Welcome back to Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki. This week, we’re here to talk about pizza. For the noobs out there, pizza is a savory dish of Italian origin, consisting of a usually round, flattened base of leavened wheat-based dough topped with tomatoes, cheese, and various other ingredients (anchovies, olives, meat, etc.) baked at a high temperature, traditionally in a wood-fired oven.
But why’s that something we’d talk about on a Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki video? Cause it’s freakin’ delicious, that’s why…
Ok seriously, there’s a reason we’re talking about pizza today. I love to use the pizza example as a simple explanation of the difference between regular SEO and local SEO. Local SEO has been around for years, but most business owners still haven’t heard of it.
Google uses different algorithms to return search results. Traditional SEO is the practice of optimizing your site for Google’s regular algorithm, where there’s no geographic focus. Local SEO, on the other hand, is the practice of optimizing your site for Google’s local algorithm, where you’re trying to show up in a specific geographic area.
I wrote a post about this on Search Engine Land a few years back, and the idea really stuck (cause c’mon, everyone loves pizza).
So for today’s example, let’s say that you’re fresh out of law school and just got a killer new gig at a law firm in Memphis. It’s your first day at the firm, you’re hungry, and you’re craving a pizza. You open up Google and do a search for just two words – “pizza delivery” – and Google gives you a list of all the pizza places near the firm.
That night, you get home, and you love pizza so much you decide to get another pizza. Once again, you head to Google and type in just two words – “pizza delivery” – and you get a completely different list of results, since Google shows nearby results.
Now, that makes perfect sense to you since you need a pizza from somewhere nearby. That’s Google’s local algorithm at play. Google has analyzed the gazillion queries it gets, and it has realized that for certain types of businesses, searchers need local results, even if they didn’t include a geographic keyword like a city, neighborhood, or phrase like “nearby” or “near me”.
Like I mentioned in the video a few weeks ago, the local algorithm will display the map pack – a map with pins and three businesses listed below – but the standard 10 blue links of the organic results are also influenced by the local algorithm.
There’s overlap between the signals that matter for regular SEO and Local SEO, but if you have a local business that serves customers in a specific geographic area, Local SEO will be much more beneficial.
There are additional signals that matter for Local – things you don’t have to worry about with regular SEO. You optimize content differently, build links differently, and reviews are a key factor as well. Citations don’t even matter to regular SEO, but they’re a foundational factor of local.
If you’re a local business, you need to be sure you’re doing Local SEO – or, if you’re using an agency or a vendor for SEO, you need to be sure they understand Local and they’re including all the extra things involved with local.
So now it’s time – put your hand on the screen right here…
BOOM – we totally just high-fived cause you learned something awesome.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Tactical Tuesdays with Wiki, and don’t forget to come back next week for another awesome video. See you next Tuesday!