How to Determine a Benchmark for Local SEO Work

Blake Denman is the President and Founder of local SEO agency, RicketyRoo Inc. In this article, Blake will explain just how you can help your business stand out from the rest by finding your own unique benchmark.

You’ve spent a lot of time figuring out all the keywords you want to rank for. Now what? Your goal is to increase rankings on Google Maps and in local organic search, but where should you start?

There’s no shortage of things you can do:

  • Google My Business optimization
  • Google My Business spam-fighting
  • Reviews/reputation management
  • Citation building and monitoring 
  • On-site SEO
  • Link building 
  • Social media management
  • Content creation

Some of these tasks might take just a few hours to “dial-inâ€, while others will take longer, require more resources, or are considered a long-term play. So it’s important to consider what’s a priority and what’s not.

In this article, I’m going to share a framework you can start using today to help figure out the what and why of it all by identifying the unique benchmarks in your market.

Getting started Tools

You won’t need a ton of third-party tools for this. For the purpose of this article, I’m going to use BrightLocal’s Local Search Audit, but the SEO tool of your choice will do just fine, too.

Let’s get started!

Our Example

To demonstrate the process I performed a local search for a personal injury lawyer in Portland, USA, and selected a business that was not ranking very well. This data was pulled on May 11th, 2020, and their business info has been blacked out throughout for privacy (it’s not included in the SERP screenshot below).

Personal injury lawyer Portland

Using Local Search Audit

1. Start by logging into your BrightLocal account. Then, under SEO Tools, select Local Search Audit.

2. Set up your preferred general settings and give the report a name.

Local Search Audit tool

3. Enter the business information for your or your client’s business.

Local Search Audit settings

4. Put in your top 5 keywords and make sure the ‘Search Location’ and ‘Type of Business’ are correct.

LSA search settings

5. In ‘Report Sections’, the only area you’ll need to check is ‘Local Listings & Reviews’. Once you select this option, the tool will start to find the local business across the 21 listing providers they use for the report. It can take a minute before you’ll be able to run the report.

LSA report sections



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