Before you hire a local SEO company, it helps to be clear in your own head about what you think is broken. If customers in Miami, or South Florida, or wherever it is you operate, aren’t finding your business, then what you want is somebody who is going to look into why that’s happening, write down the work they think it needs, and tell you how the two of you are going to know whether any of it is working.
Most of the proposals that get forwarded to us don’t do that. We’ve seen one that was four pages long and never mentioned the client’s city. So when you search for an SEO local company, read the proposal looking for three things: the work, named; the person doing it; and some way to tell afterward whether it got done.
Does your local business need a local SEO company yet?
Possibly not yet. Google itself says a small local business can probably do a good deal of its own SEO work, so hiring help isn’t something a local business has to do to show up in search engines, and a proposal that implies otherwise tells you something about the company sending it.
Where we do get called in, it’s usually one of three things. Somebody needs a developer and doesn’t have one. Or somebody has the skill and hasn’t had a free afternoon since March. Or there’s a previous agency, twelve months of invoices, and nobody can point to one thing on the site that’s different.
Before you talk to anybody, including us, write down three lines: the service you want found, how far you’ll drive for it, and what’s gone wrong. One plumber’s version: water heaters are the money jobs, we’ll go up to Doral for them, and the calls dried up in June. That’s a brief. It gives a local SEO campaign a business problem instead of a feeling.
What local search engine optimization can and can’t change
Google’s guidance on local ranking names three things behind local search results: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how closely your Google Business Profile matches what the person typed. Prominence is how well known the business is, and the signals Google describes are other websites linking to yours, how many reviews you have and how positive they are. More reviews and better ratings can help your local rankings. We’d put the emphasis on “can,” since it’s not a guaranteed outcome and nobody honest will tell you it is.
Distance is the one people argue with us about. A roofer in Homestead is not going to show up in the map for someone searching from Aventura, no matter what anyone does to the website, and a proposal that says otherwise is selling you something. An agency has to work around that rather than through it. You also can’t pay Google for a better local ranking, and ads don’t change the organic results, so if an agency quotes ads and SEO as one number, make them split it. Local SEO strategies and ad spend get measured differently.
What local SEO services should include
We’ve had clients show us contracts where the entire scope was the words “monthly optimization.” A real scope is almost boring: the water heater page and the drain page rewritten, the contact form fixed, everything approved by you, and all of it listed in the report at the end of the month. Anybody can check those.
GOA-TECH, a digital marketing agency in Miami, describes five components in its SEO services, which are analysis, content, technical improvements, link building, and ongoing monitoring and reporting. Use those five as a checklist for reading any local SEO service proposal, including ours, and get the answers in writing.
Analysis, SEO strategies and findings you can act on
Ask whether keyword research and competitor analysis are part of it, whether your existing service content needs revising, whether there’s a technical problem somewhere, and which findings need doing now rather than eventually. The analysis we hand over at the end of a first month is usually a short list, maybe eight items, with a sentence on why each one matters and who has to do it. If what you get instead is a 40-page export from a tool with a lot of red and green scores on it, that’s not analysis. Google says third-party SEO tools don’t have access to its ranking data, and a tool score is a tool’s opinion.
Google Business Profile, local listing and citation work
A proposal written around the website can leave the Google Business Profile and your listings out without anybody intending to, so ask directly whether the local SEO service covers them. The profile itself isn’t complicated, which is partly why it gets neglected. Is it verified. Is the name the one on the sign out front. Is the address real, or should it be a service area. Are the categories right, and are there only as many as you need. Hours, including the holiday ones. Photos. Somebody answering the reviews. That’s the whole checklist, and Google publishes it. The agreement has to add who does each of those, who approves a change, and who at your business confirms the phone number before it goes out to forty directories. One dentist we took on had three numbers floating around, two of them old, because the practice had changed numbers twice and nobody told the directories. Local citations without that kind of ownership aren’t a deliverable.
