This is the fifth article in the series: “Unlock the Door to New Customers with Local SEO“.
.If you’re looking to increase your local SEO visibility, you need to have a plan in place for monitoring and measuring your local SEO strategy so you can achieve the best results. Without a plan in place, it’s impossible to track your progress and know what tactics are working and which ones are missing the mark.
Identify Your Goals
Before you can begin monitoring and measuring your local SEO strategy, it is important to first identify your local SEO goals. What do you want to achieve with your local SEO strategy? Do you want to increase visibility, improve rankings or gain more local customers? Once you have established your goals, you can begin to track and measure your progress towards achieving them. This will help you understand what is working and what needs to be adjusted in order to reach your desired outcomes.
The Tools
Google Analytics is the most used tool to measure your traffic and engagement. By placing a bit of code on your website, Google can track your visitor’s actions within your website.
Google Marketing Platform is the place to start. Once logged in, you can access Google Analytics and the entire suite of Google Business tools. You will also need to set up your Google Search Console. You can then link your search console with the analytics tool.
Search for your business name. Any existing profiles should appear in the search results. Follow the links and claim your profile. Be sure to check more than just page 1.
Despite the similarities between Google Analytics and Google Search Console, they are not the same. Google Search Console helps you monitor your website’s technical performance and search engine results. Google Analytics helps you learn more about your users, including who they are, how they found you, and how they interact with your website.
Google recently released Google Analytics 4 [GA4] which provides additional tools to monitor the source of traffic through url tagging.
There are several other tools available to monitor website traffic, some paid and some free. Some are like Google Analytics and some offer different functions. We have our own tool which incorporates data from Google Analytics, Search Console and other sources into one dashboard so you can get a complete picture of the performance of your local SEO strategy. This tool is free with our local SEO packages.
Call Tracking
Besides the analytics, there is another method of monitoring and measuring results – call tracking. Call tracking is a service which allows marketers to track the phone calls received as a result of a particular marketing campaign or local SEO strategy. You are assigned a unique phone number, either local or toll free, which is used on your website, sales funnel or your ad campaign.
As calls come in, certain data is collected allowing you to analyze and quantify the calls attributed to your SEO strategy or ad campaign. You can even record phone calls making it easy to qualify leads, coach your staff, and improve customer service. Other data tracked include the person making the call, the customers phone number, the length of calls, time of day calls are received and location the call originated. All this data is available in reports you can use to measure SEO performance.
Conclusion
By monitoring and measuring your local SEO strategy regularly, you can ensure that your business is making the most of its online presence and reaching the right audience. Taking the time to review your local SEO efforts, tweaking and optimizing as needed, will help to keep your local SEO strategy up-to-date and effective.
Monitoring and measuring can be an exhausting and time consuming exercise and may take time from actually running your business. And making the right adjustments to get the best results can be confusing to some. Why not let us take care of it for you. Full comprehensive and detailed reporting comes with all of our local SEO packages.
