Want to learn how to navigate corporate and become a preferred vendor?

Or are you just itching to understand what drives the hard-working (often surprisingly small) teams at the heart of franchise management?

Introducing Local Search at Scale: Trials & Triumphs, a brand-new series of video interviews in partnership with Steady Demand.

Each month, Diamond Google Business Profile Product Expert and Steady Demand owner Ben Fisher takes to the mic to ask a guest about managing local search (and everything else besides) at scale within the USA’s biggest franchises.

These are the unsung heroes, the boots on the ground keeping everything moving. You won’t find flash-in-the-pan strategies or the latest fads in marketing—just inspiring stories about the people who really make things happen in the franchise and enterprise world.

In this inaugural episode, Ben speaks with SystemForward‘s Jill Villejoin, a seasoned marketing director in the franchise industry.

Watch to learn:

• How Jill manages franchise marketing with such a small team

• How to get franchisees on-board with local SEO

• Who does what in the world of franchise management

• Why scalability is so crucial for marketing vendors and technologies

• and much more!

About Jill Villejoin

Director of Marketing at SystemForward

Jill Villejoin, a seasoned marketing director for a franchisor of home service brands, leads strategic initiatives at SystemForward America, driving revenue growth and brand success for franchises like Pop-A-Lock and TemperaturePro.

Throughout her career, she has excelled in collaborative leadership, crafting effective marketing programs that resonate with customers and franchisees alike. Jill oversees national-level marketing strategies, training, and business consultation ensuring seamless operations across locations, while also balancing her passion for cooking, coaching softball, and family time as a devoted mother and spouse.

Watch the Video

Liked this video? Join us over on BrightLocal’s YouTube channel and subscribe today to be first in line when the next episode drops!

Want more Ben Fisher? Check out his original series of articles on enterprise local SEO, Local Search at Scale, which covers everything from dealing with decision-makers to understanding where budgets are most impactful.

Today, I’ll be looking at one of the last problems you may run into when executing a local SEO effort—making sure the brilliant plan you’ve come up with can effectively be carried out across every single franchisee/location.

However, before we get into those specifics, it should be noted that your first item of business should be coming up with an effective plan that makes sense for your organization. However, since that is a bear of a topic all on its own (and one we’ve touched upon in our previous installments), we’re going to skip that and go right into what you should do once the plan is settled and agreed upon to make sure it is successful across all your locations.

01 – Know Each Local Market

Regardless of whether or not your organization has hundreds of locations across the entire country or just a few in one particular region in one particular state—each location is unique and brings with it opportunities for customization.

While adherence to the overall plan is paramount, it’s also critical that you allow the local team managers the flexibility to make slight changes that will speak to the local clientele (more on setting up the local managers for success will be found in the next section)

The impotence of doing the research to know all of your local markets can’t be overstated, nor can baking into your local SEO plan the flexibility to adapt slightly depending on the location.

The process of researching your local markets is a fundamental step in crafting a successful local SEO strategy. It’s not just about understanding the demographics or the economic landscape, but also about grasping the cultural nuances, local trends, and consumer behavior. This knowledge allows you to create content that resonates with the local audience, use local keywords that improve your search engine rankings, and offer products or services that meet the local needs.

Flexibility is another crucial aspect of local SEO. While it’s important to have a consistent brand message and a unified SEO strategy, each location might require a slightly different approach. For instance, a promotional campaign that works well in a bustling city might not have the same impact in a quiet, rural town. Therefore, your SEO plan should allow for some degree of customization based on the specific characteristics of each location.

Moreover, collaboration with the local teams running each location can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your local SEO efforts. Local teams have a deep understanding of their respective markets. They can provide valuable insights that can be used to fine-tune your SEO strategy. They can also help in executing the local SEO plan, from content creation to community engagement.

Remember, local SEO is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a dynamic process that requires continuous learning and adaptation. Regularly review your SEO performance in each location, gather feedback from locals, and stay updated with the latest local trends. Use these insights to refine your SEO strategy and make necessary adjustments.

02 – Give the Local Teams the Power

Related to item one, it’s important to give the people who are actually doing the work and have a strong connection to each location the power to manage their own campaigns. This can be a somewhat delicate dance—you need to make sure they adhere to the major components of the plan, but you also need to make sure they know that they can adjust some of the minor details in order to make their efforts more effective to the local customer base.

If it is your job to oversee the entire campaign across all locations, make sure you clearly explain to each location manager both A) the things that cannot be altered under any circumstance, B) the ones that they have full autonomy to edit/adapt based on their own judgment, and C) any other items that they will need to consult with you first about.

This communication is vital to maintain brand consistency while allowing for local customization. For instance:

A) could include the company’s logo, brand voice, and key messaging, which should remain consistent across all locations.

B) might encompass local content creation, event promotions, or social media engagement, where location managers can exercise their judgment to cater to their specific audience.

C) could involve larger strategic decisions, like partnerships or major campaign changes, which should be discussed with you first.

Regular check-ins and open channels of communication can help ensure that everyone is on the same page. Use these meetings not just to monitor progress, but also to address any concerns, share best practices, and celebrate successes. This can foster a sense of teamwork and shared ownership of the campaign.

Moreover, provide ongoing training and resources to the location managers. This can empower them to make informed decisions and feel confident in their roles. Remember, their local expertise is a valuable asset to your campaign.

Clear communication, regular check-ins, and ongoing support are key to successfully managing a campaign across multiple locations. By striking the right balance between consistency and customization, you can create a powerful local SEO strategy that resonates with each unique market.

03 – Make Sure Your Branding is Consistent

Consistency is one of the most important elements of a successful branding campaign, and it’s just as vital with a local SEO campaign. This might seem to be in direct opposition to the previous point about giving local teams the power to customize elements of the campaign, but the core branding ideals should never change.

Odds are good that if you work at an enterprise-level organization, there is already a well-established style guide that everyone in the marketing department is intimately familiar with. But in case you don’t have one, or if you don’t have high hopes that everyone involved with the project is as familiar with it as you are, the main elements that should (likely) never be changed are the logo, the typography, the overall brand voice, and the color scheme.

Try your best to make sure the local teams read up on your brand guide, and be sure to put the above items in the “things that cannot be altered under any circumstance” category we highlighted in the previous section.

Ensuring that local teams are well-versed with the brand guide is fundamental to maintaining brand consistency across all locations. The brand guide serves as a blueprint that outlines the key elements of your brand identity, such as logo usage, typography, color palette, and tone of voice. It’s a reference tool that helps local teams align their efforts with the overall brand image.

However, understanding the brand guide is just the first step. It’s equally important to ensure that the guidelines are implemented correctly. Regular audits can help check for any discrepancies and rectify them before they impact your brand image.

Moreover, encourage local teams to ask questions and seek clarification if any part of the brand guide is unclear. This not only ensures that they fully understand the guidelines but also fosters open communication and a collaborative work environment.

Remember, while the brand guide provides a framework, it doesn’t restrict creativity. Encourage local teams to infuse their unique insights and ideas within the boundaries of the brand guide. This can result in innovative campaigns that resonate with the local audience while staying true to the brand identity.

A thorough understanding and correct implementation of the brand guide are crucial for maintaining brand consistency. By fostering open communication and encouraging creativity within the framework of the brand guide, you can create effective local campaigns that strengthen your brand image.

04 – Take Advantage of Technological/Automated Solutions

There are so many tools that you (and your various teams) can and should be taking advantage of that will save you time and effort when it comes to local SEO. We are not going to be covering AI (artificial intelligence) in this particular section, but it is worth noting that while this area is still very new, there are already some exciting ideas, possibilities, and examples of people leveraging the amazing power of AI to boost their local SEO presence. For now, however, let’s focus on the more traditional technology tools.

If each local franchise or location has its own website, be sure everyone is using the same content management system (CMS) to save time when updating content across the entire organization. You probably already are, but using a unified customer relationship management (CRM) platform will help manage inbound customer requests and gauge success as you go. And we’ve talked before about the importance of regular posts/content on the various Google Business Profiles for local SEO—look into solutions that can automate GBP posts for you to allow synchronicity across all locations.

Incorporate marketing and SEO tools to streamline campaign management and implementation processes. Utilize content management systems (CMS), customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, and automation tools to ensure consistent content distribution, customer engagement, and data tracking across all locations. This enables centralized control while allowing for localization as needed.

05 – Continually Monitor Performance

I’ll be brief here—it’s important that you regularly check in on the performance of ANY digital marketing campaign. As you likely are aware, your higher ups are likely going to be looking for a near-constant evaluation on ROI—if you can’t show them the effectiveness of what you’re doing, you likely aren’t going to be doing it for very long.

We’ve touched upon this before in previous installments, but whatever your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are, you need to be monitoring them constantly. You might be looking for increased foot traffic, a spike in inbound calls or emails, or even just to start outranking a single competitor for a single keyword—whatever it is, check in on the status of your goal(s) constantly. This will give you ammunition when your bosses are looking for good news and help you stay ahead of any potential roadblocks or bottlenecks in the campaign.

Monitoring your KPIs is an essential part of any successful SEO strategy. These metrics provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your efforts and help you identify areas that need improvement. They serve as a compass, guiding your strategy and helping you stay on track towards your goals.

