As several of our clients have brick and mortar stores, we’re dealing with a lot of local campaigns. While local campaigns are often regarded as “less work” or even “easy” compared to an international or e-commerce campaign, there’s still a ton of work that needs to be done right when setup. To help speed up this process while still remaining efficient, we organized a Trello board to keep on the right path.
It’s a public board because we want your feedback as well. What needs to be added, removed, tweaked, etc. This is like a flowchart or a concept map for a local SEO campaign, but with legs. Use it to manage the tasks that your project requires.
Local SEO Campaign Setup in Trello
Side note: I’ve left out most site-specific steps unless they were directly tied into the local setup.
Local SEO Campaign Research List
This is going to involve all aspects of getting your local campaign ready. Researching the best terms for the industry (and location), taking note of any notable competitors, and making sure that you benchmark key metrics that you’ll need to report on later.
Here, you will keep track of your keyword research tasks; this involves the preliminary work you do to see what keywords the page or site in question might be able to rank for.
Next, a competitive analysis is done. You will keep track of it here. This will include keyword research for competing pages. Ask yourself, “can we do this better?”
Look at the citation count, current rankings, monthly conversions, and current review locations. Track your progress here.
Local SEO Campaign Setup List
After setting up your tracking you’ll be creating/updating the local pages themselves. This is truly one of those tasks that you need to make sure is done correctly the first time. Because of long turnaround times for changes, you’ll want to double check that all your information on your Google/Bing pages is compiled correctly.
After your location pages are set up in the search engines, you’ll next need to add the necessary local changes to the website itself. This includes adding the NAP where needed and adding the necessary Schema markup.
Here, you will manage tasks for your website visitor tracking, including GA and any other platforms you will use.
Step-by-step, you will need to claim and complete your Google profile:
- Images
- Video
- Categories
- Hours
- Website
- Description
Like the Claim Google card, this card will be used to track the tasks that go into claiming your Bing profile.
- Business Inf
- Social Profiles
- Business Specialties
- Photos
You’re going to want to tidy up your website. So, here, you will manage and monitor your progress with markup, adding location pages, content rewriting, optimizing images, fixing broken links, etc.
Local SEO Offsite Campaign List
Citations and links are huge when it comes to building a successful local campaign. This stage involves putting plans together to make sure you have a steady flow of high-quality links and citations being built/earned.
In addition, having a specific strategy in place for earning reviews is key. With the ever-growing increase in social integration into search engines, reviews are too important to be overlooked. The trick here is to get help from the business owner, as they are typically the ones who interact directly with the customer.
Once the campaign research, setup, and on-site work is done, it’s time for prospecting your citation list. Here, you will keep track of local directory submission sites and other citation you’d like to pursue (Yext, Manta, etc.), and track your progress here.
Depending on the size of your list, you may want to include a citation building card separate from your prospecting card. This is completely up to you, but it’s what I prefer. If so, you’ll keep an eye on the work here.
Then comes the fun part: building links. This is one of the most powerful parts of the work you will do. And you can keep track of your efforts in this card. This is where our link building campaigns get a little complex, and we usually use this card to link out to an entirely new Trello board.
Finally, you will arrive at the end of your campaign and it will be time for a review of your campaign. What were your successes and failures? Do you need to keep working, or have you met all of your goals? Often, your client will want a report on everything that’s been completed and what the results were. Manage the processes of the final stages of your campaign here.
Final Thoughts
When these strategies are executed well (and in order), the result is a strong foundation that gives any local SEO campaign a great boost. Use this format for all of your campaigns and let us know how you’ve altered the process to your liking.
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