There are a lot of agencies and SEO SaaS (Software as a Service) hawking very dated ideas or otherwise blatant scams in SEO. Most of the biggest ranking problems in SEO come from agencies cutting corners and pushing local SEO ranking myths about signals to rank higher on Google. While we can appreciate there are many well-intended people who want to help you, if you see the SEO myths below, it’s a perfect sign to cut ties and work with someone else. Professional SEOs place businesses at the top of Google search as well as the map pack with Google Business Profile, where almost all business sales leads are captured with few exceptions, and this has a cost. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Like all things, talent comes at a cost but that cost is worth thousands if not millions of dollars to the business. As of this article we estimate an average of 70% of leads will come through Google Business Profile over the website and almost 100% will come from highly focused content web pages for each query. Accuracy is big business and you could be missing out big time!
Local SEO Myths That Hurt Your Local Business Rankings:
Keyword Density TF-IDF
TF-IDF is “term frequency-inverse document frequency,” or keyword density is being touted as the end all of being found but realistically bordering on early day keyword stuffing, which once upon a time would work a good two decades ago when I first started working in digital marketing. The people pushing it hard are search tool salespeople referencing old patents and gross oversimplification. Realistically, staying on topic with properly structured content with the appropriate, relevant keywords is enough and obsessing over term frequency beyond basic reason is entirely unnecessary. Remember that synonyms or similar words with the same meaning are the reason we do keyword research; the reality is that most words have more than one meaning, and people use various terms and search intents to find a business. We aim to provide the most accurate information possible the first time without being robotic or hyper-verbose. Google can confuse the context of words, and using relevancy helps tell Google what a page or site is about. Like in sales, you want to give the customer exactly what they’re looking for and not talk yourself out of a sale without losing the customer.
LSI Latent Semantic Indexing
Someone just learning to code and pushing their homemade tool might push LSI because it’s been around since 1988 and is good for very simple things. These days Google uses BERT, Rank Brain and various other algorithms to understand human language NLP (Natural Language Processing) as well as our intent. To show just the co-occurrence of words on a page to be enough to rank on Google falls much into the early 2000s where it was enough to basically just keyword stuff a page. Some people still think that works, and many tools would push it to make you believe that’s a thing. However, you’re now dealing with the human interaction signals at a much higher level now and if the content is keyword-stuffed while being overwhelming to the point where people leave, then the site will tank in rankings. Up until about October 2023, prior to AI launching in a big way, it was easy to just pump out long-winded articles that were rather keyword-rich. This is no longer the case, and one should very much think more about short, useful, helpful, and shareable content that is quality over quantity. Over the past two years, many SEOs have been very angry at Google for not sharing these lengthy articles on top of Google, but in truth, no customer wants to read all that! Focus on SEO copywriting and being hyper-relevant to your local business customers. If your content is not closing you more sales, then you’re focusing on the wrong things! Rankings are not enough alone to earn business.
AI Content For Local SEO
While Google’s stance on AI content is clear that they allow AI content, they also clearly don’t allow plagiarism. Since most business owners will inevitably run the same queries into AI to form the same content, which is copied from sources, it is more than likely that this content brought to view from AI writers will not rank for long.
Since 2012, technologies like spindexing, where original content from other sources was reordered and even synonyms were used to make said content look original, stopped appearing in search results as spam updates from Google.
A majority of agencies that cheaped out on content, skipping SEO copywriting in favour of AI writers, killed their client search results and rankings. The entire site quality is evaluated, and the authority drops significantly if the perceived value is low. Those that spun up thousands or articles in long form with little to no value for customers haven’t ranked well since 2023 after Google’s response to AI. Google responded with amplifying NavBoost in a much higher manner, which means that how people interacted with your site page mattered as much as the content on it, if not more just to sort out with the massive exponential growth of AI content pumped out. Boring your potential customers to death to rank higher on search engines is unacceptable and search algorithm wise will result in your site content if not the entire site being dumped in short order.
Cases where AI is acceptable on your local business website include alt descriptions and massive sites where no titles have ever been written. However, where no titles are written, Google has a habit of writing its own, which is often frustrating, so make the titles a priority. We will, however, always prefer manual content creation for any primary pages and any new pages given the opportunity. If you have no content at all on some pages and are facing a Soft 404 with no budget for copywriting then AI could be a consideration assuming it’s evaluated by an editor. Keep in mind, the entire site quality is considered when ranking a page for overall authority which means that satisfactory content could really be holding you back from a lot of business.
We pretty much always recommend SEO copywriting for your local SEO campaign. You’ll want to answer the primary pain points clients didn’t even know they had right out of the gate and keep their interest in ways AI can’t emulate.
