How to track local SEO performance

For any local business, a solid local SEO strategy is required to improve its position on local rankings. As a result, this should increase organic traffic to their website and foot traffic in-store.

A local business that masters local SEO will reap the benefits, taking itself to a whole new level with increased revenues and growing profits.

The best thing about local SEO? It’s all organic which means it can be free if you know what you’re doing.

How do you track your local search performance, though? Find out everything you need to know about enhancing your local SEO strategy and improving your metrics with our useful guide, including the use of a local rank tracker.

Tracking SEO performance of your local business

Whatever product you sell or service you provide, you should give local SEO plenty of time and attention as you can transform your business simply by ranking well on local search results.

If you track your local search performance, you can understand how certain keywords are performing and what you must do to improve your ranking. If you’re underperforming compared to your competitors, check what they’re doing and see how you compare in local listings.

There are plenty of tools online that you can use to check your ranking in local listings, while keyword research can be conducted with websites like Semrush, KW Finder, Answer The Public and Ahrefs.

You must track your performance on local search engine results pages as it can be the difference between a lack of customers and a steady stream, helping to increase profits and grow your business.

How do you track local SEO performance?

You can track the performance of your local SEO strategy in many ways. When focusing on your local SEO efforts, you must use data-driven decisions to enhance the ranking of your local business.

At Paramount Digital, we believe the following list of factors is essential to tracking your local SEO rank.

• Google My Business Insights
• Local business directory listings
• Reviews
• Average page load time
• Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Clicks and Impressions
• Keyword ranking position
• Schema for local search ranking
• Backlink profile tracking
• “Near me” searches
  

Google My Business Insights

Google My Business (GMB) Insights is a great place to discover how your business is performing in local search results.

You can find anything from page views to engagement and customer actions, which includes form submissions, direction requests, and more.

GMB is a fantastic way of finding out how your business listing is performing, but there are other ways of viewing your insights, too. By adding a GTM link to the Google My Business website address, you can then track the progress of the performance of your Google My Business profile. This allows you to see the queries your Google My Business profile gets clicked for providing you with insights on what may be important to optimise your profile for. 

Optimising your Google My Business is a great place to start in increasing local traffic, as the top three map listings locally show up higher than typical organic search results allowing for a higher CTR.

Local listings

You can easily look at your local listings using tools like Yext, Uberall and Moz Local.

Here, you can see which listings are correct and incorrect and allows you to remove duplicate listings because these negatively impact your SEO performance.

For a local business, this is a useful way of finding out how you look on local listings and where you sit compared to other local businesses. High quality local listings may also benefit your websites domain authority which is used as a trust metric by Google. 

Reviews

Customer reviews are another key performance tracker as you can see directly what customers think of your service and products. Replying to customer reviews thanking them and wishing them well looks good as a local business, too.

Not only is responding to reviews positive for your SEO performance but it looks good for potential customers as they see an active and friendly business listing.

This may make them more likely to come in-store or purchase services from you.

Also, the quality, quantity and recency of reviews help with your local SEO.

Average page load time

Page load time is one of the most important metrics for local businesses trying to perform well on local rankings.

If you’re earning impressions through your Google Business profile, you’ll have a high bounce rate if your page load time is slow. With the majority of users now on smartphones, patience is at an all-time low and it’s much easier to jump back out of a slow website and find a quicker one lower down the search rankings to find an answer.

Google Analytics offers insights into page load time and has a page speed test you can utilise. If it’s found that your page is loading slowly, you can compress images and videos and reduce redirects to improve speed.

The faster your load speed, the more chance you have of keeping visitors on your website.

Click-Through Rate

A click-through rate is the rate at which users are clicking on your organic SEO results and any ads you’ve posted.

Carefully look at the data and discover which local keywords are being clicked on more than others, and so on. You can then optimise other pages on your website to ensure a better click-through rate.

A click from an ad or Google Business profile can directly lead to a sale online or in person, which is incredibly important for local SEO.

Schema for local search ranking

One key part of a local SEO strategy is ensuring you rank for specific terms on local search results and that you show up on Google Maps. 

Local search provides many features for customers to interact with a local business without clicking through to their website, including booking a reservation.

You can offer how-tos, information on events, recipes, a link to a podcast, and much more, by using schema. If you want your local SEO strategy to take off and blow competitors out of the water, consider using schema on your listing and continue to check how it’s performing.

If you see one feature that isn’t attracting much interest on search engines, try swapping it out for something else useful and relevant to your business.

Keep track of backlinks for your local business

Backlinks are incredibly important for conducting a successful local SEO strategy. Building links back to your business from directories or blogging websites and forums shows Google that you’re a trustworthy source which increases your domain authority (DA) on local search engines.

Ahrefs offers a backlink checker for local businesses to track this particular metric. It provides information on the number of domain referrals, the total number of backlinks and your domain authority.

If you find that your backlinks are quite low, reach out to websites and see if you can write a guest blog that links back to your website or Google Business profile.

“Near me” searches

Have you ever searched for a service and added ‘near me’ at the end of the search term? Well, it’s growing in popularity.

According to a 2019 study by Google, ‘where to buy’ and ‘near me’ searches had grown by over 200% since 2017. While performing keyword research, try to find a way to use these terms on your website so you can attract more traffic via organic rankings.

Track your performance in ‘near me’ searches and target terms you believe can help your website rank.

Tracking local search ranking for local businesses

If you’re an independent business taking care of your local SEO and want to track performance to improve local visibility, we hope this guide has helped.

If you follow the steps we outlined above and make use of local rank-tracking tools from Semrush and Ahrefs, you should find specific ways to target local rankings and improve traffic online and in person.

Local rank tracking is an essential way of monitoring your performance in local rankings and can be the difference that makes your business a success.

Contact Paramount Digital

If you run a business and would like support to improve your local rankings performance, Paramount Digital can help you.

As an experienced SEO agency, we can help you attract more local customers via search engine results pages. If you need this level of expertise, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.

You can email us at marketing@paramountdigital.co.uk or call us at 01744 747474.