For instance, if one of your KPIs is increased foot traffic, you might monitor local search rankings, website traffic from local search, and online-to-offline conversions. If you’re aiming for a spike in inbound calls or emails, you might track metrics like call volume from online sources, email click-through rates, or lead conversion rates.

Regular monitoring allows you to spot trends, measure progress, and make data-driven decisions. It enables you to adapt your strategy in response to real-time data, ensuring that your efforts are always aligned with your goals.

Moreover, constant monitoring provides you with tangible evidence of your campaign’s success. This can be particularly useful when reporting to higher-ups, as it allows you to demonstrate the value of your work with concrete data.

Constant monitoring of your KPIs is not just about keeping track of your progress. It’s about using data to inform your strategy, demonstrate your value, and ultimately drive your campaign toward success.

06 – Encourage Communication

Making sure all of your teams are in communication with each other is another topic we’ve covered before, but it’s important enough to go over here since most communication breakdowns in enterprise-level campaigns occur between the locations themselves.

Regular contact with all key players across all locations will help not only make sure that everyone is still on task and no one is falling behind, but you might also learn that one of your franchise locations has experimented on something and it’s seeing dramatically positive results. Things like that are worth sharing, and making sure everyone is in constant contact with each other will reduce the likelihood of things falling through the cracks.

Conclusion

Well, I hope this Local Search at Scale series has been useful to you. In my (many) years of SEO experience, I can say that executing a local SEO campaign for a major enterprise is one of the more challenging undertakings. Between making sure everyone is on the same page, to getting buy-in from the corporate executives to finding out what you should focus on, and everything in between—it’s a lot!

However, with a solid plan in place from day one, a streamlined method of communication between all involved parties, and helping each individual location thrive by providing them with the tools they need, enterprises can effectively make a huge impact on their bottom lines by devoting the time and effort that local SEO deserves.

Indeed, managing a local SEO campaign for a large enterprise can be a complex task. It requires a deep understanding of both the global brand strategy and the nuances of each local market. It also demands effective coordination among various stakeholders, from corporate executives to local teams.

However, the challenges are not insurmountable. With a well-thought-out plan, clear communication, and the right resources, you can navigate these complexities and create a successful local SEO campaign. The key is to start with a comprehensive plan that outlines your goals, strategies, and KPIs. This plan should be flexible enough to accommodate the unique needs of each local market, yet consistent enough to maintain a cohesive brand image.

Communication is another crucial element. Regular check-ins, open channels of communication, and a collaborative work environment can ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards the same goals.

Lastly, empowering each location with the tools and resources they need can help them thrive. This could include training on the brand guide, access to SEO tools, or insights on local market trends.

In conclusion, while executing a local SEO campaign for a major enterprise can be challenging, it’s also an opportunity to make a significant impact. By investing time and effort into local SEO, enterprises can enhance their visibility, engage their local audiences, and ultimately, boost their bottom line.

Here’s a quick recap of what we’ve covered so far:

The first installment—How to Best Tackle Local SEO as a Large Enterprise or Franchise Business—was an overview of the topic at large and included the top five problems enterprises/franchises often face when trying to boost their local SEO efforts and the top five tips for how they can improve them.

The second installment—How to Understand Where Enterprise Marketing Budgets Are Most Impactful in Local SEO—was a deep dive into why large organizations always seem to have such a hard time understanding why investing in local SEO efforts is so important.

The third installment—How to Solve the Problem of Communication When Working with Enterprise Brands—took a look at why communication at large enterprises presents such a unique challenge to these big organizations and provided tips on how to overcome it.

The fourth installment—How to Deal With Having Too Many Decision Makers in an Enterprise or Franchise Business—examined the problem that many enterprises face of having “too many cooks in the kitchen” and how best to streamline communication and meetings to get the job done.

Next, I’m going to take a look at problems that may arise when deciding who is actually going to accomplish each individual task that must get done during a local SEO campaign.

Establish Clear-cut Goals from Day One

Establishing clear-cut goals from the beginning is crucial, as it helps create a sense of direction and purpose. It’s important to involve relevant stakeholders in the goal-setting process to ensure buy-in and commitment from everyone. This collaborative approach will ensure that the entire team is on the same page and has a shared vision of success.

When setting goals, use the SMART criteria to make them:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant, and
• Time-bound.

This will help you track progress and make adjustments when needed.

For instance, if your objective is to increase foot traffic to individual brick-and-mortar locations, examples of a SMART goal could be: “Increasing foot traffic in the individual brick-and-mortar locations, driving people to the website, increasing conversions on the website, or even improving the online reputation of the franchise as a whole by trying to increase the number of positive reviews on the Google Business Profile (GBP) for each location.”

Additionally, it’s essential to prioritize goals based on their potential impact and the resources required to achieve them. This will help you allocate resources efficiently and focus on the most critical tasks first.

You may also want to establish short-term and long-term goals, as they will serve different purposes. Short-term goals provide motivation and quick wins, while long-term goals ensure the project’s sustainability and long-lasting impact.

Regularly revisiting and reassessing your goals is also important. The dynamic nature of local SEO means that new challenges and opportunities will arise over time. Be prepared to adapt your goals and strategies to stay ahead of the competition and capitalize on emerging trends.

In summary, establishing clear-cut goals from day one is vital for the success of your local SEO campaign. Ensure that your goals are SMART, prioritized, and adaptable to the ever-evolving world of local SEO.

By setting the right goals and working towards them, your enterprise will be well-positioned to achieve success in local search rankings, drive customer engagement, and ultimately boost your bottom line.

Make Sure All Roles Clearly Understand Their Responsibilities

We’ve touched on this a bit before in prior installments, but when it comes to assigning the work, it’s worth highlighting the importance of understanding responsibilities in a more in-depth manner.

For a project as massive as improving local SEO for a major enterprise with numerous franchise locations, assigning and delegating work effectively requires a clear understanding of who is responsible for what, and it needs to be established from the jump.

As I mentioned above, the actual nuts and bolts of a local SEO project will vary slightly depending on the organization itself, its size, and its particular goals. Additionally, the roles of people who are involved in the project may vary as well (e.g. one enterprise might have a massive IT team and can afford to assign one person to each franchise location, whereas others might run a slimmer IT department and can’t spare to loan any team members out).

Having said that, these are some of the roles you might consider assigning to a local SEO project.

Roles to Assign In a Large-scale Local SEO Project

Project Manager

As the name might suggest, this would be the person to manage the project. Depending on the size of the enterprise, there may be one overarching Project Manager for the entire organization in addition to individual Project Managers that oversee each location.

The Project Manager’s job is to check in on all the other team leads, ensure that deadlines are being met and tasks are getting done, and check in often to make sure the results are progressing throughout the project.

Google Business Profile Manager

You probably (hopefully) don’t need to hear it from me, but Google Business Profiles (GBP) are a massively important part of a local SEO campaign.

Each franchisee must have a GBP that is fully optimized, and that receives regular, SEO-friendly updates, so it makes sense that each GBP should have a manager assigned to it. This person should respond to reviews promptly, post regular updates, add new photos, and make sure all the attributes/services/products for the business are as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

Writer

As mentioned above, regular updates to the Google Business Profiles will be key, yet the GBP Manager might not have the time or the inclination to write them.

Having someone who’s a talented writer with experience in content marketing can help not only alleviate this burden from the GBP Manager but will also ensure that updates to the GBP are well-written and contain the proper keywords.

SEO Professional

Obviously, that’s not an “official” title per se, but you’ll absolutely want to have someone in your corner who has seen a thing or two in the SEO world.

This person can work with the GBP Manager and Writer to ensure that the keywords are the right ones, but also can help on the back-end items such as making sure the store locator page on each site contains the city and state in the title tags, ensuring the clickable mobile elements are working correctly, and making sure that local schema markup has been implemented on all of the store locator pages.

This is not a comprehensive list of roles, and again, your team may look vastly different depending on the nature of your enterprise, but I would consider these the bare minimum of roles that need to be on a team to boost local SEO.

Establish a Realistic Timeline

We’ve probably all been there before at one point or another in our professional lives: the boss comes in with a big idea that will undoubtedly help move the needle (e.g “We need to increase sales and get more customers!”) but doesn’t know how to best execute the plan.

Or if they do, they will almost always provide the team that is actually going to execute the plan with an unrealistic (and usually unfair) timeline.

I know I sound like a broken record here, but local SEO projects are no different.

Local SEO projects make take months, or even years, to fully actualize. And if the enterprise in question is like most other companies in America at the moment, everyone on the team will have plenty of other projects they are currently working on with all of their accompanying tasks.

That’s why it’s crucial that you establish a clear, aggressive timeline, but one that is realistic and gives your team the time they need to complete what’s been assigned to them.

Again, there is no clear-cut answer for how long your project will take; it will inevitably depend on the size of your team, your specific local SEO goals, what other projects are currently going on at the company, and how many locations you’re dealing with.

To establish a realistic timeline, it’s essential to break down your local SEO project into smaller, manageable tasks and milestones. This will enable you to allocate resources more effectively and monitor progress at each stage of the project.

Start by identifying the key deliverables and then estimate the time required to complete each task. It’s crucial to involve your team members in this process, as they can provide valuable insights into how long each task will take based on their expertise and experience.

