Local search in 2024: Key trends and tactics

Location-based businesses must focus on five areas – discovery, relevancy, experience, engagement and conversions – to drive impact today.

Who are location-based businesses? Anyone with a brick and mortar or office where people come to you: bakeries, pizza parlors, accountants, studios, mechanics, etc. you get the idea. For these examples and more their customers are using 'nearby' or <city> in their online searches.

Local has evolved from listings management to real experience and engagement. Today, consumers are looking for more personalized experiences and relevant conversations across all touch points. 

Whether you are a multi-location brand or a small local business, the biggest challenge is providing a personalized experience across all channels and touchpoints.

Local is more about experiences than listings management 

Here are the top five areas that location-based businesses need to focus on in 2024. 

1. Discovery

It is critical to be discovered for name and location-based queries by:

• Creating the most comprehensive listing on Google Business Profile (GBP) and vertically specific authoritative channels.
• Having proper schema structure on your website.
• Publishing relevant, timely and engaging content such as local events, rates, menus, hours, and maps. 

I recommend businesses to treat their GBP as another social media network, with this way of thinking it you'll remember to update it anytime you post to FB or IG for the menu change or special promo or event you'll have.

2. Relevancy and authority

Some of Google’s algorithm updates have been aimed at ensuring that businesses are creating helpful content that offers expert opinions on products and services and delivers value. For businesses, it is not about creating more content; creating topical, entity-rich content aligned with your channel and audience strategy is critical. 

• Quality of your website
• Reviews on the Google Business Profile
• Customer interactions with the business

3. Experience

For location-based businesses, providing a connected experience is critical. The challenge is providing quality information to a brand-loyal customer looking for a location-specific query. Here are six must-haves to consider as you think about experience: 

Consistent information: The details of your brand, particularly location data, must be uniformly presented across every platform. For businesses with multiple locations, the best strategy to ensure uniformity is to have all platforms draw from a single source. Whether it’s your main website, directories, advertising campaigns, public relations, or other channels, they should all rely on this centralized source for accurate brand information. 

Site architecture: It is important to create the right site architecture to ensure information about each location is available easily. Location information must be qualitative, relevant, engaging, and current and include local and regional searches. Talk to your web designer about this.

Localized experience: Make sure your location page incorporates elements that anticipate and address the local audience’s needs. Content such as FAQs, videos, events, rate calculators, itineraries, menus and more.

Location, backlinks, website, GBP, video: Andrew Shotland says, in 2024, the most critical factors for local online performance include the physical location of the business, as relocating can significantly impact local search rankings. Backlinks, while less influential for local pack rankings, remain important for organic search results. Businesses should maintain a simple yet effective website, optimize their Google Business Profile.

Personalized experience: Ideally, every visitor accessing your website should feel like the site and content were meant for them and not for the masses. The objective is to tailor the user experience to the audience’s intentions and meet the business’s requirements. Delivering a personalized user experience involves adjusting everything from visuals and text to prompts for action. This approach is designed to enhance engagement on your site and increase the likelihood of converting visits into actions.

Technical SEO: All the rich content that you have created needs to be discovered and understood by search engines. The goal is to ensure at least 95% of your site content is crawlable and indexable with no issues with redirects, canonicals, multiple hops, broken pages, etc. However, just having your content crawled and indexed isn’t enough. There are some technical SEO tips to maximize the visibility of your content. Talk to your SEO expert about this.

4. Engagement

Customer engagement is an important signal for search engines. Metrics like time spent on the site help search engines determine whether the content meets the searcher’s needs. 

Alternative channels like TikTok, where Gen Z is spending a lot of time, are a threat to Google’s market share. Improving customer engagement needs to happen across channels. Strategies like engaging a community of influencers, active digital PR, adding interactive and informative videos, customer reviews, and a robust social channel strategy can help increase brand engagement. 

5. Conversion

Maximizing conversions is the end goal of all marketing efforts. Here are four power tips to maximize local conversions:

• Paid marketing: To get the most conversions from your local marketing efforts, compliment your organic marketing with paid marketing efforts.
• Target audience segmentation and personalization: Use audience segmentation and targeted display to reach well-defined audience personas. Combined with on-site personalized experiences, these can bring highly qualified visitors, engage, and convert them more effectively. 
• Co-optimization: Finally, make sure your paid and organic teams do not work in silos. Co-optimization of paid and organic marketing efforts can help you reach expensive but high-converting paid audiences through organic marketing and optimize paid budgets to improve ROI.
• Business intelligence and analytics: With performance data often siloed between channels and systems. To avoid data discrepancy, it will be important to capture all data into a central source of truth. All performance reports and dashboards across channels should be built from this central data source. 

Takeaway: Rethinking your SEO KPIs and success metrics

As search evolves and Search Generative Experience rolls out, traditional SEO metrics used to track local performance will become less relevant.

• Organic listings will get pushed lower down the search results page.
• Local results are and will show more engaging and relevant content such as images, posts, reviews, etc.
• More Google properties will occupy SERP real estate – like SGE, People Also Ask, image listings, video listings, local listings and more. Saturating these will be important to get your brand in front of the audience.
• As more content is delivered within the search results, click-through rates from informative queries are likely to drop. 

New KPIs need to be adopted to measure success. These include:

• Top of the funnel: Rich results and impressions. 
• Middle of the funnel: Phone calls, driving directions, appointments (where applicable), messaging, reviews, and clicks.
• Bottom of the funnel: Time on site, conversions, bookings, transactions.

Local is no longer just about listings management. Today, it is about creating a well-integrated strategy to cover all audience touch points and optimizing for discovery, relevancy, experience, engagement and conversions. 

What are your current efforts to capture new customers during local search?