Chrome Bot Traffic to Google Business Profile
It’s unusual that we see anyone recommending running chrome bot traffic to Google Business profile or local site. However, there are some unsavoury SEO agencies, if we can even call them, that run Chrome bot networks to Google Business Profile and local sites in an attempt to game the local algorithm with Navboost, which, over a period of 13 months, looks at traffic location and device (desktop/mobile). However, it is neither sustainable nor intelligent to have a smoking gun pointed right at your business. If you hired someone to do this please stop immediately. It violates Google’s policies and likely sets you up to be sued. Doing things like fake reviews and running fake traffic is a quick way to find yourself losing everything you own. There are various cases of this but those doing this with your business are playing a dangerous game.
Let’s consider that you did run Chrome bot traffic for a minute. Google looks at verified user history in GMAIL, that user’s typical location, their verified search history from that user entity through the Chrome browser, and various other information spanning years. So let’s say that you, for the moment, rank well, and they decide to deep mine suspicious activity for a minute with the Google Web Spam Team and assess the above criteria. Chances are the team you hired wasn’t that diligent and had no way to emulate those signals. Most GMAIL accounts people purchase, even if it was a very diligent spammer, are secured from accounts overseas in developing countries and likely aren’t looking for your legal services or other. So Google looks and sees all these accounts from an entire other continent from another native language trying to manipulate local search results. What do you think they do after this? In most situations, local businesses face permanent removal from Google and never recover if not going out of business entirely.
Moving the Map Pin On Google Business Profile
For nearly 200 days, there’s a long-standing exploit in Google Business Profile where moving the pin on competitors impacts their rankings. Suddenly, an unknowing business is placed well outside of the zone of their customer base, losing all rankings. There are many ways to trigger this, and monitoring against this is strongly recommended. Offenders doing this could have their accounts and business permanently banned if not sued by Google’s legal team.
Fake Business Reviews
The idea that fake reviews are a good idea is insane. Google Business Profile and other profiles definitely do benefit from the recency factor. One ideally wants at least 1/3 or more of the leading competitor’s reviews in order to compete. However, it’s quite evident that Google will for a time consider businesses on trend with good service via reviews. If you thought that getting these reviews from fake producers was a good idea then think again. The Federal Trade Commission made fake reviews illegal in 2024, as if it was ever legal to deceive customers, and many networks like Amazon/Google have been suing these bad actors. Assuming you got away with publishing these reviews it’s likely they’d just be dismissed algorithmically because fake reviews are created from GMAIL accounts started overseas. Navboost measures sites by mobile/desktop, and regionally over 13 month periods which means they’re absolutely looking at where people are coming from. Assuming these bad actors created GMAIL reviews even by virtual private network (VPN) it’s likely that they probably still wouldn’t show for long as Google tends to flag this activity immediately. We’re seeing people complaining that their reviews are being taken down and it’s quite obvious Google’s looking a little closer at this. We’ve never promoted this or done this and hopefully you aren’t either. There are many ways to gain a business reputation but lying isn’t one of them.
Pointing Backlinks at Google Business Profile
If your SEO recommends doing this, don’t walk; run! There is absolutely no value in backlinks pointed at your Google Business Profile, and it’s not weighted against backlinks, nor has it ever been. Backlinks to your website, including local citations from good resources with traffic, are still very much a go. We had a San Diego personal injury lawyer telling us he hired someone to do this and we had to explain that there’s literally 0 value to this.
PBN Public Blog Networks
The idea that blog networks are relevant now is kind of hilarious. Google can tell when there are a million links from random irrelevant topics to various commercial intent websites and sees when it’s generally blatantly spammy SEO intent. Most SEO tools showing backlinks are burned networks with garbage links, and any likely better public blog networks have robots to block the SEO tools, which is a key sign for Google to dive deep into them algorithmically. Google looks at the traffic from a site regionally and qualifies content accordingly for specific queries. PBNs largely died in 2012 and started to really favour local traffic sites instead for local SEO otherwise known as local business citations. Sites with few outbound links and high volume traffic from your likely customers will be far more valuable than some generated blog farm from which the brokers sell a billion links. The kind of quality one would need to do a quality PBN raises the question of why would you not just put the content on your website? Write really helpfull content and earn links that way. It’s far from easy, but why bother investing your money in something that’s been essentially dead a long time?
Guaranteed #1 Google Results by Agencies
There is a flourishing amount of fake agencies guaranteeing number-one results, or it’s free. The only thing that has control over search results is Google. They’re counting on most local businesses jumping on low-cost local SEO and the fact that most will not ask for a refund. The reality is that top results get 25% of the business and those of us with the top local SEO expertise to place our clients there have to pay our team of experts well to get there. Do you really think local SEO experts would value their services and time at only $300-500 a month with all the work involved in top local SEO ranking factors? These so-called fly-by-night agencies are making a mint ripping off desperate business owners thinking SEO is off-the-shelf knowledge. Google has very clearly stated to steer clear of local marketing agencies suggesting they can guarantee search engine results.
