Why Your Website Is the Foundation of Local SEO Growth | Greg Gifford

SEO-optimised, human-written, no exaggerated claims, fully YouTube-compliant.

Most businesses think local SEO success means higher rankings.
That mindset is holding them back.

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, Rana Shahbaz speaks with Greg Gifford, one of the most respected voices in local SEO, about why your website is the real foundation of local SEO growth, not ranking reports or map grids.

Greg explains why rankings are a vanity metric, how websites actually influence Google Business Profile visibility, and what businesses should focus on if they want more calls, leads, and sales instead of green boxes in reports.

This conversation is essential for business owners, marketers, and agencies who want to improve website performance, understand modern local SEO, and adapt to AI-driven search changes.

What You’ll Learn
Why rankings are not a reliable measure of SEO success
How websites drive real local SEO growth
Why your website matters more than your Google Business Profile
How local SEO is different from traditional SEO
Why conversions matter more than traffic

• The role of content, links, and reviews in local visibility
  
  
• How AI search is changing website traffic and intent
  
  
• Why long-tail search drives better business results
  
  
• Common website mistakes that hurt local SEO
  How to think strategically about website growth
  
  

👤 About Greg Gifford

Greg Gifford is a leading local SEO expert, speaker, and educator with over a decade of experience helping businesses improve local visibility and conversions. He is known for his practical, no-nonsense approach to SEO and for teaching marketers how to focus on what actually drives results.

⏱️ Optional Timestamps

00:00 Why rankings are the wrong goal
 01:30 How Greg got into local SEO
 04:20 What real local SEO success looks like
 06:10 Why websites matter more than map grids
 07:50 Local SEO vs traditional SEO
 10:00 Why shortcuts do not work
 11:15 Review recency explained
 14:00 The value of local SEO in real money terms
 20:30 AI search and changing click behaviour
 24:20 Why losing traffic is not always bad
 28:50 Local SEO for national businesses
 31:40 Website structure and internal linking
 34:30 Common local SEO myths
 40:20 How to approach keyword research today
 46:20 Long-tail keywords and conversions
 49:30 Where to follow Greg

📌 Subscribe for Weekly Episodes On

• Website growth
  
  
• Local SEO
  
  
• Website strategy
  
  
• Conversions and leads
  
  
• SEO in an AI-driven world

#websitegrowth #seo #businessgrowth #podcast

Transcript

Rana (00:00)
Yeah, and you know, one of the bigger mistakes that people make when it comes to local is they assume that you just do normal SEO stuff and add in a Google business profile. And that's not really accurate because when you're doing SEO for a local business that's doing face to face business in a market, you need to be doing local SEO, which is not normal SEO with GBP. It's an entirely different approach to SEO. You're writing content differently. You're optimizing the content differently. You're getting a different kind of links when you're doing link building.

You are adding in all of the Google Business Profile stuff, but you also have to worry about customer reviews. you mentioned 15 to 20 % clicks for the number two results. Are these numbers still the same after AI overviews or are they much different reports? Success in local SEO means you're getting more phone calls, you're getting more foot traffic, you're selling more of whatever it is that you're selling. The ranking, the traffic, the clicks, all of that.

Rana (01:10)
Certain ranking doesn't matter if you are not selling more. And that one idea explains why so many local businesses feel stuck. They celebrate green ranking reports, but the phone doesn't ring. Craig has spent more than a decade in the trenches of local SEO, leading search strategy at Search Lab, working with car dealerships and multi-location businesses, where visibility means real revenue, not vanity metrics. In this episode, we unpack why local SEO is a regular SEO plus Google Business Profile, why your website still matters more than your

map listing and how businesses should measure success by calls, conversions and sales, not rankings. If you want local SEO to actually grow your business, not just look good in reports, this episode will challenge how you think about local search.

Rana (01:54)
welcome to the website growth show.

Greg Gifford (01:56)
Hey, thanks for having me.

Rana (01:57)
I'm really excited to, you know, speaking with you and learning from you about everything about local SEO. Before getting into the details, can we start? What made you become a local SEO nerd and what gives you so much energy about talking about local SEO?

Greg Gifford (02:11)
I mean, to be fair, kind of have a lot of energy in life. Normally it's not really just what I'm talking about. Local SEO. I'm just a energetic dynamic kind of guy. guess I've, my personality has always been that way. ⁓ what got me into local SEO.

Rana (02:20)
amazing.

Greg Gifford (02:24)
Geez, like really years and years and years ago, I started off doing flash websites and all of the annoying like minute and a half long animated intros to websites that we all look back on and go, God, what were people thinking? That was totally the sort of stuff that I was doing. And I basically did a bunch of websites, ended up doing a website for a guy that's a commercial photographer. We decided to partner up and do a little marketing agency kind of thing. And we started doing websites as part of that.

And we realized really quickly that Google couldn't see the content in these websites because a flash website was really like five lines of HTML code that just said, launch the flash player. And then all the content was in the flash file. So Google couldn't read it.

So we started to try to figure out what we could do to feed that content to Google so that those sites would show up and did some stuff that totally worked. Knowing now what I didn't know then it was incredibly nefarious black hat stuff that you are really not allowed to do, but we didn't know that. And that's kind of how I discovered SEO. then things ended up, you know, as a lot of partnerships do, we ended up having to dissolve that, that agency, that partnership.

and I went to look for a job and the easiest thing I could slot into quickly was getting a job as a flash designer. And it came down to working for Match.com or working for this company that did websites for used car dealers and the Match.com guys had a interview process that just annoyed me and I immediately realized I did not want to work at a place with that much corporate red tape. So I ended up going with the car dealer one.

