Firstly I want to apologise for the lack of feature updates from us over the last few months, there is a good reason for this… we have been busy at work building Hike Local!
Since launching Hike we have continually had requests for integration with Google My Business, well we have great news! Hike Local is our latest product which connects directly with your Google My Business account and helps you to improve your performance in Google Maps.
Hike Local comes with a wealth of shiny new features to help to optimise your Google My Business listing in simple easy-to-follow steps that you will be used to from Hike.
See an overview below of some of the key features you will have access to;
Listing Optimiser
With the listing optimiser you will be guided through the process of optimising your Google My Business listing from directly within the Hike Local platform. Each part of the optimisation process is broken down and recommendations are given.
You changes are automatically synced with Google so you do not have to update 2 places with the same information.
Questions and Answers
Adding questions to your listing is a great way for you to build out your own FAQ section for your potential customers to see from directly within Google Maps. You can also answer any questions that have been asked from within your Hike Local dashboard (even the questions you asked yourself). Building out a detailed FAQ section withing your Google My Business listing can help to answer questions your potential customers may have before they sign up.
Media Management
Google’s latest research shows that business listings with photo’s get 30% more calls and 42% more direction requests that those without photos! This is an amazing stat and something that you can directly impact from your Hike Local dashboard. With Hike Local you can upload photos to any of the 8 categories along with getting view stats for each photo.
Step-by-Step Actions
Following on the success of the Hike Action Engine we have built a custom action engine specifically for your Local SEO, this includes 26 new data points that we check on your local listing.
The actions have also been categorised into the individual Hike Local sections to make them easier to manage. One big change is that you can complete all of these actions from directly within Hike Local!
Review Analysis
Reviews for your business has a big impact on both customer confidence and your local SEO performance. With Hike Local you can track any new reviews along with getting detailed sentiment analysis on each of your reviews.
The sentiment analysis will show which of your review are left in a positive, negative or neutral sentiment. We will also show the top sentiment words, highlighting areas of the business that people love and more importantly people dislike.
You have the ability to respond to reviews from directly within the platform. Responding to both positive and negative reviews quickly can really help to portray great customer service.
Local Posts
Local Posts are Google’s version of Twitter & Facebook posts, and get great exposure within Google’s network. There are 3 types of posts that you can create within Hike Local, Updates, Events and Offers.
1 important note about Google Local Posts are that they expire 7 days (unless they are an event which the end date is more than 7 days in the future) after they have been posted. This means that to keep a post live on your listing on a regular basis you would have to post every 7 days.
With Hike Local you can schedule posts for any time in the future, meaning that you can do a month’s worth of posts in one-go and always have a post live on your listing. (something you cannot do in the Google My Business dashboard)
Insights
Our insights dashboard takes all of your insights information from Google My Business and allows you to compare it against different time periods to see how your performance has improved.
Within your Google My Business dashboard you can only see stats from the last week/month/quarter and not between 2 specific dates. You also cannot compare data over time. We grab 6 months worth of data when you join Hike Local and keep grabbing data for as long as you are on the platform, meaning that over time you can get a better picture of your Local SEO performance.
Lets Talk Costs…
Hike Local could be seen as a whole platform on its own and because of this we are allowing people to be able to sign up for Hike Local without the full Hike platform, this will start at just $19.99/£14.99 per month.
For existing Hike customers you are able to add Hike Local to your existing plans for a reduced price of $15/£10 per month, this can be done from within your dashboard.
