Using GSA SER for local search

Chemeleon

I'm new to GSA SER.  I'm curious how some of the more experienced users would use it for ranking for a local search term with a new website.  Let's say you built a site to rank for 'pest control seattle'.  Yelp is holding the top spot here, and the top competitor has just a few hundred links from a few dozen domains, lousy on page, and > 90% of the anchor text is worthless....But they do have age.

This strikes me as relatively low competition...Right now I'm just setting up campaigns for these types of searches where I'm collecting 3-8 verified links per day (PR 3+, <50 OBL) and selecting article, blog comment, wiki, web 2.0, forum, directory, microblog, social blog, social network, web 2.0.

Am I being way too conservative, or does this sound about right for a new domain? 

I'm thinking that a tiered campaign might be overkill at this point, and just focusing on consistent link velocity and link diversity to avoid getting sandboxed.

Does anyone have experience using GSA SER for these types of searches?

davbel

@chemeleon it's too conservative and you need to get rid of the min PR and OBL, it will look more natural without them.

For something like this a tiered campaign is an ideal set up.

Startrip

yes but for local you cannot use GSA as a standalone tool imho. you need to do some manual work for citations (or buy a fiverr gig for that).

Chemeleon

But citations are only for the places listings, right?

Andy why couldn't GSA SER be used to build citations?

I'm not planning to use it standalone, but it seems like it could be used to generate citations for places listings if one wanted to use it for such?

Startrip

well there are no citation engines yet, and there is only a limited number of platforms that suits your business (no point in listing your french local business in a libanese directory ... ) and they are - from experience - complicated to fill out and they are all different. i think it would be a hard task for SER to create local business listings, i dont know if sven plans to add citations.

i dont wanna go too deep into local SEO here (which i used to do almost completely manual before i started spamming lol), but your places listing is also affected a lot by your organic ranking. if you rank organically #1 for haircutter london, you will probably have a high places listing too. i even outranked the places listings and was on top of the seven pack. its not too hard since most local businesses lack even onpage-SEO and hardly rank for their own name.

My recommendation: you can start a tiered campaign with strict filters (OBL/Badword, you dont wanna link your aunties nail-saloon on a page that is spammed with viagra-links) on the business homepage and do manual work with citations. magic submitter has a script for that, but its in the 300$ league and I'm not the kind of person who tries to over-automate, but just FYI.

For local SEO its crucial to make it really really careful, since its not a throw-away page and can't be just replaced by another Flexsqueeze page that stands in the queue..

Chemeleon

Thanks, Startrip...I'm doing some tests with some phony-business lead gen sites so I'm not risking much...I'll have to outrank the 7-box with them like you talk about since there won't be a places listing for them.

Laubster

A week or two ago there was an article floating around where I believe Google said your website is less likely to rank if your Places listing is ranking and vice versa.  May be worth searching around for on SearchEngineNews or something like that.  Could be a waste of time to put effort into both. 

Startrip

@laubster you better dont listen to G too much
Don't get me wrong here, im just saying that experience shows its good to do the exact opposite of what google tells you.
I did fine with ranking both.

Laubster

Haha, very true.  I don't have any experience with local so I have no idea.

Startrip

its a total different playing field. start reading some of the local SEO forums you will find the good ones pretty fast.