Once you’ve estimated the time required for each task, factor in any dependencies or potential roadblocks that could impact the project timeline. For instance, consider the availability of team members, potential bottlenecks, and other ongoing projects that might demand their attention. It’s also a good idea to build some buffer time into the schedule to account for unforeseen challenges and delays.

Regular progress check-ins and status updates are essential for keeping the project on track and ensuring the timeline remains realistic. These check-ins provide an opportunity to identify any delays or obstacles and adjust the timeline or resources accordingly. Encourage open communication within the team, as this will help flag any issues early on and enable prompt resolution.

Another important aspect of establishing a realistic timeline is setting expectations with stakeholders. Communicate your project timeline, including any potential risks and uncertainties, to stakeholders from the outset. This transparency will help manage expectations and build trust, ensuring everyone is on the same page throughout the project.

In conclusion, a realistic timeline is crucial for the success of your local SEO project. Break down the project into smaller tasks, estimate the time required, factor in dependencies and potential roadblocks, and maintain open communication within your team and with stakeholders.

By carefully planning and monitoring your project’s progress, you’ll increase the likelihood of achieving your local SEO goals and ultimately drive success for your enterprise.

Stay in Touch

If you want to completely derail a business project of any scope or size, the most effective way to do that is probably to practice poor communication. Forgetting to check in with team members, failing to give regular status updates, and not maintaining a regular stream of communication will inevitably lead to missed deadlines, hot tempers, and just generally speaking, a hot mess.

Properly delegating work, assigning proper roles, and working together as a team requires effective communication. How you establish this regular contact is up to you.

• Maybe your GBP Managers have a daily standup meeting every morning for 5-10 minutes, just to connect very quickly and see if anyone needs help.
• Maybe your Writers have a bi-weekly 30-minute meeting with the Project Managers for each location to give them a report on how everything is going, and then those Project Managers email a monthly overview to the overall Project Manager.
• Maybe every single team member for each location gets together for an hour every day over a video conference to bounce ideas off of each other and try to come up with new metrics to move the needle.
• Maybe all of the above!

Whether it’s email updates, video conferencing, in-person updates, or just quick messages over Slack, however you decide to do it—just ensure that there is a regular, expected pattern of communication across all parties. And in my experience, when it comes to communication, the more the merrier.

In addition to the communication strategies mentioned above, it’s vital to foster a culture of openness and collaboration within the team. Encourage everyone to share their ideas, challenges, and accomplishments, as this can lead to better problem-solving, innovation, and a stronger sense of camaraderie.

Moreover, celebrating individual and team successes can go a long way in boosting morale and keeping everyone motivated to achieve the common goal.

Utilize technology to facilitate communication. Project management tools, shared calendars, and collaboration platforms can help keep everyone in the loop and ensure that deadlines and milestones are tracked effectively. These tools can also help create a transparent work environment where team members feel accountable for their tasks and progress.

Lastly, remember that communication is a two-way street. Active listening and acknowledging your team members’ input can significantly enhance trust and engagement within the team. By maintaining open and regular communication, you’ll not only keep the project on track but also build a strong, cohesive team that can tackle any challenge that comes their way.

Constantly Analyze and Be Ready to Pivot

You might be familiar with the aphorism, “Man makes plans, and God laughs.” Among other things, it highlights that even with meticulous planning, an abundance of preparation, hours of research, and basically doing everything right… the wheels can still fall off.

That’s why for a local SEO project, it’s important that you’re analyzing every single step. SEO is an ever-evolving beast and some of the best tips we have right now for enterprises and local SEO might look a bit different in 2024 and beyond.

Being able to spend as much time and devoting as many resources as possible to constantly evaluate your efforts will help you achieve your goals, but it’ll also help you pivot if they aren’t working. Being able to adapt is key because Google is constantly making tweaks to its search engine algorithms.

In this fast-paced digital landscape, it’s essential to stay agile and responsive to the changing dynamics of local SEO. Regularly monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjusting your strategy based on the data you gather can lead to better results and help you stay ahead of the competition.

Don’t hesitate to experiment with new tactics and techniques, but make sure to A/B test them before implementing them on a larger scale. This will allow you to determine their effectiveness and minimize the risk of disrupting your overall strategy.

Ensure that your team stays informed about the latest industry trends, best practices, and algorithm updates by attending webinars and conferences, and following industry influencers. Encourage them to share their learnings and insights with the rest of the team, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

Finally, always be ready to pivot your approach when necessary. If a particular strategy isn’t yielding the desired results, take a step back, reassess, and come up with a new plan.

Embracing a flexible and adaptable mindset will enable your enterprise to thrive in the ever-changing world of local SEO, ensuring sustained growth and success.

Conclusion

Much like building a house, the foundation of a strong local SEO project is going to be in establishing roles and assigning work from the beginning.

By coming up with goals that make sense for your organization, ensuring that your team is composed of people with skills that are necessary, that they’re communicating regularly, and making sure your timelines are realistic and won’t cause burnout (which you definitely want to avoid), you’re setting your enterprise up for local SEO success.

The first installment – How to Best Tackle Local SEO as a Large Enterprise or Franchise Business – was an overview of the topic at large and included the top five problems enterprises/franchises often face when trying to boost their local SEO efforts and the top five tips for how they can improve them.

The second installment – How to Understand Where Enterprise Marketing Budgets Are Most Impactful in Local SEO – was a deep dive into why large organizations always seem to have such a hard time understanding why investing in local SEO efforts is so important.

In this installment, let’s focus on why communication at large enterprises presents such a unique challenge, and why it’s critical to overcome this challenge to move the needle with any local SEO effort.

Assemble a Team

Step one when working with an enterprise or a franchise is to assemble your whole team into one meeting. The team should be comprised of anyone that will have a say in local SEO or ad spend. This includes, but is not limited to:

The CEO/President

Usually, the President will be accessible and should know what is happening, additionally, they can be your best friend. When things go sideways (and they will) you need an ally that will get others motivated and make things happen fast.

The Brand Manager

The Brand Manager’s involvement is crucial as they usually communicate with franchisees and store managers. If not the Brand Manager, then find out who does this. They will help you to motivate those on the ground. The one taking photos, doing the work, responding to reviews, etc. It’s like herding cats to get the people on the ground to do anything, so if you want something to happen you need this champion’s buy-in.

The Director of Marketing

This is another top ally you need. When the President is not available to help you, the Director of Marketing can step in, and, most likely, the President will delegate to them anyway. They can also be the connecting tissue between all involved parties.

The Director of Social Media

You may be asking yourself, why do I need Social involved with local SEO? Well, the reason depends on the organization you work with. Sometimes the social team will be the ones posting on your Google Business Profile and sometimes they are the ones doing listing management. Either way, they may feel threatened by you, so best to involve them from the start. You are really there to help and they need to know this.

Director of Customer Success

This role is important and easily overlooked. Remember, you are looking at all reviews that come in and analyzing patterns around conversions. Basically, getting into the customer’s head. What you learn should be shared with this team as they can take your findings and improve the business. There may be pushback, but, guess what? Your ally, the President, is there to help them listen.

The Director of Sales

Another overlooked role to involve. They usually hold the keys to footfall traffic data and know where sales come from, but unfortunately getting this info from them is painful. It’s important to have them understand from the start that, as an SEO, your work impacts their world. You will be discovering things they really should know, ranging from customer experience (reviews) to keyword traffic (buyer intent) and more. 

The Listings Manager

The Listings Manager role may be part of the marketing team’s work or could be outsourced to a third-party aggregator for citations. They can also be the ones who hold the keys to bulk verification. Regardless, they need to be in the loop since how they react to local SEO requests will impact your work. Will they allow you to add new profiles? Do they have certain naming conventions? Are they using software to manage the source of truth for data? Will they assist you when there are duplicate or closed/moved location issues?

The Online Paid Brand Manager

Ahh yes, the paid team! They can often feel the most threatened by SEOs in general. The nature of the job means that they tend to thrive on instant gratification, and, in my experience, will not usually share footfall traffic data. Also, they know they can lose budget if success is too great in other areas like organic SEO. So, it is advantageous to bring them in on day one so you can help them feel like they are integral to your success. Which they are! Think of all the juicy conversion and keyword data they have.

The Money 

Accounting needs to be aware of new bills and, more importantly, a process needs to be put in place from the start to get access to funds when they are needed. This usually means creating a loose budget that is pre-approved even if not used completely. If you do not do this, then any decision (as you will see below) can take a ton of time.

The IT Person

You are probably scratching your head here. So yeah… Ben, why the IT guy? What in the world does he have to do with marketing? Well, let me give you one example:

We had a large restaurant chain and, in order to claim a duplicate GBP maps listing and do video verification, we had to make a new email that was associated with Google Workspace. Sounds super simple right? I mean, I can make one in less than 5 minutes. Wrong!!! 

The Brand Manager created a ticket in their workflow system, which had to be evaluated by another team member. They argued about the feasibility of the new email account (I mean, it was going to cost $5 right??), then it had to go through another team for approval, and then the IT team had to approve the new email. Once that was approved, the accounting department had to agree on how to pay for it. After the $5 was approved, a new ticket had to be opened to start provisioning. All had to be approved by the President, who did not understand why they needed this in the first place. All in all, it ONLY took a month. 

