7 Tips For Better Local SEO Reporting by Matthew Bertram Ep. 554

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. My name is Matt Bertram, the SEO strategist for today. Your SEO strategist, my SEO strategist, Chris's SEO strategist, everyone's SEO strategist. We had an SEO strategy meeting earlier today. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of the podcast. Again, Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And I guess I said that already. What happened to my brain? Did you want to reintroduce yourself? In case you didn't catch it, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Chris Burris. And I say, in case you didn't catch it, because apparently I didn't catch it until I'm like halfway through. I was like, that feels extremely deja vu. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. We have a really good article we're going to discuss today. It is Seven Tips for Better Local SEO Reporting. It is by a guy, Matt Bertram. Oh, by you. It's an article by Matt Bertram in Search Engine Journal. Good stuff, man. Like, I enjoyed this article. You're doing so many things that I'm not aware of. I'm like, oh, here's a couple of articles we might want to cover. It's like, this is a really good one. Oh, it's your article. So awesome. That's- Well, I got to put it in there and I'm going to let you select, right? You can figure it out. Yeah. It's an objective selection. I would say that an adjustment you could make to the title is Seven Tips for Better Enterprise Local SEO Reporting, right? In 2022. In 2022, right? Because we're going to dig into this. It's really good for a standard local reporting, like if you're just a plumber in a certain area. But you also talk about doing good local reporting for some organization, some enterprise that might have local organizations around the country. I don't know, like 48 locations or something like that. That's just one of our clients has the 48 locations.

So I mentioned that. And that's probably where some of this comes from. But it's good for both. Before we get to that article, we're going to read a review. This is, hey, fellas, really like the content, but only feedback is, can you reduce these videos to like 10 minutes? And this was actually a year ago. So if you think in terms of, I kind of want to say you're moving in the right direction in terms of TikTok and where reels are and everything. They're so incredibly short. We've gone down to like 20 seconds. If we got them to 10 minutes, he'd be like, could you take them down to a minute and a half? I do think that there's a place for 10 minute podcasts for sure. And I do think that that could be a good target with a little bit different format. Yeah. All right. We are sponsored. This podcast is sponsored today by SE Ranking. They're actually going to come up throughout this podcast a number of times. But just remember, this is an enterprise level search engine optimization tool. It's good and it's inexpensive. It's professional and it's easy to use. It has lots of tools, but each of them is good enough to be sold separately. You might not know it, but it has lots of industry awards. In fact, what I'm saying is you might not have heard of SE Ranking, except if you're a listener to this podcast. But it has lots of industry awards and superb user rating. Again, we'll be mentioning it throughout this podcast because it just fits in naturally. That's not going to be an ongoing commercial. It just fits in naturally. They have authorized us to give to you a 30-day trial instead of a 14-day trial. All you need to do is go to bestseopodcast.com forward slash SE Ranking. And that will take you to the page where you can get your 30-day free trial. Again, normally you can get a 14-day free trial. That's pretty awesome. Yeah. So I would say

that this is a Ukrainian company. So certainly if you want to support Ukraine, this is a great way to do that. A lot of their team is displaced. It is a big tool over in Europe for European listeners. They have probably heard of it. It's been breaking into the US market. And rightfully so. It's a great tool. They're adding new features all the time. Their content tool, which we went over last podcast, which they've added is a great addition as you continue to build out your suite. And one of the really nice things about a tool like SE Ranking is that you can do a lot of things in one place, right? So you don't have to go to all these different tools to do it. You can learn how to use one tool well, and then that data can be cross-applied in there. So I think it's going to be a leading tool, if not already. Like it is already, but I think the US market's been a little bit behind to catch up. And I would just encourage you to check it out if you haven't. And I feel like Matt just described and co-signed. It has lots of tools, but each of them is good enough to sell independently. And they're coming out with new tools all the time. So happy to have them as a sponsor. Happy to be using them for search engine reporting on a regular basis. All right. So let's jump into this article. Seven Tips for Better Enterprise Local SEO Reporting in 2022 by Matt Bertram. All right. Here are seven tips to improve your local SEO reporting and serve your local clients. The first one is simplify reports. Simplifying your SEO reports is not just a tip that local SEO agencies should follow, but one that generally any agency should do. And really the SEO or the person responsible for SEO in your organization. And that may be you. You may be the business owner who's doing that. You should simplify your reports. The reality is

