Local SEO Tips That Actually Drive Leads and Revenue | Joy Hawkins

Most local businesses believe SEO is the answer to growth.

But what if you start too early?

In this episode of The Website Growth Show, Rana Shahbaz speaks with local SEO expert Joy Hawkins about when local SEO actually works and when it does not.

Joy explains why brand new businesses often fail with SEO, why timing and foundation matter, and how to use data to make smarter decisions about your website and marketing.

This is not a generic SEO conversation.

It is a practical breakdown of how real businesses grow using local SEO, what mistakes to avoid, and how to focus on actions that actually generate leads and revenue.

What you will learn in this episode:

• When local SEO works and when it does not
 • Why new businesses should not rely on SEO early
 • How to choose the right locations using SEO data
 • Why your website still controls your rankings
 • How case studies improve visibility and conversions
 • Why bulk content and AI content can fail
 • How internal linking and navigation impact SEO
 • Why quality links and brand mentions matter more than volume
 • How to measure success using leads and revenue instead of traffic 

Key takeaway:
Local SEO is powerful.
But only when your business is ready for it.

Subscribe to The Website Growth Show for weekly insights on:

Website growth strategy
Local SEO and website optimisation

Conversion focused website improvements

How to turn your website into your number one business growth tool

Transcript

– Show Intro

Rana Shahbaz 0:00

Businesses who are looking to invest in marketing, how do you suggest the local business, a local SEO is the right fit for them?

Joy Hawkins 0:06

I would say you want to start doing local SEO after your business has been established a bit. Um, I think it's tough if you're a brand new business to just go and invest in it. You're probably not going to get an ROI uh right away because you have no foundation. So Google doesn't want you doing SEO. You got to keep that in mind. They really don't. Google is not on our side. They don't want us to be able to control the search results. Me and the business owner, we're on the same page. Like we want to dominate. Like we're good. Google, different page. Like they don't want you to dominate.

Rana Shahbaz 0:35

Metadata on all pages are are very important for local SEO. And how do you decide how many pages a local business needs on their website?

Joy Hawkins 0:44

Yeah, I mean, they only need it based on what's being searched. And that is kind of the question that we always try to answer is like, what how do you you can't really run out of topics or things to talk about, right? But at the same time, you have to kind of balance adding new content to improving your existing content.

Rana Shahbaz 0:59

You mentioned that uh SEO is all about uh pattern recognition. So what is the current pattern you are recognizing in SEO? Welcome to the website growth show brought to you by WP Minds. I'm your host, Rana Chalaz. On this show, we speak with business owners, agency leaders, and marketers to learn what's working to improve their website and grow their businesses. If you're a local business and looking for the latest local SEO patrons to grow your business, this episode is for you. Most businesses are guessing their way through SEO. But the truth is, SEO is pattern recognition. And my guest today is one of the best in the world at sporting those patrons before they become obvious. Joy Hawkins has helped hundreds of businesses dominate local search and stay ahead of Google's constant changes. In this episode, she breaks down what is actually working right now and how you can apply it to your business. Joy, welcome to the website growth show.

Joy Hawkins 1:53

Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.

Rana Shahbaz 1:54

Yeah, I'm excited to learn how businesses can turn their website their number one business growth tool. And I'm super excited to having a call with you and learn from you. Is it still possible to grow a business with local SEO?

– How Google, AI & Ads Are Changing Search

Joy Hawkins 2:09

Definitely. I think uh a lot of players have come along that have challenged Google, but nobody's ever come close to delivering the kind of traffic that they can deliver.

Rana Shahbaz 2:18

That Google is one part, but what the Google is doing nowadays, AI and all these local packs are have disappeared from Google search. So, you know, you you post every day around those those challenges. So how how the world has changed from a few years ago to now?

Joy Hawkins 2:34

Yeah, I mean I like to look at it as local SEO is everything Google, right? So, um but I think that's also expanding because we also have um the only AI tool that I care about currently is ChatGBT. And not because I'm seeing much traffic from it yet, like it's not even comparable to Bing based on the current traffic that it's sending to small business sites, but it's growing. So that's something to keep in uh or keep attention on. Um mostly with Google, we like to focus on the entire page. So I've always been adamant about making sure like you're present everywhere in the ads, in the local pack, and the organic section. And we have a lot of people that'll come to us who just care about one or the other. And I'm like, no, no, no, you need to be in all of it because you just don't know when Google's gonna shuffle something. And currently they're shuffling things so that ads are a lot more prevalent, which is not shocking. Um, so I think the businesses that were not doing ads, and to clarify, there's two different types of ads you need to do as a small business too on Google. So that's you know, it's a lot, right? A lot of people are confused. They're like, oh, there's local service ads, there's regular PPC ads. Yes, you should be doing both. So we try to cover all the different areas, and you know, and now you also have AI mode. So I feel like Google is becoming a lot more pieces, but as long as you're touching all of them, you should be good.

Rana Shahbaz 3:48

Yeah, all of the pieces is the keyword. So I would try not to go into too techy and speaking with the business owners, what they can do in today's challenging world to get results from their local SEO efforts. First of all, when you speak with customers, well, you have built an incredible business, 43 plus you know, a team member you work with. Um I'm sure you must be having a few hundred websites, if not thousands, so you are looking at regularly. Uh, first of all, businesses who are looking to invest in marketing, how do you suggest the local business, the local SEO is the right fit for them?

– When Is the Right Time to Invest in SEO?

Joy Hawkins 4:23

I mean, I would say you want to start doing local SEO after your business has been established a bit. Um, I think it's tough if you're a brand new business to just go and invest in it. You're probably not gonna get an ROI uh right away because you have no foundation. So let's let's talk like a brand new website that's not an ideal um for local SEO because you have a long time frame um to get results. Whereas when we get clients that have been in business for let's say five to 10 years already and they've already got somewhat of a foundation, we can turn things around for them really fast. Um and that's great, right? Like because then they're not pouring out uh you know three to five thousand dollars a month for an entire year before they get an ROI. Like that's a terrible situation to be in. And if you're a brand new business, you probably don't have three to five thousand dollars a month anyway. So it's like, um, I would say at the beginning, that's where you probably want to stick with ads, right? Stick with ads, really work on reviews, work on getting some loyal customers, you know, from the ground up. And obviously that's the hardest part of starting business, as we all know. But I would start there and I would not invest in local SEO until later. Um, it's just gonna be a lot easier that way.

