Picture this: You’re finally rolling into that long-awaited beach town after a brutal 12-hour drive for Spring Break. Your stomach’s growling like it’s calling dibs on the best seafood place in sight.
First stop? Google Maps.
Within seconds, you’re hit with a treasure trove of reviews, juicy menu previews, and mouth-watering photos—your “tinker meter” already calculating who’s about to earn your hard-earned dining dollars.
But here’s a thought: what if we flipped the script and brought that same local SEO magic into agriculture?
Yes, local SEO.
Because if a seafood shack can thrive from a solid digital footprint, just think of the possibilities for agribusinesses.
Travis tee’d up Tanner with 5 quick questions to cover the basis of local SEO and why it might just matter for those of us in ag.
Travis: Give us a bit of a high-level overview of local SEO. What exactly is the thread between SEO and then local search results?
Tanner: Local SEO is how customers find local businesses. When you hear about local SEO we’re typically referring to your Google Business Profile and how that displays in Google's local “Map Pack”.
Local SEO ranking factors differ somewhat from traditional SEO, to some degree. The chief concerns for local SEO are Proximity, Relevance, and Reputation (think GMB reviews).
➡️ Proximity of the searcher to your business.
➡️ Relevance of the search phrase to your business and service offerings.
➡️ Reputation of your business comes down to a steady stream of 5 star reviews from real customers. Respond to these reviews and stay engaged with your page.
- Bonus (and just as important) are backlinks and citations from directory sites to your location pages (Google Business, Bing places, etc.)
Just take this example for when I search for ‘Texas lenders’ in Google Maps:
Travis: Who - specifically in agriculture - would this matter to? Is it primarily for those with brick-and-mortar locations? Does it matter if locations have heavy reviews for specific sites?
Tanner: Ag businesses with one or more physical locations benefit the most from well-optimized local SEO. Think ag lenders, crop insurance agencies, ag retailers, etc.
If you can display relevant, local, high-quality service in a given area, then you can leverage local SEO to drive new business.
Travis: How does local SEO overlap with paid tactics? Where’s the gap – or opportunity – that agribusinesses would have today that they could jump on before it becomes more commonplace?
Tanner: 5-6 years ago, we drove crop insurance and lending leads on Facebook for under $2/lead.
That gap has closed. (Pour one out… 🍻)
It’s still possible, but I’d say it’s far more competitive and expensive.
What I’m seeing work now is Local Search Ads (not to be confused with Local Service Ads, which most agribusinesses don’t qualify for).
The key here is to optimize your GMB and any location pages on your website. Within Google Ads, you can leverage your GMB profiles as assets to allow Google to serve local search ads in your territory (another setting you can define).
Considering the rural nature of most agribusiness, driving traffic to a GMB profile is often more mobile-friendly (and higher converting) than driving prospects to your website.
Travis: Does ‘local content’ also become important here? What does that look like?
Tanner: Unique local content is another crucial factor. A mistake I see most businesses make is copying/pasting content across all of their location pages. No bueno…
This content should be used to display local relevance and expertise.
Some businesses take this further and run locally targeted Google Demand Gen (formerly display ad) campaigns.
These are locally relevant articles that leverage Google’s audience data instead of search data.
This allows businesses to show up across Discovery Articles, Gmail, and YouTube alongside content your audience is already reading.
Travis: What does it look like to measure success with local SEO? How do you compare yourself to competitors?
Tanner: At the end of the rainbow, we are always searching for sales, leads, and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
With local SEO, we like to measure our keyword rankings for a given location with a tool like SEMRush or Yext. Now, we can monitor our brand strength and GMB rankings over time and track our progress.
The image below shows rankings for one keyword at one Google Business Profile location for a given sales territory.
You can leverage this data to see how you stack up to a competitor in the area. You might also use this data to identify areas where you should supplement your organic results with a paid strategy.
We set this report to run once every 30 days. This allows us to track results over time for every GMB location for this business.
There you have it: the quick and dirty on local SEO and its role in agriculture.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch with Tanner or Travis, and we can chat more about the opportunities available to you.