This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter five of ‘Part 3: Retention & Growth’. 

What’s that? Google has put out another algorithm update. It’s OK, you’ve not been doing anything dodgy with any of your clients. You know the local search algorithm inside out. Nothing bad will have ha… wait, what’s that? Your best-performing client’s visibility has suddenly tanked? That can’t be right. Why is your phone ringing incessantly? Why is that email in all caps? What are you going to do?

Ok, that may be a bit of an extreme example, as things like this shouldn’t come as a surprise. But the truth is there’s no guarantee that an algorithm update won’t affect one of your clients. On some occasions, they may have done absolutely nothing wrong, but Google has decided that someone else has done something better, and this update has surfaced their content in place of yours.

Another example is when they add something to the algorithm, like changing how opening hours affect local rankings.

So having a process in place to respond to one of these situations is important. We’ve talked to a number of experts from across the local search industry to find out how they react when one of their clients has potentially been affected by an algorithm update.

Algorithm Response Plans from the Experts

We asked each local search expert “Google has launched (yet another) algorithm update. Your client’s been affected. What do you do?”. You’ll find their answers below.

"It should not be a surprise, but the first step is understanding what’s been hit and how it affects the business."

Tim Capper, Owner at Online Ownership

First off, this shouldn’t be a surprise. You should have seen the signs if you’re doing local SEO properly. Algorithm shifts rarely come out of nowhere, and clients should already have been prepped for possible turbulence.

Now, let me drop an old-school truth bomb: overreliance on automated “pretty” reporting instead of manual reporting here is what’s happening. And what I see happening probably landed you here in the first place. That’s why I prioritise manual, insight and “gut” driven reporting, focusing on what matters and what’s next rather than just painting a rosy (or panic-inducing) picture.

If you’re paying attention, you should already have seen early indicators, small but telling fluctuations in site performance, sections behaving oddly, or ranking inconsistencies. These “niggles” may not have a clear cause at the time, but they’re worth flagging. That’s why reporting should be proactive, not reactive. 

But now, here we are: algorithm update, impact, damage assessment.

The first step is understanding what’s been hit and how it affects the business. Sometimes, when you step back from the numbers and analyse the business’s core strengths and market positioning, the reality isn’t as dire as it first seems. Is it just this client’s business or all businesses within the same vertical mirroring this impact? 

Next, look at the type of update and what the SEO community is uncovering. Is there a clear recovery path? Can we adjust and bounce back, or is a fundamental rethink needed? 

And finally—be honest. If you don’t know exactly why the algorithm hit a particular site, don’t bluff. Say it straight: “This is new; I need to dig deeper, form a theory, test small, refine, and either roll back or roll out.” That’s how SEO should be done—not knee-jerk reactions, but thoughtful, calculated responses.

Algorithm updates will keep coming. The difference is whether you’re waiting to react or already anticipating the shift.

"As soon as you have that early context, the key is communication."

Rachel Ellen, Local Search Strategist at Croud

Firstly, don’t panic! Before rushing to react, calmly assess the situation by gathering insight from Google Search Console, Google Business Profile (GBP) insights, or other analytics. Data should give you a better idea of the scope of the problem if it’s affecting your client, and if so, how severely. Consider and observe how competitors and the wider industry have been impacted, too, as this helps paint the bigger picture. Look to the wider SEO community. Usually, there’s lots of early chatter that gives an idea of how big an update it’s been and who the early winners and losers might be.

As soon as you have that early context, the key is early communication. In an ideal world, you’ll get to your clients before they come to you. If they open up their email to find early comms or a call invite offering an update, this shows proactivity and instant reassurance that whatever has happened, they are in good hands. If they do come to you first, acknowledge their concerns, but reassure them that volatility is completely normal and that updates can take time to settle. Explain that you’re on the case and will come back promptly with clarity and a plan of action if needed.

From here, it’s good practice to spend some time validating the accuracy and optimization status of your client’s GBPs (including your reviews), their on-site EEAT signals, and their technical health, such as indexing or site-speed issues.

As said, updates can often take a good few weeks to settle, so it’s wise to closely track rankings and traffic patterns during this time. It may well be that things recover quickly, in which case—hurrah! You can update your client accordingly, and concentrate on reinforcing what’s working.  If it’s not so good news, prioritize time for deeper investigation, focusing on identifying content gaps, technical issues, or shifts in user intent.

In a nutshell, when an algo update hits, establishing context is key. Keep clients informed, stick to best practices, and avoid any reactionary moves. If you’ve prioritized quality and trust, you are far more likely to stay ahead.

"Our strategy to troubleshoot rankings post-algorithm update begins with a simple look at the current search results and weighing the top-ranking pages against our own."

Steve Wiideman, Owner at Wiideman Consulting Group

Too often, agencies and clients alike immediately jump to the conclusion that an algorithm update was the cause of any sudden drop in organic traffic or visibility. I think it’s important in any SEO effort that we start by following the same action plan as we would had there not been an algorithm update, but seen a drop in organic traffic. 

Before we dive in, we always want to reassure our clients that in general search engines are very forgiving if we break and need to restore content or attributes that have supported growth. We also want to remind our clients that user signals, and being the final destination users prefer to go to, are more important than content and links alone. Therefore, if fresh search results yield lower click-through rates, our listings will naturally rise back to the top over a few weeks as the search engine figures out that these new results weren’t very helpful. 

Our initial plan includes:

1. Running a full crawl of the website using whatever industry tools are at your disposal. We prefer Ryte due to its robust feature set and detailed insights. However, Screaming Frog, SEMRush, or SiteBulb would be a good runner-up. We’re looking for crawling and indexing issues. You wouldn’t believe how often we see development servers deploy to production with a Disallow: / in the robots.txt file.

2. Look for content changes at the site level, such as the replacement of heading tags with span tags, and the removal or programmatic replacement of titles, descriptions, and other metadata. Modifications of structured markup, XML sitemaps, and internal links. All of these can raise an eyebrow with Google and other search engines, which when made during an algorithm update have been known to emulate the “shaking of the Etch A Sketch,” almost like starting over with page-scoring. Best not to make updates during algorithm updates.

3. Navigate to Google Search Console and run a before and after comparison from the date of the drop-off, sorting by Click Difference first, then by Impression Difference. What types of pages lost clicks and impressions? Transactional, commercial, or perhaps both?

4. Lastly, we’ll look at spam and negative SEO, starting with new incoming links available in AHREFS and other link analysis tools. I’ll analyze the anchor text of recent links to see if competitors decided to fool Google into thinking our client was attempting to manipulate search results. If I don’t see a pattern, I’ll filter redirecting links to see if a competitor is attempting to force Google into thinking our pages are temporary using a 302 redirect, which often sends our listings into the dreaded Omitted Results. If I see a high spike in Google Search Console, despite conversion and traffic being down, it’s possible that a competitor is attempting to fool Google into thinking our client is manipulating search behaviors.

Once we have the all-clear from these four areas, only THEN do we look at the change in traffic being potentially caused by an algorithm update.

Our strategy to troubleshoot rankings post-algorithm update begins with a simple look at the current search results and weighing the top-ranking pages against our own. Here is a breakdown of these steps:

1. Based on the most affected pages, choose the top 3 to start with.
2. Run a search for the keywords for which the pages lost the most clicks and isolate the top 3 competitors.
3. Using a Google Sheet (or other workbook software), create a row for each SEO focal point to compare and columns for our client’s site and the top three competitors.
4. Fields might include File Name (pizza.html), Title, Meta Description, H1, Incoming Links, Internal Links, AI score, web vitals scores, image names and alt attributes, use of video, maps, reviews, etc.
5. Run a survey and ask participants which of two pages (your client’s vs one competitor at a time) is the most helpful and why.

Once completed, it’s a great idea to pow-wow with the team and break down the differences in your client’s page versus the competition. Sometimes, we learn right away what likely caused the drop in rankings. For example, after the “Medic Update,” we noticed Healthline’s survival and found a small Fact-Checked badge our client didn’t offer. Less than a month after testing and adding the badge ourselves, we saw nearly instant recovery.

If this becomes the case, no further testing should be required. However, if the team is still scratching their heads, run the other two competitors through this sequence until the problem becomes obvious. 

Reverse-engineering new search results after an update is by far the easiest and fastest way to identify what we believe Google suddenly cares about, and often enough, what they don’t. If, after all the testing and reverse-engineering, the problem still isn’t resolved, return to this page and find an expert (or experts) you would like to reach out to for their personal opinion or, if necessary, an audit. In most cases, traffic and visibility returns on it’s own within a few weeks, so if it’s possible, get buy-in to hold off on any immediate changes until the dust settles.

" I assess whether our clients are actually affected by the update."

Elizabeth Rule, SEO Analyst + Account Manager at Sterling Sky

First and foremost, I assess whether our clients are actually affected by the update, which can take several weeks, sometimes even a month or two, to determine.

For example, the Diversity Update that began rolling out in August 2024 didn’t show its full impact on our clients’ organic traffic until November and December. Because of this delay, we didn’t communicate any major findings to clients until we had concrete data, which was about two months post-update.

Once we’ve confirmed whether a client has been affected, and to what extent, we move into action planning. This includes developing strategies to recover lost rankings or traffic if necessary, or identifying opportunities if performance has improved (since not all updates are negative).

Communication is tailored based on the client’s level of SEO awareness and involvement. For clients who are highly engaged in SEO and likely to follow industry news, I’ll often reach out proactively when an update is announced, knowing they’ll want to discuss it. For others who are less SEO-savvy or are busy running their business day-to-day, we typically wait until we have meaningful insights and a clear plan before reaching out.

When a client raises concerns directly, we’re always transparent. We share where we are in the analysis process, what early signals we’re seeing, and what actions (if any) we’re taking on their website or Google Business Profile (GBP).

"Analyze competitor movements to understand if this is an industry-wide shift or specific to your client."

Myriam Jessier, Fractional SEO + Trainer at PRAGM

When a client’s local SEO performance takes a hit after a Google algorithm update, here’s my actionable framework for agencies to effectively manage the situation:

Immediate Response Plan

1. Assess, Don’t Panic

Don’t rush into making changes during the update rollout. Algorithm updates take time to settle, and what looks like a disaster on day two might stabilize by week three. Document the current rankings and performance metrics to establish a clear baseline for comparison.

2. Research the Specific Update

Each algorithm update targets different aspects. Identify what this particular update focuses on—whether it’s content quality, local engagement metrics, review management, or technical factors. Cross-reference the timing of ranking drops with the update rollout to confirm causation.

Sometimes, it’s not algorithmic but a problem client or agency side that caused the issue and you waste time searching for a needle in a Google update haystack. 

3. Strategic Client Communication

Contact the client proactively before they come to you in panic mode. Be transparent but reassuring – explain that fluctuations are normal, you’re monitoring the situation, and have a structured process for assessment and action.

Detailed Analysis Phase

1. Targeted Performance Audit

Use geo-grid rank tracking to identify precisely where and how rankings have shifted across neighborhoods or service areas.

• Are the ranking variations within the same city as expected?
• This helps you review things such as content, listings, etc. for specific neighborhoods—for example, Le Plateau in Montreal is famous for having many recent French immigrants, so keywords and content can’t be the same as for the rest of the town. 
• Find areas where your client has low visibility but could expand. 
• When an algorithm update hits, geo-grid tracking helps agencies to see if the effects are uniform across the entire service area, or if they’re localized to specific regions. This makes things more actionable for you as an agency. 

Analyze competitor movements to understand if this is an industry-wide shift or specific to your client. Check Google Trends to see if whatever you are ranking for is no longer trending.

Some industries like plumbing may have seasonal peaks, while others may simply be evolving (such as fitness coaches specialized in specific training programs). 

2. Identify Pattern-Based Impacts

Look for patterns in affected keywords, content types, or business categories. This helps pinpoint which aspects of the algorithm update are most relevant to your client’s situation. If you can’t find the red thread, chances are, it’s a bigger problem than a local SEO issue.

3. Local Listing Integrity Check

Verify all local listings for accuracy, consistency, and compliance with Google’s latest guidelines. Listing quality and verification standards have become increasingly stringent and your client may not be aware of that.

Recovery Strategy Implementation

1. Prioritize Google Business Profile Optimization

Update categories, attributes, and service offerings to align with current search intent patterns.

2. Enhance Local Content Relevance

Create or optimize hyperlocal content that demonstrates genuine community engagement. 

3. Review Management Recalibration

Implement a systematic approach to review generation and management if you haven’t already. Focus on genuine customer engagement rather than volume. If possible, try to establish a review scheme that matches other ones in the area.

4. Technical Local SEO Refinements

Review that structured data to make sure you avoid nightmares like this one. 

Client Retention Best Practices

1. Education Over Reassurance

Position your agency as a strategic partner by educating clients about the nature of algorithm updates. You could have a short newsletter that goes out or a phone call to help them understand that updates are here for a reason: to reward businesses that do things right… but sometimes, they do temporarily miss the mark and correct the course later. 

2. Implement Regular Algorithm Resilience Checks

Don’t wait for the next update. Establish quarterly reviews of local SEO fundamentals to ensure ongoing compliance with Google’s evolution.

3. Set Realistic Recovery Timelines

Be honest about recovery expectations. Major shifts can take two to three months to fully stabilize, if not more. Outline specific milestones to track progress and keep clients engaged in the process.

Successful local SEO agencies don’t just react to algorithm updates–they anticipate them by consistently aligning with Google’s fundamental goal: connecting users with the most relevant local businesses that genuinely meet their needs.

Communicate, don’t panic, and do your research

So there we have it. A thorough run down of how you can respond when the chips are down. The key to retaining your clients is through strong communication. This communication starts before the problem arises. A strong relationship that’s based on trust and education can do a lot to help when things get trickier.

Then, don’t panic. Remember that algorithm updates often take weeks to actually finish rolling out. Do some proper research of your own. Check whether traffic is actually down alongside rankings. See what the industry is saying. Work out whether the client has even been affected by an algorithm update. It could be something seasonal.

Then, once you’ve done all that research you can get a plan together. All the while, communicating what you’re doing to your client.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter four of ‘Part 3: Retention & Growth’. 

In an increasingly competitive SEO world, client retention is becoming more important than ever. According to a recent Sparktoro survey of over 600 agencies and freelancers, a majority are reporting that their biggest challenge is their sales pipeline and new client acquisition. That means every client lost is going to have a bigger impact on agencies that plan to grow.

So, how can you improve SEO client retention? Well, as a previous freelancer and current agency owner who’s worked in the industry for over a decade, I’m going to share some of the biggest complaints I hear from business owners and what you can do to stand out in such a competitive market. Apply these not-so-common-sense principles, and I’m confident any freelancer or agency will not only retain clients longer but probably close more new business, too.

What is value beyond deliverables?

I’ve talked to a lot of business owners who have worked with SEO companies. In fact, on the GBP Help Community, where I volunteer as a Product Expert, I spoke to nearly 1,000 business owners in 2024 alone.

One benefit of this is it allows me to get a pretty good pulse on the industry and how business owners describe their problems (which I then, of course, incorporate into how I describe solutions). And if there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years, agency reputation is not at a high point among business owners, to say the least.

In my experience, many business owners are unimpressed with digital marketing agencies (generally speaking here). And aside from the obvious horror stories, I think there’s a fundamental disconnect between what clients hope to get and what they actually receive—even from the “good” agencies!

Let’s look at some noteworthy findings from the Sparktoro survey I mentioned. They report some pretty staggering numbers…

When agencies were asked what they expect their biggest challenge to be over the next year:

• 70% of respondents said new business sales.
• Nearly 40% said existing client retention.

When asked how they feel about the current state of the agency world:

• 44% said, “It’s a struggle right now.” 
• Just 10% said it’s “healthy.”
  

So what’s behind all of this? Why is it so hard to sell? And why do so many agencies think it’s a struggle right now?

It’s certainly not because businesses are spending less on digital marketing. Various reports suggest strong growth in digital spending in 2024, and digital marketing investments are projected to continue growing over 10% YoY and will be a $1 trillion industry by 2030.

I’ll tell you why most agencies find it hard to sell right now: the market isn’t seeing enough value from most agencies. Duh!

One problem I see frequently is that agencies try to “sell” the value of digital marketing, in general, rather than selling the value of themselves. And given the enormous worldwide investments in digital marketing, I don’t think anyone needs to be sold on the value of ranking on Google. It’s not 2001, people!

We’re at a time in the industry of nearly complete adoption. It’s akin to Apple trying to sell the value of cell phones. If that was their only value prop, I’m sure it would be a struggle for them, too.

This brings to mind a client who fired their previous agency even though the agency was producing great results.

The deliverables were there, the performance was there, and in fact the price was cheap too. Yet, the client wasn’t happy.

For this particular client, it came down to “soft deliverables” – mainly communication and basic customer service. They also had a hard time connecting the dots between their marketing performance and what the agency was actually doing (and the ROI of it all).

They were fully aware of the value of SEO and how important it was for their business. Nobody had to convince them of how important it was, nor did they need to be convinced they ranked well for some valuable keywords.

What they told me is that actually SEO gains were not a motivating factor for seeking change – that they were more concerned about understanding SEO, ROI, and digital marketing strategies.

So, with that in mind, if I had presented them with a pitch focused on the value of SEO and how I deliver SEO results, I’m sure it wouldn’t have been very meaningful for them.

