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Local has evolved from listings management to real experience and engagement. Today, consumers are looking for more personalized experiences and relevant conversations across all touch points.
The behavior of a local consumer is changing rapidly in the world of AI-powered search. Based on the searcher’s intent, search engines strive to surface results that will meet the searcher’s need – in other words, content that will engage them and provide a great experience.
Whether you are a multi-location brand or a small local business, the biggest challenge is providing a personalized experience across all channels and touchpoints.
With cookies going away, this challenge becomes even bigger. As you think about digital transformation, consider integrating various disjointed systems to centralize customer data as your golden currency.
This article discusses the top areas location-based businesses need to focus on in 2024 and key metrics to measure performance and success.
Below are the top five areas that location-based businesses need to focus on in 2024.
It is critical to be discovered for brand and location-based queries by:
Here are the core ingredients for discovery:
Dig deeper: Future-proofing digital experience in AI-first semantic search
Some of Google’s algorithm updates have been aimed at ensuring that brands are creating helpful content that offers expert opinions on products and services and delivers value.
For brands, it is not about creating more content; creating topical, entity-rich content aligned with your channel and audience strategy is critical.
Robust content strategy helps build relevancy
Robust reviews help build authority
Reviews are an important trust signal and help build local authority for brands.
The top three things that impact local business in 2024, according to Joy Hawkins, will be:
“We still see traditional SEO factors on the website along with content moving the needle the most for small businesses. Reviews need to be constantly sought after as review recency is a ranking factor and customers also scan reviews and are most likely to see the first few that are listed. We also see that Google rewards businesses that get searched a lot and clicked on a lot.”
For location-based businesses, providing a connected experience is critical. The challenge is providing quality information to a brand-loyal customer looking for a location-specific query.
Here are six must-haves to consider as you think about experience:
Consistent information
The details of your brand, particularly location data, must be uniformly presented across every platform, be it the systems for content creation, distribution, or customer relationship management.
For brands with multiple locations, the best strategy to ensure uniformity is to have all platforms draw from a single, authoritative data source. Whether it’s your main website, directories, advertising campaigns, public relations, or other channels, they should all rely on this centralized source for accurate brand information.
With the rise of AI-driven search technologies, the demand for consistent and high-quality data becomes even more critical to prevent errors or discrepancies.
Site architecture
It is important to create the right site architecture to ensure information about each location is available easily. Location information must be qualitative, relevant, engaging, and current and include local and regional searches.
Here is an example of how multilocation businesses should create localized experiences.
Google typically allocates a limited crawl budget for every domain. Your site architecture should enable seamless information flow between the main brand page, countries, states, cities and location pages to ensure crawl budget is used effectively. This will also ensure that your content is easily indexed in search engines.
Localized experience
Make sure your location page incorporates elements that anticipate and address the local audience’s needs.
Depending on your industry vertical, these could include Content such as FAQs, videos, events, rate calculators, itineraries, menus and more and presenting the information in multiple languages.
Consider adding related searches, product reviews, bios of subject matter experts, etc., to the page to demonstrate local expertise, relevance and authority.
Dig deeper: How to create a perfect location page for SEO and visitors
Location, backlinks, website, GBP, video
As Shotland put it, in 2024, the most critical factors for local online performance include the physical location of the business, as relocating can significantly impact local search rankings.
Backlinks, while less influential for local pack rankings, remain important for organic search results.
Lastly, brand demand is key, with searches and clicks on your brand directly improving rankings across the board.
To optimize control, businesses should maintain a simple yet effective website, optimize their Google Business Profile with accurate categories and services, garner positive reviews, engage in regular Google Business Profile posts, and incorporate video content into their profile.
Personalized experience
Ideally, every visitor accessing your website should feel like the site and content were meant for them and not for the masses.
By connecting various channels, such as organic and paid, with travel intent and customer data platform, you can personalize experiences for searchers. Experience can easily be personalized based on:
The objective is to tailor the user experience to the audience’s intentions and meet the business’s requirements.
Delivering a personalized user experience involves adjusting everything from visuals and text to prompts for action. This approach is designed to enhance engagement on your site and increase the likelihood of converting visits into actions.
Here’s how personalized experiences can help increase engagement.
Technical SEO
All the rich content that you have created needs to be discovered and understood by search engines. The goal is to ensure at least 95% of your site content is crawlable and indexable with no issues with redirects, canonicals, multiple hops, broken pages, etc.
However, just having your content crawled and indexed isn’t enough. There are some technical SEO tips to maximize the visibility of your content:
Dig deeper: 8 steps to a successful entity-first strategy for SEO and content
Customer engagement is an important signal for search engines. Metrics like time spent on the site help search engines determine whether the content meets the searcher’s needs.
Alternative channels like TikTok, where Gen Z is spending a lot of time, are a threat to Google’s market share. Improving customer engagement needs to happen across channels.
Strategies like engaging a community of influencers, active digital PR, adding interactive and informative videos, customer reviews, and a robust social channel strategy can help increase brand engagement.
Maximizing conversions is the end goal of all marketing efforts. Here are four power tips to maximize local conversions:
As search evolves and Search Generative Experience rolls out, traditional SEO metrics used to track local performance will become less relevant.
We need to start adding new metrics as part of our tool kit. New KPIs need to be adopted to measure success. These include:
Local is no longer just about listings management. Today, it is about creating a well-integrated strategy to cover all audience touch points and optimizing for discovery, relevancy, experience, engagement and conversions.
Centralizing information and data will be crucial for multi-location brands to drive consistency across touchpoints, deliver a meaningful localized and personalized experience, and track performance across channels.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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