Sean Garner Consulting | Marketing Agency & Certified StoryBrand Guide

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E27: How to Master Local SEO to Outrank Competitors

Sean Garner

How well is your local business performing online? In this episode, I reveal how to dominate local SEO and drive more traffic to your sales funnel. We’ll cover the three pillars of success: optimizing your Google Business Profile, automating your five-star review strategy, and leveraging on-page SEO to rank higher than your competitors. I’ll even share scripts and tools you can use right now to improve your rankings. Ready to take your local marketing to the next level? This episode is packed with actionable advice to help you grow.

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Sean Garner

Sean Garner is a marketing consultant and Certified StoryBrand guide dedicated to helping small business owners grow and dominate their industries. He created the Marketing Domination podcast to teach people how to combine storytelling with strategic marketing to help businesses connect with customers and stand out online.

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EPISODE 27 TRANSCRIPTION

How to Get More Leads

Sean Garner [0:00]: I want this session to be much more interactive, and hopefully, we're going to fix people's listings and get them some more leads and traffic today to their websites. Before we get started, show me by a show of hands if your business is local, where you have a brick-and-mortar location or you serve a specific local market or area.

Okay, perfect, perfect, perfect. Awesome. So, for example, tell me about your business.

Okay, perfect. Yeah, so you serve a local area. You're not going to build houses all over the country, right? Okay, perfect.

So what we're going to be talking about today in this session is how to become a local legend and leverage local SEO to fill your sales funnel. In the last session, we talked about what you needed for a sales funnel, some strategies to fill it, and how to optimize it. This part is about filling and optimizing it at the local level.

If you have a national company, this might not be as applicable to you, but there are still some good best practices and automations that we’ll show you to help your business. Just like we had "build, fill, and optimize" for your sales funnel, today we’ll cover optimizing your Google Business Profile, getting more five-star reviews than your competition, and leveraging on-page SEO opportunities for your website.

We’re going to break all this down—why you need it, and honestly, if people allow me, I’d love to audit your listing and show you things you can do today to improve it so you can rank higher than your competition. We also have some really cool SEO tools to plug your website and your listing into and show how you’re ranking, plus actionable steps to improve it.

One thing to note when it comes to SEO: there are different aspects of it. You’ve got something called the map pack. If you Google “plumbers,” it’s going to instantly pull up a map showing all the different plumbers nearby. Before that, there’s the paid sponsored ad section. But the organic content—the first thing people will see for a local service business—is the map pack. Below that, you’ll see people asking questions—FAQs that Google answers. Then below that, you’ll see the website listings.

Website Rankings

Sean Garner [02:15]: What we're going to be doing today is showing you how to optimize and rank higher for the map listing and the website listing. Both of these will feed into each other. For local service-based businesses, the biggest opportunity is in that map pack listing. When it comes to the numbers for the map pack and ranking on Google, the number one listing typically gets anywhere from 30% to 39% of all the traffic. Think about the keyword someone is Googling for your business—let’s say, “lawyers Dallas.” About 40% of all searches are going to that top page. The second listing gets, at most, 24%. The third listing drops to around 18%. Beyond the top three, the numbers are minimal, and very few people even scroll past those top results. Now, Google doesn’t really have pages anymore; it’s a continuous scroll. But even with that, nobody is scrolling much. If you’re not in the top three, you’re missing out on significant traffic opportunities for your website and for leveraging this organic content. If you’re not number one, you have a huge opportunity to gain more volume. Think about your current website traffic. If you’re not number one, you’re leaving a lot on the table. I do have a question: does anyone here know if they are ranking number one right now? Personal training? Awesome. Okay, we’ll check that out. What’s the keyword? “Personal training”? Great. We’ll find out.

