If you’re a local business, what’s it going to take to rank in Google for people searching for your product or service in your local area?

In this video we give you some quick things you can check to see if Local SEO is for you, and to illustrate this we compare mortgage broking, as a more competitive industry, with a search for a local mechanic.

Read the video transcript

Okay, so first we’re looking at the “mortgage broker Castle Hill” search results and immediately we see that all four ad spots are taken up. So straight away we know that people consider this a competitive term – that there’s money there that people want to rank for so even before we move further we know that there’s going to be a bit of competition for SEO.

Then we see the google maps results before we actually get into the organic results.

Now over here on the right hand side you’re seeing some things on the side of the search results that you yourself wouldn’t typically be seeing. That’s coming from a free Google Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere, if you want to look it up, and what it does is it gives us some information, like the difficulty of that search term to rank for, the related keywords that people might search for, and what people also search for.

And then over here on the left hand side looking at the actual search results that are coming up we see what Keywords Everywhere is doing is inserting a few stat’s about each of those results.

First up we’ve got the domain authority which is a measure of how authoritatively google might look at that domain. Just because it’s got a high domain authority does not mean that every single page on that website has that same domain authority – it’s overall looking at the value of that domain. It may mean that some domains rank better than others, easier than others, but it’s not always the case.

The other thing to look at is the referring links – again this does not mean that that’s the number of links to that individual page. If it’s not, it should be just considered as an indicator of the amount of SEO that website has been doing, so if you’re seeing a lot of links to that website that means that quite typically they are engaging somebody to do SEO for their site, so immediately you know you’re going to be up against that so it’s not going to be a walk in the park necessarily.

And what we’re looking at here is a lot of bigger companies that are ranking just because of their domain authority. They’ve been around, they’ve been doing that SEO for a while. We’re seeing Yellow Pages as a directory coming up, Word of Mouth is coming up – what that says is that this is still a potential if you want to do SEO for a term like this because we know that Yellow Pages is not necessarily going to be doing SEO on every single page, so as soon as we start seeing that coming up we know that there is potential to come in and potentially rank for that, may take a bit of work but it’s not insurmountable.

You can see it’s not until we get further down the page that we start seeing probably this one is a local business that’s ranking.

That being said if we go back to the Google Maps results where we see the Google Business Profiles of these businesses, not all of these businesses that we’re seeing coming up in the top three are reflected in the organic results further down so this does indicate that there is potential for a bit of local SEO to get you up and ranking.

Now, if we then move on to “mechanic Castle Hill” this is what would be a lower competition search term. In general, the the smaller local businesses aren’t necessarily going to be doing the same amount of SEO that a service like a mortgage broker would be doing. In general, the cost per service isn’t worth as much so you don’t get the same degree of SEO as a general rule.

That being said we are seeing a couple of Google Ads, it’s not the entire four spots that are taken up so if you wanted to jump in on something like this, it’s very likely the cost per click if you are running some Google Ads would be not very expensive.

Then moving into the Google Maps results, before we start seeing what’s going on in the organic results, and you can start seeing okay you’ve got UltraTune as a franchise, Yellow Pages is a directory, AutoGuru again a directory, and then you’re seeing some local business results coming up but you can see the referring links – there’s only 103 there, there’s only six there, so you know that this is a term that doesn’t actually have a lot of competition so if you wanted to come in there and start ranking for a search term like this then there is a potential for you to take over.

So when you’re looking at things like this just from a service perspective you can install the Keywords Everywhere chrome extension just to get an idea of what is going on and just to work out just by yourself whether or not it’s worth considering SEO.