should you be investing in local SEO moving into 2025 of course you should but in today's local SEO tips video with me Chris Palmer with Chris pal.org I want to help you business owner assess your leading competition in order to understand where you should be pointing your marketing dollars your marketing energy and your marketing budgets your time your mental resource where should you be focused in 202 for you and your business so I do not want to waste any time I want to help you decide how to Market should it be Maps should it be
PPC should it be location Pages organic blog content like what is actually driving dollars for the businesses that are in the position that you want to be in let's not waste time here I want to get directly into the strategy and how to uncover this for yourself so you will need some tools all right I understand you probably have a lot of different things going on I'm not promoting semrush I I it it means nothing to me I just want you to have the resources available to yourself to be able to do the analyzation in
order for me to uncover the answers I'm utilizing semrush all right now also during this time frame I'm going to use an example now I'm going to use an example that's fresh to me because I worked with a client this morning I won't share with you their website but I'll give you their actual key terms and I'll I'll walk you through how we came to the realization that local Maps is going to be the best to invest the most marketing dollars in for this business all right so when we start taking a look at uh
the term here laser hair removal in barington okay now again I understand that your key terms could be different your business is different your location is different but the strategy is simple we want to take a look and analyze our competition and figure out where are they deriving their marketing or their new customers from as far as a web presence all right now when we come inside of here we can take a look that here's our maps all right we scroll down to the bottom here and we take a look in this particular area we
take a look at the leading business we pull them in to semrush we're take Tak a look at our organic research and we're going to take a look all right now I'm pulling them in taking a look at our organic research why because I want to uncover and identify should I be focused on targeting more organic pages in more areas so what does this mean to you as a business owner right what services do you provide and what areas do you want to provide them look up and figure out well who's ranking above me just
like I did here I put in the area right and I also put in the service I look up the area and the service I went to the top performer and then I take a look what I'm looking at here inside of this tool semrush and there's a lot of tools that do this but what I'm looking at or what am I what I'm identifying is organic traffic why is this because I'm looking to identify should I invest dollars resources and time into creating location service Pages for these services in these locations the best way
to uncover this is take a look at your leading competition in the spot that you want to be in look down the list and we can see here look it here's their name we could see here that their name plus location so this is 36% and then here's their name plus location again 36 and 36 what is that 60 70% we scroll down the first term that means anything for this business that isn't people that already understand or know their name right because this is this is called a branded search phrase is going to be
Med Spa in this area you with me what I mean here is that 6% of their overall traffic a 6% of 155 a month is coming in for a leading term now here's why knowing or uncovering this information is valuable to you here's why because of this all right if you know that on average your web pages convert 4% of the time okay if your web pages convert 4% of the time and you're able to get an extra five people six people per month to your website right but only 4% convert is it in your
best interest to create a page okay so create a page let's just say it's 40 bucks optimize a page okay what what's that cost another 50 bucks right build links to a page okay that could be another 100 bucks right you with me so far I'm uncovering the cost that it will cost me to create a page optimize a page build links to a page in order to compete for a term is the extra one to two people per year worth the investment of time budget and resources yes or no all serps are different all
keywords are different all services are different but we need to look at the leading competition that's in the place that we're supposed to be in or that we want to be in and let's see how much traffic is actually coming in for this let's look at another term okay so when we come out here we're also going to take a look so we'll go right out here rington I all right so this is the location that I was looking at this morning and when we start taking a look around here all right we can see
that these Central cities or towns that we would also want to Target okay because I'm using this as an example would be this Deer Park Bearington Hills iverness right so let's just use Deer Park so let's again take our primary service and let's look up Deer Park okay now we want to come inside of here and we're going to take a look at organic search rankings what we're identifying here is is it going to be the in our best interest to invest in Pages location Pages optimization and backlinks to create organic pages to Target does
the traffic and the potential customer value equal our time and our energy yes or no and what we're using is we're using semrush in order to decode this by looking at leading competition that's in the place that we should be we're able to decide for ourselves is this something we want to Target all right so again we're going to this particular area we can see right off the bat using keywords everywhere that there is no cost per click or search volume keywords everywhere is a tool it's inexpensive I'm not promoting it it's just another way
to have a quick glimpse of volume and cost per click along with other factors with that said take a look here we're at in United States this is pulling in keyword dat data from Google's API this gives me a lot of data really quickly we can see here no CPC also no search volume we scroll down the list here we go to the top performer this is the player that's in the spot that we want to be we take a look at them we pull them into our tool and we look for the term that
we want to win in this case it's going to be Service Plus location in Deer Park we take a look at their organic search rankings we look down the list and we can clearly see this is a branded term branded term branded term what does branded mean branded means that the people that are coming to the site 50 60 70% of the time already know this person's name so wait a second this gives us another clue another piece of information business owner right to you this gives you another piece of information what is it well