Instead, my proposal focused on partnership, customer service, communication flexibility, meeting flexibility, how I could adapt to their operating style, what my work entails, and how my work ties directly to their bottom line. 

Rather than selling results, I was selling how I could tie my role to results (any results – good or bad).

They ended up closing on a deal that was priced 4x their previous agency – and they’re still one of my happiest clients. They’ve even referred multiple new clients.

I have a similar anecdote: I had another client who, after having strong SEO results, referred another business to me. I wasn’t surprised, given the campaign’s success, but what was surprising is what I learned from the new prospect: the client never even mentioned performance to the referral.

My client told this referral that the communication made it worth every penny and more.

And this was after he had worked with several marketing agencies for over the past 10 years.

I don’t believe these are flukes, either. I regularly hear complaints that clients feel neglected, they don’t understand where their money is going, that their strategy seems generic, they don’t fully grasp what agencies do for them, and they aren’t getting what they thought they were buying.

So, how can you counter these common pain points and stand out?

5 Tips to Close More Deals and Keep Clients Longer

1. Being a Partner vs Vendor

In my experience, most clients aren’t looking for a task rabbit. Many don’t even understand this stuff (that’s why they are looking for a partner). They don’t know what tasks need to be done, which ones will pay off, what’s the best fit for their business, and most importantly, what they mean to their bottom line. 

What I see is they are looking for a trusted expert to guide them on the best path forward and explain how things work, why it will work for them specifically, and how to measure the ROI of it all.

Having worked for agencies and as a customer of agencies when I was in-house, I’ve noticed that many operate more like vendors than partners. Whether it’s rate cards, packages galore, or templated reports and dashboards, it seems more like a product than a service—and I don’t think clients are looking for a product. At least mine aren’t.

Because of this, I tend to spend a lot more time one-on-one with clients. Is that scalable? No. However, customer service can retain a client through difficulty.

Vice versa? Not so much.

That’s why partnership and customer-centric values are top priorities in how I do business, particularly when most of my clients are doing local SEO. I know that local businesses meet their customers face-to-face, day in and day out, so weak customer service from me won’t be acceptable.

So, instead of selling effort and deliverables, I sell partnership (which just happens to include some deliverables).

Which brings me to my next point.

2. Stop Selling Deliverables

Aside from selling the value of digital marketing, another common problem is selling deliverables. According to a different agency survey from BrightLocal, over 50% of agencies said that their billing structure is based on deliverables.

Usually it looks like something like this:

• One blog per month
• One backlink per month
• Four GBP business posts per month
• And so on

Sound familiar? 

It’s worth considering that, at a time when most agencies are reporting trouble with their sales pipeline, most are also billing clients based on deliverables.

While this might be a case of correlation rather than causation, there are definitely a few issues with this approach:

1. Clients Aren’t in the Market For it

When was the last time you heard this from a potential lead: “Hi, um, so I’m looking for one blog per month, one backlink per month, and four GBP posts per month. Do you have any in stock?”

Right… so why do we sell this? In my experience, clients don’t know what that stuff is, but if it gets them more customers: “then sure?” And that’s a best-case response!

2. It Commoditizes SEO

If SEO is one blog per month, one backlink, or whatever, then why don’t they just go with the next agency that provides that stuff for less?

3. It Ties Your Work to Tasks

That means if those tasks don’t get done, then they aren’t getting what they paid for. So if calls are up 60% YoY, that doesn’t really mean anything if you didn’t deliver your deliverable (aka, that blog).

4. Your Work is Always Aligned Toward Meeting Deliverables Rather Than Clients’ Real Goals

That sets you up for a client who doesn’t see real value in your work because those deliverables were never their real objective to begin with.

I’ve learned this the hard way. It’s pretty frustrating when you’re producing results for a client, yet they’re unhappy because a blog wasn’t completed on time! 

I know some might argue that operational structure can prevent the issue of missing deliverables, but my point is that it’s actually quite telling if a client sees a blog deliverable as more important than calls. Clearly, they aren’t attributing my work to the call increase! 

And that’s a big problem, which brings me to my next point.

How to Create Better Local SEO Proposals

Learn More

3. Vanity Metrics vs KPIs

The same BrightLocal survey found that the most common challenge clients bring to agencies is revenue not meeting expectations. 

Interestingly, “needing one blog per month” didn’t make the list… but I digress.

Aside from undervaluing deliverables, clients also undervalue all sorts of metrics that are important in SEO.

They don’t see value in impressions, traffic, rankings, or any of those metrics (generally speaking). These are all metrics that only matter to marketers.

So unless your client is also a marketer, there really isn’t any value in showcasing it unless it is directly tied to actual KPIs (i.e., calls, sales, etc.). If a client comes to you and says, “Customers can’t find me online,” and you show them a rank tracking report, that actually doesn’t tell them anything about how many more customers found them online.

Let me put it this way: in my previous role, where I worked as an in-house Director of Digital Marketing for a healthcare chain, I reported directly to the CFO. And while I am indeed a marketer who uses all sorts of metrics to perform my job well, I can assure you I wasn’t going to the CFO end-of-year to report how impressions increased by a whopping 300%. CFOs don’t speak that language.

My reports were always tied directly to new business, revenue, and specific attribution year over year, and that’s how I operate with clients as well. While I know impressions and clicks are valuable, my clients simply do not speak that language either.

They speak:

• Phone calls
• Appointments
• qualified leads
• Sales
• Revenue
• ROI

Rankings and traffic are just how you get to the metrics that actually matter.

I know my clients will never see value in a vanity metric, no matter how “up and to the right” or shiny it may look to me or another SEO.

The good news with this approach is you also don’t need to have case-study-level homerun ROI every time. The mere fact that you helped a client implement attribution and tie SEO efforts directly to business outcomes will make your services stand out in a big way! Because that in and of itself is highly valuable, even if performance didn’t end up as strong as you hoped.

4. The Problem With Account Managers

While some clients like account managers, I’ve heard and seen enough of the bad not to have them at my SEO agency.

Don’t get me wrong—some account managers are great! But the term just doesn’t make the most sense in the agency world. It also has a negative connotation for many business owners who are unhappy with agencies (many of whom have account managers).

AMs make perfect sense in the SaaS world, for example. They can help clients make the most of the product and are often a valuable asset since they are experts in it.

That’s the issue I have: in the agency world, clients aren’t looking for a product. Even if digital marketing strategy were a product, then the AM would need to be the person who actually developed and implemented the strategy to be a true expert in that client’s particular “product.” 

Clients generally don’t need to be convinced SEO is valuable, nor are they looking for high-level general concepts and the deliverables involved. They aren’t stupid. They might not completely grasp SEO, but most of them certainly know when they are getting blown smoke. 

In my experience, what they are actually seeking is a deeper understanding of what exactly is the plan for them, why, what’s next, and whether or not they are getting a return from a particular task (or if it’s just a waste of time).

To some marketers, this might come off as needy, hence the solution of handing clients an account manager so the client knows things are getting done and has a person to talk to.

But that won’t fix anything if the “problem” you are trying to solve via an account manager isn’t even the real problem to begin with.

What I’ve heard from a number of business owners is that they have perceived some account managers as a sort of “buffer” between them and the people actually running the strategy and doing the work. Which makes sense… Because that’s exactly what it is (generally speaking).

This all goes along with point #1 above – clients want a partner, not a vendor. Account Managers seem more like a vendor thing. I mean, it’s even just the name… Account Manager.

I think most of my clients would be quite offended if I referred to them as an “account.”

5. Proactivity vs Reactivity

The last place I want to be with a client is when they are wondering where I am or what I’m up to. In fact, I’d prefer they have as little opportunity as possible to reach out to me first. At my agency, we’re always looking for excuses to talk to clients. I know they are less likely to be compelled from a cold outreach if they are in constant contact with me!

For example, we recently noticed an SEO client was trying to post links in their Instagram posts. We don’t work on their social media, nor have we sold it or even intend to. That said, we decided to create a LinkTree for them and give some suggestions on Instagram marketing best practices. It was very quick, easy, and only cost us a few dollars. And those few dollars very well may end up paying off more than we could ever quantify! You never know when an agency might come along and approach my client with, ” Wow, your current provider never told you that!”

Wrapping Up

Selling SEO is becoming more difficult, which means keeping your current clients is more important than ever. Fortunately, there’s no shortage of business, which means freelancers and agencies can continue to grow if they can better understand their customer’s pain points and deliver more value beyond a deliverable. By focusing on customer service, ROI, and communication, agencies can position themselves to stand out in a crowded market and retain clients longer.

Do you know a freelancer or agency struggling right now? Be sure to share, save, or bookmark this page if you’ve found it valuable. That way, we can all help businesses get more back from their SEO investment – which will build a happier & healthier SEO industry for everyone.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter three of ‘Part 3: Retention & Growth’. 

SEOs are always sharing advice, so if you keep up with newsletters or articles, you’ll be regularly running into something new to try. Whether it’s trying to get your website or businesses included in a new SERP feature, testing out a method to appear in AI Overviews, or even connecting social media posts to SEO strategy. Lots of things are changing, and many SEOs are sharing their insights, testing new strategies, and refining what works in real time.

Clients who like to educate themselves on SEO aren’t ignoring the new information, either. They want to keep up with the times, read about case studies, and see what SEOs with big followings are sharing. There’s nothing wrong with that.

When you’re client-facing, you’ll inevitably have one come to you about a new thing they read about, and they want to know why you haven’t tried this new thing out for them. It causes FOMO (fear of missing out), and whether that new thing is right for them or not, they can make an impulsive decision to do it anyway.

So, how do you cut through the noise and get the client to focus on what really matters? How can you make your point and get the win, both for yourself and the client?

It’s all about education, managing expectations, and preparing for the aftermath if you can’t get the client on board. 

“Shiny new object” syndrome

“Shiny new object syndrome” occurs when businesses jump on new trends without fully evaluating their impact or necessity. With the SERPs and AI changing up the SEO industry on a near-weekly basis, there is a lot more trepidation around what makes for the best approach and a sense of urgency to hop on to the latest new thing someone’s shared. Many companies see a new approach, hear a success story, and assume they must implement it immediately without considering whether it fits their needs.

A great example of this is programmatic SEO (a method that uses automation and technology to create search-engine-optimized web pages at scale). As of December 2024, ChatGPT had 300 million weekly active users worldwide. With the possibility of making things easier, faster, and more efficient, you’ve likely had or will have clients who want to figure out how to use ChatGPT for everything. The popularity of ChatGPT and the allure of programmatic SEO can lead a client to think that just because this technology exists and works for some companies, it can be the perfect opportunity to use this method for creating hundreds of business location pages, for example, at once.

However, just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should. By blindly following the promise of hundreds of local landing pages created instantly that can rank, clients overlook many factors: no consideration of content quality, risks around duplicate content, and the fact they’re likely to be creating a negative experience for their potential customers. The example below from this excellent guide on the pitfalls of programmatic SEO highlights what can happen after the initial short-term gains.

Another example of “shiny new object” syndrome with local business clients is the rush for SEO testing. The client may have seen a recent case study or even read something you’ve published about another client’s results with testing and want to know why they haven’t been given the same plan. But the truth is that they don’t even have their foundation set up in such a way that testing is justified. It could be a brand new site, or there could be a lot of work to be done just redoing the work of the previous agency. 

When clients are showing you other people’s success and recommendations, managing their “shiny new object” syndrome can be overwhelming. You must be prepared to discuss and handle requests for random things like the examples mentioned. 

How to Say No

Saying no to a client’s idea in the best possible way isn’t just about managing the rejection they’ll feel—it’s about guiding them toward a better decision, too. By approaching the conversation with clear explanations, relevant data, and a focus on their long-term success, you can turn a tough conversation into an opportunity for education and trust-building.

Explain

When a client wants to try something new, the best approach is to help them understand whether it’s truly beneficial for their site. Just because a strategy worked for one business doesn’t mean it will work for another.

The industry they operate in, the current state of their website, and the competitiveness of their market all impact whether a tactic will deliver results. A strategy that helped a large eCommerce brand won’t necessarily translate to success for a small local business.

It’s also important to explain the risks. Some trends might bring short-term success but cause long-term damage. For example, a client might see a case study about a website ranking quickly by purchasing many links and assume they should do the same. 

First, you would want to address the case study, social media post, or idea they’ve shown you. Be specific in your approach to debunking its success, and explain that search engines can detect and penalize manipulative link-building tactics. Cite your sources, and if you can find the same source or publication making a debunking argument, then all the better! Google Search documentation is your friend in explaining away any of these spammy tactics they might bring up. 

Educating clients about the potential consequences of trend-chasing helps them make more informed decisions. If you tell them they’ll lose out on money, they aren’t likely to suggest this again. 

Tie it Back to Business Goals

When clients are uncertain, reassurance always comes from connecting SEO efforts to their business goals. A local business’s goals are to drive local traffic, improve leads, and increase revenue. Showing how the current strategy supports those objectives is key. When they push for a trend that doesn’t align with their goals, put things into perspective by comparing the return on investment of their existing plan versus the new idea. Sometimes, the numbers alone are enough to shift their thinking.

Data-driven insights work wonders in these conversations. Instead of simply telling clients that a strategy won’t work for them, showing them performance trends, competitor insights, and past case studies provides concrete evidence. This shifts the discussion from opinion to fact, making it easier to keep it on track.

Reassure

Managing clients is all about proper communication and developing and executing an SEO strategy that actually works. Part of your job is empathy and understanding your client’s situations and requests. Their SEO budget can be everything to them, especially when you’re working with small-to-medium-sized businesses. Every dollar matters, and they are bringing these new ideas to you because they just want to get a return on their investment as soon as possible. 

When discussing this with the client, keep the client’s perspective at the top of your mind. Remind them of the past results you’ve achieved for them and that they have trusted you before to create the best path forward for them. Align yourself with their point of view and match their communication style in your approach. 

What if they insist?

Even with the best explanations, some clients still insist on trying a new trend. Instead of fighting them on it, finding a middle ground can help them see the reality of their choice without risking their entire SEO strategy.

Compromise  

Sometimes, a client just won’t take no for an answer. In these cases, a compromise can be the best way forward. If the new idea isn’t likely to cause harm, framing it as a test allows the client to explore it while maintaining control over the outcome. Setting clear metrics and a defined time period ensures the results are measurable and actionable.

Going back to our programmatic SEO example, if a client insists on this approach for location pages despite you sharing your concerns, testing a small batch of pages first allows for an assessment of performance without making large-scale changes. If the results are positive, adjustments can be made before expanding further. If they are negative, the impact is contained, and the client can see why the approach may not be the best fit.

Let Them See the “Fruits” of Their Labor

If a client is determined to move forward with a risky idea despite your warnings, sometimes the best approach is to let them see the results firsthand. When performance declines or the expected results don’t materialize, presenting this information objectively makes it easier to guide them back to a more effective approach. 

Letting a client fail isn’t necessarily the best approach, but in some extreme cases, it’s the only way for them to understand a trend’s limitations. Instead of debating opinions, the conversation becomes centered on real-world outcomes, making it easier to refocus on proven strategies.

It’s About Educating, Not Just Explaining

By balancing education, expectation management, and strategic compromise, you can help clients navigate the “shiny new object” syndrome. The goal isn’t just for you to say “no” and have the client accept that—a client engaged with your work and industry is always a good thing—instead, it’s to educate clients with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions that drive real results.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter two of ‘Part 3: Retention & Growth’. 

Whether you’re launching a local SEO strategy for a new client or planning the next quarter for a long-term term one, stakeholder buy-in is essential. For most marketing professionals, at some point in your career, you’ll need to present to executives to gain support for your initiatives.

This is especially important when finalizing marketing budgets or securing resources from other teams within a company. This could be prioritizing web tickets for technical updates or ensuring that content writers will be available to help with on-site optimizations. Gaining support beyond your direct client contact and team, including company executives, is key when SEO efforts require cross-functional collaboration and is a general occurrence when planning programs.

Stakeholder approval is often necessary for timelines, budgets, and resource allocation. These conversations typically happen during quarterly brand reviews (QBRs), annual planning sessions or strategy check-ins focused on “what’s next” or program progress against planned goals. Since time is limited, success depends on effectively communicating SEO’s value, defining key success metrics, and aligning SEO with the company’s broader goals. 

Why Getting Buy-In Is a Key Part of the Process

How can you prepare for a meeting with leadership? It starts with understanding the importance of the conversation ahead. Remember, SEO is an investment for a business that takes resources, time, and often cross-team collaboration to be effective. You may have already worked diligently with your direct client team to put together an SEO strategy focused on meeting all of the established KPIs.

Getting buy-in from key team leaders can be beneficial in a couple of ways:

• Resource allocation: This helps ensure that SEO initiatives have the proper resources for projects, such as developers, content writers, or analytics support.
• Prioritizing updates: This can ensure that SEO-related tasks are prioritized against other marketing initiatives and into workflows such as IT or development backlogs. Often, this can lead to faster implementation of items identified as having a high impact on SEO.
• Cross-team collaboration: Support from leadership can ensure that the SEO team is brought in during projects or planning conversations that might impact organic results, such as making changes to the navigation, content updates, web planning, or UX testing.