And really quickly, they were like, wow, you're way overqualified to just be a flash designer. So I started running the whole design team. And then pretty soon after that, I was running all of marketing for the company. And then we wanted to start selling SEO as a service. So we started interviewing people to come in and build out that SEO team. And all the people that we interviewed, we were kind of like,

the owner was like, Greg, you know more than any of these people were interviewing. Why don't you go start the SEO team? Because we can hire anyone to do marketing. So then I really got into SEO full time doing nothing else. And because it was for car dealerships, it just happened to be local. And so I worked at that company for like eight and a half years. And then when I left there, I went to another company that did

websites, for new car dealers instead. So for 12 and a half years, it was only car dealership SEO, which was local SEO. And that's when I started speaking at conferences and becoming a well-known figure in local SEO. And then I just kind of stayed in local SEO because I love it.

Rana (04:58)
Amazing and lovely story What is your today's nowadays, what is your favorite part of day to day work about local SEO? What do you love about most?

Greg Gifford (05:06)
Honestly, my favorite part is that I don't do local SEO anymore because I'm the CEO now and the way my brain is wired. I was always really good at doing local SEO, but I gravitated pretty quickly once I, you know, started doing SEO instead of marketing for that, that one company.

I gravitated really quickly towards the whole process side of things, because my brain really, you know, it tickles the good parts of my brain when I'm efficiently doing some sort of a process and creating processes. So really, I haven't actually done SEO in years because I've been more on the operation side. I really, really enjoyed, you know, figuring out operational efficiency as opposed to just doing SEO on a couple of websites. So.

You know, my day to day now is really nerdy and spreadsheet heavy, but I love it. It's awesome.

Rana (05:56)
Amazing. While we are on a topic of local SEO, although you don't do it, but I know you know lot more than many other people about local SEO. So businesses who are listening, first step is defining the local SEO success. In your experience, how do you define the local SEO success?

Greg Gifford (06:15)
Definitely not with a map grid ranking report. Far too many people think local SEO success means you have these map grids that are all green, but people don't realize SEO success is not measured by how well you rank for something. While business owners may be confused and think that that is the end goal, the actual end goal of hiring a marketing partner

is to generate more interest in your business so that you sell more of whatever it is you're trying to sell. really success in local SEO means you're getting more phone calls, you're getting more foot traffic, you're selling more of whatever it is that you're selling. The ranking, the traffic, the clicks, all of that is really more of a vanity metric kind of thing. Although organic traffic tracking that in analytics and leads.

both organic leads and overall leads. Tracking that is still a good KPI to monitor because as you gain more visibility, you should see more traffic, you should see more conversions, but that's not really where your reporting should stop. Your reporting should include, how's business going? Is business looking better than it was a year ago when you started working with us?

Because that's the real gauge of success is, are you selling more of what you're trying to sell? Because I could give you ranking reports all day long that are just solid green boxes saying, you rank for all these terms everywhere in your town. And you could say, well, that's cool, bro, but I'm not selling anything more than I was selling a year ago. And that's where a lot of agencies fail. They're looking at the ranking reports going, look.

You went from a box of red to a box of green. We must be winning. But it's a term that doesn't really matter to the bottom line of the business, so it doesn't generate any leads. So who cares? So that's why you have to take the next step and really look more at the conversion and sales side than just the visibility side.

Rana (08:02)
This is fascinating and interesting. So if it's not looking at the greens on the maps, how can you get more calls, more conversions, more sales? What people or businesses need to do?

Greg Gifford (08:12)
Yeah. And you know, one of the bigger mistakes that people make when it comes to local is they assume that you just do normal SEO stuff and add in a Google business profile. And that's not really accurate because when you're doing SEO for a local business that's doing face-to-face business in a market, you need to be doing local SEO, which is not normal SEO with GBP. It's an entirely different approach to SEO. You're writing content differently. You're optimizing the content differently. You're getting a different kind of links when you're doing link building.

You are adding in all of the Google Business Profile stuff, but you also have to worry about customer reviews. So you have to do more activities than you do with an online-only business, and it's all of the above. There's no one thing that you do. It's doing everything correctly to send all of the right signals to Google or in the future to whichever AI model.

Rana (09:00)
That's interesting. I was listening to someone who mentioned that in a local SEO, when it comes to local SEO, your website's only job is to support Google Business Profile.

Greg Gifford (09:13)
I don't think that's accurate at all. I think your Google business profile supports your website. Because if you look at the Google business profile is just being, or look at your website as just being supportive of the business profile, you can inherently make the conclusion that the business profile is more important than the website. And I think it's the opposite. I think the website is more important because you, while there are certain verticals that you can get a business profile to rank

without a website, for most verticals, the visibility of your Google Business profile is entirely based on, mean, sure, there's other factors like reviews and category selection, but realistically, your GBP visibility is based on the content that you have on your website. And if that content is optimized correctly, because if it was the other way around and your site just supports the GBP then your GBP ranking really well would mean people don't really need your website.

And depending on the product or service that you're selling, people do need the website still. They do want to come in and see the site. They do need to see that you have the answer to the question that they're asking or the problem that they're trying to solve. And if you just have a GBP, they have no content to read to see that that answer exists or your solution is the right solution for their problem. So I think it's, you know, it's reversed of that. It's the website is the most important thing. The GBP is just another avenue to help that website show up.

Rana (10:33)
Amazing. And there are lots of puzzles when, as you said, there's quite a few things you need to do to get local visibility, clicks, calls, and everything. Does Pareto principle, 80-20 rule applies on local SEO efforts? Are there 20 % of the efforts brings 80 % of the results when it comes to local SEO?