Rana Shahbaz 5:27

That makes sense. So I think that will that piece will help uh many people to manage their you know local SEO efforts and expectations. So let's say first thing is uh can we can we run through all these tech part with a with a case study? If you have any you know recent case study, a business came with who were you know a few years old, have some reviews you picked up on on A and how to how did you what did you do to take them to B or C. So is there any any example we can you know unpack?

– The Law Firm SEO Case Study That Scaled Fast

Joy Hawkins 5:58

Yeah, so one of my one of the clients that I work on myself is a personal injury lawyer and they're in Florida. And when they came to us, I'm trying to remember, I want to say they had maybe seven or eight locations. I mean, I don't know the exact number, but it was around there. They've easily doubled that in the last few years. Um I think where we have really been able to help them is figuring out what markets to open offices in. It might sound like an easy thing to decide, it's really not. So I'll actually look and see what markets have like a decent size population as far as people living there, but don't have a million competitors. And that's kind of like a lot of times people they're like, oh, they all want to go in the big cities. That's not always the best idea because uh some of the cities there, I mean, like you look at Orlando, for example. That was a market I told them not to go into because it's nuts. Like to compete in Orlando, like you're gonna be spending at least, again, a year or two to even catch up to who's there, if you can catch up. Because I I don't even know if you can catch up to the monster uh law firms that are there. So we've been seeing a lot more success going for the like medium kind of size, not the tiniest towns, but not the largest town, somewhere in the middle. And then we always do an analysis to figure out like where they should put their office. Um, there's a lot of things that I remember we had a uh foundation repair business that I worked with a couple of years ago. And one of their biggest problems was that their locations were all in the suburbs of the city they serviced. And so they'd have these warehouses in these towns that were like 3,000 people that was a suburb of a town that had like 500,000 people. And so they didn't rank in the big town, and that's where they wanted to rank, and there was a huge disconnect there. Um, so I think it's just one of those things that a lot of small businesses um struggle with. And I think that's one of the ways for this client that we've been a really big asset is just telling them, like, okay, you're not ranking in this area. This is a pocket where there's a lot of opportunity. Let's talk about your next office being over there. And so we almost act like they're a real estate agent, which is kind of funny, but um they're they've been expanding like crazy and it's working very well for them.

Rana Shahbaz 7:59

Well, that that that is very exciting and there's something new I think we we can unpack here. Uh, I can recall my early SEO understanding. This this was the basic rule that you find uh low competitive keywords with reasonable search volume. So basically use that SEO element to help your client open new offices, which is which is fantastic. So the person uh personal engineering attorney, you help them open doing this keyword research and other research, open locations at the right places, which is the first foundation.

– Why Your Website Still Controls Rankings

Rana Shahbaz 8:30

What was what is the next step? What did you do for them to help grow?

Joy Hawkins 8:34

Yeah, so on their website, um I would say like the website is definitely not dead. It's it's funny because I don't know, 10 years ago people were saying how you know Google's trying to keep more traffic on Google. That is true, guys. Like for sure, Google's trying to keep more traffic on their pages and send less traffic to websites. And they've been very successful at that. The one time where I say your website really matters, though, is it's still the number one determination of where you where you rank and how you rank. So even with some of the new AI features we're seeing on Google, so we see this new feature that's only in the US right now. It's only on 8% of searches that we are tracking and only on mobile. So you won't see this on a computer. We see this thing that I've coined or called the AI local pack. It's basically Google has gotten rid of the traditional map pack that we're used to seeing with three listings, and they replaced it with one that's powered by AI. What's interesting about it is that they have these little descriptions that show up right under the business. So it doesn't just list the business name and you know, reviews and phone number, it lists a little description about the business. And I've been digging into like where do they get this from? How do they how do they uh pull these words? How do they um craft which ones to put in there? Uh good news is you can control it and it's pulled from your website. So it's like that is the number one place that Google's pulling it from. They're not looking at third-party validation or like, you know, grabbing it from some listing you have there, it's pulling from the website. So I'm a big fan of, you know, old-fashioned SEO. Your website is still number one place where you can control stuff. Um, and so that's what we've done for this particular client. Sure, we do some link building, but the primary focus has been on like how do we get their content better? And one of the ways of doing that for any small business is to publish and talk about real world things. So in a lawyer's case, like tell me the cases that you worked on and what happened and what was that person running into? What were their problems that you helped solve and how did you solve them? And how much did it cost? And what did you get them? Like, you know, go down the list of questions. It's kind of shocking, but like most small businesses don't do this. They don't talk about case studies, they don't publish anything about their clients. And like any business can do this. So if you're a home service business and you do renovations, you can talk about a renovation job that you did again, before and after photos, how much it costs, how long it took, how difficult it was, what did you do, what problem did that solve for the homeowner, you know, et cetera. Um so that that strategy has been one of our primary focuses for all of our clients, no matter what industry they're in.

Rana Shahbaz 11:00

Amazing. This is exactly what I'm trying to do on this podcast, run through the case studies. And but there is another perspective came with one of our guests who didn't like case study because it that can be misleading. So I I agree, you know, with with the guest because case study, every business is different. So you should not take it as a copy paste, you should take inspirations. It's for understanding purposes, difficulties, challenges, and build on those case studies to grow your business, your particular asset. So with with this, and also these are the simple things, but I often say simple is not necessarily easy. But these are simple things to create case studies published regularly, which I think help not with SEO, with anybody on land on your website, can make more sense, quickly digest the content, understand what value as a business you you're offering and what other people have already received, which is probably that's why these case studies work. Uh so using uh these case studies, so is there any particular way to mention on the websites to get the most reserves how to organize this one? Or is it like just publishing on a blog?

Joy Hawkins 12:09

No, I mean I try to put it on the page that's about that thing. So if you're talking about a painting job in a particular town, then you would want to put it on your painting page for that town, right? So it should go on the page that is targeting that particular area. Um, as far as how you structure it, it does matter. This is where, again, like having an SEO skill set really helps because we like to do what we call semantic triples, uh, which is something that might sound weird, but it's basically a way of structuring a sentence so that AI can read it well. And it's like the idea of like Joy Hawkins is the best like local SEO uh agency in the world. Like, so that's a terrible sentence because my agency is actually Sterling Sky. So it would be like Sterling Sky is the best local SEO agency in the world. If the geographic area I'm targeting is the world and SEO is the thing I'm targeting and Sterling Sky is the entity. So how that would look for ABC Plumber would be like ABC Plumber, you know, offers plumbing services in Denver, Colorado. We do this, this, this, and this. You want to actually mention your business by name on your website. That's something a lot of small businesses don't do. They actually just say we, which is like great if you want to assume that the bot actually knows the name of your business, which you'd hope they would. But I think it's better to make things really dumb and simple. And then you increase the likeness of them actually featuring your brand name anywhere that they're pulling that information on Google as well, which is good. So how you structure it certainly matters quite a lot. And the biggest thing to keep in mind with SEO is like your headers and your title carry so much weight, your URL as well. But that is like a huge piece of it that a lot of people miss. And it it's it's not hard. It's just knowing, knowing what to do and where to do it.

