LOCAL SEO BOOST

Why Local Maps Marketing Takes Time

You may be wondering why your online marketing for your local business isn’t producing immediate results. Here is what you need to know about why local maps marketing (local SEO) takes so long and what can be done to speed things up.

You may find the process of raising your local maps ranking to be lengthy whether you do local search maps on your own or partner with a local marketing agency. Do keep in mind that local maps marketing (local SEO) is much faster than ranking organically. This is because you’re competing with a smaller pool of businesses in your local area. With that said, let’s dig in.

Here’s what we’ll cover in this article:

How local maps marketing works
Why you might not be seeing positive results
Keeping your efforts going

After working on your company’s local search optimization for a while, you might wonder why the positive results seem to be coming along so slowly.

When you are spending time and resources optimizing your presence online, it can be easy to lose patience. However, there is hope. Here are some reasons why local SEO seems to be so slow.

How Does Local Maps Marketing Work?

It should come as no surprise that we’re a pretty big fan of local maps marketing.

With local maps marketing, you give search engines all the information about your business that they need. We usually call this information the NAP for your business (name, address, and phone number).

The data is commonly called an ‘online citation’ when it is arranged together.

However, there is more to it than that. The search engines should also know the URL of your business’s website, the hours that it is open, the area of service provided if it exists, and anything else that a consumer could need to know when searching online. The marketer should think about including menus, photos, service descriptions, reviews, etc.

Why You Haven’t Seen Results From Your Local Maps Marketing?

You may find some companies promising you immediate visibility on the first page of local search.

As much as I’d like to tell you that local SEO works this way, it doesn’t. Local maps marketing (and SEO in general) requires your website to build trust with the search engines. It takes time to build trust, so don’t expect to see an improvement in your search rankings right away.

Unless they’re talking about implementing a paid advertising campaign, you should not believe a digital marketing agency that promises overnight results.

I’ll get right to it. You may not see results with your marketing efforts for the following reasons:

There is no or very little information about your business online or your business is new.

There are many complexities associated with local maps marketing, and this is typically the case for businesses that have little information online. Marketers will have to do the following things to get their business listed online:

Social profiles (including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, etc.)
GMB (Google My Business)
Bing Local
Yelp
Detailed Business listings on Industry-specific sites

The process is more complex than simply adding your business information to local listing sites.

It’s also important to include images, an overview, and links to your site (if your a new business and you don’t have a website, you’ll need one that is optimized to be found in local search).

As soon as all the listing pages have been created, you will either need to begin building citations manually or hire a marketing agency to do the work for you (this is much easier).

Nonetheless, this is a small part of local maps marketing. The local search ranking process involves a lot of factors. Rankings for local searches are affected by several categories, including:

Signals to your Google My Business (GMB)
Link signals
Proximity
Review signals
Behavioral signals
Keyword usage
Mobile responsive website

The categories listed above are broken down into a whole host of factors that search engines use when ranking local businesses.

Local search marketing efforts take time to produce results, depending on your industry. Your business may take longer to reach the first page in local search if you’re in a highly competitive industry.

If your competitors are already well-established online, they will likely show up ahead of you in search results until your trustworthiness can be proven to the search engines.

The two things that help build trust with search engines include developing citations and profiles for your company. Getting customer reviews is an added bonus that will help improve conversions and may result in a small bump in your search rankings.

While these factors can have a positive influence on your local rankings, several factors can adversely impact it (such as incomplete or incorrect citation information).

Your company has been established for several years, but there is incomplete or wrong information online about your business.

Here are some of the factors we need to address that can negatively impact your rankings.

In the case that your business has already been online for some time, but you still find it difficult to rank on the first page of local search, there are probably some negative factors at play.

Having incorrect citations can be a big problem for local businesses trying to improve rankings in local search engines. I’ll let you in on a little secret. Having incorrect NAP on the web is among those negative factors.

Did you ever change the name of your business, relocate or update your phone number? If so, the information you have floating around is probably incorrect. Your online information can be inconsistent or inaccurate, and it takes time to clean it up.

Here is what the process entails:

Start by searching Google, Bing, and online directories to locate any inaccurate listings for your business
Searching these listings and updating any incorrect listings where necessary
Submitting correct and updated information to the data aggregators who feed search engines the information they need

The information search engines use about your company isn’t gathered in one place.

The information they collect is gathered from all across the Internet. It can be problematic when search engines come across conflicting info about your company on different sites online, which causes them to get confused and don’t know what to show to searchers.

Google penalizes business websites that have conflicting info online because it wants to show searchers the most relevant and accurate information.

It takes a while for search engines to get caught up with the changes.

After the listings have been cleaned up and optimized, search engines need to get caught up.

Even though Google and Bing’s search engines are smart, the second your business information is changed (or displayed) they don’t update their indexes. It takes search engines some time to crawl and index web pages (find and process them) before they can use and display the new information on those profile pages in their search results.

Before new information appears in search results, directories need to be crawled and indexed so that the changes can be displayed.

Search engines take varying amounts of time to crawl new pages, so it can take days or months for them to crawl your website. To speed up the process, you can submit your sitemap to be crawled.

There is a waiting period even for Google My Business. The information you add about your company doesn’t appear online immediately after you’ve verified your page.

Moreover, don’t forget that your work doesn’t end once your information is seen and found online. To prevent rankings from sinking due to new or conflicting citations, you’ll need to monitor your rankings.

When all this is done, why do you still pay for local maps marketing?

Search engines may find new or incorrect information about your company even after all of this information is cleaned up. Moreover, as mentioned earlier, any conflicting information may cause your search ranking to fall. There is still more to local maps ranking and in moderately competitive industries a local ranking strategy may need to be implemented to remain on top.

Remember that even a small mistake such as a comma in the wrong place can make your citations inaccurate.

Local maps marketing is a constant process that cannot be completed once.

Because of things like inaccurate NAPs and negative reviews, it’s useful to have a digital marketing agency help you.

It’s not enough to make sure your citation information is up to date, you must also continually ask for reviews (because reviews are also a ranking factor for local searches) and have a social presence for your business.

I will end with a couple of thoughts

Marketing your local business requires commitment! Local search presence comes with benefits and some obstacles, so it is important to understand them.

You can always consider paid advertising if local maps marketing is taking too long.

Whatever you do, don’t give up on your local maps ranking. You’ll find it is well worth waiting for!