as kind of marketing people, we need to be data driven. And our first impulse as marketers and communicators is to provide as detailed a report as possible. But this can often bury the user. Our reports should tell a clear and concise story about how well our marketing campaigns perform. Complicated reports with unnecessary data distract from the campaign successes that you're actually trying to share. And you point out like there are situations we've bumped into reports where we've seen other organizations use data to hide kind of bad results. And so if you are on the receiving end of way too much data and it's leaving you with unable to process and understand if you're actually getting good results, there may be a reason that that's happening, right? And it could be just their marketers and they're excited about data. It could be that they're trying to obfuscate. Well, yeah. I mean, that's potentially one of the reasons why. Certainly you can get inundated with information to not be able to make good decisions. So it's really important to understand what those business goals are, what those key KPIs are when you're looking at data. And certainly I know we're going to talk about later the cadence in that reporting and what is useful to you. The big thing here more than anything else, and this can be applied to a lot of things, simplify, simplify, simplify. I coach a lot of different business owners and different marketers and that sort of thing. And typically what happens is like, let's distill this down to the simplest possible form, focus on that and then crawl before you walk, walk before you run, that sort of thing. And so simplifying reports is absolutely key. I love KISS. Keep it simple, stupid. All right. So follow these six tips to keep local SEO reports simple. Number one, set clear goals. Outline the campaign's goals at the top of the report. So like everything should be related in some way to that goal. Number two, eliminate unnecessary metrics. And we've kind

of talked about metrics and we kind of talked about this. Metrics like- We are in the matrix, Chris. We're in the metaverse right now. In the matrix of metrics. Metrics like total keyword volume, impressions, and backlinks matter very little if what they're focused on are driving foot traffic to the store. And so that could be spent or be wasted on them and not really be useful because they're actually, hey, how many people came in my store? That's kind of all I need to know. Number three, use a single reporting period. So stick to tracking one reporting period, whether that's going to be a 30-day period or a two-week period. And that's really going to be driven by how often are you reviewing the data, right? If you're reviewing it every two weeks, then you actually want to have two weeks of data. If you're reviewing it every 30 days, then you want to be looking at 30 days of data. I know I often want to look at whatever the data is, whatever it's, whether it's traffic, whether it's bounce rate, whether it's conversions, whether it's actually revenue generated or costs. I often want to look at the previous 30 days, the 30 days before that, and then the year before. So the same month, the year before, right? So that it may be that you're way down from last month, this month, but that could be seasonal and you're way up from this month, last year. And so that's actually more relevant. And so you've got to look at both of them. Yeah. I mean, Chris, one of the questions you were asking me prior to this is, what was I talking to about potentially not great metrics specifically to reporting? And what I was talking about, which we already discussed, I guess, but to share with everybody else, is a lot of enterprise-level brands like to look at, well, how do we do versus last week? How do we do versus last week? Because that's their cadence of reporting. And you can't get