Traffic Insights for Top Google Rankings

Sean Garner [03:59]: Power, sports, and page, okay, perfect. If you're ranking number one, then you're already doing great. We can also look at the keywords and check the total average search volume to see how many people are actually searching for that keyword. That way, you’ll know based on where Google is actively ranking you, how much of that potential traffic you’re capturing. This helps us make decisions not based on personal preference or emotion, but rooted in data. For instance, you can evaluate the financial reward of capturing that keyword and related keywords in your industry or niche. If you're ranking number three and thinking about investing in SEO strategies, consider how much business and website traffic you're currently receiving. If you go from 20% of that volume to 40% by moving to the top position, you're essentially more than doubling your website traffic. That potential conversion rate makes it obvious whether investing in SEO is worthwhile.

Sean Garner [05:22]: With SEO, knowing those numbers is essential. If you're not ranking in the top three, you’re not really competing effectively in the SEO world. The biggest opportunity we have lies in something called the map pack listing. Let me show you a couple of examples. If you Google "Tulsa Home Appraiser" on your phone and look at the results, check the "More Places" section. For this keyword, you’ll see listings like Measured Home Services with 221 reviews, Appraisals in Real Estate with 59, Brown Appraisals with eight, and Tulsa Jewelry Appraisals, which isn’t even relevant, but it has 49 reviews. Then there are businesses with 18, two, or even no reviews. Now, let me ask a rhetorical question: is there one listing that stands out?

Sean Garner [06:08]: Yay, there we go—gold star to the first one. It’s the one ranking number one, and they have more than four times the reviews of the second-place business. They are what we would call an industry dominator. Shameless plug—they’re one of our clients. Our goal isn’t just to get to number one but to make sure our clients are so far ahead that their competition can’t catch up. In this case, this client could stop paying us for a while and still remain untouchable because of how far ahead they are. I’ll show you what we’ve done for them and others to achieve this. You look like you’re about to say something. Yeah?

Sean Garner [07:09]: We can look at how many reviews you have. While more reviews won’t automatically get you more leads, they can improve your ranking, which increases the chances of people finding and choosing your business.

Sean Garner [07:27]: Mm-hmm.

Sean Garner [07:41]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sean Garner [07:46]: The bottom line is...

Sean Garner [07:54]: Let’s use your business as an example. We’ll plug in your information in just a second. The number of reviews doesn’t matter as much as your ranking. If your competition has more reviews and is still outranking you, then we need to look at the strategies we’ll discuss to boost your ranking. That’s the opportunity to improve your performance.

Sean Garner [08:08]: Now, let me show you some of the things that make this listing exceptional. The first step is optimizing your Google Business Profile.

Optimizing Your Google Business Profile

Sean Garner [08:47]: So the very first thing we need to do is make sure your Google Business Profile is completely filled out. First question: do you have a Google Business Profile? Yes or no? Okay, perfect. If you don’t have one, the first step is to create one. Just go to business.google.com, or if you’re logged into your Google account, click the nine dots in the top corner, select "Business," and follow the steps to set it up. Depending on your industry, there may be more stringent rules. For example, contractors often need to provide licensing information, and financial institutions might require video verification to prove the physical location. It’s a nuanced process, but setting it up usually takes about 10 to 15 minutes.

Sean Garner [09:20]: Once it’s set up, the most common issue is businesses not completing or optimizing their profiles. Let me give you some real talk, including gray areas and best practices. The first thing is to make sure everything is completely filled out. Start with your business name. Here’s the gray area: your business name should be the same across all platforms—Google Business Profile, Facebook, Yelp, and anywhere else it appears online. Consistency is critical. If your business name naturally includes a keyword related to your industry, that can help a lot.

Sean Garner [09:51]: If it doesn’t, there’s a technical option to add the keyword to your business name, but this only works if it matches how your business is legally identified and used across all platforms. For example, if you’re trying to rank number one, your Facebook page and other listings must also display the same name. Consistency ensures Google doesn’t penalize you later.