Rana Shahbaz 13:50

So metadata on all pages are are very important for loc local SEO. And how do you decide how many pages a local business needs on their website?

Joy Hawkins 14:00

Yeah, I mean, they only need it based on what's being searched. And that is kind of the the question that we always try to answer is like, what how do you you can't really run out of topics or things to talk about, right? But at the same time, you have to kind of balance adding new content to improving your existing content. And I can see it both ways being overdone. We see some sites where all they're doing is publishing new content, they never come back to it, and that's stupid. Uh, and then we see on the other hand, some sites have no new content coming out, and that's also stupid. So you want to do a bit of both. Essentially, don't forget about your old stuff, the stuff that gets you the traffic. If you do not keep it updated, we will see what we call like, you know, just content decay, where over time you will get replaced by newer, shinier things. So it's good to go back to those things and update them and add updated information if anything's changed, maybe add a new case study, um, a new photo if you're in an industry that is very image heavy, that kind

– The Biggest SEO Mistakes Businesses Make

Joy Hawkins 14:54

of stuff.

Rana Shahbaz 14:54

This is a lot of work for many, many small businesses. So do you have any sweet sweet spot that what are the consistency they should follow to update existing content and produce new content?

Joy Hawkins 15:06

I mean, I tie it to ROI. How much time and money you should spend on this stuff is should be based on how much money you are making from it, right? So I always say follow the money. Like if you are noticing a really good return on a tactic, then try it more. And I will tell you, there's definitely the law of diminishing returns when it comes to SEO. So a perfect example of this, I had a another lawyer that I worked with who we created a few, what we call service area pages for him. So it was like pages targeting a town in a specific state, and um talked all about that particular town. And he was like, This is great. I want more of these. I'm gonna create 200 of these. And I said, Don't do that. And he's like, No, I'm gonna create 200 of these. I'm gonna use AI, I'm gonna write them all and publish them all. And I literally was like, Don't do this. And he actually got really upset with me and he canceled because he didn't like my advice. But I was very dead against it. He was really proud of his strategy and I was very against it. And I was like, this is a bad idea. So he publishes them on his site all at once, another horrible idea. And literally, like his traffic didn't go up. He barely got any traffic at all for any of the pages he published, and there were hundreds. And to keep in mind, like just to keep perspective on this, his site was probably only a couple hundred pages to begin with. So he's like doubling the size of his site overnight with all these pages that are basically all about the same thing, just targeting his entire state with various cities. Almost none of them got indexed. So you look at his indexing report in Search Console, and like most of them, Google's like, I don't even want this in my index because there's nothing newer interesting here. So it there is that thing where I feel like a lot of times business owners are like they see a good thing and then they do it and do it and do it. And Google doesn't want you doing SEO. You got to keep that in mind. They really don't. Google is not on our side. They don't want us to be able to control the search results. Me and the business owner, we're on the same page. Like we want to dominate. Like, we're good. Google, different page. Like they don't want you to dominate. They're gonna try hard to make it make our lives difficult as SEOs. That is their job. They're gonna try and push their ads. That is Google's agenda. So whenever you do anything at scale, they're gonna try and catch you, right? And that's why you can't do stuff at scale like that. It doesn't work because they catch you. It's not that when you don't do it at scale that technically Google's okay with it. I mean, theoretically speaking, they're really not. They're not okay with anything you do to manipulate their algorithm. Should you care? Not unless there's like a risk. So I only care about the things that are, you know, at risk to harm a site. And that is a perfect example of one of those cases where you just can't just take a concept with an SEO and scale it. It it often fails.

– AI Content: Opportunity or Dangerous Shortcut?

Rana Shahbaz 17:34

Wow. This is very, very important. All the points are very important. So anything you can do in bulk is dangerous when it comes to SEO. Another important part, content creation has become very easy with AI. So you mentioned it not doing in bulk. What about create creating with a consistent flow, but using AI, majority of the AI? What is your opinion on that?

Joy Hawkins 17:56

It scares me. And I think it scares me because we haven't seen what Google's gonna do with it yet. So I'm starting to hear, and I've seen, I've actually seen some small business sites get nailed from the last core update that Google just did in December. So they did a core update. Normally, when Google does updates, they like historically speaking, over the because I've been in this industry since 2006. So I've seen usually with Google algorithm updates, small businesses are normally okay. Like they don't normally get slaughtered, their sites don't normally tank like in a large scale. A lot of them are usually fine. That is not true anymore. Um so we are seeing with Google updating their algorithm, they are going after uh anything again that they can detect that they think is unnatural. And while they say AI content's okay, again, at scale, it is not okay. And on certain topics, it is not okay. If you're a lawyer, you should be staying away from AI. That is a what Google classifies as like your money, your life. Probably say if you're a doctor, same thing. Like if Google thinks AI wrote your content and you're giving somebody life advice, it's not good.

Rana Shahbaz 18:58

Exactly. Makes sense, yeah.

Joy Hawkins 18:59

So I'm very cautious with it. That being said, I know people that are like killing it with AI right now. I'm just worried my fear is that they won't be killing it in a year from now and that their sites will tank. And I'm starting to see that how much of it is AI content, I'm not 100% sure because there's other stuff in there too. So I don't, it's hard to isolate like it was just AI content. Like usually those sites are also doing some bad link building practices and they're usually also doing other kind of shady things that Google doesn't like. So it's really hard to say for sure that it was AI content, but I'm definitely starting to see the the path where Google is targeting that kind of stuff. And so I don't know. I would I'd be very cautious. And I I certainly wouldn't deploy anything site-wide.

Rana Shahbaz 19:41

So do you are you are you saying one should, particularly professionals, doctors, lawyers should not use AI to create content? Or are you saying use it wisely?

