Digital marketing agencies offer an excellent value proposition to their customers. While a big chunk of their client-base comprises retail customers and end users, there is also significant portion that comprises B2B customers.
These B2B customers are mostly design, development and marketing firms that do not have SEO specialists on their rolls and therefore seek a digital marketing agency that offers them an SEO Reseller program.
Under an SEO Reseller program, the B2B customers are able to give out SEO-related tasks to a digital marketing agency. This helps the B2B customers take the burden off their shoulders and focus on picking more SEO projects without hiring SEO specialists; which in turn enables them to increase their business, reduce overheads, have less stress and earn the goodwill of their clients.
An SEO Reseller program works well for the digital marketing agency too, since it enables the agency to white-label it’s SEO services and offer it to their B2B customers.
Another benefit that accrues is local SEO. Let’s understand how it works.
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is a process that involves the use of geo-targeted keywords and content to optimize a website so that its visibility improves on local search results. This works when users are searching for businesses in their local vicinity.
Local SEO assumes significance for businesses as they are keen to appear in local search engine results and make their brand popular in their community. The higher the results in “near me” searches, the more is the traffic that comes to the website.
In an SEO Reseller program, digital marketing agencies also bundle together local SEO services to their B2B customers at no extra cost and hence these B2B customers can profit from an SEO Reseller program.
Below are the local SEO activities that are undertaken by the digital marketing agency.
Carrying out a local SEO audit
It is advisable to carry out an SEO audit as it brings out the technical issues that are impacting a website’s ranking, especially the components that affect local search result performance and the fixes that are required to correct it.
Competition Analysis
This is done to identify local keywords and website content that is being used by competitors and the corresponding SEO ranking of the various pages.
On-page SEO performance
This helps find out how is the on-page SEO performance of the website. Are the link building and citation promotions working fine, or not?
Analysis of backlinks
Checking the backlinks of the website, especially their domain authority to find if there are any local websites or chambers of commerce linking back to the website?
Social Signals
Determining the ranking of the website in social media – what do the socials signals such as ratings, reviews, and other forms of user-generated content point towards? Is the brand or the business popular in social media? Do they drive traffic to the website?
Doing a local SEO audit beforehand helps in setting and implementing a local SEO strategy, based on a local SEO checklist.
Find the appropriate keywords for local search
Find out the keywords that users are using to find local businesses. Below are some parameters that are related to search, namely:
– Location of the store
– Opening and closing hours
– Where is the store located?
– Phone number of the store
– Directions to the store
These questions easily can be easily answered in the Google Snack Pack.
Add the location to the keyword
The best way is to have the location in the keyword. These days several tools are available to check keywords and their search volume.
Check community forums to find potential keywords
This can bring up interesting keywords, both commercial or transactional that can be added to local SEO checklist.
Find out keywords for related searches
When someone types a keyword in a search browser, it brings up frequent searches related to queries of other users. These queries can be plugged into your keyword research tool to get information on search volume.
Localizing the content of the website
Ideally speaking you should create content for every geo-targeted keyword and the content should support the keywords that you are targeting.
Creating content for area-specific landing pages
In case you are optimizing multiple locations, then it is advisable to create area-specific landing pages with local SEO content.
Leveraging local events to get ideas for content
Your content should appeal to local audience and hence it makes sense to leverage local news stories and local events so that you are able to position your brand and company as a leader in the local community.
Optimizing website’s GMB (Google My Business) listing
Leverage the website’s GMB listing across Google Search and Maps.
Making the NAP (Name, address and phone number) consistent
This offers your information to your clients. Ideally you should create a spreadsheet with all details of your business, from which you can easily do copy-paste, or make edits in future.
Making regular GMB posts
GMB posts serve like mini-ads that provide updates on events, offers, or announcements for the business. When a user clicks, the post expands to provide more information and shows a call to action or a link.
Monitoring GMB performance
You can use the GMB dashboard to monitor how customers are engaging with your business. For instance you can:
– Determine number of phone calls received.
– Find out the origin of the traffic.
– See customers are doing branded search and which ones are doing a direct search.
– Find out the overall rating of the business.
– Monitor customer activities and experiment on your local SEO strategy.
Optimizing for Google Maps
Optimize the features of Google Maps to improve how the business’s websites appear on local search results.
Focusing on local link building
In order to get more local physical and online traffic, focus on building links with websites that have a high domain authority, and yet are local. For this:
Building local citations
This will get your business name and contact details into the market. You can do this process either manually or by automating it using tools.
Searching for brand mentions
This can be done using social listening tools such as Mention or Google Alerts to monitor brand mentions across the web and follow it up by checking the quality of the websites, their domain authority, and business
Leveraging reviews from local websites
These throw insights on what potential customers are browsing through and so it is worthwhile to tap into them.
Improving on-page local SEO
An optimized on-page local SEO provides a solid foundation for building links and reaching out to other authoritative websites. For this you need to optimize the website for organic search and focus on localizing the pages.
Adding local keywords in the meta- title and description
With geo-targeted keywords appearing in your title and description, it will be easier for Google to create a contextual relationship between the keywords and page content.
Implementing Schema
When optimizing businesses for local SEO, you can start with the Local Business Schema Markup. It will allow you to add properties, such as a markup for operating hours, business address, and aggregate ratings for the business.
Leveraging customer reviews.
Since Google uses reviews to evaluate local search performance of businesses, it is essential that reviews are positive so that customers feel that your products are services are trustworthy. When this happens, website traffic increases.
Enabling customers to leave reviews
Encourage your customers to leave a review either on your GMB profile, or create a short name and URL allowing businesses to request reviews from customers.
Responding to even bad reviews
It is recommended to respond even to bad reviews as it prompts an interaction between businesses and customers and builds transparency. High-quality, positive reviews help businesses rank higher in search results and get found by their customers.
Conclusion
An SEO Reseller program is a flagship offering of digital marketing agencies. With local SEO offerings also bundled in it along with regular website SEO offerings, it becomes even more attractive for the B2B customers of digital marketing agencies.