I worked with a client with several parks and physical locations across the UK for their business.
They are in the holiday and leisure industry, and each location has a separate Google Business Profile account.
With this, I saw that despite many of their locations outranking key competitors in organic search, they were struggling in Local search and Map results.
How to Improve Local SEO
So, I set out to improve this.
Annoyingly, by default, clicks from a GMB profile to a website are categorised as Direct or even Referrals in Google Analytics.
To combat this, I set up UTM tracking in the URL. This then replaced the website URL for each location we were looking at.
This then allowed us to see this in more detail in GA.
Local SEO Optimisations
Minimum information
I made sure that each location had a minimum of:
- Business address,
- Business hours,
- Category,
- Reviews.
Category Use
I paid special attention to the categories that were chosen, too, as I knew this contributes to relevancy.
A good way to do this is to look at what competitors have as their main and sub-categories.
In my experience, I have found that niche categories should be the main category, as this generally results in a higher number of views.
For example, for this client, I used = Holiday park, lodge, caravan park, holiday home, and campsite etc.
Business Description
It is vital to use important keywords in the business description.
The key here is not to be spammy but to ensure that the main search terms for the client are included.
Attributes
Attributes can be a very powerful feature as they act as an emotional reason to click.
There are also a number of special attributes, too which can include:
- Women-led,
- Black-owned,
- Transgender safe space,
- Healthcare-related options,
- COVID best practices.
Services
I then added the main services as service items with a view to this helping with the CTR.
Sub-items were also added with additional information where it made sense to do so.
Photo Use
The value of photos should not be unestimated in local SEO and should show the business/values/products.
Businesses with photos on listings receive 42% more requests for directions on Google Maps and 35% more clicks to their websites than businesses without photos.
Local SEO Optimisations
With the nature of the searches for this business, I knew that tweaks to the business name could be very powerful.
Localising the Business Name
I have found that you can typically localise a business name without issue.
E.g. [Location Name] Holiday Park, Sussex.
The Power of Branding
Branding goes a long way too.
I added the client brand name to the start of each location name.
E.g. [Brand Name] [Location Name] Holiday Park, Sussex.
I spaced each of these optimisations out to track which had the biggest impact.
Local SEO Results
After making these changes and monitoring the performance MoM, after a while, we started to see some really significant results.
We saw:
- 125.84% increase in Sessions from Local sources in Google Analytics,
- 197.12% increase in New Users from Local sources in Google Analytics,
- 8.28% increase in Average Session Duration from Local in GA.
And the good news didn’t stop there. I saw amazing results for the clients in revenue and eCommerce.
This included:
- 91.88% increase in the Local eCommerce Conversion Rate,
- 333.33% increase in the number of Transactions from Local sources,
- 692.95% increase in GA from Revenue from Local sources.
The locations of the parks in local and map results were improving too.
A park in Cornwall was previously outside the top 15 in local and Map results, whereas it now sat in position number 6 for the term “holiday park Cornwall”.
A popular Sussex Park was outside the top 10 in local and map results and now sat at number 2 “holiday park kent and Sussex”.
Another park in Wales was outside the top 10 in local and map results and now sat at number 4 for the term “holiday park wales”.
What made the Biggest Change?
Of all the changes I made, localising the business name and ensuring the use of appropriate services combined resulted in a 37.7% increase in sessions from local search.
Looking for Local SEO Services
Please get in touch if you like what you’ve read and want to make your website more visible for local searches.
I’d love to help make your website more visible.
