SEO Locale has been handling the marketing for our company, Sector Bay Laundry, for about 6 months. We moved on from another company, and the work ethic and responsiveness have been a night and day difference. I can't point out one specific person because the entire team as…
SEO for businesses on the lake.
Erie is the one Pennsylvania city that faces another direction: a Great Lakes port, a summer town on Presque Isle, a medical and manufacturing city the rest of the year, closer to Cleveland and Buffalo than to Philadelphia. We run SEO for Erie businesses from the other corner of the state: the map pack, the pages for Millcreek and the townships, and the reviews that bring the call in July and in January.
One of the areas we serve from two offices in the Philadelphia region.
An SEO campaign built for Erie’s two seasons.
Reading the Erie market
The city and its neighborhoods; Millcreek and the Peach Street corridor where the retail and the practices are; Harborcreek, Fairview and the townships; the bayfront and the peninsula. The audit maps where your customers search from and which part your competitors hold.
Google Business Profile for residents and visitors
Categories, hours that change with the season, photos and reviews that name the neighborhoods, so the profile shows in the three-pack for the Millcreek resident and the visitor at the bayfront alike.
Rankings, calls and forms in one report
Every keyword is checked weekly in SEOApp, the rank tracker we built, and the monthly report shows rankings, calls and forms together from your own analytics.
Content written for northwestern Pennsylvania
Service pages and posts that name the neighborhoods, the townships and the season. A contractor in Fairview and a restaurant on State Street need different pages, and both get them.
Why Erie businesses hire a Philadelphia agency
Erie is the farthest market in the state from our office and one of the least contested in search. Most of its map packs are held by businesses with profiles claimed years ago and never completed, and most of its business sites do not work on a phone. That is the opening: an Erie business that completes its profile, publishes real pages for its services and its neighborhoods and asks every customer for a review can hold its category across the county within a year. We bring the process from a market where every ranking is fought over, and we run it the same way for clients across Pennsylvania.
From State Street to Peach Street
Erie’s businesses live downtown along State Street and the bayfront, along upper Peach Street in Millcreek where the mall, the big retail and many of the practices are, around the two hospitals and the university, and in the townships of Harborcreek, Fairview and Summit. Each is its own search, and the campaign builds a page for the ones you serve, a profile whose service areas name them, and reviews that mention them. The Pennsylvania page covers the state; this one is about the corner by the lake.
A summer market and a winter market, in the same city.
From June to August Erie is Presque Isle, the bayfront, the beaches and the visitors from Pittsburgh, Cleveland and Buffalo who search for restaurants, rentals and things to do without knowing a street name. The rest of the year it is a city of hospitals, a university, GE’s old shops and the businesses that serve the people who live there, who search by neighborhood and by Peach Street. The campaign has to be built for both, a season apart.
What clients say on Google.
Live reviews pulled straight from both our Google Business Profiles, refreshed daily.
SEO Locale has been great in every way! Very responsive and certainly willing and able to help in anything related to our site, seo and etc. You will not be disappointed, they are a great team to add as a vendor for all businesses.
Amazing team. SEO Locale has helped transform our digital presence and continues to deliver real, measurable results. They’re responsive, collaborative, and genuinely care about our growth. Highly recommend for anyone looking to level up their marketing.
SEO Locale has been incredible to work with. We had been using another company before them, and the results were very poor so partnering with SEO Locale was a breath of fresh air. From day one the difference in communication, professionalism, and results was obvious. Nick and…
We’ve been working with SEO Locale for over a year now, and the impact has been great. They took the time to understand our niche in exotic car exhausts and built an SEO strategy that fits our brand perfectly. We’ve seen stronger organic traffic, better keyword rankings, and…
I had a really good impression of Nick and the team but unfortunately they significantly underdelivered on what was promised. With two days left after our first month all we had received was a list of keywords and a few articles that were almost certainly AI generated, about 20%…
Questions from Erie businesses
The ones we hear on the first call, answered the way we answer them there.
Yes. Erie is the far corner of the state from our office in Montgomeryville, and the campaign runs the way it does for every client who is not down the road: a video kickoff, a shared dashboard, weekly rank checks in SEOApp, a monthly review with your strategist and a phone number that gets answered. We work with clients across the country the same way.
Yes, if it starts in the winter. The visitor searches begin in the spring, and the pages and the profile have to be ranking by then. A campaign that starts in June helps next summer, not this one; paid search can carry this one.
Both, in different places. Millcreek is a separate result page and most of the county’s retail and many of its practices are there. The home page names the town the business is in, and a page for the other covers it. The audit shows which searches have the volume in your category.
Map pack gains from the profile and citation work usually show within two to three months, and faster than in Philadelphia because the competition is thin. Organic rankings for the service pages build over four to eight months. The audit gives a timeline for your category.
Every keyword is checked weekly in SEOApp, the rank tracker we built, and you get a login. The monthly report shows rankings, traffic, calls and forms from your own analytics, and the strategist walks you through it. Nothing is a screenshot.
No. Every agreement is month to month. The plan is explained before you pay for it, and you can stop when the work stops being worth it.
Meet our
SEO team.
The people who would run your Erie campaign, in their own words — how we win the map pack and the searches behind it for clients across Pennsylvania.
Book a Call
Erie searches by season, by neighborhood and by the people passing through
The resident search is the year-round market, and it is won the way local search is won everywhere: Local SEO pages for the neighborhoods and townships, Google Business Profile SEO work that completes the profile and keeps the reviews coming, and a site that works on a phone. The visitor search is the summer market, and it is different. A family in a rental near Presque Isle searches for a pizza place, an urgent care or a boat rental without knowing Millcreek from Harborcreek, so the pages for a business that wants them are written for the visitor, with the landmarks instead of the township names and the hours that are true in July.
Who you compete with
Erie’s map packs are held mostly by businesses that have never done SEO on purpose. Google trusts their age, which is the only advantage they have, and a complete profile with a review stream and real pages passes it. The campaign is built on completeness rather than tricks.
What we do first for an Erie business
The free audit, reviewed by a person, comes first. It covers where you sit in the Erie map pack and the organic results for the searches that bring calls, who sits above you, what their profiles and sites carry that yours does not, and the technical faults on your site. The profile and citations are fixed in the first month. The service pages are rewritten next. Neighborhood and township pages follow, and the review process is set up to run from your own software.
Paid search and the site
Paid Advertising covers the searches worth buying before the rankings arrive, concentrated in the summer for the businesses that live on it, and Web Design & Development rebuilds the site when the audit shows it is the thing holding the rankings back, which in Erie is more often than not.
Manufacturing, healthcare and the lake economy
Erie’s larger employers are the hospital systems, the university and the colleges, the plastics and locomotive manufacturing that never fully left, and the insurance company downtown. The businesses that serve them, industrial services, staffing, logistics across the lake corridor, search regionally and nationally, and for them the local program protects the name and the office while a National SEO program carries the searches from Cleveland, Buffalo and Pittsburgh. The practices, contractors, restaurants and shops that serve the residents are local, and the map pack is the whole game.
The lake economy is its own category: marinas, charters, rentals, the bayfront restaurants and hotels. Those businesses are searched by visitors a season ahead, and their pages and profiles have to be strong by spring. SEO starts at $500 a month and there is no contract.
Other Services
An Erie business is found on a map before it is found on a page, so Local SEO and Google Business Profile SEO come first, with Web Design & Development behind them for the site the calls come through and Paid Advertising for the summer searches worth buying while the rankings build.
SEO tips & information.
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Free local SEO audit. We check where you sit in the Erie map pack, in season and out, who is above you, and exactly what it takes to change that.