When people first get into digital marketing and they hear SEO, they think, “Okay, got it. People search Google, I want our company up top.”

What people often don't realize, at least not at first, is that there are multiple SEO practices because there are multiple Google indexes: There's video SEO for YouTube, image SEO for their shopping site, shopping SEO, and local SEO for Maps and Google business profiles.

As you can imagine, there are lots of practitioners in the local SEO space, but few are as good as the Sterling Sky Agency in Toronto, which focuses on just that corner of the Google world.

Joy Hawkins is the owner of Sterling Sky. She has been working in the industry since 2006 and writes for publications like Search Engine Land. She speaks at all the leading marketing conferences you've heard of like MozCon, Local U, Pubcon, and the State of Search. Joy has been kind enough to carve some of her day out to join me.

Our podcast host Tod Maffin spoke with her recently.

Table of Contents

• What is “Local SEO”?
• How Competitive is Local SEO?
• Newest Google Features for Small Businesses
• Attribution Labels
• Where Should a Business Owner Focus?
• Do Bad Reviews Hurt my Google Ranking?
• Are We Following Old Advice?
• The Problem with Local SEO Spam
• …But Does Spam Work?
• How to Combat Spam in Your Industry/Region
• How to Insulate Your Business from Google Algo Changes
• What Should a Business Owner With Limited Time Focus On?
• The Future of Local SEO
• More About Sterling Sky

What is “Local SEO”?

Tod Maffin: Can we start with a quick overview of local search? I mentioned maps and business profiles, but when you work with companies, what exactly are you doing for them?

Joy: That's a good question, because I feel like that actually is something that people get wrong a lot. When I say local search, I'm not just referring to Google Maps. That is definitely a part of it, but it would be getting essentially any local business ranked on Google. I would define it as basically SEO for any business where their customers are local. If you only get customers from a certain geographic area, let's say 50 miles away from wherever you're located, you would want local SEO. Even the traditional organic results for Google are different when you're dealing with local businesses.

A lot of people don't realize that. You don't get the same thing when you search on Google for plumber, if you're located in Chicago, as if you did the same search on Google located in Seattle. That's what we mean when we say local search.

Tod Maffin: You're optimizing then, for things like location and relevancy at a level above the standard Google SEO best practices?

Joy: Right. For example, 10 years ago, I may have the years wrong, but about a decade ago, it didn't use to matter. If you searched just a simple phrase like auto insurance, you would get the same exact results. You would get GEICO and State Farm and Progressive and stuff. Now, when you do those searches, you don't necessarily get these giant sites, you get small local businesses that are local to your area. Google has been really, really evolving how they figure out if the person is actually looking for something local for them. You'll see even things like shoes or Nintendo Switch or searches like that actually return local businesses now as well, because Google realizes, when you're buying a Nintendo Switch, you're probably going to go to your local store and buy one.

How Competitive is Local SEO?

Tod Maffin: Is it quite competitive? That feels like it's quite new and, how do I say this nicely, exploitable. If my competitors aren't catching up to that yet, and they don't realize that optimizing for local search is a thing, then it seems like that would be an opportunity for me to dive deep into it. Am I right there? Is it new enough that there's a window of opportunity?

Joy: It really varies based on the industry. Some industries, yes. I would say home services are definitely very behind on this. The average plumber and HVAC company, they're not doing a great job at local SEO. It's really awesome working for businesses like that. You can get really good results faster because there's not as much competition. If you're talking like lawyers, for example, they've all been onto this for a very long time and it's super competitive. It definitely varies quite a bit depending on what type of business you're looking at.

Newest Google Features for Small Businesses

Tod Maffin: I want to ask you in a moment about local spam that is out there, what you see working well in SEO, what's not working, and so on. I guess the good things about Google and also a bit of its frustration is that they are always adding new features to their platform. Can you walk us through some of the more recent additions that Google has released that small businesses, in particular, should be aware of?

Joy: Yes. One thing I'll say about Google features, the whopping majority of features that Google adds inside, we call it Google My Business, but they just renamed it so that the Google business profile is what they call it now. They're the same thing, so use whatever term you want. Inside your listing on Google, so just, again, to make sure everybody knows what I'm talking about here, if you do a Google search for your business name and city, you'll usually come up with a listing. It has all kinds of stuff on it like reviews and an address and phone number and things like that. That listing, Google has given business owners the ability to manage that. You claim it through, usually, a postcard that you get in the mail. Then once you claim it, there are all these features that they allow you to use that will enhance or enrich your profile. A thing to keep in mind is most of these do not actually impact where your business ranks. They're helpful because if your customers are searching for you, you want to make sure you have all the information filled out, like when you're open. It's a really simple one. People don't put their hours in. Even over holidays, you see this all the time. It says they're open and they're not open. It's frustrating.

