STAT’s toolkit includes everything an SEO analyst needs to stay on top of the shift to local search.
As every SEO expert worth their salt knows, you simply can’t ignore local search. The push towards local has been growing for the past few years, and it’s currently estimated that 30-40 percent of all searches are made with some type of local intent.
On top of that, mobile search is absolutely exploding. Mobile search goes hand in hand with local search. When people are searching from their mobile devices, they’re generally on the go, and looking for something in their vicinity. Whether a searcher is looking for a pizza joint, doggy day care, a trendy bar, or travel arrangements, localized SERPs have a huge impact on organic SEO rankings.
The highly localized SERPs we see today are a big change from what we saw just two years ago. But in SEO, we can’t be afraid of change because it’s inevitable. With change comes a whole host of new opportunities. The potential to attract and convert new customers via local search is absolutely enormous.
Google’s commitment to local
The changes we’ve seen in Google search engine results over the past year reflect the significance and value of searches with local intent.
Google’s recent acquisition of Zagat in September 2011 only further cements their dedication to localization. Google couldn’t get Yelp, but Zagat was the next best thing, providing restaurant ratings and reviews from around the world to supplement Google searches with trustworthy content for local search results.
SEO analysts are now living in a world where it’s not uncommon to see only three organic results on the first page. Between the Local-pack, Hotel Finder, Flight Finder, News Results, Images, Videos and more, there’s barely room left for any organics.
In fact, for travel-related searches, it’s not uncommon to only have one or two organic results and a few Google Adwords placements being the only external links on the entire SERP. Add to this the fact that the SERP we see in one city is not the same as the SERP we see in another city, and you might be left asking how you can measure your SEO efforts at all.
Going local with STAT
It’s for precisely these reasons that we’ve built specific features into STAT that are geared towards solving the problem of measuring results in highly localized markets.
Say, for example, your client is a nation-wide pub chain in the US. They want to know where they rank for [sports bar] in Seattle, San Francisco, LA, and Miami. With STAT, we’ve made it possible for you to measure your client’s specific rankings in each of those cities—and in any other city in North America.
This isn’t something new for us. Local search is part of our foundation, and we’ve been offering the ability to track your keywords in any North American city since early 2011.
In fact, STAT was the first SEO analytics provider to offer rank tracking at both a country-wide and city-wide level. This allow customers to track revenue-driving search terms in every country in which they do business, while also being able to see how local and regional keywords perform alongside each other. Aren’t you curious to know how your city-specific rankings stack up against your country-wide ranking benchmarks?
This all comes back to one of our core goals: Give our partners what they need to excel at their jobs, and then get the heck out of the way. We want you to rock at SEO, and we don’t want you to spend forever clicking around our platform trying to get at your data. We’re focused on giving you the tools you need to impress, and making it easy for you to get your results in front of your clients.
If you would like to see a demo of STAT for your organization, get in touch with us.
Happy optimizing,
Rob & the STAT Team
