Using Local Business Partnerships And Collaborations To Build Authority And Visibility via @sejournal, @JRiddall

In the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), one thing remains constant: the importance of authority, which has a distinct effect on organic search visibility.

Authoritativeness is the “A” in the much-heralded E-E-A-T found in Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines.

In short, a business or organization needs to prove its authoritativeness to Google, and all other search engines, in order to be considered worthy of visibility in search engine results.

The authority of a local business can be established in a few different ways, most notably:

• Via the helpful, high-quality, well-structured content it creates for its target audience/customers.
• Through validation of its offerings via industry-specific backlinks it maintains to its primary product, service, or other relevant content.
• Via the engagement of its content.
• Through validation of its “localness” via its local appearance, community participation, and engagement.

We are obviously going to focus here on the fourth, often underestimated and overlooked, aspect of local business authority.

It only stands to reason: if a business wants to be visible locally, it needs to truly be visible in the community, with the digital local community merely being an extension of the real world.

While traditional SEO tactics like keyword optimization, content marketing, and link building are still essential, savvy digital marketers will look beyond these tactics to stand out from local competition.

Leveraging local business partnerships and collaborations to build your local online authority and extend your web presence will most certainly increase your visibility.

In this post, we’ll explore the power of forging partnerships with other local businesses and organizations to drive growth.

Building Authority Through Partnerships

Authority in the digital realm refers to your brand’s credibility, trustworthiness, and expertise in your industry and/or location. For small, local businesses, both matter.

As noted, Google and other search engines consider authoritative websites more relevant and rank them higher in organic search results and local map packs.

Here’s how forging reciprocal local business partnerships can help build authority:

Co-Branding And Trust-Building

Partnering with reputable local businesses and organizations can create a co-branding effect.

When consumers (or search engines) see your business/brand associated with other businesses they already trust, it naturally enhances credibility, trustworthiness, and authority by extension.

Local business organizations like chambers of commerce, Business Network International (BNI), and many others have been established, at least in part, to help small local businesses extend their reach, build trust, and, thereby, earn authority.

Many of these organizations have categorized online directories, content distribution opportunities (e.g., email newsletters or blogs), and business awards.

Maintaining listings, content, or recognition here provides search engines potentially powerful local and topical signals. Basic membership is important, but the more a business owner can do to boost their local offline and online profile through active engagement, the better.

Expertise Sharing

Collaborating with local, like-minded businesses may enable you and your audience to tap into your partner’s related expertise and showcase it on your digital platforms or vice versa.

This can be accomplished through guest blog posts, joint webinars, offline events, or social media takeovers, all of which can enhance your reputation as a trusted, local information contributor.

One of the challenges of content marketing, especially for small local businesses, is simply having the time to create the content. Thoughtful partnering with other business owners provides a viable means to share this burden of feeding the content machine.

Content Syndication And Social Collaboration

Similarly, two businesses who choose to simply share each other’s content on their respective platforms expose each other’s brand to a wider audience and can establish each as a go-to source for local information.

While social signals – such as likes and shares – are not Google ranking factors, having partners occasionally like, share, and effectively validate any of your content will certainly extend its potential audience, where it will perhaps again be read, liked, and shared.

Content sharing, depending on where and how it’s done, may result in the creation of valuable local backlinks.

Backlinks

A well-structured partnership should include the reciprocal sharing of backlinks between websites.

Backlinks remain valuable in SEO, as search engines interpret them as votes of confidence.

Where possible, these links should be put in the proper context relative to your partnership and the related products or services offered.

For example, a local auto body shop might establish a partnership with a local full-service mechanic. Each could link to the other’s respective service pages as a reference for those customers looking for a trusted referral.

However, even a non-service-specific link for a local partner can be beneficial, as here, too, this is at least local, if not topical, validation.

And yes, Google’s algorithm is sophisticated enough to identify when one local business has linked to another.

All backlinks (except for those that don’t add any relevant value) contribute to authority.

Supporting Local Organizations And Events

Another aspect of growing local trust and authority is becoming involved in local service organizations, sports teams, clubs, or events.

Whether you are providing monetary or volunteer support, most organizations have websites or social media presences where a logo, perhaps a short business overview, and preferably a link can be shared.

