u/firoz6033

https://preview.redd.it/8adqihn5x6kh1.png?width=1221&format=png&auto=webp&s=1e3213fc127be12017dd5ba4c5b3937f85e048fd

For local businesses, I’ve always found it interesting how different people measure the actual leads generated from their SEO work. Do you track things like:

1. Phone calls
2. Contact/form submissions
3. Click-to-email
4. Google Maps Click

I’m especially curious about phone calls and form submissions. Do you use Google Analytics, call-tracking software, a CRM, or something else?

What type of tracking system do you use to track calls and leads?

Last 3 month comparison data from GSC

Google My Business Call Data.

Brightlocal Ranking data

Hey Local SEO Experts,

I’m not feeling confident about my client's data. Three months ago, I started working with a junk removal client.

The main competitor was very strong. I found that my client's activity on GMB and their website was very low, so I optimized the GMB profile, including the service section and service area.

Then, I began optimizing the landing page by fixing incorrect target keywords. I also built citations, published two guest posts, and created 100 basic backlinks.

In the second month, I started publishing blog posts and used internal linking to point to the service page. I noticed improvements in both blog posts and service pages, which you can see in the GSC data.

I also improved rankings in some locations to the top 1 or 2 spots, which is visible in Gridview data.

Calls have also increased, as shown in the Google My Business call insight data. However, when I spoke with my client, he said that more than 60% of the calls are from marketing or insurance companies, despite the overall improvement.

Now, I want to avoid fake or spam calls, as my client also wants this. I spoke with some experts who suggested building an AI agent to answer calls, but I don’t know anything about that.

Is there an easy way to avoid fake or spam calls? I would appreciate your suggestions.

Hello, Local SEO experts. Hope you are doing well. I need one suggestion that can help me improve my Local SEO career.

I started my local SEO career in 2022. Then I got hired by a local SEO agency in North Carolina. In that agency, most of their clients were in cleaning, restoration, and renovation, so I gained industry knowledge.

Two months ago, I started my own local SEO agency. Now I prefer the home improvement niche as I have deep knowledge about it. I work with home improvement, construction, roofing, plumbing, locksmith, junk removal, trash pickup, hauling, dumpster rental, demolition, etc. Since I am outside the USA, my clients pay me only $500–700 on average. Most of the clients' fees I spend on content, link building, and my team, so there is less profit margin in those industries.

Now I want to learn about some profitable industries (1200- 1500 USD). I am a quick learner, so I can easily provide the best services to my clients. I don’t want to grow my team, so I will work actively; this is easier for me.

Please suggest some profitable niches in Local SEO.

Thanks in advance.

Hey small business owners, welcome to my post. In this post, I need your suggestions to start an offline business. Please read this carefully and share your advice.

I started my career as a WordPress web developer, then switched to local SEO. Over the last six years, I’ve worked on Upwork, in agencies, and more. But when it comes to offline business, I’ve failed multiple times.

An interesting story: I have some mango gardens and tried selling the fruit using Facebook ads and a website. Although our products were good and sales decent, I didn’t make a profit due to high marketing and order fulfilment costs.

Then, I switched back to my remote agency job in local SEO. This year, I quit that job and started my own small local SEO agency. I’m good at this field, want to expand my team, and fulfilment is going well. So, I have free time to start another offline business.

Here’s the key point: please suggest some businesses I can start and how to research them. I’m from South Asia—keep that in mind. My passions are music, cooking, and travelling. I’m also an expert in gym and fitness. Please give me some business ideas. I’d be grateful.

I can invest $15K–$20K initially, and more later as my local SEO agency grows.

Thanks for your comments!

Hey Local SEO Experts, I want to share my personal experience in this post.

I started my solo freelancer journey in May 2026. Before that, I was working for a local SEO agency. I quit my job and began this new path. First, I tried Upwork but didn’t get a positive response as my profile lost its JSS score.

Then, I tried social media. I joined networking groups and helped business owners who were struggling to get new customers. I focused on niches like home improvement, junk removal, landscaping, and locksmith services. I successfully got one client in the junk removal niche. I worked very hard and improved his business ranking. His overall business grew by more than 80%, so I suggested he open another GMB profile in a different city. Finally, he gave me three businesses and two referral clients. That was amazing for me.

Fifteen days ago, I hired two junior local SEO experts to help me with projects. This freed me from day-to-day operations, allowing me to focus on sales and marketing. I plan to build a big team in the future.

I offer detailed audit reports to local business owners. They understand well, and then we discuss more details in live meetings. Most clients are aware of pricing, so I try to keep it low, around $500 to $750. They show me interest and offer to make a deal, but in the end, I don’t receive any response from them. In the last 10 days, the same thing happened with five clients. I have sent audit reports to more than 20 clients; five were interested, but when it came to payment, they didn’t reply. I’m expanding my team based on promises from these new clients to start projects, but now I’m facing a slight financial loss and losing motivation.

Has this kind of situation happened to you? What am I doing wrong? How can I overcome this problem? Please share your thoughts.