any kind of contextual data of what you did last week because again, there's seasonals. Like what if last week was Black Friday? Like, of course, this week's going to be worse. Yeah. What does that mean? You need to look at that versus last year. You need to look at that versus, okay, what are other sale periods that we have for our business or our stores? So you got to consider all that. So it's better to look at a three-day rolling or three months versus three months rolling. And then also even the past year to see if there's any changes in that. And certainly a lot of good data can be derived from that. But when you're looking at too tight a window, the data becomes meaningless. So again, people get lost in the noise and you just got to zoom out, take a 30,000 foot view and then understand what is the data trying to tell you. Yeah, absolutely. All right, number four, visualize data. So tools like SEMrush and SERanking, of course, our favorite, provide pie charts and line charts for important key metrics that can help clients visualize campaign progress. And you could have potentially rewarded this to help you explain to clients or allow clients to understand campaign progress. Number five, segment reports into different sections. I like to, this turned out to be Matt, likes to organize his reports into chapters, such as traffic overview, local keyword overview, social media overview. And then finally, this is the sixth point, tell a story. Don't just inundate clients with metric after metric. Explain metrics in brief paragraphs on the top or below those charts. So when you're talking about data, when you have a section of data or a chart, then explain like, what does this mean? And what is this, is this good and why is it good? Make sure that you're telling that story. So Chris, what we do when we're training our account managers is we send out automated reports that we set up based on client KPIs on a

monthly basis. And then we do a quarterly review to look at how the campaign run for the last quarter. But the big thing is when that report comes out, we train the account managers to help interpret that data. And we have paired that data down and simplified that. But also it's really important if you don't know analytics, there's certainly a Google certification out there that I would encourage people to go get. But it's really trying to understand what is that story that the data is telling you? And how do you apply that story to share that with the business owner or your manager, depending on where you sit, depending on how you're hearing this information. But telling that story with the data, the data tells a story. It's really your job if you're, I guess, in this role to be able to explain that and share that with the necessary stakeholders. And the first step to that is simplify reports. The second step to that is choose the right metrics. So most local businesses only really care about two vital metrics, traffic and conversions. Like how much traffic is coming to the site? What are the conversions look like? You should choose metrics that are relevant to your story. Matt likes to include the following six vital metrics from Google Analytics. So the first one is top landing pages, where people actually land on the site most often. Location by city. This is like users, new users, sessions and bounce rate. But by city, like where are they coming from and how are they coming in? Number three, overall sessions. What's the total session count? Number four, top traffic channels by sessions. So where is the traffic coming from? Is it all referral traffic? Is it all direct traffic? Is it Google organic search or paid traffic? That also goes to traffic sources and medium, which is number five. And then number six, new versus returning customers. So what is the opportunity for growth versus, hey, it's just customers coming back to either re-engage, which

can be great, because maybe they're making more purchases or are they just coming back to re-engage? And if you've got a tangible product, maybe they're coming back to figure out how to use it or figure out the best way to use it, how to install it, how to upgrade it, whatever. But those are the metrics that he likes to look at. He says, these metrics tell our clients, which campaign... And don't interrupt me. I'm reading your words, right? It's a little irony. I'm curious if you talk about me in the third person. As I'm sitting here, it's kind of interesting. But don't interrupt me because these are your words. Maybe you're already interrupting me. I don't know how that works. These metrics tell our clients, which campaigns yield the most significant traffic flow and from which cities and sources. He also likes to include Google search data, such as clicks, impressions, and CTR, click-through rate. That's what you have to... Do you have anything more to say on that? I feel like you might've... If you want to ask me a question about it, certainly I can answer it, but I've already written it down. So I'm not sure what else I can... Yeah, no, I think that's good, right? So we've got simplify reports. We've got choose the right metrics. And then the next, and again, we're covering seven tips for better enterprise local SEO reporting. It's also local SEO reporting is segment keywords by location. And this is where it may be more important for an enterprise organization, enterprise level organization that actually has locations, maybe spread across. So what I would say to this is this was like a big issue with multi-location data in the past because you could only get national data. And now platforms are buying enterprise level data based on Google data centers. And you can target specific GPS coordinates. You can target specific cities, zip codes, super really important because if you have multiple stores, say for example, or whatever, well, how do I rank here versus