Tod Maffin: All the time.

Joy: Simple things like that can really be frustrating to customers. It's mainly there for that. The purpose of these features is so that Google can give the right information to your customers. How you rank is a whole nother thing, but most of the features inside GMB are aesthetic, if that makes sense.

Attribution Labels

Tod Maffin: Yes. They're adding things like attribution labels that you can put if you're LGBT-friendly and things like that.

Joy: Yes. It's interesting. Timing-wise, it's with a lot of the movements. I think it was a year ago, they added Black-owned as an attribute, but that was in the US only. If you're not in the US, you can't use that attribute.

Tod Maffin: Yes.

Joy: Again, it was a response to everything going on in the States at the time. They do tend to pick and choose what they're coming out with based on what the society is doing and stuff. They have a lot of transgender stuff.

Tod Maffin: Yes. I've also found that the attributes and/or labels are also specific to the business category that you're in.

Joy: Yes. Some of them are uniform, like women-led, I think, is every business category. You can have that as an attribute. Veteran-led and things like that, but there are some that are specific to certain categories. Whether or not you have COVID testing available, that's only available to certain categories, certain business types that would actually have the likeliness of pharmacies that would have COVID testing done.

Where Should a Business Owner Focus?

Tod Maffin: It's a new quarter, a new year. What things should the owner of a small or medium-sized business be focusing on first in 2022?

Joy: Reviews is always the top of the list, I think, for what business owners should do when it comes to optimizing your website and getting ranked on Google. Some business owners do that and they do it well. It's hard. All I can say is that from working in this industry for over a decade, it is not an easy thing to do for a salon. To know how to cut somebody's hair and make them look pretty is a totally different thing than knowing how to get a website ranked on Google. As far as what the business owner themselves should really focus on, reviews is something that every business should be able to manage themselves and keep track of and ask people to review you.

Understanding how Google treats reviews is also helpful. I think there's a big gap there where a lot of people are like, “How is Google okay with this negative review?” People don't really understand Google's policy on that. They're big on freedom of speech. It's completely fine with these mean-spirited, rude reviews that businesses get, but they are not okay with ones that are political or racist or things like that. There is a hard line. We saw, last couple years, a big movement that Google made was they decided that any reviews referencing mask policies, those are political in nature and Google will remove them if you report them. There were some pretty big changes in the US. They got a huge amount of reviews removed, because people on both sides, depending on what side you're on, some people were really upset about the mask policy, some people really liked the mask policy. There's all these reviews about masks that have nothing to do with the actual store experience.

Do Bad Reviews Hurt my Google Ranking?

Tod Maffin: Do rankings factor into the search engine results? If I have bad reviews or increasing bad reviews, am I being pushed lower in Google?

Joy: That is a really good question. What I have found is that reviews themselves, I don't believe– This is, honestly, just from my findings, because you're going to get different answers depending on who you ask about this. What I've seen is that reviews, in and of themselves, are not a ranking factor, it's how they influence people clicking on your listing. Click-through rate is a ranking factor. People clicking on you, people finding you, your popularity, that all factors in. If you are competing and you have five reviews and your competitor has 100, people are not as likely to click on you. That is going to hurt your click-through rate which over time would hurt your ranking, if that makes sense. In a sense, yes.

Tod Maffin: It's an indirect effect.

Joy: Yes, because honestly, the average rating, all that stuff, there have been a huge amount of studies done on it that show that customers really do put a lot of faith in those, which is sad, but they do trust them even though they're written by complete strangers. Your average rating, the number of reviews you have, all that stuff, that is a really big deciding factor on if somebody clicks on you or calls you.

Tod Maffin: It's funny too, because we all buy, at some point, from Amazon and hopefully, we all look at the reviews. I have learned over time that the reviews are nonsense. I've bought stuff that is highly reviewed by everyone and it's a terrible piece of crap. I've taken a chance on something that people were saying, “This breaks and everything,” and it's worked out great for me.

