Exponential growth is a juicy headline. Obviously the thought of 4x your daily customers is something many businesses only dream of. However lots of businesses can experience growth like this. Using a combination of SEO services and a robust review process we helped Old Pine Barber shop 4x their daily customers, helping them hire an additional barber to take on the work load.
This is how you can do it too.
Setting Up Your Local Business For SEO Success
This case study take a look at a local barbershop. However we’ve achieved growth like this with all our clients. From Fortune 1000 companies all the way down to local 1 off barber shops like this client.
Growth like this is achieved first through SEO
This is a graph from the last year, taking the local business Old Pine Barber Shop from 0 clicks a day to over 20.
#1. Start With Your Website
Before you start doing any SEO work you need to start with your website / business and answer these questions:
- What services or products do you offer?
- What searches do you want to rank for?
- Do your target searches have search volume? (e.g. is anyone actually searching for those keywords?)
- Does your website & Google My Business profile have detailed but baseline information? (e.g. hours, about us, contact us, menu, footer etc.)
- Does your website have pages with detailed and helpful content that helps potential customers learn about your services or products?
After you’ve completed all of these questions you can move on to step 2.
#2. Why Your Website / Business?
Okay so you’ve built out the content on your website and diligently filled out as much information as possible. Now it’s time to ask the most important questions which form the base of conversion rate optimization (aka getting people to do something that you want).
- Why should Google show your webpage?
Do a Google search for one of your target searches. In this case study let’s say “Barber Shop” is our target search term. Look at the Google search results. What makes your webpage better than what is currently offered by Google? Be unbiased and ruthless at scrutinizing your own webpage. It’s not good enough to be better at somethings. You need every aspect of your webpage / Google My Business Profile to be better than your competition.
- Why should Google show your Google My Business profile?
Do you have more reviews? Are your reviews only 5 star (aka you might have paid or hand picked them?), Does your profile give them a good description on what you offer? Are your hours up to date? Is there a local phone number? Are there products or services I can buy right online? Can I book an appointment online?
- Once on your webpage is it obvious what the next step is?
So many of our clients come in with great detailed content on their webpage, but no one is buying their products or booking appointments. Why? Well as stupid as it sounds your web page needs to be blatantly obvious what the next step is for a potential customer to take.
Let’s look at these 2 examples for the search term “mortgage broker”:
Look at this landing page, what is the next step?
It looks like they want you to click “learn more” to take you to another page to read a lengthy page of content.
Now look at this example from Alex Lavender. It’s very obvious that the next step is to start your application, which you can do right away in the first form. Or if you’re not convinced yet you can click the secondary button “meet Alex Lavender”.
Even something like these 2 examples. They’re both great websites, look sharp and have great content. However with Alex Lavender’s website it’s very obvious what the next steps are. This helps exponentially with your business, which is the ultimate goal of SEO… to grow your business!
#3. PROVE That Your Business Is The Best
And this is the best way to do it:
- Backlinks from other websites. Get links from all your online profiles; socials, memberships like the chamber of commerce, yelp etc. Plus work on backlink building… but that’s a huge topic within itself.
- Reviews, probably the most important aspect for a local business is reviews! Getting consistent new reviews, shoot for a 4.7 star rating, respond appropriately to negative reviews, and best your competition by getting a solid foundation of hundreds or even thousands of reviews!
The SEO Game Changer For Old Pine
We worked with Old Pine and built them a website with all the 4 pillars of SEO taken into account. And it’s easy to say that our SEO work far out bested any of the competition in Halifax. However the website wouldn’t get into the top 5 results. This was frustrating to say the least, we looked at technical SEO, hreflang, backlinks, content EVERYTHING! But we were getting no where.
However we realized the biggest gap was in the Google My Business reviews. Old Pine had 12, the websites that were ranking organically on Google (not Google maps) had at least 40 reviews. So we worked with Old Pine and gave out sample hair pomades if clients gave us a Google review… any review! We got 4 star, 1 star, and 5 star reviews and gave EVERYONE a free pomade.
And it worked.
It worked wonders, after we hit a consistent pace at 1 new review a week we jumped to top 3 results in only 4 weeks. We now have 61 reviews and counting, and the Google search traffic is coming in droves! This was easily the most important part of SEO that we did for this business, and something that should be of primary focus… even before you spend money on backlinks.
We’ll make a new blog post on the best Google My Business Review profile you can make, to help guide you on what is ideal.