SEO is often referred to as an ongoing chess game, particularly when Google is involved—and local SEO is no different. Google’s local ranking algorithm uses various signals known as local ranking factors. These can become more prominent or less important depending on the current algorithm Google is using to rank local businesses.

In many cases, local SEO reporting will highlight some clear areas for improvement or identify what your competitors are doing better. But what do you do when it’s not obvious?

We thought we’d take a look at a real-life example to try to help.

So today, we’re diving into a real local SEO problem. Using two genuine (but anonymized in this case study) dental clinics within a mile of each other in a small town in the United States, we’ll explore how to read BrightLocal reports to identify areas for further investigation. We’ll also consider the other local ranking factors to investigate beyond those reports.

Throughout the case study, we’ll highlight some key areas for investigation or actions to take, so you can use these as guidelines for investigations with your own clients.

Starting Stats: Local Search Grid

Let’s take a look at a problem you might be faced with. Imagine you’re an agency working with Dentist A, an independent dental clinic in a small town in the northeastern US. You’ve not been subscribed to BrightLocal for long, and you’ve been getting to grips with reading the reports. So far, you’re mostly concerned with local ranking reports.

You’ve added Dentist A’s keywords to Local Search Grid (LSG). The top of your report shows the Average Map Rank for your first keyword (‘dentist’) is 7.3. It also shows 25 green grid points, which means they’re ‘high ranking’ (as in ‘in the Top 3 in the Local Pack). The orange and red points show you areas that need improvement. So far, so good.

Scrolling down underneath the map image, you’re presented with a side-by-side comparison of your top local competitors. This is when you see something confusing. Dentist B, one of your closest competitors in proximity, has an Average Map Rank of 4.9, while yours is 7.3. 

Two other competitors sit above Dentist B. Both have hundreds more reviews, backlinks, and a higher domain authority (DA) than you, so it’s clear why they’re performing well. But when you compare the report’s local ranking factors side-by-side, you should technically be outperforming Dentist B.

Let’s examine these factors more closely.

Despite both dental clinics’ average Google rating of 4.9 out of 5, Dentist A should have an overall advantage for this term—shouldn’t it? Yet its average local ranking is over two positions lower.

Now, we will look at our other BrightLocal reports to see if they uncover anything else.

Further Investigation with BrightLocal Tools and Reports

Local Rank Tracker and Google Business Profile Audit

Local Rank Tracker (LRT) tracks the positions of your keywords in Google and Bing over time so you can see which are gaining or losing visibility in the SERPs. Google Business Profile Audit displays a summary of your GBP’s key information, and its performance for five of your chosen keywords against local competitors. In this section, we’ll cover the two reports together as the insights feed into one another.

As well as looking at the main LRT report to see if ranking positions for keywords change over time, you can also use it to compare rankings with a chosen competitor. Let’s look at how Dentist A and Dentist B perform in Google organic desktop rankings for some of their key terms.

On the date in question, you can see that the competitor, Dentist B, is ranking for more of the key terms and outperforming Dentist A for two of them (dental clinic and emergency dentist). Now we’re getting somewhere.

So, aside from monitoring any downward movement to our key terms in the SERPs to pinpoint any changes that may have caused this, we know that Google is rewarding Dentist B with better organic rankings for these terms. The most obvious case could be that Dentist B has better optimized its website pages for this key term, while Dentist A has overlooked it.

Actions to Take

Review Any Recent Website or GBP Changes

If you have made changes recently, don’t modify or reverse them. It’s not yet clear if this will have impacted rankings, so you’ll want to monitor this over time.

Assess Competitors’ Website Content

If you regularly monitor competitors’ website content, can you see if anything significant has changed? If you’re unsure or you don’t have a record of changes, put yourself in the shoes of a prospective patient and review competitor content, asking:

• Does their website have more comprehensive service pages dedicated to services that match key terms?
• Is the content of good quality? That is, does it demonstrate expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness (as per Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines)?
• Is the location and its surrounding service areas clearly presented in some way?

Audit Competitor GBPs

Look up your competitor’s GBP and make note of the features being used. Compare this against your client’s GBPs to identify any gaps you may have. Ask yourself:

• Does it use Google Posts to share updates with users?
• Has it listed Services that correlate to key terms?
• Does the Q&A section have any questions in it? Have they been answered?
• Are there photos of the clinic, its team, and its facilities?

Review and Update Your Keywords

As businesses change and evolve, new services are added, some may be removed, and new geographical areas may open up. It can be easy to overlook the process of reviewing and updating keyword portfolios to reflect these. However, this should not be underestimated! Tracking the ranking positions of terms that are no longer relevant to your brand is pointless and skews your focus to the wrong things.     

With the above, it looks like we’ve already got a list of things we can do. It’s a good start!

Now, If we jump over to GBP Audit, we see a more visual representation of Dentist A’s GBP.

Each tab at the top lists 10 top competitors for each keyword, which builds on the information presented in Local Search Grid and Local Rank Tracker. However, we can see here several more factors to consider in order to help ranking performance:

• Whether the profile is verified
• % of Key Citations (more on this later)
• Linking domains (total linking root domains, e.g. you might see 200 links, but they might only be coming from 50 root domains)
• Number of photos

This is all well and good, but we’ve still not found the smoking gun—the metrics that really mark Dentist B out from Dentist A. Let’s move on to the next report and see what else we can unearth.

Citation Tracker

Citations are thought to be a local ranking factor, which means it’s important to ensure the businesses you are managing can be found across various online directories. 

Citation Tracker (CT) is quick and simple to set up. Using your business details, CT will locate all of the citation websites you’re listed on and highlight inconsistencies and errors on key citation websites.

Above, we can see that Dentist A’s picture is not too rosy. The Key Citation Score of 28/100 tells us that both the quantity and quality of citations are not up to scratch. Moreover, out of the 23 live citations, only 13 are considered key citations, and 11 of those have errors—that’s close to half of Dentist A’s citations.

Simply scrolling down on this report highlights every citation and its errors. In Dentist A’s case, there are some significant differences in the business name being used across these websites.

Put yourself in the shoes of a customer, and that’s a pretty confusing experience when you’re doing research—especially for an important decision associated with healthcare.

From a customer perspective, the Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023 investigated the implications of incorrect business information on consumer trust and found that 62% of consumers would avoid using a business if they found incorrect information online.

Competitor Citations

Adding a competitor as a location within BrightLocal and setting up its own Citation Tracker report is a simple way to compare performance and identify key citation sources you may be missing. It’s up to you whether you choose to run them as one-offs or regularly for a more consistent picture of the competition.

We went ahead and ran Dentist B’s CT report. 

Luckily for Dentist A, Dentist B’s citations are in even worse shape, with just nine in total! However, the dashboard does not highlight any errors, while we know that Dentist A does have some to work on. 

It seems like citations aren’t the make-or-break factor for Dentist B outranking Dentist A, but this doesn’t mean that cleaning up, fixing, and building new citations shouldn’t happen. It’s still important to maintain and optimize listings to ensure business information is accurate.

Actions to Take

Correct Your Citation Errors

Fixing these errors should be the first port of call. In Dentist A’s case, there are only nine to do, so this won’t be too time-consuming. For businesses with dozens of listings to fix, you can see why monitoring them regularly is important.

Within your CT dashboard, you can travel straight to the live citation and edit your listing. Or, if a colleague or client manages citation amends, you can click the status of individual citations to leave notes highlighting what needs to be done.

Find and Add New Citations

CT highlights the relevant citation websites where listings are not found, which can be used as a checklist to work through. You can go through and add these yourself, or consider using BrightLocal’s Citation Builder service for a fuss-free and speedy turnaround.

Reputation Manager: Monitor Reviews

Moving into the realm of reviews, Monitor Reviews is a useful dashboard as it displays review growth over time, as well as a breakdown of star ratings and the sources of where reviews are coming from.

We already know that Dentist A has an average star rating of 4.9, but there are two clear areas that need improvement.

For some reason, Dentist A hasn’t received a new review since January 2024, leaving a two-month gap on the timeline. A quick manual check confirms this, so there is a clear starting point: achieving new review growth.

While the star rating breakdown is positive, the review source breakdown highlights just three sources of reviews: Google (98%), HealthGrades (<1%), and Wellness (<1%).

Diversifying review portfolios is an important consideration of reputation management. According to the Local Consumer Review 2024, 36% of consumers use at least two different review sites before deciding to use a local business. 

Plus, as we highlighted earlier, ensuring consistent information across different sources, such as review platforms and citation websites, reinforces trust with consumers.

Dentist A could consider building a stronger profile on other review platforms, such as Better Business Bureau (BBB), TrustPilot, YellowPages, and Doctor.com.

Competitor Reviews

We set up a Monitor Reviews report for Dentist B to compare the review profiles of the two businesses. Although its review sources are even less diverse and have fewer total reviews than Dentist A’s, Dentist B’s review growth chart shows a constant stream of reviews month on month.

From this, we can conclude that review frequency and recency play important roles in creating what Google deems to be a trustworthy review profile.

Review Responses

Heading over to Dentist A’s review profiles on Google, HealthGrades, and Wellness, another key observation is that it only replies to business reviews sporadically. Google’s guidance on improving local rankings specifically calls out managing and responding to reviews.

Plus, our findings from the Local Consumer Review Survey consistently show that consumers are more likely to use a business that responds to all types of customer reviews, whether positive or negative.

On the other hand, Dentist B doesn’t seem to reply to any business reviews. Although it appears to have the upper hand with review growth and recency, both businesses should absolutely consider review responses a priority. 

Actions to Take

Create Review Campaigns to Encourage New Reviews and Diversify Sources

Clearly, relying on reviews coming in organically isn’t working out for Dentist A. Creating timely, automated review campaigns is simple and effective with Get Reviews. 

Now, we can create email and SMS templates, including email follow-ups, create an NPS system for gathering useful internal feedback, and select the external review platforms we want to ask customers to use.

Local Search Audit

Local Search Audit provides an instant snapshot of your local SEO ‘health’ in an easy-to-understand traffic light system.

As we’ve already analyzed Rank Tracker, Local Listings, Reputation Manager, and GBP Audit, we’ll cover Links & Authority and On-Site SEO here.

Links and Authority

Links and Authority is rated as ‘OK.’ Further down, Local Search Audit shows the following metrics for Dentist A against the average competitor: 

• Google Index count (how many of your pages are Indexed by Google): 42 vs. 20
• Link count: 285 vs. 511
• Linking domain count: 89 vs. 149
• Domain Authority: 13 vs. 14.2

Link building is an important part of local SEO as it helps build awareness and authority, boost organic visibility, and signal that brands are trustworthy.

From these stats, we can see that attaining new links and broadening linking domains should be a key focus for Dentist A to improve on.

Actions to Take

Link building is renowned for being a tricky area in SEO—you can easily dedicate a whole role to outreach. So, while an entire link-building strategy may be a lot to recommend straight away here, you can start small.

Create a List of Target Websites and Publications

Generally, a good link portfolio should consist of relevant, authoritative sources. It’s also wise to consider how you can diversify it—for Dentist A, it could be something like an article on cosmetic dentistry ahead of big events for an authoritative wedding publication.

Set Up Brand Alerts to Find Mentions of Your Business Online

This can be useful for identifying when your brand is mentioned online but has not been linked to, so you can create a list of organizations to reach out to for corrections.

Review Your Backlink Profile with a Dedicated Tool

Semrush and ahrefs are just two examples of tools that can identify your links and linking domains, as well as provide insights on competitor backlinks. Competitor backlink analysis is also a useful way of scouting out ideas for the types of content and topics that are being linked to or covered by journalists.

On-Site SEO

This section of the Local Search Audit report is a small goldmine. It counts the number of pages crawled, the number of internal links, page titles and metadata, mobile rendering, and keyword count, to name just a few.

From a technical standpoint, Local Search Audit rates Dentist A as ‘Good.’ It’s worth noting that Dentist A’s website is fairly small, with just 66 pages. Plus, although it’s given the green flag overall, a few problem areas are highlighted:

• Missing image alt tags
• Sparse content pages (<500 words)
• Google PageSpeed Score

Scrolling down, the Local Search Audit also highlights the presence of ‘Top Keywords’ across the site. Quite astonishingly, ‘dentist’ does not appear here whatsoever! As we suspected earlier in the LRT section, the key term has been completely overlooked here.

Given that Dentist A’s primary GBP category is also ‘dentist,’ this is quite a severe misstep. 

Dentist A can easily begin to rectify this issue by re-optimizing key pages for the correct terms.

Actions to Take

Identify Missing or Low Count Key Terms

When it comes to fitting keywords into your website content, you never want to force it. However, this area of Local Search Audit could highlight if you are under-servicing some of your key terms.

In Dentist A’s case, the website is missing one of its priority, tracked keywords, which also correlates to its primary category in GBP. 

We’ll move on to sparse content in the next section.

Beyond the Tools

We’ve identified plenty of areas that can be improved upon to boost Dentist A’s local visibility, but there are only a few clear areas where Dentist B is outperforming them so far—review regularity and local rankings.

So, with what we’ve learned from the tools and reports, how can we take some of these insights away to investigate further?

On-site Content

Unfortunately, since we’ve anonymized our dentists, we can’t show you screenshots of the websites. But for Dentist A, imagine an HTML-coded Myspace layout circa 2006 (seriously). The navigation is not particularly intuitive, and, as we just discussed, the content across the website is sparse in detail.

Local Search Audit highlighted 45 out of its 66 pages as sparse content—that’s 68% of the site’s content with pages containing less than 500 words. Although content quality doesn’t—and shouldn’t—always correspond with quantity (e.g. word count), you would expect a website in the healthcare industry to have some comprehensive content.

It’s important to have clearly defined service pages, with descriptions that outline what potential patients can expect and answer any questions they may have.

With our auditor caps on, we can already see some clear reasons why Dentist B might be outranking Dentist A from a content perspective. So, we’ve compared the two dental clinics side-by-side, rating key elements of on-site content for local SEO. (Again, we can’t show you the websites, so you’ll have to trust us on this!)

Actions to Take

Page Optimization

At the very least, take the opportunity to optimize website pages. Optimize titles and descriptions with relevant keywords and a concise character limit, and find natural opportunities to include more of your key terms in page content.

Content Refresh

Rewriting website content can be a daunting task, but it’s easier to tackle if you break pages down into priority groups. For example, you could start with your key services and work on them in batches.

Page Structure

Whether you’ll be writing the content yourself, or briefing it to a team member or freelancer, a content brief is a great way to maintain consistency with your page structures. You can include keywords, page titles, headings, and descriptions, as well as dedicated sections that need to be written and included, such as FAQs.

Research Supporting Content Ideas

Would your website benefit from a blog or dedicated area for more informational and supportive content? This type of content can help answer queries that users might search for in their earlier stages of research, so you can target long-tail key terms and diversify what you are ranking for. 

Google Business Profile

So far, the reports have surfaced some areas of GBP that need further investigation, such as categories and photos. Dentist B does not use any secondary categories, whereas Dentist A has two: cosmetic dentist and dental implants.

Considering a relationship has been found between additional GBP categories and higher local rankings, it is surprising that Dentist A doesn’t have a noticeable advantage in its rankings.

While it’s not clear how photos might influence the performance of a GBP listing in local rankings, both Dentist A and Dentist B could significantly benefit from adding more. Dentist A has two, and Dentist B has four.

Knowing that Google’s rankings algorithm takes into consideration user behaviour in SERPs, it stands to reason that anything you can do to make your business more attractive to engage with online will have an indirect impact on rankings.

Adding photos of the business exterior and interior, facilities, team members, and even patients in different clinic areas (having obtained their permission) can help prospective patients feel more trusting of businesses. The Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023 found that the industry where consumers most wanted to see photos of team members was healthcare. Plus, customer reviews with accompanying photos can help to show ‘real’ experiences.

Additional GBP Features

Google is always testing and rolling out new GBP features that make them more helpful to searchers. Some are industry-specific, but many general features can be added to enhance your profile.

Dentist A and Dentist B don’t appear to use any additional features to their advantage. There are no Posts, Services, or specific attributes. Plus, both have unanswered questions from users, so this is an area that should be built out to help manage prospective patients’ expectations.

When performing similar analysis of your clients and their competitors, ask yourself the following questions:

• Does the GBP use profile attributes? 

Where appropriate, attributes such as ‘Black-owned,’ ‘LGBTQ+ owned,’ and ‘women-owned’ can help to signal safe spaces for customers within local communities. There are also attributes related to accessibility   

• Have Products and Services been added?

GBP managers can add specific Services to GBPs, which helps users narrow down their searches and find relevant results.

• Build out ‘Questions and answers’

You don’t need to wait for a customer to ask questions. Add questions yourself and provide answers.

• Create Posts

Google Posts are an easy way of displaying what’s new, any recent updates or promotions front and center on a GBP. They’re also a good way of showing business activity to searchers.

Opening Hours

Towards the end of 2023, it was confirmed that business opening hours influenced local rankings. In short, businesses rank higher when they are searched for during the business’ opening hours.

Dentist A and Dentist B have similar opening hours. They are both closed from Friday to Sunday and operate similar hours on their usual business days. In this instance, it doesn’t appear that either clinic has an advantage over the other, but it’s a factor to consider for your own investigations.

Business Listings vs. Practitioner Listings

Dentists and healthcare provider GBPs differ from many other business types because there is an option to add separate practitioner listings.

Dentist A uses its practitioner’s name alongside the business name in its GBP, which seems to have caused issues and confusion with its citations across different sources. Some citations list the dental clinic name, and others list only the dental practitioner.

Considering Dentist A and Dentist B are neck-and-neck in so many areas of local SEO, this could be one of the elements that are harming Dentist A the most.

Social Media

Many local SEOs consider social signals a dwindling local search ranking factor, and they haven’t been included within the last three Local Search Ranking Factor reports. However, recent reports suggest that GBPs may now pull social posts into profiles if Google Posts are absent, so this could be set to change.

Even if not considered an important local ranking signal, social media can be a useful trust signal for E-E-A-T. Having an active online presence helps show searchers that you are who you say you are. It also provides a valuable platform to showcase experience, expertise, and authority.

For professionals such as dental practitioners, where personal branding is considered important, adding ProfilePage markup to website pages helps Google highlight information about experts and creators. If the lead dental practitioner has social media profiles or author pages for online publications, Google can draw on these to associate the E-E-A-T signals.

Dentist A has a Facebook page with 217 followers. The page has not shared any updates since October 2023 and, prior to this, had not posted for six months.

Dentist B, meanwhile, only has a LinkedIn presence. This seems an odd choice for a dental clinic, as professionals largely use LinkedIn to network and engage with employment opportunities. The page is inactive, though, with zero followers and no posts or activity.

For the dentists in this case study, Facebook should be an obvious choice for setting up social profiles, as it also functions as a citation and review platform.

Meanwhile, visual social channels like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok can be hugely beneficial for showcasing services, client testimonials, and experiences. Before and after content can be incredibly powerful on visual platforms, particularly for services such as cosmetic dentistry, dental implants, and orthodontics.

Actions to Take

Update Facebook Profile

In Dentist A’s case, the Facebook page needs to be managed more regularly to inform the community of any updates. It could also benefit from a profile refresh to reflect key services, add recent photos, and use recent client testimonials.

Consider Establishing Yourself on New Social Platforms

As mentioned, both dentists could benefit from a presence on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube to showcase their services and USPs.

When deciding on the best social media platforms for your brand, keep the key objectives in mind. What are you looking to achieve on social media? Who is your key audience? What type of content are you looking to create?

Conclusion

Hopefully, this investigation has highlighted how to get the most out of BrightLocal report insights and why it isn’t always crystal clear why one business may be outranking another—even to the most experienced local marketers!

Although every area of local SEO plays an important part, we’ve identified several key areas for Dentist A to improve on as a matter of priority. We’ve recapped these below:

Some areas of auditing and analysis take practice and even some trial and error, so don’t be disheartened if you aren’t immediately uncovering insights. With time, you’ll find your own ways of working and maybe even develop a process to train other colleagues or client partners, but this case study should be a good start for now.  