Understanding Your Audience

When putting together a pitch or presentation, you must tailor your message to the people you are presenting to. This boils down to understanding what stakeholders and executives care about, often high-level business outcomes, and how SEO contributes to them. Some questions that might come up regarding SEO might include:

• How does the ROI of your SEO program compare to other marketing channels?
• Is organic traffic translating into leads or long-term customers?
• How do we adapt to changes such as Google algorithm updates, LLMs, or AI?
• What risks are there for not investing in SEO?
• Is SEO contributing to revenue growth?

Keep in mind that executives don’t need SEO deep dives. Your main point of contact needs to understand those types of in-the-weeds details.

Instead, when tailoring presentations for executives and stakeholders, remember that they want clear insights on how SEO will help to reach business goals and support growth. Yes, the two audiences are different, making it important to know your audience so that you can anticipate questions and touch on important points in front of them.

Stakeholders & Executives vs. Marketing Teams

For example, stakeholders and executives care about:

• Staying aligned with the market, beating competitors
• Company growth
• Revenue growth
• Efficiency and resource allocation

Defining What Success Looks Like

As a marketer, defining success helps ensure that strategies align with business goals, providing clear metrics to measure performance and ROI. Defining success can help gain stakeholder support by showing how initiatives align with overall company objectives. This sets expectations for the SEO program and shows how projects align to reach the set goals. 

Defining success starts with identifying some of the key metrics that your team will report on. These can include metrics that are reported monthly to the marketing team and KPIs that can relate to the larger goals set out by the company. 

For example, some typical key metrics of an SEO program can include:

• Organic traffic: Sessions, new users, clicks, website visits
• Engagement metrics: Pages per session, engagement rate, engaged sessions, GBP profile actions
• Leads/Conversions: Form fills, free trials, click-to-calls, survey completions, newsletter sign-ups
• Visibility: Impressions, overall keyword rankings, captured SERP features, profile views

Examples of items that may be called out in a presentation to show the scale of projects, but not used as performance measurements, include:

• Number of pages that were optimized or updated.
• Number of net new content written and pushed live.
• Number of web tickets created and resolved.
• Number of broken links fixed on the website.

Understanding Company Goals and Key Objectives

Company goals and key objectives are typically going to be tied to growth, revenue, maximizing ROI, market share, and edging out competition. Depending on your business, this can include driving more website traffic to a specific site section, creating an expansion plan to help with business growth in new markets, or driving more sales/conversions for a specific product or service.

Examples of some company goals can include:

• Increasing online sales for X product by 10% this year. 
• Increase the number of returning customers.
• Opening new locations and increasing visibility in those markets.
• Increase web traffic by X% this year.

Aligning SEO Goals With Company Goals

Once you understand the company goals, it’s important to show how organic efforts can help reach those goals. Tying SEO goals directly to revenue growth and key business objectives can help show the impact on the company’s bottom line, which in turn can make it easier to get buy-in and resources.

Example Goal: Growth In New Markets

The company plans to open up new locations in a market where a top competitor already has a footprint. With this expansion, the company’s goal is to grow business visibility, reach new audiences, increase market share by cutting into competitor’s share, and drive more traffic to the website.

To achieve this goal, the SEO team plans a couple of key initiatives:

• Creating and optimizing local listings such as Google Business Profile to secure top positions in the local pack, grow localized keyword rankings, drive engagement to profiles, and attract branded and non-branded search traffic. 
• Conducting a competitor backlink audit and targeted acquisition strategy will help establish local authority, increase brand visibility where competitors are already listed, and drive referral traffic from local sources.
• Working with web and content teams to develop optimized local landing pages with strong call-to-actions can improve organic rankings, drive additional traffic, and generate leads through on-site form fills.

These initiatives work together to strengthen the company’s local presence in the market, compete effectively, and drive business growth.

Building The Case For SEO

To start the conversation around SEO, there needs to be a clear understanding of what SEO is—and what SEO isn’t. It is critical to explain its role in the marketing mix and how investing in SEO can drive more traffic, capture different audiences within the customer journey, reach new users, increase brand visibility, and support business growth.

Another key point is that, unlike other marketing channels, such as paid, SEO is a long-term strategy and may take time to see the full impact of efforts. Setting these expectations upfront helps navigate discussions around performance impact and timelines. 

When building your case for SEO, it’s important to touch on a few key items:

• Define value and business impact by demonstrating how SEO supports company goals.
• Present a high-level SEO strategy or roadmap focusing on main initiatives and how each project ties back to established company goals. 
• Focus on the big picture rather than getting lost in tactical details.
• Communicate ROI by outlining expected outcomes, explaining KPIs, and showing how success will be measured. 
• Be transparent about the resources and budget required for specific initiatives, clearly explaining why they are necessary and how they will be used. Executives will want to understand the rationale behind these allocations.
  • Example: You need content writers to assist with updating on-site content for product pages. This should improve keyword rankings for a specific product to help drive more traffic to pages and reach those ready-to-purchase audiences. Learn more about this in Melissa Popp’s guide to mastering content creation for client success.
• Set a project timeline, ensuring you cover everything from planning to execution.

Delivering Local SEO as Part of a Wider SEO Strategy

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Client Relationships & Partnerships

Before preparing to present strategies and goals to executives and stakeholders, ensure you’re fully aligned with the marketing team that you’re directly working with. This is the team you’re directly working with to solve their problems and achieve the goals you’ve set out together. They should be aligned on upcoming initiatives and serve as your partners and/or advocates during the conversation with larger teams. 

Whether it’s a newly signed client or one you’ve worked with for years, data can support an SEO strategy. Highlighting past success—whether with the specific client or when implementing a similar strategy—can help show opportunities and ease doubts. This could include successful past initiatives within your SEO program or a case study highlighting effective tactics for a similar client. A proven track record of success and a strong client relationship built on trusted recommendations help establish credibility and reinforce the effectiveness of your approach. 

Getting Ready For Your Next Presentation

Building a strong case for SEO is essential to securing the resources and support needed to reach goals and drive meaningful business impact. Gaining stakeholder buy-in ensures alignment with company goals, helps with implementation efforts, and fosters cross-team collaboration, which can drive long-term success for an SEO program. 

When planning your next presentation to executives and stakeholders, remember the audience, what they care most about, how your SEO strategy aligns with company goals for the year, and the effort required to reach those goals. When executives understand the value of SEO, the team can be better positioned to executive strategies, adapt to the changing search landscape, and sustain growth in competitive markets. 

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter six of ‘Part Two: Processes and Workflows’.

Foreword: Saving the Dream

Why did you start on this little mission of yours in the first place? I’m assuming you’re not a classic movie villain, and you’re not going after power for power’s sake. You probably did it for promises of freedom or a better life. A little green in the bank probably caught your imagination too, but even that, I would say, comes from a desire to have more control over one’s life. After all, what do we want money for if not for spending our time and energy in more fulfilling ways?

But every company reaches what Michael E. Gerber calls the “Adolescence” phase. You’ve realized you can’t do it all alone, so you start delegating and hiring new people. And too often, when people reach this phase, that promise of having more control over one’s life starts to feel a bit like snake oil. Your team’s problems haven’t really stopped being your problems, and now new challenges seem to be forming in places you didn’t realize existed.  Not only is your sense of control not improving, but it’s actually made worse by an exponentially increasing number of questions to answer, crises to avert, and futures to plan for. You may feel like you have anything but control over your life.

The solution is process.

Now, those of us who work in SEO, local SEO, or any form of digital marketing, for that matter, hate being put into a box. We’re a proud people. We’re battle-hardened from years of explaining to clients why the strategy they’re suggesting is overlooking important nuance and why all of those KPIs they want to focus on aren’t as clear-cut as they want to make it out to be. And every time a new trainee asks a question about SEO theory, we’re always happy to provide them with the infamous “it depends.” Additionally, the mad scientist in us is often a perfectionist who doesn’t want to sacrifice quality in favor of an assembly line approach.

But I want to stress to you that creating a process for your work does not have to be the death of quality. On the contrary, I hope to show you that implementing processes will help you regain control and even help you deliver a better service.

Vision

If your team doesn’t know where the company is going, how are they supposed to help you achieve your goal? How could they possibly think outside the box and provide creative solutions if they don’t even know there’s a box to begin with? And how are you supposed to prioritize anything properly? You need to create something tangible to latch on to.

The Definition of a Vision

There is a strange amount of debate on the definition of a company vision and how it relates to things like a mission statement. Personally, I believe those arguments are mostly about semantics. What really matters is that there is a clear and compelling future that you and your team are working towards.

Think of it this way: The most important part of developing a good local SEO strategy for a client is researching and determining your core terms. Is that not the case? Without them, you’re just guessing, and any optimizations may turn out to be futile. You might get lucky, but you might also be that guy building a strategy primarily centered on ‘near me’ keywords in 2024.

Determining a primary topic and the terms associated with it will guide the nuances of the rest of your strategy. The clarity that comes from your long-term vision for your client’s success will answer many of the open-ended questions about how to approach aspects of your on-page, linking, or Google Business Profile (GBP) strategy. You, your organization, and your processes are no different.

Defining Your Positioning and Choosing Your Niche

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Define Your Ideal Customer

A good vision of success should include a vision for who you will be helping and how. Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) are nothing new, but too often, I see people companies trying to service every type of customer that sends them an RFP. If that’s you, I highly recommend re-evaluating that reality.

It can be hard to turn down a potential source of income. At the end of the day, you’re trying to bring in revenue. And maybe, in your current state, you’re struggling to believe you could say no even if you wanted to. If that’s you, and now isn’t the best time to start saying no to RFPs, then maybe you at least begin the process of defining an ideal customer profile and make it a goal to strive for. 

What’s required of you and your team can vary wildly already before introducing entirely different client types into the mix. Suppose you’re being pulled in too many different directions. In that case, you’ll eventually reach a point in your growth where effectively pricing your service, setting boundaries, and setting up processes for better efficiency for your team becomes impossible.

This doesn’t mean you can’t expand into services for more than one vertical or client type. But you should try to own your backyard first. Focus on what you’re best at and who you have the most rewarding experience with first. To use another SEO analogy, it’s like trying to overcome the proximity bias with your map rankings. Owning your backyard first will give you the strength and footing necessary to overcome the next obstacle. But if you don’t start there, you leave a lot to chance.

Building and Organizing Processes

You’ve likely heard the phrase, “You can lead them to water, but you can’t force them to drink.” But are you leading them to water? Is there even a watering hole to go to? Or is everyone wandering through the woods until they find a stream on their own? 

Self-reliance is an important attribute to look for in a good recruit, and I’m as big an advocate for that as the next guy. Everyone wants a team of rock stars. But as a leader, it’s your job to bring people together and align their goals. And that starts with the processes you use to achieve those goals. If everyone has their own way of doing everything, there will be a lot of unnecessary bottlenecks and arguments about best practices. You may all want what’s best for the client, but what that looks like to each of you is not always going to match up. And while it’s always good to challenge ourselves and be willing to improve, if there isn’t a standard to measure your work against, your discussions will just go in circles. 

A Process for Creating Process

Is it meta to have a process for creating process, you ask? 1000% it is. But if you don’t use one, you’ll likely fall into any of the countless traps that await your inner perfectionist. So, your first and most important process is a process for creating process. (Say that five times fast)

It’s super simple: Gather, Simplify, Capture, and Document.

Gather 

Start by gathering the information for a rough outline of what your organization does. It’s really important that you don’t get ahead of yourself here. Adding some detail can be helpful; after all, we’re mostly brainstorming right now. But during this step, you should focus on boiling things down to their major pivot points.  

When I’m first getting started with this, I usually prefer to go analog and use a large whiteboard before transferring things over to my computer. It gives me the freedom to get a little chaotic as I brainstorm, allows me to see the whole “picture” at once, and requires less effort to make adjustments when I reach the “Simplify” step. However, depending on your needs and preferences, using something digital like a Google Doc or even something more sophisticated like a mapping tool may make more sense. In either case, just make sure to pick one and stick with it. 

If you’re worried about missing something important, remember you can always break things down into more detail later. Don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Get it all together as best you can first and go from there.

Simplify

Before we start documenting anything, take some time to look at what you have and see if there are any ways to organize better or simplify the outline’s structure. One of the ways I like to approach it is to ask myself how well someone would retain this information if I used the same structure to create a sales pitch. This helps me stay concise (as the incessant, rambling ADHD-er that I am), and it helps me quite literally later when building a pitch for our sales conferences, training programs for new employees, and presentations for onboarding clients. 

This is also a stage at which I recommend having someone look at what you’ve got with fresh eyes. 

Capture

Now it’s time to start recording yourself. Start capturing the “How-to’s” of your major services. For example, if you have a periodic audit for a client set every month, have whoever’s best suited on your team record themselves going through the process and explaining it along the way.

There are  various tools you can use for this. Anything that records your screen and audio will do. My personal recommendation is Loom. We originally started using it to help with remote work collaboration but found it worked even better for training videos. It’s simple to use and has some really convenient features, including easy integration with our training manual program.

Document

Now for the Pièce de résistance. Now that we have an outline and videos to go with it all, we want to write down the essential goals, how-tos, and anything else that can clarify or support the training video. This is where I recommend getting the most detailed. Some of the best details you can provide here are any useful sources or references that further explain your reasoning or provide an easy path to the tools needed to complete the process. 

I highly recommend getting a good training manual software like Trainual to document everything. It’s not required, though. If you’re pressed for cash or would prefer an alternative, you could always go the simple route and use something like Google Docs or Slides. The first SEO Manual I ever made was a Google Slides deck with videos and diagrams. Eventually, that slide deck got too big (hundreds of slides too big) and increasingly harder to maintain and keep organized. As time progressed, people had an increasingly harder time going through them.

Using good software has made it easier to keep things up to date and divvy up lessons in a way that’s far more user-friendly. As a bonus, making it more user-friendly for my team has made it more engaging, which has led to better knowledge retention and, therefore, fewer unwanted opportunities to repeat myself. 

The Anatomy of a Good System

When you begin evaluating your systems or are just creating a new one from scratch, I recommend having a framework for that approach, too. Call this a second process for creating. Supplemental to the documenting process we just went over, it can help define current processes better and ensure that any new processes you create are done efficiently. 

The best framework I’ve found to help me in my thought process is to define what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and who is doing it. The key for me is to force myself to answer these questions as much as possible to keep myself from getting lost in the weeds. 

What You Do

Start with the value being provided. This will become more difficult as you get into smaller actions, but always start with what the client is actually getting out of it, or at least what provided value the task is feeding into. Then,  define the deliverables. 

For example, instead of “GBPs tasks” or even “Optimize GBP’s,” I would label it “GBP Management” at the very top. “Optimize GBP’s might be a part of it, but it’s not the overarching value you’re providing if you’re also taking care of suspensions, appeals, and the like. “GBP Management” provides a better umbrella to fit your current systems under and a framework any new ones you create can funnel into easily.

When You Do It

This is the step I see overlooked the most. Everything seems simple on paper until it’s put into practice. That’s because context is what pulls your system apart. Consider onboarding a client as an example: When does your team begin and finish optimizing a GBP? What about On Page? Links? The simple answer is when the client signs the contract, but what about the accesses you need to entities like the site? Clearly defining the “When” of one process often clearly identifies the “What” of another. The GBP example did so by outlining what was needed on the Client Success Managers’ part to ensure onboarding went quickly and smoothly. 

How You Do It

This is the step most people naturally tend to start with, but it’s important to do it after What and When. Because how you do something is what evolves the most. If your company grows, you’re going to need to make changes at some point. If you add to your service offering or make addendums to your company vision or identity, the How is more likely to change. But the What and When, while still subject to change, are much more rigid in comparison. Doing it after What and When also provides the perspective you need to question the current How and refine it if necessary.

Who is Responsible

While perhaps the most important part of the process, choosing who is responsible is easiest when you realize the scope. If you’re a one-man show, I would still recommend creating some form of title or label so that if the day comes that you need to delegate it out for one reason or another, it’s a seamless transition.

An Ongoing Process

Not only do you not need to document everything now, you shouldn’ t. 

The most straightforward reason is that your time is limited, and this is supposed to help you with that, not make it worse. These steps are also meant to help you improve your processes, not just record them. Seeing how your organization functions in a clearer and more concrete format makes decisions to modify it easier. Paired with your company vision, you’ll be able to see more clearly if certain secondary procedures in the fine print of your strategy are worth your time or not. But if you spend all your time in the fine print, you’ll never get around to that.

This is an ongoing process. If I were to compare it to anything, it’d be dieting. No amount of extreme calorie deficit in the short run is going to erase the need for long-term consistent habits. For most people, it’s better to start by building a few good habits at a time and build on top of that consistency one piece at a time.

Practical Principles for Process

All the process documentation in the world won’t fix anything if you don’t take the time to simplify, organize, revise, and optimize them. In this section, we’ll review a few ideas that can get you pointed in the right direction. At the end of the day, you’ll have to create your own systems that fit into your business model and best serve your clients. But these can serve as inspiration and a good place to start.

Some examples include the use of task management software. Project management tools like Asana, Click Up, or even Notion can be really helpful in speeding up delegation and organization. However, they are not required to implement these principles.