Joy Hawkins 19:50

Use I I I I probably would stay away from it. Um, like again, we don't really use AI at all for content. The one thing I do use it for is summarizing things. So, for example, let's say we wanted to take this interview and turn it into content. We could have a transcript run through AI and it could organize it in a way that's nice. And is that AI content? I would argue no. It's not. It doesn't come from AI. It's organizing it. It's you and me talking. We're the ones giving the information. So I think if you're using that kind of approach, it's fine. Where you're just sitting down and saying, you know, like give me a 2000-word post on whether or not you should get a plastic surgery. I I don't know. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't do that.

Rana Shahbaz 20:26

Very, very important point. So so I think we have to we have to wait and see how this uh evolves in coming months.

Joy Hawkins 20:34

Yeah. I'm like, I don't know. Anything that's new, again, people gravitate towards it because they're like, ew, it's shiny. And I'm like, yeah, but you don't know how Google's gonna treat it. And they don't do anything when any something's new. They look at patterns, and the more that people do something, the easier it is for Google to detect. And they literally just launched something like 10 days ago, not even, yeah, like really recently, that's targeting self-serving listicles. What that basically means is like you putting out a list of the best lawyers in Florida, let's say, and you are a lawyer in Florida, and you put yourself on that list at the top and then publish it. Like this tactic works like bonkers for the record. Like it works really well. You can even put it on your own site, it works. They're starting to tank. Like those types of posts are starting to fall off. Google is because so many people did it that now they can detect it. So once enough people do a specific tac that they don't really like, they can go after it and target it and they can find a way to to hit it algorithmically, which is what they want to do. So that's where it's like.

Rana Shahbaz 21:33

Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned this one. Uh my team was working on the listicle, so I was not uh happy to you know publish it. I could not justify it. So it it was in the pipeline. So most probably we will not. I think that if we learned over the last uh 20 years something, that this is this was the pattern. There is some tactic works, and if you're working on a tactics, sooner or later you will be picked up and things will go south from there. So I think building on a foundation, if you're building a real business, always a good good thing. So you uh we started with picking up the right niche, right location, local SEO. That's that's very important with low competition and having a proper expert written content, rightly formatted, the metal tags, all these things are important for local SEO. Is that it for the website part or you have to do more?

Joy Hawkins 22:21

And that's m mainly it uh you want to make sure like I said you you keep things updated. Internal linking is also super important. So one of the biggest mistakes I see that small businesses make is they just link too much. Basically you have a page you don't want 500 links on that page because it means every single page that you're linking to, you're splitting the credit 500 ways. And so it's actually better to carefully consider like, oh I have these five pages. They send me a lot of leads. Those are the pages that you want to build internal links to so you want to link to them on your website from all your other pages. So we're very um careful about that like and strategic about that. And like one of the biggest things we see with sites is their menu. So you know all the pages that you have in your menu small businesses often just they shove everything they've got in that thing. That is not a great idea. You don't see Amazon doing that. You don't see that they have every single thing in their menu you want to put the things that are like the most important to you the things that convert the most in there and leave off everything else. I'll find pages in site's menu that get like zero to one visits a year. And I'm like this page does not deserve to be in your menu. Take it out you will see lifts on all the pages you leave in. So that is kind of a thing we do usually for new clients when we first start with them. We kind of audit how many pages they're linking to in their menu. We remove as many as we can and you'll see some good results from doing stuff like that.

Rana Shahbaz 23:43

Yeah I totally agree and this is the one simplest thing but I think many people can do it quickly and can see much better result, even if not in traffic but conversion wise that can really help with with the uh with with your you know business growth. So do you have any any form secret tip or a formula to check which pages deserve the main navigation?

Joy Hawkins 24:04

Yeah I mean we look at direct traffic and we also look at Google organic traffic. So direct traffic just that's to make sure that we don't remove a page that maybe doesn't rank well on Google but gets like you know the people that are on your site are actually clicking on it. So we would never want to remove a page like that. It might be like an informal like an informational page that just doesn't make sense from an SEO perspective. So we look at both and then really on the SEO side we're looking for pages that get lots of traffic from Google. Those are usually ones you'd want to keep in ones you'd want to remove are ones they get next to no direct or organic traffic.

Rana Shahbaz 24:36

So you purely decide on the traffic not on the you know hierarchy or the importance like a normally small business they have home page about page and services and the contact page. So you don't go with this UI perspective you go target with the traffic holder.

Joy Hawkins 24:52

Well those ones are fine but I'm talking about like the million drop downs right so when you go under services or like you know depending on the site they'll have like 50 different things under that and those are usually the ones we're auditing. You definitely always want an about us page and a contact page that's that's clear. So I never suggest getting rid of that. But yeah we are usually auditing all the stuff at the drop down.

Rana Shahbaz 25:12

Amazing again you did you for you optimized the site so leaving that part will help your local SEO or what what's the next bit to that?

– Link Building Strategies That Actually Work

Joy Hawkins 25:21

Yeah I mean the site is where I think we spend the most time because it's something you have to constantly refine. Link building would be another big one that is ongoing that never really ends. So getting other websites to link to your website this is an area that Google has been really, really trying to kill and when I say that Google doesn't want people doing SEO, they really don't want you link building. So any type of link building for the most part they don't want you doing like doesn't matter people talk like white hat, black hat, it doesn't matter. It's like any form of links Google really doesn't want you doing. So with that in mind there are certain types of links that frankly we don't really even focus on like citations is a popular one in local SEO because it's easy. So you can go buy 500 citations on Fiverr and uh get it for pretty cheap and they will likely do nothing for you. If you do see a boost from it, which I'm not denying that people do, it generally doesn't last. So it's like you you go up and then a month later you don't like you're back down to where you were. So what we normally find what works still with links, uh good old PR still works really well. So um you know getting mentioned in like things like news articles, whatever uh we've got some writers that we work with on different publications and things and they're always looking to interview experts or to have experts weigh in on topics that they are that they're knowledgeable about, right? Because that actually helps the journalist do their job better. So that's like that still works. That still helps build credibility. I'd say a newer thing that we are starting to pay attention to that not really really links, but it's more like mentions of your brand and things is Reddit. So Reddit has kind of taken the world by storm. It's everywhere on Google. And what I generally see is most marketing companies that are offering Reddit to their clients, they're just buying comments. So they'll buy somebody to go and a lot of them don't even like the business doesn't even know this is what they're getting. They're just told oh yeah we'll get you better on Reddit. And I would be really scared of companies that offer that as a service like I would dig and ask for a lot of details because I moderate several subreddits in several different industries on Reddit and I can't even tell you how many people I ban on a regular basis who are doing that. It's so obvious. They'll come on and they'll be like oh yeah I I recommend this plumber blah blah blah and you look at their profile and you can see everybody's comments. Like it is painfully obvious when it's a paid for thing.