Remember, there are communities ready and available to ask for help, too! Check out our Facebook community, The Local Pack, and Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum.

Before we begin… what is Reddit?

Reddit is a forum social network that was founded in the USA in 2005 and has since grown to encompass over 82m active daily users (as of March 2024).

Users can register and post content, such as text posts, images, videos, and links, that other members can then upvote.

Reddit has thousands of individual communities hosted on the platform dedicated to particular topics, known as subreddits.

Near the start of 2024, it was reported that Google and Reddit had formed a partnership that would, in Google’s words, “facilitate more content-forward displays of Reddit information.” In short, Reddit content would appear in more results for Google searches.

Google claims the move came because searchers increasingly use the search engine to find information on Reddit, tying it back to its core principle of surfacing helpful content to users.

This irked SEOs. 

As a global community forum, Reddit pretty much has a thread on everything ever. But, as many within the digital community have pointed out, that doesn’t make the content expert, authoritative, or trustworthy.

Amsive Digital’s Lily Ray highlighted the prominence of Reddit results for Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) search queries—terms related to topics, products, and services that can impact a user’s health, finances, and even safety.

Importantly, these queries should surface quality content in Google results, aligning to E-E-A-T guidelines.

Serious question for you @searchliaison:

For 6+ years, and throughout the QRG, Google has shared that YMYL queries – presumably like “weight loss” – require the highest levels of E-E-A-T. For 6+ years, we’ve seen sites like the CDC and Harvard ranking prominently for these… pic.twitter.com/7fpoUOKANO

— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) April 3, 2024

Study Methodology

With the above in mind, we wanted to understand the significance of the Google/Reddit partnership in relation to local search intent.

So, we analyzed 800 local SERPs using one transactional keyword (e.g. coffee shop) and one informational keyword (e.g. best coffee shop) across 20 different verticals, searching from 20 different US cities, to determine:

• How often Reddit results appear in any form within local search results on ‘page 1’
• Whether Reddit results appear as organic (blue links) search results or feature in a ‘Discussions and Forums’ section
• The average ranking positions of Reddit results for vertical-specific search terms (an average taken of searches for 20 US cities)

Note: This study was conducted at the beginning of May 2024, so the search results are accurate for this snapshot in time.

‘Page 1’ refers to what was previously the first page of Google results before indefinite scrolling was introduced for many users. Generally, this encompasses the first 10 organic links in Google results and finishes with the ‘People also search for’ section, although this can vary due to different SERP features.

Let’s get to the results.

The infographic below shows the average ranking positions of Reddit results appearing in organic search results for the different verticals we tested, using informational search queries. As we’ll get to shortly, all 20 of the verticals showed organic Reddit results when informational terms were searched.

Appearance of Reddit Within Local Search Results

Informational Searches (e.g. best coffee shop seattle)

The headline results are that we found Reddit results appearing for 81% of informational search queries (e.g. best coffee shop seattle) and 16% of transactional search queries (e.g. coffee shop seattle).

It makes sense that informational searches would generate results from Reddit; it’s a forum network where people frequently seek opinions to aid their research and consumer decisions.

Essentially, this means Google trusts the content enough to show it for eight out of every ten informational searches. However, when you consider that content on Reddit can be generated by anyone, expert or not, it’s still a pretty significant finding.

Although Reddit results appeared 81% of the time for informational search terms, every vertical we tested generated some Reddit results. The lowest case in this instance was for ‘betting store’, with Reddit appearing for one in every 10 searches.

At the same time, the following verticals saw Reddit results for 100% of informational searches:

• car dealerships
• chiropractors
• day spas
• fast food restaurants
• HVAC
• storage facilities
• tax advisors
• vet clinics

You can see a table with all of these results and more in the appendix.

Transactional Searches (e.g. coffee shop seattle)

Our study found that 16% of transactional searches generated Reddit results. With comparatively few Reddit results found, transactional searches won’t be a key focus in this analysis, but it’s still interesting to see which vertical-specific terms generated the results.

The verticals with a higher percentage of transactional results generally appear to sit within the hospitality and leisure industries: fast food (85%), day spa (60%), gym (45%), travel agency (35%), and coffee shop (30%).

However, the threads that appear in their search results, whether as organic links or in the discussions feature, correlate more to the intent of an informational search. Have a look at the example below for ‘coffee shop austin.’

As we found in the Local Business Discovery and Trust Report, these are often the types of businesses where consumers want to see genuine experiences from other customers, while the ‘risk’ remains low if they do decide to make a transaction. Google may show these Reddit results as supporting information to other sources due to its low risk.

In terms of YMYL queries, the only relevant search term that generated Reddit results was for ‘tax advisor’, with Reddit appearing just 5% of the time. While we don’t know how much Google might have scaled back on these types of results appearing in SERPs since Lily Ray reached out to the company in April 2024, this clearly shows they are still appearing. 

Average Ranking Positions for Vertical-specific Local Searches

Reddit’s prominence in the SERPs is clear, but how are they ranking, and are there any trends across the verticals we used?

Although the informational query chart does not appear to show any instant patterns, we can see that only three verticals generate Reddit results with an average ranking position of three or higher. These fall into the leisure and hospitality category where, arguably, searchers looking for the ‘best’ might want to be able to compare people’s experiences of things like gym facilities and movie theater amenities.

The example below shows that the Reddit thread goes beyond recommendations and delves into the ‘why’ of something. In this instance, the original poster is asking for more.

And perhaps there is something in that. Perhaps Google rates the quality of discussion content as high enough to rank organically because it is exactly that: a discussion. It goes beyond the statement-like nature of reviews, where we don’t have the opportunity to probe into the experience further.

Then again, why does ‘best movie theater’ average a 2.3 ranking across 20 US cities, and ‘best hotel’ only average 6.1? Is it because, in Google’s opinion, there are greater authorities and platforms on the accommodation side of hospitality to discuss what makes something the best?

For transactional searches, there are fewer results with average ranking positions. In some cases, this is because no Reddit results were generated at all. In others, the results were grouped within the ‘Discussions and Forums’ feature instead of an organic position.

What this chart does show, though, is that the verticals where Reddit results were displayed as organic links are all fairly ‘low risk’, with no YMYL verticals seeing results for our transactional searches.

Also, as we’ll go on to discuss with the fast food restaurant vertical, it could also be that Google is reading mixed intent for these queries. While ‘hvac contractor huntsville’ generates organic results for actual HVAC services in the area, the Reddit result displayed surfaces advice and recommendations.

It could be the case that, as Google pivots towards longer, more conversational search queries (especially as part of AI Overviews), it doesn’t recognize the urgent need for transactions in more generic terms. We’d have to do more testing with various transactional terms to determine this.

Reddit Appearing In a ‘Discussions and Forums’ Feature

Since late 2022, there has been a SERP feature called ‘Discussions and Forums’ where multiple forum results, such as Reddit or Quora, are grouped together in one section. This makes it clear to searchers that any results within this section have been pulled from forum networks.

We wanted to know how often they appeared within the ‘Discussions and Forums’ feature. We found that results sometimes only appeared within this SERP feature, sometimes only as organic (blue links) results, and sometimes both.

Reddit results grouped into the ‘Discussions and Forums’ feature appeared more than a third of the time (35%) for informational search queries. Meanwhile, out of all the informational queries that surfaced any type of Reddit results altogether, the proportion of ‘Discussions and Forums’ results was 43%.

It’s unclear why Google displays some Reddit results as organic links and others within this feature. As mentioned, there are cases where both appear—for different threads and discussions—so does this mean that Google displays the threads it deems more helpful, authoritative, or trustworthy as organic links?

Although many searchers have likely heard of Reddit, there will be plenty that haven’t. The ‘Discussions and Forums’ feature feels like the most transparent way to display thread results, clearly labeling them to users and enabling them to make up their own minds.

Reddit Results Appearing in SERPs More Than Once

Some verticals were likely to generate Reddit results in SERPs more than once, including for transactional search terms. 

Fast food restaurants generated multiple Reddit results for one in every five transactional searches (e.g. fast food restaurants boston) and almost half of the informational searches (e.g. best fast food restaurants boston).

However, looking at several examples of these results, it appears that Google may determine the intent behind our transactional fast food searches as more informational. Although local packs tend to be displayed, showing fast food restaurants nearby, the organic results show a mix of review sites, listicle-style articles, and forum discussions.

What do these results mean for local SEO?

Developments like these can be frustrating for marketers and SEOs. It feels like a neverending chess match between us and Google, particularly when you’re putting in the work to create unique, helpful content and find that (arguably) lower-value content like Reddit forum threads are being rewarded in the SERPs. 

However, we can take away some lessons and considerations from it all. 

Continue Creating Unique Content

As with just about anything in SEO, we don’t know how permanent these developments within the SERPs will be. What we do know, though, is that the principle of E-E-A-T continues to be an important factor in how Google rates the quality of your content.

With this in mind, don’t be scared or disheartened by the findings in this report! Continue creating content that is unique to your brand, as well as relevant and helpful to your audience. This might be location-specific website pages, building out your key services and products, or providing FAQs.

If you are a marketer or specialist within a regulated or YMYL industry, such as healthcare, finance, banking, or gambling, continue demonstrating your expertise, experience, authority, and trustworthiness, and consider how else you can create unique content.

Keep on Top of Your Brand Mentions

If you haven’t considered Reddit before, you might find it useful for measuring consumer perceptions of your brand. Try conducting a site search for your brand terms on Google (e.g. search ‘site:reddit.com brand name’ in Google) to see where you appear there. Or better yet, set up a Reddit account and have a poke around in there yourself!

In fact, the very day before this research was published, Search Engine Land reported on a new special snippet that appears to be being tested with Reddit results. Top user answers, with upvotes displayed, are being pulled into the results, presumably as a way to ‘enhance’ them. So, you could look at it as another way for Google to get users to click through to Reddit threads, or, on a more positive note, it’s potentially another opportunity for your brand to be visible as a new type of snippet—providing users have a reason to talk about you.

The wider lesson here, however, is considering where else brand mentions can appear. As discussed in the Local Consumer Review Survey 2024, ‘unstructured’ brand reviews can appear in many places, and consumers are increasingly looking to alternative platforms to research your brand, including:

• Local news: 43%
• Instagram: 34%
• YouTube: 32%
• TikTok: 23%
• Reddit: 21%

If you can, consider using social listening and brand monitoring tools or setting up free media alerts sent directly to your mailbox. 

Seek Organic Opportunities to Represent Your Brand Within Forums

Do not try and fake your way into Reddit. Users generally don’t mind it when a brand or brand representative can answer questions or provide further information within a thread. However, nothing is more obvious than when brands attempt to snake their way into conversations ‘organically’ to drive prospective customers to them.

It might be tempting to drop some offers into conversations here and there, but we’d recommend keeping interactions as organic and helpful as possible. Reddit has an official advertising platform if you’re looking to go down the route of sponsored content, Reddit Ads.

Here’s what BrightLocal’s Social and Community Manager, Jenny Bernarde, says on the subject:

“Sometimes, Redditors can tell when a brand account is there to do marketing and selling. If they sense marketing, it’s not going to do well. On the other hand, answering questions and getting your brand out there is a good thing—if you can do it authentically and helpfully, and give way to others to speak of their own experiences. 

At the end of the day, it’s useful to use Reddit and reply to things to show that valuable authority and expertise.”

Jenny’s tips:

• Have a brand account that is the main ‘voice’ for the brand.
• Create a brand subreddit that provides your community with a space to talk about your brand. This is not your own brand creating content.
• Have brand representatives register on Reddit to reply to questions, and share suggestions in wider subreddits.

Deliver a Customer Experience Truly Worth Recommending

Ultimately, you can’t give people a reason to talk about your brand if you aren’t focused on delivering exceptional customer experiences. There is only so much local marketing can do for you without it.

The Brand Beacon Report 2024 found that the highest-performing multi-location businesses prioritize customer satisfaction and retention over customer acquisition. These businesses reported marketing performance that exceeded expectations and also had clear local marketing strategies in place.

It’s a no-brainer. Customer satisfaction and experience are key to brand reputation and your bottom line.

Summary and Discussion

It’s clear that Google trusts the content it’s surfacing from Reddit and understands that users want to see this information when researching. While AI Overviews is only just rolling out, seeing how Reddit’s prominence in the SERPs develops from here will be interesting.

What are your thoughts on Google showing Reddit results in the SERPs? Is there a danger in giving some threads a position in organic rankings instead of being grouped with other forum results?

We’d be really interested to hear your take and any recent experiences on these developments. You can tag or mention us over on X, LinkedIn, or join the discussion within our Facebook community group, The Local Pack.

Appendix

Reddit results appearing for all verticals

Avg. Reddit ranking positions for all search queries

How often Reddit results appear in SERPs as organic (blue) links

Discussions and Forums Reddit Result Appearances

I, for one, tend to take comfort in the shared characteristics of my fellow specialty coffee-swilling millennials… well, mostly.

The thing with stereotypes, though, is that they can cause us to assume things about people. And in many cases, there can be negative associations with such groups. 

When we conduct the annual Local Consumer Review Survey, we examine the results to look for patterns around demographics like gender or age. Do younger consumers search for reviews online more regularly than older groups, for example?

The 2024 report pointed to several key themes among consumers, such as a sense of fatigue from being prompted for reviews too often and wariness of taking what they read at face value. Yet, while 73% of consumers had written a business review in the last year, it was interesting to note that some consumers lean towards only leaving positive reviews, while others lean towards only leaving negative ones.

In fact, we found that the percentage of consumers only leaving positive or negative reviews had grown year on year.

So, what type of person only writes a positive review, and are they very different from those who only write negative reviews? Why would someone specifically only leave positive or negative reviews? What kind of crusade are they on?

Let’s take a look. Some of the findings might just surprise you. Have a look at the profiles we’ve put together below, or scroll down further for a breakdown of the findings.

The Positive Reviewer

Going back to our stereotypes, you might assume that older consumers would have less patience and, therefore, be more likely to leave negative reviews. Our results showed quite the opposite, as 45-60 year-olds were the largest age group of Positive Reviewers.

Typically, the Positive Reviewer will ‘always’ read online reviews when researching local businesses and will ‘always’ write a review after an experience. This commitment shows us that they have faith in the review system, so their motivation for leaving reviews probably stems from a desire to contribute to the system and be helpful by sharing their experiences.

It’s very interesting, though, that when we consider they always write business reviews, these reviews are also always positive and not a mix of sentiments.

Does the Positive Reviewer simply never have a bad experience? Or, are these reviewers determined to always find the positive in any given situation?

The top factor that impacts the Positive Reviewer’s decision to use a business is reading other reviews describing positive experiences. So, it could be that they are more careful in the businesses they choose and that they spend time reading the written content of reviews.

Additionally, the Positive Reviewer likes to use local news as an alternative platform for business reviews. While this could be in digital or print form, it tells us that the Positive Reviewer views business information printed or published by a local news authority as trustworthy and credible. 

When we consider that they use two platforms on average to read business reviews, they could be verifying reviewer-written content with information found in local news.

The Negative Reviewer

It might surprise you that the Negative Reviewer tends to be between 18 and 29 years old. With this in mind, though, it likely won’t come as a surprise that they tend to use Instagram as a top alternative reviews/recommendations platform.

This reviewer type reads online reviews ‘regularly’ as part of their local business research and generally writes a business review more than half the time. So, while reading business reviews is an important part of the research process, Negative Reviewers do not feel compelled to ‘always’ write business reviews when they’re asked to. 

At a glance, the Negative Reviewer appears less trusting than the Positive Reviewer in that they typically check more review sites (three) and expect to see named reviewers in order to trust their review content. So? This tells us that trust indicators are important to them, which means you must give them a reason to trust your brand. 

While you can’t control the content of customer reviews, you can ensure you maintain consistent reputation management profiles. That means ensuring your brand is present across a range of review platforms and dedicating enough time to generating reviews across all of them. If the average Negative Reviewer checks three review platforms, and the reputation score is wildly different on each one, that isn’t a good indicator of trust.

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Positive vs. Negative: Findings Breakdown

Some of the findings don’t stand out as a particular trait belonging to either profile, but we can compare them side-by-side to highlight similarities and any other areas that might be worth discussing.

Reviewer Type by Age Group

• 63% of Negative Reviewers are aged between 18-44 years.
• 58% of Positive Reviewers are aged 45+. 

If we consider why a consumer might be driven to write a negative review, it’s likely an emotional response to things like bad customer service. The consumer is reacting to disappointment, maybe even feelings of injustice.  

The 18-29 years age group was the largest segment of negative reviewers (36%), with the chart reflecting a decreasing trend across the older age groups. 

Although we don’t know exactly why this might be, it could be that, as digital interactions are so ingrained among 18-29-year-olds, leaving a review for a bad experience feels like a natural first port of call for this age group. 

Review Reading and Writing Frequency

It seems surprising that 19% of Positive Reviewers only read reviews ‘occasionally’ as part of their local business research, compared to 11% of Negative Reviewers.

However, looking at this through a lens of trust might suggest that some of our Positive Reviewers are just happy to find a local business and give it a chance based on first-hand information they find. This could be a brand’s website, owned social media profiles, or official business listings, for example.

For Negative Reviewers, this could further indicate that they are more mistrustful and want to make sure they are reading multiple sources before making a decision.

Top Review Platforms Used to Evaluate Local Businesses

Google, Facebook, and Yelp are the top three platforms used by both Positive Reviewers and Negative Reviewers.

What’s most interesting here, though, is that we also know almost a third of Negative Reviewers are members of the Yelp Elite program. So, why is Yelp not number one among Negative Reviewers? And why do only 42% of them use Yelp, compared to 47% of Positive Reviewers?

It is possible that people are members of Yelp Elite because of the perceived and exclusive benefits the program offers but do not actually use the platform that often to evaluate other business reviews.

The only platform that it seems Negative Reviewers use more than Positive Reviewers is Apple Maps.

Alternative Platforms Used to Find Business Reviews

• Positive Reviewers use local news significantly more than Negative Reviewers to find local business reviews and recommendations.
• Negative Reviewers appear more likely to use newer social media platforms like TikTok and Threads as alternative sources of local business information.

Important Review Factors

The factors that are most important to positive and negative reviewer types generally reflect the pattern and order we saw in the main report, with written positive experiences by far standing out as most important. This tells us that both Positive Reviewers and Negative Reviewers are spending time reading—or at least skimming through—the content of reviews.

Yet, while this review factor is top for both types of reviewer, their motivations might be very different. As we’ve posited, the Negative Reviewer might check review content across multiple platforms because they are naturally less trusting.

For Negative Reviewers, the second most important review factor to them is seeing reviews are written by named users, instead of anonymous profiles. Again, this points to a sense of wariness or mistrust in the information they’re finding online, potentially conflating anonymous reviews with inauthenticity. 

‘High’ star ratings are deemed important to both reviewer types, although it’s worth noting that it appears more important to Positive Reviewers than Negative Reviewers (54% vs. 41%). 

If we examine their expectations for average business star ratings, we see that Negative Reviewers are more likely to use businesses with lower star ratings than Positive Reviewers.

Expectations for minimum average star rating

You might expect this to be the other way around. But, it could tell us that Negative Reviewers are weighing up other review factors, such as the experiences described in written review content or who is writing them, rather than just taking star ratings at face value.

Why might the Positive Reviewer be more selective around businesses with ‘high’ star ratings? Perhaps it comes back to the earlier suggestion that these consumers are determined to have positive experiences with local businesses and, therefore, won’t take a chance on a business with (what they perceive to be) low star ratings.

Expectations for Review Responses

As we know from the main Local Consumer Review Survey report, it’s a significant expectation for business owners to be seen to respond to all types of online reviews, good or bad. That trend is no different here.