Joy: I think that, unfortunately, smart consumers know to look at the negative reviews. I do this all the time with Amazon. I'll see 12 glowing positive reviews, but I'll keep scrolling until I find a negative one and I'll read those. That tells me, are these reviews bought and paid for? Unfortunately, there was a study just released, I think it was MomentFeed or Uberall released a study that basically looked at fake reviews and Google was number one on the list for having the most fake reviews. It sucks, but as a consumer, if you see a business with all glowing five-star reviews, that's a bit of a red flag, depending on the industry, too, right? There are certain industries we see this more than others, but it's frustrating. It's a very hard thing for Google to combat. They have done a terrible job at it.

Are We Following Old Advice?

Tod Maffin: I was interested in watching Amazon's response to that, because when that study came out, their response wasn't to say, “We're going to fix up our review systems,” their response was to throw social platforms under the bus. If you remember this, their response was, “Actually, the problem isn't really us. The problem is that people are gathering on Facebook groups and they're sharing these negative reviews.” I thought that was a bit peculiar. Reviews, people should focus on. Are there any strategies that businesses should be paying less attention to this year than they may have in previous years?

Joy: That's a good question. One thing that has changed, and I don't really think this is something you pay less attention to per se, but just something to be aware of, but there was a big algorithm update in end of November, beginning of December. I think it was about a week that it took to roll out. The big, core takeaway from this update, it changed the Map Pack results. When you do a search for Google, you see three results beside a map. We call those the local map results. That's what I'm talking about here. There's a huge change to the algorithm that determines who shows up there. What it basically did is it made it so that a business will not rank as far away from their office as they were ranking before. We saw a lot of businesses, for example, let's say Toronto, huge area, massive city. If you were doing a really good job at SEO, you could actually rank throughout the entire city. It was possible in some industries. We saw businesses that were managing to achieve that with really, really, really good SEO, see a huge shrinkage in how far away they rank. It comes down to one of those things where we're like, “What do we suggest? Do they have to open up more offices now?” That's the question that we're asking. Which is probably what a lot of them are going to do, but knowing that a single location will only stretch so far and that Google is really trying to hyper-localize the results.

My biggest takeaways were, yes, knowing that is important. Knowing that your one office is not going to reach everybody in your geographic area when it comes to Google Maps, that needs to be something people get. Knowing that, also, getting more organic traffic, making sure you get traffic from other keywords that don't show local pack results, things like that have to be a part of your strategy or you're really going to have suffered from that update.

The Problem with Local SEO Spam

Tod Maffin: Has Google cleaned up the spam problem they had with local SEO? What I mean is, if you lived in Edmonton, for instance, you'd type in “Plumbers near me.” You'd get returned a whole bunch of clearly fake plumbing websites or “businesses” with names like Edmonton Plumbing and Plumbers Near Me. They'd actually put to use the name Near Me in the title. When you went there, it was literally just a lead farm. It was just a cheap-ass website that someone had slapped up, and I guess what they were doing was collecting all of the leads, and then turning around and selling them to the actual plumber. They inserted themselves as a middleman. Does that still exist today?

Joy: Yes. I'm actually working on a big study, it's not released yet, but it's coming out later this year. I'm going to be presenting it at our next Local U event, all about this topic. The crazy thing is, when Google looks at spam, they come up with these reports every year, and they say how many listings they removed and pat themselves on the back. They always say they're doing a good job. When you're looking at it from Google's perspective, they look at all industries at once. When you do that, it actually doesn't look so bad, like, okay, a small percentage of listings are fake or spam. When you niche down and you get into certain industries, we have some that I'll be presenting on that were like 90 plus percent of the listings that we looked at were fake. Garage Door Repair is probably one of the best examples. If you are a garage door repair business and you don't report spam or look for it, you are going to get crushed by it. It is everywhere. They're all lead gen, like you're saying. They're fake names, not real businesses. When you call, you get sent to a call center, and they filter out your information and then sell the lead to somebody.

Tod Maffin: Or when you call, you get a voicemail that's full.

Joy: Yes, but usually, you get a call answering service, because that's how they make money. They have to sell your information. I remember once, actually, calling a listing as a customer and getting that, like having that happen. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this isn't a real business. I'm literally putting my money towards these lead gen people right now.” There is a whole group of people in local SEO that do this. This is how they get their client's business. They create these fake listings and then they give these leads to their customers, and they don't tell the businesses where they're getting them from.

…But Does Spam Work?

