Local SEO Journey - Fully Transparent Results

Hey Blakers1 any updates on this?

Okay, I am finally getting around to updating this thread. It's been a busy month and we've seen some more progress in the organic SERPS, but still no local pack ranking yet.

Here's a screenshot showing our most recent visibility trend over the last 60 days according to SEMrush. Keywords tracked are the same as the ones listed in my original post.



Organically, we're doing great! I think the most important movement we saw was for the keyword "business phone birmingham". We were on page 3 the last time I posted screenshots, but it has since moved to the #2 position according to SEMrush.

However, when I checked Google this morning, it is showing in the 4th position. Always keep in mind that SEMrush shows an average of your ranking over time and actual SERP results may be slightly different if you check them live.

This is something you need to educate your clients about early on in an SEO campaign. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of questions from bored clients Googling their own business from the office after lunch. If you can get the phones ringing with inbound leads pretty quickly, it tends to cut down on those questions a lot. Keep your clients busy! :-)

Out of all the keywords, there are only three that SEMrush shows as having a local pack feature:

- business phone service birmingham alabama
- voip birmingham
- business telephone birmingham al

For the first one we moved up 35 positions in the organic SERP to #16. There wasn't any movement on the other two keywords yet, but that's to be expected this early in a campaign.

This site didn't have a backlink profile to speak of, so we are working on getting some editorial links placed on quality IT service related blogs this month. We also made some improvements to the Google My Business categories.

I'm not a very big fan of the default categories they leave us with in GMB, but I was able to find and add the following for this site:

- Telephone Company
- Telephone Exchange
- Video Conferencing Equipment Supplier

You'd think Google would have something in their categories about business phone systems, VoIP service providers, or anything related to IT. But they don't. This was the most applicable categories I was able to find.

However, as much as I might hate on Google for not giving us more categories, this is a very important step for local SEO. I've seen sites earn positions in the 3-pack just from adding appropriate categories, so make sure you don't skip this step.

I'll post another update at the end of April. By then, we should have been able to get some unique images added to their GMB profile and all our guest posts should be live. We'll have to see how much movement that gives us in the local pack for those three phrases showing map features. Stay tuned! :-)

Did I miss citations? Are they set up for mobile? BTW a mobile business card is proving more effective for me then a mobile website. I was just wondering if these were missing pieces for you. I know SEO is key but so is getting the business in the directories and I don't just mean major search engines. You need a LOT of citations to rank in the map. OR try press releases. I Would do both you could command another big payment more for each of these. This is IMHO but I've also seen rankings appear in the maps when I've done these things.

Having said that I do not know why sites rotate in and out of the maps. I am guessing the old goog has too many sharp people doing all these things and is trying to give everyone a fair share idk.

Hellor Blake,

I am buried in IT and MSP copywriting.

Since Dec 2017 it's been non-stop. Sales pages, Verticals, Services, Blogs, Articles, Email campaigns and Newsletters.

Ranking well for VoIP can be difficult. But what I've been doing, and is working well for my client's websites, is linking to Authority websites, as well as connecting to different internal pages. The biggest care I have to watch for if I'm linking to an Authority site, it cannot be a competitor.

Also if I'm writing a VoIP article I would use these SEO words:

VoIP Birmingham Alabama
Voice Over Internet Phone Birmingham
Internet Phone Alabama
Ring Central Data Phones Birmingham
Telephony
IP Telephony
Internet Protocol Telephony

I also try to locate synonyms as best as I can.

I did go over and look at Low Latency Communications website. Couple of things I see you can do to boost their rankings, missing from their website. If you'd like to talk more about the IT and MSP industry PM.

Chinchilla

Very detailed and looks like you're going in the right direction! What off-page SEO are you currently doing?