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Local SEO Vs Traditional SEO | Key Differences

Find out the key diffrences that diffrentiate Local SEO with more traditional SEO. As a small business Google is offering you the golden chance to jump over all search results and making it to the first page. Read on to find out how!

An early bird gets the worm. That’s the saying, if I’m correct.

Heading into 2024 and beyond, the world of local SEO is shifting in a new direction. It has already started navigating that way in the last few years, but most moving companies still haven’t jumped on the bandwagon.

This is unfortunate since the early birds of this new era of SEO won’t just get a few extra eyeballs on their website. Instead, by taking action right now, they can completely scale their businesses and expand their customer base beyond what they may have thought was possible with online marketing.

What am I talking about?

Google Maps, of course. You likely already have a Google Business Profile but have never paid too much attention to it. Perhaps you’ve viewed this entity as the same as a Facebook page or an Instagram profile.

If that’s the case, you’re wrong. If you continue with this approach into 2024 and the years that follow, your moving company will be left behind by others who have started focusing on this asset in time and made room for growth that follows after only a few months of not-so-hard work and focus on their Google Business Profile above other online marketing venues.

In today’s post, I’ll discuss why you absolutely need to pay attention to your Google Business Profile, how it can help you scale, and finally, how to leverage your Google Business Profile for the fastest results.

What is a Google Business Profile?

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve heard of Google My Business. It has been up and running since 2014, and businesses have used it to build their online presence and attract more customers ever since. 

It was only recently that Google made the change and rebranded this product to Google Business Profile. Although the name is different, the value you can gain from it and the process of building up your business with it remain the same. 

Simply put, Google Business Profile is an online product that allows you to list your business on Google Maps with your details, such as name, address, and phone number, often referred to as NAP. You can also add your website, and photos, and have customers leave reviews on it. 

You can also post updates like you’re on Facebook, and people will find your business on Google Maps as a little red pin.

And lastly, given that Google Maps is a search engine, your Google Business Profile (let’s refer to it as GBP from now on) can also rank for keywords people type in when looking for a service or a product. 

I already knew this; what’s the deal?

Great, this allows me to proceed with what’s the true value of this asset.

How Google Business Profile Can Help Your Business

The first perk lies in the fact that consumers trust Google for their commercial needs, and the data proves it. 

One in five Americans almost always trusts Google, while around four in five say they mostly trust what appears in Google search results (we like to call these SERPs).

Now let’s focus on Google Maps and local businesses. 

According to BrightLocal, an average business gets discovered around 1,000 times per month on Google Maps. These discoveries result in an action – a call, a direction request, or a website visit – around 5% of the time. 

This means that an average business gets around 50 people who take some form of action with your business that gets them a step closer to becoming your customers. 

The upper echelon of businesses on Google Maps can get way more leads, with 16% of businesses receiving more than 100 calls each month from GBP.

People don’t just use Google to learn why Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo. They also use it to spend money. 

And if you need more convincing, just ask one of our customers what they think.

I see, but I still haven’t understood how this can help me scale, like you said in the beginning

Let’s start with your location. Where are you based?

Many of you are based in metro areas, so let’s pick one.

I’ll take New York City. 

When I plug in a simple keyword like “movers nyc” into our keyword research tool (tools we use to find what people type in Google to find businesses), this is what I get:

Almost 30,000 people search for movers in NYC every month. Now, if you take a look at the CPC section, you’ll see a figure of $45.

This is how much advertisers spend on Google just to get a single click from a person searching for this keyword. Not a call, not a filled-out website form, but just a click. 

By the way, this data comes from Mangools, one of the more credible SEO tools on the market.

So, if advertisers are willing to spend $45 for a single click, don’t you think that they’d make a lot more in return? 

According to First Page Sage, a GBP ranking #1 for a keyword get’s around 17% of all clicks. 

If this were to be the GBP from your company, and the keyword was to be “movers NYC”, this would yield around 4,700 new eyeballs for your business every month.

The average conversion rate on GBP, as mentioned above, is 5%. This equates to around 235 people taking some form of action with your business. It will likely be way more, given how specific this keyword is. 

But let’s stick to 235. How many of these actions would be calls? Let’s take a third.

So that’s almost 80 calls a month. An average close rate is 30%, which leads to 24 new customers for your business every month.  