Greg Gifford (10:56)
No, I don't think that's accurate with local. think I mean, I don't want to put a number on it, but

While there are some activities that you maybe find very redundant and time consuming that don't really move the needle that much, you can't just say, well, of all the time that I'm spending, only 20 % of this is really driving the effort. Because you're spending a lot of time on content and technical optimization, you should be spending a lot of time on link building. You should be spending a lot of time on

Reviews which you can't really do yourself that requires training the client to ask customers the right way and to Change their processes to boost their chances of getting reviews So there's a lot of different moving pieces that are all vital to achieving really quality results If you were to cut any element of that out, you're not gonna do as well. So I think

you know, 100 % of all the stuff you need to do is valuable and necessary.

Rana (11:52)
So you have to do all the hard stuff to get this local SEO strategy right.

Greg Gifford (11:57)
Yeah, you know, if you wanted to try to take a shortcut, I mean, right now, review recency is a really important signal. You can actually have businesses that have way fewer reviews, outrank businesses that have a lot more reviews because the business with a lot of reviews isn't getting reviews on a regular basis. And the know, the upstart smaller scrappy guy is getting four to five reviews a week.

and the big guy's getting one or two a month, okay, well then that guy just on the review recency alone might outrank the other guy. But then if he doesn't have the right information on his website, he's not going to convert and the guy with more reviews is going to convert because he has more stuff on his site. So I really think that while there's a couple of things that might help a little bit, the best thing to do is just do it all and be a real marketer and you're going to end up having a benefit. I think a lot of SEOs out there

Especially the ones that lean a little bit more on the black hat side of things are always looking for that one quick silver bullet That's gonna just skyrocket their client to number one Unfortunately in today's world there really aren't that many Secret hacky silver bullets left. You just have to do legitimate marketing

Rana (13:02)
Yeah, I agree. when it comes to doing a local SEO properly, do you have any resource or any guide? your recommended resource.

Greg Gifford (13:10)
Yeah, you're right. There's a ton. The first thing that I always suggest to people is to pay attention to the usually annual, except we didn't do one last year, but the annual local search ranking factor study that WhiteSpark runs that David Mihm used to run way back in the day. That's, think, one of the most valuable things to look at when it comes to trying to sort out which signals matter and what areas you should be putting the most effort into.

The really cool thing is you get kind of like a little pie chart that shows you the things that matter the most for showing up in the map pack and you get another one that shows you the things that matter for showing up in localized organic and this year they added another chart in that show you the things that matter the most for showing up in localized AI search results. So it's a really good kind of quick hit initial here's all the stuff that matters and it's sorted by

weight. So the more important stuff is listed first, the less important stuff listed at the bottom. And it's hundreds of factors. So that's really valuable to not just look at the pie charts, but to read through the entire study. And really also at the end, he's got a lot of quotes from all the experts that helped with the study. And a lot of those quotes are really insightful too. So that's always number one recommendation. Number two recommendation, I have a course on

kind of like an intro to local SEO at SEMrush in the SEMrush Academy and also at the Bright Local Academy. So either one, SEMrush, Bright Local, it's probably an hour, maybe a little over an hour long course, but it's broken up into little kind of bite-sized lessons. Either one of those, ⁓ excellent resource. The Local Search Forum is really good. There is localsearchforum.com.

That's basically a forum just for local SEO nerds. That's excellent for sure. Don't go down the local SEO subreddit rabbit holes most of the advice about local SEO that you're gonna get on reddit is Hokey at best and a pointless waste of time most of the time What else is out there?

I have a weekly video series called Local Search Tuesdays. It comes out every Tuesday in the morning in the US. like morning time US. It comes out for everybody obviously, but like comes out in the morning in the US on Tuesdays. Short, usually three to five minute long clips that are usually about one particular element related to local. But then I speak at a lot of conferences. So I do also share my conference presentations, which are going to be focused on local SEO. I'll also collect tips from other speakers.

and compile those into an episode after a conference. So there's outside voices of other experts in there as well. I think that's a valuable place to go. And then, you know, there's tons of different places. The Sterling Sky blog is really great. Joy Hawkins runs Sterling Sky. She's pretty much the number one local SEO expert out there. And they do a lot of testing and publish a lot of the results of their testing. So that's great. We do a lot of testing. You know, we've just done, we've just worked.

two thirds of the way through releasing the largest study that we've ever done. We broke it into three different verticals to show how verticals are treated differently. So we've already released the auto dealer version and the personal injury attorney version and we're releasing the cannabis dispensary version in January. know, anywhere where you can see these local SEO experts that are sharing helpful information.

with anyone, it's gonna be a good resource. Darren Shaw has a really great kind of video series and podcast at White Spark as well. So I think those are probably the top sources. If you are not familiar with Local SEO and you're just learning any of those would be great. And even if you've been in Local for a bit, they're still helpful. And I think for the people that have been in SEO for a long time and think that Local is just adding in a little bit of Google Business Profile stuff, also incredibly helpful to.

to see how you need to reset your brain and think differently when you're working with a business that needs to optimize for the local algorithm.

Rana (16:55)
Fantastic. And we will put these links into the show notes so people can access those links as well. And on this conversation, my favorite part is having a case study. So if there is any of your favorite case study or any business over the years where people were struggling with local SEO, came to you, you did XYZ on those things, and the results change.

Greg Gifford (17:02)
Perfect.

