I mentioned in a previous post that TDM has historically been focused on national accounts. We’ve had success with some of the most competitive keywords online, and we’ve shown results for some of the biggest online retailers. So naturally in developing a local search division, we would expect to see the same types of results, possibly even faster because the keywords aren’t nearly as difficult. So since we launched local search, has that been the case? Is local search easy? Here are some early observations:
1) Local Search is Fiercely Competitive and Cutthroat! I had seen this firsthand before. My wife runs a wedding planning company in Raleigh, and the wedding industry can be pretty vicious with vendors trying to gain that edge over their competitors by any means necessary – we’ve even had anonymous emails come through warning her not to use certain vendors. So I knew it could be pretty bad. And when opening companies up to reviews with Google Places, we knew there was always the possibility of fake reviews from competitors. Sure enough, one of our clients was victimized by a fake review. What was shocking though was just how blatant it was. Someone set up a fake google account and gave one star to about 20 carpet cleaning companies in the Triangle – except one that got 5 stars and a glowing review.
Interesting how this person has reviewed only carpet cleaning services – and all in one day. Well fortunately it’s easy enough to respond to these, and responding in the right way can turn a negative into a positive – and make that competitor look absolutely awful.
2) Most clients are savvier than we expected. One of the potential negatives of entering into the local search market was that there would be a lot of hand-holding with the local business owners or marketing managers. And by hand-holding I really mean explaining things very slowly, repeating, and possibly even starting at “here’s the ‘on’ button of your computer”. Well, that hasn’t been the case – we severely underestimated the local business owner. Many of our clients have taken it upon themselves to learn internet marketing and SEO basics. We’ll hear the phrase, “I know enough to be dangerous” pretty often. But the reality is that these clients have learned enough to know that they need help. It can be extremely time-consuming (and oftentimes ineffective) to run a campaign by yourself. These business owners realize that to run a natural search campaign correctly, they need outside expertise – and need to spend time running their businesses, not building a blog or finding people to link to their sites. For us though, it’s great explaining strategies – and training people on how to write in their blogs – when they already know what they’re talking about.
3) Yes, search results happen fast. When we’re targeting our clients’ most important keywords, we’re seeing results at a speed that we’ve never seen before on the national level. We’ve had several situations where we’re seeing top five results in under two weeks. This doesn’t happen with every client, sometimes it takes months. But the overall speed at which our clients are seeing better rankings, more website visits, more phone calls, more pop-ins, more leads, more inquiries, and more sales has been nothing short of awesome.
Which leads me to our final observation – we should have started this up a long time ago 
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I think the velocity of change in local results is getting faster, although the speed of change in Google as a whole is getting much much faster. This maybe because local businesses are not optimised and when they are, they quickly jump above competitors.