Leveraging Google Reviews

Sean Garner [10:58]: You don't have to put that. No. No, you don't need to put that. For example, the spammy version would be "Real Estate Appraiser, Measured Home Service, Real Estate Appraisal." That’s not really his company name. We use vertical space lines; that's typically what we do.

Sean Garner [11:18]: This is the gray area. Technically, Google's answer is no. I'll be honest, this is wrong. In the eyes of Google, they could report that, and they might make us change the name. Most likely, they won’t. Typically, the only one who’s going to report it is an upset competitor. But as long as you actually call your company that everywhere—like, what is the company name again? If your website shows Page Honda Power Sports whenever people log on...

Sean Garner [11:54]: Yeah. Then, most likely in that case, nobody’s going to say anything because they’ll assume it’s the name of your business. Where it gets spammy is in industries like plumbing, service-based companies, attorneys, or accountants. They might call it something like "Dallas Lawyer, Scott Reed." That’s not the name of his business. Scott Reeb or Reeb Law is the actual name of the business. People are just trying to keyword stuff to win.

Sean Garner [12:16]: So you can do it, but be wise with how you do it, and make sure it's consistent across all platforms. Absolutely. Yep, 100%. That's one way of doing it. Thankfully, we know some attorneys and other resources to help navigate this. The technically correct way to do it would be for your LLC to create a DBA that includes the keyword you want. That way, you can show that you own it if anyone challenges you.

Sean Garner [12:39]: Next is making sure you have the proper business category. There are tools you can use to look at what your competition is doing and identify the ones you need to rank against. For example, in your industry, do you want the listing to say "Gym," "Group Fitness," or "Personal Trainer"? You need the right category for what you actually do. There’s no universally right answer; it depends on your business. For example, in Scott’s case, there’s a difference between "Attorney" and "Law Firm." Both are options. You need to select the correct one for your business.

Sean Garner [13:07]: The next one is the description. This is another area where people try to game the system by adding irrelevant keywords to their listing. Keywords are what people type into Google to find your business. You can add these into the description, but if you keyword stuff—using those words unnaturally or excessively—Google will flag it and throttle your listing. Instead, write good, persuasive copy and naturally include the keywords where they fit.

Sean Garner [14:11]: You would not want to go, "Measured Home Service is the appraisal company that does real estate appraisals for all of your real estate appraisal needs," and just overly use the words to get it to rank. That looks fake. Google is going to know it. If it doesn’t sound like natural human language, it’s not going to work. The other thing is you want to have everything set up to be consistent across the entire internet. With Google, there's something called your NAP, which stands for name, address, and phone number.

Sean Garner [14:38]: How it is typed out here—from your name, address, and even formatting with brackets and hyphens—needs to be consistent on your Google listing, website, and every other place online. This consistency is one of the ranking factors Google uses to ensure it’s the same listing and not a duplicate. Your Google business listing should link to your website, and the NAP details must match exactly. If you have multiple phone numbers for tracking leads or sales, your main number should still be the one on your Google profile and website to keep everything consistent. Does that make sense?

Sean Garner [15:08]: The quick version is to ensure everything is filled out completely and correctly. Set up your service area, business hours, and all the relevant details. You can also add updates to your listing and connect your social media profiles. Unlike social media, you don’t need to post all the time on Google Business. Posting one to two updates a week is sufficient to show Google that your listing is active and relevant. You can drag an image, link it to your website, and add a call-to-action button like "Learn More."

Sean Garner [16:32]: You can use tools like SEMrush, HighLevel, or Hootsuite, which integrate with Google Business for scheduling posts. These tools simplify the process of maintaining an active profile.

Sean Garner [16:52]: Does the algorithm on Google work the same as social media? Not really. This is less about SEO for the posts themselves and more about signaling to Google that it’s an active listing. It’s unlikely that anyone is scrolling through and analyzing Google posts, but doing this gives you a slight edge over competitors who aren’t. It’s one of those small, extra steps that can help boost your ranking.

