“I wouldn’t even like to guess how much time Listing Management saves me. Probably weeks of work so far.”

Alex Muller, marketing director at Pinnacle Treatment Centers

Challenge: Increasing visibility with local SEO

For Alex Muller, reaching people suffering from addiction through traditional channels is no simple task. While other industries can leverage demographic data and targeted ads, the marketing director is unable to learn much about the kind of people that are most in need of help.

"Addiction doesn't really discriminate," Alex explains, “There are extremely famous people that suffer from addiction, right down to homeless populations. So it’s really tough to put it into a buyer persona. It's literally anyone.”

Because of this, Pinnacle Treatment Centers doesn’t run paid advertising campaigns and instead relies on local SEO, where conversions are often high.

“With local SEO, you’re not competing as much with gigantic .org or .gov sites. At a local level, it’s usually transactional and commercial searches, rather than informational. The intent is usually there. If you’re searching for ‘detox center’ or ‘addiction center near me’, the CDC and DEA don’t provide those, so it’s much more important for us to have our location pages show up for those local keywords.”

But with 137 locations (soon to be 139) across nine states, Alex faced a significant operational challenge when rolling out a nationwide strategy.

The centers already had Google Business Profiles for each location, as well as Bing Places, which Alex had painstakingly uploaded manually. But there was still a wealth of directory opportunities that remained untapped.

“There's so much Yelp traffic, I knew we were missing an opportunity there. And we weren't listed across the board on Uber, Apple Maps, Siri… It’s a huge ranking factor for Google, so I knew I needed to get our NAP info consistent.”

Solution: Maximizing citation opportunities with Semrush Local

Fortunately, he didn’t have to do it alone…

From experience, Alex was well aware of how much work would be involved in solving that problem manually. That’s when he turned to Semrush Local and its suite of tools that were designed to lighten the load for busy marketers like him.

“Listing Management helps us a lot,” Alex says. “Just having our locations listed on Facebook, Yelp, Apple, Bing, Yahoo, Snapchat, Yellow Pages… It's more opportunities to land higher in the search results because those are all pretty high domain authority sites.”

The tool doesn't just publish essential information to 150+ globally supported directories, it also tackles duplicate listings and outdated information head-on. For Alex, manually tracking changes across 137 locations would have been a nightmare. Semrush Local automated this process, making it easy to maintain accurate and current listings. "Notifications pop up in our duplicate tab and I can just go right in and suppress them," he says. “There were a tonne of duplicate listings that we fixed up.”

At Pinnacle, accurate listings aren’t just a matter of better local SEO, they’re essential for the well-being of patients. Alex admits, “Unfortunately, there had been a couple of instances in which a lease was up at a treatment facility and we moved to a different building. But the old listing was still out there, and at least two patients showed up to an old address. Listing Management has put a stop to that so patients don’t face these kinds of obstacles in their treatment.

“Before using Semrush Local, I would have had to manually search 137 different locations one-by-one. And even then, I'm not sure I would have found all of them. And I would have to keep doing it.”

And it’s not just Listing Management that’s making life easier for Alex. Semrush Local is packed with other powerful tools to help with Pinnacle’s local SEO.

“User-suggested changes are really useful,” Alex says. “Someone might suggest we change the opening hours and I can quickly look to see if they're right. Then I just go and update them in Listing Management. It updates pretty quickly too. Changes seem to take effect within an hour or less.”

With a better handle on listings usually comes an influx of reviews. But with Semrush Local’s Review Management, Alex is well on top of things. “I get the alerts right away. There's not much time between our response and their initial review. It allows us to react quickly if someone writes a bad review about the operations at one of our facilities.

“Monitoring them with Review Management probably saves me anywhere from five to 10 hours a week.” Alex had been using Semrush at Pinnacle since he started and introduced Semrush Local just a couple of months ago. “We’ve already seen growth,” Alex shares.

Results: Listing Management doubles traffic in months

The impact of implementing Semrush Local was dramatic. Pinnacle saw a remarkable increase in traffic, with user sessions doubling in a short period.

"In January 2024, before we started with Listing Management, we had 36.7k users and 46.3k sessions. “But in March, we've had 93.3k users and 103.5k sessions," Alex reports, indicating a surge of more than 100 percent. “This is 100% thanks to Listing Management.”

Organic traffic also shot up from an average of 19k in Q4 2023 to up to 29k in Q1 2024.

Thanks to the bump in traffic the treatment centers have received, web form submissions jumped by 6%.

Outside of Semrush Local, Alex also uses the platform’s On Page SEO Checker for ideas to improve their website’s visibility, the Backlink Audit tool to check for toxic links, and the Site Audit tool to uncover broken links.

“Position Tracking gives us a lot of insight into how our rankings are improving in specific locations. We rank ahead of five out of the six competitors we track in terms of organic keywords and organic traffic. We were outranking them before, but the gap has grown.

Traffic and position data in Semrush

“Between February and March, which is about when we started, we've had 14 new keywords go into the top three and three new keywords go into the top 10.”

Key takeaways

With Semrush Local on his side, Alex can expect to see more improvements to Pinnacle’s local SEO.

With Listing Management, Alex never has to worry about inconsistencies in listings or missed opportunities in top directories.
In just a few months, Alex has doubled traffic, simply by connecting Pinnacle’s locations to Semrush Local.
Review Management lets Alex know if there’s a problem at a facility right away and makes replying to feedback from 137 locations a lot less stressful.
When replying to patients, Alex can leverage AI tools to craft a personal, thoughtful reply and save even more time.
Semrush’s reporting tools make tracking progress with reviews and listings really simple, even if you’re managing as many locations as Alex.

“I would definitely recommend using Semrush Local for sure,” Alex affirms, pleased with the results he has earned in just a few months. “You get all of your listings on there and you can keep on top of duplicates. It shows professionalism and that you care about how you come across.”

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