Now Steve, I kind of don't

like case studies. And here's why. Case studies by nature are a very brief explanation of what was done. And so typically a case study is more of a sales tool for an agency or a freelancer than it is helpful information for other marketers that want to know what to do. Because you'll read a case study of we worked with this client and we did some stuff on their GBP and we did some link building and we did some content.

Maybe it gives you a little bit of detail of what they did with the content. they're like, and six months later, their traffic was double, but it doesn't sit there and give you the outline of the strategy that was used or list the individual tactics of what they did on site. They're just like, well, we, refocus the content to focus more on local authority. Okay. What does that mean? like case studies are great if you're trying to win an award or you're trying to have a sales tool where you can send it out to prospects and say,

Look, here's a couple of case studies in your vertical that are examples of the results that I was able to achieve. But when I'm trying to share resources of here's where you go to learn more about this stuff, I think case studies are too much of a high level view and don't really get into the nitty gritty of what matters for marketers that are trying to learn this stuff. You know what I mean?

Rana (18:31)
That's very interesting. My favorite part of case studies, because that gives you the direction of why the local SEO is important for that part. I totally understand for replicating that case study, there are lots of efforts behind the scene, which is generally very hard. But I think to show people the importance of any marketing tool or marketing efforts.

Greg Gifford (18:39)
yeah, for that part, it's for sure valuable.

Rana (18:55)
The case study gives you kind of direction. So this is what is achievable if you do everything right here.

Greg Gifford (18:58)
Yeah, yeah, no.

Yeah, exactly. And we had an element of this big study that we released, the auto dealer attorney cannabis study. And so we mostly use Placescout in there because Placescout is like a ridiculously awesome tool for local SEO. But we also partnered with Ahrefs to do some link analysis, because the Placescout tool just didn't really do the link analysis to the level that Ahrefs could do. And one of the elements of Ahrefs is

you get this this number that they call organic cost, which is a trust is analyzing your website. And so it goes and it looks in its own index. And it looks to see the number of keyword phrases that a business shows up for and what the positions are. And it can do some accurate enough ish math.

to figure out what the PPC equivalent would be and how much you would need to spend in PPC to get the same amount of traffic you're likely getting with SEO. So, you know, everyone knows that like if you rank number one, you probably get 18 to 20 % of the clicks that happen for that particular keyword. So then it would, you know, it would say, okay, for this guy that ranks number one for this one keyword, the average cost of a click is $2.50. And with the search volume that we know that that search gets,

we can deduce that he would get 20 % of that volume times that cost is here's how much it would cost to get that visibility for that one keyword. And so it looks across the hundreds or thousands of keywords that that business ranks for in its database and does that calculation and spits out a number and says, on average, you would need to spend X amount of dollars to get the equivalent amount of traffic that you would be getting organically. So then we can compare.

the businesses that ranked at position one in the map pack to the businesses that ranked at position 10 in the map pack So what's the organic cost number at number one and what's the organic cost number at number 10? And you subtract those and that results in giving you the gap of what is it worth to rank number one from a traffic perspective or on the flip side, if you're at number 10, how much of a gap is there?

for the fact that you don't rank as well. What would you need to spend to catch up? So according to the study, and I know this number because I'm working on slides today for a podcast webinar thing that I'm doing on Thursday for automotive, the average car dealership at number 10 would need to spend $245,000 a month in PPC.

to get the same amount of traffic that the guys that rank number one are getting for free. And I love that number. It's a little bit of a tougher explanation. And clearly you understand how all this works, but the general public kind of starts getting confused when you're like, wait, how do they know how much traffic I'm getting and how do they know what that costs? But once you can get through that explanation so that people are on the same page and they understand where the numbers are coming from, I think it's incredibly compelling to then let people know, hey, look.

If you're not doing quality local SEO and you're ranking lower in the map pack at number 10, that's $245,000 a month as a car dealer that you would need to spend at number 10 to get the same amount of traffic that your competitor who ranks number one isn't paying for other than what they're paying for their SEO service. So I think that is that that's the kind of information that you can glean from these case studies and things like that, where you want a quick hit that says

Here's the value of SEO for that business owner out there that's not quite sure if this is money they should be spending or not.

Rana (22:30)
No, thank you so much for explaining it in detail. And what are the important stuff you need to pay attention to? You mentioned 15 to 20 % clicks for the number two results. Are these numbers still the same after AI overviews, or are they much different?

Greg Gifford (22:45)
No, obviously, like click through

rates are going down significantly because of AI overviews, but it depends on the phrases you're looking at. I think it's really kind of coming out now that a lot of these websites that are losing traffic because of AI overviews, they're not losing conversions. They're just losing window shoppers. So that mid to upper funnel traffic is really what you're losing, which if you really think about it, that's that blog type content.

that people would have come to your website and not converted on that content anyway. So who really cares if you're getting fewer click-throughs to your website? It just means the clicks that you're getting are way more likely to convert because they're likely further down the funnel. Another big element of this though is because it's that mid to early funnel informational type query, anything transactional doesn't usually pull an AI overview.

So it doesn't really affect your conversions because when people are far enough down the funnel that they have purchase intent, the types of queries that they're asking are not going to pull an AI overview. It's just going to give you a map pack or a regular search results. So I understand people are freaked out. It's a big period of flux. Things are definitely changing quickly already and are going to continue to change it at a fast pace.

