Kick Point vs some other companies we’re tracking. Look at the bottom two charts that deal with engagement and look for anomalies.
Remove barriers and invite engagement by connecting to things that people want to know.
Why wait for them to come to you?
This zap tracks everyone within 10km of the Kick Point office who mentions pizza and then pushes it to Slack.
I see two people right there who clearly need some pizza. You can customize the bot icon and what it says. Twitter’s also the a great platform for this since it is so easily tracked and indexed.
Reviews! The lifeblood of every local business.
Think back to the knowledge panel. The better panels had reviews from a multitude of sources.
Calendaring & Events
Do they have a link to the driving directions? Do you see if people open them, especially on Gmail?
If you have an option to add it to calendars, make sure the “where” is correct, and add driving directions! This URL (http://kickpoint.ca/directions/) redirects to our driving directions on maps.
Can you host meetups? What else can you do to bring people in? Bringing people to your space helps with engagement.
Phone calls are nice but texting is cool too.
It’s going to happen. And you know that Google can track SMS just as well as phone calls.
I’m actually not sure! But if Google is considering calls made to a specific number and your tracking isn’t that number – maybe?
Driving directions – so important it gets its own section.
Push people towards driving directions whenever possible.
Otherwise you can’t track it.
Are you winning in your space?
Someone will click on a ton of results before they choose somewhere. If they go to you – that’s the strongest signal you can get across.
How can you build that trust before they’ve visited you? Does your site match the searcher experience?
Optimize for the searcher experience. Read the study here: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
That was a lot of metrics. You can make a pretty kick ass dashboard with that.
Proximity is a big buzzword right now, and it’s important, but I bet engagement can beat it.
The issue we’ve seen is when the map is too small to include you. You need to shout loud enough that Google must pay attention to you, instead of these other places.
Download our companion spreadsheet at http://kickpoint.ca/engagepdx2017