Further, if approved by the supported organization(s), who are no doubt also looking for any positive exposure they can get, content and links to their websites, programs, events, etc., should be published on yours.

Typically, this is done in the “about us” section or perhaps on a page dedicated to all of your community support initiatives.

These types of relationships will bolster localness online and provide more evidence of your business’ role as a contributing, engaged member of the community.

Local Competition And Content Differentiation

Depending on your location and level of competition, establishing local partnerships and collaborations may simply be a way of differentiating your business from all others when competitors don’t have the time, resources, or foresight to leverage this important opportunity.

The introduction of generative AI used to produce content has raised fears in some circles around the potential for a lack of “unique” informational content, as some marketers, while not advisable, will post what AI has generated verbatim.

Local collaborations can be a great way to complement what AI has to offer by injecting partner contributions in amongst standard service-related blog posts and FAQs.

A Local Collaboration Case Study: Fitness Food

Here’s a quick example of a local business partnership scenario and some of the potential benefits to be realized.

The Collab

A local fitness studio partners with a healthy café, offering a stay fit meal deal to gym members. The café provides fitness class discount vouchers with qualifying fitness-focused meal purchases, which both prominently promote on the home page of their websites while linking to each other.

They also collaborate on a weekly Fitness Food blog post with reciprocal links, which they publish and share on their respective websites and social media platforms.

Lastly, they create a health challenge and contest on social media for their customers, where participants are asked to share their fitness and nutrition journeys – again cross-promoted.

The Results

• Combined, the businesses positioned themselves as leading community advocates for healthier lifestyles, reinforcing their authority as wellness experts.
• Blogs linked to their offers and primary service pages, shared via each other’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, trigger a boost in each business’ Service page rank in organic search and, subsequently, organic search traffic and conversions.
• The program attracts local influencers who post user-generated content with links to their offers and blog posts, further enhancing their reach and authority.
• The health challenge and contest becomes a trending topic on local social media platforms, leading to likes and shares, thereby attracting a broader audience.
• The partnership created a mutually beneficial cycle – as more people joined the fitness studio, they also frequented the café, and vice versa.

Practical Steps To Building Local Business Partnerships

With the potential benefits of local business partnerships outlined above, here are some practical steps to establishing and maintaining effective relationships:

Identify Compatible Businesses Or Organizations

Seek out local businesses and groups that ideally complement your products or services and share your target audience.

Ensure their values and marketing goals align with yours, as this will form the foundation of a successful partnership.

Develop A Clear Value Proposition

Clearly define what each party brings to the table.

Consider how you can benefit each other, whether through collaborative content creation and distribution, co-promotion, shared events, or other tactics.

Create A Partnership Agreement

Consider putting a written agreement in place outlining the terms and responsibilities of each party.

This document should include details like the duration of the partnership, resource/time contributions, content ownership considerations, and any other mutual expectations.

Leverage Both Online And Offline Channels

Promote your partnership through various channels, both online and offline.

Utilize your website, social media platforms, email marketing, pay-per-click advertising depending on the promotion and budget, and in-store physical signage to showcase your collaborations.

Collaborate On Content

Partnering on content creation, such as blog or social media posts, is an excellent way to leverage each other’s expertise and resources.

If the plan is to create a blog post per week or month, alternate scheduling to spread out the workload. This will no doubt resonate with most local business owners who are generally taxed for time.

Monitor, Measure, And Adjust

Any good digital marketing campaign should be monitored and measured to see what’s working and what isn’t i.e., messaging, channels, etc.

Part of your campaign planning should include a determination of what to measure and the goals you both hope to meet.

Analyze organic search results, website traffic, social media engagement, and sales at regular intervals to gauge impact. Be ready to suggest and make adjustments if something isn’t working as expected.

Plan, Engage, Collaborate, Grow

Building online authority and visibility is paramount for businesses of all sizes.

While traditional tactics are still essential, forging local business partnerships and collaborations can be a game-changer in establishing both local and topical authority.

These partnerships not only enhance your credibility and trustworthiness but also expand your reach and customer base.