But I want people to pause for a moment on that anxiety and that freak out and really examine what's going on. Because ultimately, the way that people are finding us is changing, but the number of people looking to buy the product or service that you're selling hasn't changed. So the only thing that's going to change is the way that people find you. Who cares if you get a, it's like,

What's the important thing to track? Is it ranking? Obviously not. That doesn't tie in anything. Is it just website clicks? Well, no, because I could get any website a bunch more clicks, but if all of that traffic bounces and doesn't convert, then that business owner is again unhappy a year later when you come up to the end of your agreed upon partnership and you want to renew that relationship. And you're like, everything we've done has worked. Look at all this traffic that you've gotten. And the business owner says,

It's not working bro, because I'm not selling anything more this entire year than what I sold last year because you're looking at the wrong metrics. So that's where I think a lot of this lost traffic noise is really just noise. Like who cares? Things are going to change. No matter what we do, we're not going to be able to stop it. I had a conversation. Gosh, I don't remember where it was. I'm pretty sure it was at a conference in Dallas recently, but it was a guy that works for cloud flare and you know, cloud flare released the ability for people to block.

any of the AI bots from crawling or the AI models from crawling their website because they want to protect their content and force people to come to their website. And I think that's incredibly short sighted. Now, if you're a publisher, like a news website, OK, there could be an argument made there. But for a local business that is serving customers and selling products or services in a local market to block any AI model from reading content on their website.

is honestly completely boneheaded because you want all the AI models to consume your content. So I think there's this kind of disconnect where the paradigm has shifted drastically and people are hanging on for dear life to the way that SEO used to work and not realizing, look, you're going to have to change because it's changing whether you want it to or not.

Rana (26:07)
That's amazing. And with all these changes going on around the businesses who are not sure, can they still grow a business using local SEO?

Greg Gifford (26:17)
heck yeah. Local SEO completely still works. And like, you know, we have a Slack channel where we share client wins and we've had several things in the last couple of months where they're showing a traffic chart from a client or a lead chart, like conversions chart. Looking at the last 12 months, you just see this massive uptake and it's like all of the, all of the noise out there is, my gosh, zero click is eating all of my traffic. I'm not getting any more traffic.

Boo hoo, boo hoo. Okay, nobody ever really talks about conversions, right? Okay, well, who cares if your traffic's down and your conversions have this hockey stick? Or I still have a lot of clients that their traffic's going way up. So again, I think it's looking at the right things, looking at the right metrics as a whole and not just concentrating on one or two things. And a lot of agencies haven't done that for a very long time. A lot of agencies out there are like, well, hey man, if your traffic's up and your ranking report looks good, then everything we're doing is working and that's not really true.

Rana (27:11)
Got it, got it. And ⁓ when it comes to local SEO, businesses who are serving nationally or internationally, do you think they should invest in local SEO as well?

Greg Gifford (27:20)
It depends on what it is that they're selling. So most of the time, a company that is selling internationally doesn't need local SEO because if they're selling internationally, it's probably some e-commerce type of a thing where they can sell to anyone and they don't have like a physical storefront, boots on the ground in different cities all over the world that they would have to sell from. But you do have that situation sometimes. So really the easiest thing to do is take

I don't know, four or five, more if you want to try it for more if you have a diverse type of business, but usually take the four or five most important money making keywords and do a search for that keyword without a geo modifier. So, you know, if I'm if blue widgets is the thing that matters to my business, I would search blue widgets by itself. I wouldn't say blue widgets Dallas or blue widgets London or blue widgets Rome.

I don't want to explicitly state a location for my search. I just want to search for the phrase. If Google then displays a map pack, that is the clearest indication out there that you need local SEO because anytime the map pack is displayed in search results, that's Google saying this search query has local purchase intent often enough that I need to show a map pack because there are things that pre-COVID, you could do a search for patio furniture and it would

always display just e-commerce stuff. Post-COVID, you search for patio furniture, you'll get a lot of e-commerce stuff, but you also get a map pack because it is mixed use. Some people don't care to buy local, some people do. So when you do those searches and if you see the map pack, you know that at least some of the time, often enough for Google to display a map pack, this search query has local intent. And if you're competing with that, even if you're purely e-commerce,

and you don't have a physical storefront, you still need to use the tactics of local SEO and have a strategy that includes local SEO to compete because you have to realize that just because you don't have a physical storefront in Denver, if you're selling your product or service to people in Denver, you're going to need the right structure and architecture to your website.

to be able to compete with the people that actually have a physical location in that market.

Rana (29:28)
This is very interesting. with this e-commerce business example, does that mean that e-commerce business, then, if they are selling throughout the US, they can target all the US local keywords as well?

Greg Gifford (29:40)
potentially if it is something that you also have an element of locale or of like local intent or locality in the way that people search then potentially you would I just spoke at Change my SEO about a month ago and there are a lot of affiliate guys there and had a lot of conversations with these affiliates that don't have a physical location but they're selling something like cable TV in a market and you're searching cable TV city

Well, they need to do local SEO and structure things correctly and optimize the right way to be able to compete for people looking for local, or looking for cable TV in a city. So sometimes you will have to change the way that you're doing SEO and have some local elements implemented, even though for the vast majority of what you're doing, you don't have to worry about local.

Rana (30:29)
Excellent. Let's assume there is a national business who are mainly ⁓ doing organic SEO, now looking to do local SEO as well. They did a search, local maps appeared. What are the couple of things they need to be very careful to not mess up with local and organic SEO?

Greg Gifford (30:46)
So if you do have that situation where you're kind of like a hybrid approach and you need to do both, you want to keep the main menu section of your site not geographically targeted, just generic with no location parameters or no location targeting whatsoever. And then you create silos of content. So think of it almost like a microsite, but it's not a microsite. But let's say to make it easy,

Let's say your product or service, you've got five things that you offer. So your main menu has product, service, whatever you call it, and the submenu has links to those five things. So you have a page about each of the major things that you sell that is not geographically targeted. But you also want to, for the sake...