what other type of marketing are they doing are they dropping mail are they running PPC have they been in business for 5 years 10 years are they doing radio ads are they doing well in Google Maps this helps us uncover the marketing strategies if people already know their name their name and they haven't been here 10 years how are they finding them this leads us to the marketing channels that are working you with me so when we take a look down this list this is business owner business owner we can see here that the position
is not a map pack right we can see here that they're not ranking in the pack so how are they getting the majority of their traffic aha we I have identified the primary service in the area that is driving their actual service it's not the one we looked up so what what have we uncovered well now we know that hey this person is ranking in the top spot for a term that we want in an area that we want but what's actually driving the clicks to their website is for a different service so do we
offer this service do we offer this service in that area yes or no the answer is yes then we might want to consider creating that page but this actual service in this area might not be the best solution because as we can see the person that's invested the time the energy the resource they're not getting the clicks that we thought they would be all right let me share with you another thing all right another strategy another way to uncover should you be investing in local SEO you see as we're uncovering different key terms all right
you always have to take into account creating the page right we have to keep into account the page creation the optimization building links right to the actual page reoptimization all right now whether you're doing this for yourself okay or you're paying somebody what are the costs associated with each of these services and if you're doing it yourself what's the cost plus your time worth do I want to invest the time and the dollars and the resources into this local SEO when I can clearly see that the leading competition is getting it from somewhere else all
right you need to make that decision for yourself based on your keywords let's keep going all right now back to our original example all right another way to uncover all right because I have a business owner their main location and Main Service is this all right so we look up their main service in their main location all right now when we come inside of here and we look up main location Main Service we can see it's a $12 keyword 40 clicks a month all right we scroll down the list here and we start to look
at well wait a minute here's businesses that are in the map pack right so we want to identify how much traffic are they potentially getting from being in the map pack what is this uncovering for us this is uncovering for us should we invest in a Google Maps strategy what do I mean by this should I go in there and optimize should I be updating my posts should I hyperfocus my Google Maps listing around a service and a service set along with locations and I want to point this out if you want to Target Google
Maps you also want to at least have something on the website targeting either the the Service Plus the location let me give you an example so we come inside of here I don't know who this is it's just for an example Just For Education to give you this strategy all right what we're going to do here is we're going to go into here and we're going to click on this business all right now we can see that they're in the map pack for a primary service that we want in an area that we want so
we're going to get their website we're going to come into here and we're going to put them into our tool this is semrush we are looking at organic research but wait Chris I thought we were looking at Google Maps well we are but it's very hard to identify how much traffic is coming in from Google maps without a thirdparty tool and no third-party tool is exact but semrush does a pretty good job so here's what you do you want to go ahead and take this business put it into semrush we're going to scroll down we
could see their traffic along with how many keywords they rank for we look down the list here and we can see here that barington I Spa is a top keyword this is probably something that we do now I want to point something out to you see this organic research we put in their website but look at this C position their traffic is coming from being in the local map pack so what does this tell you business owner this tells you that whatever your keywords are whatever services that you provide in whatever areas you provide them
in right you're probably doing something different than what I'm showing you but what I am showing you is that when you put in your leading competition if you look down the list and you see all maps here this position like this or whatever tool you're using however they identify you can see that the traffic that's coming in for this keyword is because they're in the map pack they're getting Spa in this location because of the map pack they're getting Med Spot in this location because of map pack what does this tell us that for if
you want this key term and you want to get similar traffic then the investment for local SEO needs to be in for Google Maps why because the people in front of us are generating traffic leads and Clicks in the map pack not organic search you with me and this is how you uncover where should you invest the most energy should it be the map pack like this right do I want to be in Google Maps or do I want to invest in location service Pages what I'm giving to you is a way to take a
look at the people that are in front of us or the businesses that are in front of us uncover what they're actually getting traffic for and then doing a simple equation internally right we're doing a simple equation internally we're going to add up the page creation whatever whatever the services press releases citations backlinks Google Maps optimiz ization Google posting our grid map all the stuff that it takes to reach that position we're going to add it all up plus our time is it worth it yes or no my name is Chris Palmer with Chris pal.org
I hope this is helpful for you I really do focusing your attention or focusing your energy on the best way to direct your budgets your time and your mental resource will be more effective than doing a bunch of things that are just spinning your wheels if you need any help with local SEO Google Maps keyword research anything how to use this tool anything never hesitate feel free to go ahead and ask in the section below and I look forward to seeing you in the next local SEO tips for 2025 video I'll see you in the
next one have a good day bye-bye