You can start small by reaching out to your local business groups for membership options or another small business with which you believe you share – but don’t compete for – customers and do a link exchange.

Community building, offline and on, will be key to any local business wanting to compete and grow in an increasingly digital world.

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Featured Image: PopTika/Shutterstock

Data-Driven Decision Making To Optimize Local Digital Marketing Efforts via @sejournal, @JRiddall

If you’ve been involved in any sort of marketing over the past 20 to 30 years, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “Content is King.”

This may very well be true, as content in its many forms underpins all interactions between businesses and their target audience.

However, if “Content is King,” then data is an omnipotent force directing the King’s every move.

This is particularly the case with digital marketing, where nearly all interactions and engagements can be monitored, analyzed, and optimized.

To put it simply, data helps us to understand what is working and not working so we can focus our attention on doing more of the former and less of the latter to drive results.

Start With Actionable KPIs

For small local businesses, which don’t typically have a great deal of time or resources to allot to their digital marketing efforts, there are some basic data points or key performance indicators (KPIs) we can track and review with our marketing partners if we employ third-party support, to ensure we are maximizing those efforts.

As with any strategy, it’s important to properly identify and establish meaningful goals against which progress can be measured.

KPIs such as visibility scores, click-through rates (CTRs), or website traffic, engagement, and goal conversion rates broken down by channel can and should be monitored.

Monitoring should be conducted over relevant comparative time periods – for example, month-over-month or year-over-year – to reveal trends or patterns we can learn from and take action upon.

Organic Search Visibility

With admitted bias, we will first look at the data related to our local organic search visibility or local SEO.

Here, we want to understand how well our content (website, Google Business Profile (GBP), or other points of our web presence) shows up in organic search results for keywords we want to be found for.

We could spend a fair bit of time reviewing how to arrive at such a list of keywords, so we will assume for now that keyword research has already been done.

We can either conduct Google searches (preferably Incognito to remove any personalization of results), or we can leverage rank tracking tools, which can provide us with granular or more broad visibility data.

When it comes to local organic search visibility data, the goal should be to understand where we have established some level of authority upon which we can build and sustain momentum.

Another invaluable and typically underutilized tool set to gauge and understand organic visibility, performance, and potential underlying causes, for better or worse, is Google Search Console (GSC).

GSC is broken down into five sections with useful data for website owners related to:

• Performance – Keyword queries, average positions (to be taken with a grain of salt), impressions, CTRs, and top-performing pages/content.
• Indexing – Which website pages are/are not being discovered, crawled, and included in Google index.
• Experience – Detailed metrics related to overall experience, Core Web Vitals, and mobile usability.
• Shopping – Specific to ecommerce websites and manageable via Google Merchant Center.
• Enhancements – Validation of website components like breadcrumbs, logos or videos.

Screenshot from Google Search Console, September 2023

Of these, local business owners or their authorized agents should review and take action, as needed, on insights and recommendations provided in the top three sections.

Note: As a tool primarily designed for webmasters, there are often “issues” and alerts which should be reviewed by someone with technical knowledge in order to prioritize and address them.

Google Business Profile Performance

A successful Google Business Profile, for many local businesses, is as important (if not more) than their website.

After all, the Local Map Pack has superseded organic search results for many local search queries – particularly those conducted on a mobile device.

Further, many of the primary actions businesses want their customers to take (i.e. call, message, book, ask for directions, visit website, leave a review) can be accomplished via a GBP.

Local businesses that maintain a complete, accurate, and active GBP, alongside a solid website experience, will be rewarded by Google with increased visibility across the board.

In terms of data, GBP provides a wealth of information related to visibility on mobile and desktop search over time, the keywords being searched, and the ongoing metrics related to the primary actions noted above.

Screenshot of Google Business Profile Performance Reporting, September 2023

This data should be reviewed on at least a monthly basis to identify whether or not the GBP is being found and engaged with.

If not, steps should be taken to more frequently post content (e.g. promotions, links to website or blog content, photos) to gain more glowing Google reviews and to respond to the same in a timely manner as customers and Google expect.

Paid Search And Social Engagement

Local businesses that need to augment their organic visibility with paid search and/or social ads, depending on who and where they believe their audience to be, naturally want to pay attention to how well their campaigns and budget are performing.