It would never happen this way in reality, but for the sake of the conversation, let's say that for some reason only in Texas does that search also have local intent. So you don't have to worry about targeting the whole country or the whole world. You're doing regular SEO for the whole world, but for everybody in Texas, you're doing local SEO. That means those five pages that exist on your main menu. You also have those five pages for the cities in Texas that you want to target. So you're probably going to hit the big city. So you're going to be

Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, San Antonio, Houston. So that means each of those five cities will have those five pages. So you're selling blue widgets, red widgets, green widgets, purple widgets, and white widgets, right? You're gonna have those five widget pages that are blue widgets, Dallas, red widgets, Dallas, yellow widgets, Dallas, purple widgets, Dallas. Then you're gonna have blue widgets, Austin, yellow widgets, Austin, red widgets, Austin, et cetera.

You have to write them uniquely. can't just switch out the city name. So it has to be unique content, valuable content. And you also have to do link building. So when you're doing link building, the links that you get from the Dallas area, because in local, you want local links to the business that you're optimizing for, which means now your link building becomes more complex, along with your site becoming more complex, because to get the Dallas content to rank better.

You need links from other Dallas entities and Dallas websites linking to your site specifically to those Dallas pages. You get links from San Antonio, they point to the San Antonio page. You get links from Houston, they point to the Houston page. And so you have all of that involved. And then if it is one of those hybrid situations where maybe you do have a physical footprint, you would then need to have the Google business profile for each of those cities that you're optimizing or multiple profiles within those markets that you're optimizing.

And then you have to worry about customer reviews if you have the Google Business Profile. So it can become incredibly complex, almost like an enterprise-level franchise where you have a single website with hundreds or thousands of locations that are all on that website. It kind of becomes like that. So it can get really complex really quickly. So you really have to have a handle on the intricacies of local SEO compared to traditional SEO.

Rana (33:36)
Yes, I totally get this. gets very complicated. To make it very simple, I tried to give you a simple example. The business which offers services currently, offering services throughout the country, throughout the US, but they have an office in San Diego only. So they only want to target San Diego local back only. So I understood the blue in their service menu, blue widgets, green widgets, yellow widgets. That's what they are doing now.

if they want to add just one city element as well. So they will add another menu with San Diego and then the blue widgets, green widgets go in. OK.

Greg Gifford (34:09)
I wouldn't really

I would well first I would want to know What is the percentage of business they get from the San Diego market versus the rest of the country? Because if the San Diego part of the business is only 10 % and 90 % comes from the rest of the country

I would really deprioritize ranking in San Diego. But if the San Diego part of the business is 50 % and the rest of the country is 50%, you may want to make the decision that the main menu, five widget pages, five different colors of widgets are actually optimized for San Diego. And then you have the duplicates of those pages, except obviously not duplicates because uniquely written, but

The second version of those five pages is not linked to from the primary menu and that's just the national focus. Or it could be the other way around, that San Diego's not a big enough chunk that you want the main menu optimized for it. So the main menu five pages for your widgets are not optimized for San Diego, but then you have the San Diego stuff also there. But I wouldn't add it as two menus where you're like, here's the,

You know, your menu button would be called widgets and then it dropped down as blue widgets, red widgets, yellow widgets, et cetera. You wouldn't have widgets and then widgets in San Diego as two different menu buttons. You would just have widgets. But then throughout your content, you can have contextual links to, know, our corporate headquarters is in San Diego. We actually have a physical storefront that you can come visit and buy these in person. If you don't live in San Diego, clearly we can ship nationwide and you're cool. Right.

Well, then in that case, when you're saying we sell widgets in San Diego, the text widgets in San Diego is linked to your San Diego widget retailer page, which then also links to blue widgets, red widgets, yellow widgets. So internal linking makes sense to both customers and to Google. Both types of content will rank and it won't be confusing to customers to have two different widget menus, one for San Diego and one for the rest of the country.

Rana (36:06)
I hope it is complicated. hope this makes sense to people who are listening. So thank you so much. It's such a great information. moving on, are there any local SEO myths you want to burst today? Your favorite ones?

Greg Gifford (36:20)
The one that I hate more than anything else is adding EXIF data to images before you upload them either to your website or to more specifically the the one that just won't seem to die is Having the EXIF location data and images that you upload to your GBP image gallery

Rana (36:21)
maybe. Maybe top three.

Greg Gifford (36:41)
It's stupid. It has never been proven to be effective. People keep saying it works. Google completely strips out the exit data when the image is loaded anyway. And then people will say, but they still read it when it's loaded. So it's still effective. No, it's not. I've talked to multiple Google engineers. It absolutely has zero effect. Another one that's crazy that keeps popping up is that when you do link building, you should link directly to your Google business profile because that helps your profile rank better. But you can't.

link to a business profile. There's only two things you can do. You can link to a search results page that shows the profile because you're searching for that brand in that city, or you could do a Google map search that shows the profile because you're searching on maps for that brand in that city. But you're linking to a search results page that has a search query parameter on it. You're not linking to the profile. So you physically can't do it. And also it would be stupid to do it anyway because it wouldn't matter and it's been proven not to do anything.

Those are the two that really kind of chaps my hide. What's another big one?

I think those are those are the two main ones. There's a lot of other like, dumb little hacky things. But yeah, those are the two that just those are like the the local SEO myth zombies that just refuse to die no matter how often people are like, Yo, man, that absolutely doesn't work. You'll still have five other people on some local SEO subreddit going, Hey, man, if you really want to rank, here's what you do. And it's just dumb.