Choosing the Best Project Management Tools for Your Agency

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Using Targets Instead of Tasks

Let’s set the scene: I was a new manager, still young in my experience in SEO. My team was comprised primarily of college students who first heard about SEO when they applied for the job. I felt like I was losing a lot of time creating and following up on Asana tasks, so I decided I was going to automate some of it.

I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I needed to eliminate the monotony for my own and my client’s sake. But how was I supposed to create a linear process for something as ambiguous as SEO? And how would I structure it so I could easily delegate it to a very inexperienced team? I didn’t have the benefit of hiring “rockstars” like so many business gurus on YouTube suggest. We hired great people, but we were a small start-up and didn’t have pockets deep enough for experienced professionals. 

I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to try something, so I started with onboarding. It was the most straightforward process we had, and we even had a checklist of sorts already. So, I organized it and automated it with an Asana project template. It covered everything we needed to do when we took on a new client, including collaboration tasks with our client success department, content team, and design team. I thought I was a genius.

Then, all of the reasons “it depends” in SEO started showing up in my Slack inbox. Mistakes started rolling in, and millions of questions came with them. Externalities weren’t being taken into account or were even being ignored because someone assumed it was someone else’s responsibility. In many cases, I had a hard time arguing with that assumption. If I were in their shoes, I think I would have done the same.

You Can’t Templatize Everything

Despite my best efforts to automate the process, I ended up more overwhelmed than when I started. So, in a stroke of genius (otherwise known as panicking), I tried to templatize everything even further. Clearly, the problem was that I hadn’t used enough skip logic in my process, so I started looking for every opportunity I could to create an if/then statement and create more preventative measures.

Surprise, surprise, it only got worse. Everything was turning into what Dan Martell calls Transactional Leadership, and I was pounding my head against the “Tell-Check-Next” ceiling. I’d tell them what to do, check that it was done correctly, and then tell them what to do next. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do as a manager.

However, the problem with a transactional approach is that the only way it can scale is by adding more transactions. This can only translate into more time lost and more quality compromised. In this framework, all your team’s problems don’t stop being your problems, and you’re eventually consumed by the endless pit of QC-ing everything, everywhere, all the time. And that’s time you and your client don’t have. 

The Definition of Done

Everything took a turn for the better when I stopped focusing on all the things that could go wrong and started focusing on prioritizing my end goals for each project. The tasks on my onboarding template became a list of areas that needed to be covered rather than a list of every step to complete. I started defining what “done” looks like at the highest level for those areas (also an idea I stole from Dan) and introduced stewardship to the system by making the assignees responsible for the outcome instead of just the tasks. If they were waiting on assets from a client or another department in the company, it was on them to follow up and solve the problems.

Of course, I still provide training and answer questions. But when I do, I often start by asking, “Well, imagine I didn’t exist. How would you handle this?” Ultimately, it’s my job to give them the tools they need, a destination to reach, and assistance as necessary along the way. 

This mindset can and should be applied in every stage of your process. When you work in something more creative or analytical, like SEO, it’s better to use targets instead of tasks. Otherwise, your “process” will just be one big juggling act.

“Once you set the outcome instead of telling your employees “how,” they start talking about results, not tasks. They begin offering their energy, not just their skills. They start asking themselves, ‘ Is there a better way?’ instead of asking you, ‘ How do we do this?” – Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time

Process Beats Paranoia Every Time

A scenario pretty much every SEO provider has had nightmares about at some point is the dreaded morning phone call from a client asking why something on the website is broken, or the GBP is set up wrong. “How did we miss this?” you ask yourself. You know the person you assigned to the project wouldn’t knowingly leave that behind for someone to find. So how’d it happen?

Simple: They’re human.

Fun fact: we all are, and that’s not changing any time soon. And while emphasizing the importance of not making mistakes to your team is important, “Don’t Make Mistakes” is not a strategy. You can’t stop biology from doing its thing. So what can we do about it? It’s here where most fall into the trap of thinking they must QC everyone’s work. But while QC-ing is also important, I urge you to remember the Tell-Check-Next loop I mentioned earlier. That’s a ceiling you cannot break through. Besides, nobody wants a helicopter parent, and nobody wants to be one, and it’s not effective anyway. But the good news is, you don’t have to be one. 

Set up Routines Based on the System You Already Have

Instead of checking everyone’s work all the time, create routines for checking or auditing clients periodically. This doesn’t always have to be a major QC audit, either. My team’s smallest QC checkpoint is a final QC at the end of onboarding from the SEO, Design, and Content teams. Everyone is already there, and it’s hard for something glaring on a page to get past three individuals in a single sitting. It’s simple and takes little to no extra time because it’s just a part of the Asana task template we have set up. 

For larger QC measures, I’d recommend starting with any routines or systems you already have and simply adding to them. You probably already have periodic check-ins every week or month where you evaluate rankings and any other metrics you’ve deemed top priority. Introduce some QC-ing into them.

What’s likely to get overlooked? Grammar, for example, is an easy one to forget when you’re worried about keyword density, word count, backlinks, etc. It seems small, but it’s no less embarrassing when it comes up on a phone call with one of your biggest clients. Make it a routine to check that, along with some other on-page optimizations, when building location pages or anything that involves the written word for a client, once a month when your team is already there.

This allows you to show your team you trust them while still putting in some countermeasures to support their humanity.

Minimum Viable Product

There’s no law for how long these intervals should be; it’ll depend on your time and resources. So, just start with something. Processes are iterative anyway. You’ll probably reach a point where some of the intervals feel a little too far apart. In that instance, remember two things:

1. A little too far apart is better than the alternative.

   You do not have the time to check everything all the time, and you won’t break through the Tell-Check-Next ceiling.

2. You can always improve it, but you can’t do that if you don’t try something.

   Theory only takes you so far. Once you get a process down, you can find ways to speed some of it up or simplify it.

Simple System Examples

Improved Collaboration

One of the best changes I made was to my weekly 1:1’s with my team. I had actually discontinued the meetings for a time because I felt like they were a waste of time and always got too convoluted with all of the objectives I tried to tackle every meeting. But not having a scheduled time meant I just wasn’t getting around to talking with my team members enough. So, I re-implemented them and changed how I approached them. Keeping the idea of transformational leadership in mind, I changed my meetings to be oriented around outcomes rather than just task instructions. We still discuss tasks and questions as necessary, but the primary goal of every meeting is to answer the following questions:

1. Were there any notable improvements in rankings?
2. Were there any notable drops in rankings?
3. What are you doing about it?
4. What do you need from me?

There’s always more that could be discussed, but ultimately, this is what they’re responsible for. Everything else hangs off of these questions. Keeping simple, quantifiable markers of success at the forefront of the discussion keeps the meeting focused, helps prioritization, and makes it clear to your team members what they’re responsible for. It also gives them the ruler they need to measure their own day-to-day priorities against, helping to eliminate the extra busy work that might otherwise get in the way.

Quarterly Link Planning  

The most dreaded phase of service for me has always been what I call the “Now what?” phase. You’ve been working on a client for some time now, and you’ve achieved the primary objective of your contract to rank for the core terms you’ve selected, and now there are no obvious next steps. Now what? We know all of the things we could do. But what should we do? What will be the best use of our time and the client’s money? How do we make sure something is always being done while also making sure it’s beneficial for the client and not just busy work? These are just some of the questions I always found myself trying to answer.

One of the deliverables I decided to tackle first was link building. I started by trying a rigid schedule for certain deliverables like backlinks. I needed to make sure things were happening without having my hands on every lever in the machine. However, the problem was the same as the onboarding template. It was too rigid, it didn’t scale nicely at all, and, most importantly, it ignored the unique needs of the client. So, I replaced it with a simple planning phase that we now go through every quarter. This made the schedule the rigid pivot point rather than the deliverables themselves and created a balance between consistency of process and quality of service. And there was no need to introduce automations to do it. This thought process is beginning to guide how we approach most of our ongoing services.

Conclusion

Implementing structured processes within your agency is not about stifling creativity or turning local SEO into an assembly line—it’s about reclaiming control, improving efficiency, clarifying directives, and ultimately delivering better results for your clients. Without clear frameworks, scaling becomes chaotic, decision-making slows, and your time gets consumed by unnecessary firefighting. But by defining goals, setting measurable targets, and building adaptable processes, you empower your team to operate with autonomy while maintaining quality and consistency.

The key takeaway? Processes should evolve alongside your agency. Start small, document what matters, and refine over time. Prioritize outcomes over rigid task lists, foster accountability within your team, and establish systems that reduce errors without micromanaging. When done right, these systems won’t just improve your SEO services—they’ll give you the freedom and control you originally sought when you started this journey. Your agency’s growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of your sanity—process is the answer.

We’ve been surveying the local search industry since 2011 to help marketers and SEOs assess its state. When you work in such a fast-moving and competitive industry, it’s natural to ask classic imposter syndrome questions, like “Am I doing this right?” or “What does everyone else think of this?”. So, we wanted to help marketers find the answers.

The Local Marketing Industry Survey: Agency Edition examines the experiences of almost 400 local agency marketers, including freelancers and consultants, agency owners, and agency employees of all levels. Let’s take a closer look at the insights. 

Local Agency Marketers at a Glance 

It helps to set the scene by taking a snapshot of how agency marketers are feeling about their roles and the wider industry. But who are we representing when we talk about ‘agency marketers’? 

We aim to provide realistic and balanced representations of local marketers so that our insights can be relevant, useful, and, more importantly, actionable. Below is a breakdown of agency roles and seniority. Aside from the smallest segment for C-suite agency marketers, you’ll see a pretty balanced spread.

Salary Averages in the USA: Gender Pay Gap of 31%

The median salary for local agency marketers in the USA in 2024 was $80,000.

We present the median salary instead of the average because it’s a better representation of the ‘mid-point,’ whereas averages can be skewed by numbers in the extremes. When we extracted the same data from 2023’s Local Search Industry Survey, we found no change year over year. So, it doesn’t look like agency marketers are any better off in 2024 than they were in 2023.

However, when we break the salary medians down by gender, a different picture emerges. Male agency marketers are earning 31% more than female agency marketers, highlighting a significant disparity.

According to Salary.com, the median US salary within the professional services industry is $77,454. Based on our findings, female local agency marketers earn 19% less than this, while males earn 3% above the professional services median.

Unfortunately, the gender pay gap disparity is not a new finding and is not just limited to this industry. Earlier this year, Search Engine Land found that male SEO professionals were earning 36% more than females, but it is an enduring issue across industries globally. 

I hope that in providing these figures, female-identifying local SEOs and agency marketers can use these benchmarks as a resource to negotiate higher, fairer salaries. But obviously, it’s not as simple a fix as that. Nicole DeLeon provided some great research and conclusions for Moz in 2020, highlighting areas that need to be improved across the industry (and beyond), such as salary transparency.

Salary Satisfaction Levels

On the surface, the majority of agency marketers feel satisfied with their salaries—67% of all respondents said they were ‘somewhat satisfied,’ ‘satisfied,’ or ‘very satisfied.’

However, we decided to break out freelancers and consultants to provide a view from a self-employment lens and acknowledge that determining (and paying!) your own salary can be challenging. While the pattern largely follows a similar sentiment, it is noticeable that a higher percentage of freelancers and consultants are ‘somewhat satisfied’ compared to ‘satisfied’ (29% vs. 23%), and 6% of freelancers and consultants are ‘very dissatisfied’ compared to just 2% of other local agency marketers.

We also looked at salary satisfaction broken down by gender to see if, knowing what we do about the salary disparity, female agency professionals might be feeling less satisfied with their salaries compared to male agency professionals. Nothing stood out from this view, and the patterns for both groups reflected a similar, generally positive sentiment that looks much like the chart above.

However, when salary satisfaction was broken down by years spent in the industry, one group stood out.

Just 46% of respondents with fewer than two years of industry experience feel satisfied with their salaries.

This could suggest that ‘entry-level’ agency professionals are eager to progress within their roles and earn higher salaries accordingly. It could also show that they feel frustrated at the compensation they’re receiving in relation to the responsibilities and tasks they have to perform. 

Generally, entry-level agency SEO and local marketing roles can involve many necessary but often time-consuming (and sometimes menial) tasks rather than the juicier areas like strategizing. It also tends to be the stage of a career where you’re more likely to need to learn quickly on the job, so the pressure can outweigh salary satisfaction—meaning, it’s easy to see why this group of respondents stands out.

Incentives Beyond Salary

Of course, there are other financial incentives associated with (but not exclusive to) salaries that feed into the ‘package’ an employer provides that will affect salary satisfaction overall. Bonuses, profit shares, commission, and other reward types are attractive incentives that can essentially ‘top up’ salary levels, while the prospect of salary increases and promotions highlights opportunities for career path progression.

So, aside from measuring median salary levels, we also wanted to gauge the other ways in which agency marketers are being invested in by their agencies. It’s important to note that we excluded freelancers and consultants from the chart below.

It’s encouraging that 40% of agency marketers have received a raise in the last 12 months, while a further third have benefited from various bonus schemes.

Almost a quarter (23%) of all agency marketers have not received any additional salary incentives, though. If we examine that group of local marketers more closely, we can see a distinct relationship to lower feelings of satisfaction around their salaries overall.

Incentives and motivation have been hotly debated topics in business and management disciplines for decades. As a business grad myself, I grimace any time a workshop facilitator asks the room if they know about the hierarchy of needs… but I digress. 

While many will argue that financial incentives aren’t a true motivator in the workplace, the fact is that even though inflation has slowed down, prices for just about everything in life remain high.

So, for agency owners or even senior agency marketers, it’s worth considering how you can introduce incentives that recognize your team members more and reflect your commitment to investing in them.

Career Progression and Learning at Work

Clear career pathways and progression opportunities are a big ‘green flag’ for any agency wanting to hire and retain top talent. Yet it’s all too common to hear professionals say that the only progression opportunities for them at work are in line management. 

Line management is a challenging task that requires a specific skill set. It is not for everyone. With this in mind, we asked agency marketers how they felt about their career progression opportunities at work.

The two statements reflected in the chart highlight that the majority of agency marketers have opportunities to develop at work. However, there is an interesting difference between the certainty of having clear progression paths at work and developing new areas of expertise. 

68% of marketers agree that they have clear progression paths within their agencies. In fact, a full 32% of respondents agreed strongly with the statement. Meanwhile, 85% said their agencies would be open to marketers developing new areas of expertise to achieve professional goals. Both are positive statements, but the difference suggests that development at work might be more self-led for some professionals, putting the onus on individuals to shape their development.

For some, that can be an empowering move, but realistically, it can be challenging to make time in your day-to-day life to learn new things. Having clarity in development and progression by ensuring line managers are regularly working with team members on a more formal plan removes that feeling that it’s ‘all on you’.

Training Budgets As An Incentive

Offering employees a personal training allowance, while not directly impacting salary, is a positive indicator that shows a commitment to growth and progression. In many cases, the ‘perk’ has become a desirable part of the overall employer package. It reflects good attitudes towards growth, and the personalization element highlights a sense of autonomy for agency marketers when shaping their development.

While freelancers and consultants can certainly allocate training and development budgets for themselves, we removed them from this dataset to examine how larger agencies approach training more closely.

Last year, we found that just 39% of agency marketers had access to personal training allowances, so it’s great to see how much this has improved, now standing at 57% of marketers.

For the remaining 43%, it might not necessarily mean that training and development isn’t an important part of their agency life. Access to events and industry conferences, product training or training with partners like Google and Meta are often regular parts of the job. Yet, arguably, those with access to a personal training budget are likely to benefit from both the necessary and chosen development opportunities.

We also had to wonder, while a training budget isn’t a direct financial incentive, does this autonomy and empowerment mean agency marketers are more fulfilled with their salaries? 

While we can’t directly compare all salaries here to say that those with training budgets are earning more than those without, it certainly seems like there is a relationship between salary satisfaction and personal training budgets. 76% of local agency marketers with training budgets are satisfied with their salaries, compared to 52% of agency marketers without allowances.

It follows that better access to training and development ensures professionals are learning new skills, therefore placing them in better positions for career progression, and leading to overall salary satisfaction.

Feelings of Job Security

Finally, and arguably more importantly than salary satisfaction, how are local agency marketers feeling within their roles right now?

It seems like we’re never short of ‘big things’ to acknowledge when discussing the current business or economic landscape, from inflation and significant industry layoffs to political unrest and global conflict. Therefore, it is important to gauge how secure marketers feel at work, and hopefully, it can help answer one of those imposter syndrome questions we mentioned at the start of the report.

Overall, the picture is strong, with just 8% of marketers stating they don’t feel very or at all secure. However, looking at this small group of respondents more closely, almost half are business owners, whether consultants or agency owners, so it gives a glimpse into how those with the closest eye on the bottom line are feeling.

Breakdown of job security levels by job role:

Moving Onto New Roles

All of the areas that we’ve discussed so far can become key reasons for wanting to move on to a new role. But there are other reasons for moving on that might sit entirely outside of an agency’s control, such as personal commitments and changes in circumstances, perhaps even a big career change. So, where do local agency marketers sit at the moment? 

Given that we can probably assume those who aren’t sure right now aren’t looking for a new job any time soon, that means approximately 65% of agency marketers plan on staying put for now. For the remaining 35% of marketers, what’s prompting their decision to move?