My upwork account current Status

Hello Upwork Community,

My name is Firoz Ahmad, a freelancer from Bangladesh, and I want to share my Upwork journey with you all — the ups, the downs, and my hopes for a fresh start.

I provide Local SEO services, mainly helping small local business owners in industries like junk removal, hauling, demolition, restoration, contracting, bookkeeping, locksmith services, cleaning, and more. My journey on Upwork began with great enthusiasm. I was proud to achieve the Top Rated badge and maintain a 100% Job Success Score for a long time.

However, life had other plans. I took a full-time agency job to support my family and had to pause my Upwork freelancing. Unfortunately, before pause upwork, one client gave me a 3-star review in 2025. This single rating dropped my Job Success Score to 79%, causing me to lose my Top Rated badge. It felt like all my hard work vanished overnight.

Now, I’ve returned to Upwork with renewed energy and have already landed a new project. I’ve also started building my own agency team. But I know that rebuilding my profile and regaining that Top Rated status will be tough.

Upwork means more than just a platform for me — it’s a record of my hard work, skills, and passion. It’s something I can proudly show as my professional portfolio. So, I’m reaching out to this community for advice:

How can I recover my Job Success Score and regain the Top Rated badge?
What strategies do you recommend for growing a Local SEO freelancing profile in niche industries like mine?

Any tips, encouragement, or personal experiences you can share will mean a lot to me.

Thank you for reading my story. Let’s grow together!

Warm regards,
Firoz Ahmad

I spent four years doing local SEO at an agency before I finally quit in April to do it on my own. Comfortable salary, decent clients, but I was managing 20 accounts and doing real work on maybe 5 of them. The rest got a monthly report and a prayer.

So I left. No big client lined up, just some savings and two small leads from people who knew me. Here's the honest recap of 90 days in.

Clients signed: 3
Monthly recurring: about $1,400
Leads that ghosted me: more than I want to admit
Months of runway left: 2

What's working: going deep instead of wide. My first client is a service-area business with no storefront and a mixed-up citation profile. At the agency I'd have flagged it and moved on. Now I actually fixed it. Went through every citation, killed the ones with the old address, rebuilt the ones I could edit. Took two weeks of boring work. Their SoLV went from 31% to 54% over the next six weeks. That result got me client number two through a referral.

What's not working: I'm terrible at sales. I know the SEO cold but I freeze up on pricing calls and undercharge every time. Signed my third client for way too little because I panicked. Also underestimated how much time admin, invoicing, and just finding leads would eat. The actual SEO is maybe 40% of my week now.

The thing nobody warned me about is how quiet it gets. No team to check work, no one to tell you you're on the right track. Some days I'm sure I made a mistake leaving.

If anyone's made this jump from agency to solo, how did you handle the sales side early on? That's the part I clearly got wrong.

Hey all, I do local SEO and Google Business Profile optimisation for small businesses, mostly service-area and single-location shops that are getting outranked by competitors with worse reviews but a cleaner profile.

Most of what I fix isn't glamorous. Last audit I ran, a business had 6 separate listings floating around from old addresses and a rebrand years back, splitting their reviews across weak duplicates instead of one strong one. Google doesn't merge reviews between listings once that happens, so the fix is consolidation, not just "add more posts." Another common one: businesses set their primary category to something generic like "Doctor" when the specific match "Pain Management Physician" is what people are actually searching and what's showing up in the map pack instead of them.

What I actually do:

Full GBP audit — categories, NAP consistency, photos, posts, Q&A, duplicate listing cleanup. Website local signals — schema markup, NAP matching, location pages if you're multi-location. Citation cleanup across directories. Review strategy (not buying reviews, actual velocity and response systems). Geogrid ranking scans so you can see where you rank across your service area, not just one spot check

Rate: $15/hr or $100 flat per audit (happy to scope a fixed price once I see your listing). Turnaround: audit report in 3-5 days, ongoing work after that if it makes sense

I'll be upfront, I can't promise a #1 ranking timeline, nobody honest can since Google's algorithm shifts constantly. What I can promise is a clear list of what's actually broken and a prioritized plan, not just a checklist of vague "best practices."

Happy to do a quick free look at your GBP if you drop your business name or a link in the comments, no pitch, just tell you what I see.

local seo advice i see repeated everywhere that has never once worked for me

"add keywords to your gbp business description." the description isn't a ranking factor. google said it, barry tweeted it, and i tested it across 40+ profiles anyway. zero movement. the description is for humans deciding whether to call you

"build 50 citations." i've onboarded clients with 12 citations outranking competitors with 80. after the top 10-15 core ones, it's busywork you bill for, not seo

"embed a google map on your contact page." does nothing for rankings. never has. it's fine for ux, just stop selling it as optimization

"post daily to gbp for the algorithm." the algorithm doesn't care. your reviews, your primary category, and your proximity care. everything else is decoration

the uncomfortable part is that half the industry's monthly retainer is built on the stuff in this list

what's the most common advice here that you've tested and watched do absolutely nothing