Rana (38:01)
I think these two are powerful and will save a lot of time and hassle to people who are trying to rank. So thank you very much. Is there any annual hack or habit that really helped you with local SEO?

Greg Gifford (38:13)
I mean, like for me personally, like I am a perfectionist and my brain just immediately like the way that that our owner likes to explain it, I think works really well is he will think of something and say, here's what I need to do. And he's thinking of the end result. And when someone says, hey, we should do this thing, it's like if you're thinking

you know, I here's here's the point that I need to score. You're thinking of what happens when you score that point. I'm thinking of we have to get to the point where we're able to score first. So my brain is thinking of the, know, most people think of step one and step 50. My brain immediately thinks of steps one, two, three, four, five, all the way up to step 50. So I think the analytical way that my brain is wired has really helped me with SEO because

I'm thinking through the minuscule important steps that it takes to get to a point. And so when we're doing testing, it's very well designed. I'm also kind of a bulldog. Like I'll just keep working at it. I, I, my wife gets mad at me. I enjoy work. Like when I take extended time off, like I did a conference in Bali ⁓ a year ago and we were in Bali for three weeks with the kids. It is really hard for me to not work for three weeks. I enjoy my job.

Rana (39:23)
Did you get a, did

Greg Gifford (39:24)
I like thinking in,

Rana (39:24)
you, did you get?

Greg Gifford (39:25)
like figuring things out. So I think that helps too. I've talked to a lot of people that seem to complain that some of the younger generation, and I think this is just a stereotype, I don't think it's true, but people tend to complain if they're a little bit older, that the younger generation just wants to show up and get a paycheck and they're gonna work their nine to five and that's it. I don't think that's true. I think the younger generation has the fire. I think they just work differently than the older generation does.

You know, the drive to get results, I think, was really important for me. The attention to detail, I think, was really important to me to be successful.

Rana (39:56)
Amazing. And are there any common mistakes as well? Did you notice a couple of common mistakes which?

Greg Gifford (39:57)
for sure.

Rana (40:05)
you see most businesses do when it comes to local SEO.

Greg Gifford (40:06)
wow.

Most people approach it incorrectly, like we've said multiple times in our conversation of thinking that it's just regular SEO and then add on Google Business Profile stuff. For sure, it is the all-encompassing do everything that you can to have a better digital pattern than your competitors. And I think that's a mistake a lot of people make.

I think a lot of people make the mistake on their Google business profile to not really dial in and optimize it. Well, they'll choose one category and that's it when there might be two to three or even four categories that apply to what they do and they miss out on search results because they just didn't pick the right categories. I think a lot of people don't realize that reviews are a really important signal to the local algorithm and they tend to have one vendor agency partner.

help with SEO and then a reputation management vendor help with reviews. And it is much more cohesive and better to have or to find an SEO vendor that really gets local and includes reputation management and what they do. I also think there's just the general mistake of, again, people think it's regular SEO. So they might optimize content the right way, but they'll still just go get regular links and they don't realize you have to completely do link building differently with local. I think the other big problem is

people assume that in local, mentioning a city on the page gets you to rank in that city. So you see situations where you'll have websites that say, serve customers in city one, city two, city three, city four, city five, city six, like in this big commerce separated list of cities. That's not going to help you rank in that city. And it's garbage content to read as a customer because they've already found your website. They don't care that you serve customers in 25 other cities. So a lot of the like quick win hacky stuff, you know,

doesn't really work, but people think that it does and it ends up at best not helping or actually making their website worse than it was.

Rana (42:00)
Amazing, really helpful advice once again. So to wrap up our conversation, people who are looking to get results in local SEO, what is the one thing you can suggest people to start from there?

Greg Gifford (42:13)
Honestly, I think before you even start is the most important step. I think the question you asked early about what resources people should look at to learn more about SEO, I think that's the key. I think too many people out there will find one person or one website or one blog post or one training course that explains stuff and they stop there. And that's the extent of their knowledge.

I think you should make sure you truly understand all of the intricacies of this local SEO thing that you're trying to do. And that means you need to go to multiple sources. Don't just take my course on SEMrush and think that you know how to do local SEO. I feel like it's a pretty good course, but there's definitely a whole lot more that you could do. You know, I do a local SEO training course at Brighton SEO twice a year, every spring and every fall for the last 11 years now.

That's a six and a half hour course. I am talking about local SEO and how to do local SEO all day long. So there's way more than what you can get out of an hour or an hour and a half course. So I think having the right knowledge about what you're trying to do and how it's different from how you've learned SEO is really the most important step.

Rana (43:21)
Amazing. if I read somewhere, Brian Tracy said that every minute you spend on planning saves you 12 minutes in execution. So I think that really applies here as well.

Greg Gifford (43:28)
So yeah, definitely.

Rana (43:31)
Was there any question which I should have asked you or you think whenever you go on to the podcast, you think people should ask you and never asked?

Greg Gifford (43:40)
That's a really good question and I honestly, man.

I can't think of anything that you should have asked that you didn't ask, honestly. You asked some really excellent questions.

Rana (43:49)
thank you so much for that.

Greg Gifford (43:50)
yeah. Yeah.

Rana (43:51)
know, sets

your directions. So what is your best tip on picking up the keywords you can bet on, you can spend time and efforts to get rank?