The main reason is pretty clear, and it comes back to our earlier point that, yes, money isn’t everything… but it is actually also sort of everything. 53% of marketers plan on moving on for a higher salary. Agency owners should wonder why that might be—are you paying your employees what they deserve, and are conversations around salaries approachable? For those professionals that did receive a raise in 2024, were they paid enough?

Meanwhile, improved work-life balance (41%) and workplace flexibility (40%) are two key areas that go hand-in-hand and show that many agency professionals are seeking a job that more closely matches their needs. 

Work-life balance and flexible working have become standard components of discussions around the workplace. You cannot move on LinkedIn without coming across thought leaders discussing their views on hybrid working, workplace flexibility and work-life balance. Even though 2024 seems to have been a big year for ‘return to work’ mandates, it’s clear from our findings that work-life balance continues to take precedence for agency employees.

Agency Health, Life and Approaches to Structure

In the following sections of the report, we’ll examine some key areas of agency life through the lens of ‘high performance.’ To determine who the high-performers were, we asked marketers what their agency’s primary goal had been throughout 2024, and followed up by asking how they’d performed so far towards that primary goal.

For the sake of this section we have divided up respondents into ‘High-performing Agencies’, and ‘Everyone Else’.

• ‘High-performing Agencies’ = Respondents who said their agencies were ‘exceeding’ performance expectations.
• ‘Everyone Else’ = Respondents who said their agencies’ performance has either ‘met’ or ‘fallen short’ of expectations this year.

This view can help us understand what the ‘High-performing Agencies’ are doing differently from everyone else.

Looking at those business goals, we can see that all agencies are largely following the same trend; new client acquisition, increasing revenue, and increasing the lifetime value of existing clients were the top three priorities.

The key difference, though, is that ‘High-performing Agencies’ prioritize increasing lifetime value (AKA customer retention) more than ‘Everyone Else’ (20% vs. 14%).

While there’s not a huge difference between the two percentage points, it raises an interesting point that seems to come up repeatedly when discussing business goals: the importance of customer retention. 

Earlier this year, we explored this theme in the Brand Beacon Report 2024, where similar findings highlighted how high-performing brands also valued customer retention more than their average-performing competitors. In that report, we touched on the supporting evidence that shows customer loyalty can have a greater impact on your bottom line than simply chasing new customers.

The ‘Right’ Agency Structure

The way an agency is structured and works with its clients is crucial to its success—but is there a right way of doing things? You know what I’m going to say here: well, it depends.

The overall size of an agency and its teams and the variety of services offered will influence how things are run, and it may change as the agency scales or diversifies. We were interested to see how agency marketers are typically set up and also whether we could glean any insights from those ‘High-performing Agencies’. 

Overall, there is a fair mix of team structures, which you’d expect to see. Aside from our freelancers and consultants, the top agency team structure is one where the account manager is a primary point of contact for all client work. It is also by far the most common structure for ‘High-performing Agencies’.

At first glance, I was surprised at these results, mainly based on my own experiences working within smaller, more collaborative agency team structures. Perhaps there is something to be said for the efficiency of running on this model, leaving channel specialists to actually spend time executing the work. 

Obviously, we’re not going to recommend restructuring your agency based on these insights, but if you ever find yourself wondering if there are better ways of doing things, it might give you some food for thought.

Choosing the Right Marketing Agency Structure

Read more

Approaches to Billing Clients

Billing is another area that completely varies based on the nature of the work you do, how your agency is structured or, as a freelancer, how you like to work. It’s also an area that has a lot of new agency owners or start-up consultants scratching their heads, so it’s useful to benchmark the approach. Again, is there a right way?

Monthly fees based on deliverables (or retainers) are still the most common billing method, although it’s very interesting to note the downward shift year-over-year (54% vs. 64%). Coinciding with this, there appears to be an upward trend in agencies billing by project (41% vs. 39%) and those calculating retainers based on hours (29% vs. 22%).

A monthly retainer based on hours suggests that these agencies have a very clear idea of how much their service products cost. On a similar note to the team structure section, it could also nod to a sense of efficiency in how agencies deliver their services. Alternatively, an hourly retainer model could be more attractive to some clients in that they can work with account managers to spend the money on the services they need accordingly.

What Should My Agency Be Charging for Local SEO?

Read more

Local Marketing Services Provided

Which services are agencies packaging up into their core local marketing offering?

Before delving into a more comprehensive list, we’ve summarized the most commonly offered local marketing services in the chart below.

The majority of what we’d call the ‘fundamental’ local marketing services sit at the top of the list of services most commonly offered to clients. Although website design appears to be a surprisingly high (60%) offering for local marketing agencies, in this case, it is more common than local SEO pillars like citation management and review management.

The full list of local marketing services is shown below.

Based on previous benchmarking surveys, we expected review management, PPC, and social media to appear higher in the list. However, both PPC and social media require very different skill sets, and it’s not uncommon for clients to use multiple agencies based on their specialities. 

It is interesting to see that less than half of agencies offer review management (down by approximately 2% on 2023’s Local Search Industry Survey). Could it be that, rather than providing this service, agencies are encouraging and educating clients to implement these strategies themselves? This might also show that businesses and brands themselves have become more savvy about owning these areas of local marketing in-house.

The areas lower on the list, though, can also act as a gap analysis of sorts by highlighting that there is space in the local marketing agency market for ventures into these areas.  

Client Lifespan and Turnover

The aim of a successful agency is not necessarily to have the most clients but to have clients with fruitful and mutually beneficial partnerships. Sometimes, these partnerships come to a natural end as a project wraps up, while others are based on longer-term strategies and vision.

It’s an amazing feat to be able to say you’ve worked with a client for five or ten years, but you want to make sure that the relationship is still fruitful for both of you.

At first glance, the pattern for ‘High-performing Agencies’ versus ‘Everyone Else’ is largely similar, and it looks like the sweet spot for everyone is a client partnership between one and five years.

However, it’s also notable that ‘High-performing Agencies’ seem to retain the longest partnerships of 10 years and over more commonly. So, what are the top reasons for client turnover when they do inevitably move on?

It’s not surprising that budget cutting is the most common reason for client turnover. Whether you’re a high-performing agency or not, if clients are looking to save dollars, partner services and tools are often the first things to be scrutinized.

The reasons for turnover appear fairly even across all local agencies, but what is the least common reason for ‘High-performing Agencies’ is actually the second most common reason for ‘Everyone Else’: project work. Again, we’re not going to make any bold recommendations about overhauling the way your agency is doing things, but if your agency isn’t performing against expectations or is struggling with client turnover, it could be useful to examine the ways you are selling and billing work.

Reacting to Developments in Search

We can’t discuss the state of the search marketing industry without acknowledging some of the developments, innovations, and—let’s face it—shakeups influencing the way agency marketers do their jobs.

You don’t need me to point out how often things change within SEO. Along with constant developments and improvements to key local marketing products like Google Business Profile (GBP) that can change the tactics businesses in different industries use, the industry has seen plenty of big swings in 2024. I am, of course, referring to Google’s AI Overviews (formerly Search Generative Experience), ChatGPT Search, and other changes in the way people search for things and get information online.

When big news breaks, agency marketers quickly turn to industry news outlets, experts and peers to see the reaction. But how aware are their clients of what’s going on?  

86% of local marketers agreed that their clients are aware of how new developments in search could impact their business visibility and rankings. 

Over the years that we’ve been running industry surveys, we’ve asked local marketers whether their clients see reacting to algorithm changes as an important focus. Considering algorithm updates are usually something you don’t ‘see’, Google overhauling its SERPs with AI Overviews has been big news. 

66% of agency marketers said their clients feel reacting to algorithm updates is an important focus in 2024, up 5% from 2023. It makes sense that clients want to stay on top of such changes.

Yet, as we know, the nature of local search is changing in ways beyond traditional search and the ways in which people discover businesses are changing. What about developments beyond Google? 

73% of local marketers agreed that clients are aware of the importance of ranking beyond Google. Although lower than the awareness of algorithm changes, it’s positive to see this in such high numbers. With the news of ChatGPT Search still hot off the press, it will be interesting to see how this might change in the coming months.

Local Marketing Agencies in 2025 and Beyond

With such big developments in the industry continuing to roll out, and absolutely no sign of the AI hype dying down, exciting opportunities lay ahead for agencies and their clients.

AI and Big Opportunities

Alongside big tech swings in 2024, we’ve also seen a real return to basics in terms of the impact of foundational SEO. E-E-A-T continues to be at the top of experts’ minds when highlighting the importance of focusing on end users. At the same time, those specializing in certain verticals or niches are quick to highlight the benefits of new GBP features. 

On the whole, where do agency marketers think the biggest opportunities are for their clients in 2025?

As a content purist, it fills me with joy to see that E-E-A-T is front of mind for agency marketers as the top opportunity (24%) when it comes to their local marketing strategies. Of course, being at the behest of Google’s guidelines, you could argue that it leaves little choice for those wanting their clients’ content and websites to be found. But, a strong focus on creating content and experiences that are truly helpful to the end user can only be a good thing.

I’d expected to see alternative search engines and new advertising platforms with higher percentages, particularly with how platforms like Reddit have gained such visibility in SERPs and become an attractive advertising option.

Perhaps it’s too soon to expect agency marketers to have strong thoughts about strategies beyond Google. Although ChatGPT Search is using Bing’s Index to power its search engine functionality, it’s still early days.

In the areas of local marketing that agency marketers believe to be the biggest opportunities in 2025, it’s no surprise that the most common answer is AI and machine learning. 

As the biggest opportunity for their agencies, it makes sense that it’s also the most common area in which agencies want to improve their own knowledge. 

59% of agency marketers want to develop their expertise in AI, and it’s a sensible answer too, no matter your thoughts or skepticism on AI. There is a lot out there, with baiting email subject lines and constant streams of new articles on the subject, and clients often expect agencies to be up to speed on the ‘latest’ thing. So, wanting to get to grips with AI beyond a general understanding is a good business decision.

Plus, despite the healthy sense of optimism around the opportunities AI can bring, agency marketers seem to be also conscious of how it’s being sold to them.

79% of agency marketers said that they feel some businesses are overselling the capabilities of AI. And, if you think about how often you see ‘do x with AI’ shoehorned into meta titles in Google results now, you can’t blame them.

As we pointed out in our generative AI case study last year, it is ever-evolving, and professionals should remain cautious of its capabilities for now, particularly as far as accuracy is concerned. We are increasingly seeing cases of ‘AI-washing‘ throughout various industries, in which businesses are being held accountable to inflating the capabilities of AI in relation to their own products.

It’s particularly interesting, then, that despite a sense of caution and skepticism, agency marketers still expect potential tech partners to actively incorporate AI into new products. Following generative AI’s explosion into the industry in 2023, we started asking local marketers about their expectations of AI moving forward.

Not only do agency marketers still expect tech partners and tool providers to incorporate AI into their products, the sentiment appears even stronger in 2024.

So, wait a minute, what are we saying here? Let’s summarize:

• 33% of agency marketers think the biggest opportunities for their agencies lay within AI.
• 59% of agency marketers want to develop their own knowledge in AI.
• 79% of agency marketers think that some businesses are overselling the capabilities of AI.
• But, 84% of agency marketers still expect potential tech partners to actively incorporate AI into new products.

It’s a slightly confusing message overall, but in my mind it suggests that there is a sense of wanting to be seen to do the right thing or be known for keeping up with the latest tech developments. 

Investing in the Future

Overall, the future of local marketing agencies paints a fairly strong picture. Along with an appetite to develop marketer expertise (and, therefore, agency services) in relation to AI, agencies appear optimistic about their growth, both in terms of increasing team sizes and maturing their existing tech stacks.

66% of agencies told us they’ll be hiring in 2025. Although we didn’t ask agencies about AI roles specifically within their agencies this time around, it will be interesting to see whether we see changes in team structures or service product offerings throughout 2025 that can be attributed to how AI is influencing the workplace.

Meanwhile, almost three-quarters of local marketing agencies plan to invest more in their stack stacks next year. It’s important to remember that investing in technology doesn’t always mean adding ‘more’ to the stack and often involves maturing. Streamlining platforms for better visibility across teams, improving integrations, cutting loose outdated or redundant tools, and investing in new products to support the demand for new services are just a few obvious benefits of investing more in technology.

So, it’s encouraging to see that marketers are willing to make the investment rather than shy away from making potentially grand investments.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for taking the time out to read the Local Marketing Industry Survey: Agency Edition. Once again, we owe a huge thanks to the local agency marketers who participated in the survey—we really can’t do it without you!

We hope you found these benchmarks useful. Anything you’d like to share or discuss from this report? Be sure to tag us in your posts on LinkedIn or start a post in The Local Pack, we always love to hear your commentary and feedback.

If you’d like the opportunity to contribute to research like this, make sure you’re signed up to receive the BrightLocal newsletter.

About the Local Marketing Industry Survey: Agency Edition

The Local Marketing Industry Survey was conducted via across August and September 2024 using BrightLocal’s subscriber channels, social media, and peers within the community.

The survey population is made up of 385 respondents, of which 53% identify as male, 44% identify as female, 1% identify as non-binary, and 2% prefer not to disclose gender.

Publishers are welcome to use the charts and data outlined within this report, crediting BrightLocal and linking to this article’s URL. If you have any questions about the report, please contact sammy.paget@brightlocal.com or research@brightlocal.com.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter four of ‘Part Two: Processes and Workflows’.

Content marketing has come a long way from the days of simple blog posts and social media updates. Today, it’s about delivering a seamless, data-driven experience that resonates with an audience—and the right technology is what makes it all possible. Whether you’re scaling up your agency’s content strategy, aiming for more efficient processes, or just trying to keep up with the demands of the digital world, finding the right tools is crucial.

But let’s be real: managing large-scale content projects gets messy fast. Without the right technology and tools, you’re looking at bottlenecks, missed deadlines, and all the headaches of misaligned workflows. That’s where leveraging the right tools comes in. They’re here to handle repetitive tasks, reduce errors, and free your team to do what they do best: create meaningful content that connects with its target audience.

If you’re looking for an article on shoving a few prompts into an AI and generating some quick content, this isn’t the guide you’re looking for.

In this guide, we’re diving into how technology can help you tackle these challenges head-on. We’ll walk you through essential tools—from content management systems to collaboration platforms and analytics dashboards—that can take your content strategy to the next level. So, if you’re ready to build a more efficient, agile, and impactful content operation, let’s get started with the foundational tools every content team should have in their toolkit.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content management systems (CMS) are the backbone of any successful content strategy, providing the infrastructure to create, manage, and publish content efficiently. A CMS helps centralize your client’s content and streamlines your workflows, enabling your team to focus on creating impactful pieces that engage your audience. Whether managing a blog, website, or multi-channel campaign for a client, using the right CMS can make all the difference in your content’s reach and effectiveness.

When working with clients, it’s essential to consider how access to their CMS will impact your team’s ability to execute content strategies efficiently. In many cases, agencies may not have direct access to the client’s CMS, or access may be limited to a single point person on the client’s team. This can create bottlenecks if that individual is unavailable or if content needs to be updated urgently.

It’s also common for clients to prefer uploading content themselves, which means extra coordination is needed to ensure accuracy and timing. Establish clear communication with your clients from the start to navigate these situations. Discuss access levels early on and set up workflows that account for these limitations, such as providing detailed content briefs or setting up approval processes that help ensure a smooth handoff, even if you’re not managing the CMS directly.

Benefits of Using a CMS

A CMS brings a handful of benefits to content teams and clients alike, from enhanced organization to improved collaboration. With the right CMS, your team can produce high-quality content more efficiently for clients, making it easier to meet deadlines and stay aligned with content goals. Here’s how a CMS helps your team work smarter, not harder:

• Streamlined Content Management: A CMS centralizes content storage, making it easy to organize and retrieve articles, images, and other assets. This saves time, reduces clutter, and ensures that everything you need is just a few clicks away.
• Enhanced Collaboration: With a CMS, multiple users can work on content simultaneously, tracking changes in real-time. This not only enhances teamwork but also ensures content consistency across the board.
• Efficient Publishing Workflows: A CMS automates publishing schedules, allowing you to plan and post content on various channels with minimal manual intervention. This is essential for ensuring timely content delivery, especially when juggling multiple campaigns.
• Scalability for Growing Teams and Content Needs: As your content needs grow, so can your CMS. Many platforms are built to handle increased content volume and complexity, making it easier to scale up without losing efficiency.

Popular CMS Options

There are many CMS platforms available, each with its own strengths. With so many options out there, choosing one that aligns with your team’s technical abilities and the complexity of your content needs is essential. When working with clients, it’s essential to consider that you may be navigating their chosen CMS, which is not one your team is familiar with. However, recommending user-friendly platforms, known for their intuitive interfaces and flexible permissions, can make collaboration smoother and ensure that your team and the client can efficiently manage content updates without unnecessary delays.

Here’s a quick look at some of the most popular options and when to use them:

Consider whether open-source or proprietary CMS solutions best fit your team’s or your client’s needs when choosing between these options. Open-source options like WordPress and Drupal offer flexibility and community support, while proprietary CMS platforms like Wix often come with dedicated customer support and additional features.