The fact that both positive and negative reviewer types are looking for responses to all reviews reinforces the importance of monitoring your reputation platforms for new reviews and ensuring review content is properly addressed.

It also suggests that not all is lost when it comes to the Negative Reviewer! They’re not just looking for responses to negative comments and, interestingly, may be more willing than the Positive Reviewer to use a business that doesn’t respond to reviews at all (56% vs. 52%).

Prompting Consumers to Write Reviews

When looking at the review prompt methods consumers would likely respond to, we can see that Positive Reviewers are more receptive than Negative Reviews to six prompt types in particular:

• SMS (16% more than Negative Reviewers)
• In-person (15% more than Negative Reviewers)
• Receipt or invoice (11% more than Negative Reviewers)
• Email (9% more than Negative Reviewers)
• Social media (7% more than Negative Reviewers)
• Business card (7% more than Negative Reviewers)

But, overall, email is the top prompt method for both reviewer types. 

Negative Reviewers are more receptive to prompts on social media than to all other methods except email. As discussed earlier, this could show a relationship between younger demographics and their ‘natural’ online behavior.

However, as we’re talking about Negative Reviewers here, it might be worth considering how your brand uses social media as a call-out for reviews. Is it calling out for new reviews in one post while ignoring negative feedback shared on other posts? 

What does this mean for your business or brand?

The profiles above may seem a bit of fun (and we’ve aimed to present them in that way), but there are important considerations to take away for your own reputation management strategies. 

1. Customer service is key

As highlighted in the main report, the most important step towards generating regular, positive reviews should, of course, be a focus on delivering the best customer experience possible. You need to give your customers something to remember, something to talk about, something that prompts them to write a review that is unique. 

2. Responding to all business reviews

The next takeaway is to acknowledge and act on all feedback, good and bad. You can’t change a bad review, but you can do the right thing by responding to it—and be seen to do so. We know that it’s a critical expectation in all consumers’ post-experience journeys, whether they default to a positive or negative reviewer. Not only does it show prospective customers that you actively respond to and take on feedback, but it should be seen as an opportunity to convert your negative reviewers into those who are willing to try again. 

3. Opportunities to create brand advocates

Meanwhile, engaging with and responding to your positive reviewers should be seen as an opportunity to nurture advocacy towards your brand. There is plenty of evidence out there that highlights the benefits of repeat custom and customer retention for your bottom line, but with the prevalence of user-generated review content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, who knows where else positive brand mentions could show up?

4. Consider your review prompts carefully

Finally, on the subject of social media, while it is a method of review prompting that reviewers are receptive to, ensure you are considerate and vigilant in how you manage this. A blanket ‘one size fits all’ approach may not be appropriate here, where responses and engagement are publicly visible. 

We hope these profiles have given you some food for thought for how you approach different consumer types.

The online reviews business is hugely competitive. Reputation, as they say, is everything. Even on the research front, we increasingly see more consumer review reports enter the market. 

The Local Consumer Review Survey delves into all of the crucial questions. How are today’s consumers searching for and interacting with business reviews? Which review elements are most important to consumers, and how do online reviews measure up against personal recommendations?

If you’ve been an avid follower of our consumer review research, you’ll recognize there are some questions we ask most years. This allows us to collect that juicy year-on-year trend data that shows how things may—or may not—be changing.

But we also want to keep things fresh. The review landscape continues evolving, so we always aim to dig into the latest developments and bring brand-new insights to support your reputation management endeavors, be you a big brand, small brand, marketing consultant, or business owner.

Here are just some of the key findings you can expect from the Local Consumer Review Survey 2024.

Key Themes and Findings

The chart above shows that the percentage of consumers ‘always’ or ‘regularly’ reading online reviews has held fast over the last three years (75% in 2024 against 76% in 2023). 

Meanwhile, just 3% of consumers say they ‘never’ read online reviews, reflecting how ingrained reviews are in most consumers’ business research.

Where are consumers reading online reviews?

The review landscape has expanded in recent years, with many brands and apps incorporating review functionalities to support purchase decisions.

In terms of ‘official’ review platforms, several long-standing sites are prominent in the USA (and beyond).

• Google remains the most-used website for reading online reviews, although the percentage of consumers using it for this has dropped from 87% in 2023 to 81% in 2024.
• Consumer use of Apple Maps and Trustpilot has increased by 3% since 2022, from 13% to 16% and 7% to 10%, respectively.

It won’t surprise many that Google remains at the top of the list for consumer review sites. The search giant is still, by far, the biggest review platform today.

What’s more interesting is where we see a downward trend for almost all listed websites and directories, except for Google, Apple Maps, and Trustpilot. 

Despite remaining in the top three most-used platforms, Facebook and Yelp have seen decreases in percentage points over the years—3% for Facebook since 2022 and 9% for Yelp. The gap between the two has also become much closer in 2024, with consumer use of Facebook for online reviews overtaking Yelp for the first since time 2020.

Back then, we noted that the dip in consumers using Yelp may have been caused by the impact covid-19 had on physical businesses like restaurants, hotels, and entertainment. It’s not entirely clear why the percentage of consumers using Yelp in 2024 is lower, however. 

The use of Tripadvisor and Better Business Bureau (BBB) has dropped significantly since 2022. Both platforms are typically known and used for industry-specific reviews: Tripadvisor for hospitality and entertainment business reviews and Better Business Bureau for professional trades and service-area businesses (SABs).

As the most widely-used review platform, it could be that Google continues to eat the market share of other review platforms as it becomes more helpful to users. For example, Google and its business profile management product, Google Business Profile (GBP), introduced notable features over the last year that enable businesses in particular niches to optimize their listings. Price comparisons, booking availability, and business amenities are now prominent features of hotel business profiles, and SABs can set service areas and make specific services prominent on their profiles. 

Finally, Apple Maps and Trustpilot are the two platforms that beat the downward trend and show increasing consumer use instead. In early 2023, Apple announced Apple Business Connect, a late-coming rival to GBP. As we reported at the time, businesses have been slow to claim their business profiles, and a quick poll found that only 12% of consumers used Apple Maps over Google Maps.

New features and an improved Apple Maps interface, including more appealing iconography to distinguish business types, could explain why we are seeing an increasing trend in consumers using this app.

Meanwhile, while Trustpilot is an open review platform, businesses often invite verified customers to review their customer service experiences. These reviews are clearly labeled as ‘Invited’ or ‘Verified’. The increase in consumers using Trustpilot to read reviews could be related to a desire to read verified—or perhaps, to them, more trustworthy—reviews.

How many sites do consumers check reviews on?

Despite noting a downward trend in the use of some review platforms, we wanted to see how many sources consumers used to read reviews on average.

• 77% of consumers use at least two review platforms in their business research.
• 41% of consumers use three or more review platforms.

Less than a quarter of consumers only use one review site before choosing a local business. This finding is particularly significant as it reinforces the need to ensure your brand is represented consistently across multiple review platforms.

When asking consumers for business reviews, providing them with several options is a good idea. As we know from the responses to the previous question, consumers have preferences and may have accounts with particular platforms. Giving them options and making the process as simple as possible can encourage them to leave reviews. 

Where else do consumers source business reviews?

When it comes to reviews and recommendations, we have to acknowledge the importance of alternative sources, including the growth of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok for “unstructured” consumer reviews (i.e. reviews that don’t follow a dedicated review structure or scoring system). 

2023 was a particularly interesting year for developments in these areas, with the introduction of Threads, the rebranding of Twitter to X, and the boom of generative AI. This is the first year we included ‘Threads’ and ‘ChatGPT/generative AI’ as responses.

• Local news as an alternative review source has increased by 8% since 2023.
• In 2024, consumers are using Instagram and TikTok for business reviews more, with an increase of 2% and 3%, respectively.

Apart from YouTube, all of the sources we listed in 2023 have seen increases. Most notable is local news—an interesting source, as it could cover both digital and more traditional forms of media, including print, radio, and TV. 

Local news and community initiatives are classic local marketing tactics that can support your brand’s visibility in local areas but can also be effective for link-building.

The increase in consumers using various social channels highlights the importance of maintaining your brand’s social presence. Being active and aware of these review alternatives will ensure you can find and respond to reviews and comments, engage with users, and maybe even win new audiences.

Finally, almost 10% of consumers said they’re using ChatGPT or similar generative AI tools as an alternative source of review information. Considering the technology only burst into the mainstream in early 2023, and research in March 2023 found that 73% of consumers had not used generative AI, this is significant.

How Consumers Interact with Review Platform Functionalities

We’ve noted some of the improvements that Google has made to business review platforms to support visibility and show more useful information to prospective customers. Now, we will look at some of the features that make finding the right review content easier.

For several years now, users have been able to use a search functionality within Google reviews to look for specific keywords and terms. More recently, it has improved filtering with ‘mentioned’ keywords, and now initially prioritizes the order of reviews shown on the default filter based on what it deems ‘most relevant.’

We provided consumers with an image of reference (below) and labeled eight prominent review features, asking consumers how useful they found each one when searching for business reviews on Google.

• 96% of consumers said that the ’search reviews’ function is useful to them in some way.
• ‘Sort by newest’ is deemed the most useful review function, with 47% of consumers finding it ‘highly useful.’
  

Clearly, all of the functions shown to consumers are useful in some way. The largest percentage of consumers who do not find a feature useful at all is 15% for a ‘highlighted’ review. From this, we can assume that consumers prefer to judge the relevance of the business’ reviews for themselves, rather than being guided by Google.

47% of consumers rated the ‘sort by newest’ function as ‘highly useful,’ which tells us that almost half of consumers consider review recency as important when deciding which business to use.

Although this question is specific to Google review functions, it’s important to note that most prominent review platforms use similar features to support the user experience. The ‘sort by’ functionality is a standard tool across most digital experiences, while keyword filters and search functionalities are present on platforms such as Yelp and Tripadvisor.

So, while we can only discuss the findings above concerning Google business reviews, it’s useful to consider how you can make review functionalities work for you on different platforms.

Functionalities like ‘sort by newest’ and ‘sort by highest rating’ incentivize businesses to actively put more effort into their review profiles, achieving a regular stream of reviews if they know that’s how people filter.

It also reinforces the importance of delivering excellent, memorable customer experiences. If there are things you want your brand to be known for, consider ways you could encourage customers to mention them in their reviews. Dog-friendly places or restaurant menus with particularly renowned items are just two examples users might be looking for.

The Most Important Review Factors

What are consumers looking for when they’re browsing business reviews? Are they looking for a high number of ‘good’ star ratings, or are there other factors that would reassure them before using a business?

• 69% of consumers would feel positive about using a business if its written reviews describe positive experiences (static against 2023, which was down from 75% in 2022).
• In 2024, 8% more consumers feel positive about a business if its reviews are written by named users than in 2023 (48% in 2024 vs. 40% in 2023).

Overall, there is a downward trend in review factors helping consumers feel positive about using a business. This could suggest that people are less willing to take things at face value.

There has been an increase in the percentage of consumers who said that reviews written by named users—as opposed to anonymous accounts—would make them feel positive about using a business. This points to a general sense of wariness around user-generated content and perhaps shows more digital ‘savviness.’

What star ratings do consumers expect to see?

• 71% of consumers would not consider using a business with an average rating below three stars, 16% lower than in 2023.
• 6% fewer consumers would use a business with a 3.5 star rating in 2024 than in 2023.

At a glance, there is an upward trend in consumers willing to use businesses with ‘low’ (lower than 3.0 stars) star ratings, and a downward trend where consumers expect ‘high’ (higher than 3.0 stars) star ratings as the minimum. 

However, if we examine this further, the majority of consumers still expect a business to have a star rating between 4.0 and 5.0. This figure has remained static since 2022.

The anomaly here is businesses with star ratings of 3.5, where we can see a percentage downshift of 6% since 2022. Could this suggest that consumers are now mistrustful of ratings that sit in the middle? 

If a business location has fewer reviews, its average star rating is likely to be skewed by an extremely low or high rating. An increasing willingness to give businesses with low ratings a chance suggests that consumers look beyond face value or are paying attention to review details to reach their conclusions.

There is no denying, however, that businesses should aim for a minimum average star rating of 4.0.

Does the number of reviews matter?

So, how many reviews does a business need to have for consumers to trust the average star rating?

• Most consumers expect a business to have between 20-99 reviews (59%), which has not changed since 2023.
• 12% of consumers said that the number of reviews does not impact the trust in their star rating, down 2% since 2023.

Interestingly, since 2023 there has been a very slight increase in consumers choosing the lower threshold of 0-19 reviews and a similarly slight decrease in consumers saying the number of reviews does not impact their perception.

This hints, once again, that consumers will look beyond ‘at-a-glance’ numbers and ratings to make their own minds up. They don’t necessarily believe in the implied worth of star ratings or how many reviews a business has without reading into the details to verify their impressions.

Almost two-thirds of consumers (59%) said that a business should have between 20-99 reviews in order for them to be able to trust the average star rating. So, while our findings suggest that consumers might be more willing to give businesses a chance, the majority expect between 20-99.

Review Recency

• 27% of consumers expect to see business reviews as fresh as two weeks, up from 25% in 2023, which was up from 22% in 2022.

Expectations of recent reviews is on the up, with 27% of consumers saying that reviews left within the past two weeks impact their decisions, compared to 22% in 2022. Reviews left within the past six months to a year are less likely to impact their choices.

In most cases, it makes sense that this is the expectation. If consumers read business reviews, they want an accurate representation of the most recent experiences with that brand. This will be especially important for businesses within the hospitality industry, including food and drink brands or hotels.

This finding highlights the importance of maintaining a regular stream of incoming customer reviews. A sporadic approach to review requests and followups won’t do, but a more robust reputation strategy or process can help.

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Responding to Consumer Reviews 

We’ve been discussing review responses for several years, and our findings consistently showed that consumers expect businesses to respond to their reviews. 2024 is no different.

• Consumers are 41% more likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews than a business that doesn’t respond to any.

The chart above clearly indicates that review responses matter to customers. 88% of consumers would use a business that responds to both positive and negative reviews, compared to just 47% that said they would consider using a business that doesn’t respond to any reviews.

Some consumers may see a business only responding to bad reviews as an attempt to save brand reputation without acknowledging the opinions of others. Similarly, consumers may see a business only responding to good reviews as just amplifying good feedback in order to gloss over the negative.

Either approach can appear inauthentic, and consumers today are clearly pretty savvy when detecting this.

As we know that review responses are an expectation in consumers’ minds, we wanted to find out if it was important when business owners respond to reviews. 

• 93% of consumers would expect a business to respond to their reviews.
• 34% of consumers expect a response to their reviews within two to three days of posting.

A mighty 93% of consumers expect businesses to respond to their reviews! So, if this has not been a part of your reputation management strategy so far, take this as a call to action.

Meanwhile, 87% of consumers said they expect review responses within two weeks, and only 4% feel it doesn’t matter when they receive one. This clearly shows how important timeliness is.

The Power of Generative AI in Reputation Management

Back to the subject of AI… in this year’s survey, we wanted to test something a little different.

We presented consumers with a business review sourced via Google. Then, we showed them two review responses and asked them to choose which response they would prefer to receive.

What the consumers didn’t know about these options is that one (Response 1) was the human response sourced from a genuine business owner on Google, and the other (Response 2) was a review response that we generated using ChatGPT.

58% of consumers unknowingly chose the AI-generated review response as their preferred response! Of course, there are many reasons why someone might prefer the content and sentiment of one written response over another.

When we considered the reasons behind their preferred response, it was interesting to note the sense of over-familiarity conveyed in response 1, compared to the more measured sentiment in response 2. Would you agree?

We can’t say what prompted this finding, but it highlights an interesting use case for marketers who may struggle with crafting unique review responses at scale.

Trust in Business Reviews

One of the most prominent themes that reports such as this surface is the importance of consumer trust in brands. While brands cannot actively control the content of the reviews published by other consumers online, we know there are many ways to manage the reputation process.

So, where do reviews sit in consumers’ minds compared to other types of recommendations?

Reviews vs. Recommendations from Other Sources

• 50% of consumers trust reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family.
• This is the first year that ‘I trust consumer reviews as much as recommendations from influencers with my local community’ was included as a response to this question.

The percentage of consumers who said they trust reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends has increased by 4% since 2023. It’s a significant finding, showing that half of consumers feel online reviews carry as much sway as personal recommendations.

For this year’s report, we wanted to distinguish between social media influencers and local influencers—essentially, macro vs. micro-influencers. We wanted to learn: is there a significant difference between well-known social media influencers endorsing a brand and influencers within the local community?

We found that the percentage of consumers who said they trust reviews as much as social media influencers has remained at 35% since 2023. 24% of consumers said they trust consumer reviews as much as local influencer recommendations. This could be lower than social media influencers as we tend to follow local personalities for specific recommendations, like restaurants and bars. If we were to examine the trust in macro and micro-influencers more closely, to look at businesses in different industries, the reasons might be much clearer.

We can see a 4% increase in consumers who said they trust consumer reviews as much as professionally written articles since 2023. This suggests that they verify online reviews against the opinions from other sources they deem trustworthy. This could also show a sense of wariness in terms of trusting influencer-endorsed content.

The Impact of Local Reviews on Big-brand Reputation

Another new question we had was how local branch reviews of big brands or franchises impact consumers’ choices, and whether this affects overall brand perception.

For example, if your nearest McDonald’s branch has a Google star rating of 2.0, would you still use that store? And how would that affect your overall perception of the McDonald’s brand?

• 89% of consumers said that the reviews of local branches would impact their decision to use the store in some way.
• 91% of consumers feel that local reviews of chains and franchises impact their overall perception of the brand in some way.

These findings are important because they show that marketers in big brands can’t afford to rest on their laurels in the hope that brand equity will win out. For more than a quarter of consumers, both of these things are true:

• The local consumer reviews of chains or franchises would impact their decision to use it ‘a great deal’.
• The local consumer reviews of chains or franchises would impact their overall perception of the brand ‘a great deal’.

The power of local reputation to impact brand perception should not be underestimated, particularly if we consider the previous findings on how consumers trust personal recommendations from friends and family or those of online influencers.

Fake Reviews and Suspicious Activity

Those in the reputation and local marketing game will know the perils of fake reviews. Even those who aren’t will likely have seen the reams of suspiciously gushing product reviews on e-commerce sites such as Amazon—generally known as the biggest culprit for fake reviews. 

As we’ve touched on in previous reports, and in our many resources on fake reviews, it’s a real industry problem. Most review and e-commerce sites take the issue seriously as a matter of policy, and Google in particular regularly takes strict action to prevent the practice.

What kind of trends are we seeing fake reviews this year?

Consumers are confident they’ve seen fake reviews across most platforms we asked about. Just 19% said they hadn’t seen any on the sites we provided, which remains static compared to 2023.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon remains the top culprit for fake reviews. However, it’s interesting to note that, aside from Tripadvisor, Apple Maps, and BBB, the percentage of consumers who are confident they’ve spotted reviews on the other review giants has decreased.

This could result from the efforts that platforms have put in to combat the issue in recent years, suggesting that there are genuinely fewer obviously fake reviews on these websites. According to Google, it removed over 170 million policy-violating reviews in 2023, 45% more than in 2022.

Despite a lower percentage of consumers saying they’ve used BBB to read reviews in 2024, there has been an increase in the percentage of consumers who are confident they have seen fake reviews there (9% in 2024 vs. 5% in 2022). The platform itself has recently spoken out on the issue of fake and incentivized reviews, suggesting the practice is becoming notably widespread on different platforms.

Can consumers tell if a review is fake?

A fake review could be left for various reasons. Some businesses pay fake review sellers for positive reviews of their businesses and negative reviews of their competitors, for example.

But fake reviews may also be written by disgruntled customers, employees, or even competitors! In some cases, people might write fake reviews to try to support friends or family, particularly if their business is struggling against negative feedback.

