How to Get High-Quality Local Leads
In this post, I will take you through what we did to help one of our local SEO clients get more leads. I hope you find the information both informative and helpful. Please, reach out to us if you would like help generating more local leads.
Resurrectedcc.com Case Study
This client came to us because his online presence was none existent. He had a newly redesigned website that looked great but it was not bringing him any leads. He runs a cabinet painting company in Colorado Springs and he was wanting to grow his business. He started out on our Mountain Climber plan which is one of our larger local SEO plans. It comes with our normal 4 phases but also has landing page creation and some additional benefits. After a couple of months, he went from no online leads to 60 leads in his inbox. This is a small business and each one of those leads is very valuable to this client. Not to mention these were high-quality leads.
In the leads below, you can see that he is being contacted by investors and homeowners. Not only is his website handing him high-quality leads on a platter but the lifetime value of these clients could be huge. This client does a fantastic job and he should expect many referrals from these leads.
Google My Business
One of the most important parts of local SEO is claiming and optimizing your Google My Business. This is always our first step when we begin working with a local SEO client. This process can take a little time but it is absolutely worth it. Below is a before and after image of the clients GMB. As you can see views went up 1,041%, searches are up 1,370% and activity is up 1,396%.
How to Set Up Your Google My Business
You will want to go to https://www.google.com/business/ and then attempt to look up your business. If you do not see your business, Google will ask you if you want to create a new business listing. It will then take you through a short set up process. At the end, they will ask for your address to send a postcard to you. That postcard serves to verify your location and your business and it should arrive in about 5 days. Once you verify your GMB you will want to go through and optimize it.
- Add about 20-30 photos – photos of your employees, happy customers, outside and inside of your business, before and after pictures, etc.
- Add a detailed business description
- Add your services
- Add your service areas
- Ask past customers, friends, and family to leave a review
- Start adding posts
- Make sure that you have the correct business hours, phone number, and website URL.
Business Citations
The next thing you will want to do is begin creating business citations. A citation is any web-based reference of your local business name, address and phone number. You can pay a service like Yext $20 dollars per month to create these listings for you. There are also companies like Citation Builder Pro that will build them for a one time fee ranging from $35-$135 depending on how many citations you want to be created. The last option is to build them manually.
The above options are fine but I like to do extra research and find niche and geo-specific citations that the companies previously mentioned can sometimes miss. For this client, a niche citation would be something like Angieslist, contractors.com, HomeAdvisor, etc. Here is a list from BrightLocal on the best citations by niche.
An example of geo-specific citations would be springsguide.com, Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce, etc. Whitespark has a list of the best citations by City if you need some ideas on what geo-specific citations to add.
Business citations help Google to better trust your business. If Google’s algorithm sees that many high authority websites are referencing your business they will feel more comfortable sending traffic your way.
You may be wondering how many citations you need to rank locally. According to research done by BrightLocal, the average business ranking in the top 10 of Google’s Map Pack had an average of 81 citations. Those ranking in the top spot had an average of 86 citations.
NAP Consistency
NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. NAP consistency is just making sure that your name, address, and phone number show up the same across the web. It is considered to be a top 5 local ranking factor.
When many of our clients start with us their citations can oftentimes be pretty messy. This causes Google to not trust their business. If your information is not consistent then Google cannot feel comfortable sending searchers to you. The last thing Google wants is a searcher driving to an address only to find out that the business has moved or call you and not have it be the right number. This causes the searcher to lose trust in both Google and your business.
City Page Creation
Now that we have gone over a couple of the foundational steps lets go over a very important step in getting high-quality leads. We started at the logical place which is analyzing which keywords would bring him the most valuable leads. It is not always about which keyword has the highest search volume. The better question to ask is which keyword will bring me the highest quality leads. The last thing you want to do is spend hours creating a landing page only to have it fail to bring you leads or it brings you low-quality leads.
For this client the keyword ‘Cabinet Painting Colorado Springs’ was the logical place to start. This keyword does not receive a ton of searches but the user intent is fantastic. Meaning that if someone is searching for ‘Cabinet Painting Colorado Springs’ they are probably ready to reach out. The other great part about building out these landing pages is Google will automatically start ranking you for related keywords. This client is now ranking in Google’s Map Pack for a number of related keywords thanks to this one landing page (see the image below).
We also created a landing page for ‘Cabinet Painting Denver’ which receives 720 searches per month. That page is position 14 at the top of page two and should move to page one here shortly. We also created a couple of other landing pages for smaller nearby cities.
If you would like to learn more about our local SEO service please reach out to us. A great place to start is by signing up for a free SEO audit.
