The One Where We Discuss Local SEO With Levi Williams-Clucas
Description
In this week's episode, we chat with Levi Williams-Clucas, SEO Specialist at StrategiQ, about local SEO and the importance of reputation, reviews and trust.
Where to find Levi:
Resources from the episode:
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Episode Sponsor:
This season is sponsored by Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog develop crawling and log file analysis software for the SEO industry, and wanted to support the WTSPodcast as listeners to the show. They’ve just released version 16 of their SEO Spider software, which includes - improved JavaScript crawling to help you identify dependencies, such as JavaScript content and links, automated crawl reports for Data Studio integration, advanced search and filtering, and the app is now available in Spanish, French, German and Italian. You can check out the latest version at Screaming Frog's website (screamingfrog.co.uk).
Where to find Screaming Frog:
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Episode Transcript:
Sarah: Hello, and a very warm welcome to the Women in Tech SEO Podcast. I am Sarah McDowell, an SEO content executive, and I will be your host for today. Joining me I have the wonderful Levi Williams-Clucas, who is an SEO specialist at StrategiQ, and they will be talking to us today about Local SEO. Welcome to the show, Levi.
Levi: Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.
Sarah: Thank you for giving up your time and agreeing to spend Wednesday afternoon with me. Have you had a good day?
Levi: I've had a great day. Yes, it's been nice and sunny outside, and I've been able to pet my cats today, so very happy.
Sarah: Sounds like a wonderful, wonderful Wednesday. To kick things off, I want to ask you how you got into this wonderful world of SEO, and how you ended up being an SEO specialist at the agency StrategiQ?
Levi: I've always been into marketing, and I did my degree in marketing and was ready to go as soon as I came out of uni. It didn't work that way and I ended up having a bunch of random temp jobs, and then got my first proper agency job at StrategiQ as a Digital PR. I decided it wasn't for me and thankfully my manager noticed an interest in me for SEO and suggested it and shout out to Chris Green if anybody knows him.
He suggested, "Would you like to move into SEO?" I thought, "Yes, I'm going to give that a crack." I've been happy as a pig in the mud ever since really. It's my calling.
Sarah: I love that saying "Happy as a pig in mud," I've not heard that one before.
Levi: Oh, that's one of my favorites.
Sarah: That's awesome that within your agency, then someone who worked with you was able to identify a whole area that you would be interested in. I think that's really cool.
Levi: Yes.
Sarah: Cool. What one bit of advice would you give other women starting out in the industry?
Levi: I had to go think about this, because there's a lot of things that I think I would like to give as advice to women in the industry, but I think my main one is not to change who you are or what you believe in, to fit into something that other people say you should be or should believe in. How you look, sound, how you identify, really doesn't have any impact on how good you are at your job, and how well you can learn what you need to do to succeed in your role.
You should really remind yourself of that when you feel like you've been treated otherwise, and prove those people wrong. I have, I'm here, I'm covered in tattoos and piercings, and I have a very successful career despite being judged on a regular basis about things like that, so absolutely don't change who you are to fit someone else's agenda.
Sarah: I absolutely love that advice and I could not agree more. You have to stay true to yourself. Don't you?
Levi: Yes, absolutely.
[Quick Fire Round]
Sarah: You agreed to come on the podcast to talk about Local SEO and yes, I'm very excited to be speaking with you about this today. Let's start with the basics, what is Local SEO?
Levi: Generally speaking, it's just optimizing what I like to call your online entity, so your website and all the other things connected to it, to be visible in search results that's either in a specific area or about a specific area. I think it's important to include about a specific area as well, because that can make a big difference to search results if you're adding a location modifier to a search.
Sarah: Now, just something to clear up as well, is that technically speaking, local SEO, we're talking about your online local presence with online directories, but because of that, the monopoly that Google has, with more so focusing on Google, is that right to say?
Levi: Yes, I think there is opportunity in local SEO with things like Bing Maps, and a whole bunch of other search engines that you can use, but yes, absolutely, more often than not, people will go straight to Chrome or Google search on their mobile devices, or something similar to look for their local things. Arguably, they provide the best local results as well, so generally speaking, yes, Google.
Sarah: Would you say then, if you're putting a plan of action together, your focus main priority is Google, and then once you got yourself into a place where you're happy we then move on to look at other opportunities?
Levi: Yes, I'd say absolutely look at your user-base first. If you've got perhaps an older generation user-base, or a B2B, you tend to get more of the Microsoft, I can't remember which one the Microsoft is now. You tend to get more of the other search engines that are being used instead of Google.
We do have things like Bing, which we do always keep an eye on just in case the user-base uses that more but generally, we would normally go for Google first unless the data says otherwise.
Sarah: What would you say are some of the fundamentals of local SEO?
Levi: It's as we said, Google My Business and the alternative versions I think it's Bing Businesses for me or something like that, it's got a silly name. Those business profiles absolutely the most critical part in my opinion. Local links, also important. I think that they are a fundamental that get missed quite often, people think they're not that valuable, but they really are. Locally-focused content.
If you're talking about being local to somewhere, but you can't say anything about the area, are you really that local? Do you really know much about the area? Also, consistency, and that comes across in all your citation building and directory building, but also, just generally across your website, being consistent is so important for being trustworthy as a good result in the local area.
Sarah: With consistency, a buzzword that I hear a lot when people talk about local SEO is your NAP, isn't it? Where you've got consistency with your name, address and postcode? I suppose that's just, if you've your core data is correct that anywhere that you can be found, that's one way that Google and other online directories can qualify you in a way, I suppose?
Levi: Yes. It's a really good way of making sure that obviously, if you've got consistency across everything that your business name is connected to, then people are going to trust your brand more. Also, it makes it easier if somebody spelled something wrong, or they're not quite sure how to spell your brand name, but they might know the phone number, or they might know the address of the business.
Having that all connected up and consistent just makes it so much easier to create this lovely web of information that's all the same, and encourage that trust within the brand.
Sarah: I'm getting the vibe. You've already said about trust, but reputation, reviews, trust, all those things has a fairly big impact on local SEO?
Levi: Yes. Personally, I know there are people that would argue against this, but personally, it's the most important part. Google is slowly becoming more and more like a person in how it treats search results and how it decides what is valuable for a user. If you look at it from a user's perspective, if you've got no reputation, if you've got no reviews, if you've got no news about you, you haven't done any press releases wi
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