Rana Shahbaz 27:44

Yeah.

Joy Hawkins 27:45

So it works for again short term like maybe you'll have some comments slip through the cracks and they won't get banned. But even if they stay up for a few months like the second that that subreddit gets some moderation because I know because I've taken over some that kind of were abandoned and like it was littered with spam and then you just go in and you purge and it's like there it's gone. So Reddit is very heavily scrutinized, heavily human moderated. So while you might be able to get away with some garbage there for a while, it generally doesn't last. So we are doing for our clients now is trying to set them up as professionals who offer advice, who help answer questions. It's the long play it's not the short play. The short play would be yeah like going getting our clients' brands mentioned everywhere and then they show up better in AI and then it kind of works really fast. The way that we've been doing it is the slow, more sustainable method that won't get you banned on Reddit, but also doesn't theoretically speaking pay off like overnight. Like it takes years to gain an audience there. And I say that having done it for my own business it takes a while. It is not short.

Rana Shahbaz 28:48

I think that that is how it's always been that the right thing always takes time. And these these spam practices one way or another today is Reddit uh used to be you know blog comments whatever uh you do a spam is always have a pattern. That's why Google is you know so clever to pick it up eventually on on these spammy spammy practices. So link building is another important part but the right way of building links important links are more important than uh low quality links is that the message on on link building yeah what you want to look at is like who actually ranks in the search results you know and those are the sites generally that you want to be present on.

Joy Hawkins 29:25

And sometimes it's worthwhile to pay for a listing on those sites you know what I mean like it's kind of funny but there's a lot of directory sites that aren't dead in certain verticals and industries like we see quite a few in the legal industry that are ranking higher than ever. They've survived all of the updates they're also getting featured and quoted quite a bit by ChatGPT. So sometimes it's worth just paying like you know $100 to $200 a month to get featured there if the site is doing well. And it's probably a better use of your money than spending $5,000 buying links on fiber. Actually it's definitely a better use of your money than that. But yeah link building is getting hard. Like it is really hard we we do press releases as well they they do work if you have some like award you've won or uh let's say you're moving into a new market. There's some instances where sending out a press release uh can see some some good results. Um again you you gotta be kind of creative about it because the average small business doesn't have anything interesting going on.

Rana Shahbaz 30:19

So again the challenge here with the content like a creating content it's always challenging you should publish daily weekly and how to you know have your resources and manage all those things. With this uh uh link building I think that's the practical challenge again doing is right way good quality links are the you know right way to go about it.

Joy Hawkins 30:41

Then quantity

– SEO Is All About Pattern Recognition

Joy Hawkins 30:42

how do you decide the quantity here is it just as and when you should build link or should you should try to follow any certain uh consistency on link building as well I hate quantity for measurement on anything other than leads obviously it leads and traffic clearly that's things you should measure but like you should not have an aim to have X blog posts a month or X links a month. That is the wrong way to look at it. I could make a small tweak on a website that can increase traffic dramatically and then I can also spend five hours on a piece that literally gets zero clicks and zero traffic and zero leads. So it has nothing to do with the amount of things you do or the amount of time even it's following what's working measuring patterns right it's like pattern detection that is what SEO is so I look for patterns and things like oh if this page dropped in ranking why did it drop in ranking is it something your competitors did Google change something I spend hours analyzing search results looking at like what words Google shows in the search results, the order of the words how did it change like what was there before versus what's there now? So there's a lot of studying I think I spend way more studying than executing because that makes what I do execute I know I'm executing on the right things. So we've actually built that into our processes here we have for every single client we have a good chunk of time every month that we spend analyzing did this work? Did it do what we thought it was going to do or did it not work? Because as you alluded to earlier the frustrating thing too is you can have something work really well on one site and then it doesn't work at all on another site. And that is just the the nature of SEO. Maybe they're already good on that signal and they don't need to improve it at all. So it just didn't have the same lift. So you always have to be measuring it's not cookie cutter anymore at all. I'm not sure it ever was but it's certainly not as of right now.

Rana Shahbaz 32:26

Yeah and one thing I'm noticing that you know I I I'm trying I like to uh keep things simple try to make things simple for for me for team for customers but this SEO thing is not simple. You know it's it's a complicated complicated uh matter. So we with all these uh uh complications how how do you manage client expectations clients wants to spend money get some results but this looks like you know long-term play and uh how do you manage client expectations here?

Joy Hawkins 32:56

Yeah honestly so we do a couple things um it is the hardest thing you have to do as an SEO owner like 100% when I go to uh masterminds and I talk to other leaders in the space and other owners number one struggle for everybody is dealing with clients they're like how do I get rid of my clients like they want this is why affiliate marketing was so great because they're like we don't have to deal with clients we just have our own sites and we make our own sites rank and we make money and I'm like I get it like clients are the most frustrating thing and frankly my personality is not great for client relations. I'm the person you want to come in when there's a problem that needs to be solved like with an algorithm and like you know something got hit or something went down. Why did it happen? I'm the person you call in I'm not the person you call in when we have a you know uh hormonal client that's upset about something because I just I my brain can't comprehend it. So from a business side you need people that are good with people. Like I literally need to hire people that are like counselors. You need like people that can just validate some of the clients' concerns even when they're way out of line like we have clients like drunk texting texting us at like 3 a.m asking like the stupidest questions and that's that's what you have to deal with right so you need the right people from a business perspective right you need the people you don't want me. You don't want a person like me that's gonna be dealing with the clients uh you want somebody who loves talking to people and I I have lots of those that I employ and I think it's fantastic to have that balance. I think the other thing is to educate people right so it's really important to be able to clearly articulate like this is what Google's doing and show them like plain and simple. Like a conversation we're having right now with clients is how ads are stealing traffic from SEO and that is while it's a sad depressing thing for an SEO, it's a reality and I'm not going to ignore it. So I'm gonna go to my clients and I'm gonna be like listen there are you know twice as many ads in your market as there was last year. And I have examples of screenshots I can show them to use visuals, right? Don't try to explain it with words show them a picture a screenshot that's like this was this search result a year ago this is what it looks like now and once you see the two side by side it's like insane. Like we've got three local service ads now there was two last year. Okay. The one ad that's there, the PPC ad, it's twice as big. Like you've got like site links, you've got images, you've got all these features that Google added to that that weren't there last year. Then let's go down to the local pack. Wait a minute last year we had three listings and they all have call buttons on them. Now we've got two and they don't have call buttons on them anymore. Hmm I wonder why your calls are declining like all of a sudden you paint this picture and you show them visually and it's like it's a lot of work though to educate clients. This is not an easy job. And I think this year I said is going to be like a really tough year for retention for local SEO agencies because I don't think business owners get it, but they will with time. My advice to you if you anybody that's listening that's like I run a local SEO agency like take a deep breath expect that people don't know what's going on and they're just kind of like this crazy mindset. Oh, I gotta spend money on AI, I gotta invest in geo and like all these stupid things. If they don't understand now they probably hopefully will in a year when they do all those things and it doesn't give them an ROI they'll they'll hopefully come back to you.