However, if IT had been involved in the beginning, the process could have been started on day one.

I highly recommend creating a central area of communication. Make a channel on the business’s messaging app, such as Slack, at the very minimum, and be as transparent as possible.

Organization is Key

We talked about this quite a bit in our last piece, but one of the biggest issues enterprises face is their size. With so many employees spread over numerous departments overseeing various locations, it can be all too easy for big projects to lack cohesiveness. This is why getting organized right from the start is critically important.

Many enterprises follow a traditional business hierarchy, with a board of directors at the top, followed by c-level executives, VPs, directors, and managers. While the directors and managers may be doing most of the work (more on that later), it’s critical that the higher-ups are well-informed of any local SEO plan and have buy-in.

Organizing the data in a way that the both CEO and local marketing manager clearly understand is invaluable. There are numerous reasons why boosting your local SEO is great for the bottom line of the company—make sure they are made clear to everyone who will be involved in the work and overseeing it.

Establish Clear, Attainable Goals from Day 1

All too often, marketing campaigns don’t have clearly defined goals, which makes evaluating their success and proving ROI difficult. This is true for both large enterprises and smaller businesses, too.

One of the first parts of any successful local SEO campaign is to clearly identify the main goals of the organization and how the campaign will accomplish them. Some of the more common goals for a local SEO campaign are increasing foot traffic, generating more inbound leads in the form of phone calls or clicks, improving online visibility, increasing conversion rates, growing sales, and establishing the company as a thought leader in the space.

You should know which are most important to your organization before you make the initial presentation. After all, many times for campaigns such as these, the higher level executives will make a request to their team that the organization needs to increase leads or see more foot traffic.

Understanding your goals before you start will help you organize your efforts and assign specific tasks to the team members working with you on the project.

Define Roles

Speaking of team members, any project—be it about your local SEO efforts or anything else—won’t get very far if the people working with you aren’t sure about what you need them to do. In addition, assigning roles will help team members to keep each other accountable. Just like in school when you had a group project if a member of your group was slacking, you and your team members would nudge them along to do their fair share.

Additionally, with something like local SEO, where there are going to be a lot of tasks to accomplish before success is seen (updating each location website with proper SEO schema, adding photos and posts to each individual location’s Google Business Profile, link building… the list goes on and on), it’s essential that, as project lead, you list all the requisite tasks, cross-reference it with every member on your team, and ensure that each one is assigned to someone who will get the job done.

Follow Up

So, let’s say you’ve done everything right up to this point. You’ve clearly communicated to everyone in the corporate hierarchy what the project is and how it’s going to help boost the organization’s local SEO visibility. You’ve presented the data and have all of your goals clearly defined and ranked in order of importance. You’ve gathered your team members and each of them has been assigned one or more of the tasks that will help you accomplish said goals.

Now what? Do you sit back, marvel at your organizational skills, and hop off on a plane to Hawaii to enjoy a few Mai Tais under the sun? You could, but we would advise against it.

During the course of the project, you’ll need to regularly monitor all key metrics to accurately gauge their effectiveness. You need to be in constant communication—both with your team members who are doing the actual work and the executive team who are eager to see results—about how the project is going. Routinely following-up and constantly communicating with your team will help you avoid major snags during this massive project and head off small problems before they become big ones.

Is your campaign to increase foot traffic not yielding the results it should be by week one, two, or three? Staying in touch with the footfall team at regular intervals will help illuminate why. Are the Google Business Profiles for each location not being updated as often as they should? Weekly or bi-weekly meetings with the GBP team will give you answers.

Establishing regular communication with all team members and following up after key intervals will help maintain that the project goes along smoothly and will increase your odds that you hit your goals.

Conclusion

While local SEO can be complicated (particularly for enterprises), it’s not rocket science to understand that regular communication amongst all involved parties can be hugely beneficial. Get organized from day one, make sure your goals are clear to your team, ensure that everyone knows what they are doing, and have regular contact with everyone on your team—these should be done in order to achieve success and elevate your enterprise’s local locations in the world of local search.

Here’s a quick recap on what we’ve covered so far:

The first installment—How to Best Tackle Local SEO as a Large Enterprise or Franchise Business—was an overview of the topic at large. This included the top five problems enterprises/franchises often face when trying to boost their local SEO efforts, and the top five tips for how they can improve them.

The second installment—How to Understand Where Enterprise Marketing Budgets Are Most Impactful in Local SEO—was a deep dive into why large organizations always seem to have such a hard time understanding why investing in local SEO efforts is so important.

The third installment—How to Solve the Problem of Communication When Working with Enterprise Brands—took a look at why communication at large enterprises presents such a unique challenge to these big organizations and provided tips on how to overcome it.

In this installment, we are going to examine the “too many cooks in the kitchen” phenomenon that can happen in any business but is particularly common with enterprises.

Too Many Cooks

I would be remiss if I didn’t start this section off with at least a passing reference to the famous (infamous?) Adult Swim sketch of the same name. If you’re unfamiliar, Too Many Cooks was a short film that aired on the Adult Swim network back in 2014. It was such a unique combination of parodying the sitcom intros of the late 80s/early 90s and slasher horror films that it instantly went viral.

If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and head to YouTube to check it out…but don’t say we didn’t warn you if it leaves you with an unsettling feeling in your stomach! And be sure any little ones you may have in the house aren’t watching it with you.

But speaking of unsettling feelings…if you’ve ever worked at a larger company and tried to get anything of substance done, you know that there are a lot of people who need (or, probably more accurately, want) to be involved in the process. This can significantly gum up the works of any operation, particularly one with as many moving parts as a local SEO campaign.

When we are talking about “Too Many Cooks” in the context of working with an enterprise or franchise system, we see this all the time, unfortunately. It’s not uncommon for different departments, teams, and individuals to all want to have a say in a particular project or initiative. And while collaboration is usually a good sense, in this example this can lead to a lot of back-and-forths, delays, and an overall lack of progress.

This phenomenon is often referred to as “analysis paralysis” or “decision by committee”. In these situations, the desire to involve as many people as possible can actually be counterproductive. Rather than moving forward with a clear plan of action, the project becomes bogged down in a sea of opinions and ideas.

This can be a real problem in the context of a local SEO campaign. An SEO campaign requires a variety of different tactics to come together, including keyword research, both on- and off-page optimization, and more. Each of these requires a high level of expertise and having too many people involved can lead to conflicting advice and a lack of clarity.

A real-life encounter I was involved with personally illustrates this perfectly. I was working with a franchise that wanted to create a consistent plan for naming Google Business Profiles as well as create an expansion strategy at the same time. They decided it would be a good idea to involve the agency of record (all 15 staff members), the legal department (five people), the brand/marketing department (four people), and some leading franchisees (six people). Then there was our team (one person…yours truly). That is a total of 31 people, with different ideas, voices, feedback, motivations, and preconceived notions. 

In the beginning, it was a mishmash of ideas with no clear strategy or direction. Good ideas would be discarded and more than a few weeks were wasted going around in circles. 

When everyone finally had their say, we removed all unnecessary people from the meeting and brought it down to one representative from each group. They would be the final voice for their department, while others from the departments would still have their say, making it a win-win scenario. 

By taking this final step, we were able to draft an initial strategy that all departments were happy with and they could each go their separate ways to start implementation. Total time after a restructuring of people? Two more meetings and less than a week. Pretty good considering the first round took a month!

Do You REALLY Need to Be Here?

This leads us to the next part. It is important that, at the onset of your local SEO campaign, you assign roles to your team members and give them clearly defined tasks that they need to accomplish and own.

It’s important to assess whether each team member’s participation is critical to the success of a particular task or meeting. If not, it may be better to exclude them and only involve those whose presence is necessary. This not only helps to prevent delays but also frees up resources to focus on other tasks that are more critical to the campaign’s success.

In large enterprises, there are a lot more people involved as opposed to a business with just a single location, and most of them will need to be kept apprised of the bigger details. But to speed things along and avoid having too many cooks, it’s probably wise to have semi-regular “status update” style meetings with those folks (typically upper management) that don’t have a lot of actual tasks assigned to them, while the actual “doers” on your team meet can meet much more frequently.

And speaking of the doers on your team and assigning roles, make sure that you assign somebody to take diligent notes at the frequent meetings and have that person summarize and prepare those notes for the less frequent meetings you have with the top brass. You can quickly communicate what happened in the previous month (be sure to highlight your wins!), and what’s in the month(s) to come.

Finally, it’s important to keep an eye on the overall campaign’s goals and objectives. This means regularly checking in on whether the campaign is on track so you can make adjustments as needed. This is particularly important when dealing with large enterprises, as it can be easy for the campaign to become derailed due to changes in the business’s priorities or other unforeseen circumstances.

Help the Decision Makers Early On in the Process

Hopefully, somebody on your team (probably you, if you’re reading this!) knows what you need to do to move the needle for each franchise location in terms of local SEO. It’s even better if your team has several people who are knowledgeable—not only is this definitely a “the more the merrier” type situation, but odds are good that you’re going to have to make the case early on in the campaign to the senior executive staff about WHY you need to do the things you’re going to have your team do.

As I mentioned previously, many higher-ups at enterprises may very well have a difficult time understanding the value of the small-yet-necessary things that need to be done to move the needle…things like regularly uploading high-quality photos to your Google Business Profile (GBP) or coming up with a reliable schedule for well-constructed GBP posts.