Considerations for Selecting a CMS

Selecting the right CMS means understanding your team’s and your client’s needs and the platform’s capabilities. It’s not just about the features but also about how the CMS integrates into your team’s workflow and scales with your business or your client’s business as it grows. Here are some key factors to keep in mind:

• Ease of Use: A CMS should be intuitive enough for all team members and clients to use, regardless of technical skill level. Platforms with user-friendly interfaces can help speed up adoption and ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Scalability: Look for a CMS that can grow with your and your client’s business. Your platform should accommodate increasing content demands, allowing you to expand seamlessly without switching systems.
• Integration Capabilities: Ensure the CMS integrates well with your and your client’s existing tools, from analytics platforms to social media schedulers. This connectivity helps create a unified content ecosystem, minimizing manual work.
• Cost: Budget is always a consideration. Weigh the CMS’s features against its cost, factoring in potential expenses for plugins, upgrades, and technical support.
• User Support and Community Resources: If your team lacks in-house tech expertise, consider a CMS with robust support and active user communities. Having access to forums, tutorials, and customer support can make a big difference, especially for smaller teams.

Choosing the right CMS can empower your content team and your clients, simplifying day-to-day tasks and enhancing collaboration. With the right platform in place, everyone will be equipped to produce and manage content that meets an audience’s needs and supports growth goals.

Content Collaboration Tools

For content teams, especially those spread across multiple locations or managing various clients, seamless collaboration is essential. Without the right tools, it’s easy to lose track of updates, miss deadlines, or experience inconsistencies in content quality. Content collaboration tools bring your team together, fostering better communication, task management, and file sharing, all in one place. By utilizing these tools, your team can work more efficiently, ensuring that projects stay on track and content meets your quality standards.

Key Features to Look for in Collaboration Tools

The right collaboration tool will streamline your team’s workflow, reducing friction and keeping everyone aligned on goals. Here are some essential features to look for when selecting a tool to support your content team:

• Real-Time Communication: Effective collaboration depends on timely communication. Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams allow for instant messaging, video calls, and group chats, ensuring everyone can stay updated and connected, even across different time zones.
• Task Management: To keep projects organized and on schedule, choose tools that offer task assignment and progress tracking, such as Trello or Asana. These tools provide clear visibility into who’s working on what, helping prevent overlaps and missed deadlines.
• File Sharing and Document Collaboration: Seamless document sharing is critical for content teams. Platforms like Google Drive and Dropbox allow multiple users to edit and comment on documents simultaneously, facilitating real-time collaboration and reducing back-and-forth email chains.
• Project Management Integration: Look for tools that integrate with project management systems to create a unified workflow. For instance, Asana and Trello integrate well with platforms like Slack and Google Workspace, making it easier to manage projects, track updates, and store files all in one place.
• Security and Compliance: Content often involves sensitive information, so it’s essential to choose collaboration tools that prioritize security. Tools with robust encryption, access controls, and compliance with data protection standards ensure that your content and client information remain safe.

Using the right collaboration tools improves team efficiency and enhances content quality by promoting consistency and accountability. When your team has the resources to communicate effectively and manage tasks seamlessly, it allows them to focus more on creativity and less on logistical headaches.

Content Analytics and Reporting Tools

Data-driven decision-making is at the heart of effective content marketing. By analyzing key metrics, you gain insights into what resonates with your audience, allowing you to refine strategies and improve performance over time. Content analytics and reporting tools provide the data you need to make informed choices, helping you understand which pieces drive engagement, conversions, and overall business goals. With these tools, you can track content performance, identify trends, and ensure your content remains aligned with audience interests and company objectives.

GA4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) offers a comprehensive view of user behavior, allowing you to track website performance across multiple touchpoints. GA4’s capabilities include tracking page views, user engagement, and conversion events, providing a robust data set for understanding how visitors interact with your content. Key metrics to track include sessions, bounce rate, and conversion rate, which offer insight into how well your content engages visitors and drives desired actions.

SEO Tools

SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush are essential for tracking keyword performance, backlink profiles, and competitor strategies. For teams focused on local SEO, BrightLocal’s rank-tracking tool is perfect for monitoring the impact of location-specific content. While not a keyword research tool, it offers valuable insights into how your content performs in local search results, helping you track visibility and improve local rankings.

These tools allow you to monitor your site’s search engine rankings, optimize relevant keywords, and identify areas for improvement. Key metrics to focus on include organic traffic, keyword rankings, and backlink quality, which provide a clear picture of your content’s SEO health and visibility in search results.

Social Media Analytics

Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social are invaluable for tracking social media engagement. These platforms let you monitor likes, shares, comments, and overall reach across various social channels, helping you understand what content resonates with your social audience. Key metrics to track include engagement rate, follower growth, and social reach, which show how effectively your content engages and expands your audience on social media.

Content Optimization Tools

Content marketing tools like ContentHarmony and Clearscope provide insights into user interaction with your content, helping you optimize for relevance and user experience. These platforms analyze how well your content aligns with search intent, suggest improvements, and provide keyword recommendations. Key metrics to track include content score, readability, and topic relevance, which indicate how well your content is optimized for users and search engines.

Reporting Dashboards

Custom reporting dashboards consolidate data from multiple sources, offering a real-time overview of key performance indicators (KPIs). Platforms like Google Looker Studio allow you to create customized dashboards that visualize metrics relevant to your content strategy, from engagement to conversion. Key metrics to track can include traffic trends, goal completions, and ROI, giving stakeholders a clear view of how content contributes to broader business objectives.

Looker Studio Dashboards for Local SEO

Learn More

Integrating Content Analytics Tools into Your Workflow

To fully leverage analytics, making data review an integral part of your content planning and optimization processes is crucial to your workflow. Start by scheduling regular analytics check-ins to review key metrics, identify trends, and adjust your content strategy as needed. By aligning your content goals with the data, you ensure your team consistently moves toward desired outcomes.

Best Practices for Leveraging Technology in Content Marketing

Integrating technology into your content strategy can dramatically improve your team’s efficiency, creativity, and output. However, with the wide range of tools available, it’s essential to follow best practices to ensure you’re getting the most out of your technology investments.

By strategically selecting and using content tools, providing adequate training, and regularly assessing their impact, your team can streamline workflows and optimize content performance without sacrificing creativity. Below, we explore key best practices to help you effectively harness technology’s power in your content marketing efforts.

Integrating Content Technology and Tools

Selecting tools that integrate well with each other creates a seamless content management ecosystem. When your CMS, analytics, collaboration, and project management tools are connected, it reduces friction and improves workflow efficiency. For example, choosing tools that allow data to flow smoothly from your CMS to your analytics platform makes tracking performance and making quick adjustments easy.

An integrated system also makes it easier for your team to work within a unified framework, simplifying everything from content creation and publishing to tracking and optimizing. Aim to build a cohesive toolkit where data flows easily, enabling you to spend less time on administrative tasks and more time creating impactful content.

Training and Adoption

Even the most powerful tools are only as effective as those using them. Invest in thorough training and onboarding for your team to fully leverage new technology. This ensures that everyone is comfortable with the tools, understands their capabilities, and can use them to their full potential. Consider hosting hands-on training sessions, creating step-by-step guides, or offering ongoing support through internal workshops or documentation.

Encouraging tool adoption across your team is also crucial. Strategies like incentivizing early adopters, recognizing power users, and assigning “tool champions” who can provide guidance can help increase buy-in. When everyone is on the same page, it fosters a culture of efficiency, consistency, and confidence in using the technology available.

Regularly Reviewing Content Tools

As your content strategy evolves, so should your toolkit. Regularly reviewing the tools and platforms you use ensures they meet your team’s needs and remain aligned with your content goals. Set aside time every quarter or semi-annually to assess the ROI of each tool, considering aspects like cost, usability, and feature updates.

Keeping an eye on emerging technologies and trends in content marketing is also essential. Many tools regularly roll out new features that can enhance your workflow, so staying informed helps your team remain competitive. By conducting these periodic reviews, you can avoid tech bloat, reduce unnecessary expenses, and ensure your toolkit evolves with your content strategy.

Balancing Automation with Human Creativity

While automation can handle repetitive tasks and increase productivity, it’s vital to maintain a human touch in your content. Tools can help with scheduling, analytics, and optimization, but creativity should always be at the core of content creation. Avoid over-relying on automation to the point where it stifles originality or dilutes your brand voice.

Automation is most effective when it frees your team from mundane tasks, allowing them to focus on storytelling, crafting unique perspectives, and connecting with your audience in meaningful ways. Aim to strike a balance that maximizes efficiency while ensuring your content remains authentic, engaging, and reflective of your brand’s personality.

Cost-Benefit Analysis of Content Tools

Implementing new content tools often comes with both financial costs and time investments, so evaluating the return on investment (ROI) for each is necessary to get stakeholder buy-in. Consider factors like subscription fees, onboarding costs, and potential productivity gains. To assess a tool’s value, compare its benefits (such as improved workflow, time savings, or increased output quality) against its costs, both in terms of money and team resources.

Performing a cost-benefit analysis for your tools justifies the investment to stakeholders and helps you make informed decisions about which tools provide the most value. This analysis can guide you in determining whether a tool is indispensable, nice to have, or an unnecessary expense. The goal is to build a toolkit that maximizes productivity and delivers tangible benefits to your content strategy without overextending your budget.

Streamline, Optimize, and Thrive with Content Technology

If you’ve made it this far, you’re ready to elevate your content game. By leveraging the right technology, you’re setting up your content team for smoother processes, better collaboration, and results you can measure. Think of these tools as more than just features on a dashboard—they’re the fuel that keeps your content engine running efficiently so you can focus on what truly matters: creating engaging, authentic content that resonates with your audience.

Now’s the time to look at your current content workflow. Where are the bottlenecks? What could be more streamlined? The tools we’ve covered are designed to help you tackle these challenges head-on, making sure your team spends less time on repetitive tasks and more time on the creative work that drives results. Start by picking one or two tools that make the most sense for your team and roll them out on a trial basis. This lets you test the waters and get real feedback without overwhelming your team with new processes right off the bat.

Integrating new technology doesn’t have to mean overhauling everything overnight. A pilot program allows you to experiment, adapt, and find out what works best before committing to a larger rollout. It’s all about finding a rhythm that suits your team and fits your strategy. The goal here isn’t to become a tech powerhouse overnight but to build a sustainable, efficient content strategy that grows with you.

So go ahead and embrace the tools that will make your life easier and your content better. With the right approach, you’ll be well on your way to turning insights into action and action into results that make a real impact.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter five of ‘Part Two: Processes and Workflows’.

A busy agency can thrive or merely survive on its choice of project management tools. Old-fashioned spreadsheets and clunky time-tracking apps can seriously hinder your team’s creativity. Too many tools can lead to duplication of effort, cause confusion, and potentially lead to completely inaccurate billing.

Keeping your projects organized and accurately tracking your billable hours is key to working effectively and efficiently. Having the right tools in place also means you can confidently manage your resources and consistently deliver client work on time.

There are two distinct categories of tools you want to look out for: project management tools (to help you keep track of your overall project and enable effective communications) and time-tracking software. Many project management tools include time-tracking, but for many, you’ll need something extra.

So which marketing project management software tools will make your life easier and help you scale your agency business? With so many tools on the market, identifying the best fit is easier said than done.

Why do you need marketing project management tools?

Juggling multiple client projects, incoming briefs, various deadlines, and a team can be a recipe for disaster. Unless that is, you have logical processes for everything from content creation to client reports and actually useful tools in place to do some of the heavy lifting for you.

Project management and time-tracking tools aren’t just nice to have. They can make a noticeable difference to how seamlessly your agency operates:

Organize client briefs

Different clients have different priorities, service agreements, and briefs. A dedicated project management tool makes it easy to keep track of each specific client and their associated briefs, no matter how many projects you currently have on the go. This is especially useful if you often receive ad-hoc or last-minute requests and need a better way to stay on top of them.

Streamline resource planning

A good tool will give you a clear view of each project and its upcoming deadlines so you can allocate resources accordingly. This isn’t just a way to make managing your team easier. It can also go a long way toward controlling costs and optimizing how your agency business operates.

Efficient task management

Assigning specific tasks to individual team members is another way to manage your team’s productivity. It also encourages accountability by making it easier for each person to manage their workload and maintain a clear view of what they need to deliver.

If your chosen tool has status tracking, you can quickly see who’s on track and who’s in the weeds. From there you can intervene, if needed, or assign additional resources to keep client deliverables flowing.

Enhanced communication

The right project management software will enhance collaboration and communication. This isn’t restricted to internal comms, either. Many tools will allow you to control permissions at an individual user level, so you can also grant limited access to your clients. That access could speed up project approval or open up productive new lines of communication between your agency and your clients.

Features to Look Out For in a Project Management Tool

The specific features your agency business needs will depend on the size of your team, the nature of your client projects, and your style of working. That said, some features are pretty much essential:

• Automations: Automations make it easier to scale workflows and quickly complete recurring tasks by pre-populating certain fields.
• Calendar: An essential for managing upcoming to-dos, a built-in calendar can help you stay on top of annual leave and client meetings for easier diary management.
• Task management: The ability to set up a task, schedule a start and end date, and assign someone from your team to complete that task is non-negotiable.
• Document management: You should also be able to upload documents like keyword research reports and client briefs to support your team.
• Status tracking: Is a task in progress? Ready for review? Or, with the client for approval? Status tracking allows you to answer those questions and keep your project momentum moving in the right direction at a glance.
• Messaging: Whether internally or with your client, messaging improves collaboration and speeds up the delivery and approval process.
• Client view: Having a dedicated client view means you can grant controlled access to your clients. This view provides them with direct access to their account team while ensuring internal communications remain private.
• Time tracking: Accurate time tracking is essential for client billing. It can also be helpful if you routinely work with subcontractors and need to keep track of their working hours for payment purposes.
• Integrations: Plugging in other apps can be a serious time saver and add additional functionality that makes it easier to get the most out of your team.
• Customizable dashboard: A customizable dashboard gives you complete control over what you see, so you can create an optimal view based on how you (and your team) work.

Top Project Management Tools

Time Tracking Software for Marketing Teams

Time tracking is one of those agency staples that’s easy to take for granted. But it’s also easy to get wrong. Real-time tracking and reporting can seriously bolster your transparency credentials with clients. If you’re managing a team, intuitive tracking also helps you to stay on budget and easily handle contractor payments.

So, what should you look for when shortlisting time-tracking tools for your agency?

• Real-time tracking: Tracking billable hours in real-time can nurture client confidence in your agency and help with retention. It’s also invaluable when it comes to getting the most out of your team and pinpointing productivity drains.
• Reporting: Any decent time-tracking tool will have extensive reporting capability. You need this feature to manage client invoices and see how your team is spending its time.
• Integrations: Integrations just make life easier. Look for tools that can connect with other platforms you use daily to manage your agency workflows. 

Top Time Tracking Tools

Choose Wisely and Choose Early

Embedding this sort of tool into a growing business can be easier said than done, especially if you’re trying to do it retrospectively. Adding a project management tool and defining clear processes early can be really beneficial and save a lot of time down the road.

As with any tool, whether that’s a local SEO tool or a project management tool, the key is to find the one that works best for your agency’s needs. Make sure it benefits your work rather than adding more steps for the sake of it.

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter three of ‘Part Two: Processes and Workflows’.

Building a successful SEO agency requires a laundry list of moving parts to come together. You need a skilled, knowledgeable, and engaged team with a variety of skillsets. For starters, you need negotiation and networking skills to bring on new clients and then ensure they stick around. Then you need teams who are capable of actually doing the work, whether that’s local SEO, digital PR, paid media, or whatever other service you’re offering. A clear USP is non-negotiable to stand out from the crowd.

Before any of that, you need to choose the right structure to knit it all together.

How you organize and run your agency is fundamental. This alone determines how efficiently and effectively you execute client projects. It directly impacts your ability to scale your business, how your team members operate, and how they collaborate. It goes without saying that it will also have a huge impact on your SEO agency’s profitability.

The challenge is that there are multiple potential agency structures you could choose. Deciding which is right for you will be influenced by factors such as your own experiences as an employee, the clients you have, the existing skillset at your agency, your company culture, and your longer-term business goals.

Do you want your agency to have multiple offices in other states, for example? If so, you need a structure that can easily replicate in secondary locations. Or do you want to become the go-to choice for local businesses in your city? Do you have a strong content offering but only one person doing PR? How does each of these affect your setup?

If you’ve previously worked at agencies with little accountability or felt stressed and burnt out by competing responsibilities, you might crave a more traditional structure. On the flip side, a pod setup could give you what you need if you thrive in highly collaborative, client-focused environments.

There’s a lot to think about, so let’s dive in.

4 Marketing Agency Structures

Before we go much further, it’s worth defining the structures we’ll refer to throughout this article. For the sake of this article, we are referring to four different structures: traditional/hierarchical, pods/squads, matrix, and freelance.

Getting your marketing agency structure right sets the best possible foundation for your future growth. Deciding precisely how your teams will be organized and how your chain of command will operate can be daunting because so much rides on getting it right.

Other structures are available, but they often overlap with the ones mentioned above or at least heavily rely on them.

Why it’s Important to Structure Your Agency the Right Way

There are tens of thousands of SEO agencies across the United States specializing in traditional SEO, local SEO, or a blend of the two. No matter where you’re based, you’re unlikely to be the only option in town. That means you’ll be competing to secure a limited pool of clients. Whether you’ve developed a super-efficient content process or have identified an untapped niche, every edge you can get over others matters.