In short, are their ad dollars being well spent and/or delivering a return?

All search and social ads providers offer a wealth of performance data related to visibility, clicks, conversions, and spend, which can, in turn, be broken down by demographic, location, time, or other variables.

In fact, the growth of paid digital ads can, in large part, be attributed to the granularity of the actionable data available for campaign optimization.

Paid search ads and keyword focus should also be viewed relative to organic visibility.

In other words, we need to understand what keywords/topics we have visibility and/or are able to drive traffic and conversion for so we don’t have to pay for them.

Keeping in mind, SEO and establishing authority always takes time.

Organic Social Media Visibility And Engagement

Social media, in its many forms, is an important channel for some local businesses that have taken the time to build and nurture a social following. Social media is, after all, at its core, about community.

All social media platforms recognize the need for businesses to be able to measure the value of these channels and, as such, provide analytics to understand what are often described as soft and hard engagement metrics.

The difference between the two is the essential degree of effort and commitment required by the consumer.

Low-value soft (sometimes called vanity) metrics include follows and likes, while hard metrics are shares and clicks, where consumers are making the extra effort to endorse the content they have read, listened to, or viewed.

Tracking and reviewing these metrics, particularly the hard metrics, can provide excellent signals as to the type, topic, and channel preferences of an audience, thereby guiding future content creation, distribution, and optimization.

Website Analytics

Every local business owner should have access to some form of website analytics, with a vast majority recognizing and opting for Google Analytics as the de facto source of truth for understanding site audience composition and behavior.

Website analytics help us to understand and validate who our audience is (demographically), where they came from, what they consumed on our site, how engaged they were, and whether or not they took any of our calls to action (CTAs).

Similar to other data sources where local business owners are concerned, the key to using Google Analytics or any other platform effectively is to focus on the metrics and KPIs that matter most – i.e. conversions, traffic by channel, top entry pages, and engagement trends.

Create or ask for dashboards and reports that provide insights, answers, and next steps at a glance. Underlying data will always be available to drill down into if needed, and time allows for deeper analysis.

Competitive Data Insights

When it comes to competitors and gaining competitive insights, we are effectively taking many of the same focused data points noted above and seeing if we can reverse engineer the things our competitors appear to be doing to get ahead.

• What keywords do they appear to be optimizing their website for or buying search/social ads for?
• What content do they have that appears in search results, or they are sharing via their GBP?
• What social platforms are they active on, and what content appears to work best for them?

However, it is important to first make sure we know who our competitors are, specifically online and/or in specific channels.

For example, a quick Google search or review of local SERP data for our focus keywords will reveal who our primary organic search competitors are for those keywords.

At a local level, this may include national and big box players, but should, more importantly, define who our top-performing local small business competitors are.

We should also be cognizant of the fact these are likewise local small businesses, who have similar challenges and certainly not all the answers, but we should take notes where they are outperforming us.

The Future With AI

We’ve, of course, all been hearing about the rise of AI and how it’s going to change how business and the world in general works.

This is already starting to happen with digital marketing, as AI feeds on data to provide insights, recommendations, and other benefits with lightning speed.

The tech giants like Google have been using AI for years to help deliver more accurate search results and run better-targeted ads.

Small businesses will be able to benefit from AI’s ability to quickly analyze data and provide predictive analytics and optimization recommendations across digital campaigns.

Business owners who are open and aware of what’s coming will no doubt be a step ahead of the competition.

Bringing It All Into Focus

If it hasn’t already been made obvious, the wealth of digital marketing data available to small businesses is useless without the proper filters and focus.

Important data tools include dashboards for regular analysis of what’s happening so we can act now if we need to, as well as reports for monthly, quarterly, or annual reviews of what happened so we can adjust our strategies.

Armed with the right information, businesses can more easily navigate the digital marketing landscape to keep ahead of the competition and grow.

So, if you’re a small business owner and you’re not on the data train yet, we’d suggest you grab a ticket quickly! AI hopped on a few stops back, and we’re all about to start going faster than we ever have before – in a very good way.

All aboard and enjoy the ride!

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Featured Image: SFIO CRACHO/Shutterstock