here? Like this is what I know nationally, but how do I rank in my local area within maybe driving distance of a store? Certainly important for multi-location SEO. And it was interesting because in our SEO strategy session earlier today, you're like, hey, I'm in New Mexico right now. Let me do a quick search and see what it looks like here just to kind of confirm data. And sure enough, it was the same results. And it's good to have that combination. And you can use VPNs, right? You can use VPNs to do that sort of thing. But I think it's super important because one of the things I think that people don't realize is when they're doing searches in their own Google dashboard or whatever, if you're logged into Google and Google knows who you are, they're gonna show you preferences. So sometimes they're gonna show you like a lot of people search their own business. They keep searching their own business or their own store if they're a manager or whatever. And by the way, don't do that. Yeah, well, Google's gonna give you the results that you're looking for. So what happens is if you first start searching for it, it will start showing it higher and higher when you search it. But then if you keep searching and you don't do anything but search for it, right? If you don't take any kind of action, it will actually start dropping. So we found the case both ways with managers or owners that if they're searching in their, like they're set up in their Google, their own Google account. I'm not saying that, right? What would you call that? Your Google profile? Google profile, they're like, hey, why am I not showing up, right? And it's because you've searched for yourself so much. And not clicked yourself, right? And you haven't clicked or whatever. It's like, okay, we don't wanna show this. Or if they start searching, they're like, oh, I'm doing really good. And so you gotta be careful of that. Especially when

you're doing SEO to make sure you're in incognito or you're using listening tools or you're using a VPN or something like that to get accurate data. From that specific location. So getting into some more of the local aspects of SEO, you'll need to ensure that your reports are adequately optimized to only report on local keyword data. So for this section, you'll need an advanced keyword tool. Of course, our favorite, there's SE Ranking, SEMrush is out there, Moz, Ahrefs. And did I mention SE Ranking? Go check that out, bestseopodcast.com forward slash SE Ranking. As you can see below, he's actually got a screenshot. He set up position tracking for searches specifically in the Houston metropolitan area. And then you can upload keywords that he's tracking into a tool such as SE Ranking, right? SE Ranking, SEMrush, and then even Google Analytics. Well, and I do want to caveat, I have not used the new Google Analytics 4 tool as much. Like when we switched over last time in the AdWords account, I hate it. And it doesn't give me all the data that I'm looking for. But it's a reality. Google's also rolling out that they're sunsetting some of their other products as well. And so, that's the thing about SEO, you gotta get used to change because it's always a moving target. It is always changing. All right, once you have position tracking and tags set up, you can easily export and add those keywords. You can import them into a CSV maybe to work with some kind of geeky SEOers out there. You can also import them into SE Ranking. All right, so number four, segment traffic by device. So equally crucial for tracking local SEO campaigns is filtering data by device. And it's interesting, I first thought it was like, is that really important? Like I wasn't, like I had to keep reading. Desktop versus mobile, come on. Oh, you know that that's important, but do you need to segment the traffic and what is the data that you can get out of

it? And you go on to explain. You'd like to include sections in your report outlining traffic by device and even going as granular as location and device. Why would you wanna do that? Asked Chris and Matt responded. Regarding local SEO, mobile search traffic is arguably more important than desktop. I knew that, thank you. Especially when you factor in click to call and mobile ordering, right? So those are situations where the actual interaction with the customer and or potential customer is very distinctive and very different. And yes, you wanna track that. Well, I would even say I would go as far to say that Apple users versus Android users help give you a better idea of your demographics. And also, if you're gonna add other media channels and other strategies to it, there's different approaches to iPhone users versus Android users. Yeah, yeah. And then that's why you wanna segment out that local. Yeah, I mean, the tablet and then there's a lot of like we don't know kind of data, but I could tell you if we did do this podcast and I know a lot of people don't wanna listen to some old podcasts. They only wanna listen to really current podcasts and even how people search. We have a lot of really good data, but one of the things that has changed since we started, so like five years ago, whatever, four years ago, like when I came on Azure Coast. Yeah. What I saw is there was actually more desktop traffic than mobile. At that time, yep. It was probably 70, 30 and that's flipped completely. Maybe it's even more. It's probably actually for a lot of companies, it's at least 80, 20 or even 90, 10 towards mobile. And people are still building websites and optimizing websites for desktop. And typically, depending on what it is you're selling or your niche, they're buying maybe on the laptop, but they're doing all the research on the mobile and you gotta really understand that customer journey. So there's those sort of things and

