Whether you're trying to do your local search marketing yourself or you've partnered with an agency, the process of elevating your local search ranking can seem lengthy.
If you've been working on your business's local SEO for a while and you aren't seeing results yet, you're probably wondering what is taking so long.
It's easy to lose patience when you're putting precious time and/or resources toward improving your digital presence, but there is a light at the tunnel. Let's talk about why local search marketing seems to take so long.
In case you didn’t already know, local search marketing is kind of our thing.
Local search marketing involves telling search engines exactly what they need to know about your business. We commonly refer to this info as your business's NAP (name, address, phone number).
When this data is structured together, it's commonly referred to as an online citation.
But, it goes further than that. Search engines also need to know your business’s website URL, hours, service area if applicable and anything a consumer might need to know when searching for a business online. Think menus, photos, services, business descriptions, customer reviews, etc.
Some digital marketing agencies might promise to immediately get you to the top of the local search results.
I’d love to tell you local SEO works that way, but it doesn’t. You can think of local search marketing as building trust with search engines. You don't build trust overnight, so you shouldn't expect to improve your search ranking overnight.
If you hired a digital marketing agency and they’ve promised you overnight results, you probably shouldn't believe them, unless they're talking about paid advertising. Check out this post to learn how to choose the right digital marketing agency for your local business.
Let's get down to it. Here are three reasons you might not see instant results:
Local search marketing is complicated, and this is especially true when a business is brand new or has no information online. In order to get businesses listed online, marketers will have to create and optimize the following:
It’s not as simple as plugging a little information into local listings.
You also need to add images, a bio and links back to your website (and if your business is brand new with no website, then you will also need a website that’s optimized for local searches).
And, once you've created all these local listing pages, you will need to either engage in manual citation building or find an agency to do this for you (which is just a whole lot easier).
This is just a small piece of the local search pie, though. There’s a lot involved in local search rankings. Some of the top categories that affect your business’s local search ranking are:
And those categories are broken down into many more signals search engines take into account when they rank your business in local searches.
Your industry also plays a role in how long it will take to see results from your local search marketing efforts. If your business is in a highly competitive industry, it could take even longer to rank in local searches.
This is because your competitors are likely already established online and will show up before your business in search results until you can prove to search engines that your business is trustworthy.
Building trust with search engines involves building your online presence with the aforementioned profiles and citations as well as acquiring customer reviews.
And, while those factors have a positive effect on your local search ranking, there are a number of factors that will have a negative impact on your local search ranking (like incorrect or incomplete citation information).
Let’s talk about the negative factors.
If your business has been around for a while, but you’re still having trouble making it to the top of the local search results page, some of these negative factors are probably affecting your business.
One of the most common problems local businesses face when trying to rank higher in local searches is incorrect citation information. And guess what. Incorrect NAPU across the web is one of those negative factors.
Ever changed your business name, moved locations or updated phone numbers? You probably have incorrect information floating around. Cleaning up inaccurate and inconsistent business information online takes time.
Here’s what’s involved:
There isn’t just one place search engines get all their information about your business.
They take information from all over the Internet. This can be a problem because if a search engine finds conflicting information about your business on different websites, it becomes confused and doesn’t know what to tell searchers.
Because search engines are really only interested in giving searchers the best, most relevant search results, they penalize businesses that have conflicting information online.
Learn more about why your local search is going down here.
Once the information has been cleaned up and listings have been optimized, search engines have to catch up.
Google and Bing are smart, but they don’t change (or display) your local information the second it’s updated in a few directories. Search engines have to do something called "crawling and indexing" (finding and processing) web pages before they use and display new information from those pages in searches.
Even when you submit new information to directories, those directories have to be crawled and indexed before the changes appear in search results.
The same goes for your website, and it can take anywhere from days to months for search engines to crawl new pages. You can, however, submit your sitemap to be crawled in order to speed up the process.
Even Google My Business takes time. Once you’ve verified your page, it can take a few days before the information you added about your business shows up online.
And, don’t forget that once your information is showing up and you’re being found online, the work still isn’t done. You'll need to keep an eye on your rankings to make sure they don't slip because of new, conflicting citations.
So, why are you still paying for local search marketing once all this is done?
Even after all this information is cleaned up, search engines might still find new, incorrect information about your business. And, as I mentioned before, this conflicting information can cause your local search rankings to drop.
Remember, something as simple as an apostrophe in the wrong place can cause citations to be incorrect.
Local search marketing is not something you can do once and reap the rewards.
That’s why it’s helpful to have a digital marketing agency to have your back when things like incorrect NAPUs and negative reviews happen.
Not only do you have to continually check that your citation information is correct, but you need to consistently ask customers for reviews (since reviews are a local search ranking factor as well) and make sure your business has a social presence.
Final Thoughts
Local search marketing takes commitment! It's important to understand the benefits that come with having a local search presence and the obstacles that come with it.
But if you find that your local search marketing is taking too long, you can always try paid advertising to get your presence started.
Either way, keep working on your local search ranking, and remember that it will be worth the wait!
In the meantime, check out and subscribe to the RevLocal blog for more information on local search marketing.
Isabella Andersen, Content Contributor
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