Rana Shahbaz 36:07

Yes ROI is the important part maybe if you're providing ROI you don't need to show anything client won't read the reports but if you're not providing ROI everything get everything get you can still provide ROI and still get nuts.

Joy Hawkins 36:21

We had a client that's like their graph is like going up up like calls constantly going up like it looks beautiful. It's one of the best ones I've seen they canceled because they switch out SEO companies every year. I'm like explain the logic there. Like that makes no sense. Why would you if something's working why would you go try something else? Like I just I don't even understand the mindset. But they told us that from the beginning they they were like oh by the way we we get a new SEO company every year. Okay.

Rana Shahbaz 36:45

That's the that's the new one another another perspective.

Joy Hawkins 36:49

Well this is the world of people right like it's just I don't know sometimes I can't explain it but that is that is a challenge for sure.

Rana Shahbaz 36:55

Great. So we are running through with this attorney uh case study that you have done all these things have you done anything else apart from these things which discussed repeating a right location optimizing the website building links we just started working on Reddit for them and let me think of what else we've done.

Joy Hawkins 37:11

On the link building side we've definitely done some press releases I suggested to them there's awards most businesses um have kind of shied away from the award sites. So in every market there's usually awards in your local market and in every industry there's usually awards in the industry. And honestly up until like the last year I probably ignored them. Why they matter now is that I'm starting to see that AI specifically is curating lists not just simply based on Google reviews. They are looking at external things and one of the biggest things to look at is awards. So it might be time to consider going and you know applying for that Angie award or that home advisor award or that super lawyers award or whatever fill in the blank whatever industry you're in. Something to keep in mind though is like they're not all the same. So don't just get anyone but if you see a site that's ranking really well and also like competitors that have you know awards in their site, that is a piece that I think is becoming a little more important than it was before. So that is definitely something that we're doing for that attorney. They want awards we're like great we need to feature these on your site more prominently so like we're talking put them in your header put them way up there like you want that to be the first thing that Google reads when they crawl your site. And so we've done that for them. It's on their homepage it's everywhere. We're also sending a press releases saying hey like we won this award. I'm gonna put that photo in their ads I'm gonna put that photo on their Google business profile like everywhere. You can do a lot with just a single award. So that is kind of some of the stuff that we are currently working on for them.

Rana Shahbaz 38:35

I would say keeping our spam conversation in mind. So again if you have won five, 10 awards in a very short period of time that will become spam as well maybe so any tech you you apply maybe use it wisely that is how it should be what's your opinion on this I don't know if there's enough sites that you can spam them to be honest.

Joy Hawkins 38:53

I did see a network of sites that were like best of and like they had like 15 sites that were clearly all made by the same person. Not sure that approach worked very well but uh usually in local there's not very many like there isn't an a massive amount that you can go I've definitely heard of people creating their own awards and I I don't know what the ethical violations are there but that's certainly an area that I'm not willing to touch.

Rana Shahbaz 39:16

Exactly my point was what whatever works you will find these black hat things on that. So try to shed away maybe a participate in a a reasonable one.

Joy Hawkins 39:24

That's something I'm gonna touch that's for sure.

Rana Shahbaz 39:26

Exactly exactly and after doing all these hard work how the the Satorny clients what were their you know KPIs and in what time frame you achieved better results for them.

Joy Hawkins 39:37

But yeah I wish I knew their their stats off the top of my head I do we definitely have some published on SterlingSky's website. So SterlingSky.ca we've got case studies on there with actual with actual numbers I just don't know them off the top of my head I can tell you that definitely like the they've been a great client uh I think they've been a client of ours for four or five years now. And I do think that our strategy has really changed over the years like based on what we were doing when we first started with them. They the only thing we care about is leads. That's the only thing we really track and they are starting to also find that like they're getting leads from AI. So it's first I've heard about that for them was like in December. So as of last year they're like oh yeah we're starting to get actual cases that people are finding us on AI. So that's kind of cool. But yeah as far as like how many leads we've uh got them I don't know that number off the top of my head but um they've been a really great but certainly that what the work you did it improved their you know rankings and traffic and leads. Yeah certainly you were doing all these things reasonably yeah yeah actually their budget with us has grown over the years too like when we first started I think they were paying like a third of what they're paying now. And because again we only suggest that you increase your SEO budget if you're getting ROI from it. So I'm like, hey you want even more ROI let's put more money into this it should be one of those things just like you know your investment portfolio, right? You you only put more money into something that you actually are seeing returns on. So that is always my recommendation to people like start with a certain budget and then if you start to see that really pay off then increase it, right? Um and make sure that that increase also is paying off. But as far as what we report to on clients, we have a dashboard that shows the leads over time. We track calls, form bills, chats that's all that I care about.

Rana Shahbaz 41:13

And how do you help clients decide a marketing budget how much they should spend on local SEO?

Joy Hawkins 41:19

We have minimums for sure. So like our minimum for small business is $3,000 a month our minimum for lawyers is $5,000 a month. We had to up it for lawyers I found that they just can't compete on the same level as other industries due to like how competitive things are. That being said like I've talked to some specific legal marketing agencies that charge $10,000 minimum. So like I I don't think our minimum is um super, super high. But I will say like there are only a handful of low cost SEO providers that I've found that actually deliver much and I think that is a harder model than it used to be. So that is one we actually experimented with years ago we tried we're like hey what if we came up with a thousand dollar a month like SEO plan could we do anything? It didn't work uh it was one that I scrapped very quickly. We found that the client expectations were exactly the same as the people three times as much yeah yeah maybe people yeah in a couple cases more right so we were like this doesn't work like it just unfortunately attracted the wrong businesses um so we just decided this isn't the direction we wanted to go and that's what I was saying too as well if you're a business that's not even like let's say if I if I was gonna put a number on if your business isn't making a million dollars a year maybe you're not ready for SEO because SEO does take an investment right like it's not cheap. It shouldn't be cheap usually so yeah I think that that is a really important indication of like when you're ready to to make that jump.