What’s your revenue from an average move? Around $1,000? 

It may be more or less, but let’s use this number.

So by ranking #1 for “movers NYC”, you’d make a revenue of $24,000 per month or $288,000 per year.  From just ONE keyword.

There are a lot of other keywords. 

  • Moving companies NYC – also around 27,000 searches per month
  • Long distance movers NYC – around 2,500 searches per month (less searches but a way higher average order value)
  • And then there are keywords for each of the boroughs, each getting a few thousand searches per month.

You get the picture. 

Okay, I see, but how do I achieve these results?

This now get’s us to the next point…

How to Use Google Business Profile to Make Almost $300,000 per Year

These numbers are great, but what can actually get you there? What if you’re not based in NYC?

Many other locations have great numbers in terms of potential customers. Although you may not be based in a metro area, you can still achieve incredible results.

You can also target cities around your city. An average GBP gets a 5-mile radius, meaning that it can show up for keywords in locations up to 5 miles away from it in any direction. 

So you’ll not be limited just to your average-sized town, but can instead target all the cities around it. 

To achieve worthwhile results, you obviously need to rank for some of the high value keywords we mentioned. It’s not going to be easy, especially if you’re a busy business owner. You won’t have the time to do SEO for your GBP.

It will require a lot of manual labor that consists of repetitive tasks. You’ll need to optimize your GBP AND the website that’s connected to it. You can’t bother doing that, can you?


This is where Rotate Digital comes in. We handle all of the work for you for a fraction of what you’re going to make once you get to the finish line. It will take a while to get there, as most SEO campaigns take around 3-6 months. 

But once you get to the top, you stay there. It’s not like with Google Ads, where you vanish from the face of the Earth as soon as you click the Pause button. 

No, when you rank, you stay ranked. For years. With just a little maintenance (which we will handle), you can keep your position at the top of search results while dominating your local area.

Remember, in the world of SEO, the winner takes it all. There’s no room for second or third place. Organic CTR (which is simply a percentage of clicks out of all traffic) drops for second and third-ranking GBPs, and then it weighs off significantly after that. 

But what about my website? Should I rank it too?

Google Business Profile vs Website in SEO

Yes, you should, if you truly want to dominate. 

But the point of this article is to have you focus on the future of SEO, which is GBP. All of the statistics we’ve gone over above are just going to increase, as they’ve already done each year so far. 

Maybe you’ve noticed that a local search results page now has 9 websites, sometimes even 8, instead of the traditional 10. 

Google is pushing down websites and adding (or improving) features constantly, like Google Business Profiles, Local Services Ads, Frequently Asked Questions, and more. 

They’ve also added ads in Google Maps, which means that some search results pages have 4 Google Business Profile results – 1 ad and 3 “organic” ones. 

Their goal is to have businesses rely on Google’s assets, not their own. Your website is yours, while your GBP technically belongs to Google and not you. 

This doesn’t mean that websites don’t have their place, as the top-ranking site gets around a third of all clicks.

A truly winning SEO campaign will focus on both the website and GBP for total dominance. 

Winners see search engine marketing as a monopoly game. The more spots they can take on the search results page, the higher the chance of them winning. 

One spot is going to be your GBP, and the other will be your website. That’s two spots.

Now imagine adding paid advertising to the mix – Local Services Ads and traditional Text Ads. That’s two more spots.

You can take this even further, by ranking your profiles on Angi’s, Yelp, and Thumbtack, which almost always have pages of their own ranking for a lot of moving-related keywords.

People click on those two, and they call top-ranking profiles on those platforms (which are also search engines of their own). Imagine if your company was one, or all, of those profiles. 

There’s no limit to how much you can do or how creative you can get.

Conclusion

If you haven’t considered SEO yet, it’s time to reconsider your online marketing efforts.

We wouldn’t be going this far in showing you all of these statistics and value without truly believing in how much your business can change with SEO and GBP.

Our current clients have believed in our vision, and that has resulted in an ROI that has their competitors envious. 

Just look at Arch Moving:

Or Young’s Moving:

Do you want to be our next success story? 

We want you to be. 

All you have to do is take the first step and schedule a 100% free consultation call with one of our SEO experts.

See you there!

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