Tod Maffin: I don't want to encourage it, but I feel like I have to ask this now. Does it work? Is this a strategy that actual businesses– Obviously, no one wants to pay off someone who has just inserted themselves as a middleman, but are these services so cheap that the numbers actually work for businesses?

Joy: It does work. I'd be stupid to say it doesn't. If it didn't work, nobody would be doing it. It wouldn't be a problem that's lasted over a decade if it didn't work. It definitely does work. Whether or not I suggest doing it, it is not the business practice I would want to do, because it's churn and burn. You only have a listing for as long as you can get away with it. Google is ultimately going to try and find you, and then when they do, you need a new one. It's never-ending, and you're always having to keep up one step ahead of Google and their spam tactics. Google does find these patterns and cracks down on them, and then you see there's a new pattern, a new way that they are able to get these listings, past Google's radars and fool them. It's really actually quite interesting to see the creativity that people come up with on how to get these listings created. Smart individuals behind it.

How to Combat Spam in Your Industry/Region

Tod Maffin: Is there anything that you can do if you're a business owner, and maybe you are a legitimate garage door opening or repair company? Is there anything that a business who is stuck behind a whole bunch of these fake listings can do other than just report these sites when they come across them?

Joy: Definitely, report them. There's a form that Google created a couple years ago for this purpose called the Business Redressal Complaint Form, so you can report them. It's endless, that's the frustrating thing.

Tod Maffin: Does it work, though? I've reported a bunch of stuff to social platforms and nothing happens.

Joy: It does. Again, this comes down to, keep in mind that, you as a business owner, your understanding of Google's guidelines might not be accurate. You might see something, assume it's spam and it's not. That's the other thing with Google's guidelines. They're not very easy to understand sometimes. It can be very frustrating when you report something that's so clearly fake and you're like, “Why didn't Google remove this?” It's like you have to almost be a private investigator. You got to collect all your evidence, and then make sure that you share that with Google, which is frustrating. Some people are like, “Google should just do this,” but it's their business, right? That's not going to solve your problem at the end of the day. Reporting it is good.

The other stuff that you can put on that, and this is where I think people shy away from, is there are laws against some of this stuff. There's a company called The Transparency Company that just launched a tool that I've been using. It's a chrome extension, and they scan and tell you if a business has fake reviews or not. What it's cool for is, if it's a lead gen listing, 100% of the reviews are fake, guaranteed, because they're not a real business. I've been using that in conjunction to try and use that or collect evidence, but if they have fake reviews, that's another thing where there are implications for whoever's behind it. There's advertising laws, there's things that they're breaking. I don't know how some of these organizations have gotten away with it for as long as they have, but Google has had lawsuits against some of these businesses over the last few years, where they've actually sued businesses for creating fake listings that violate Google's guidelines. They take a while, but there have been lawsuits over these types of things. That's another thing. If you really want to take it a step further, talking to the media, trying to get it out there, reporting to the FTC, things like that, there are some additional measures you can do on the legal side.

How to Insulate Your Business from Google Algo Changes

Tod Maffin: Google has told us that they update the algorithm, the code, several times a day, in fact. The ones that get the attention are what they refer to as the core algorithm updates, these big huge ones, one, maybe two a year. When they roll out, they often will impact the search position, the result position for businesses. Is there anything that we as a digital marketer can do to keep our sites from getting hit from one of these core algorithm updates?

Joy: Core updates, from my experience with them, I feel like if you're a digital marketer and your client's getting hit negatively by core updates, you're doing something wrong. I think you need to reevaluate what tactics you're using, because you should be seeing mostly positives. I realize you can't control everything the business is doing and what they're paying for, but overall, core updates is a good indication of whether or not you're using the right strategies.

There are other updates that aren't necessarily that way. You could be doing everything right, like this one that I was talking about that came out in November, it was not a core update. It was an update to the local search algorithm, so we named it the vicinity update because it all had to do with proximity and where the business was. You're not doing anything wrong if you got hurt by that one. That was just Google basically shrinking how far that they were willing to show a business.

You didn't break guidelines, you didn't do anything that Google's penalizing you for. Just all that reward and benefit that you were getting, they were like, “We're going to give that to this business over here instead, because they're closer to the person searching.”

What Should a Business Owner With Limited Time Focus On?

Tod Maffin: Very interesting. Let's say someone runs marketing for a company and SEO is technically on their plate too, but they can only commit one, two hours a month to it at the most. What should they do with those one or two hours a month?