One way to help decision-makers understand the importance of local SEO is to provide them with real-world examples of the impact it can have on a business. For instance, you can share data on how optimizing Google Business Profiles and building local citations has helped other businesses in your industry improve their search engine rankings and drive more foot traffic to their physical locations.

It’s also important to emphasize that local SEO is a long-term strategy that requires ongoing investment and maintenance. This means that they need to be prepared to commit the necessary resources like time, money, and staff to ensure that the campaign is successful over the long haul.

They might wonder why the organization doesn’t just back up a Brinks truck of cash to the nearest PPC company and blow the entire budget on pay-per-click ads. Presenting them with a good case at the onset of the campaign of what is critically important for this local SEO campaign will likely save you the time and effort of having to re-educate them down the road.

Do Your Best to Not Overlap Responsibilities

There is no denying that for a medium to large enterprise with dozens of locations, a comprehensive local SEO campaign is going to be a Herculean project. There are lots of little things (and quite a few big things) that need to happen in the right way and at the right time in order to really start to see a difference in the rankings themselves and the secondary benefits such as increased foot traffic.

We’ve previously covered many of these tasks that need to be done, as well as the importance of assigning them to the right people. But one surefire way to throw a wrench in an otherwise smoothly-operating machine is to have multiple people or teams assigned to the same job (e.g. link building or proper citation management).

Have you ever heard of the Bystander Effect in psychology? If not, the TL;DR of it is that an individual is much less likely to act in a situation that requires action (such as standing up to a bully or helping someone who is in danger) if there are other people around. The effect is more pronounced if there are more people around—we have a natural tendency to assume someone else will jump in and help out.

If more than one person is in charge of (or even working on) a task, the odds of it slipping through the cracks grow exponentially…and you likely don’t need me to tell you that you want to do everything you can to avoid that! Mitigate that problem before it ever becomes one by making sure that, in the early phase when you’re assigning roles and tasks, no two people or teams are in charge of the same thing (especially the same thing for the same franchise location).

Conclusion

As someone who’s been in the SEO game since 1994 (yes, I know I’m dating myself), trust me when I say that while local SEO isn’t rocket science, it can quickly become a tangled web the larger the enterprise is, the more locations are involved, and yes—the more cooks there are in the kitchen.

Like many other large projects, it can help dramatically throughout the duration of the project to be super organized, communicative, and meticulous when first setting everything up. Having clearly defined roles, well-defined and attainable goals, and doing everything you can at the onset to ensure everyone is on the same page will save you tons of time and stress down the road.

The first installment, ‘How to Best Tackle Local SEO as a Large Enterprise or Franchise Business‘, was an overview of the topic at large, and included the top five problems that enterprises/franchises often face when trying to boost their local SEO efforts, as well as five tips for how they can improve them. Here’s a refresher of those key challenges:

1. A lack of understanding of where their marketing dollars can be most impactful in terms of local SEO (this is what we’re tackling today)
2. A lack of communication between all involved parties at every location or branch
3. Too many involved decision-makers can grind the approval process to a halt
4. The difficulty of deciding who should actually do the work
5. The difficulty of making sure the plan is executed across all locations

Moving forward, each installment will look at one of the problems or tips and do a deep dive into that particular issue. Today, let’s look at why these large organizations seem to have a fundamental challenge in understanding why investing (smartly) in local SEO is so important.

Big Solution = Big Meeting

Franchises and enterprises often use their size to their advantage. They have bigger budgets than independent operations and will often flex those financial muscles to drown out the competition when it comes to digital marketing.

They also have bigger staffs, which means the odds are good that they have a roster of capable and talented people to help get the job done. But bigger staffs present an issue that underlies this problem of not knowing where to spend: larger organizations have more difficulty getting all the stakeholders in the same room, in the same meeting, and on the same page.

Let’s say you own a single, independent retail clothing store and you want to start a marketing campaign. You likely only need to have yourself and a few other people in this initial meeting to decide the best strategy (probably just the store manager and the person who handles your digital advertising).

Now, imagine you operate a retail clothing chain with dozens of locations in the Western United States. You’ve got to have all the C-level executives, directors, managers, social media team, your pay-per-click (PPC) team, your SEO team, and each store owner/franchisee in this initial meeting together so you can jointly determine what your KPIs are going to be and who is responsible for what. That’s easier said than done.

And speaking of KPIs…

The Difficulty of Proving Local SEO ROI

We previously mentioned the typically large budgets that enterprises and franchises deal with. And while digital advertising has changed a lot over the years, PPC is still king. In fact, according to research from Social Media Today, PPC spending hit the 11-figure mark for the first time in 2017 with just over $10 billion invested… and it’s only been growing since then. According to Statista, in 2022 search advertising spending is expected to amount to 164.6 billion U.S. dollars worldwide.

When it comes to marketing spends, big organizations tend to be enamored with PPC because it is relatively easy to determine ROI in a quick period of time. The CFO can approve a spend of X amount of dollars, which relates to Y amount of clicks, which in turn leads to Z amount of increased possible conversions online. It’s cut and dry, and you can see the full results of a 30-day campaign just a few days after it’s over.

But while you can judge the ROI of that PPC campaign from a global perspective, it is much harder to quantify on a local level. Large enterprises are notorious for throwing a ton of money at a PPC campaign, looking at the boost in metrics, and calling it a day.

But for many brick-and-mortar enterprises and franchises, what they most want to see—the biggest KPI—after an investment in local SEO, is an increase in foot traffic to individual locations. Which makes sense, right? After all, more foot traffic in the stores leads to more sales.

But how does an effective PPC campaign translate to footfall? Often, it’s a difficult task to associate the two since the footfall teams at many large enterprises don’t work hand-in-glove with the online team. While there may indeed be a footfall person or even team measuring foot traffic and comparing that against in-store sales, it can be difficult to track the increase or decrease in footfall to anything you’re doing online.

The real difficulty for any brick-and-mortar store is measuring foot traffic to conversions. What KPIs should we be looking at, then, to determine if a local SEO campaign is effective? Let’s examine.

Evaluating Local SEO Success

Admittedly, this can be somewhat of a challenging process. There are many guides out there that will offer competing metrics for evaluating the success of your local SEO efforts, but here are the ones that are worth really honing in on.

Phone Calls from Google Business Profile

While not available to all businesses, Call Tracking from Google Business Profile (GBP) is an excellent way to see how your local SEO efforts are progressing. There are a lot of great additional features, but the main takeaway is that you’ll be able to glean peak days and times in which your customers are using the “Call” button directly from Google search.

An alternative to Google’s call tracking is to get a number with a provider like Call Rail or Call Tracking Metrics.

Overall GBP Impressions and Website Clicks

The GBP for each individual franchise or location is likely the first stop for any customer searching locally for the goods or services the business offers, and the insights Google offers profile managers are invaluable.

In your locations’ Google Business Profiles, you can compare the number of people who found your page by searching for the business directly versus general searches for a category, product, or service. You can track how many people are requesting driving directions and see what is a better generator of traffic: people who find your listing on Google Search vs. Google Maps.

Impressions on Photos

According to Google, businesses or locations that have good quality, regularly updated photos see a 42% increase in requests for driving directions. That’s nothing to sneeze at! People that are requesting directions from a local search are extremely likely to come into the business, especially if you keep accurate opening and closing hours on your GBP.

Finding a quick and easy way to regularly upload photos to your GBP can go a long way to boosting your local SEO presence, and give your potential customers a better idea of what to expect at your business and what’s new.

Getting Buy-in

So we’ve established that the favorite method for a digital marketing campaign (a massive PPC spend) isn’t necessarily the most effective route for enterprises and franchises to see a local SEO boost. We’ve also highlighted how a dedicated effort to optimize each individual GBP can make an appreciable difference (here are some helpful tips from Google on how to do just that).

Considering this, it should be easy for enterprises to focus on local locations, direct people to do the key things to optimize each GBP, and watch the increase in impressions, driving directions, and foot traffic… right?

Eh, not so much.

Going back to the first point, it’s all about communication. Again, this is more difficult the larger and more unwieldy the enterprise is. Let’s look at how complex something like the marketing budget can be for a business that has numerous franchises.

More Locations, More Complexity

Some franchisors have a marketing budget that each individual franchisee can use. Some do not. Some franchisors will allow each individual franchisee to essentially do whatever they want on a marketing front (so long as it’s with approved vendors). Others do not.

At the end of the day, the majority of franchisors want franchisees to invest more in local marketing efforts so they can make more money and pass it back up the chain to the franchisor. But when the franchisee is in charge of the marketing, they often don’t have the time (they are busy running the business) nor the inclination (few franchisees have significant experience in local SEO or digital marketing) and will often let it fall by the wayside.

Even if the franchisor and franchisee can agree to a division of labor, so to speak, there is still likely going to be a lack of buy-in from the top at the corporate level. One big reason why bigger companies love PPC is that it’s a near instant level of gratification. Proving that for local SEO spends is much more challenging and takes time to build.

Conclusion

To help enterprises and franchisors understand the value of investing in local SEO, the most valuable thing one can do is to make sure that everyone is on the same page.

