SEO of all stripes can honestly be confusing, filled with acronyms, guidelines, and weird-seeming rituals, but here’s the good news: almost nobody knows how to provide great customer service better than local business owners, and the majority of Google’s highest ideals tend to boil down to this. They want the public to have a good experience using their results to navigate the web, and a good experience can be summed up as helping people. As complex as local SEO can seem, that’s really all it’s about.

If you owned a local diner, you’d have a staffed phone number to take calls, a big sign over your door so your eatery could be found on the street, hours painted on your front window, a clean establishment, and someone to greet and seat your guests. You’d hand them a clear and comprehensive menu of your dishes, and you’d direct them to amenities like your patio, your bathrooms, or your booster seats. Your walls might be decorated with testimonials from famous customers, or just from regulars, and you might hang some photos about the history of the business to make the dining experience more enjoyable. You’d display certificates of having passed inspection by regulatory agencies, and if a customer wasn’t happy with a meal, you’d be there to try to make it right. You’d do all you could to provide a great meal, and you might even surprise a guest by serving their cherry pie à la mode so that they’d tell their friends about your restaurant, building up your great reputation.

All of this translates to what you can do online to develop your E-E-A-T factors over time, so top your own slice with a scoop of vanilla, because the work ethic you’ve put into running a great local business offline is going to serve you well as you step onto the web to help people discover, trust, cite, and choose you. You’ve got this!