there's certainly nuances and there's other strategies based on the different types of phones. But I do think that understanding your customer journey is I think really what I'm getting at and where those decision points are that people are looking for. Yep. I'm gonna put in a teaser here for our Before the Greenroom podcast because you mentioned that you hate data. You hated the data as AdWords. I think it was as AdWords changed. So we'll talk a little bit about that. I'm gonna talk about WooCommerce is actually coming out with a new reporting tool native to WooCommerce and I had an incredibly dysfunctional experience. Well, the experience was functional the fact that there's missing data. So we'll talk about it like crazy, crazy decisions or outlines for the new reporting tool. And then I also want to ask, kind of add, not ask, but add, I broke my wife's soccer.com account. And so ordering some equipment for my son and using my wife's account and it's like totally broken and we're gonna talk about that. Like, by the way, if you don't know, soccer.com is massive organization. They actually answered the phone at like 1030 last night and took my order over the phone because I broke soccer.com. Wow, Chris, congratulations. You know that that's actually a role in organizations, like in programming organizations, like the person that breaks things is a good tester, you know? And then there's certain people that have skill sets to break things. I would dangle that there was one reason and Google AdWords was really smart, but there was one reason of why I switched over. So that could be, if we did like a little Jeopardy game at some point or whatever, I don't know if it's Jeopardy, but there's one reason why I ended up having to use that tool before AdWords switched over and why I started to use it. They had dangled one thing in front of me that I kept going in to use that tool and it forced me to make the transition. So

if you're out there listening, comment if you know what that is, and if not, check out our, what is it, before the green room? We haven't even launched it yet, but by the time you listen to this. So that's good. Also, you can get the answer to the joke. What did the SEO say when he walked into the bar? All right, so number five, this is back to tips of better enterprise local SEO reporting, track local SERP results. For local businesses, Google business profile listings can be significantly higher. What is it called? Google business profile listings. What is that? I don't know what that is. You don't know what that is. It's right there. It says Google business. Is that GMB? Oh, that's yeah. That's formally known as GMB. So what we actually have at the company is Marcus said, we have a quarter jar. So if you say GMB, you have to put a quarter in. Yeah, quarter jars are. Yeah, that's SEO. That's the SEO jargon jar. Yeah, there you go. I like that. So Google business profile listings can be a significantly higher source of conversions and foot traffic to a business than their actual website. There are many keyword tools like SE ranking that offer detailed keyword information about local search results, such as is it in the local pack? Are they a featured snippet? Are they in the knowledge base? I mean, knowledge graph, right? This is that that may not exist anymore. Do I have to put a coin in the SEO jargon jar? This information is highly relevant to businesses looking to rank in near me searches that generate a lot of traffic for their business. All right, number six, go beyond standard SEO tools and metrics. So going beyond the local pack, we can add several additional KPIs, key performance indicators to our local SEO reports that are highly relevant to businesses. Consider including the following four metrics in your next local SEO report. Number one, reviews. Are reviews important? I don't remember off the top of.

