Outranking Tough Competitors: One Business At A Time
A new client comes to your digital marketing agency and says their competitors are stuck to the local packs like mussels cleaved to coastal rock.
The rough truth is that Google’s local search engine results often don’t make sense at first glance, or even at second or third glances.
Local brands are left to puzzle out how to achieve maximum growth when they’re consistently being outranked by sticky competition for their core search phrases.
Methodology
About a year ago, I decided to run a study in which I’d track a local finder for a single query — “breakfast (X city)” — to see if anything brands or the public did over the course of 12 months would shift the top eatery out of its #1 spot.
My anonymized data and takeaways are at the service of your agency as you work to increase local clients’ visibility so that they can achieve optimum growth.
Visualizing a year of movement in the local finder
Google’s local finder results are paginated in sets of ten.
A total of fifteen brands saw some visibility in the top 10 local finder results over the course of the year
Takeaways
1) Nothing anyone did in 2020 shifted Brand #1 (which I’ll call Tansy) out of its top spot.
2) The higher a business appeared in the local finder, the more stable it tended to be throughout the year.
3) Of the 15 total brands that won a spot in the top 10 results over the course of the study, three began and ended the year in the same position.
Finally, two that began the year in the top ten fell out of the set by year’s end and two latecomers made brief appearances
When I see a results set like this, I suspect a sluggish market in which no one is making a strong enough marketing effort to surpass a business like Tansy.
Anything you can do to help clients remain safely viable will be work of real value for the duration of COVID-19.
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