Corporate brands face unique top 5 local SEO challenges in local SEO. Discover 5 of the most common and how to solve them for a more efficient business space. Local SEO is a strange beast.

Getting it for a business requires both pieces of knowledge of how to do National SEO, Google my Business SEO, and understanding how Google handles your search queries in different markets. This means that there is an infinite number of challenges in the business environment for search marketers.

What Are the Top 5 Local SEO Challenges in Enterprise Local SEO

• Priority of the venue with internal stakeholders.
• Have a single source of truth about location data.
• Store locator optimization.
• Manage and optimize google my business.
• Creating a local search presence for companies and markets in the service area.

1. Local Priority Internally

Sounds weird, but I can not tell you how many multi-site organizations we worked with, where positions were not a priority for the digital marketing organization. In the case of retailers, we found that the organization typically focused on National E-Commerce marketing. The positions were a nuisance that had the least possible investment. Makes sense. Dealing with hundreds or thousands of sites is complicated.

Determine the Total Manageable Market for the Main Categories

Suppose a multi-site e-tailer has 40 categories that are important to him from a revenue pov. It would be helpful for them to understand how their site works for valuable keywords in these categories in each market. For a truly national brand, we often started with 10 million keywords and 5,000 purchases. As I said, that’s a lot of data. We will not go into detail on how we work with this data, other than to say that the result of this analysis should show how the brand is categorized relative to its competitors in all markets.

• Where it is weak, we can see which competitors dominate and how they do it. Specifically, we want to see markets and categories with only a small number of competing winners.
• This is a sign that there is an opportunity for the brand. Once we have the categories and markets with opportunities, we can apply the search volume data to get an idea of how big the opportunity is.
• Assuming the opportunity is large enough, this now provides the rationale and roadmap for investment. But at the same time, the niches themselves are usually your biggest SEO advantage.
• The top 5 local SEO challenges with each of these organizations were how to make them prioritize the Local.
• The solution is very simple: Show them the money. While there are many ways to do this, here you can start.

Try Your Design at a Limited Number of Purchases

Once you have your design, select a small number of sites to try out your design. Hopefully, you have access to a set of analytics that can help you with the statistics you need to make the test valid. Run the test, measure the results, and then ask the statistics team to estimate how the results would look if the distribution had taken place at all locations. A success test + math of multiple locations can often give the organization the confidence to make bigger bets.

2. Have a Source of Truth About Location Data

With the advent of local listing companies like Yext and Uberall, this is no longer a problem. However, we still encounter multi-site companies that don’t have a single source of truth for all location information. If you don’t have it yet, put it in its place.

3. Optimization of Store Locators And the Top 5 Local SEO Challenges

Many brands outsource store locators to third-party vendors. There’s nothing wrong with this in theory, but there are a few ways we’ve seen it go wrong:

• Search-only Store Locators: However, many brands often find in their store finder a tracking page with a search box to find your location. A few years ago, we searched for locators for the top 100 retailers in the us and found those with search-only locators that rank 50% fewer keywords than those with state> city> location architecture. Therefore, make sure your monitoring architecture is created this way.
• Content Page Position: Brands often have a budget for generating tracking on their site, but leave nothing for the content. There is nothing wrong with a homepage with the name, address, phone number, product/service categories of your business, etc. Ranking can definitely improve SEO performance. This is where your position managers come in handy. We often see that successful brands use site manager surveys to get unique local content. Other sources may include local customer reviews, shared local point of interest data, and products that are popular in that market.
• Priority Categories: Most E-Commerce queries show local results near the top of the SERPs these days. We often see brands that win in local packages linked from their site pages to their main categories. Think of it as a way to tell Google that your sites are relevant to these categories.

4. Manage and Optimize Google My Business

Here Are Some Challenges and Opportunities With GMB.

• Beware of Duplicate Lists: Surprisingly, duplicate lists are still valid with GMB, but I just spoke to a service area company that was having classification issues. It was very easy to see that they had duplicate GMB entries. By the time they eliminated the duplicate lists, their rankings increased by 15 places for the primary keyword they targeted. So watch out for these.
• Keep Track of Your Gmb Lists: Your GMB listings are in constant Condition. Users add photos and reviews. Google can replace your data if it trusts another party’s data more than it trusts you. The GMB is not something that Puts it and forgets it. Establish a system to regularly track changes to your GMB pages. Although you may see many changes through the GMB control panel, you will not understand them. This is one of the reasons we created this free, open-source tool to track image changes in your GMB.
• GMB Post Scale: GMB posts are short announcements that you can attach to your GMB business profile. These can be an inexpensive way to generate high-converting traffic to your site. Posts can include text, photos, or videos. The top 5 local SEO challenges we often see is that companies are often not set up to produce content for every site.

If you want to create GMB posts for multiple sites, implement a GMB-ready marketing assurance system for new offers so they can be posted. This often involves creating a GMB sized (400 x 300) version of the approved marketing and copying images for GMB as part of each new offering. You will also need to make sure that you tag links from your GMB posts with a tracking parameter so that you can measure the performance of your analytics.

5. Presence of Local Search for SABs and Marketplace:

Not all local corporate brands have offices. There are many local market brands, such as Yelp, Door Dash, and Zillow, and service area companies (SABs), such as plumbers and roofers, that target local search queries but do not qualify for local packages. This is because they do not have physical locations in their target markets. And that means losing a lot of potential clicks and revenue.

This will not work for all brands, but for those who have the right business model, setting up an In-store at a partner’s headquarters is a great way to get extra exposure for local packaging. The FedEx On-site services at Walgreens are a good example of how it might work:

• And of course, if the potential customer price is high enough, you might as well consider opening physical sites in some areas just to try and rank the local packages well.
• Like I said at the beginning, there is an infinite number of local SEO tactics that corporate brands can apply.
• As with any marketing channel, create, try, measure, and repeat to help you move beyond these common SEO challenges for local businesses.

Other Resources:

• A guide to local SEO for large companies
• The complete guide to local SEO for many sites
• Local SEO: the ultimate guide to improving local search rankings