Joy: I would say basic SEO, onsite stuff, writing title tags, making sure you've got internal linking. I've literally done audits for businesses that don't have internal links on their site. This is basic SEO 101, but they don't have internal links. You go to their homepage and it's just a wall of text and nothing's linking to anything and there's no anchor text. That stuff moves the needle, not just in the local pack results, but also organic. Literally, go to Moz, look up SEO 101, and that stuff is 100% where I would spend your time if you only had an hour or two.

Tod Maffin: It's taking existing content and improving the on-page stuff, the title tags, and the meta content and so on?

Joy: Yes. That still moves the needle more than any other thing. Link-building, absolutely, but I don't think you're going to have much of a link-building strategy with two hours a month. That might be difficult.

The Future of Local SEO

Tod Maffin: Yes, definitely. What is coming from Google this year that you're most excited about?

Joy: I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know where they're headed. I know with this algorithm update and stuff, there are a lot of businesses that are trying to rethink strategies. I'm hoping that at some point, Google will fix the problem that they've always had for service area businesses, but who knows? The issue is, if you're a plumber and you service an area that you don't live in, you rank where you live, you don't rank where you service. That has always been a really big pain point for a lot of service area businesses.

That's something that Google's never solved. It'd be great if they solved it, but I'm not really holding my breath. I would assume that they would continue to make certain attributes and things more easy, more accessible. I think they're revamping some of the reports visually inside the Google My Business dashboard. Looking at that, seeing how many calls you get, they're trying to make all that stuff easier for businesses to find, so I would expect continued improvements in those areas, like the metrics and stuff.

Tod Maffin: Are you generally optimistic about the state of local SEO for the next year?

Joy: It's becoming more challenging. I like that, so I might be weird. I don't know if everybody likes that. Some people grumble and they're like, “Oh, it's frustrating because now I have to rethink all these strategies and stuff,” but I like that it's challenging. I feel like it makes it harder for anybody to just do. I'm up for the challenge, but I'm also super competitive. It's my personality type. I would say it's definitely getting harder to scale. I hate the word scale. We don't use it at my agency because I don't think it really applies to consulting type of work. Having a tactic where you can just easily spin it out for 100 different business types and get these awesome results, that type of thing, really, really tough to do in local search.

More About Sterling Sky

Tod Maffin: Sterling Sky, your agency, I mentioned it at the top as being one of the top resources. It really, really is. Your blog is a wealth of information. Can we talk a bit about what you do? Let's start with, what kind of company is your best type of client, your ideal client, the kind of client where you can provide the most amount of value? What does that company look like?

Joy: I have a lawn care client that, I love working with them because they're so much better than any other competitors with everything. Their service is better, their customer service, what they actually do for your lawn is better. It's good to work with companies like that, where they actually do good work. It's harder to work with shady companies where you're trying to combat their horrible reputation. We've had a few of those.

I love home services because I feel like the majority of them aren't really invested in SEO, so it's great for the ones that are. We're able to make a dent. Real estate agents is another one. Real estate market's been booming. Real estate agents are by default, pretty bad at SEO. Most that I talk to, they're not even targeting the right keywords. Things they're going after are not the things that convert. We have a lot of those, and the lawyers are another one that have always been heavily invested in SEO. They understand the value of it and it's a super, super competitive space, but it's also really good and lucrative. If you can rank well as a lawyer, it translates to a lot of revenue.

Tod Maffin: Do people hire you, you come in, you do a whole bunch of work and you leave, or are you the kind of system where you set up a retainer and you work with them month over month?

Joy: Definitely retainer, because the problem with SEO is it's not like a set it and forget it type of thing. That strategy almost never works, because if your competitors are constantly improving, they're adding content, they're getting new backlinks, things like that and you're just stagnant, over time, you're going to have a tough time keeping and maintaining what you've got.

I strongly believe that SEO is not a one time cost. It's something where, as long as you are making money from it, that's key, you need to be able to justify the marketing expense. You should be getting more leads and more business because of SEO than you were getting before you invested in it, and that's huge. My agency's big on, we want to track lead numbers. I don't care about rankings, I want to see our lead numbers going up year over year, month over month, that kind of thing. As long as that's true, then it's worthwhile to continue to invest in it. That would be my answer to that.

Joy Hawkins is the owner of the Sterling Sky Agency.