With all these reasons in mind, the content and sentiment of such reviews can vary wildly. There may be a barrage of star ratings with no written context or review content that feels too unbelievably positive or negative, for example. So, which of these would make consumers suspicious that a review is fake? 

This year, we introduced the response ‘the review feels like it was written by AI’. Surprisingly, this answer came out top! 40% of consumers said they’d suspect a review was fake if they felt like AI had written it.

It’s an interesting point because, as we know, there are plenty of legitimate use cases for generative AI in content writing. A consumer may feel unable to articulate what they want to say well enough and use generative AI tools for this. It’s also worth considering how, while standalone AI tools such as ChatGPT are available for anyone to use, generative AI is now being incorporated into other software and plugins. The Google Suite and Grammarly are just two everyday examples where generative AI can help predict and improve your writing, making suggestions based on tone and sentiment.

The fact that consumers are collating AI with ‘fakeness’ suggests that there is a misunderstanding in terms of what the technology really is and does. Coupled with AI headlines entering the mainstream press, it’s easy to see how people might reach these conclusions.

However, we also know from our review response test earlier in this survey that maybe consumers prefer the content generative AI can produce. Sure, they didn’t know that’s what they preferred, but it presents an interesting contrast in how consumers act vs. how consumers think.

The remaining results highlight some big contrasts between 2023 and 2024. In 2023, consumers seemed confident that reviews with just ratings and no words would make them suspicious that reviews were fake (47%). This has decreased by 19% in 2024. 

They also seem less certain that seeing business owners suggesting a review is fake would make them suspicious of fakeness (19% vs 30% in 2023). Further, they’re now less suspicious of reviews from users without profile photos (17% vs 27% in 2023).

As with the previous question on specific platforms, these responses could result from websites tackling fake review issues or consumers simply noticing fewer fake reviews while browsing. Alternatively, it could point to a greater sense of trust in online reviews.

How Consumers Write Reviews

So, we know how often consumers read reviews to support their business research and the elements they feel are most important to build trust. But how many consumers are leaving reviews themselves? Are they more likely to leave reviews for all experiences, positive or negative, or do they favor a particular type of review?

What types of reviews are consumers leaving?

While the numbers are roughly the same as last year, slightly more consumers have written reviews in the past year (73% vs 72% in 2023). The sentiment of these reviews has changed, though. 

The chart above highlights a positive shift in the percentage of consumers leaving positive reviews (38% in 2024 vs. 34% in 2022) and negative reviews (10% in 2024 vs. 7% in 2022). The percentage of consumers leaving both types of reviews has decreased from 33% in 2022 to 25% in 2024.

This trend suggests a further waning of the ‘gray area’ between extreme personalities and opinions, as we’ve seen in political discourse over the years (though it would be too far a leap to suggest they’re directly related).

Fewer people are being what you might call ‘balanced’ and leaving reviews for various experiences, and more are getting increasingly set in their ways. The good news is that, right now, there are more consumers only writing positive reviews than negative.

• The percentage of consumers that ‘always’ left a review when prompted has increased from 12% in 2023 to 19% in 2024.

69% of consumers can recall leaving a business review after being prompted by the brand within the last year, vs. 60% in 2023. Coupled with this, only 12% of consumers said they were prompted but did not write a review, compared to 19% in 2023. So, we can infer that more consumers positively respond to review requests in 2024, even if they don’t always write them.

What does this mean for your brand? Well, you may not always be successful, but it is absolutely worthwhile to ask customers for reviews. Nearly seven in every ten consumers will likely write a business review based on the above findings. So, if you aren’t currently asking, you are very likely missing out!

As for how to ask them, and even when, that’s up next.

Asking Consumers For Business Reviews

Knowing how and when to ask a customer to leave a brand review is tricky. Ask too soon, and they may not have had time to reflect on their experience; ask too late, and they may have forgotten about it entirely.

Plus, let’s face it, we all get a lot of review requests these days, don’t we? Multiple prompts in a short window can be irritating, and email inboxes are overflowing with review prompts, promotions, and spam.

So, how do consumers want to be asked for reviews?

Methods of Requesting Reviews from Customers

• The top three methods for asking for reviews are: email (32%), in-person (28%), and via social media (27%).
• There has been a 3% increase in consumers choosing ‘none of the above’ when asked about review prompt methods.

Despite email being a busy place, 32% of consumers still say they are more likely to respond to review requests this way. The top three answers from 2023 are the same in 2024 (email, in-person, and social media), although you’ll notice there is a downward trend across all three.

This finding, along with the 3% increase in consumers choosing ‘none of the above’ for review prompts, could point to a sense of review request fatigue. We’re all so used to being prompted to review transactions and experiences that it can run the risk of feeling meaningless.

Brands need to make their requests count by using the right formats, making it simple (as we discussed earlier with the choice of review platforms), making their request stand out from the others, and timing it right.

But when is “right”?

The Window of Opportunity for Review Prompts

We asked consumers when they think brands should contact them with a review prompt, and provided seven different industries where this could differ.

We’ve grouped hospitality, entertainment, and wellbeing together in one chart, as the industries share similarities in how their services focus on providing customers with experiences. Healthcare, professional trades/SABs, and real estate have been grouped in another.

• 24% of consumers expect to be asked to leave a review for food and drink brands on the same day as their experience.
• 48% of consumers said food and drink brands should ask for a review within two to three days of the experience.

‘Food and drink’ stands out as the industry where consumers expect the fastest turnaround for review prompts. Almost a quarter of consumers want these businesses to reach out on the very same day, although the majority would prefer between one and three days.

For accommodation, entertainment, and beauty and wellbeing, we see larger proportions of consumers who think businesses should ask any time within a week.

Our earlier discussion on review recency comes into play here. If you’re planning on visiting somewhere to eat, you’d expect to read about the most recent customer experiences with food and drink brands. It makes sense that consumers would expect these types of businesses to follow up quickly.

The same might be true for recent experiences in the accommodation, entertainment, or beauty industries. However, consumers might require a slightly longer window to reflect on their experiences with these business types—for example, how well a particular beauty or cosmetic treatment lasts.

• Healthcare review prompts should be sent within three days to a week (40%).
• 11% of consumers would not want to be prompted to leave a review for a real estate experience at all.

For healthcare, professional trades, and real estate, consumers would expect slightly longer windows before brands reach out to ask for a review, although within three days to a week is the sweet spot. 

40% of consumers said they would prefer healthcare brands to ask within three days to a week. Given the nature of some healthcare services and procedures, it feels accurate that consumers wouldn’t want to receive prompts too soon after an experience.

The key takeaway from these request findings is that brands need to be smart with their prompts, get the timing right, and avoid bombarding their customers at all costs. Remember, this is still a part of the transaction or experience, so annoying customers with endless review request emails could achieve an undesirable result.

Incentivizing Customers to Write Reviews

Now, while we’ve included incentives within the following section of the report, it is crucial to note that BrightLocal does not endorse the incentivization of reviews in any way.

We can appreciate that there is a lot of conflicting information out there and it’s easy to go down this route to attract more customers to write business reviews. What’s the harm of rewarding loyalty with a simple discount, right? Wrong, unfortunately.

For brands and businesses that aren’t in the know—of which there are many, so if this is you, don’t panic!—it’s important to note that most review platforms prohibit review incentivization. The penalties for incentivizing or buying reviews can vary, including the disabling or removal of your review profiles, or having your profile labeled as one that has unlawfully incentivized reviews.

Last year, we found that review incentivization is still sadly alive and well. Given the ongoing issues around the prevalence of fake reviews, we wanted to see if businesses were still going down the incentivization route in 2024. The results are… quite something.

Not only is the practice of review incentivization up across the board but the percentage increases in consumers recalling being offered these incentives is significant.

Increases in Review Incentivization: 2023 vs. 2024

It could be that such drastic increases in discounts or free gifts come from a lack of understanding of incentivization rules. As discussed, many businesses don’t know that these methods are prohibited on many platforms, and may have viewed discounts or free gifts as ‘harmless’ ways to reward loyalty.

The fact is that incentivization encourages consumers to leave reviews that they might not have organically, and influences the content of the review—typically in the brands’ favor. Even if they are from verified customers, the reviews cannot be deemed authentic and trustworthy, therefore discrediting the entire system.

Summary

While much of what was important to consumers in 2022 and 2023 holds today, some themes stand out in 2024.

Firstly, it’s more apparent than ever that consumers are checking multiple sources for business reviews and recommendations, including those outside of traditional review platforms. It’s a pressing reminder that reputation management should be viewed as a strategy instead of a task; not something that can be picked up when there’s time. Reputation encompasses both digital and offline channels. Realistically, it should be a shared responsibility and actively factored into areas like social media and community management, email marketing, content strategy, and more.

Next, brand marketers have to be more strategic with their review requests. Automation is a wonderful thing that can speed up tasks for us marketers. But without the human considerations of timeliness and providing customers with the choice of where and how they review, it remains ineffective—or worse, frustrating for consumers. 

Several findings hint at a sense of consumer apathy towards the expectation for them to provide reviews after almost every experience with a business. Brands must remain conscious and respectful of this when asking for customer favors. It’s a tricky balance, knowing that review recency is a particularly important review factor.

Ultimately, with all things customer experience, the utmost focus should always come down to exactly that: delivering exceptional, memorable experiences. Give consumers a reason to want to write your brand a review actively; make sure they have things to talk about that others will find useful; be present across your reputation platforms (that includes the alternative channels, like social media), and always keep in mind how local brand experiences contribute to overall brand perception.

Methodology

The Local Consumer Review Survey 2024 was conducted using a representative panel of 1,141 US consumers via SurveyMonkey. 

Publications and individuals are welcome to use the research findings, charts, and data, provided that BrightLocal is cited as the author and the page URL (https://brightlocal.com/research/local-consumer-review-survey) is linked to.

While much of the physical economy has recovered since the pandemic, there is evidence that it caused a sharp disruption in brand loyalty. Purchase decisions fueled by convenience, value, and proximity have led to new shopping behaviors.

Of course, businesses in every sector will face unique challenges. But only multi-location marketers will know the ongoing chess game of managing a brand at local, regional, and national levels.

We wanted to understand the challenges multi-location businesses face in 2024, how they might differ based on their size, and what drives marketing performance.

To achieve this, we asked 200 marketing decision-makers working in multi-location brands in the USA, Canada, and the UK about their marketing performance, investments, and strategies to build a picture of the current multi-location landscape and understand the key to high performance in 2024.  

Throughout the report, we’ll discuss critical themes of marketing technology, the importance of customer satisfaction and retention, and areas of opportunity in marketing tactics.

Understanding Definitions Within the Report

In the second part of this report, we’ll talk about the ‘High Performers’ of multi-location marketing, creating a benchmark that we’ll refer to throughout. Readers will find this helpful in measuring their performance and that of competitors.

The third section of this research will highlight three key groups: Local Players (11-50 locations), Regional Challengers (51-100 locations), and Big Brands (101+ locations) and compare what they’re doing to the High Performers, so businesses of all sizes have a benchmark to look to.

The Multi-location Marketing Landscape: Key Trends

Let’s kick off with an overview of the market in general. We’ll look at how brand marketers feel they’ve been performing, what channels they’re investing in, and what local marketing looks like for them.

Looking Back: Marketing Performance in 2023

The great news is just 4% of multi-location marketers feel their marketing performance fell below expectations in 2023. With almost two-thirds reporting that performance exceeded expectations, it’s a highly positive perception of their teams’ capabilities. 

The Marketing Mix

The Top Five Channels That Multi-location Brands Are Investing In

A whopping 99% of multi-location brands are investing in social media, with 88% investing a medium-high amount in this channel. This result is significantly higher than the other marketing channels listed, so it’s clear that social media forms a vital part of multi-location marketing strategies.

Paid social, SEO, TV advertising, and local SEO follow as the next most invested in marketing channels. So, brands are investing in brand awareness channels (Paid social and TV) while also focusing on the importance of visibility (SEO and local SEO).

It’s interesting, then, that PPC is at the bottom of the list for channel investment. Sitting lower than traditional forms of marketing (direct marketing, radio, out-of-home advertising), this could suggest that brands do not see the best returns from PPC for brand awareness. Alternatively, it could just be that multi-location brands use PPC for smaller or more targeted strategies and are getting more from their campaigns for lower spend.

Marketing Team Capabilities

As mentioned earlier, multi-location brands will face different challenges than other business types. Consistency is a big theme here, as brands must replicate the same standards, service, and experience they are known for from location to location.

Another challenge is maintaining brand standards when adapting to new areas where local requirements and customs may differ.

We wanted to gauge how marketers felt their businesses were doing in keeping on top of these common obstacles.

The Top Five Business Challenges That Multi-location Marketing Teams are ‘Very Good’ or ‘Good’ at Tackling

As with performance, marketing leaders generally reflect a positive sentiment towards their teams’ capabilities, and there don’t appear to be any glaring problem areas. 

However, while 80% of brands said their businesses were either ‘Very Good’ or ‘Good’ at understanding ownership of marketing within organizations, we can see that 23% felt that the ability to manage the adoption of marketing initiatives and streamline external communications was just ‘Fair’ to ‘Poor’. This suggests a potential breakdown between the communication and execution of some marketing as responsibilities fall to location levels. 

It could also show that, although 82% of our marketing decision-makers feel their organizations are ‘Very Good’ or ‘Good’ at managing internal communications, the messages might not be being received or understood as well as they think further down the chain.

Let’s take a look at where local marketing strategy comes into play.

Local Marketing as a Strategy (Not Just a Tactic)

It’s positive to see that the vast majority (86%) of multi-location brands have dedicated local marketing strategies in place. That leaves 14% where either no dedicated strategy exists or the strategy is unclear

A lack of dedicated local strategy means that crucial business challenges, such as the ones mentioned above, can be much harder to overcome. With no local marketing strategy, how can you expect teams in different regions or locations to fully understand, be on board with, and adopt marketing initiatives?

So, if you’re reading this, you don’t have a robust local strategy, and you’re familiar with some of these marketing challenges, local strategy might be an excellent place to start.

Managing Local Marketing Activities

Now, the way multi-location businesses execute marketing activity at regional or local levels may vary for many reasons, based on industry, differences in area requirements, or franchising requirements. It’s interesting to look broadly at how multi-location brands manage this, though.

Again, if there are gaps in how well your business manages multi-location challenges, considering the different approaches may help you understand why.

Almost half (45%) of multi-location brands use a hybrid approach of centralized marketing teams (at the level of HQ) and branch or location-level local marketing.

What works for one business won’t necessarily work for another, and we’re not saying there is a correct answer. But it is worth considering that plenty of research around change management, business transformation, and product adoption shows that teams often react more positively to change, or are more willing to adopt new processes and initiatives if they feel they have some ownership of them.

Supporting Local Marketing with Technology

Next, we wanted to understand how widely technology was used in multi-location local marketing. 98% of brand respondents say they are using the technology to support local strategies.

Of course, when we refer to marketing technology that supports local marketing, this could include any number of tools, from monitoring local rankings and fluctuations to business location performance data, review management, and more. But what this does tell us is just how crucial marketing technology is in delivering on these tactics.

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The ‘High Performers’ of Multi-location Marketing

In this section, we will take the brands who reported that their marketing performance ‘exceeded’ expectations and use this group to create the benchmark for marketing performance.

Throughout the report, we’ll refer to this group as ‘High Performers.’ The remaining brands we compare against—those meeting expectations or falling short—we’ll refer to as ‘Average Performers.’

It’s important to note that both groups contain respondents representing multi-location businesses of all sizes.

High Performers: Key Findings

Marketing Channel Investments

• High Performers are 17% more likely to invest ‘highly’ in social media than Average Performers (57% vs 40%).
• High Performers are 15% more likely to invest ‘highly’ in paid social than Average Performers (42% vs 27%).
  High Performers are 10% more likely to invest ‘highly’ in local SEO than Average Performers (38% vs 28%).

Using Marketing Technology and AI

• 56% of High Performers are using marketing technology to ‘a great extent’, compared to 22% of Average Performers.
• 36% of High Performers are using generative AI to ‘a great extent’, compared to just 13% of Average Performers.
  

Local Marketing Strategy

• 94% of High Performers have a dedicated local marketing strategy, compared to 60% of Average Performers.
• 52% of Average Performers rate their marketing teams’ understanding of local SEO as ‘Fair’ to ‘Poor’, while 93% of High Performers rate their teams’ understanding as ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’.

High Performers: Top Trends

Marketing Channel Investment

• 95% of High Performers are investing a medium-high amount in social media.
• Just 1% of High Performers do not invest in social media at all.
• After social media (organic and paid), High Performers are investing the most in Local SEO.
• Of the responses offered, the channel High Performers invest in the least is PPC (pay-per-click).

This chart highlights the investments High Performers make across their marketing mix. You’ll notice a lot of green bars, which shows that High Performers are no slouches when it comes to putting their hands in their pockets and investing in a variety of channels. 

Organic social media stands out, with the most significant level of investment: 57% of High Performers rated their investments in the channel as ‘High.’ Just 1% said they do not invest in social media at all.

Behind organic social media, paid social sits as the second most invested in. Paid social is a popular choice for awareness and discovery campaigns to capture new audiences and entice customers away from competitors. These two channels being positioned at the top of the chart suggest that High Performers prioritize customer acquisition and retention equally.

Local SEO sees the third-highest level of investment from High Performers, with 76% making medium-high investments in this area.

As we’ll get into shortly, High Performers are much more likely than other businesses to have a dedicated local marketing or local SEO strategy in place, so it’s clear that a confident understanding and investment in this area is paying off for them, and that local marketing is fundamental to overall marketing success.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC), meanwhile, is the least invested in. 10% of High Performers aren’t investing in the channel at all, while 32% have stated only a low level of investment.

Local Marketing Focus: Strategy, Knowledge, and Tools

While we asked multi-location marketers about their level of investment in local SEO, we also wanted to understand whether this is an area that marketers fully understand. Namely, whether businesses have dedicated local SEO strategies in place and whether their marketing teams clearly understand the differences between traditional SEO and local SEO.

• 94% of High Performers have a dedicated local strategy in place—34% more than Average Performers

There is a clear contrast here, with just 2% of High Performers stating they don’t have a dedicated local strategy, compared to a third of Average Performers.

• 93% of marketing teams in the High Performers group have a ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ understanding of the differences between traditional SEO and local SEO.
• No one in the High Performers group rated their team’s understanding of local SEO as ‘Poor.’
• Less than half of Average Performers have a ‘Good’ or ‘Very Good’ understanding of the differences between traditional SEO and local SEO.

Examining Local Marketing Teams

With over half of Average Performers stating their marketing teams’ understanding of local SEO as ‘Fair’ or ‘Poor,’ we broke out their marketing team sizes to see how many people are working on local marketing.

• 59% of High Performers have dedicated more than 40% of their marketing team to local marketing.
• 40% of Average Performers have dedicated more than 40% of their marketing team to local marketing.
• Over a quarter of Average Performers dedicate up to 20% of their marketing function to local marketing.

From this, we can determine that the highest-performing multi-location businesses take local SEO seriously, as they dedicate more resources to teams and strategy in this area. 

Marketing Technology and Multi-location Businesses

From the above data, we’ve seen that High Performers and Average Performers treat local SEO differently. Would things change when we asked about the use of technology in local SEO? Would this uncover some opportunities for Average Performers to take note of?

• 98% of High Performers use marketing technology “to some extent” or “to a great extent” to support local marketing, compared to 77% of Average Performers.
• 29% of Average Performers use marketing technology to little or no extent.

The chart above highlights that 100% of High Performers use marketing technology to support their local strategies, with only 2% saying they use it ‘a little’ extent. This is compared to 29% of Average Performers using marketing technology to ‘little’ or no extent.

Only 22% of Average Performers use marketing technology to ‘a great’ extent, compared to 56% of High Performers, suggesting that High Performers see a more significant benefit from their tools. This could be down to team capabilities and whether they have the knowledge or training to use certain tools or have more team resources dedicated to local marketing. 

