Founder & Chief Executive Officer
A personal trainer in Toronto came to us with a social media account that had been running for a long time and had collected about 128 followers. Low, given how long she had been at it, and that was only the surface problem.
We logged in and found that nearly all of her followers were in other countries, mostly India and Bangladesh. The ads running on her account were from UNICEF, served in Hindi and Urdu rather than English. Even the accounts being suggested to her were from other countries. Nothing about her account was connected to the city she actually worked in.
It took us three months to clean up, reset, and genuinely relocate that account. We ran local engagement, tagged local people, and built collaborations with businesses in her area, all to demonstrate to the platform that this was a Toronto business serving Toronto clients.
She trained people one on one. Her entire business depended on reaching people within driving distance, and her account had been quietly teaching the algorithm the opposite.
The account had not been neglected. Content had been posted. Activity had happened. The problem was that every signal the account produced pointed somewhere other than Toronto.
Platforms work out who to show your content to based on patterns, including who engages with you, who you engage with, where interaction comes from, and what your existing audience looks like. Once an audience skews heavily toward one region, the system keeps serving you more of the same, since it reads that as evidence of who finds you relevant. The advertising she was being shown was simply the clearest symptom. The platform had categorised her account as belonging to an audience she could never sell to.
That is a compounding problem rather than a static one. Every day the account kept running on those signals, the picture got more entrenched, which is why resetting it took months rather than a week of posting different content.
Summary Platforms infer your audience from engagement patterns, and once an audience skews to one region the system serves more of the same. The misalignment compounds daily, which is why resetting took months.
A personal trainer doing one on one sessions has a service area measured in kilometres. A follower in another country has precisely zero value to that business, no matter how engaged they are.
Local intent dominates search behaviour, with roughly 46 of every 100 Google searches carrying local intent, and 98% of consumers searching online for nearby businesses. Around 80% of US consumers look up local businesses weekly. For a service that requires physical presence, local relevance is not one factor among many. It is the whole thing.
So those 128 followers were worse than no followers. They were active evidence, delivered to the platform daily, that her content belonged in front of people who could never book her.
Summary Roughly 46 of every 100 Google searches carry local intent and 98% of consumers search for nearby businesses. For a service requiring physical presence, followers outside the service area have no value.
This is where the cost calculation gets uncomfortable.
Three months of specialist work to undo the damage. Plus however long the account had been running in the wrong direction, which is time that produced nothing. Plus the clients she did not get during all of that, which is the largest number and the one nobody puts in a spreadsheet because it is invisible.
Set that against whatever the cheaper arrangement saved per month and the maths rarely works out. Cheap help that produces nothing is merely wasteful. Cheap help that actively miscategorises your business creates a problem that costs more to fix than the original work would have cost to do properly.
I understand the instinct completely, since budgets are real and small business owners are stretched. The thing worth weighing is that the downside here is not simply getting less value. It is paying twice and losing a year.
Summary Three months of repair work, plus the wasted period beforehand, plus the clients never acquired. Help that miscategorises your business costs more to fix than doing it properly would have cost.
I want to be precise about what this story proves, because the obvious conclusion is slightly off target.
The problem was not where the person sat. It was that nobody involved was grounded in the market the business served, and nothing in how the account was run reflected that market. The engagement happened with whoever was nearby in the manager’s world rather than in the client’s city. No local businesses were tagged, no local conversations joined, no local collaborations built. Those are the deliberate actions that teach a platform where you belong, and they require either being in that market or running a strategy specifically designed to compensate for not being.
Plenty of capable people work remotely and manage local accounts properly, by working through scheduling platforms, building genuinely local engagement lists, and knowing the neighbourhoods, events, and businesses that matter. Plenty of local hires do none of that and produce exactly the same mess. The variable is whether local relevance is being actively managed, and price is a weak proxy for that.
Summary The problem was absence of local grounding rather than location itself. Local relevance has to be actively managed through deliberate local engagement, and whether that happens is the real variable.
Before giving anyone access, get answers to a few things.
Ask how they will build local relevance specifically, and listen for whether the answer includes naming actual places, events, or business types in your area. Ask who you will be engaging with and how that list gets built. Ask how they will handle account access, since logins from unexpected places contribute to the signal problem. Ask what your audience demographics look like now and what they should look like in six months, which forces a measurable target. And ask to see your own analytics regularly, since the trainer’s situation was visible in her numbers the whole time.
Then check your own account today. Look at where your followers are, what ads you are being served, and which accounts are being suggested to you. That takes two minutes and tells you whether the platform understands where you operate.
Summary Ask how local relevance will be built, who you will engage with, how account access is handled, and what your audience should look like in six months. Then check your own follower locations and served ads today.
This problem is not confined to social, and the website version is less visible.
A site with no local grounding struggles in local search for the same underlying reason, since search engines also work out who you serve from signals. Content that never mentions your city, a missing or thin Google Business Profile, no local references, and no connection to anything in your area all leave the same gap. Local search engine optimization is largely the work of making your location unmistakable, and a good SEO company will treat that as foundational for any business with a service area.
Website design matters here too, since the structure needs to carry location clearly rather than burying it in a footer. For a business serving a specific area, being technically well built and geographically ambiguous is a wasted asset. The trainer’s account was a vivid version of a problem that shows up quietly on a great many websites.
Summary Websites face the same problem when nothing signals location, since search engines also infer who you serve. Local search engine optimization makes your location unmistakable, which is foundational for any business with a service area.
A personal trainer in Toronto had an account full of followers in other countries, ads in languages her clients do not speak, and three months of specialist work ahead of her before any of it could start working.
Whoever runs your social media needs to be actively building relevance in the market you actually serve, with local engagement, local collaborations, and local knowledge behind it. When that is missing, the platform learns the wrong thing about your business and keeps reinforcing it.
Saving money on the front end is understandable. Just make sure what you are buying includes somebody paying attention to where your clients actually are, because in the long run the cheaper option can cost you considerably more.
Sources:
SOCi Consumer Behavior Index and BrightLocal research, reported via Shno (approximately 46 of every 100 Google searches carry local intent; 98% of consumers search online for nearby companies; around 80% of US consumers search for local businesses weekly).
https://www.shno.co/marketing-statistics/local-seo-statistics
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