Not to sound like a broken record, but you’d be surprised how difficult this can be for larger organizations.

It’s critical because all involved parties (directors, managers, franchisors, franchisees, CFOs, etc.) need to understand what is going on. They need to understand the KPIs that will move the needle, and they need to understand that it may take some time to see ROI.

But if efforts can be made and the time is put in, everyone will be happy as footfall increases, conversions rise, and GBP impressions increase on a regular basis.

In this new series, Local Search at Scale, Steady Demand’s Ben Fisher gets to the heart of the local SEO issues that matter to large brands and franchises with 100s of locations.

To say that local SEO can be a bit complicated is putting it mildly, and that’s just when speaking about small businesses with a single location. When you’re talking about an enterprise-level organization with numerous locations (i.e. franchises) across numerous markets, it can quickly become a mess.

For starters, before we dive into how to best approach local SEO as a large enterprise, let’s first briefly define what we mean when we talk about local SEO. Local SEO is a marketing strategy that has a singular goal—to help your business be more visible and rank higher in local Google searches. Any type of business that has a physical location or a particular service area (known as a Service Area Business, or SABs) can benefit greatly from a targeted, organic local SEO campaign.

Seems fairly straightforward, right? Why then do so many large enterprises usually fail with their local SEO efforts? Let’s discuss, and move on to five tips that can help improve your campaigns.

The Primary Challenges Large Enterprises Face

While large enterprises enjoy many advantages over their smaller counterparts (massive budgets, larger talent pool, etc.), their size can actually be a drawback when it comes to properly executing a local SEO strategy. Some of the main problems I have seen in my years of helping organizations both large and small with their local SEO are:

1. A lack of understanding of where their marketing dollars can be most impactful in terms of local SEO

I mentioned the budget up above, and enterprises aren’t shy about flexing their financial muscles when it comes to large ad buys that run in every market in which they have a franchise. However, when it comes to a targeted local approach that needs to be carried out at the individual franchisee level (such as getting local owners/managers to regularly post content and upload new photos to their Google Business Profile, or GBP), there is often a fundamental disconnect.

Because enterprises are typically used to larger spends (such as throwing a king’s ransom at a Google AdWords campaign) and because they are used to thinking in terms of hardline ROI (“we spend X amount of dollars and see Y amount of new business”), they often balk at spending on the individual level. They’d rather not “rock the boat” and instead keep it safe with the same old approach (which doesn’t move the needle at the local level).

2. A lack of communication between all involved parties at every location or branch

Organic, local SEO work takes just that—work. It’s not exactly brain surgery, but it does take real people doing real things, and being accountable for the process. In larger enterprises, this can prove to be a challenge.

Oftentimes, a campaign can be as barren as a global marketing manager emailing all the franchisees out about a promotion or effort they should undertake that can help bring in new leads. Some actually do it, many don’t, and some probably don’t even read the email. Then, when the results are—unsurprisingly—not there, executives at the enterprise level will pass the buck off to the local managers and claim they’ve done everything they can.

3. Too many involved decision-makers can grind the approval process to a halt

I mentioned above that one of the biggest benefits enterprises have over small businesses is often their massive pool of employees. There are bound to be talented and driven people who can (or at least should) work together to achieve stated goals.

However, with this many people involved in the process, things invariably fall through the cracks.

You have people who feel they are “too senior” to be doing things such as claiming local listings or hiring new vendors for the franchisees to work with.

Conversely, you might have people who are new to the organization and are hesitant to jump in because they don’t want to step on anyone’s toes (or they simply haven’t been told what they should and shouldn’t be doing).

Either way, nothing is approved and nothing gets done. This can be disastrous if the task at hand was something like making sure all the Google Business Profiles at every location were in compliance, as a suspended GBP can be a costly mistake.

4. The difficulty of deciding who should actually do the work

The situations listed above about employees and enterprises not being sure who is doing the work spill into a third situation. You might have a situation where there are a dozen or more “decision-makers” in a meeting, something is brought up that needs to be done (such as making sure each Google Business Profile for each franchise is in compliance), and everyone agrees that it’s important… but nobody volunteers to do it because they assume somebody else will (AKA – the Bystander Effect).

As you can imagine (or are aware of personally if you’ve worked for a large company), this is a common occurrence.

One of the best ways to mitigate this is having the enterprise control all of the marketing at the franchise level, including making small, yet critically important, updates to all the Google Business Profiles. This doesn’t totally solve the problem of slow decision-making processes and concerns about targeted local budget spending, but at least everything is happening in one place.

5. The difficulty of making sure the plan is executed across all locations

Some of the problems I’ve laid out above only get worse when an enterprise has hundreds of locations. Not only are there more people involved which increases the likelihood of tasks not getting done, but it also increases the scope of work (especially if the franchisor is in charge of local marketing efforts).

Let’s take something as simple as responding to a review on the GBP page for each location. If we allow five minutes per response and have an average of five reviews a month (which is a very conservative estimate for some types of enterprises), that’s about a half-hour of work per month per location.

If an enterprise has 200 locations, that quickly swells into 100 hours a month. That’s not an amount that can just be tossed to a single person or that can be assumed somebody else is tackling.

Here is my recommendation for how to ameliorate this particular issue: first, enterprises must clearly define who is responsible for what tasks, when they should be completed, and how they should be carried out. They must also create documentation for these processes and include a way to track the tasks. They should state the desired results from the beginning so team members know how they are tracking, and there should be a budget in place to help with vendor spends and anything else.

Top Five Local SEO Tips for Enterprises

In my opinion, the following list contains the top five local SEO practices that will not only solve the problems laid out above but also help you reach your discoverability goals and start outperforming your competition.

1. What should be on the website for each individual location

First and foremost, every location should absolutely have a website. That isn’t up for debate. I won’t go into too much detail about the SEO strategy for each individual franchise site, but the following should be considered the bare minimum:

1. Title Tags: Make sure the store locator page on each site contains the city and state in the title tag
2. Clickable Mobile Elements: This is especially crucial for things like mobile numbers and anything else indexed by Google and other search engines
3. Schema Markup: Be sure to implement local Schema markup on all store locator pages

2. Managing Google Business Profile pages properly

I could spend all day telling you how critically important GBPs are for local SEO rankings… but instead of that, you could just take Google’s word for it.

The bottom line is that enterprises must make an effort to ensure that the Google Business Profile for each and every franchise location is optimized, a regular stream of relevant content is posted, and that they are all continually monitored to ensure that no erroneous information is present.

3. Link Building

Link building has long been a cornerstone of a successful SEO strategy, and it’s no different when it comes to the enterprise approach for local SEO. I’m not going to go over how to link build here (there are plenty of good guides on how to do that via a quick Google Search), but I will say that it’s not something you should ignore.

Many enterprises make the mistake of skipping link building due to the sheer number of locations they have and the fear that all that time and effort won’t have an appreciable impact. While it’s unfortunately not a scalable undertaking, link building is critical to the success of any local campaign.

4. Citation Management

Similar to link building, citation management is something that has been known to SEO experts for quite some time, and is also something that enterprises should absolutely do for their franchise locations. The good news and notable difference is that there are tools available that make citation management scalable across your locations.

Yext, Moz Local, and BrightLocal, for example, allow you to create, verify, and optimize listings for every location of your brand. They can help push citations, clean up duplicate data, adjust incorrect data, and defend the online presence for hundreds of franchises at once.

5. Soliciting and responding to Google Reviews

Reviews have quickly become one of the most important metrics a potential customer uses when making a purchasing decision. In fact, according to BazaarVoice, 78% of online shoppers trust reviews more than recommendations or word-of-mouth from family and friends.

That is an eye-opening statistic and perfectly illustrates why enterprises should encourage customers to leave reviews. But getting a high number of reviews is only half of the battle; you must also respond to them in a timely manner, and respond to both positive and negative reviews. Customers expect to see the occasional bad review from a brand, but how that brand responds to them is key.

Conclusion

Wrapping up, the best way for enterprises to handle local SEO is to take a clear look at their organizational structure, identify some of the pain points (particularly when it comes to workflow), and make informed decisions on who should be doing what.

Once you have people assigned to the critical jobs of citation management, Google Business Profile optimization, link building, and soliciting/responding to reviews, it’s also critical that you have implemented ways to track these tasks and measure performance against your goals. Once your team knows what to do, how to do it, who’s doing it, and where to track it, you should start to see a notable increase in your local SEO efforts.

Photos also help engage the people that see your Google Business Profile—and Google tracks every interaction that people have with your listing. The more interactions, the more important Google feels your business is. Below you can see just how many times people have seen an attorney’s photos over just a one-month time period. Her GBP photos were viewed 236 times!

Now, if there’s one thing that’s better than photos, it’s video. In fact, video is so engaging that you don’t even need sound. Studies show that as much as 85% of Facebook video is viewed with the sound off. Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Just the movement of a video is enough to stop a person as they’re scrolling on a page.

The problem: most business owners think that videos have to be big productions and therefore too much for them to tackle. Relax. Making a video doesn’t have to be difficult. Here’s why: you can now create a 30-second video that will grab people’s attention on one of the most popular places people go to search for and find information: Google!