Content, technical fixes and link building
Content is where proposals get vague fastest. “Twelve local pages” sounds like work until you ask which twelve, for which services, and who checks that the drain page describes what your drain tech actually does. And if a keyword doesn’t match a service you sell, no amount of on-page SEO justifies the page. We’ve been asked for “AC repair Coral Gables” pages by companies that have never touched an air handler. Whoever lands there calls, and you say sorry, wrong company. That page didn’t help your business. It cost you a phone call.
On the technical side we look at speed, mobile friendliness, crawl errors and site navigation. The thing a proposal has to say is who implements it, the agency or your own developer. We once watched a contact form send nothing for nine weeks because the agency and the developer each assumed the other had it. The site looked fine. The phone just didn’t ring.
“Authority building” tells you nothing. Make the provider write down where the links are going to come from, by name if they can. Google calls links made to push rankings spam, whether bought, swapped, or dropped into a directory nobody visits, and a lot of what gets sold as local link building is on that list.
How to interview local SEO companies
Ask every agency the same questions, including the ones calling themselves SEO experts, and write the answers down. What did you do for a client like us, specifically? Do you follow Google Search Essentials? What experience do you have in our industry and our city? What do you expect to happen, by when, and what has to be true for that to work out. Who do we call when something breaks. And will you tell us every change you make to the site and why. Put that last one in the agreement.
The best local SEO company for you is whichever one’s answers hold up under those questions.
Watch the questions coming back at you, too. Google advises checking whether the SEO is interested in your business, meaning what makes it distinctive, who the competitors are, how customers find you at the moment. In a first meeting we usually ask more questions than the client does, because we can’t scope anything otherwise. When you compare local SEO agencies, talk to past clients rather than the written testimonials.
Use the audit to judge the SEO agency and local SEO pricing
Our audit covers discovery and data gathering, performance analysis, opportunity mapping and a roadmap, across website user experience, SEO health, the conversion funnel, analytics and attribution, and marketing. Whoever does yours, check that it addresses the concern that sent you looking for help in the first place, and if you doubt your inquiry numbers, have tracking accuracy assessed before anything else. For the audit, read-only access to Search Console is all anyone needs.
Local SEO pricing is hard to compare because three different things get called SEO: an audit, a list of recommendations, and a year of doing the work. Find out which one you’re holding. And ask who owns the accounts and the content when the contract ends. We’ve taken on clients who had to ask their old agency for the password to their own Google listing.
Red flags in a local SEO service proposal
Some things end a conversation for us. A guaranteed number one, because Google says nobody can promise that, and the people who promise it know that. A “special relationship” with Google, which doesn’t exist for anybody. Secrecy about methods or changes. The provider should be willing to tell you what it intends to do on your behalf. A request that you link back to the SEO’s site as part of the deal. A cold email from a stranger diagnosing your site. A fake address, or “Best Plumber Miami” tacked onto the business name. And remember it’s your site Google penalizes, not the agency’s, so if a tactic sounds off, say so before it goes live.
What local SEO reporting should tell you about local search results
A report has one job, which is to stop you from confusing a suggestion with a change. Ours has three columns for exactly that reason: recommended, done, waiting on you. We added the third column after a client read “fix the contact form” in a list of recommendations and assumed it was fixed. Then the report should say what the tracking shows, calls and form fills, and what it can’t tell you about your local visibility. Rankings and visibility in local search results belong in there too, but a map position that doesn’t produce a phone call is a number, not a result.
How long does local SEO take? Longer than anybody wants. We give an estimated timeline with the assumptions written next to it, and you should expect the same from anyone. Can an SEO company get you into the map results? It can help with the profile improvements Google recommends and the reviews and links Google names as prominence signals. Nobody can buy or request a position.
If you’d like to see how your location information looks across Google, Yelp, Facebook and the other maps, apps and directories, run our free listings scan. For questions about hiring, scope or an audit, request a free consultation.