There is clearly an opportunity for underperforming businesses to identify how and where marketing tools can better support their local marketing functions—or where additional training is needed within teams.

High Performers: Further Analysis

Comparing High Performers’ and Average Performers’ business priorities highlights striking differences that could help us understand where that better performance is coming from.

Business Objectives and Future Priorities 

We asked marketers what business outcomes their marketing activities are designed around. These core performance areas influence goal-setting (KPIs, OKRs, and similar frameworks) and determine what marketing teams focus on throughout the year.

• 67% of High Performers focus on customer satisfaction—15% more than Average Performers.
• 68% of Average Performers focus marketing activities on customer acquisition —12% more than High Performers.
• High Performers are 15% more likely to focus on customer retention than Average Performers.

The results in the chart above reflect a more measured approach for the High Performers, with reasonably equal weighting across the business outcomes. This level only drops off as we come to location footfall, where fewer than one-third of High Performers have said they’re focusing marketing efforts here.

For the Average Performers, however, there are two stand-outs: revenue growth (80%) and customer acquisition (68%). 

It would be surprising for businesses not to rely on marketing to support revenue growth. Still, it’s interesting to see customer satisfaction (52%) and customer retention (49%) take more of a back seat for Average Performers.

A lot of research shows that your existing customers are better for your bottom line. Focusing on nurturing a loyal customer base can yield more impressive profits. According to Bain and Co., increasing customer retention by 5% can lead to a 25% profit increase. Meanwhile, evidence also suggests that acquiring a new customer can be up to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing customer.

So, while focusing on attracting new customers is good for revenue growth, it’s important to consider how marketing teams can contribute to the shared responsibility of customer satisfaction.

• 39% of High Performers are prioritizing customer satisfaction in 2024, compared to 27% of Average Performers.
• 38% of High Performers highlighted increasing locations as a top 2024 priority, compared to 25% of Average Performers.
• 35% of High Performers highlighted increasing AI and automation as a top 2024 priority, compared to just 17% of Average Performers.

Comparing the two charts above, we can see that High Performers are prioritizing things with a measured approach that aligns with their core marketing outcomes.

We see a continued commitment to strengthening existing customer relationships and building brand loyalty—and plans to increase locations (38%) and acquire new customers (35%).

The data from Average Performers, on the other hand, tells a markedly different story. Customer acquisition sits at the top of their 2024 priorities (63%), followed by increasing brand awareness (50%) and increasing overall efficiency (47%). 

Considering the Average Performers have reported only just meeting performance expectations—or even falling short—and are also looking to increase efficiency in 2024, you’d hope to see a more balanced approach in their priorities. Customer acquisition sitting squarely ahead of other key priorities, like improving customer satisfaction, suggests a misunderstanding of what it takes to achieve business (and revenue) growth.

As we’ve touched on, customer satisfaction and retention can be significantly more cost-efficient for brands. But from a reputation perspective, we mustn’t underestimate the sheer power of brand loyalty here, too. While your existing customers are often happier to try your new products and services, you should also consider how a base of loyal customers can lead to brand awareness via their advocacy.

Implementing Local Marketing Tactics

Let’s look at the marketing tactics businesses are working with. In doing so, we might be able to highlight just what the High Performers are getting right—and understand some areas where our Average Performers are missing opportunities.

• High Performers are 25% more likely to use video as a local marketing tactic than Average Performers (63% vs. 38%).
• High Performers are 16% more likely to focus on reputation management as a local marketing tactic than Average Performers (46% vs. 30%).
• Average Performers are 13% more likely to be using outreach for local marketing than High Performers (59% vs 46%).

Similar proportions of High Performers and Average Performers use social media, paid advertising, and local content as local marketing tactics.  

The key areas where the High Performers are focusing more are video, local rankings optimization, reputation management, and local citations. However, the local marketing tactic that Average Performers rely on significantly more than High Performers is outreach (59% vs. 46%). This finding, and their focus on customer acquisition above all else, suggests that Average Performers have been over-reliant on outreach marketing to fulfill this goal. 

Video marketing can be tricky to implement if the budget and talent are hard to find, but it’s clearly an area that High Performers are taking advantage of more than Average Performers. If you’re reading this and your brand isn’t currently working on video, it’s worth considering where you can start. Could you take a handful of your locations as a test and see what results it yields?

While video sits much more in brand awareness and engagement, the remaining three tactics that High Performers use more than Average Performers (local rankings optimization, reputation management, and citations) are fundamental to ensuring visibility in the right places, so that the right people can find you with the search terms you want to be found for.

Analyzing Multi-location Strategies by Business Size

Challenges, tactics, and strategies all change with scale. The more locations you work with, the more complex the marketing will be.

Now that we’ve looked at what marked High Performers out against the rest of the pack, let’s take a look at how multi-location businesses of different sizes compare.

First, let’s recap how we defined these business sizes:

• Big Brands: businesses with 101+ locations
• Regional Challengers: businesses with 51-100 locations
• Local Players: businesses with 11-50 locations

We’ll start by looking at business objectives for the coming year.

Business Objectives, Priorities, and Challenges

• Regional Challengers are prioritizing customer satisfaction (51%) and customer retention (54%) the least out of all groups, but prioritizing profit margin (57%) and location footfall (41%) significantly more than the other sizes.
• Big Brands are prioritizing profit margin the least out of all the groups (46%).

The Top Three Marketing Objectives Multi-location Businesses Have Been Working Towards

Much like the High Performers, Big Brands appear to show the most consistency in evenly weighting their business priorities. The two lowest priorities, where the percentages drop more, are profit margin and location footfall.

However, the biggest gaps between the groups appear to concern the Regional Challengers. 51% of Regional Challengers said their marketing activities focus on customer satisfaction, compared to the High Performers benchmark level of 67%. The next biggest gaps appear in gaining market share (41% against the High Performers benchmark of 54%) and customer retention (54% compared to the High Performer benchmark of 64%). 

If your brand falls within the Regional Challengers group, you might see this as a chance to review your current marketing output. Are there some missed opportunities around these areas?

As we’ve already found, a relationship exists between underperforming brands and their prioritization in attaining new business over satisfying existing customers. It looks like Regional Challengers are following a similar pattern.

Another interesting difference is how Regional Challengers appear to focus on specific location footfall over the other groups. Again, it does suggest a ‘quantity over quality’ imbalance. Are Regional Challengers focusing too much on increasing feet through the door when they could be increasing the average basket spend, for example?

• The High Performers benchmark for customer retention (45%) is significantly higher than individual business sizes.

The Top Three Marketing Priorities for Multi-location Brands in 2024

When looking at the different sizes of multi-location businesses and their priorities, we can see some interesting differences between the groups.

Firstly, the Local Players, Regional Challengers, and Big Brands are generally far behind the High Performers benchmark with customer retention. It’s a theme that keeps cropping up and provides all the more reason for multi-location businesses of all sizes to pay attention to this area.

You’ll notice that nearly half of our Big Brand respondents (49%) have highlighted AI and automation as a focus area for 2024.

Artificial Intelligence in itself is not a new concept. However, the constant—and very newsworthy—developments in generative AI throughout 2023 have put the words into every marketer’s mouth.

Since the boom of generative AI, larger brands and market leaders will likely face higher pressure to adopt new AI-driven technologies than smaller-sized organizations. There is somewhat of an expectation to “keep up” with the others in the big leagues. 

Retail, hospitality, and entertainment feel like obvious examples of where you might expect to see this in the mainstream. Plenty of brands are rolling out implementations of generative AI in digital environments to aid customer experiences. Will we start to see this in physical environments, too?

• 42% of Big Brands cite increasing labor costs as a key challenge for 2024, against 24% of Regional Challengers.
• 39% of Local Players feel increasing material costs will be a big challenge in 2024.
• 35% of Regional Challengers cite increasing competition as one of the biggest challenges in 2024.

We asked marketers about their top three challenges for the year ahead, and the groups have some notable differences.

As we’ve seen with Big Brands prioritizing AI in 2024, it’s a no-brainer that they’ve also placed emerging technology as one of the biggest challenges for this year. Their top challenge, however, is increasing labor costs, with 42% of this group agreeing that this is one of the biggest current issues. Without getting too conspiratorial, is one of these challenges seen as an opportunity to resolve the other?

It’s worth looking further at the responses around technology here: compared to the 42% of Big Brands, only 19% of Regional Challengers are worried about emerging technology in 2024. Yet when it comes to updating their existing tech stacks, 32% of Regional Challengers see this as a big challenge for 2024. This is higher than Big Brands (19%), Local Players (25%), and the High Performers benchmark of 29%.

What could this suggest? Perhaps Big Brands don’t view their tech stack as a problem, or maybe their focus is slightly clouded by the genAI race. If the latter is the case, it would be interesting to see what challenges they may encounter later, in terms of integrations and streamlining.

We can see that Regional Challengers aren’t currently getting the most out of their tech stacks, and may well seek to update these in 2024. 

Regional Challengers see increasing competition as the biggest challenge (35%). This goes hand-in-hand with their top priority for 2024:  brand awareness (51%). There’s clearly an awareness of, and a need to, raise brand profiles to remain competitive.

Local Players see increasing material costs as their biggest challenge in 2024. It makes sense, as smaller brands may have less bargaining power in the buying market and will likely feel the squeeze of increasing costs more than larger competitors.

If this is their biggest business concern, it also makes sense that they would be less concerned with technological advances, either in their tech stacks or in adopting emerging technologies.

Local Marketing Deep-Dive

The Importance of Strategy and Knowledge

When putting together our questions for respondents, we hypothesized that the bigger the brand size, the more mature its local marketing strategy would be—that is, having a dedicated local strategy in place and a team with a strong understanding of the nuances between local and traditional or typical SEO.

• 92% of Big Brands have a dedicated local marketing strategy, the closest to the High Performers benchmark of 94%.
• Businesses with 51-100 locations (Regional Challengers) are the least likely to have a local SEO strategy in place (16%), followed by Local Players (11-50 locations).

Proportionately, the Big Brands show more local SEO maturity, with 92% stating that a dedicated strategy is in place. This is just two percentage points behind the High Performers benchmark, which generally reinforces an assumption that Big Brands would have more mature local SEO practices.

As we found earlier, 10% of all businesses do not have a local marketing strategy (and 4% were unsure if they did). So, we can see from the chart above that this segment is mostly made up of representatives from Regional Challenger and Local Player-sized businesses.

However, you’ll notice that Local Players are more likely to have a local marketing strategy in place than Regional Marketers. Why might this be?

It could be that Local Players, having a smaller (and possibly more concentrated) portfolio of branches, have a better understanding of their markets and local area requirements. Brands in the Regional Challengers group are more likely to have experienced a rapid period of expansion in recent times, meaning that a more comprehensive strategy is needed—or that their previous one no longer fits.

• Regional Challengers appear to have the biggest gaps in local SEO knowledge, with 27% claiming their teams have a ‘Fair’ or ‘Poor’ understanding.
• Local Players are the closest group to the High Performers benchmark (94%), with 90% stating a ‘Very good’ or ‘Good’ understanding of the differences between traditional SEO and local SEO.

90% of Local Players rate their marketing teams’ understanding of local SEO as ‘Good’ to ‘Very Good’, compared to 83% of Big Brands, 73% of Regional Challengers, and against the High Performers benchmark of 94%. Why might Local Players be the most knowledgeable?

It could well be that that greater local marketing maturity is not achieved simply by being a larger business that has existed in the space for longer. Instead, it could suggest that local marketing maturity is ‘elastic’: it develops and changes as the requirements of a brand also change. 

Understanding of local area requirements will vastly differ when a business goes from 11-50 locations to hitting a milestone of 100 and scaling up further to the nationwide level. 

Local Marketing Tactics in Action

• Big Brands appear to be the biggest users of local-specific content (58%), while just 40% of Local Players implement this tactic.
• 69% of Big Brands and Local Players use paid ads as a local marketing tactic, compared to 59% of Regional Challengers and 61% of High Performers.

Analyzing local marketing tactics by business size, we can see that Big Brands broadly follow the High Performers benchmark by investing in a wide range of tactics rather than a select few. 

Citations and business listings are important for brands of all sizes to ensure that business information is consistent and uniform online. This challenge only gets greater for Big Brands, as having hundreds or even thousands of locations to update and maintain becomes more difficult and time-consuming.

We’ve covered just a few of the detrimental effects of incorrect business information on brand reputation in the Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023.

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There are some tactics that Big Brands appear to be investing in more than High Performers, which could suggest that they are spending too much time (or money) in some areas. The most notable example of this is local-specific content (58% vs. 46% for High Performers).

Too much content can be a problem, particularly if it confuses or cannibalizes your SEO efforts or jeopardizes your user experience. This could even be a legacy issue as SEO best practices have evolved. 

While content is still vital for boosting visibility and building trust by reflecting your expertise and authority (see: Google’s E-E-AT), there was a time when brands and agencies thought that churning out reams of ‘fresh’ content was the answer. Some brand marketers may not be up to date on the latest SEO best practices or no longer work with agency partners, so could be over-reliant on some tactics they feel they understand well.

In the data above, Regional Challengers appear to be using social media, email marketing, and paid advertising the most as local marketing tactics. Against the High Performers benchmark, the gaps that highlight some potential opportunities for them are video, local rankings, citations, and reputation management.

While we previously highlighted the difficulties of video marketing, this tactic may actually present an opportunity for some business sizes and types. Where Big Brands are pretty much using the tactic in line with High Performers, we notice a gap between them and Regional Challengers and Local Players, suggesting there may be a chance for the latter two groups to learn from what the most successful brands are doing.

Email marketing tells a similar story to video, highlighting how Big Brands use it more than Regional Challengers and Local Players. It’s always a good idea to look at what competitors are doing, or even brands in other industries, to highlight areas of opportunity and improvement in your own marketing. Could Big Brands be using email as a customer loyalty tool, nurturing customer segments with tailored content that isn’t just sales-led?

Gap Analysis: Search Marketing Tactics 

Local rankings and reputation management are two areas in which Local Players seem to be fairly behind, compared to both the High Performers benchmark and their peer groups. They’re also the least likely to use local content (40%) out of all the groups.

If we group all of the marketing tactics by the outcomes they’re designed to impact, we can see a theme as far as content, reputation, local rankings optimization, and citations are concerned: the importance of search visibility.

It’s worth remembering that your competitors aren’t necessarily just the biggest names or the market leaders in your industry. In the multi-location world, you must also consider who else is in your potential customer’s proximity.

Without focusing on key visibility tactics and hoping to get by on brand name alone, you run the risk of failing on other fundamental areas that can turn people away—being outranked in the local map pack, incorrect or inconsistent business information causing confusion, and avoidable negative reviews.

Other Findings: AI, Economic Outlook, and Channel Investment and Impact

Despite only hitting the mainstream at the start of 2023, generative artificial intelligence has already caused a dramatic influx of new ‘AI-assisted’ tools aimed at both business and consumer audiences.

In August 2023, our own Local Search Industry Survey found that 93% of local marketers had already experimented with AI tools. So, in the question below, we wanted to know to what extent generative AI is now used at the multi-location scale.

• 88% of multi-location businesses are already using generative AI.
• 28% of multi-location businesses say they are using generative AI “to a great extent”.
• Only 11% of multi-location businesses aren’t using generative AI “at all”.

70% of marketers state that generative AI is used “to some extent” or “to a great extent,” suggesting that the technology has made waves within these organizations.

Furthermore, when asking those who are investing about the returns seen so far, it appears that generative AI mostly exceeds expectations.

• 64% of multi-location businesses said the ROI of generative AI has exceeded expectations.
• 98% of multi-location businesses said the ROI of generative AI has “met or exceeded expectations”.
• Just 2% of multi-location businesses felt the return of their generative AI investments fell short of expectations.

We’ve seen many examples of brands using generative AI in fun and clever ways for digital and out-of-home advertising and social content. It can leverage strong brand USPs and positioning surprisingly cost-effectively: take this advertising battle between McDonald’s and Burger King, for example. 

So, where do multi-location see the biggest opportunities with the continually evolving tech? We asked marketers to select up to three areas.

It looks like marketers are looking for assistance with more technical endeavors than creative ones. 36% of marketers highlighted data analysis as an area that generative AI can impact the most, while 24% highlighted SEO, and 23% cited forecasting and prediction. 

While it’s easy to first think of generative AI’s capabilities to create new, original media, there are a whole host of genAI tools in the market specifically designed to assist with—and speed up—data analytics. Creating engaging data visuals and summarizing vast amounts of data to provide impactful insights are just two use cases for such tools. 

However, that’s not to say that ‘data analytics’ can’t lend itself to other areas, like personalization, in order to create unique experiences. Think about personalized menu recommendations for restaurants, virtual ‘try-on’ experiences in retail outlets, or custom fitness profiles in gyms and health centers. This term also encompasses ‘forecasting and prediction’, of which data analysis is the very heart.

As the technology continues to evolve, though, there’s no doubt we’ll see opportunities and use cases for all industries unfolding.

Economic Optimism in 2024

How are multi-location marketers feeling about the year ahead? The good news is that businesses say they are looking pretty resilient and, as we’ve seen above, are already making strides in how they’re adopting and adapting to new technologies.

Despite economic challenges, the sentiment among multi-location marketers for the year ahead is high, with 77% feeling optimistic about 2024’s economic conditions. 

Only 10% of multi-location businesses feel pessimistic about the economic conditions ahead of them in 2024.

On top of this, brands also have a good appetite for business expansion.

81% of multi-location businesses told us that they are likely to open new locations in 2024. So, despite the challenges discussed earlier in the report, the multi-location business landscape is staying positive and ready to tackle what comes its way.

Channel Investment and Impact 

We’ve previously discussed marketing channel investment at a high-performance level. In this next section, we’ll go further to take a look at the impact that marketers are seeing on their revenues as a result of channel investment.

We’ve summarized each group with some key findings below.

High Performers vs. Average Performers

• High Performers invest more than Average Performers in 9 our of 10 marketing channels.
• Average Performers invest more in PPC than High Performers.

• High Performers see a good impact on revenue from SEO, considering their investment level (7.0 Investment Score vs. 7.3 Impact Score).
• Despite lower investment than Average Performers in PPC, High Performers see a better impact on their revenue in this area (5.9 Investment Score vs. 6.6 Impact Score, against 6.3 respectively for Average Performers).

Local Players

• Local Players see the most impact on revenues from social media (7.6/10).
• The channels seeing the highest impact on revenues are PPC and Direct Mail.
• Local Players are investing the least in PPC among their marketing mix.

Regional Challengers

• Regional Challengers see the most impact on revenues from social media (8/10).
• The channels seeing the highest impact on revenues are Radio, Direct Mail, and SEO.
• Regional Challengers are investing the least in radio advertising out of all channels—but the impact for those investing is fairly strong (5.6 investment score vs. 6.5 impact score).

Big Brands

• Big Brands are seeing the highest impact on revenues from paid social (7.5/10) compared to the other channels.
• The channels seeing a higher impact on revenues are PPC and Paid social.
• Out of all the channels listed, Big Brands invest the least in radio advertising.
• Big Brands appear to see the least impact on revenues from SEO (7.7 investment vs 7.5 impact).

Summary

If your marketing performance fell short of expectations in 2023, we’re not here to tell you to increase your local marketing function by a certain percentage or that adopting new marketing tech will immediately boost your results.

But the beauty of benchmarking is that it allows you to lift your head out of the sand (or various other reports) and consider opportunities for improvement: to compare what competitors in the multi-location marketing space are doing and pinpoint why they may have been outperforming you. 

Perhaps your team has even had a hunch about implementing a particular tactic or tool and has not quite had a case to prove to unlock some budget. We hope that this report’s findings will help strengthen that case for you and highlight new areas to think about.

One thing stands out for sure, though, and that is the overarching importance of local marketing in contributing to brand performance. It’s clear from our benchmarking that brands with dedicated, knowledgeable local marketing teams and local-specific strategies in place are outperforming others. 

