Succeeding In Local Search: How to Find Your Local Online Competitors?

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Written By Robert Dunford
I am a Marketing Consulting in the Great Toronto Area with over 25 years experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.

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In the local SEO industry, understanding and matching trends and patterns hold value in local companies digital marketing strategies.  Local search ranking has evolved to a more complex area in the SEO industry.  Having digital marketing as a service to ensure the success of your business has become broader than before.

Getting into digital marketing for new business can be tricky if marketers are unfamiliar with which strategies will work for them.  In connection with local SEO, you should learn to analyze the competitive landscape of the industry your business belongs to.

For you to achieve this, you need to identify your local online competitors.  Auditing your local competitors will enable you to contrast and discover which dominant metrics are in the localized organic SERPs.  In addition, it will help in developing or optimizing your existing strategies and reaching your as digital marketing goals.

Steps in Determining Your Local Competitors

Local companies digital marketing strategies tend to be simple.  It often focuses on keywords and finding ways to rank for them.  However, to further drive success in the Local SEO industry, note what practices may be missing in your strategies.

Step 1: Do a local pack search on Google 

If Google detects keywords that seem to have local intent, the SERP will most likely contain a local pack that includes locations where the keywords may be relevant.  It is a feature that lets you determine businesses that rank first to third in the local pack.

Step 2: Know the importance of keyword research

List down your most desired keywords or keyword phrases. Then, conduct a keyword search set in the location of your business; this way, it’s easier to see what searchers in your area are seeing on the local results page. 

Step 3: Identify how strong your competitors are

After you do searches using a local pack, list down the competitors in the results to determine who your direct competitors are.  Find out the pattern to which the most dominant keywords or phrases your competitors have against yours.

The Pros and Cons

While the steps above may look straight forward, there are still some drawbacks to this approach.  Doing manual searches can be a tedious task and time-consuming, especially for multi-location enterprises.  For local businesses located in large cities, it requires looking for differently-located competitors with different postal/zip codes, which makes the entire process a large chore.

On the bright side, what you can get from it includes discovering a trend to single out market-wide competitors.  Understanding how your competitors thrive in the industry can give you an idea of what needs improvement in your strategies and develop them.

Local companies digital marketing foundation needs to be stable for it to succeed. Thus, acquiring valuable information that you can incorporate with your goals while using digital marketing as a service to help you dominate local search rankings.

Contact me today for more information on how SEO or PPC marketing can leverage your business.

Rob Dunford is a Marketing Consultant in the Great Toronto Area with over 20 years of experience in building and implementing marketing plans for small business.

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