Yes. Recently Google announced that they added video capabilities to Google Business Profile! In addition to adding photos to your Google Business Profile, you can now add videos that show off cool things about your company. Have you taken advantage of adding a video about your business? If not, it’s time to get started…

How to Upload Google Business Profile Videos

Google Business Profile allows videos up to 30 seconds long, and these videos can be added by customers and by owners. As a manager of a Google Business Profile account, you should first login to your GBP account.

In the dashboard you will see all the locations you currently manage:

Click on the business location you’d like to add your video to. You will either see the ‘Add Videos’ image on the Overview tab…

…or you can also click on the blue + sign to add a video:

Once you click on the ‘Add Video’ button you will be given the option to drag the video you want to upload or select the video from your computer—making it super simple.

Google says that once you upload your video it can take up to 24 hours for it to display, but our videos have loaded in minutes—which is fantastic! (In this video example the attorney gave some tips on how to handle a dissolution of marriage—very useful if you’re going through a divorce and are trying to understand what the divorce “lingo” means.)

However, for you marketers out there—there’s a catch. You need to make sure your videos are taken at the place of business, are of people that work at your business or directly pertain to your business. (Google Business Profile videos is no place for cheesy stock photos, stock videos or marketing bling videos.)

In fact, Google can remove them if the primary subject of the content is not related to the business location. (And people are tired of seeing stock photos anyway. Google Business Profile is a way to show off the people, personality, culture, products and services of your business (not the sanitary version of a stock photo business.) So that means no stock photos or stock videos!

If you decide you don’t like the video you added, it’s simple to delete by clicking on the trash can icon and then hitting ‘Delete’.

Once you upload the videos to your Google Business Profile account, they will appear in the overview tab on the Google Business Profile Dashboard. Owners who uploaded videos can be seen in the ‘by owner’ tab. When customers upload videos they will appear in the ‘customer’ tab. All videos will be displayed in the ‘video’ tab.

Once uploaded to Google Business Profile, your videos will display where your local photos do. As a bonus: if you have two or more videos, you can get a video subtab that will show up on mobile devices.

What Size, Duration and Resolution Should Google Business Profile Videos Be?

Google has given us general guidelines for the GBP videos. Keep in mind that if your business isn’t verified yet, your videos won’t show up as live until you verify your GBP listing.

If your business is verified, you’re ready to upload videos! After you’ve decided what video you want to upload to your Google Business Profile, make sure the video follows these guidelines when it comes to the video size, length and resolution:

• Google Business Profile Video Max Duration: 30 seconds
• Google Business Profile Video Max File size: 75 MB (reduced from 100 MB as of October 2020)
• Google Business Profile Video Min Resolution: 720p

(Note: We were able to upload a video that was 1 minute 30 seconds long, but that may have been a fluke.)

What Kind of Google Business Profile Videos Should You Create?

Many people get hung up on the type of videos to create—when really, that’s the easiest part!

Here are some GBP video ideas (and remember—you only have to make 30-second videos*, so keep them short and to the point):

• Show how one of your products is packaged and shipped out
• Highlight and show off an employee
• Give a tour of your office
• Create a company “mascot” (like a bobble head) and every day you can have a “find the mascot” search throughout your building
• Have your customers “sit in” on a company meeting so they see how decisions are being made
• Having a company picnic? Bring the camera along and share the fun
• Feature how a product is made
• Interview employees about what they like best about working for your company
• Invite your customers to upload videos to your GBP listing

*Google has stated that the videos should be 30 seconds in length, but we were successfully able to load a very informative one minute thirty second video to a client’s Google Business Profile Account. But remember video marketing best practices—don’t make your videos so long that you lose your key audience.

The best strategy for the videos is to sit down with your team and brainstorm about the types of videos you can create and upload—and then… just do it!

What About Inappropriate Videos Customers Might Upload?

Many business owners are concerned that customers/clients can change information and add videos and pictures to their Google Business Profiles. (And sometimes they should be concerned—all it takes is one inappropriate video and the damage is done.)

If you’re a business owner or manager of a Google Business Profile Page, you can flag inappropriate videos through your dashboard. If the inappropriate video is not removed by Google, jump onto the Google Business Profile Forum and see if you can politely ask for a Google Business Profile Top Contributor’s help.

To see the guidelines for submitting user-generated content, you can see Google Maps User Contributed Content criteria.

More to Come

Google has been making a lot of great updates to Google Business Profile over the last few months. According to Google, native mobile support and notifications of new customer videos are coming soon. And you can bet there are even more cool things coming ahead!

The problem is that some companies resort to using fake reviews in order to get an unfair advantage over their rivals. 

According to our latest research, 62% of consumers have seen a fake review in the last year. With 77% of consumers always or regularly reading online reviews for local businesses, and around 50% of consumers trusting reviews as much as personal recommendations, the proliferation of fake reviews can be worrisome.  

How important are Google reviews? 

Google’s importance as a review platform continues to grow, meaning fake Google reviews are likely to be of particular concern to most small businesses. 

Not only is Google a major source of search traffic, visibility, and business, but it’s also the one referenced the most by consumers, with 81% of consumers turning to Google to evaluate local businesses in 2021. Therefore, any fake reviews on Google could be especially damaging.

Additionally, Google is the fastest-growing review platform, accruing more new reviews at a much faster rate than rivals, such as Facebook and Yelp. Again, this could be troubling for small businesses dealing with fake Google reviews simply due to the sheer volume of reviews being added to the platform on a daily basis. 

Having a review management tool can be helpful when it comes to keeping up to date with new Google reviews, so fake or malicious ones aren’t missed. 

Google reviews are also known to be a local search ranking factor and can impact where your business places in the search results. This is significant as an onslaught of poor-quality fake reviews could hinder your search visibility and ability to win new business. 

Can you get Google reviews removed?

Reviews that violate Google’s policies can be removed. A tool called Managing Your Reviews is available to flag up offending reviews, request their removal, and monitor the status of the request. You just have to search for your business profile and click ‘Report a new review for removal’ to get started.

Why are fake Google reviews a particular concern? 

It’s important to know how to remove fake Google reviews because of one concerning detail — anyone can leave malicious feedback and it will appear on your profile immediately for all Google users to see. 

The problem is that removing the review isn’t instant, so you’ll need to go through Google to request the removal. In the meantime, as your request works its way through the system, the fake feedback could be damaging your reputation. 

How do I complain about fake Google reviews?

You’ll need to go through Google to complain about fake reviews. You can flag an offending review directly on Google search by locating it and then clicking on the three dots to the right, where you’ll see an option to report it. 

You can also flag a review for removal from your Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) dashboard. Just locate the review, click on the three dots, and flag it as inappropriate. 

Another option for Google review reporting is to use the Managing Your Reviews tool. 

Before you report fake comments to Google, it’s worth gathering as much information as you can to back up your claim. Look out for obvious signs that the feedback is fake, such as if the reviewer references people who don’t work at your business or products or services you don’t sell. If possible, cross-reference the date and time of the review with your own records. Lots of spelling mistakes, a one-star rating with no comment, irrelevant details, a lack of knowledge about the product or service, and incoherent text all point to a fake.

You can also check the content of the review against the guidelines for Google reviews to ensure the comments you’ve identified as fake fall into one of the violations. This could be the case if the comments contain offensive content, are attempting to impersonate someone else, contain explicit content, are off-topic, or are promotional in nature with an email address, phone number, or other solicitation.

How do I report a business for fake reviews? 

If you suspect that a competitor is using fake reviews to bolster its review profile, you can make a report by flagging the review in the search results. Simply navigate to the fake review, click the three dots at the side, and then click on ‘Report Review’. Google might then consider removing it.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t be doing this simply to bolster your own Google presence. It should be reserved for those times when you’re certain a review is fake. All submissions will be reviewed by Google but it’s not a given that flagging a review will lead to its removal. A better tactic to enhance your search visibility is to focus on boosting your own online presence with a strong review generation strategy.   

A Step-by-step Guide to Reporting Fake Google Reviews

Step 1: Consider Responding

Before you get into the process of reporting fake Google reviews, it’s worth responding to the review first. This is important because fake reviews can take a while to be assessed by Google and removed. In the meantime, the potentially damaging feedback will be publicly visible, so a response can help to limit its impact. 

In the event that you can’t get the fake review removed, your response demonstrates to your customers and prospective clients that you care, that you’re dedicated to resolving complaints, and that you take feedback seriously. Use our tips for responding to negative reviews to always leave a calm, measured, and professional response.

Step 2: Flag the Review to Google on Desktop

With your response left, you can now report the fake feedback to Google.

To do this on desktop, bring up the review and click on the flag at the side.

Step 3: Be Prepared for a Follow Up

Google may contact you to get more details about your complaint. You can prepare for this follow-up while you’re waiting for Google to remove the fake review, just in case they do get in touch.

First, document the URL of the review. To do this, click on the name of the user that left the comment, then select the review itself, and when you only see your review under the person’s name, copy the URL. You’ll need this in order to get support from Google later.

Prepare the following information:

1. Your business name, address, phone number, website URL, and Google Maps link. 
2. State why the review should be removed 
3. State which of the policies you feel is being violated
4. State why you feel it’s a fake review
5. Prepare any documentation that supports your claim

Step 4: Get in Touch with Google

If you’ve not heard anything after a few days, you can reach out to Google. Try sending the Google Business team a message or tweet them on Twitter. Alternatively, click on the support icon in your GBP dashboard and tell Google what you need help with. You’ll then be presented with the appropriate contact information for your query. 

