Speakers & Key Participants:
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Marcus Ahlqvist (Host) – PinMeTo
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Moa Antonius Blom (Customer Advisor Lead) – PinMeTo
The session highlighted key pillars such as maximizing sales through visibility, protecting brand reputation, optimizing market communication, and staying secure in an evolving digital landscape.
A real-life success story featuring Smile Dental Clinics illustrated how businesses can effectively implement local marketing strategies to centralize location data, manage reviews, post localized content, and drive measurable outcomes.
The webinar concluded with an interactive Q&A where attendees discussed advanced use cases such as call tracking, API integrations, and the importance of maintaining data consistency across platforms.
Webinar transcript
The text has been lightly edited for clarity.
Introduction: Managing Local SEO in 2025
- Bernardo Candeias:
Good morning and welcome to today’s webinar, “Secrets to Local SEO Success.” My name is Bernardo, and I’m the Communications Manager here at PinMeTo. I’m thrilled to be joined today by my colleagues Marcus Ahlqvist and Moa Antonius Blom, who will guide us through today’s topics.
Before we begin, I’d like to remind everyone that this session is being recorded. If you feel more comfortable, you can turn off your camera. The recording will be shared on our website for later access.
We encourage you to ask questions during the webinar. Please share them in the chat or raise your hand at the Q&A session. Without further ado, I’ll hand over to Marcus to start with the introductions.
Part 1: The Fundamentals of Local SEO with Marcus Ahlqvist
- Marcus Ahlqvist:
Thank you, Bernardo! Let’s dive in. I’d like to start with a quick refresher on what Local SEO is and why it has become so vital in today’s digital landscape.
Local SEO focuses on optimizing your online presence to be found in local searches, such as "coffee shop near me." Unlike traditional SEO, which revolves around your website structure and keywords, Local SEO is about how visible your brand is on third-party platforms like Google Maps, Bing, and other search directories.
Why is this important? Local SEO enhances visibility for consumers with high purchase intent. If someone searches for a service near their location, they’re likely planning to make a purchase soon. By ensuring your information across these networks is consistent, accurate, and engaging, you not only increase visibility but also foster trust and credibility, driving foot traffic to your stores.
At PinMeTo, we specialize in this field. We don’t manage your website’s SEO. Instead, we empower you to optimize your presence on external networks like Google Business Profiles to ensure your business stands out in local search results.
Part 2: The Key Pillars of Local SEO Success
- Marcus Ahlqvist:
Over the years, we’ve observed four key pillars of successful Local SEO strategies:
1. Maximizing Sales through Increased Visibility
Ensuring that your business ranks high for relevant local searches helps drive foot traffic to your locations.
2. Protecting Brand Reputation
A consistent presence across platforms ensures customers trust your brand. For instance, incorrect or outdated information like hours or contact details can lead to distrust.
3. Optimizing Market Communication
Take advantage of free tools that platforms like Google provide to share localized promotions and updates. Unlike paid ads, these tools meet customers at their exact point of need, leading to higher conversion rates.
4. Safeguarding Cybersecurity
Misinformation or unauthorized edits to your business profiles can damage your reputation. Our platform ensures cybersecurity compliance and monitors your information across platforms.
We take pride in being the only company in our industry to hold the ISO 27001 certification for cybersecurity. This ensures your data remains protected, even in highly complex multi-location scenarios.
Part 3: Real-Life Success Story – Moa Antonius Blom
- Moa Antonius Blom:
Thank you, Marcus. I’d like to share a real-life example of how these principles work in practice. Let’s talk about one of our long-standing customers, Smile Dental Clinics, the leading dental care chain in Sweden.
When Smile first collaborated with PinMeTo, their main challenge was managing inconsistent location data across multiple platforms. By implementing PinMeTo’s Listings tool, they gained control of their location data, making updates centralized and efficient.
Over time, they also adopted our Posts and Conversations tools to manage social media content and customer interactions. These additions allowed them to create localized engagement and effectively manage customer reviews from platforms like Google and Trustpilot through a central inbox.
Key Results from Smile Dental Clinics
- 53% Increase in Google Views within six months for optimized locations.
- 14% Increase in Google Actions , including clicks, calls, and driving directions.
Smile also enhanced its review management strategy, actively encouraging positive feedback via Google Business Profiles. Combined with the consistent location data updates, this boosted their local SEO ranking significantly.
Our tools helped Smile scale efficiently while maintaining brand reputation. For example, Smile used our API integration to analyze activity data with tools like PowerBI, allowing customized reporting across platforms.
Live Q&A Session
Espen Rasmussen:
How do customers track bookings resulting from Google Business Profile locations?
Moa Antonius Blom:
Great question! In our platform, you can set up UTM tags on action links, such as your homepage or booking links. From there, Google Analytics can track performance, including bookings.
You also have insights in our platform to track actions like website clicks, calls, and driving directions. While we don’t track completed bookings directly within our platform, integrating UTM tags allows you to monitor exactly how campaigns and listings contribute to your conversions.
Marcus Ahlqvist:
To add to that, what we typically notice is an increase in activities like clicks, calls, and driving directions—actions that often lead to conversions. While we can't track the entire customer journey directly to a sale without access to their backend systems, these activity-level increases (often between 10–30% after optimization) are a strong indicator of improved performance.
Espen Rasmussen:
That makes sense. I’ve seen clients successfully map calls from Google Business Profiles into their internal systems to measure those conversions. Adding call-tracking capabilities helped them bolster buy-in for their efforts.
Marcus Ahlqvist:
Absolutely. Call tracking is a fantastic approach to tie customer engagement to business results. For instance, if customers implement external tools like Looker Studio or PowerBI for these purposes, they can use our Insights API to complement PinMeTo’s functionality seamlessly.
Senad:
Do you use tools like Semrush for optimization, or are there similar external platforms integrated into the process?
Moa Antonius Blom:
Great question, Senad. For SEO analysis or keyword research, tools like Semrush are often used by marketing teams to strengthen traditional SEO strategies. In our case, however, we focus specifically on Local SEO. That means all the optimizations we perform, such as ensuring consistent business data or publishing localized content, are completed directly through our platform.
Marcus Ahlqvist:
To clarify, we don’t position ourselves as direct competitors to platforms like Semrush—they cover a much broader feature set, often at a higher cost. However, when it comes to Local SEO essentials like optimizing directories and managing Google Business Profiles, we provide a streamlined, customer-focused solution designed specifically for multi-location companies.
Closing Remarks: Key Takeaways
- Moa Antonius Blom:
To recap Smile Dental Clinics’ journey:
- They initially sought an organized approach to managing location data across platforms.
- Gradually, they extended their efforts to include social media content (Posts) and review management (Conversations), maximizing their online engagement.
- Through collaboration with our team, they achieved measurable results, including a 53% increase in Google views within six months for the optimized locations.
Their proactive approach to continuous optimization and feedback collection was key to their success.
- Marcus Ahlqvist:
I want to leave everyone with this takeaway: Local SEO is not optional—it’s essential. Whether you manage your external profiles manually or partner with a service like PinMeTo, ensuring consistency and accuracy across platforms is critical to staying competitive in increasingly digital and local-focused markets.
Lastly, I encourage you to explore our website and resources, such as our blog and Knowledge Hub, for more insights and customer stories. Thank you again, and we look forward to seeing you at our future webinars!