Local SEO Benefit

[WMCA]

Hi

Our company is looking to increase our local SEO footprint and wondering what is the industry average for traffic increase to quantify investment. Can’t really find anything online.

I understand this can be very subjective in relation to market size, competition, localization, etc but just trying to get a sense of opportunity if we cross our t’s and dot our i’s, what's the potential?

Context: We’re a national brick and mortar with eComm. We’ve already done a lot of leg work in optimizing our NAP but very little citation building/claiming.

Please provide resources for stats

Thanks for any input.

Cheers

[Ray-pp]

Hi WMCA,

Unfortunately, I doubt that the community can provide a resource that says 'if you improve local seo, your traffic will increase by x%' - you're assumption that these numbers are highly dependent upon the locale and website is correct.

You can do something like the following:

• Identify key, local terms that your company will target
• Determine the overall local search volume for the above terms
• Use search term ranking estimates for each term (i.e. come up with a SERP rank for each local term)
• Estimate the CTR for each term (use your historic CTRs with estimated improvement)
• Use the above to conclude to the total new traffic your site will get if all criteria is met
• Use an estimated ecommerce conversion rate (again, based of historical data if possible) and AOV to calculate new revenue earned

[RyanPurkey]

In addition to Ray's response, are you also asking about increasing walk-in visits to your brick and mortar store via an increased presence on local search?

You're best planning gains will likely come from quantifying the average values of visits to your brick and mortar and ecommerce stores then planning for X hours of work to increase that number Y%.  This is all going to be data that's unique to you.

Still, here are some guides to help you with your planning.

1. http://searchengineland.com/google-uses-neural-networks-reverse-turing-tests-validate-street-address-numbers-signs-209801  (A review of the growing interlaced relationship between real location presence and virtual presence.)
2. http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/  (Analytics guidance on tracking offline conversions)
3. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2343577/google-local-searches-lead-50-of-mobile-users-to-visit-stores-study (Stats from Search Engine Watch saying 50% of mobile users doing local searches visit business locations.)