Local Marketing Frequently Asked Questions
Open Local Platform
Rio SEO’s Open Local Platform provides multi-location organizations with a comprehensive, seamlessly integrated suite of turnkey local marketing solutions—Local Listings, Local Pages, Local Reviews, Local Ratings, Local Reporting, and Local Manager—proven to increase brand visibility across search engines, social networks, maps applications and more.
The Open Local Platform supports critical enterprise integrations with more than 170 top directories, including Google, Bing, Apple Maps, Yelp, Facebook, Foursquare, and more to optimize and streamline local SEO while deploying accurate and relevant content at scale. The Open Local Platform offers tangible, measurable results, providing increased opportunity and enhanced accountability for enterprise brands with hundreds and thousands of locations.
The Open Local Platform is an advanced, local-centric Content Management System comprising local search products built for optimal local content creation, reputation management and detailed reporting. This scalable suite of local marketing tools syndicates critical local data, from a single dashboard and publishes it to over 100 of the top directories, including Google, Bing, Facebook, Foursquare, Yelp, Nextdoor, and more. Built and supported by local search experts, Rio’s Open Local Platform takes into account consumer context, relevance and intent to nurture your prospects through the online to offline funnel, from search to sale.
Yes, this is included in the platform and through our white-glove service and pushed out to you as deemed necessary. We provide best-in-class ranking reporting for organic, local maps, and within citations the information on a knowledge card. All of that is compiled regularly in a format you desire and is driven by an expert from our team against your KPIs.
Support
Rio SEO provides a “do it for you” or “do it with you” approach to full-service support. In fact, many customers prefer not to regularly log in to our platform because of the high service level they receive. Rio SEO’s comprehensive suite of expert driven services and customized solutions is designed to meet all of your local marketing needs with a dedicated account team. Whether you seek expert full service support or a convenient self-service solution, we’ve got you covered!
There’s no limit to our support and how many hours our clients receive. All of our solutions include agency-style, 24/7, full-service support. During onboarding/implementation, each client is assigned a dedicated Project Manager, an Account Director, Listings Coordinator, SEO Strategist, and Executive Sponsor to ensure exceptional service for as long as the client is with Rio SEO.
Absolutely! As industry leaders for over ten years, we know “local search” isn’t limited to brick-and-mortar alone. Many of Rio SEO’s customers, including service-area-based businesses, benefit from our ‘dealer locator’ and ‘service area locator’ solutions, as well as our knowledge of listing management for service-area-based businesses. We provide digital knowledge management and industry-leading technology for all your local marketing needs, whether or not your business has any physical locations.
Rio SEO provides the same level of service whether you have 50 or 5,000 locations. That means if your marketing team is small and you don’t have the time to worry about inaccuracies on Google, Bing, or Apple, your dedicated Account Management team will take care of the work for you. During our onboarding process, we learn what KPIs are important to your brand and we work to achieve those goals on your behalf. We can schedule detailed reporting to be delivered to your inbox and share our progress during monthly or bi-monthly meetings to provide ongoing transparency.
Local Listings
Yes, updates for the brand are done in the brand’s respective accounts. We believe in providing enterprise brands true ownership of their location data, which is why our clients retain 100% ownership of their data.
Gain peace of mind in knowing that you retain your listings should you move on. You always own 100% of your data and your listings will not be reverted to their previous state after working with Rio.
Our dedicated full-service support team will help with this process. No matter how good, bad, or ugly the state and size of your location data, Rio SEO experts are here to help. If you’re interested in seeing a snapshot of the state of your current local search data, reach out to our team and request a free local marketing audit to get started.
We’ve got you covered. A support specialist will update your hours in our centralized platform and changes will be updated in near real-time (for API connections), or via ad hoc updates –and of course, you have the ability to publish updates yourself, if you so desire.
Google My Business has introduced a number of attributes that help your brand accurately communicate the services you have available and the health protocols you’re following in order to provide a safe shopping experience for your customers. The attributes available to your brand will depend on the primary category you’ve selected and will vary by industry. We can make recommendations and help your brand deploy these attributes at scale for your GMB listings.
Local Pages
All search today is done at a hyper-local level. When a consumer is looking for goods and services via search, they will be given a response that is based on their IP address or mobile location. Local Pages help your brand compete for your products and services in those areas around your store, franchise or restaurant. Creating a local page that is properly marked up with schema and contains highly localized content about your products and services makes it easier for a consumer to find your brand in that micro-moment of need. It also helps searchers find more relevant information about your location-specific products and services.
