The full title of this book by Keith O’Brien is
“Frugal Business Owner’s Guide to DIY Local SEO: How You Can Generate More Leads and Get More Customers without Breaking the Bank“.
In my review posted on Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book a Four Stars rating. This means I consider it to be Good.
Here is my book review.
A very good introduction to the issues of local search engine optimisation
This book presents a choice if you have a local business and want it to be found easily on the Internet:
- Pay an SEO consultant between $1,000 and $2,500 to do the necessary work for you; or
- Do it yourself (or delegate to a trusted employee) provided you “have an additional 10-15 hours per month (maybe more in the beginning) to put towards this process”.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t find both of the two options discouraging as it’s more money or time than you can justify.
It’s therefore important to recognise that there is hard local search and easy local search.
The difference lies in:
- – the size of the location
- – the popularity of business type
- – the incentive to rank highly based on how many searches there are each month and the value of a customer. The higher the incentive, the harder existing competitors will have worked to be ranked.
Trying to rank for “accountants in London” for example, is much, much harder than ranking for accountants in a small, provincial town.
In many cases, getting ranked for sensible, low volume searches is a case of making sure that you don’t make some simple mistakes that stop you being found by the search engines. Their task is to find the most relevant pages and, if you haven’t done the work to make it obvious to Google that you are relevant, you won’t rank.
The book was January 2016 so it’s up-to-date and it explains the important issues very clearly and helps you to prioritise actions. Although it takes some time for Google to reflect changes, you may be pleasantly surprised by how little you need to do.
It’s well worth reading and available at a very attractive price. There are several things that I think it would benefit from including:
- An explanation of how you can assess how much it’s worth for you to be ranked well.
- The link between local organic search success through effective SEO and buying clicks for you top keyword searches.
- The way that Google’s personalised search distorts the results you see so that you think you’re doing better than you really are.
Just as many websites were sold with over-inflated expectations, I believe the same thing happens with local search. Being ranked #1 in Google for a few selective phrases needs to be much more than a boost to the ego, it has to just the investment in time and money by generating extra customers.
It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
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