NEW in Local Search Grid: Primary and Additional Business Categories

Understanding the competitive landscape is a key part of any marketing activity, and local search is no different. To learn how to beat your local competitors in search, you don’t just need to find out who’s beating you, but crucially why.

This is where Local Search Grid‘s competitor tables come in: each one provides you with an overview of how well your local pack rivals are performing in key SEO metrics like citations and reviews.

Beyond these objective performance metrics, though, it’s worth keeping a close eye on the Google My Business (GMB) categories your competitors are using. Why? Because the categories you select have the chance to significantly impact the relevance of your business to searches.

Did You Know? According to research carried out in 2020, ‘Primary GMB Category’ and ‘Additional GMB Categories’ are considered two of the top five most important ranking factors in local search results… and the former is Number One!

Local Search Grid has always done a great job of surfacing GMB categories in reports, but from today you’ll see an update that, for the first time, shows you both Primary and Additional Categories in the Top Ranking Competitors table.

Until now, there was no easy way to collect all category data on competitors in one place. You would have to access source code or use a Chrome extension on a laborious page-by-page, profile-by-profile basis. This update brings all these insights together, allowing you to see with ease how these additional categories might be influencing rankings for certain keywords.

How does it work?

As you can see below, we’ve split out the existing ‘Category’ column in this table to two new ‘Primary Category’ and ‘Additional Categories’ columns. I’ve highlighted ‘Additional Categories’ in the screenshot as that’s where the new data sits.

Lsg Additional Categories

If you’re thinking “that’s not many additional categories,” you’d be right! That’s because we’ve made the full list of Additional Categories for each business available with a quick click of the ‘arrow’ button. This way you don’t have to contend with an incredibly long table until you’re ready to dig into this data.

Lsg Add Cats Expanded

Ready to see Additional Categories in your report? Simply run the report again to see the new data!

How can I use this new data?

Looking at the example above, we can see that the (amazingly-named) Storm Balgeman Miller Klippel is a law firm not currently ranking in the local area for the search term ‘law firm’.

Their Primary Category is ‘Legal Services’, which is particularly suitable if they don’t specialize in a particular area of law. One of the things they might want to look at, based on the findings of this report, is adding additional categories to their Google My Business profile.

Where do they get inspiration for these categories? From the competitors in the report, of course! Looking at which additional categories might be helping competitors leap to the top for different keywords allows you to map out the additional categories you should be using.

In the above example, the business could consider adding categories like ‘family law attorney’, ‘civil law attorney’ and ‘personal injury attorney’, where relevant, to get some added visibility in SERPs.

Let me at those Additional Categories!

BrightLocal customer? Just set up a new Local Search Grid report and see this fresh data for yourself!

Interested in trying out BrightLocal and Local Search Grid? Start your 14-day free trial here!

Knowledge is Power

With this new information, available on all new Local Search Grid reports, you can see the finer details of your rivals’ GMB profiles, allowing you to understand the playing field better and making strategic decisions about the GMB categories you choose for your own, or your client’s, business.

It’s good practice to know who you’re up against in local marketing. With this new feature, we hope you’ll enjoy getting to know them a whole lot better. 

Find out more about Local Search Grid in our dedicated section of the BrightLocal Help Center.



from My RSS Feed https://bit.ly/3m0jplJ
via gqrds

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

5 Compelling Reasons to Adopt a Simple Brand Identity

Image
What is brand identity? First and foremost, a brand identity is how your company presents itself to customers. Another way you can define brand identity is to think of it as all the components that help people differentiate your business from competitors. Things like a color scheme, tone, logo, tagline, font, or even your most popular, signature products can all help build a lasting brand identity. Why does brand identity matter? As a local business, you may be asking yourself, “Why does brand identity matter to me?”. Perhaps you’ve already reached your goal of ranking in the local pack. But once you’ve reached that oh-so-coveted number one spot, what are you doing to make potential customers engage with your business? Without a clear brand identity you could leave searchers confused, alienated, and simply not wanting to take action on your listing. As I’ll explain later, with Google My Business spam on the rise, it’s more important than ever to stand out in local SERPs. Simple vs
Read more

5 Compelling Reasons to Adopt a Simple Brand Identity

Image
What is brand identity? First and foremost, a brand identity is how your company presents itself to customers. Another way you can define brand identity is to think of it as all the components that help people differentiate your business from competitors. Things like a color scheme, tone, logo, tagline, font, or even your most popular, signature products can all help build a lasting brand identity. Why does brand identity matter? As a local business, you may be asking yourself, “Why does brand identity matter to me?”. Perhaps you’ve already reached your goal of ranking in the local pack. But once you’ve reached that oh-so-coveted number one spot, what are you doing to make potential customers engage with your business? Without a clear brand identity you could leave searchers confused, alienated, and simply not wanting to take action on your listing. As I’ll explain later, with Google My Business spam on the rise, it’s more important than ever to stand out in local SERPs. Simple
Read more

Should You Fight for Featured Snippets in 2020?

Image
Since Google introduced featured snippets in 2014, “position zero” has been considered one of the most coveted spots in SERPs.  Featured snippets allowed websites to vie for extra traffic by appearing both at the top of organic search results and again in the top 10 results.  Or that was the case, until Google rolled out a deduplication update on January 22, 2020, ending the era of featured snippets as so-called “position zero”.  In an attempt to declutter SERPs and improve user experience, Google now won’t surface the same URL twice on page one. The first page of search results will show a featured snippet plus nine search results (instead of 10), and the featured snippet’s URL won’t reappear on page one.  Given that featured snippets receive around 8.6% of all clicks, while 19.6% of clicks go to the first search results beneath it, many webmasters and SEOs aren’t happy with the update and have actively discussed the option of opting out altogether using Google’s nosnippet ta
Read more