Your SEO team structure allows you to leverage those opportunities for maximum impact. It determines how optimized your organization is and influences every action that takes place within your agency every day. Get it right, and you’re set up for success. If you get it wrong, you will likely find scaling your agency an uphill battle.

Team Morale

Because your agency structure defines how your teams work, its impact on morale can’t be overstated. An optimal team structure gives everyone a clear idea of their responsibilities and who they report to. The right organizational structure will nurture individual creativity, encourage accountability, and enhance collaboration. Each of these factors helps to keep employees engaged, motivated, and committed to delivering successful client projects.

Employee Retention

Team morale is a critical factor in employee retention—a vital consideration for any local SEO agency. Maintaining the same team ensures consistency within your client relationships. Perhaps most importantly, it also keeps the knowledge you’ve developed through training and mentorship within your business rather than walking out the door to benefit a rival agency.

Current estimates place the cost of recruiting a new staff member at $4,000 – $20,000 (excluding salary and benefits). So, keeping your existing team happy is much easier on your bottom line than trying to find new people to fit into a structure that simply isn’t working.

Optimal Resource Management

The right team structure enables you to optimize how your resources are managed and deployed. Regardless of headcount, the correct structure will empower you to easily assign tasks and organize workflows in a way that makes the best use of each person and their unique skill sets.

Collaboration and Communication

When hierarchies and relationships between individual roles are well established, collaboration and communication can thrive. Establishing those channels benefits every aspect of agency operations, from creativity and productivity to efficiency and effectiveness.

Faster Decision-making

Things happen quickly in the local SEO space, so you can’t afford for your agency’s decision-making process to be slow and cumbersome. A clear, well-defined SEO team structure allows the right people to make fast decisions when called for. This can positively impact how your agency responds to client needs or changing market conditions.

The Ability to Scale

Think about some of the tasks you routinely conduct during a typical local SEO project. Perhaps that’s performing keyword research or sending out ranking reports to clients. You can complete those tasks quickly and for any number of clients because you have a workflow that you can scale.

Having the right marketing agency structure follows the same principle. If it’s designed and implemented correctly, you can duplicate that structure to bolt on additional teams or offices as your business grows.

Is there such a thing as a perfect agency structure?

Working in SEO, you know the answer to this already… “it depends.”

As an SEO professional, you’re programmed to sniff out the best and most efficient way to do something. That’s what drives improved search visibility for your clients. So, when thinking about how to structure a digital marketing agency, you’re most likely looking for the optimal way to position and connect departments, teams, and roles.

If this puzzle is already giving you sleepless nights, you can rest easy. While some setups will be more suited to how you prefer to work than others, there’s no one perfect answer.

The optimal pathway for you depends on your company culture, the work you do, your clients, the size of your business, its specialisms, and your growth ambitions. Every organizational model will come with pros and cons.

If you’re a larger, multi-disciplinary agency, you may naturally have defined teams like SEO, content, and paid search already in place and grouped according to area of expertise. In this scenario, a traditional or functional set-up may suit you best, with teams defined by their function and more experienced or senior people taking on additional responsibility by assuming management roles.

On the other end of the spectrum, if you’re building a remote agency that operates as leanly as possible and doesn’t have full-time direct hires, a freelance model could give you the cost savings and agility your business model needs.

It may seem inconsequential, but even your client reporting and communication style can influence which agency structure is better suited to your business. Are your clients handled by a dedicated client services team, or is it the case that each person deals with specific clients? Do team members provide reports and progress updates as they perform keyword research, optimize Google Business profiles, or build citations?

There’s no universally correct answer. You’ll undoubtedly have to compromise in some areas to benefit in others. The secret to success lies in choosing the structure that gives you, specifically, more pluses in the ‘pro’ column than negatives in the ‘con’ list.

Where does local SEO sit?

For the last 10 years, Google data has suggested that four in five searches have a local intent. Ask any marketing professional, and that translates to one thing—an enormous opportunity to tap into a growing and lucrative market: local search optimization.

Where local SEO sits within your wider agency business is a crucial consideration when deciding how best to structure for scalability and growth.

Some agencies may have a dedicated local SEO team, but others may divide the tasks into different roles. Perhaps a social media executive picks up GBP management, a PR reaches out to local publications or businesses about collaborations and links, and an SEO manager oversees the project, and so on.

Questions to ask yourself include: 

Is local SEO your core focus, or is it one service offering within a larger agency?

If you only offer a few local SEO services, a pod set-up is ideal for running results-focused campaigns, while a freelance structure provides agility. If you have other divisions for services, such as paid search and content marketing, there are more people and more moving parts to consider. In that scenario, the traditional hierarchical structure is a popular choice.

Do you have groups of experts (copywriting, social media, technical SEO) who work across all client projects?

A flat or matrix structure allows for a higher degree of collaboration, which could bring enhanced creativity and innovation to your client projects.

Do you have smaller multi-disciplinary groups who tend to handle specific client accounts autonomously?   

Organizing teams into pods means your crew can develop a deep understanding of their specific client accounts. This tends to lead to strong client relationships, high retention rates, and excellent case studies.

Would the account management process need to change if you were to take on new clients?

If your local agency suddenly receives an influx of new clients, it’s vital that your existing clients don’t notice an abrupt decline in service levels. You’ll need to be able to replicate the same processes at scale. That’s achievable if you can create new pods or hire new SEO experts to join an existing team.

How to Fit Local SEO into Your SEO Offering

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How Each Structure Works in Practice

Traditional or Hierarchical

It’s common to see the traditional or hierarchical agency structure in place in large businesses with multiple departments.  

How the Traditional Model Works

Your agency is organized into individual divisions or departments, typically by function. Everyone reports to a higher-up, with team leaders, department heads, vice presidents, the CEO, and the board of directors filling out the chain of command.

This type of structure is found in pretty much every industry. Some of your clients may operate in this way, especially the larger multi-location businesses that retain your local SEO services.

Pros

You will likely feel very familiar with this traditional marketing agency structure. Given its continued popularity across every sector of the economy, this organizational model has well-established advantages.

• Easy to scale: Scalability is the number one reason that you might be tempted to go with this traditional marketing agency structure. Because there’s a clear chain of command and clearly defined divisions, it’s easy to scale up as your business grows. If your sales team reaches its target and brings in a large volume of new business, you can easily hire more people into your existing departments. If you want to expand your service offering, you can slot in a new division.
• Accountability: Another significant advantage, especially if you expect to have a large headcount, is that everyone knows exactly what their role is, what their responsibilities are, and who they report to. There’s no ambiguity about who does what, so everyone can be held accountable.
• Scope for career progression: The traditional model usually provides a defined pathway for anyone wishing to work their way up the career ladder. For example, someone joining your team as a junior local SEO exec could progress to a senior specialist, team leader, department head, or VP as they grow their skills and experience.  
• Development of expertise: As your team members will sit within a specific division, there’s plenty of potential to develop expertise in that niche. This depth of knowledge could elevate your client results, giving you an edge in your local area.
• Efficient resource management: The structure and definition of this agency model removes any ambiguity and uncertainty. There’s no question as to who does what. This means you can plan projects efficiently and effectively and optimize resource management.

Cons

There are a few potential downsides with this model, too:

• Bureaucracy: Because of the layers of management, there’s a danger of bureaucracy setting in. This slows down the decision-making process. Having to push change through the chain of command hampers your ability to respond quickly to changing client needs and industry developments.
• A danger of silos: Having distinct divisions can encourage a siloed mentality to creep in, with each division then focusing inwards rather than taking a big-picture approach to agency success. It also means there’s less impetus to collaborate cross-team to get the best solution.
• Conflicting priorities: Leaving each team to manage its resources could affect how well certain projects or clients are prioritized. Rather than client-focused, in some situations your teams may end up focusing on their own budgets and KPIs.
• Communication and ownership confusion: A traditional structure often makes it unclear who works on what accounts or who owns what, especially as there is often not a set group for specific clients. 

Pods or Squads

Dividing your agency into pods or squads is another organizational structure to consider as you prime your local SEO agency for growth.

How the Pod Model Works

This organizational chart may look like the traditional structure, but it works differently. You’ll still have a clear chain of command, with a CEO and director at the most senior two levels. Instead of VPs, you’ll have pod leads, and instead of divisions, you’ll have pods.

Each pod is a small, multidisciplinary team comprising a handful of specialists—for example, a Google Business Profile expert, a copywriter, and a PR specialist. Each pod is assigned to a specific client or project, so the makeup of the talent within the pod may differ from one project to another, depending on the project’s requirements. 

Pros

• Development of expertise: This type of organizational structure takes a client-first approach. It’s helpful for building sector and client-specific expertise, as each pod will focus on a minimal number of projects. That knowledge can translate into better results for the client.
• Greater client satisfaction: Having a dedicated team focused on their success leads to greater client satisfaction and lower client churn.
• Collaborative and creative: A small group of people dedicated to a project should ensure high levels of collaboration, as everyone is working towards the same objectives. Bringing different skills together also introduces a range of perspectives, which can lead to innovative and creative strategies and problem-solving.
• Greater efficiency: Each pod is a self-contained unit, so it operates more efficiently with fewer roadblocks. This can make your agency more productive, giving you a competitive edge.
• Clear ownership: With each pod having a defined set of clients, it’s very easy to know who to talk to about what for each one.

Cons

• It’s not as easy to scale: Scaling with squads is more challenging than you might think. New hires will need to be onboarded into what could be a close-knit team, which can be a difficult balancing act to juggle. If your client numbers spike, it can be hard to create new pods from existing resources without diluting their focus. 
• Lack of agency-wide cohesion: Having independent teams is great for productivity, but it might not be such good news for your overall agency cohesion. With team members working in tight-knit groups on their own projects, it’s easy for siloes to develop, with little unity outside of pods.
• Lack of oversight: Management and decision-making take place within the pod, which makes traditional oversight more challenging. It may be harder to keep abreast of progress and you might be slower to learn of any problems within the squad or emerging trends.  

Matrix 

Still not sure how to structure your teams? The Matrix model could work if you often have multiple projects requiring input from different departments within the business.

How the Matrix Model Works

The matrix model incorporates aspects of traditional and agency pod structures. Your agency has distinct divisions and a clear management hierarchy, with pods to execute client projects. Each pod is made up of specialists cherry-picked from different divisions in accordance with project requirements.

Pros

• Increased agility: The matrix model gives you the best of both worlds in theory. While there’s the command structure typical of the traditional model, there’s also the flexibility of a squad setup. You can quickly create bespoke multi-disciplinary teams to fit exact project briefs as they come in. The pod can be adjusted by swapping out division specialists as needs change.
• Greater collaboration: There’s a high degree of collaboration between the different divisions involved in each pod. Diverse voices and perspectives can also boost creativity.
• Suited to complex projects: If your client projects are large or complex, the ability to design a custom team of experts to fit the brief is highly beneficial. This also leads to optimal resource use.
• Clear ownership: As with the pod system, you have clear overviews of who to talk to about a specific client and their specialism.

Cons

The matrix model isn’t without its challenges.

• It can introduce complexity: Managing a matrix business can be challenging. That’s because it’s inherently complex, with divisions and pods to oversee. With team members working across both layers—and sometimes reporting to multiple people—measuring productivity and maintaining efficiency becomes more difficult.
• A lack of clarity: One of the main issues with a matrix system is a lack of clarity around who’s responsible for what. There’s a real danger of division heads and pod leaders stepping on each other’s toes, as it won’t always be clear where decision-making responsibility lies.
• Team morale: With team members reporting to more than one boss, they may feel like they’re constantly being pulled in two different directions, especially if you offer more than local SEO services. This can lead to paralysis as they struggle to understand what takes priority and impact morale. 

Freelance

Using freelancers and sub-contractors is another way to create a local SEO agency primed for growth.

How the Freelance Model Works

While traditional, squad, and matrix structures are popular, they’re often not practical for smaller agencies. Freelance agency models are increasingly popular because they release you from the financial obligations associated with an in-house team but still allow you to complete client projects.

If you win a new local SEO client, you can tap into the freelancer marketplace or sub-contract to independent specialists and then move on when the project ends.

Pros

• Lower overheads: The biggest lure of the freelancer model is lower overheads. You won’t have the financial burden of a full-time team and will only pay for extra pairs of hands when you need them.
• Agility: Provided you already have a vetted pool of talent, the ability to bring on specialists as needed means your business can be very agile. You won’t have to deal with lengthy and expensive recruitment campaigns, nor will you face financial penalties if you no longer need a particular employee.
• A greater pool of talent: A very positive mark in favor of the freelance model is you can access a much wider pool of talent. You aren’t limited to hiring people within traveling distance of your office. Because you aren’t paying a full-time salary, this model may also mean that you can afford to hire more experienced specialists for a shorter period for enhanced client outcomes.

Cons

• A lack of continuity: It’s not a given that you’ll be able to hire the same freelancer or contractor every time, especially if they’re already working with other clients. Continuity could be a problem. It can be time-consuming to have to brief new freelancers on your clients and processes, and the quality of work will vary. This lack of continuity means that your clients might not have the same experience or receive the same level of service each month.
• Varying levels of accountability: Because your freelancer knows they’re only a short-term hire, you might find they aren’t as committed to your project as you may like. Missed deadlines or a sub-standard quality of work aren’t just frustrating; they could also place your client contracts in jeopardy and impact your reputation. 

How can tools and services help?

Dedicated services or local SEO tools for agencies can be leveraged to help fill any gaps, regardless of your structure.

Many of the tasks associated with local SEO are time-consuming and repetitive. You can free up your human assets to focus on other client needs by giving them a helping hand with the right tool. Or, potentially, use them to deliver services that you currently don’t have in-house without using freelancers.

BrightLocal’s Citation Builder automates the process of building and managing local citations, for instance, saving hours of time that would otherwise be wasted on tedious tasks such as manually submitting listings or checking for duplication.

Similarly, tools like Google Business Profile Audit save time on tasks such as competitor research and quickly arm your local SEO team with the insights they need to build a winning local search strategy.

Having tools to assist with recurring tasks such as keyword research, rank tracking, and client reporting is a smart way to optimize your workflows and make smarter use of your in-house experts. These beneficial resources contribute to the smooth operation of your business, making it much easier to scale. 

This article is from our Agency Growth Handbook—a collection of guides created to help local SEO agencies grow and succeed. It is chapter two of ‘Part Two: Processes and Workflows’.

Whether brand new to digital marketing or have been working in the industry for years, we can all agree that SEO is essential for online visibility, helping businesses improve search rankings and attract more traffic. 

As the SEO and digital performance marketing space is becoming increasingly competitive, it feels like an ideal time to discuss the place of local SEO within the world of SEO agencies. I’m keen to bring local SEO out of its somewhat ‘underdog specialism’ shadow and out into the limelight where it often belongs by exploring exactly why integrating local SEO into a broader SEO strategy is important and how agencies of different sizes and set-ups could approach this integration.

So, firstly, do agencies really need to care about local SEO?

The simple answer: YES!

Before I delve into the reasons why, it’s perhaps first important to acknowledge the competition that often exists between e-commerce and local SEO, as this can often be the main blocker to agencies giving dedicated place and support for the local side of SEO endeavors.

It’s perhaps more obvious that local SEO is crucial for driving footfall (foot traffic) and local engagement rather than for contributing to overall e-commerce success, despite the fact that it can do both. Within SEO agencies and even at an in-house level with brands themselves, e-commerce favors more traditional organic SEO strategies and approaches. Here, it is easier to demonstrate ROI through metrics such as online traffic and sales, while footfall and in-store sales metrics can feel like an afterthought or simply another department’s responsibility.

This has certainly been the case with some of the clients I have worked with (or not, as the case may be!); where it can initially be more difficult to get a foot in the door for local SEO when the main objective of the client stakeholders is driving online traffic. Even during the pitching process for SEO clients, I’ve seen brands that are well known for their physical presence on the high street simply not mention local SEO whatsoever in the brief when they so obviously should be. 

So, back to that, YES! Agencies really should care about local SEO.

Agencies must move beyond just on-page SEO recommendations and optimizations, given the changing search landscape, if they want to deliver truly performance-driven results for their clients. While local SEO often takes a back seat to more general SEO strategies, it plays a vital role that should not be overlooked. Unfortunately, it tends to be underestimated or overshadowed in many brands’ organic search prioritization.

While on-page SEO is vital for improving content relevance and keyword targeting, it’s only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Many agencies now offer specialized SEO services – from technical SEO and UX optimization to digital PR and multilingual SEO – yet local SEO is still often deprioritized. Operating local SEO in complete isolation or ignoring it as part of a wider organic service offering can severely limit the effectiveness of any strategy, leading to missed opportunities, poor search performance, and, ultimately client dissatisfaction.

Brands that recognize the importance of taking a more holistic approach to SEO are more likely to benefit from the ROI that a combined strategy brings. Yet, they won’t necessarily be in a position to tackle this on their own. 

Clients may have some level of local SEO knowledge within their own teams, but this is often limited either in experience or capacity to execute. That’s why they turn to agencies for heavier SEO lifting and a fresh perspective, right? Agencies that are well set up and positioned to support and drive local SEO within a wider and more holistic SEO strategy will give themselves a distinct competitive advantage over those that neglect it.