Step 5: Keep Track of Your Removal Request Status

I talked above about Google’s ‘Managing Your Reviews‘ tool, and how you can use it to flag up offending reviews, request their removal, and monitor the status of the request.

This is a great way to start the removal process, but it really comes into its own when you know the request has been received and you’re hoping to understand what the status is.

Examples of statuses include:

• Report reviewed – no policy violation
• Escalated – Check email for updates
• Review removed
• Decision pending

This workflow is invaluable for understanding where your review request is, which is particularly useful if you have clients hoping for more information on something that’s ultimately out of your control.

Step 5a: If Applicable, Appeal the Decision

Google doesn’t give you a lot of opportunity to comment on why a review breaks their guidelines, so you might find a status of ‘Report reviewed – no policy violation’ against a review that quite clearly and objectively does violate policy (here’s a really good example of this frustrating activity in action).

It’s at times like these that Google just needs a bit more information, and a nudge to set them on the right track. At the bottom of the ‘Managing Your Reviews’ tool, you’ll see an option to ‘Appeal eligible reviews’. Click that and fill out the following form to raise an appeal with Google against the decision. This will open a Google support ticket—make sure you write down the Case ID you receive.

Within a few days, you should get an email from Google’s support team with their decision. Still not happy with the response? Time to take your Case ID to the Google Business Profile Community forum and put your case in front of an expert, who can hopefully raise the issue with Google and get a resolution.

For many SMBs, and even local SEOs, the Google My Business Redressal Form is a thing of mystery. Here, Platinum Product Expert Ben Fisher shares his top tips for reporting spam through the form and outlines some of the latest updates.

At Steady Demand, we deal with a metric ton of spam on a monthly basis – spanning a ton of categories and covering almost every major city in the USA. On average, we see about a 96% success rate in spam removal, so I guess you could say we know a thing or two about the use of this form…

What is the Google My Business Redressal Form?

First, let’s cover a little history about the Redressal Form. In February 2019, the Google My Business Redressal Form was launched as a way to replace the spam reporting area of the GMB community forum. There were various reasons for this, but one of the most important was to create a scalable way of allowing users to report harmful or fraudulent listings directly to Google (versus only having the option to suggest an edit). 

How has the Redressal Form evolved?

In January of 2020, the form was updated to be a little more specific about what you should not submit. Specifically, Google added this language: 

If your complaint is not related to fraudulent activity on the name, phone number, or URL of the business, we will not be able to review your complaint. Please use these steps to report problems for all other Google Maps features. If you simply need to correct an incorrect business name, phone number, or URL, do not use this form. Use these steps to correct the information instead.

Fast forward to today: as of May 1st, 2020, the Google My Business Product Expert group was informed that you could use the Redressal for title spam, but to please use ‘Suggest an edit’ first on the GMB listing itself beforehand. 

GMB PSA: You can now submit Name Spam on the redressal form! (The text has not been updated, but you can)
— Please Suggest and Edit first.https://t.co/57ESPvOI8R#localseo pic.twitter.com/ns2TWqT4T3

— Ben Fisher (@TheSocialDude) May 1, 2020

What’s the difference between the Redressal Form and suggesting an edit?

An important distinction that most are not aware of is that ‘Suggest an edit’ (see screenshot below) is, for the most part, an automated, machine learning mechanism to teach Google what users feel should be removed from Google Maps, including Google Maps spam. 

The Redressal Form, on the other hand, ends up directly in a human being’s hands. Yes, that’s right — usually, the Redressal Form submissions are reviewed by a spam team at Google. 

That’s why you’ll see on the form itself that Google suggests uploading a spreadsheet if you’re reporting more than 10 listings at a time. Since a human is going to evaluate the submission, it is easier for them to handle bulk submissions this way. 

I must also add that if you are submitting images as proof in the file upload option (pictured above), and wonder why you are not getting any good results, it is because you are not supposed to upload images here. If you want to share images as evidence, I’ll explain how to do that successfully later on.

Once spam has been evaluated (for better or worse) the data is then recorded and the machine learns from the input. This can lead to micro-changes in the listing environment where the algorithm sees patterns emerge and then small proactive incremental updates are pushed out to a broader set of listings.

And by the way, we should be thankful that this is how it operates. Remember June of 2019 — right when the Wall Street Journal article came out about spam? Well, a massive spam sweep occurred and lots of valid listings were suspended in the process. Small incremental changes are much better than reactive sweeps!

So, even though you are only submitting a small batch of listings, the impact these edits can have down the line is much greater than you might imagine. 100 listings submitted could lead to 1,000 being removed — I see this happen all the time. If we do large batch submissions in a certain vertical and in a specific market for a few months in a row, we’ll then notice the overall spam in that area decreases dramatically.

There are some real listings that get swept up in some cases, but those cases are usually pretty small. (Word to the wise: if you are doing massive cleanups in markets, make sure your clients are prepared for a suspension — it can happen, but then you can get them right back online).

How should I fill out the Redressal Form to get the best results possible?

Whether you are submitting the Redressal Form for one or for multiple businesses, it really does not change what information should be included. So here is how I suggest filling it out:

1. Name: Either your name or the email account’s name that you are signed in with.
2. Email: Again, either your email or the one you are submitting with. (This is where your caseID will be delivered to).
3. Name of Entity: I always put “NA” for one listing or “Multiple” if submitting more than one. 
4. Content-type: Title (aka name spam), Address (virtual offices, UPS stores, or using another business’s location), Phone Number (for listings that are lead gen schemes, since they usually use the same number), or Website (again, this is usually for lead gen or malware types of sites). For a look into the different types of spam on GMB, take a look at Sterling Sky’s guide.
5. Public URL: This is the Google Maps URL for each listing that you are reporting. If you’re reporting more than 10, then submit one in this field and upload a spreadsheet for the rest. I always choose to submit the CID (otherwise known as the Ludocid) of a listing, as well. There are a handful of tools you can use to generate a business’s CID, including BrightLocal’s Review Link & Place ID Generator, or a Chrome extension from Tom Waddington, and one from GatherUp. Either way, the link ends up looking like this: https://www.google.com/maps?cid=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The last step (pictured above) is very important. This is where you are pleading your case. This is where you are explaining the impact that the submitted listing(s) are having on other merchants and consumers. This is not the place to cry about how it is impacting your rankings or how unfair it is that they are outranking others. It is about the real-world implications of fraudulent or misleading information. 

If you are submitting one Google Maps listing, then this is where you provide all your evidence. If you submit multiple listings, then this is a summary of what is in the attached spreadsheet. 

One thing to point out here is that it’s worth clustering submissions into different groups. So, submit all title spam as one submission, address spam as another submission, and so on. This takes more work but will increase your chances of succeeding.

Another mistake I often see is that people think Google cares about your screenshots. Well, they do… but not the way you are probably submitting them. If you are going to include an image as proof, use something like Snagit to make a short URL or upload it to Google Drive. I repeat, do not paste the image directly into an Excel file or Google Sheet. It is unreadable and a waste of your time.

Speaking of spreadsheets, for all you professional spam hunters, make sure you include the name, address, Google Maps URL, phone, and any other proof you are using to make a case in your sheet.

Some other useful things you can provide include:

1. Government sources like the Secretary of State or a licensing site: Include the URL to the source if you cannot show the search query.
2. Google Streetview:  Share a screenshot if, for instance, the business is operating out of a residential home, or if the address matches a different business.
3. Link to the location: If the address matches another business, include a link to that location. For example, “This address is actually a Regus virtual office” and then link to Regus.
4. And finally, do not use 3rd party sites like Facebook or Yelp, (although LinkedIn can work sometimes).

What happens after I submit the Google My Business Redressal Form?

The first thing that happens once you submit the Redressal Form is that you will get an email. It will look something like what you see below. The number in the subject is your caseID, but other than that it is pretty useless. You cannot reply to it, or follow up on it. Since you do not own the listings in question, Google will not communicate about them with you. 

At this point, most spam I see is actioned in a two-week timeframe. Smaller batches are actioned sometime in the same week. If you are submitting upward of 50 listings, expect the timeframe to be more like 3+ weeks. 

At this point, it is a black box, you wait… and wait… and click links… and wait…

At Steady Demand, we actually built a system that checks all submitted links (yay, no more clicking!) for removal from Google and keeps track of the success or failure of spam reporting. If this is something that interests you, feel free to connect with me.

What do I do if I’m not successful?

Well, the first thing to do is give it some time. Then, check all your facts — did you miss something? Sometimes, there are small clues that prove a listing is actually real. Or, maybe you just did not provide a crucial piece of evidence.

Personally, I have even gone as far as to hire a private investigator or, where legal, record conversations with a building owner asking if a company is leasing space or not. 

If you must submit the form again, then do so, but remember that a human being is looking at your submission and they keep a database of evaluated spam.

Finally, I know you feel it is Google’s job to do all of this work, and yup, it is infuriating that some spam gets ignored. But remember, it is Google’s platform, and they are bound by their own rules and they strive to seek a balance between you, the merchant, and the consumer. It is not perfect, it is also not worth getting upset about.

Use the tools you have at your disposal and even that playing field!