How much local traffic should I expect

[donsilvernail]

I handle mostly small business and provide SEO optimization services and content creation. My question is about local search.

what is a reasonable amount of local search traffic for small service companies. For instance I handle an electric and hvac company with an estimated population of 100,000 people within a ten mile radius. With approx 20 companies who provide competition. Should I expect 10 hits a day 20, a hundred? How do I quantify results on a local level as to not make expectations too high.

The good metrics I have is the amount of prospects who have found my clients through the web and purchased services. That percentage is high. But Is there room to improve if my client received 15 hits a day?

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

It really depends on how much effort you put into your local SEO and your local signals on your website.

I would take a look at citations through Moz Local, Whitespark, and Yext. Reason being, Google and other search engines will utilize the information through these listings (as well as your social channels) to return rich snippets for your local presence and searches. Having these snippets / enhanced results greatly improve click through rates from search.

You can try and estimate click throughs based on organic searches and search volume for terms in your area, but I would also take a look at local PPC opportunities to eat up more real estate.

I would take a look at your location reports in Google Analytics and see if the area you are targeting locally is improving with new opportunities you try in your local campaigns. You can also see if your search queries report in Search Console is seeing improvements for certain keywords/queries, tie that with top pages report, and see if you're seeing increases in your location report in Google Analytics.

From there, you can begin benchmarking your progress and projecting future local SEO value.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[EGOL]

When you have content of various kinds on your website it can pull in a lot of traffic from outside of your geographic service areas.  If you want to measure how much of this is "local" traffic and monetize the "non-local" traffic I would suggest using Google's DFP ad server.

You can set it up on your pages to identify traffic from INSIDE of your geographic area and show those visitors your house ads.  Visitors OUTSIDE of your geographic area - who are not candidates for purchasing your service will be shown adsense ads or ads from some other network.

After you have done this the reports available through Google's DFP ad server will let you know the amount of your traffic that is local, the number that clicked through to your sales pages, the amount that is beyond your geographic area, and the amount of bonus income that you earned from people in New Jersey or some other location where your service is irrelevant.

Steep learning curve here, but over the next months and years you can earn a load of dough from people who will never spend a penny with you.

If you are really smart, you can set up DFP to display ads for colleagues who own businesses in other parts of the country.  They should be willing to pay premium prices for impressions made by people who live in their service area.