Rio SEO has been building Local Pages since our inception, and SEO is in our name. Our mobile-friendly pages employ SEO best practices using schema markup, optimal page speed, and deep breadcrumbing with location, city, state, and specialty pages. Our CMS allows us to help you inject offers, coupons or promotions that can be seasonal and regional. Our platform gives your brand the flexibility to create a unique and robust organic search experience for each of your stores. Additionally, all the heavy development work is done by our team.
Updates to on-page copy can be made quickly whenever timely changes are needed, such as showcasing new promotions, services or updates to store hours. Everything is hosted and developed within our internal team that provides a high level of expertise as utilized by the likes of many renowned brands.
Our professional implementation team will go above and beyond to ensure a seamless transition, taking the stress out of leaving an existing vendor or starting new with Rio SEO on the right foot. We create detailed project plans and timelines that make sure we meet your needs, keeping your brand search relevance high. If you’re interested in seeing a more detailed implementation plan, please contact us.
Yes, our core CMS allows for multiple layers for user control and location dedicated aspects that can be updated throughout the organization in an easy-to-use web portal and governance to ‘traffic’ data that is displayed publicly.
Yes. Every page is optimized for schema markup, content optimization, web analytics tracking.
Analytics includes every trackable piece of information that directly relates back to directions, orders, phone calls, views, and ranking data by location.
Local Pages are completely customizable so most types of content can be hosted. Information or media is not limited by any means so social media feeds, menus, events, imagery, coupons, video, ratings, reviews, and more can be incorporated at any given time.
Local Reviews
Rio SEO’s Local Reviews combines powerful tools that provide unparalleled insight into what your customers are saying about you. Harness the power of local review ratings and scorecards to manage your brand’s online reputation for all franchises and locations from a single centralized dashboard. Engage key stakeholders and stay on top of reviews that impact your business, with customized email alerts of critical review and rating information alongside response directly within the dashboard.
We have an expansive review workflow and alert platform that allows for the collection of reviews across 3rd party sites such as Google, Facebook, and others.
We take all of your location data and provide a filterable feed and response system that can be distributed by location, user, or criteria to make reviews easy and actionable. If you have specific sites that you would like to monitor please let us know.
Data Ownership & Quality
Yes, Rio SEO’s platform is always looking after your data. And that data can change for many different reasons. That’s why the Rio platform is not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. Your data will always remain current and any updates made will never revert, even at the end of the program.
The last submission or update will remain true and consistent, but know that publishers may buy data from various services and update without active management.
Partnerships
Absolutely! In fact, as a software solution that started within a local search marketing agency, you could say the agency focus is part of our DNA. We work with search agencies, full-service agencies, and consultancy groups to harness insights and maximize strategic opportunities while you maintain complete control and ownership over your data. Learn more about agency partnership opportunities here, or reach out for more information.
Rio SEO experts ensure your listings appear on the local maps, apps, and search engines that matter in the countries you serve. We allow you to reach more customers by accurately publishing your location data to the critical search engines and directories, which can differ by country or region. Our focus is to learn and evaluate the best options for your global business needs, including multi-language support.
Yes, Rio SEO offers backlink development as part of our Enhanced Service offerings. Backlinks are a very heavily weighted SEO metric, so we have resources to improve backlink equity. We have a team devoted to exploring local authoritative communities related to your brand initiative. We also develop relationships with local authoritative communities, to build valuable backlinks that improve your locator’s SEO value and search engine rank positioning.
Bulk Submissions
When it comes to business listings, Google is the one place we suggest your business focus most of its efforts. According to our research, 83% of consumers use Google search to find information about local messages and 61% use Google Search every day, speaking to the search giant’s dominance and the importance of keeping your brand’s Google data clean and up to date.
No, all GMB users have access to bulk import their data.
Only location owners can add managers. While you can add single managers in bulk, if you have different managers you want to add by location, it must be done manually (or via API). If you have a manager that you want to add to all or a set of your locations, you simply need to move these locations to a subfolder in GMB. This doesn’t impact any location data or verification. Once your locations are in a subfolder, edit the subfolder and ‘manage users’, adding the GMB email address of the desired manager.
You cannot edit store codes or map pin location/coordinates in bulk. You also can’t add or edit Google Posts via the bulk import function, but can be performed through a valid API connection.
Yes, but not via import. You can multi-select a group of locations that you wish to close and ‘mark as permanently closed’. From here, you can either keep or remove the locations from your account. You can always store the closed locations in a subfolder separate from active locations, to avoid publishing incorrect data.
No, Google requires that Service Area businesses are manually verified. If you have a bulk-verified account that includes brick and mortar locations but try changing a location to a service area, or add a new location that is a service area, it will revert to manual verification required.
Request a demo of the Open Local Platform.
Learn why leading multi-location brands trust Rio SEO’s local marketing solutions to drive brand visibility and sales.
