How To Create Relevant SEO Reports For Local Businesses

Creating local SEO reports that traditional clients understand and are relevant for them is a complex but important work.

But how can you make SEO reporting more meaningful to the local businesses you work with, so they easily understand the value you’re bringing?

Here are five things to consider that will help make your job a little less challenging:

1. Mom-And-Pop Stores Don’t Think Like Software Companies.

Working with clients in the technology sector has its challenges. Start-ups, in particular, often attract agencies once they’ve secured funding, at the kind of critical times when senior leaders have little time to devote to supporting outside projects yet expect results. But if there’s any vertical that SEO agencies can call home, it’s technology.

Despite the difficulties, expert SEOs often understand the needs of this type of client. SEO culture, after all, has evolved in tandem with the explosive growth of the software industry.

One consequence of this is that SEOs are often good at describing their activities and results in engineering terms. Data is the shared language, so metrics take center stage.

This style of communication translates reasonably well to e-commerce and, indeed, to any type of business that lives first and foremost on the Internet.

Even global brands that first found success offline, like Nike, have spent the last decade going through rigorous digital transformation programs. Even if they are not very fluent in it, many companies can speak the software language to some degree.

For most SEO agencies, good client management hinges on a well-honed intuition of when it’s okay to have technical conversations with clients, when to explain difficult concepts, and when to avoid them. Many clients may be perfectly at home with complex SEO analyses, or even reading SEO audit reports themselves, while others may require a more streamlined method of reporting focused on real-life key results.

But remember, not all companies have gone through these changes. For thousands of retail and hospitality businesses, “online” is simply an inconvenient necessity. Family businesses, especially those where the main decision makers belong to older generations, can even see the Internet as something quite dangerous and unknown.

2. ‘Traditional’ Business Owners Know They Need To Change

Despite this, most brick-and-mortar businesses know to think about how customers find them. At the very least, they will be passively aware that they could be losing business to a competitor with a more comprehensive Google Business Profile listing or more Maps reviews.

SEO can be a fantastic way for a local shop, cafe, hotel or service provider to improve their bottom line and the overall health of their business. Agencies that understand the ins and outs of local SEO can deliver immense value to these clients, even while executing repeatable and predictable activities. It is a great opportunity to climb.

But the execution is only half the battle. Getting results for a local SEO client requires a decent understanding of their business, and in turn, the client understands the value of what is being delivered, especially in the earlier, less predictable stages.

Increasing a site’s MOZ Domain Authority by ten points, or reducing the homepage’s bounce rate by five percent, can be significant for tech-savvy clients. That sort of thing is less likely to be exciting news for a local restaurant owner.

To demonstrate value and gain the trust of traditional customers, you need to understand their business on their own terms. All good client onboarding processes involve a lot of listening and careful questioning, but when it comes to local SEO, it takes on an extra level of importance.

3. ‘Educate Us’ Or ‘Just Deal With It’

SEO agencies should try to understand both the desired business results and insight goals of their traditional clients.

Fundamental concepts like the customer journey still apply in this world, but they have an added dimension. For example, retail stores are aware of footfalls. This is not entirely parallel with website traffic; a small increase in footfall can have a huge impact. In-store experiences tend to be more memorable than website visits.

The challenge for SEOs is to map online rankings and interactions to offline goals. When it comes to in-person transactions, you can’t accurately track the conversion rate.

With pure online marketing, identifying bottlenecks in the sales funnel is easy. Sometimes Google Analytics gives the answers in black and white:

• Low click-through rate on product pages.
• Low site speed.
• Most of the traffic comes from countries to which the company does not ship.

For local businesses, it’s a little different.

Asking customers, the right questions can generate feedback like, “We’re busy at breakfast, but people are crossing the street at lunch” or “Locals come from across town for our Chai Latte.” Sometimes this information can directly guide local search tactics, other times it’s simply a useful North Star to support SEO reporting on results.

One way or another, when local SEO clients hear that they’ve earned a first page ranking for a high-volume keyword, or gained prominence on Google Maps, they need to understand why that’s significant.

Some brick-and-mortar business owners intend to become more digitally savvy. In that case, being an educator is one of the stickiest added values ​​an agency can offer. Other clients may prefer to build a relationship with a trusted expert who simply handles these matters so the owner can focus on what they do best.

The key is to establish customer preference early on in the engagement.

4. SEO Reporting Should Focus On Tangible Business Results

Of course, the best way to retain traditional customers is to show that your SEO activities are having a tangible impact on their business.

But there will almost certainly be periods when authority building, experimentation, or research have to take center stage. Local SEO clients may not immediately see why these activities are important if they don’t directly move the needle for them.

Building trust early on is vital to achieving long-term success with these businesses.

Whether providing education or concise reporting, every piece of information must connect to the everyday realities of the customer. For example, appointment creation and efforts to improve the performance of a customer’s Google Business Profile listing should be understood in light of the customer’s extra-digital actions, such as asking for directions or calling.

The ideal local SEO report presents headline metrics in the context of real-world goals. For many businesses, the relationship between website traffic and revenue is immediate and visible. In the physical world, it is not always so clear.

Situations may arise where you need to explain something a bit more abstract to a local SEO client. Perhaps huge digital progress has been made, such as a plethora of rankings on the new page two or a dramatic improvement in site performance. These results can be meaningful to clients indicating their place in the overall plan.

5. Adapt Customer Services For Traditional Companies.

For agencies that are in the process of adjusting to local SEO, there are some assumptions that are easy to make but should be avoided.

For example, it is typical for many business owners and managers to routinely use email at the heart of their workflows. On the more tech-savvy end of the spectrum, they can use tools like Slack, ClickUp or Asana to stay organized and connected. But restaurant owners and managers spend much less time online.

It’s a good idea to consider adapting your customer service processes to better fit the workflows of these customers. In the first instance, agencies should have a frank conversation with each new client at the beginning.

Whether your client is a bit tech-savvy or committed to the strategic importance of SEO, there’s no better way to provide clarity and convenience than having a client portal that brings all information together in one place.

In other cases, perhaps phone calls should make up the vast majority of project communication. Agencies need to consider how this will affect internal workflows. For example, if extensive customer knowledge is required for content creation, their input should be saved and made accessible to the delivery team.

There is a huge opportunity for agencies that can find ways of working that flow dynamically with traditional clients. These companies absolutely need the expertise of SEOs. Any agency that overcomes these operational hurdles is sure to secure lucrative relationships with local businesses.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen before, making local SEO reporting meaningful to businesses requires some extra thought, from thinking about who your audience is and how tech-savvy they are, to what their business goals are and what tangible results they want to see.