Okay, local. Absolutely. Incredibly important. Unlinked brand mentions. Number three is backlinks. And you might have to go. We'll come back to unlinked brand mentions. Backlinks if relevant to your campaign. And then for social media engagement. And for that, you might need to purchase a social listening tool or an upgrade. Like so SEMrush does has it, but you have to upgrade it. You might want to go for a tool that's specific to that particular tracking. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we've started to use tools like Brett Local to basically paint a map. And I know that SEMrush has started to do it too. But where you can see based on like a circumference around your location and how much strength that has, the pro tip would be hopefully your business is close to the downtown of that city. Yes, that's a good decision for showing up locally. Yep. All right. And number seven, provide actionable information. I put a star by this. This is probably the most important. At the end of the day, you want to have a clear, concise story and then actionable information. Adding a section at the end, summarizing campaign results and future actions based on the data you present. This section will help you complete your story using the data provided and help clients understand what you presented to them. So in reality, if your campaign is bogged down because a local business won't update its site or implement recommended changes, be sure to remind them nicely at the end of your reports and explain the benefits of your recommendations. I think that might be the most important section because it really, if you can tell the story and then the story leads into what needs to happen next and the next story, then you've told a good story and it's an important piece to like transition to the next story. Yeah, I mean, the data tells you what's going on and then creating a strategy or actual steps on what to do. Those things need to be married together when you're

presenting to the client because they are coming to you typically for answers, for solutions. And so if you're reporting the data and you want to explain the why, then you want to explain what to do next. And those actionable steps are a lot of times some of the big, and a lot of these things, if we're talking enterprise, depending on what the SEO or the agency has access or freelancer has access to be able to do on the site really prevents that. So providing those actionable steps to their team because their IT team might not let you want to touch the site, right? I don't know why I can't talk right now. But essentially, you want to have those actionable steps to say, here's what you need to do if you don't have control over that domain to be able to do it. And it's important to explain that or explain this is why we need to do this or what the next steps are. But those recommendations, I think, are the meat and everything else is the potatoes, or I don't know. I know we used to say that a lot. Chris, you used to say that a lot. If you was in a real podcast, Chris would always talk about- Meat and potatoes. Is it time for the meat or are we still in the potatoes? Exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, what every business owner and whatever every marketer wants to tell is a story that sounds like, there was a time when I was on page four of Google with all the best places, as it's the best place to hide dead bodies. I love that joke. I don't think that you asked Siri that. She'll say that anymore. I think they got in trouble. So I was on page four and then I hired EWR and I soon found myself on page three and then page two and then page one. And now I share the message that if you would like to grow your business with

the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet- The internet. Go to EWR Digital for increased revenue in your business. Once you get to the site, EWRdigital.com, click the free consultation button and you're able to schedule a time to talk with one of our internet marketing experts and you'll enjoy that. You'll get a lot of value. We have a lot of testimonials about getting great value out of that initial free call. Very proud to be delivering that service to business owners, to SEOers, to marketers, enterprise, small businesses, all of them. And because we're so excited by- I mean, you guys have made us the number one SEO podcast in the known universe and one of the top internet marketing podcasts in the known universe. And we really appreciate that. What we would hope that you would do for us is just connect with us on some of our kind of social media platforms, right? YouTube.com forward slash best SEO podcast. Of course, subscribe and click the notification bell. Instagram.com forward slash the best SEO podcast. And then finally, TikTok.com forward slash at best SEO podcast. You're finding more and more at each of these, obviously with the YouTube shorts, TikTok and then Instagram reels. You're finding those, you know, one and a half minute to three minute short videos that we talked about at the beginning and actually was requested by JB about a year ago. So go follow us there, go connect with us there. And do you have anything else to add, Matt? No, I would just say, go check out SEO rankings. So best SEO podcast forward slash SEO ranking, check it out. I would encourage you to try out the tool. I think having a 30 day trial over a 14 day trial, I think a lot of people are going to the regular site to sign up. It really takes more than 14 days, in my opinion, to really learn a tool. And you wanna make a concerted effort if you're gonna add a new tool to really use that tool

and learn and use it every day to create that habit. So best SEO podcast.com forward slash SEO ranking. Well, this has been a phenomenal podcast. Thanks to our author, Matt Bertram. Patiff to Mr. Matt Bertram. Hey, that's why this wasn't live. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.