How long until improvements are visible

[Jens]

Hi all,

I started local SEO for a dental surgery in January 2020: The website was expanded and detailed local pages for important services were created. All pages are now indexed by Google. I updated a lot of outdated entries in directories and expanded entries in relevant directories with a Moz Domain Authority over 30. Of course I also optimized the Google My Business profile.

Now I am interested in your experience of how long it takes for positive changes to show up in local search results. Maybe you would also like to give me a tip on what else I can do to improve the rankings?

 

[johnlavapie_SEO]

It depends on your definition of IMPROVEMENT. And this is where I would start.

I personally started looking for that #1 ranking as the improvement for minor keywords. But I started to learn to celebrate small things and work my way up.

In my experience, you will see a movement in listing for the first 3 months. First page, maybe top 20. Celebrate that small movement. For getting into top 3 varies with competition, how hard the keyword, google updates, and much more. But one of our departments, we saw a jump to top ranks after a year.

For tips, I used this when I was starting. And then expanded after:

The Definitive Guide To Local SEO

Stuck with local SEO? Don't worry - our Definitive Guide To Local SEO will show you the EXACT steps you need to take to get more traffic and more customers

www.pickaweb.co.uk

Hope this helps!

 

[andrewthorn]

Hey @Jens do you have google search console utm tracking setup for the listing? One way we know when things start to move is an increase in long tail keywords we track in search console for the GMB page. But it requires you to be adding a utm tag to the website link of the page.

 

[Jens]

@raellovepie Thank you very much for your tips and the link to the Local SEO Guide. This is helpful.

 

[Jens]

@andrewthorn Thank you for your reply and recommendations.

do you have google search console utm tracking setup for the listing?

No I did not use an utm tracking with google search console. I will read about it or maybe you have a helpful link?

One way we know when things start to move is an increase in long tail keywords we track in search console for the GMB page. But it requires you to be adding a utm tag to the website link of the page.

Utm tracking in that case is new to me. I have to look at that.

I could imagine extending the Google My Business link to the website with utm parameters to find out how many clicks are generated. However, this leads to a double content risk. I have to devalue this parameter URL using a canonical tag.