Brand Optimization for Local Businesses | Interview with Marion Leadbetter

Marion Leadbetter is a senior SEO Strategist with over two decades of marketing and sales experience. She has founded a SEO training company, SEO Upsycler  and is the co-founder of a boutique SEO and website design agency, Lead Better Online.

Marion shared how businesses can leverage their Google Business Profile (GBP) for community engagement, explained why preparation for AI search results is critical, and identified voice search as a key SEO trend for EV brands. She also addressed the mistake of writing SEO-first content, emphasizing a client-first approach instead.

Q1: What’s an underused strategy in Local SEO that you think has enormous potential in 2025? 

Using your GBP to build relationships with other local businesses, we have a client who is a baker as well as all the traditional local SEO we spent a large part of this year connecting with other locals, Doing a monthly round up GBP post of news in her area, featuring festivals, events, best places for coffee, special offers local to the area etc and we really quickly started to see traction in her results and how much she was viewed as part of her community and they would of course then share her pop ups, offers more often than not and its been amazing for her local SEO.

Q2: How do you see AI-powered search like Google's AI Overviews or SearchGPT changing the local search landscape next year? 

I don't think local will be as affected as other businesses, at least not straight away, as most often than not people are looking for connection when searching for local services, but I do think businesses will have to prepare, look at how content is displayed on their website, and make sure its in a format that can be pulled into an AI result.

Q3: With 2025 around the corner, what’s the top SEO trend EV Charging brands should be focusing on to improve their local visibility?

Voice search should be a focus, we are already seeing sites get traction with it and more need to be ready for it, for things such as opening times, directions, places near me etc we are now asking this of our smart devices more than ever so local businesses need to be prepared to move towards that.

Q4: Many EV brands are still finding their feet with digital strategy, what’s one common SEO myth they should stop following, and what’s the reality?

Creating a search engine-first mentality. Create your marketing strategy and build your site with your clients in mind and THEN make sure its SEO friendly. Too many local businesses still do things like keyword stuff, location stuff and write content that's written purely to rank but then it just turns people off when they visit your website as it's not easy to get the info you need or it's too hard to read so they just click off. Always client first and then search and you will maximize your results.