We also set up a completely separate practitioner listing that brought in another 80—90 calls a month without competing at all with the client’s main listing.

However, it’s not easy to keep the leads increasing at that same rate forever. Sometimes, having early wins like this can set expectations that things will continue to climb at the same rate over time, which is very difficult to sustain.

One of the ways we learned from this was to dedicate a lot of resources to continuous testing to find new keyword patterns that delivered both search volume and leads. Once we identify a keyword pattern that we’ve never seen before in Google Search Console (GSC), we create content around that topic and see how much traffic and conversions it gets. If it’s successful, we add it to an internal list that is broken down by industry.

In the last year, we more than doubled the list of keyword patterns that do this for most local businesses. Two examples of these would be cost keywords and “near me” keywords.