When looking at individual local marketing tactics, too, we can see that High Performers are implementing many that others aren’t yet. Local rank tracking and optimization, reputation management, and citations reflect the continued importance of ensuring and maintaining brand visibility in increasingly competitive local environments. 

So, how is your brand measuring up? If you have any thoughts about the Brand Beacon Report 2024 research and findings, we’d love to hear from you. You can share your thoughts with us on X, LinkedIn, or our own Facebook community, The Local Pack. Alternatively, you can contact research@brightlocal.com with any questions.

Publishers and individuals are welcome to share findings and charts from this report, crediting BrightLocal and the URL https://www.brightlocal.com/research/brand-beacon-report/. 

Methodology

This research was conducted in partnership with Sapio Research, a B2B market research company, to survey a panel of 200 marketing decision-makers for multi-location and franchise businesses in the USA, the UK, and Canada. A comprehensive screening system was implemented to ensure only respondents fitting the criteria could participate.

Breakdowns of survey respondents by geographical location, industry, and business type can be found below.

As we wrote about recently, at the start of the month, Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky caused a slight thunderclap in the local search world. She announced a new local ranking factor: opening hours.

You can read the thread of events in the piece linked above. But with such heated discussion on the matter, and only several small-scale tests conducted so far, we wanted to carry out a study with a greater breadth of business types, covering various US states and timezones.

So, we took 50 business locations across 10 primary business categories and used BrightLocal’s Local Search Grid to analyze their local rankings outside of their listed opening hours and during opening hours.

Local Search Grid Study Results

The charts below show the average local ranking for each primary category outside of business hours against their open hours. This average looks at all keywords tracked in the Local Search Grid reports.

Across the board, it’s clear to see that Local Search Grid reports run during each business’s opening hours reflect higher local rankings, on average.

The primary category ‘Fast food restaurant’ appears to show the biggest fluctuation, with local rankings improving by 2.4 positions on average during opening hours.

However, if we compare these results with some of the previous tests conducted in recent weeks, the fluctuations we see are much less severe.

While previous tests have shown dramatic fluctuations between reports for individual business locations and specific keywords, taking the average across a list of 10 keywords reflects a more steady variation.

We can look in more detail at some of the business categories and show their results day by day. 

Open vs Closed

Coffee Shop

With the exception of Coffee Shop #3, each coffee shop business in the chart above reflects a fairly steady result across three days and shows higher local rankings during open hours.

Although we did not use any navigational keywords for the coffee shop report (i.e. ‘coffee shop near me’), it does make sense that a coffee shop listing would be prioritized higher in local rankings if it is open when the user is searching. This doesn’t necessarily mean it is the most helpful result. As we’ll discuss later on, there are plenty of reasons a user might be searching for something like a coffee shop other than to visit it in the immediate future.

Dentist

We have included the above chart for Dentist here, as you will note that Dentist #1 and Dentist #2 offer slightly differing opening hours and are closed entirely for some days of the study.

For example, Dentist #1 was closed on Fridays and Dentist #2 closed on Wednesdays. We continued to run manual Local Search Grid reports in the timeframe they would normally be open (10am CST for Dentist #1 and 9am EST for Dentist #2) to note what happened to local rankings.  

We can see here that their local rankings during the day—when other nearby dental practices are likely open and operating—drop much lower than their typical local rankings outside of normal practice hours.

Businesses set to ‘Open 24 hours’

Some locations selected for the study are listed on Google Business Profile (GBP) as ‘open 24 hours’. So, it’s interesting to compare their local rankings to similar businesses listed with standard business opening hours.

HVAC Contractor

For HVAC Contractor #3, despite being listed as ‘open 24 hours’, we ran the reports at two different times of day (8am and 10am PST) to determine any fluctuations in local rankings. As you can see above, this remained steady across the three days at 3.5, except for one result showing an average of 3.6.

However, Contractor #4 also shows a good level of consistency in its local rankings across the three-day study. It also maintains an average local ranking of around 2, so it does not appear that setting opening hours to ‘open 24 hours’ necessarily gives an advantage for better rankings.

Real Estate Agent

For real estate agents, it does not look like setting opening hours to ‘open 24 hours’ helps maintain consistency in local rankings. Both Real Estate Agent #1 Real Estate Agent #3 show fluctuations across the three days.

It’s not clear why this might be from just these results, but I do wonder if Google has somehow weighed up the legitimacy of these business opening hours. It makes sense for service area businesses to work outside of standard hours and on an emergency basis, but real estate agents? It feels a little bit like a ploy to be more visible on GBP (see also: Lawyer in Appendix).

What if there are no opening hours listed on the Google Business Profile?

Movie Theater

It’s interesting to note that some business types appear not to show any opening hours on their GBPs as a sort of ‘industry standard’. We found that this was the case with the category ‘Movie theater’, which makes sense given the changing nature of movie releases and schedules, as well as one-off screenings such as late-night premiers. But would local rankings be penalized as a result?

These results are particularly compelling as they show that movie theaters do not appear to be affected at all by using opening hours as a local ranking signal.

It could be the case that each business has opted to show as ‘Open with no main hours’ as per the GBP editing screenshot below, and that they are technically shown as ‘always open’.

However, a quick Google search for three of the five movie theaters’s names plus ‘opening hours’ does return an immediate snippet-type result by Google. So, it’s not entirely clear if Google is pulling this from other business listing sites like Yelp. Either way, it does not appear that any of the movie theaters are impacted by the existence of opening hours.

Electrician

As with the movie theaters, Electrician #1 has no opening hours listed on its GBP and is not ‘open 24 hours’. We ran two LSG reports a day, at times when most electricians would typically be closed (6am HST), and when they would typically be listed as open (8am HST).

In this instance, as we saw with the dentists that were closed on typical days you might expect to be able to visit, it appears the local rankings suffered more for Electrician #1 at a time when searching for an electrician is deemed more common.

Electrician #4 appears to follow the same pattern as discussed with HVAC Contractors listed as ‘open 24 hours’ and shows consistent local rankings throughout the study. 

What do these results mean?

As of December 15 2023, Google Search Liason confirmed that Google has long used “openness” in its local ranking systems, but that it has recently become a stronger signal. However, given such polarized reactions within the local search community, this may change if Google decides to ‘dial back’ the signal strength.

The team tells me we’ve long used “openness” as part of our local ranking systems, and it recently became a stronger signal for non-navigational queries. This might change in various ways, as we continue to evaluate the usefulness of it, however.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 15, 2023

And there are plenty of reasons why they should dial it back. Although for navigational queries or searches that demonstrate the intent of wanting/needing something ‘right now’, it makes sense to prioritize businesses that are open and available to you in that moment, there are a whole host of other reasons why people may be researching different businesses outside of typical open hours.

I, for one, am an avid food researcher when I travel. I could be looking for brunch, lunch, street food, or dinner establishments in another European country at any given point in the day, weeks before I’m due to visit.

For professional services such as law and real estate, or healthcare like dentistry, a prospective customer will likely be doing their research in several stages before deciding to book an appointment or instruct a professional.

Agreed. Those are good points that I and a few others are discussing with the team. It’s why I said this might change in various ways.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) December 18, 2023

As we stated in our previous write-up, it’s important not to make any drastic changes to your business’s GBP as a result of what we’re seeing currently. At the very core, your business information should be accurate so that it meets your customers’ needs and provides them with the most helpful and useful information. 

How to Manage Your Business Opening Hours on Google Business Profile

A refresher on managing your business's opening hours in GBP.

Read the guide

As we found in the Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023, 62% of consumers would avoid using a business if they found it had incorrect business information listed. The report also delves into how things like incorrect opening hours can affect their trust in a business, therefore potentially damaging a business’s reputation, and even highlights the industries in which information like opening hours are deemed as most important to consumers.

So, for the sake of a couple of ranking positions that may or may not fluctuate throughout the day, and may also change if Google does re-evaluate the signal strength, please ask yourself: is it really worth it to mess with your opening hours?!

Summary

For full study data, including the local rankings for each business category across the three days of the study, you can find the remaining charts in the appendix below.

Publications and individuals are welcome to use the study findings, charts, and data, provided BrightLocal is credited and linked to via this page’s URL.

If you have any questions about this study, or what the results mean, please do not hesitate to contact us via X (formerly Twitter), The Local Pack, or by emailing us at research@brightlocal.com.

Appendix

Keywords

Day Spa

Department Store

Fast Food Restaurant

Lawyer

As dramatic as it may have been, we’ve been interested to know how things have really changed on the ground for local marketers. Personal feelings aside, does all this have any impact on how businesses and agencies reach their audience?

So, we polled 180 local marketers to find out how their usage of Twitter/X has changed since the takeover began in late 2022.

How were local marketers using Twitter before the takeover in November 2022?

• 54% of local marketers were never using Twitter as a local marketing channel.
• 33% of local marketers used Twitter as a marketing channel at least monthly, prior to its takeover.

Quite astoundingly, more than half of local marketers said they never used Twitter for local marketing in the first place! 

Or perhaps it’s not so surprising. Twitter was often seen as the go-to social platform for ‘microblogging’ and community building and, given the highly contextual nature of Twitter threads and discussions, it can be a tricky social media channel to ‘master’. Simply scheduling a few posts a week and spitting them into the ether won’t do. Business owners and marketers have to dedicate a lot of time into understanding how their audience engage.

So, that leaves us with 46% of local marketers using the platform as a marketing channel, and 33% that were using it pretty regularly—at least once a month.

How did Twitter usage change after the takeover?

• 26% of local marketers now do not use Twitter/X at all for marketing.
• Twitter/X usage has not really changed for 30% of local marketers.

Of those local marketers that did use Twitter, 26% have said they now no longer use the platform at all since the 2022 takeover and subsequent rebrand. So that’s over a quarter that could have moved to an alternative platform, or ramped up their marketing activity on other social channels already used.

Shortly after the October 2022 takeover, a flurry of excitement grew around Mastodon. Although not new by any means, Mastodon offered former Twitter fans a familiar environment, while running as a decentralized, non-profit social channel. Over a million users flocked to join at the time and, despite numbers dipping again, as of July 2023 it appears to be on the rise once more.

And if they didn’t join Mastodon, there was also the boom in Threads users when that launched in July 2023. Meta’s challenger app, cleverly tied into Instagram, finally gave Instagrammers a place for text-based communication with an existing audience. Yet despite gaining 100 million users in less than a week, active users were said to have plummeted by August.

And so it follows that 30% of local marketers are using X just about the same amount as they used Twitter. Given the amount of us still calling it Twitter (I’m not sure I’ll ever comfortably say X without following up with “or Twitter or whatever”), and the challenger platforms maybe not quite giving the alternative people were hoping for, maybe not that much has really changed?

Bottom line: do local marketers see X as an effective marketing channel now?

• Twitter/X averaged a 3.8/10 for effectiveness as a local marketing channel.
• 20% of local marketers said they do not think Twitter/X is effective as a marketing channel at all.
• 76% rated X’s effectiveness as a five or less out of ten.

Again, personal opinions aside, we wanted to measure what local marketers think of X now. So we asked them how they rated its effectiveness as a local marketing channel, from zero to ten. It averaged a not-so-great 3.8 out of ten.

A quarter of local marketers rated X’s effectiveness in the middle—not good, not bad—and a fifth said “nope, not at all”. 

If we compare these results to the graph displaying how marketers use X now, you see a similar pattern. So it comes down to the the real question of: why are local marketers using X if they don’t think it’s particularly effective?

What social media channel do local marketers rate as most effective?

• 63% of local marketers rate Facebook as the most effective social channel for local marketing.
• Just 2% of local marketers see X as the most effective social channel for local marketing.

Finally, we pitted X against other mainstream social platforms and asked local marketers simply which one they find to be the most effective. Facebook comes out on top by a mile, with 63% of local marketers rating it as most effective.

So, it makes sense that local marketers will find a social media platform effective if their audience are actively using it.

What can we learn from these results?

As noted within the section on X’s effectiveness as a marketing channel, we can see a fair chunk of local marketers are using X more or less the same as they did Twitter. With such a significant amount of them saying they don’t feel it’s effective, why are they there?

Mastering social media as a business owner is tough. Even for social media specialists, it can feel like you have to ‘keep up’ with all of the platforms. If this is you, consider some of these tips for social media in local marketing.

Where does your audience spend time online?

Bring it back to basics and reconsider who your target audience is. Sprout Social is a great resource for up-to-date social demographics and user stats, and even provides tips on the most engaging content types per channel.

And if you’re feeling stuck, find out where your competitors are! It’s easy enough to find which social channels your competitors are using—they may even list them in their website footer or on their Google Business Profile.

Remember the core purpose of social media

Yes, social media can be utilized to drive revenue, but it’s always worth reminding yourself that this should not be your key goal. It could be that you’re present in some of the right places but not really considering what’s important to your audience.

Visibility, engagement and trust are vital elements of the awareness and consideration stages of the marketing funnel. Consider:

• Visibility: Is your business or brand present on the right channels? Does your brand identity and core business information (Name! Address! Phone Number!) match up consistently so that you can be found?
• Engagement: Can users see evidence that you’re actively engaging with your audience? Are you responding to customer queries and issues, not just the positive feedback and good reviews?
• Trust: ‘Real’ content, behind-the-scenes stuff and even sharing your team members can help to build trust with your audience. Combined with the above elements of visibility and engagement, it shows authenticity and helps users verify that you are who you say who are.

Share your thoughts with us

Did these results surprise you? We’d love to hear your thoughts! You can reach us over on X, via our Facebook community, The Local Pack, or by emailing the research team.

Within the local SEO space, there’s plenty of discussion about the importance of business citations for local rankings. And, while this is a core local marketing tactic, it’s vital to consider the people that business information matters to the most: its customers.

In 2021, we released the Business Listings Trust Report, highlighting how consumers interact with business listings to discover and use local businesses.

While the Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023 is very much a continuation of this research, we felt that the way consumers discover businesses or look for information about them today has come on leaps and bounds, with social channels doubling as business listings, and the continued power of visuals such as video content or customer photos.

So, how are consumers looking for local businesses online today and how are they discovering new businesses? We asked over 1,000 people what they thought. Let’s get to it.

Where are consumers finding business information online?

In the 2021 Business Listings Trust Report, we asked consumers which platforms they used to find information about local businesses. This time around, we asked which platforms consumers trust to find information about local businesses.

• The top three most trusted websites or platforms consumers use for researching local businesses are Google (66%), Google Maps (45%), and a business’s own website (36%).

It likely won’t surprise anyone that Google comes out on top as the most trusted platform or website that consumers use to research local businesses. As of July 2023, Google’s worldwide market share as a search engine was 83.49%.

A business’s own website is the third most trusted method of finding business information (36%), which suggests that consumers are more likely to trust what Google is telling them—which is interesting, as business information on things like Google Business Profile could well be provided by the business itself, perhaps unknown to the consumer.

However, clicking straight through to a business’s website also suggests that consumers have a high level of intent, in that they may be looking for more detail about specific products or services and trust that a website is the best place for that information.

Facebook sits as the joint fourth most trusted platform for finding information about businesses online, alongside Yelp. Interestingly, the social media platform is so high up the list for business research, considering this year’s Local Consumer Review Survey found that Facebook usage for business research had fallen year-on-year and that a significant percentage were also wary of fake reviews on the platform. In addition, we highlighted dwindling usage stats for Facebook among US adults.

That being said, Facebook listings are prevalent among both search giants Google and Bing, with Bing often pulling the platform’s reviews through to local pack-style cards that highlight key business information.

In what circumstances are consumers looking for businesses online?

When considering why consumers are looking for local business information online, we provided a new option this year to consider proximity.

• The percentage of consumers using business information sites to discover new local businesses has decreased from 66% in 2021 to 61% in 2023.
• The percentage of consumers using business information sites to find businesses they are aware of, but have never used, dropped from 66% in 2021 to 56% in 2023.
• The percentage of consumers using business information sites to find information about known businesses has decreased from 48% in 2021 to 41% in 2023.

Of the three options presented to consumers in both 2021 and 2023, we can see that percentages have decreased across the board.

It’s interesting as there doesn’t appear to be a clear reason. It could be the case that consumers are considering more varied sources when researching businesses online, as opposed to what they might consider ‘typical’ business information sites—later on, we’ll discuss the prevalence of social media for business discovery in more detail, including channels focusing on user-generated content like YouTube.

The Consequences of Incorrect Business Information

When looking up business information like its address, opening hours, and product inventory, the availability of this information is vital to help consumers make a decision. So, what happens when this goes wrong?

• 62% of consumers would avoid using a business if they found incorrect information online in 2023, compared to 63% in 2021.

You’ll see in the chart above that the percentages remain fairly static in 2023, which highlights the continued importance of maintaining correct business information across different listings. 

A huge 62% of consumers would be turned away from using a business if they found incorrect information online, which means that only just over a third of consumers would be willing to give your business the benefit of the doubt if inaccuracies are found!

For something that could be as small as a typo in a business address, email address, or phone number, it risks losing prospective customers to competitors and potentially even damaging your business reputation.

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What actions do consumers take upon encountering incorrect information?

Although we know that incorrect business information is enough to stop 62% of consumers from using a business, we asked them what their first reaction would be to finding an incorrect address online.

• 36% of consumers would call the business to confirm the correct address, as opposed to 41% in 2021.
• 28% of consumers would seek an alternative business to meet their needs, a decrease from 33% in 2021.
• 7% of consumers would abandon their search there and then, compared to 3% in 2021.

The percentage of consumers willing to call a business has decreased from 41% in 2021 to 36% in 2023, but we can see that this has been distributed across the new options of messaging the business via their socials or sending an email. It may be that, as more and more local businesses have an active social media presence, consumers see it as an easier option to reach out this way. 

On the whole, it appears that if a customer has already decided to visit your business address, they won’t abandon hope at the first hurdle. 65% of consumers said they would take action, either by contacting the business directly or researching elsewhere to confirm the details.

It’s reassuring to know that the majority of consumers are willing to give businesses another chance, but this should still be seen as a warning sign to check your company details and contact information anywhere that it is listed!

Incorrect Business Information Can Cause Consumers to Lose Trust

• 63% of consumers said seeing mostly negative written reviews would make them lose trust in a business.
• The percentage of consumers who would lose trust in a business after seeing an incorrect address decreased from 60% in 2021 to 46% in 2023.
• The percentage of consumers who would lose trust in a business after encountering an incorrect phone number decreased from 66% in 2021 to 45% in 2023.

It’s important to consider that many business information sites also double as review platforms, or pull in reviews from other sites. When asking consumers about the issues that would make them lose trust in a business, we added considerations around negative reviews, both in terms of written content and review ratings. “Mostly negative written reviews” was the top issue that consumers said would make them mistrustful of a local business, with 66% of consumers highlighting this.

This is a particularly interesting finding and comes hot off the back of some research Near Media has recently completed around searcher behavior. At our recent Local SEO For Good conference, Near Media’s David Mihm, Greg Sterling, and Mike Blumenthal presented some fascinating findings that showed only about 33% of users were actually reading reviews.

They found that users are taking the time to seek out review content and scrolling SERPs to find better-reviewed businesses. Perhaps this suggests that, although they might not be reading them properly, consumers are skim-reading reviews to look for red flags and common themes.

Meanwhile, our findings show that 44% of consumers would lose trust in a business if they saw what they would consider a “low” average review rating. But what’s considered “low”? Well, our Local Consumer Review Survey this year found that 87% of consumers would not consider a business with an average rating below 3 stars, so that feels like a good indicator.

Our findings and the findings from Near Media show that, even if there are platforms where you do not focus on your business’s reputation, the information consumers find can be powerful enough to turn them away.

It’s interesting to see that consumers appear to be more lenient towards the issues we first presented in 2021. The percentage of consumers saying that they would lose trust in a business after spotting inaccurate information such as physical address, contact number, opening hours, and email address, has all decreased since the 2021 report.