Greg Gifford (44:00)
think that's another big mistake that people make is a lot of people, especially when you specialize in a vertical and only work with one particular kind of client, people gravitate pretty quickly to not doing keyword research. And I think you should always do your keyword research and do extensive keyword research, especially now that we've got all of these AI tools that can help us work more efficiently and quickly. You can do a lot of keyword research with a little bit of automation in there and get a lot more done. Do something that...

would have taken you four or five hours in the past, may take you 20 or 30 minutes now. So I think you got to do that keyword research. You have to realize there is nothing out there that is going to tell you what the keyword search volume is in one particular city. There's just not a tool. And I think a lot of people forget that when you're looking at these keyword search volume numbers, most of the time they're derived from Google's own AdWords keyword preview tool.

which is already going to be obfuscated and not totally correct anyway. But you have this hockey stick from head to long tail terms and the head terms have a lot more traffic and people always want to optimize for these terms that just have humongous, ridiculous traffic numbers. But it's a head term so you don't really know that that is purchase intent. The more...

long tail of phrases, the more words included in that search query, the more specific the intent is on that search query, which means it's easier for Google or for the AI that you might be searching on to understand exactly what kind of answer you're looking for. So I think the thing that most people kind of screw up even later in their careers is you want to go for these big head terms because it's going to generate a lot of traffic because what you care about is traffic where

for the same amount of effort or maybe even a little bit less effort, you could go for a bunch of long tail terms that cumulatively may not even have as much generated potential traffic as a head term. But because you've gone for the longer tail variant, there's less competition, which means it's going to be easier to rank for sooner. And that

longer tail traffic is more specific in intent. So you can target the things that are more likely to lead to conversions on a shorter timeline as well. So I'm not saying don't go after the head terms if they matter to your business, but you might spend a year trying to get improvement in visibility for some head term. And if that's a hundred percent of your effort, the business doesn't really improve that much from a sales perspective during that year.

But if you work in parallel and go after that head term that either you care about or maybe the business owner cares about, but you also do a lot of the long tail variant stuff on the side, then you're going to start having these incremental improvements to traffic and lead count and sales before anything pops off with that big term you're going after. And I think too, because of this massive flux in our industry, because of AI search,

That's a really important shift that people need to make because search behavior has already changed significantly in the couple of years that we've had chat GPT. Specifically because search queries, even on Google, are much longer and more conversational and significantly longer tail than they've been in the past because

Even a longer tail search might go from widget to blue widget to blue medium size widget in Dallas that I can pick up at a store today. Right? But that's still what you would search in Google of blue medium widget in Dallas in stock today would be your search phrase.

Where now, if you're an AI or even if you're searching in Google, people might say, I'm looking for blue widgets that are the medium size at a store in Dallas within a 15 minute drive from my current location that has these in stock today. Where can I go? Like a massively long term phrase. If you're just optimizing for widgets Dallas, you're not going to show up for that. So you really need to diversify and really consider.

Rana (47:39)
you

Greg Gifford (47:47)
what people are asking. I think that's the key is a lot of marketers are like keyword or keyword city. That's what I need to worry about. And really you need to think about what are the questions people that are people that are in the purchase phase of your funnel or pre-purchase phase, but still in the decision funnel that will lead to purchase. Think about the questions that those people would ask.

and get the answers onto your website. And that's not groundbreaking. That's things that people like me have been saying on stage for years at SEO conferences. But you see all the hustle bros on LinkedIn that are like, you need to buy Geo as a service, which is the dumbest name ever. But you need to buy Geo as a service because SEO is dead. All the old SEO tactics don't work anymore. Now you need to do things like anticipate your customer questions and answer them proactively. And I'm like, bro, I've been saying that's something you should be doing for SEO for like 10 years. So

You have to really think about it though of is my website content helping customers make a decision? That's ultimately what it comes down to.

Rana (48:46)
Yeah, that's a mic drop moment. And I really hope businesses get this long tail thing, because that is now game changing. really where the money is, is the things if people can get this stuff. You mentioned doing keyword research through AI search. Can you work on the keywords which AI giving you, or you still have to recheck with the keyword tools?

Greg Gifford (49:04)
No, no, I'm not saying, yeah,

no, I'm not saying use AI to do the research because it would be garbage. AI is going to make all kinds of stuff up. I'm just saying that now when you have, you know, if you're doing keyword research for a business that has a lot of products and services or a business that serves a lot of different locations.

You would need to use your traditional keyword research tools, but you're going to download all of this data that you would then have to parse through and organize yourself. Well, now you can throw it into AI and get summaries really quickly and get things sorted into topic buckets really quickly. So it's more using AI tools to be able to make your work more efficient, not asking chat GPT or AI mode or Gemini what keywords you should go after, because they're absolutely not going to know that.

Rana (49:49)
That's amazing. Fantastic, Greg. I think there is so much we learned from you today. Thank you so much for generous answers. I really enjoyed it. where people can connect you was the best place to connect and learn more from you.

Greg Gifford (50:02)
Yeah, really, if you want to connect with me, the best thing is LinkedIn. You know, I tend to speak at lot of conferences and people always Facebook friend request me, but I really honestly don't use Facebook anymore other than to kind of keep in touch with family. So like from a professional standpoint.

Facebook, no. I used to say Twitter, but somebody kind of killed Twitter with buying it and ruining it. So I tried Blue Sky for a while. That never took off, even though I really tried to make it take off. So really LinkedIn is the best way to connect with me or just email me. It's an easy email address. It's greg at searchlabdigital.com. By far, those are the best ways to connect with me. You can follow my video series either on our website. We have a video channel page specifically with my stuff or

Every Tuesday when the video is posted, comes out as a blog post. We also share it on YouTube so you could subscribe there. It's kind of, you know, chef's choice of where you want to go to follow my video stuff.

Rana (50:51)
Amazing. Greg, thank you so much.

Greg Gifford (50:54)
Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.