The Role of Local SEO for Businesses

What is local SEO?

In simple terms, local SEO refers to the process of optimizing a business’s online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches, which are search queries with either implied or specific geographical intent. “Best pizza near me” or “plumber in london” are great examples of search queries to find local services or businesses in a specific area.

What is Local SEO and How Does It Work?

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Why is local SEO so crucial?

Local SEO is crucial for businesses with physical locations or service areas. It not only helps businesses appear in local search results, like Google’s Local Pack and Maps when potential customers are searching for nearby products or services but also helps those businesses to stand out from their competitors so conversion is more likely. Think of it as employing local search tactics and strategies to first be found, and then be chosen.

What Are the Benefits of Local SEO?

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With the rise of mobile search, frequent “near me” queries, and Google growing more intuitive in determining local intent, local SEO enables businesses to benefit from a locally competitive edge, build trust through reviews, and capture high-intent, targeted traffic. By optimizing for local searches, businesses can boost foot traffic, phone inquiries, and website visits, ultimately converting ready-to-purchase customers. 

Any business that ignores or drastically deprioritizes local SEO is putting itself at a dangerous competitive disadvantage.

Summarizing the Key Elements of Local SEO

Google Business Profile (GBP): A critical piece of local SEO, GBP is a free tool that allows businesses to manage their online presence across Google Search and Maps. Concentrating optimization efforts here helps ensure that important business details (such as location, hours, and services) are accurate and displayed in local search results. Leveraging GBP features, such as adding posts and photos and responding to customer questions and reviews, are additional engagement practices that can help drive conversion.

Local citations: These are mentions of a business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) across key websites, directories, and social platforms, such as Apple Maps, Bing, and Facebook. Maintaining consistency here can help boost your business’s legitimacy, credibility, and search rankings for local queries.

Local keywords: Keyword research for local SEO goes a step further than general KWR, by more specifically identifying location-based search terms that potential customers are using. This could include adding your city, neighborhood, or region to targeted keywords (e.g., “electrician in new york” or “best italian restaurant in nyc”).

Reviews: Customer reviews play a vital role in local search rankings. Google rewards businesses with high-quality, consistent reviews by elevating them in local search results. Business owners responding to reviews (both positive and negative) also improves a business’s online reputation by demonstrating a sense of accountability and trustworthiness.

Where does local fit at SEO Agencies?

How an agency is set up to deliver local SEO as part of a wider SEO strategy usually depends on two things; how well the agency is set up to support and deliver local SEO, plus the type and size of client they generally work with.

Choosing the Right Agency Structure for Local SEO Success

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It can help to consider different service tiers for local SEO within an agency. The most advanced tier involves a dedicated local SEO channel, the middle tier involves access to local SEO specialists within the wider SEO team, and the most foundational tier could be focused on more general SEO support with some assistance for basic local SEO needs.

For example:

• Base tier: “Foundational support for local SEO”
  General SEO team with helpful but basic local SEO skills based on foundational knowledge. 

• Middle tier: “Integrated SEO team with access to local SEO specialist”
  Wider SEO team with access to local SEO specialists for targeted local strategies and support.

• Higher tier: “local SEO as a full dedicated channel”
  Local SEO is treated as a separate, full-scale channel with a dedicated team and comprehensive local SEO strategy proposition.

This structure allows for a scalable approach to local SEO, from minimal involvement to fully integrated, specialized support, aligning with the needs and budgets of different types of clients. 

At Croud, for example, the middle-tier approach is generally the most applicable, as all our SEO account teams have access to and are supported by local SEO specialists (like me!). Some smaller account teams take the lower-tier approach, as they’re supporting clients with few locations who are perhaps just starting out on their local SEO journeys, and only foundational support is currently needed. 

What works great for us, is that we can more easily scale up the support as and when needed, as the specialists are always on hand to join the conversation when local SEO strategy starts to pick up in terms of prioritization.

Looking ahead, our ambition at Croud is to continue educating our clients and brands on the true incrementality of an integrated local SEO program through better visibility, tracking, and measurement of the online-to-offline purchase journey.

I invite you to consider your agency’s current approach and where you may have the opportunity or ambition to evolve the local SEO offering in the future. I’ve broken down the three tiers in more detail below to help.

Foundational Support For Local SEO

In this base tier, the general SEO team may offer clients more basic, foundational support for local SEO as part of broader SEO efforts.

Services are likely to include:

• Basic on-page optimization for local keywords (if provided by the client or gathered from a simple keyword tool).
• Assisting with basic Google Business Profile setup or updates (though not full optimization).
• Helping maintain NAP (Name, Address, Phone) consistency where possible; this could well be manual rather than via specialized tools or resources.
• Limited local citation work, carried out in conjunction with general link-building.
• Providing guidance based on general knowledge of SEO best practices, with light-touch local SEO recommendations.

Integrated SEO Team With Local SEO Specialist Access

In this middle tier, the general SEO team would work in close collaboration with local SEO specialists, and/or have access to a local SEO expert who can help sell the benefits of conducting local SEO efforts and provide strategic advice and implementation support when needed. This helps strike a balance between the generalist and specialist approach, offering deeper insights and more focused local SEO activity while still integrating with broader SEO efforts.

Services are likely to include:

• Collaborative strategy, where the general SEO team drives the overall SEO strategy but consults local SEO specialists when specific regional or local opportunities are identified.
• Enhanced local keyword research involving both general and location-specific terms, conducted by the general team with input, validation, and refinement by local SEO experts.
• GBP (Google Business Profile) optimization and maintenance where the local SEO specialist supports the optimization of Google Business Profiles, helping with regular updates and ensuring they’re well-maintained.
• Local link building and citation management are handled with greater attention to detail by the specialist, ensuring accuracy and leveraging opportunities to earn local backlinks.
• Advanced local SEO audits potentially requested by the general SEO team can examine specific areas, including location-based performance tracking and insights into local competitors.
• Ongoing local SEO monitoring with access to more advanced local SEO tools, such as BrightLocal, Whitespark, Moz Local, or Uberall for monitoring performance – local SEO experts regularly review analytics for local search results and suggest optimizations to test or implement.

Local SEO As a Full Dedicated Channel

In this top-tier service, local SEO is treated as a separate, fully dedicated channel, working collaboratively alongside other channels and teams across key digital marketing efforts. This offers a far more comprehensive and specialized local SEO approach, with a team fully focused on local search optimization across all areas, driven by a specialized or bespoke local search proposition and delivering a complete service.

Services are likely to include:

• Local SEO strategy as a standalone channel – A full, tailored local SEO strategy that is independent from the general SEO strategy but integrated where necessary. Each location or service area may receive its own bespoke plan.
• Comprehensive local keyword research and content strategy – Extensive keyword research, location-specific content creation, and ongoing optimization to drive hyper-localized traffic.
• Advanced Google Business Profile management – With continuous accuracy and consistency monitoring, optimized posts, photo and video uploads, and structured reviews, products, services, and Q&A management.
• In-depth citation building and local link strategy – Comprehensive local citation management, ensuring listings are live across all relevant and necessary directories, plus outreach for local link-building campaigns to improve domain authority in specific regions.
• Reputation and review management – Dedicated reputation management set up to monitor, respond, and solicit customer reviews, plus supporting and implementing strategies to improve overall ratings and customer engagement.
• Hyper-local technical SEO optimization – Full-scale technical SEO audits focused on optimizing for local search, including schema markup for local businesses, mobile optimization, and local URL structure refinement.
• Local search performance analytics and reporting – Detailed reporting with geo-specific insights, tracking performance across regions, cities, or even neighborhoods. This may include advanced tracking of localized rankings, conversions, and footfall.

Tools and Resources Available to Help Integrate Local SEO into Your Agency

Delivering exceptional local SEO services often requires more than just manual effort. Sometimes, a helping hand is needed to find efficiencies and take the heavy lifting on some of the more manual tasks to free up capacity for strategizing! 

Agencies managing multiple clients or locations will generally have access to a range of tools in order to optimize local search visibility, monitor performance, and manage ongoing tasks efficiently. Here are the key categories of tools and resources that agencies should incorporate into their local SEO strategy.

GBP, Local listings, and Citation Management Tools

As the cornerstone of local SEO, any tools that help simplify GBP management can prove invaluable for agencies handling multiple clients or locations. They can assist with optimizing profiles, updating information, managing photos and posts, and responding to reviews, all while tracking specific GBP performance metrics.

The native Google Business Profile Manager tool allows businesses to manage profiles directly, but larger agencies often need more powerful features for scaling. 

This is where dedicated GBP and listing management tools can offer a more robust suite for managing listings at scale and tracking performance across multiple clients and locations. Additionally, many offer inclusive or add-on services or packages that support review management, social post-scheduling, rank-tracking and analytics, and more.

Each will need to be weighed up according to need and cost, but some popular examples include Moz Local, Yext, Whitespark, Uberall, and of course, BrightLocal’s listing management services.

The Best Listings Management Solutions Compared

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These tools can help agencies ensure that their clients’ key location details are uniform and up to date across various directories and platforms. This ensures that their client’s business information is accurate everywhere it appears online, which boosts local rankings and prevents conflicting or outdated information from hurting SEO performance.

Local Rank Tracking and Competitor Analysis Tools

Understanding where a client’s business ranks for local keywords and how its competitors are performing is vital for crafting and refining local SEO strategies. Tools that track keyword rankings at a local level provide data on search visibility within specific regions or cities, and offer insights on how competitors are performing in the same areas can be a godsend for highlighting opportunities, threats, trends and insights.

Some tools provide local rank tracking and competitor analysis with geo-specific keyword insights, whereas tools like GeoRanker or BrightLocal’s Local Rank Tracking Tool specialize in more granular local rank tracking, allowing agencies to monitor performance down to the neighborhood or post-code level.

Many trackers let you literally put your rankings on a map too, with tools like Local Search Grid (see below).

Review and Reputation Management Tools

Online reputation is an increasingly critical component of local SEO as positive reviews signal trustworthiness to both search engines and potential customers, while responding to customer feedback fosters engagement and can support conversion. Review and reputation management tools help agencies monitor, respond to, and even solicit new reviews across multiple platforms.

ReviewTrackers, Reputation, Reviews.ai, and SOCi are just some of the tools available for monitoring and responding to reviews across Google and other platforms. BrightLocal can also monitor and respond to over 80 general and niche review sites within a user-friendly interface.

Local Keyword Research and Content Optimization Tools

As local SEO relies on optimizing content for location-specific queries, keyword research tools can help agencies more easily discover the local search terms driving high-intent traffic. These tools can also assist in content optimization by identifying the right keywords to target for specific cities, neighborhoods, or regions and helping to build and deliver content strategies that resonate with local audiences.

Google Keyword Planner allows agencies to discover location-specific search terms relevant to a business’s services or products, while Semrush and Ahrefs both offer powerful keyword research tools that can be tailored to local markets.

Helpful Resources

Local SEO can be difficult to keep up with, as so much in the local landscape is ever-evolving, and even more so lately! Staying on top of trends, local industry insights, and especially Google guidelines can feel like a full-time job, not to mention keeping up with new SERP features, new tools, and new legislation that threatens to interrupt our way of operating and force us to learn and adapt quickly! 

Thankfully, help is on hand as the local SEO community is both incredibly welcoming and extremely generous with its knowledge. Whether agencies, local publishers, or tool and platform creators, there is so much help, support, and resources available—much of it for free if you know where to look (and, generally, someone will always point you in the right direction).

Here are three of my favorite free local SEO resources that every agency’s local SEO should bookmark:

• The Local SEO community – The Google Business Profile Help Community is both an open forum and a rich repository of free local SEO resources, including video guides, walk-through articles, and best practices. Moderated by Google Product Experts and knowledgeable members of the local search community, one of the best elements is the ability to ask questions and request advice or support with GBP and wider local SEO issues and concerns.

  The Local Pack is BrightLocal’s Marketing Community on Facebook, another great social space for guidance, support, and the exchange of ideas and insights.

• Local SEO blogs and newsletters – with so many to choose from, it was hard to narrow this down, as I could have easily made a top five! The Moz Top 10 monthly newsletter takes the prize due to its ‘Local 3-pack’ inclusion, providing three key pieces of local search news and insight. Formerly curated by the amazing local SEO Miriam Ellis (one of the most prolific local SEOs in existence), the mix of helpful updates and thought-leadership pieces always strikes a great balance to stay in the know about all things local.

  Additional shout-out to BrightLocal’s Digest as another fantastically helpful weekly newsletter, jam-packed with oodles of insight on local search trends and links to relevant news, case studies, and more! I especially love seeing their local guides for specific industries be announced here.

• Local SEO Training – hands down, my most recommended training program for anyone new to local SEO, or wanting to brush up on skills, is the BrightLocal Academy. It offers a wealth of super user-friendly courses, ranging from foundational 101s to more specialist areas such as local keyword research, review management, and Google Business Profile optimization. There are even courses designed specifically for agencies. All the courses are delivered in easy-to-follow, bite-sized segments, with clear examples, and mini assessments along the way, and all hosted by local SEO experts.

Helpful Hints, Tips, and Considerations for Leveraging Local at Your Agency

Throughout my time working in the local SEO space, and particularly with Croud, I’ve picked up some key advice, mantras, and general considerations that all help when kept in mind within an agency setting. Here are my top ten:

1. Shout about your specialism: As I said in my opening, local SEO can often be the ‘underdog’ with low awareness of its place, particularly by digital channels and outside of SEO (often as it’s thought of as ‘off-site’). My advice here is to help raise awareness and be vocal about your specialism, and how it can help add value to the right kind of client. Share relevant industry news, and local SERP features and development. Generally, fly the local flag wherever you can!

2. Know your agency’s client context: Be nosy, make it your business to know the current client roster, no matter the channel, and keep tabs on who has a local presence. Ask to see recent pitch presentations, strategy outlines, or business reviews so you have a rough context of the client’s focus areas and pain points. This may spark a local idea, even if not immediately.

3. Connect with your sales and client services teams: These can be your wingmen! If there’s a new client pitch coming up, or an opportunity for a local SEO cross-sell via an existing channel-client relationship, offer some insight to help demonstrate the opportunity and value-add, and open conversations to bring local SEO onboard.

4. Surprise and delight: Closely entwined with the above points, you don’t always need account teams or clients to come to you! If you spot an opportunity, use it as a lilypad to leap from. If a little budget can be spared to highlight an issue or simple opportunity, this can often be the thread that’s needed to hook in a positive conversation with a potential local client.

5. Know the local competition: I offered this tip in my previous blog on onboarding local SEO clients, but it’s important to note here, too—who the client perceives as their local competitors may not always align with their actual competitors. Identifying your client’s true rivals in the local search space and presenting this information may influence their strategy and unlock additional budget or opportunities to support them. BrightLocal tools like GBP Audit and Local Search Grid are great for this.

6. Don’t underestimate the power of a simple audit: Local SEO strategies can vary greatly, yet they can (and often should) all start with a simple audit. Whether conducting even a basic review of a Google Business Profile, or a client’s current location page setup, this is often how key issues and opportunities can first be identified. To put this into context, I was once able to get approval for an entire location page strategy from identifying a profile’s broken web link. You never know what a simple audit could unlock.

7. Be mindful of reporting tactics: Given the particular nuances of local SEO results, where audiences can vary, and rankings can alter just within incredibly small distances, it’s important to take this complexity into account when reporting on local performance. As an agency, you can hopefully tap into the specialist skills of analytics teams, bringing them on board to help with the more hyper-local tracking needs.

8. Don’t set and forget: A very common mantra in the local SEO world, but not one to disregard, and certainly one to take on board at an agency level. The world of local search is particularly fast-paced and relies so much on consistent business data integrity. Ensure the ‘don’t set and forget’ mantra is embedded within your local SEO approach, through audits, reviews, playbacks, and strategy sessions—keeping local SEO clients competitive and happy depends on it!

9. Become part of the local community: I’ve already shared some great resources above, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. The local SEO community is a wonderfully supportive cooking pot of deliciously talented individuals, teams, and agencies. Networking and making connections, whether through social follows, forum membership, newsletter sign-ups, or in-person events, will all support you on your growth journey as a local SEO, therefore making you an even bigger asset to your agency.
   
   
   

   17 Local SEO Experts You Need to Follow on X

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10. Empower others: Last but by no means least, remember that as a specialist, you have the ability (and I also personally consider it a responsibility) to pass your specialist knowledge on to others. Support the local community where you can. I rely on them for all kinds of support, so I like to pay it forward wherever possible (like writing this article!). Helping your colleagues in wider SEO teams and beyond learn and understand the nuances of local SEO will also support them becoming more well-rounded SEOs themselves, with local insights and skills to bring into their day-to-day work. You may even inspire someone to become a local SEO specialist themselves.

Conclusion

To wrap this up, here’s my key takeaway. When it comes to SEO, knowing the importance of the local landscape and nuances of local SEO can be critical to certain clients and, therefore, should be important to your agency and its overall approach to organic and wider search channels.

Whether your agency setup is to cover the local basics alongside SEO BAU, engage its local SEO specialists as and when support is needed, or lead from the front with full-blown local SEO-driven strategies, a holistic approach to search and servicing clients will always help you stay competitive.

If there is ever a best time to review how your agency is approaching local SEO, it is now!