The most significant difference is in the results for encountering incorrect phone numbers. In 2021, 66% of consumers said this would make them lose trust in a business, compared to 45% in 2023. Although this still takes a stop in the top three issues that cause consumers to lose trust, it reflects a shift in consumer behavior as to how they prefer to interact with businesses (as a self-confessed phone-avoiding millennial, I can relate).

What business information is most important to consumers?

Does the importance of different types of business information vary by industry?

Although it appears consumers are now feeling a bit more forgiving of businesses when it comes to issues with business information, we did have to wonder how this would vary for businesses in different industries: would you be more forgiving of a retail outlet for a low average review rating, compared to a medical clinic, for example?

N.b. In this section, we’ve chosen to display the results in two separate charts, grouping industries based on the type of consumer need (first, entertainment and pleasure, then emergency and professional services).

• Consumers view correct opening hours as most important for retail businesses (53%), food and drink businesses (51%), and entertainment businesses (47%).
• Correct address information is the second most important factor for retail businesses (48%).
• High average review ratings are seen as more important for hospitality-focused businesses: hotels (42%) and food and drink (41%).

For retail businesses, consumers need to know the most basic—yet most vital—business information: its opening hours (53%), where it is (48%), and how to get in touch (42%). It’s likely that, if a consumer is searching for a particular type of local retailer online, they already have a purchase in mind and are looking to get to that location soon.

Reputation elements appear to be less important to consumers here. This is likely because the quality of the product they’re looking to buy is often not connected to the quality of the service experience.

However, for businesses in which the service experience is the product, for example in hospitality and entertainment, review ratings and the number of positive written reviews are shown to be more important to consumers.

42% of consumers said that a high average review rating was important to them when considering hotels, followed by 41% for food and drink businesses. Similarly, 41% of consumers highlighted that a high number of positive written reviews was most important to them when looking for information about hotels.

While retailers should still view reputation management as important for building trust with potential customers, if a potential customer has a purchase in mind, then the likelihood of them visiting the store regardless of review ratings will remain fairly high.

• 49% of consumers said correct contact information is most important for tradespeople and service area businesses (SABs).
• Knowing the correct physical address is more important to consumers when looking for automotive businesses (46%) and healthcare businesses (42%).

Arguably, the requirement for businesses in the industries listed above sits much more in the realm of necessity and, in some cases, even urgency, compared to those in hospitality, entertainment, and retail. Therefore, we can see that consumers are placing a high level of importance on fundamental business information, like accessing the correct contact information and the correct address.

Being able to find correct contact information is most important to consumers when looking for tradespeople (49%), financial and legal services (46%), and healthcare businesses (44%), suggesting that, when these types of businesses are required, that need is for now.

Out of these industries, consumers think it’s important that tradespeople and SABs are reputable, with two of the top most important factors being a high average review rating (44%) and a high number of positive reviews (43%).

Again, as these types of businesses are often required in a more immediate sense, it follows that consumers expect to see evidence of their reliability. Plus, if you’re inviting a professional into your home for something like a plumbing or electricity emergency, the customer wants to be assured that they are respectful, trustworthy individuals.

How often are consumers encountering issues with business information?

• 56% of consumers are encountering incorrect business information online at least once every few months.
• 23% of consumers are coming across fake business listings at least once a month.
• 28% of consumers are contacting businesses on social media and not receiving a response at least once a month.
• 8% of consumers are calling the incorrect number for a business at least once a week.

Just 13% of consumers say they have never encountered incorrect business information of some sort online, while 35% of consumers are encountering it on at least a monthly basis.

As we know from earlier, 35% of consumers would either find an alternative local business or abandon their search entirely as a result of incorrect information, so that’s a lot of business regularly lost.

And, for those businesses where customers have arrived to find them closed (or not even there!), this oversight in business information will likely be funneling their would-be customers directly to a nearby competitor.

26% of consumers are visiting businesses too early or late due to incorrect opening hours on at least a monthly basis, so you can imagine that if it was for something as convenient as coffee and groceries, or as urgent as car repair, they’re going to go elsewhere instead of waiting for you to open.

Worryingly, more than half of consumers are spotting fake business listings throughout the year—with 23% of consumers coming across them at least once a month! There are several reasons that fake business listings might exist online (such as spam or fraudulent intentions), but in some cases, legitimate businesses may be creating spammy listings in an attempt to outrank their competitors, causing confusion and turning customers off in the process.

The bottom line is that encountering spam or fake listings is incredibly frustrating for consumers in need of a particular product or service, and is also harmful to local businesses in that industry.

How often are consumers searching for and using different types of local business information?

• 40% of consumers search for business opening hours several times a month.
• 36% of consumers are clicking through to websites from URLs found on business information sites several times a month.
• 39% of consumers are searching for business information, such as whether a business is child or dog-friendly, every month.

We also sought to understand the frequency of search behavior for particular business information. This can help to highlight where there may be gaps in your own business information.

For example, 39% of consumers said they are searching for business attributes such as being child or dog-friendly, or wheelchair accessible, on at least a monthly basis.

This means that if you aren’t calling out this information on your business listings, then you may well be losing out to competitors. Consider where you can make this information prominent across your listings: for example, Google Business Profile (GBP) allows you to add specific attributes to your listing that call out things like ‘dog-friendly’ and ‘LGBT-owned’, while you could also consider adding Q&As to your GBP to make it really clear.

Meanwhile, if you aren’t consistently updating changes to your opening hours across listings, or checking the correct URL is being used for your site, that’s a huge amount of people potentially being turned away.

The Role of Social Media in Online Business Discovery

Social media plays a huge role in the discovery of, and interaction with, local businesses. With so many platforms available to create an official business profile, and of course, many consumers taking to the platforms as the first port of call to rave—or rant—about experiences with brands, it makes sense that this is the case.

What social platforms do consumers trust for business discovery?

• Facebook and TikTok are the least trusted social media platforms, with 43% of consumers saying they either do not trust the information at all, or believe it to be somewhat untrustworthy, respectively.
• 42% of consumers believe that the information they see on YouTube is either somewhat or strongly trustworthy.
• Consumers are most ambivalent towards Threads, the newest competitor within the social media environment (at the time of publication)—41% of consumers have no strong opinions about the trustworthiness of the information on the app.

So, at the beginning of the survey, consumers highlighted Facebook as their fourth-most-trusted method of looking for business information online across all websites and platforms. And yet 43% do not believe the information they see on the social media website is entirely trustworthy.

It’s a little bit of a head-scratcher, but as we determined in the Local Consumer Review Survey earlier this year, consumers are generally more wary of misinformation and things like fake reviews today than they have been in previous years. With the sheer quantity of businesses managing Facebook pages, and some using them in place of a website entirely, it does make sense that it remains the most used.

Meanwhile, 42% of consumers believe that the information they see on YouTube is either somewhat or completely trustworthy. While that subject could probably fill many debates, it does show us that it’s a valuable channel for local businesses to consider—particularly considering how YouTube results are integrated into Google search—whether that’s in creating a YouTube channel yourself or considering options such as paid advertising, and influencer reviews.

TikTok is perceived to be untrustworthy by 43% of consumers, the same figure as for Facebook. Despite its reliance on video content, like YouTube, TikTok is known for controversial trends and users going viral, so it’s perhaps not so much in the minds of consumers when it comes to thinking about local businesses.

Our research did not survey US adults under the age of 18, but it is worth noting how Gen Z is using the social platform as a search engine more than Google, so it will be interesting to come back to this topic over time and see how consumer trust in business information on TikTok changes.

How often are consumers using social media for business discovery?

• 30% of consumers use Facebook to find local business information on at least a weekly basis.
• This is closely followed by YouTube, which 27% of consumers say they use to find local business information more than once a week.

Consumers can’t expect every local business to be a TikTok sensation, and even just keeping up with regular social posting can be tricky when you’re a small business. However, understanding how frequently consumers are looking at social media to find businesses shows us that it’s vital to ensure your business’s information is at least discoverable, correct, and consistent across these platforms.

The most obvious platforms that spring to mind for business information are Facebook, which is also considered a business citation site, and Instagram, which has refined the way it shows users business information via its maps functionality. But even TikTok and Snapchat, social platforms used largely by younger demographics, have map functionalities and business information built in, so you never know when user-generated content could even pop up featuring your local business! 

Plus, while the Local Consumer Review Survey found that 20% of consumers were using TikTok for local business discovery as of January 2023, we can see here that 31% of consumers are now using it on at least a monthly basis. That’s a significant jump in less than a year.

The Importance of Photos for Business Discovery and Building Trust

Of course, photos aren’t limited to social platforms. Consumers had long been posting photos to the likes of Tripadvisor before many of today’s platforms came into their own! But in today’s ‘always online’ world, the sheer diversity of visual content creates more choices than ever when it comes to researching and discovering businesses.

Not only do we see the glossy, marketing-quality photos that businesses want you to see across their websites and business listings, but we also get the everyday and behind-the-scenes content they share on social, not forgetting the spontaneous snaps from customers.

• The industries where business-supplied photos are seen as more important than customer photos are entertainment (24%), retail (21%), healthcare (16%), and financial and legal (15%).
• Consumers care most about customer photos in the hotel (32%), food and drink (29%), and beauty and wellbeing (26%) industries.
• Photos of staff and team members within the healthcare industry are seen as important by 17% of consumers.

For service- and experience-centered businesses, consumers want to see accurate reflections of exactly that: the experience. 32% of consumers rated ‘photos taken by customers’ as one of the most important factors affecting their decisions around hotels, followed by 29% for food and drink businesses, and 26% for the beauty and wellbeing industry.

Considering each of these industries can be known for glossy, staged, and over-saturated imagery, it’s not surprising that consumers are looking to each other’s experiences as evidence of what’s ‘real’.

Choosing a hotel is a particular investment of your trust because, for however many nights, a consumer is using this as an alternative to their home. For beauty and wellbeing experiences, a consumer places trust in its professionals, often related to very physical treatments, and therefore wants to be reassured by real customer results beforehand.

The top two industries where consumers rate business-provided photos as more important than those taken by customers were entertainment and retail. As we highlighted when discussing the importance of reflecting fundamental business information for industries such as retail, consumers are likely looking for similar here, including imagery of the business itself to confirm location. For entertainment businesses such as movie theaters or bowling alleys, this could be much more facility-led—namely, does the venue offer what the consumer wants?

Although photos of business team members seem to be lower down on the scale of important decision-making factors, there is a notable percentage of consumers choosing healthcare (17%) and financial and legal businesses (15%) based on the availability of staff photos.

For healthcare, which can involve very personal and sometimes invasive treatments, consumers want an idea of exactly who they will be trusting with their physical or mental health. In financial or legal environments, it’s the same sentiment: consumers are placing trust around sensitive topics in an individual as opposed to a brand, so it’s important that they’re able to see who they will be dealing with.

Essentially, these findings show that being able to display a breadth of photos across your business listings will ultimately provide potential customers with more information up-front to help them make a decision. As well as the high-quality marketing imagery, it’s important to show customers what’s real, so keep this in mind when adding photos to your listings.

Summary

It’s clear that the consequences of inaccurate business information can be vast, ranging from causing confusion and frustration to potentially damaging a business’s reputation or losing out on customers completely.

At the very least, local marketers and business owners should use the insights gathered in this report to get on top of their business listings and check the accuracy of information across various platforms, including social media.

Of course, it can be a big job to source everywhere your business is listed, and setting reminders to review and update information may not always ensure the work gets done—but there are easier ways to manage it! Check out the available services through BrightLocal’s Listings Management tools, which cover everything from building your citations to ensuring your business updates are pushed out to all relevant listings.

Methodology

A representative sample of 1,138 US-based consumers was used to conduct the Local Business Discovery and Trust Survey in September 2023. The survey was distributed to an independent consumer panel via SurveyMonkey, in which age group breakdowns and gender are balanced.

However, SurveyMonkey’s consumer panels only consider participants who identify as male or female and therefore do not consider where participants may identify outside of binary genders. Additionally, no consumers under the age of 18 participated in this survey.

Using Our Data

You are welcome to use the survey findings, charts, and data, provided BrightLocal is credited and linked to via this page’s URL. If you have any questions about this research, please contact the research team.

With eleven years of insights behind us, we’ve reported throughout some of the biggest and most unprecedented events to shake the industry, and the wider economic environment as a whole. 

The information provided by local marketers enables us to compile the current picture of the industry, from salary averages and overall satisfaction at work to a run-down of how agencies and freelancers are offering and billing for their services. 

So, let’s dive straight into this year’s findings. 

Local Marketers at a Glance

Firstly, who do we mean when we talk about ‘local marketers’? We surveyed 534 representatives with roles in marketing or SEO functions involving a local focus. This included freelance consultants and representatives from agencies, small businesses, and multi-location businesses. 

While you can find the summary of this year’s survey participants within the research methodology in full (at the bottom of this page), it’s important to note that 72% of this year’s respondents identified as local marketers based in the US. The remaining 28% represent the UK (6%), Canada (5%), Australia (3%), and 24 other countries (14%). 

For that reason, salary averages have been converted into US dollars at the current rate, so that we can provide an accurate representation.

Salary averages

We compared the average and median salaries of local marketers in the US to data from our 2022 and 2021 surveys.

As well as a clear upward trend in the average US pre-tax earnings since 2021, we can also see that the increase in 2023 is significantly larger than that seen in 2022. Between 2022 and 2023, the average local marketing salary has increased by 15%, compared to an increase of 5% between 2021 and 2022.

Interestingly, while the median salary range has also increased since 2021, the percentage increase is 6%. Comparing the increase in average salary to the increase in median salary, it tells us that there are outliers weighted much more towards the high-earning end of the scale.

Correspondingly, as we’ll delve further into in a few sections’ time, 71% of survey respondents self-described as being in ‘Senior’ positions within their organizations.

How satisfied are marketers with their salaries?

It’s one thing to measure average earnings within the industry, but how satisfied do marketers feel with their salaries in general?

• The majority of local marketers feel ‘somewhat satisfied’ with their salaries (46%).
• The percentage of local marketers feeling generally unsatisfied with their earnings has increased from 14% in 2022 to 19% in 2023.

Broadly, it appears that most local marketers feel okay about what they’re taking home, and this has not changed from 2022—with 46% of marketers responding as ‘somewhat satisfied’.

However, there also appears to be a trend showing that more local marketers are unsatisfied with their salaries in 2023 compared to 2022. 19% reported feeling unsatisfied in 2023, compared to 14% in 2022, while the percentage of satisfied respondents has decreased from 39% in 2022 to 35% in 2023.

So, while it seems that local marketers are earning more on average in 2023 than in 2022, they’re also feeling less fulfilled by it. There could be several reasons causing this, with the biggest and most obvious external factor being the rising cost of living across so many parts of the globe.

And, although salaries tend to increase annually in line with inflation, it could also be the case that some marketers are not feeling enough of a difference against rising costs elsewhere.

Do job seniority and knowledge levels affect earnings?

We wanted to take a closer look at factors specific to the local SEO industry and how they might affect salary satisfaction. First, we examined the relationship between job seniority and salary satisfaction.

• 42% of senior local marketers are ‘Very’ or ‘Extremely’ satisfied with their salaries, compared to 21% of mid-level marketers and 17% of junior marketers.
• Junior local marketers are the most unsatisfied with their salaries, with 48% reporting being either ‘Not very’ or ‘Not at all’ satisfied with their earnings.

The chart presents a clear picture: senior local marketers are much more likely to be satisfied with their salaries than those working at mid- or junior levels. It makes sense, considering it is generally the case that more senior roles have higher salary bands attached to them.

However, as noted previously, 71% of survey respondents identified as senior-level marketers, including a significant amount of business owners, CEOs, and directors, so you would expect to see these within the high-earning bracket.

So, we analyzed the relationship between salary satisfaction and expertise, first asking: how do local marketers rate their levels of local SEO knowledge?

• 92% of local marketers rate their local SEO knowledge as ‘Good’ or better.
• Just 1% of local marketers believe they hold poor levels of local SEO knowledge.

We can see here that being more senior doesn’t necessarily equate to being an expert—in this case, holding ‘Excellent’ levels of local SEO knowledge. Just over a quarter of respondents rated their expertise as ‘Excellent’.

Generally, though, local marketers rate their knowledge levels as good, with only 8% highlighting ‘Fair’ or ‘Poor’ knowledge levels.

So, with this in mind, would we find a relationship between expertise and better salaries? We took the pre-tax earnings of our US respondents to calculate the average earnings against the level of local SEO knowledge.

The results speak for themselves, but we were still surprised by the jump between salary averages from ‘Very Good’ to ‘Excellent’ knowledge levels. It goes to show: the more you know!

Now, returning to all local marketers and not just the majority earning in USD, we compared salary satisfaction against self-proclaimed knowledge levels.

To quote a certain US sitcom legend, could it be any clearer? Not only are individuals who possess ‘Excellent’ levels of local SEO knowledge earning the most on average, but they’re also the most satisfied with their salary.

The biggest takeaway here for local marketers should be that you don’t necessarily need to reach director levels to become an expert in your work. Honing your expertise within your field and building on your local SEO knowledge will help you to become a subject matter expert and, as it happens, you can put a price on that!

Working in Local SEO

We’ve compiled a snapshot of the individuals working in local marketing, but what’s it like to work on it, day-to-day?

Annual revenue for agencies and freelancers in the local marketing industry

Looking at freelancer revenue alongside marketing agency revenue can be a useful measure for freelancers when considering billing methods and pricing services.

• More than half of freelancers see less than $50,000 in annual revenue.
• 22% of agencies earn between $1mil-$5mil in revenue.

We can see that revenue is fairly evenly distributed across the range for agencies, reflecting the various sizes and types that make up our agency participants. 71% are earning up to $1mil a year in revenue, 22% see between $1mil-$5mil revenue, and 6% earn over $5mil in revenue annually.

For freelancers, however, we can see this is very heavily weighted towards the ‘lower than $50,000’ bracket. 52% of freelance local marketing experts earn less than $50,000 in revenue.

While it should be noted that many of our freelance respondents told us that their consultancies run part-time alongside other employment, this finding still highlights the challenging environment for the self-employed—or those thinking about becoming self-employed.

• The percentage of freelancers earning less than $50,000 in annual revenue has increased from 24% in 2021 to 42% in 2022 and 52% in 2023.
• 94% of freelancers are earning less than $250,000 in annual revenue in 2023.

When we isolate freelancer revenue and compare it to 2022 and 2021, it tells an even clearer story: we can easily see that freelancers are bringing in less revenue each year.

Annual revenue for single and multi-location businesses in the local marketing industry

Looking at annual revenue for single and multi-location businesses, we can see it is more weighted towards the higher end of the revenue brackets.

• 61% of single and multi-location businesses see over $1mil in annual revenue.

This information is useful for freelancers and agencies assessing their service pricing. Freelancers, particularly, may find they are pricing services too low—or perhaps billing in ways that end up disadvantaging themselves—so, it’s always good to see what businesses and brands are bringing in.

What are the most important local SEO metrics for success?

Everyone sees success slightly differently, which of course is why we have metrics in place to measure how we’re doing on the local front. But even key metrics tend to vary from business type to business type.

So, how do those marketing in-house measure local marketing success, compared to agency and freelance local SEOs?

• 45% of businesses highlight Google organic rankings as important for local marketing success.
• 44% of businesses highlight Local Pack rankings as important for local marketing success.
• Google Local Pack rankings is the most important metric for both agencies (54%) and freelancers (50%).
• The top three local SEO metrics for agencies are Local Pack rankings (54%), new leads (45%), and Google organic rankings (39%).
• The top three local SEO metrics for freelancers are Local Pack rankings (50%), phone calls (45%), and new leads (35%).

We can see that businesses across the board are in agreement that Local Pack or Local Finder rankings in Google are one of the most important local SEO metrics. This makes sense, given the hierarchy and visibility these results tend to have within the SERPs. If you’re not displaying in the Local Pack, potential customers are not going to have easy access to key information like your business name, description, address, and phone number.