Sean Garner [17:33]: No need to post more than three times a week. Beyond that, you’re likely to hit diminishing returns. For your business, like with power sports—selling ATVs and UTVs—you’re constantly getting new inventory. A simple strategy would be to feature a hot new model. Take the image and description from your website, post it with a call-to-action button like "Learn More" or "Buy." When someone clicks on the post, it will direct them to the product page.

Sean Garner [18:52]: If you’re a local service-based business and you’re ranking number one on the map pack, that’s where most of your business will come from. However, it’s hard to track conversions through your website because many people won’t even click on it. For example, with plumbing, most people search on Google, see your listing, and hit "Call Now." You’ll see these calls tracked in your Google Business profile’s performance data, not on your website metrics.

Sean Garner [19:40]: Yeah.

The Role of On-Page SEO

Sean Garner [19:52]: Show that update in conjunction with the listing there? Will it just help rank the listing? Just help rank the listing. So it's not going to show like, "Hey, I’m looking for a 2024 Polaris," or whatever. It’s not going to do that. But if they’re searching for that, then your map pack will show up higher because you had that keyword in it. Yes.

Sean Garner [20:23]: The more relevant Google thinks it is, the better. If it’s a newer posting, it will help. But that’s the thing—if it’s been six months since you talked about that model, I wouldn’t think you’re going to get any benefit from it because it’s more about being new.

Sean Garner [20:43]: And how I would think about it for you guys too is probably less on model numbers and more on manufacturers. So Yamaha, Polaris, Kawasaki—something like that, instead of saying, "This is the Trail Boss," or something like that. Yeah. No, no, no.

Sean Garner [21:12]: So right here it will show. See, we haven’t posted any updates in a long time, but it’s going to be down here at the bottom. Yes, if it hasn’t been posted in a while.

Sean Garner [21:26]: No, no, no. This is only visible to me. Yeah. Yeah. Not correct. Not for that. I think that was the question.

Sean Garner [21:41]: So first thing with this, and then I want us to do some listings for people, is, okay, you’ve got to optimize your profile. The main thing to optimize it is most small business owners haven’t actually done what we just talked about. They just clicked through it. Make sure it’s completely filled out, it’s up to date, you’ve added your logos, you’ve added images to it, and you’re adding updates—at least some updates. If you can get into a regular cadence, that’s obviously best. The very first step is to optimize.

Sean Garner [22:10]: The secret sauce of all this is Google reviews. The most powerful thing you can do for your small local business is to get more Google reviews than your competition. That can be difficult, and most of the time it’s difficult because, just like we talked about in the last session with automation, it’s one of those things that just gets missed. It gets overlooked or forgotten. Staff feels uncomfortable asking for it. You as the business owner might try to remember to ask, but as your team grows, they’re probably not asking for reviews like they should be.

Sean Garner [22:40]: But I want to show you guys right now how you can get more reviews. I love a good script. So here’s something that I think anyone can do right now to get a lot more reviews. There’s a script I’m going to share with you and then a process.

Sean Garner [22:56]: You could take this message right now, and I’ve got something better for you, but let me explain. You’re going to use this for all your existing customer lists—every single person you have inside your phone list. You’ll message this to friends, family, colleagues, anyone you can think of to help boost your Google business listing.

Sean Garner [23:15]: The gist of it is: "Hey, I hope you’re doing awesome. I’m trying to grow my small business and rank higher on Google. I’d really love your support. If you could just take 30 seconds to leave us a five-star review, I’d be so grateful. Even if you’ve never been a client or customer, having that five-star review helps show potential customers they can trust us."

Sean Garner [23:50]: So even if they've never worked with a commercial plumbing company, your friends could still be like, "Hey, five stars, give them a good review." One thing to know, especially if it's a new account or they've never left a lot of reviews, it takes several reviews for these to actually stick. That's something everyone should do this weekend. People are sitting on their couch watching TV—blast these review requests out to your friends. Then you want to add this link to what you do. I want to show you this though, because it's very important.

