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Without a complete local SEO reporting system, you’re simply guessing that local visibility is generating revenue. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses fail to attribute their local SEO strategies to the metrics that demonstrate profit. In this article, we cover the essentials of local SEO reporting so you can see exactly where your strategy is adding value to the business.
Local SEO reporting tracks search visibility and performance for each of your business locations. This is key to proving the value of your local SEO strategy, optimising performance and driving real business from local search (conversions, purchases, revenue, etc.).
Reporting is just as important for local SEO as any other marketing strategy. There are some unique challenges with local SEO reporting, though. One challenge is that local visibility is spread across multiple places: Search, Maps, social media and third-party properties. This means you need to pull insights from multiple places.
Another challenge is that local search merges the online and offline experience. Attributing in-store visits and purchases to online sessions is only getting harder, too, as the web moves away from cookies.
We’ll discuss these points in more detail throughout this article, but let’s quickly run through the key benefits of local SEO reporting.
Essentially, it all comes down to maximising the performance of your local SEO strategy, making informed decisions and proving the value your strategy adds to the business.
Now, let’s look at some of the most important metrics for local SEO reporting.
Organic sessions tell you how much traffic you’re generating through organic search. This is a baseline metric for tracking online visibility and the value of visibility, based on how much website traffic it generates.
For multi-location businesses, identifying your top-performing landing pages is key for several reasons:
These insights help you prioritise top-performing locations while identifying potential underperformers that require optimisation. If you only have one business location, you can apply the same reporting principles to testing multiple landing page variations.
Session conversion rate tracks the percentage of sessions that result in a conversion. To get the most out of this metric, make sure you’re tracking all relevant conversion goals (calls, online bookings, purchases, etc.) This includes actions completed through your Google Business Profile.
In Google Search Console, you can track the following metrics for local search:
Impressions tell you how often a link to your website is shown to Google users. This is the baseline measurement of Search visibility across Google products.
The clicks metric tracks the number of times a user clicks on a link to your website from Google Search. This helps you understand how compelling your listings are (eg: page titles) and the value of different placements (eg: position 1 vs position 3).
Average position tells you where a page/URL ranks on organic results pages, as a mean average. This is a key insight to how effectively you’re optimising for ranking signals.
Call tracking is a specific conversion action that you can track in Google Analytics 4. If calls to your business are important for sales and enquiries, you want to know how many calls your local SEO strategy is generating.
Your Google Business Profile includes its own reporting system for tracking important interactions, such as profile views and direction requests.
These insights help you attribute meaningful interactions to local visibility in Google and optimise performance. Currently, the metrics available in Business Profile reporting include:
Aside from being a key platform for building local visibility, your Business Profile is also one of the most powerful local SEO reporting tools available. Implement all of the relevant Business Profile performance metrics into your local SEO reporting system.
At Vertical Leap, we’ve developed our own system of local SEO reporting that tracks visibility and attributes it to your marketing and business goals. This allows us to show where local SEO drives revenue, conversions and the actions that add real value to a business.
Tracking your local visibility starts with monitoring your rankings for target keywords. For each location page, we track average rankings positions and your placements (local pack, Maps, Knowledge Graph, etc.).
Next, we map out visibility by showing where users are physically located when they discover your brand for target keywords. You can segment these insights by keywords, locations, device types, platform (Google, Bing, TikTok, etc.) and other filters. We also monitor your competitors’ local search visibility, so you know who and what you’re up against in the local SERPs.
Visibility is one thing, but we also want to know how audiences are engaging with your brand in local search. For this, we monitor three key metrics across different platforms:
These insights help us determine where visibility is generating meaningful engagement with audiences. We can identify your top-performing keywords, search placements, directory listings, etc. and prioritise your top assets.
Many businesses fail to attribute local SEO to conversions and revenue. This is a mistake because you don’t know how much value visibility is really adding to the business. We’ve already started by tracking engagement and, now, we have to single out actions that drive revenue:
Attributing local SEO is trickier than traditional search because visibility is spread over many platforms. You need to pull insights together from Search Console, Google Analytics 4, your Business Profile and social accounts.
You’ll also find major directory listings include their own analytics systems for tracking things like calls and direction requests. You need to combine the right set of local SEO reporting tools and bring all of the relevant insights into one reporting system.
By automating local SEO reporting and audits, we move away from reactionary marketing. We use predictive analytics to implement a pre-emptive SEO strategy that identifies new opportunities before they even materialise. This means you’re optimising for opportunities before your competitors even discover them and fixing technical issues before they harm your search rankings.
Crucially, we can use all of these insights to send you automated reports showing the value of your local SEO strategy. This visually demonstrates the impact of local search and your SEO strategy on revenue, conversions and marketing goals.
Further reading: Local SEO Audit: Everything You Need to Know (+ How to Perform One)
With a complete local SEO reporting system, we delve deeper into the business performance of each location. This is important for multi-location businesses that want granular insights on each specific branch.
For example, we can analyse the search demand for each location and the top branches for generating revenue from local search. We can also identify the top-selling products or items per location and seasonal trends between branches: demand, visibility, revenue, etc.
We’ve even helped multi-location companies identify the most profitable areas to open new branches by analysing search demand vs visibility and conversion data.
If you need a local SEO reporting system that maximises performance and proves the value of your search strategy, our team can help. Call us on 023 9283 0281 or send us your details and we’ll call you back.
With more than 6 years’ experience specialising in SEO, Adam has in-depth knowledge of user experience and how to increase a website’s visibility and traffic from search. His motto is “You can bring all the traffic in the world to the website, but if it isn’t good enough to convert then it’s wasted traffic”. Adam joined Vertical Leap in 2015 as an SEO specialist. By analysing call to actions, navigation features and text content (to name a few of the tasks), Adam is adept at getting a firm grasp on a website’s main goals; generating audits on how a website should be changed to improve its sales/leads. The world of SEO and user experience is always changing, and Adam makes sure to research everything so that he can keep on top of this ever-changing industry and deliver the best results for his clients. Whilst living in America is always a dream, Adam has grown up and lived in Portsmouth his whole life. When he is not working, Adam enjoys all kind of sports including football, tennis, and in particular American Football. His biggest ambition? To one day watch the Super Bowl live!
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Categories: SEO