Rana Shahbaz 42:43

With organic SEO uh normal understanding is that you have to keep up with the with the changes with content creation with promotion is is that is that the same with local SEO or you can do like a three to six months you know hard heavy lifting and then you can reduce the spend and you can still keep going with local SEO or you is it the same like organic SEO?

Joy Hawkins 43:05

That's a good question. So the thing that kills me with this is that uh I don't distinguish the two like I I think it's I consider it all local SEOs. I don't I would never go after like an approach that only goes after map pack rankings or by because you you just don't know when Google's going to change the search results. And I've seen people get really screwed uh by too being too narrow focused. The one thing I will say is those algorithms are very different. So perfect example of this if you get a penalty on your site which Google doesn't even tell you half the time if your site's penalized there's no warning you just see your traffic start declining. So it's like there's signs there but there's no like hey by the way you got a penalty they they don't issue those out at all almost well I shouldn't say at all they very rarely issue out manual penalties anymore. If you get a a site wide penalty on your site your Mat pack rankings are fine. Like so it's kind of interesting there's certain things that impact one and not the other similarly like your Google reviews impact your Mat pack rankings they don't really impact Your organic rankings. So I really do think you should be shooting for both and maximizing both and not separating the two. And also realizing that like the local pack is limited, like very limited. So there is a certain number of things you can rank for that get volume, a certain radius that you can monopolize. Like there are caps for all of it. And that's when you have to start adding new offices. So if you are the leader in your city and you dominate, and a good way to use a tool like Local Falcon, they have this metric called solve, which is like a number. And so you can go on there and you can run a scan for like, let's say, divorce lawyer, and it'll show you all the divorce layers in your city and it'll sort them by solve. If you are number one or even number two, good chances you need a new office if you want to keep growing because you've now you're the leader in your market. That number isn't gonna just continue to grow. Uh, so that is where I think expanding. We have a lot of clients in that boat for the record that are like, they're the number one in their market. It's like, great, if you want to maintain, cool, let's just do that. But if you're looking to actually grow your leads, you need to think about where's my next office.

Rana Shahbaz 45:00

Amazing. You mentioned that uh SEO is all about uh pattern recognition. So what is the current pattern you are recognizing in SEO, a local SEO, another SEO, which people should pay attention to?

Joy Hawkins 45:13

The semantic triples that I was talking about earlier honestly is the biggest pattern right now. Like I wouldn't say it's new, but I I do think that um it matters a lot. And it's probably always mattered a lot, but just making sure that you really satisfy the intents. The order of the words matters, like it's kind of crazy, but you can hyperanalyze just what's currently in the search results, what Google's putting in the AI overview, and you can see the patterns if you look hard enough. It's again it's time consuming. But um, you want to make sure that Google is very clear on what you do, and you want to make sure that the terms that you use on your pages are also the terms that Google associates with your industry. There's lots of tools that can do that for you. We actually built one ourselves internally that we use. Um, so I had one of my employees build a tool for us, but there's lots on the market. I think um Page Optimizer Pro is probably the one I would suggest uh if people are looking for a tool that'll help you figure out what what I'm talking about, like what terms. Yeah.

Rana Shahbaz 46:10

How how do you define this triple S semantics? Is that what you said? This is a patron?

Joy Hawkins 46:15

Semantic triples, yeah. Uh so it's the concept of putting together a sentence that's like the business, the thing it is, the location it is. So it's like, you know, like a like the example I gave earlier, Sterling Sky is the best local SEO agency in the world. Um, or you know, uh ABC Plumbing is the plumber that services Dallas, Texas, and they offer insert the list of all the services, like just like general statements like that.

Rana Shahbaz 46:40

And like throughout through our throughout the throughout the site.

Joy Hawkins 46:43

Yeah, and like, and well, again, depending on the what the page is about, right? So let's say you have a drain cleaning page, you would want to talk about drain cleaning and be like, yeah, so we offer drain cleaning services in this area and this area, or you also would want to include all the terms that are related to drain cleaning. So, for example, with lawyers, you want to have things like case and settlement. This is for personal injury lawyers specifically, but like case settlement, payout, verdict. There's like a million of different words that Google will associate with personal injury. You want to have as many of them as possible. And this is again, this is all like old school SEO stuff, but like when you are answering questions, when you repeat the answer with the question in the answer, Google understands it better. So there's like all these things that this is what we call like semantic SEO. They've always worked, they still work. So that that part of SEO is is not different, but um it is very important.

Rana Shahbaz 47:32

Like semantic SEO. Yes, the businesses who struggle with local SEO, what is the common thing uh you see in common pattern? Again, let's discuss the patrons. This is the pattern to succeed. What is the common pattern the businesses struggle with local SEO you see in the Oh man, there's a lot.

Joy Hawkins 47:50

So I'll just I'll name off one that I'm seeing more of lately. So link building is a big one. So one of the biggest things that I see people coming to us with is um what we call rich uh keyword anchor text. So what that means is let's say again, you're a plumber in Dallas and a site links to you and they link to you with the words plumber Dallas. So those are the words you click. It's called anchor text. What that does is that'll definitely increase your ranking for Plumber Dallas. Problem is most businesses realize this and then they start doing it a lot. So if you have, let's say, 15 links that all say plumber Dallas, at that point Google can catch it. And the threshold at which they can catch it keeps lowering. So, like maybe you got away with it for five to 10 years and they just cracked down recently. They are getting better and better at this, which is again frustrating because that tactic works so well. Everyone was doing it. Everyone was getting these like, you know, rich keyword anchor links. That is the biggest reason that I see small business sites get hit by algorithm updates. Essentially, all that work gets undone. And now I'm starting to see that like not only does the work get undone, they can actually penalize the site as well for overdoing it. So it like almost it's like a weight put on your site that keeps it from ranking. So that is a big one. And most businesses don't even realize that the SEO company is doing it. So, like when I'm talking to business owners all the time and we're like doing audits on their site, and I'm like, these are your links, they're like, I had no idea. Like they don't know what their SEO companies are doing, which is scary. And it's why it puts people like me in a really bad spot because we like, you know, don't do this kind of shady stuff, but at the same time, we're scrutinized and now people are skeptical of SEO agencies. We're almost like used car salesmen, nobody trusts them because there's so many people that have gotten so screwed. And I get it, but it's one of those things where you have to know what your SEO company is doing. Like that's very important.