Sean Garner [24:21]: Whenever you log into your Google business profile, you're going to click on "Read Reviews." Then you're going to click "Get More Reviews," and then you'll hit "Copy." This is the link you want to send people. When you send them that link, it will auto-open to their profile to leave a review and prompt them to log in. They won't have to fumble around trying to figure out where to leave the review. Here's how you do it: log into your profile, click "Read Reviews," then click "Get More Reviews," and copy that link. This is what you add to the text message, direct message, or email you send out. It takes people exactly where they need to go to leave a review and makes it simple.

Sean Garner [24:59]: This is something you can do manually right now, or if you have a mass text or email list, you can blast it out to everyone. The automated process is this, and here’s some data we’ve found. Typically, you get diminishing returns after three requests. We deliver these three requests with three days in between. How we do this for businesses is simple: as soon as an invoice is triggered, a purchase is made, or a sale is completed, we send a review request. We send it via text and email simultaneously with scripts.

Sean Garner [25:27]: Then we wait three days. If they haven’t responded or left a review, we send a follow-up. Three days later, if they still haven’t responded, we send another. Finally, three days after that, if they haven’t left a review, we send the request one last time. What we’ve found is that the second follow-up increases response rates significantly.

Sean Garner [26:14]: Let me show you some real data. This is from our IV lounge. When we send the first text message, we get a 16% click rate, and for emails, it’s 4%. After three days, the text message click rate increases to 23%, and the email click rate goes up to 5.8%. After three more days, most people have already left the review, and we don’t even get to the third step. Almost 73–75% of people who go through this funnel leave a review by step two.

Sean Garner [26:46]: By having automated follow-ups, this process works. Most businesses fail to ask consistently or follow up, and that's why they miss out. If you do this, you'll start dominating your competition.

Sean Garner [27:00]: Last thing—the other thing you can do is leverage on-page SEO. This means making sure that on your website, you're listing the keywords and including the city or service area you follow. A quick way to do this is to go to Google, type in your product or service, and include your city. This will help you see what keywords people are actually searching for.

Sean Garner [27:30]: For example, what's your business name? North Dallas Bug Control? Okay, what would a customer look for if they needed your service? Would they search for pest control or bug extermination?

Competitor Analysis and Ranking Improvement

Sean Garner [27:51]: Hey, you are showing up number one right there. That's awesome. So good job, North Dallas Mosquito Joe. However, we don't have any business listings pulled up, so I guarantee you, we can optimize that a lot better. Even though you are showing up number one when people search for "Mosquito North Dallas," you're not showing up for terms like "mosquito control" or "mosquito solution." That shows me there's a big opportunity here.

Sean Garner [28:07]: What I would want everybody to do—let's say we wanted to beat Joe. Sorry, Joe. If I wanted to beat Joe, I would go to their website right here. The first thing I’d do is use a plugin tool. This tool will tell me what keywords they're ranking for or trying to rank for. Here's their site title and SEO description—it looks like they're targeting the Richardson, Texas area based on this.

Sean Garner [28:28]: If I wanted to compete with that, I’d search for "Richardson mosquito control" and see that Joe has the keyword "Richardson" on his website 14 times. To beat him, I’d optimize my homepage and make sure I’m using "Richardson, Texas" at least 14 times in relevant and natural ways. That’s how you dominate SEO—know your competition, analyze their strategy, and do it better.

Sean Garner [28:52]: If you’re not ranking number one, it’s not easy, but it’s straightforward to figure out what you need to do. Look at your competition, identify what they're doing, and implement improvements on your website. So, three things: optimize your Google business listing, get more Google reviews, and make sure your homepage includes the right keywords to outrank your competition. Cool?

Sean Garner [29:52]: I think everyone needs this. Yes, absolutely. So if you're able to schedule a date, let’s book a calendar today. Love it.