It is interesting to see that a higher percentage of agency marketers place high importance on new leads (45%) compared to businesses (40%) and that businesses are the most concerned with their organic rankings overall (45%).

Of course, improving (or maintaining) organic rankings have long been a desired goal for businesses of all types in the SEO world. But, with agency marketers highlighting new leads and freelancers highlighting phone calls (45%) as important success metrics, perhaps this goes to show that they are more familiar with the fluctuating tendencies of organic ranking and are more concerned with contributing to their clients’ bottom lines, showing value in doing so.

Generally, SEOs with wider industry experience keep abreast of things like algorithm changes, industry news, and ranking fluctations on behalf of their business clients. So, it makes sense that agency and freelance marketers look outside of organic rankings to secure local SEO success—because we all know unpredictable it can be out there!

Reacting to Changes in Local SEO

Each year, we ask local marketers a variety of questions around core elements of local SEO, namely whether reacting to algorithm updates continues to be a priority for them and their clients, as well as their thoughts on how, or if, key products like Google Business Profile (GBP) have improved.

• 61% of marketers agree that reacting to algorithm changes is an important priority, down from 64% in 2022.

The numbers haven’t changed drastically year on year, but we can see a slight shift in how marketers are perceiving the importance of algorithm changes.

Google can take many months to confirm algorithm changes and, with so many unconfirmed updates throughout the year so far, you can’t blame SEOs for perhaps prioritizing them less than before, perhaps ‘waiting and seeing’ rather than reaction right away.

While fluctuating or disappearing rankings can be confusing and frustrating, it’s fair to say marketers are much savvier to the various different ways local SEO success can be achieved.

• 43% of marketers think GBP has improved in 2023, compared to 57% in 2022.
• 24% of local SEOs feel GBP has not improved in 2023, compared to just 9% in 2022.

It feels like Google Business Profile has changed a lot already in 2023, but it’s interesting to see that local marketers just aren’t loving it this year.

It’s worth noting that 2022’s survey was conducted and published before changes such as the NMX came in, bringing that flurry of bugs and annoyances along with it towards the end of the year. So, while a lot of significant changes have been made to GBP through 2023, it’s quite likely that some marketers are still pretty put out by those events.

Still, the floor is open. We recently reported on some positive new updates to GBP in July, so perhaps attitudes will change. Or could it be a sign that change is on the horizon? Perhaps local marketers are simply spreading their efforts across more local SEO tools and tactics.

A Day in the Life: Agency and Freelance Marketers 

It’s always interesting to gauge how many clients local marketers have. In 2022’s report, local marketing agencies averaged 19 clients, while national marketing agencies averaged 16, and freelancers averaged 14.

How many clients do local marketers have?

• 69% of freelancers have between two and ten clients.
• 33% of agencies have over 51 clients!

The sweet spot for freelancers appears to be having between two and ten clients (69%), but we were pretty shocked to see that a third of all agencies said they had over 51 clients! Even for some of the larger organizations, this seems like a lot.

Of course, all clients are different. You may have a variety of clients on retainer while working on one-off projects at the same time, and clients may come to you for very different services. Yet, seeing the polarizing results for freelancers and agencies here, it feels like a similar pattern to what we saw in annual revenue; freelancers way down at the lower end and agencies at the opposite side of the scale.

While freelancers don’t have the luxury of multiple colleagues on hand compared with agencies, it does raise the question of whether freelancers might simply be offering their small sets of clients too much in terms of services or output. If this is the case, time could easily be eaten up by a small number of clients, making it a challenge to find time for new client acquisition.

Average Client Lifespan 

It’s interesting to consider the average lifecycle of a client partnership: if you have five clients that you’ve worked with for several years, that could be a highly valuable relationship. But if your two to five clients are turning over every six months or so, you may find yourself scrambling to pull together pitches for new business.

• 25% of freelancers have clients with an average lifespan of 12 months or less, compared to 12% of agencies.
• 23% of agencies and 22% of freelancers have been working with clients for five years or more.

On the whole, it looks like agencies and freelancers are doing well at maintaining some lengthy client relationships. 96% of agencies work with clients for at least a month, although this is lower for freelancers at 75%.

It got us thinking, though: does a turnover of clients affect revenue? Would working in shorter cycles be more costly to the marketer overall, or would long-term partnerships end up benefitting a client more? What would be the ‘sweet spot’? 

We took US revenue ($) and calculated the average for each client lifespan bracket.

There’s clear evidence to show that local marketers should be aiming for anything over 12 months for a more fruitful partnership. Meanwhile, the Goldilocks duration appears to be between two and three years. But don’t take that as a sign for binning off any of your long-standing clients! You obviously know what works for you, but it’s a really useful indicator to bear in mind.

What local SEO services do agencies and freelancers offer?

Seeing what local marketing services are—or aren’t—widely available is a great way to understand opportunities to expand the services you offer.

The graph above highlights the top five most commonly offered SEO services, and charts the changes year-on-year since 2021. These areas have largely held steady across the years, highlighting how they remain fundamental local SEO services.

As for a full run-down of services, let’s take a look at who’s offering what to their clients:

It’s no surprise to see that all of the ‘core’ local SEO services such as GBP management, content creation, auditing, analytics, and citation management are high up there for both agencies and freelancers. Although, there are some notable discrepancies:

• 72% of agencies offer reporting and analytics, compared to 56% of freelancers.
• 76% of agencies offer technical SEO, compared to 53% of freelancers.
• 64% of agencies offer PPC, compared to 33% of freelancers.

As agencies tend to have a variety of different experts in a team, it makes sense that they can offer such a breadth of local SEO services. However, as we discussed earlier, around the value of becoming a subject-matter expert, the lower figures for services provided by freelancers highlight some niche areas that could be very lucrative for clients. As we’ll come to below, clients do place value in some of the more niche marketing specialisms. 

As well as technical specialisms like analytics, PPC, and technical SEO, there is a huge gap in the percentage of freelancers offering video (17%) or influencer marketing (5%).

Despite being low down among the services offered, we can also see, however, the growth for video marketing and influencer marketing since 2022. With the introduction of video content to GBP profiles and Google Perspectives now rolling out and incorporating user generated content (UGC), it seems some local marketers have already switched onto the opportunities to offer services in these areas.

Moreover, the Local Consumer Review Survey 2023 found that 20% of US adults are using TikTok for new business discovery. Whether inciting influencers to create video content or encouraging local businesses to get on the platform themselves, it’s a lucrative area for local marketers to get involved in.

What local SEO services are considered the most valuable?

You know how it is. You’re proposing a strategy based around several key tactics, and a client chimes in with something like “oh, but I saw this thing on TikTok and…”

It’s always interesting to see which services marketers feel are the most valuable for their clients. However, this year, we also asked them what they think their clients believe are the most valuable.

• The top three local SEO services that marketers see as most valuable are: GBP management (76%), content creation (53%), and citation management (43%).
• The top three local SEO services that clients see as most valuable are: GBP management (52%), content creation (39%) and website design (34%).
• 29% of clients see PPC as one of the most valuable local SEO services, compared to 23% of local marketers.

It’s encouraging to see that clients are fairly aligned with marketers in terms of priorities, which hopefully makes collaborating on strategy or getting buy-in from other stakeholders a little easier. However, it’s clear with services like website design, PPC, and social media that clients place importance in services that involve very immediate or visual changes.

It makes sense, in many ways: clients like seeing where their money is spent—or, even better, where the return on investment is coming from—but it can make pushing the case for more technical and behind-the-scenes elements like technical SEO a challenge.

You’ll note that citation management is not seen as a priority for clients, with less than a fifth of agencies and freelancers saying that their clients (18%) would highlight it as one of the most important services. As you may already be aware, citation management can be a tricky service to explain, and clients may not always understand the full scope of it as a service.

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How are agencies and freelancers billing their clients?

It’s always useful to see what other people are doing, particularly if you are a freelancer or starting out as one. How should you bill your clients? There are a variety of methods by which agencies and freelancers prefer to bill, so we summarised the findings:

It’s interesting to see that very few marketers are working on day rates, whether freelance or agency-based. It appears the general way to go is charging clients a monthly fee based on the deliverables they receive, with 61% of agencies and 53% of freelancers opting for this method. 

However, 43% of freelancers are still billing at an hourly rate. Of course, it always comes down to preference, but hours can be a tricky figure to quote for some local SEO services—particularly in more creative areas such as copywriting and content creation or social media management, where tasks can end up taking a lot longer than you’d planned (or hoped).

Local Marketer Learning and Development

This year, we wanted to introduce the theme of learning and development, to find out not only where local marketers are seeking expertise, but whether they’re afforded the benefit of professional development as part of their employment.

As we know from the findings above, the more knowledgeable employees are the most satisfied with their salaries, so it should make sense that businesses want their employees to continue developing. But, how many local marketers have the opportunity?

Do local marketers have personal training budgets?

• Just 39% of local marketers are certain they have a personal training budget in their role.
• More than half of local marketers do not have a personal training budget.

It’s quite a sorry picture, with 54% of marketers not given a personal training allowance. Meanwhile, 7% of marketers were unsure, which suggests their organizations either do not offer the benefit or do not communicate them well enough. It’s a familiar sight to see vague mentions of ‘professional development’ and training within job specifications, but it’s very different for businesses to actively encourage their people to learn.

Despite this finding, local marketers are undeterred. A whopping 98% of marketers are putting time aside to learn within their roles, budget or none, with nearly two-fifths of those spending two hours or more learning. We love to see it!

Where are local marketers seeking expertise?

• 81% of local marketers are spending time researching to build their local SEO knowledge.
• 66% of marketers learn via webinars.

Unsurprisingly, the top methods of learning on the job (considering so few marketers have access to dedicated budgets) rely on the do-it-yourself approach. Research, webinars, YouTube, and industry news are generally all free—albeit timely—methods of learning, and it’s very encouraging to see there is a strong level of commitment in the industry.

Looking to the Future: New Tech, Optimism, and Hiring Trends

We’ve got a clear picture of how marketers are doing in local SEO right now, but what about next year—and beyond? With much of 2023 already dominated by discussion around developments in generative AI, competitor brands, and changes to SERPs, how do marketers feel about achieving local success in 2023?

There has been a decrease in the percentage of marketers feeling optimistic about achieving local SEO success in the next year, from 23% in 2022 to 19% in 2023.

Alongside this, we can see a corresponding increase in the percentage of marketers feeling pessimistic about their chances of local marketing success, from 36% in 2022 to 46% in 2023. 

As well as the aforementioned developments in generative AI that have hit marketers thick and fast so far this year, there have been other significant changes within the industry that could contribute to feelings of apprehension about 2024.

Despite this fast-growing innovation, the start of 2023 saw plenty of turbulence with lay-offs affecting some of the world’s biggest tech companies. Not to mention the chaos at Twitter, now X, which impacted businesses of all sizes as marketers grappled with the potential loss—and still ever-changing nature—of this important marketing channel.

Moreover, with Google’s new generative AI-led search functionality, Search Generative Experience (SGE), likely coming at some point in 2024, this adds another key component to marketers’ growing lists of things to master.

POLL: Are Local Marketers Ready for SGE?

Spoiler alert: No, not really. Read on to discover who feels confident about the imminent roll-out of Search Generative Experience (SGE), and how marketers feel it will affect local search results.

Read

Will marketers be hiring in the near future?

With a sense of apprehension around achieving success in the industry, how does this leave marketers feeling about growing their businesses with new hires? 

• 44% of marketers will not be hiring this year, compared to 36% in 2022 and 30% in 2021.

The chart shows a clear trend in business hiring activities, with decreases in the percentage of marketers looking to hire since 2021. The most significant drop comes under the ‘definite’ statement, from 21% in 2022 to just 14% in 2023.

Although there is evidence to suggest that inflation is easing in the US, the cost of hiring and retaining employees is often the biggest outgoing for businesses, so it’s a decision that can’t be taken lightly.

Generative AI in Local Marketing

Meanwhile, local marketers are feeling hopeful about developments in generative AI and what it could mean for business.

While our recent generative AI case study highlighted that 73% of US adults have not used generative AI tools, it’s a very different story within the local SEO niche. Just 7% of marketers have not used generative AI to experiment within their roles. Of the 93% that have, these are the tools they’ve used:

And it seems, for the most part, local marketers are impressed by what they’ve seen so far. We presented several statements around the use of generative AI within local marketing, whether for their roles or wider businesses as a whole.

• 83% of marketers are actively looking to incorporate generative AI into their roles.
• 73% of marketers are actively looking to incorporate generative AI into their business.

• 75% of local marketers feel that generative AI will bring new business opportunities.
• 75% of marketers expect potential tech partners or new tools to be actively incorporating generative AI into products.

So, while we’re not saying you absolutely should be jumping on the bandwagon, it’s good to keep in mind what your peers and competitors are doing with generative AI. With 75% of marketers agreeing that generative AI will bring new opportunities, it might be worth carving out some time to discover what these might be for yourself.

Moreover, for digital marketing or web design agencies and marketing software organizations, the finding that 75% of local marketers expect tech partners and tools to be actively incorporating generative AI into their products definitely cannot be overlooked!

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Share your thoughts with us

Thanks for reading this year’s Local Search Industry Survey report, and we’d like to say an enormous thank you again to the local marketers who participated in the survey!

We hope you found these benchmarks useful. Does the information ring true for your experience in local search, or do you have any differing experiences you’d like to share? Please consider joining the conversation with our community of over 2,000 local SEOs over on The Local Pack, drop us a tweet, or mention us on LinkedIn.

About the Local Search Industry Survey 2023

Local marketing audience data

The Local Search Industry Survey was conducted via SurveyMonkey and received a total of 534 responses through our subscriber channels, customer base, social media, and peers within the community.

Although SurveyMonkey only asks participants for binary gender information and therefore doesn’t provide a wholly accurate representation of our audience, 37% of respondents identified as female, 60% identified as male, and the remaining 12% preferred not to disclose their gender.

We surveyed local SEO and marketing representatives from the following business types: 

72% of this year’s respondents identified as local marketers based in the US. The remaining 28% represent the UK (6%), Canada (5%), Australia (3%), and 24 other countries (14%). 

Publishers are welcome to use the charts and data outlined within this report, crediting BrightLocal and linking to this article’s URL. If you have any questions about the report, please contact sammy.paget@brightlocal.com or research@brightlocal.com.

When your head is buried in the day-to-day, whether you’re responsible for a small business or managing several business locations, let’s face it—sometimes you just miss stuff.

With some users already actively engaging with Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), but many others around the world unable to get a feel for this new search experience, it got us thinking about how ‘ready’ local marketers really are. So, we decided to find out.

We polled the BrightLocal user base, including freelance marketers and representatives from agencies, single-location businesses, and multi-location businesses, to get a snapshot of how people are feeling about SGE right now.

Recap: What is SGE?

Announced in May 2023, Search Generative Experience (SGE) is Google’s new way of integrating generative AI into search results. Collating key information from a variety of sources, and presented as a ‘snapshot’ at the top of search results, it’s essentially designed to enable more detailed searches from the beginning and encourage more conversational follow-up queries.

Currently, SGE is available to a limited amount of US-based users via Google Labs, and the wider roll-out date is unknown—yet expected to be in early 2024.

1. Do local marketers feel confident in their understanding of SGE?

Before we can understand how marketers think local search will be affected, we wanted to measure how confident they are in really knowing what SGE is—apart from yet another digital marketing acronym.

• 33% of local marketers have not heard of SGE.
• Just 17% of marketers feel they have a confident understanding of what SGE is.

We expected to see low levels of confidence in terms of understanding what SGE actually is, but we were surprised to find that one-third of local marketers have not heard of SGE at all. It reinforces the point that not everyone in the business of local marketing is fully engaged with SEO news.

Meanwhile, less than a fifth of local marketers (17%) said that yes, they do have a confident understanding of what SGE is. That leaves 50% of users that don’t have a confident understanding of SGE—assuming the 9% of ‘I don’t know’ responses essentially mean ‘no’.

2. Do local marketers think SGE will make appearing in local search results easier or harder?

While we can’t know for certain what the full roll-out of SGE will look like for businesses, we wanted to measure users’ optimism towards potential changes to local search results. Do they think it will be easier to appear in local search results with SGE, harder, or about the same?

• 4% of local marketers think that SGE will make it easier for local businesses to appear in search results.
• 15% of marketers think it will be harder for local businesses to appear in search results.

Overwhelmingly, we can see that local marketers really just don’t know what will happen. Given the general lack of understanding and awareness around SGE, this is not exactly surprising. But it does tell us that, simply, marketers are not ready for the roll-out and its effect on their businesses or clients.

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What should marketers do with this data?

Well, if you’ve also been feeling unsure about what SGE will bring, then the key takeaway is: know you are not alone!

It’s going to be an interesting time as we all get to grips with the Search Generative Experience but, in the meantime, here are some key considerations and sources to help you keep on top of the changes.

Agency and freelance local marketers

If you work for an agency or freelance for local SEO clients, the number one thing you should be doing is managing their expectations for changes to come. There will likely be an adjustment period, but, as more users search with SGE, it will also learn and change over time.

Prepare your clients ahead of time so that, on day one of roll-out, you aren’t bombarded with panicked questions!

Senior SEO Specialist, Andy Simpson, summed this up nicely for us and commented on how much SGE is changing already:

Andy Simpson

Senior SEO Specialist at Digital Law Marketing

 

“SGE (and Google’s Bard) is seeing constant updates and changes, so what we see this week can be different the following week. It’s an exhilarating time to be in the local search space, how will it change the landscape of local search and/or search in general?

At this moment in time, depending on the search query, it dominates the top of the desktop/mobile search experience, users are going to either ignore it and think “what the hell is this” until they get familiar with it OR they won’t scroll down to the 10 blue links below, and the organic SERPs will be lost to many users forever… let’s just see where this ride takes us!”

In-house marketers and local business owners

On the flip-side, if you are in-house or managing local SEO for your own business, don’t panic. As mentioned above, SGE will change as it learns, so we wouldn’t advise making any drastic changes based off of a hunch!

SEO Strategist, Dayna Lucio, highlights how SGE should reinforce the key fundamentals of local SEO, such as Google Business Profile (GBP) information, and customer reviews:

Dayna Lucio

Strategist, SEO at Amsive Digital

“I think it more or less is continuing to showcase the things we already stress in local SEO—provide the information that users are looking for on GBP profiles and within on-page content and continue to pay attention to reviews, because this is another way that Google is highlighting those. Like anything with Google, I expect there to be multiple tests and changes as time goes on, so its hard to say what the impact will be.”

So, the key advice here is to continue to ensure you are grounded by local SEO principles and focus on your customers.

Community, industry news, and expert sources

• If you’re not already, we’d recommend subscribing to our newsletter—we regularly round up the latest and most important news in local marketing and wider SEO practices, as well as release our research findings and expert takes on the most talked-about topics in local SEO.
• Join our community of local SEOs in The Local Pack, a group of over 2,000 strong! This is your place to ask (and answer) questions, exchange insights, and discuss new changes and challenges in local search.
• Similarly, Sterling Sky’s Local Search Forum is a goldmine of all things local search, with many prominent local SEOs answering queries and providing advice.
• Our Expert Focus series sees local and digital marketing take on a variety of topics, from AI in local search, to agency culture and client engagement.
• Follow Google Search Liaison on Twitter (sorry, X…) for updates on SGE.

Do you have any strong feelings around the future of local search and SGE? We’d love to hear your thoughts or help answer any questions. Please feel free to comment in The Local Pack, tweet us @BrightLocal, or email research@brightlocal.com. 

Methodology

This poll was conducted within the BrightLocal tool platform and received 378 responses from our user base, including local SEO consultants, and representatives from agencies, single-location businesses, and multi-location businesses.

• Do you feel you have a confident understanding of what SGE is?
• How do you think SGE will affect local search results?