Rana Shahbaz 49:43

Yeah. Well, I know we you one should be very careful again. Uh, if you're after quick reserves, we think we these old things fall into black hats on. So they may work for a week or a few months, but eventually you will be hit by uh doing all these, you know, bad practices. How do you define the uh success of a local SEO uh project?

Joy Hawkins 50:03

Yeah, I mean, so we ultimately leads, right? Leads is the ultimate thing. Not just the number of leads, the quality of leads. I can tell you that even leads, sometimes the numbers can be misleading. You know, sometimes it could be a lot of spam calls that they're getting from like telemarketers and their leads look like they're up and they're not. So I'd say the more the more scrutiny you can put on those leads, the better. Call tracking is something that we almost tell every client of ours to do. Like, don't make it an option. You want to know what's happening on your calls. Are they getting answered? Who's answering them? Are they doing a good job? Are they chasing away clients? That kind of thing. So really, really scrutinize your leads and look for quality. Cause at the end of the day, I see leads, it's really revenue, right? Like we want our business, our clients to make more money. And if they make more money, they're gonna continue to want to pay us. That is the end goal. And we certainly use like, you know, I'd say revenue, leads, traffic, rankings, like in that order, right? And I look at rankings a lot because ranking leads to traffic, which leads to leads, which leads to revenue. But the ultimate goal always has to be like focus on the thing that makes your client the most money, because not all their services make them the same amount of money either, which is a thing that we often forget. We're like, oh, let's optimize for all the things. Well, actually, they 80% of their business comes from this one thing. We probably should focus 80% of our time on that thing.

Rana Shahbaz 51:15

I love this. Normally we we rank track this uh other way around traffic, leads, conversions, and then revenue. So I like that you put revenue on the top.

Joy Hawkins 51:24

So Oh, 100%. Yeah. Fantastic. The only thing that'll keep them paying.

Rana Shahbaz 51:27

Yeah, exactly. And what what is the realistic time frame you put on a project that client will see, start seeing some results?

Joy Hawkins 51:34

Definitely depends on the site. So we actually have a that's part of our audit. We start every new client relationship, we start with an audit, which they pay for for the record. We I don't believe in free audits. I think your time is valuable. And if people want to hire us, they will pay to get an audit done. During that audit, we can give them kind of an idea. It really depends, right? So if it's a brand new site or a newish business, timeframe's gonna be longer. You're looking at like a year minimum kind of thing. If it's an established site and a really well-known business, you can get results in three months. Like sometimes it's it's faster for when when I say results, like increases in leads, right? And then I would say, you know, somewhere in the middle. But we try to estimate that. That being said, like I always tell people I don't have a crystal ball. This isn't a guarantee. Any SEO that can guarantee you an outcome, I would be very skeptical of because it's similar to investing in the stock market, right? You want someone knowledgeable who can make good decisions. Are they a guaranteed win? No. But you want to bet on the one that has the best odds.

Rana Shahbaz 52:32

Great answers. This is again, you have to bet on the person who you're working with because there are lots of variables. Again, at the end of the day, you see some sort of pattern, your things are improving, leads are improving. So uh uh amazing. You you you have done uh amazing work in this local SEO space. You have an incredible team. What what is the unusual hack or habit that really served you well?

Joy Hawkins 52:55

Ooh, um, I mean, this isn't really a hack. I hate I hate the word hack for the record. So I I realize I have to say it in our YouTube videos, but I would say um one of the things that's really helped me over the years is um storing screenshots. Might sound really stupid and and crazy, but like we have I have thousands and thousands of screenshots of search results, and I cannot tell you how much a number inside a ranking tool does not give you a picture of what's going on at all. So looking at search result changes is the biggest thing that I spend time, like a lot of time studying that will give me insight into what's going on. So not really quite a hack, but that that is one of the biggest things that I I just don't hear a lot of people say that, but that that's mine.

Rana Shahbaz 53:38

You know, when I heard that uh the Warren Buffet come to my mind that he spent most of his time, you know, reading uh just numbers of the company. That's how it become. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the tax, the data is very important and it's a boring and hardworking thing. I'm sure that's why I asked this question. So it's totally different for people who are you know killing in in this space. To have our conversation. So, what is the one action you can suggest the business owners who are looking who wants to improve

– The #1 Action to Improve Local SEO Today

Rana Shahbaz 54:06

their local SEO, grow their business? What is the one action step they can take now?

Joy Hawkins 54:10

Yeah, I would say go into Search Console, look at your pages on your site that are declining in traffic. Like you'll they'll probably find tons. Give yourself a plan to update, let's say pick six of them, your top six that uh the most traffic. And and obviously, like try and pick ones as well that can drive leads. But even if they don't drive leads, your informational pages can still link to your money pages and provide value that way. So I would say look at the top six to start and look at the keywords. Go on Google, look at the keywords. What do the people at ranking you have that you don't? What are you missing? Look at their pages. And again, this might take some time, but like come together with a plan and then update them. And I I generally find that this is something that is successful for almost every business type. As long as you've got a strong site and you have some authority, you should be successful at that. And then also, if you're not already doing it, like seriously run Google ads. Like this is becoming a necessary thing, uh, especially PPC ads. People were pulling back on them and doing just local service ads. Like PPC ads are like traditional Google ads are bonkers right now in long and local, how much real estate Google is giving them. So, really, really reconsider that. Even if you tried them years ago, your ROI will likely be better today.

Rana Shahbaz 55:20

Amazing. And uh start should they start getting reviews as well if they are not concentrating on that?

Joy Hawkins 55:26

Oh my goodness. Sorry, I thought everybody listening would already be on that. But yes, if you're not getting reviews, that that transfer is everywhere. Reviews are in ads, they are in your local pack listing. Chat GBT also cites Google for reviews now. Like they they you started with like Facebook and quickly switched to Google. So yeah, Google reviews are like very important.

Rana Shahbaz 55:45

Amazing. Joy, where people can uh find you and wants to work with you, how can they contact you?

Joy Hawkins 55:51

Yeah, my agency is Sterling Sky. Our website is SterlingSky.ca. We're in the US and Canada, and honestly, I'm on every single social media site there is, so I'm pretty easy to find.

Rana Shahbaz 56:00

Amazing. Joy, I think it was lovely to talk to you and I learned so much. I hope uh this conversation will help many businesses, you know, uh look at the local SEO differently and improve their rankings and grow their businesses. So thank you very much for listening or watching. That's it for this episode of the website growth show. Until next time, keep growing. That's it for this episode of the website growth show. If you find it helpful, please consider subscribing. Until next time, keep growing.