Chris - Local SEO

Embed your GBP in the footer of your website not a random map. use share, then embed a map, from your own profile. buy a press release. Have those 300 backlinks and referring domains pointed at your site. link to your Google profile from the press release. Embed your Google profile too. your first release uses your brand name and your naked URL as the anchor. the second one mixes the brand with the keyword. do another release every two quarters. your competitors are sitting on zero or one. five referring domains and a thousand backlinks looks bought. keep the ratio healthy. before you buy anything, run your competitors through a free backlink checker. that number is what you have to beat. show your address on your GBP. not a service area. link your GBP to its city page, not your home page your primary category is the thing you sell. not the one that sounds closest. three to five secondary categories. only things you actually sell. list 15+ services on your GBP. then go back and write two to three sentences under every one. fill in every attribute. scroll the whole list. yes or no on each. use all 750 characters of your GBP description. link all seven social profiles from your GBP. link them from your site. link your site from all seven. your hours change where you rank. after you close, you rank lower. mark closed days closed. never lie about being open. put a keyword in your business name. if your LLC won't allow it, file a DBA. post real job photos. not stock. ask customers to leave photos in their reviews. send the exact review link, not your profile. it opens the stars and the box. put it on a QR code and a tap card. ask for the review within 24 hours of the job. follow up once. put your keyword and a variation in your meta title put your keyword and a variation in your title tag your H1 should have your main keyword in it your H2 should have your keyword and a variation your H3 should have your keyword and a variation your H4 should have your keyword and a variation your H5 should have your keyword and a variation your H6 should have your keyword and a variation have more than one of each h tag. Look at your competitors pages. Do 5% more. variations look like roof, roofing, roofer. pick the keyword in Google Trends, past five years. stack every way people say it. house sitting and house sitter are different keywords. then listen to how customers ask for it on the phone. then read your reviews and your competitors' reviews. those are the words. your paragraphs need your keywords too. and the variations. AND the entities in your niche. the things Google expects to see on a page like yours: materials, parts, brands, places. every entity has a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata item and a Knowledge Graph ID. link all three in knowsAbout. bold the keywords and the entities on the page. name your image files after the service before you upload. not the camera's number. two to three sentences of alt text on every image. keyword, variation, what's in the photo. a visual service needs more photos on the page. count what the ranking pages have. a video on the page gets video schema and the transcript behind it. two to three pages of content nobody has to scroll past. your About page tells Google who the owner is. college, licenses, what they know about, photos on the job. Person schema under every name. alumniOf, memberOf, sameAs to their profiles. put your reviews on your site with the name, the photo and the date. bold the terms in them. the text behind a closed accordion or a tab is still read by the crawler. the customer sees a clean page. have a privacy policy and a terms page. Google requests them whether you link to them or not. your name, address, and phone number should be identical on every listing post on your GBP twice a week. every post links to a service page. have a video on your GBP. always. respond to every review within 24 to 48 hours. the bad ones too. every page on your site should be two to three clicks from the homepage a service hub, a locations hub, a blog hub. each one links to every page of its kind. a page with no links pointing to it doesn't exist to Google one service, one page. a services page listing everything ranks for nothing. four to five blog posts about the service, each linking to its money page with the keyword as the anchor. a blog post ranking for your service keyword is a red flag. it's competing with your money page. fix the links and the counts. blog about where you are. things to do in your city, linked to your location page. pick www or non-www. link to that one every time. every external link uses that same version. your GBP, your YouTube, every directory. no URL shorteners. check for 404s. even the big guys have them. open Search Console, Settings, Crawl stats. if JavaScript is the top file type, Google is reading a blank page. do not build two pages targeting the same keyword. they will fight each other. have two sitemaps. xml for Google, html for people. don't build 200 city pages. build the ones you have something real to say about. build your site in plain HTML. if Google has to render it, it might see a blank page. your first backlinks should use your brand name as the anchor text the quote form pops out. every extra click costs you a lead. if your business has a season, start three to four months before it. anything talking about your business has the same Name. The same address. And phone number. do all of this for six months and watch what happens.

You're force feeding Google a 301 redirect with your own links. A link to the non www version of your URL. A link without the trailing slash when your pages have one. A link in your sitemap to a page that doesn't exist anymore. On one audit it was occurring on 12 different pages. Every time Google comes by and crawls the sitemap, it finds the URL, goes to visit it, and is greeted with a 301 redirect. You're wasting your crawl budget. You're wasting Google's time. Having one of these is not going to take your site down. 1,000 of these, 1,000 cuts, does lead to your site not ranking. Having 301 redirects isn't a bad thing. You just don't want links to the redirect. What you want are links to the endpoint, the page you're redirecting to. Keep the redirect in your server config. Clean the URL out of your sitemap and stop linking to it. Same with 404s. As time goes on your site's going to develop. More blog content, more services content, and you're going to remove content. One to two to three 404s isn't going to kill your site. We just don't want to be force feeding Google 404 errors for no reason. Once a quarter, go through your sitemap, go through all of your internal links, and click them. Do these all actually still resolve? Another way to find them is Google Search Console. Settings, Crawl, open the report, scroll down to the server errors.

How you do your internal linking signals to Google what the important page is. If you have a ton of internal links pointing to a page that's not your money page, Google will think that page is important and should be ranking. Everything you've done isn't being applied to the page you want ranking. A site I audited was properly interlinking its pages. It just wasn't linking back to the service page we wanted ranking in search. Money pages are the pages we want ranking for a specific term. When someone lands on them, they convert to our service. If roof repair is one of my services, I want that page optimized for roof repair, and when someone searches roof repair, I want my roof repair page to rank. Three sources link to the money page. The blog content, the service pages, the location pages. The anchor text is an exact match of the keyword I'm trying to rank for. Your blog content is there to add relevance and link back. It is not there to compete with your money page. If you don't properly interlink, it can take a week or more for Google to come by and find all of that new on-page SEO. With all of these links pointing to the page, Google finds it a lot sooner. This stops at a certain point. That's when you start considering backlinks.

Everyone can build an app now. Then they ask me how to SEO it. What you actually first have to ask is: does anybody search for this? Go to Google Ads. Then Tools. Then Planning. Keyword Planner. Paste the term in. Hit get search volume and forecasts. You can also try Google Trends. It shows you what's being searched, but not the quantity. Two terms. The first one? Nada. Nothing. The second one has a decent amount. 1,300. That one you target on page. Then you build all the links and all of the content. If they do search for it, it's worth your time. And watch what they're searching for. Someone searching how to be a process server is probably not looking for your services.

Google can't read. It has to take your text and turn it into numbers. Some algorithmic way so a computer can understand what the page is about. Then it ties all of that information into knowledge graph nodes. A whole bunch of lines that link to each other, with little nodes of information. It does this for all the major entities. Wood. Vinyl. A broom. It has to create an understanding around each one. It does it for cities, for counties, for states. And for your Google Business Profile, which has a Knowledge Graph ID the same way it has a Place ID and a CID. So you don't have to teach Google what a ridge vent is. It already has a knowledge graph entry for it. Entities are just nouns. The nouns that come up when you talk about the service. Google doesn't only count your keyword, it measures these too. Words are fuzzy. The ID pins it. In your knowsAbout schema, link to these other sources of information, these other entities that Google is aware of. Then go and search. See what is currently ranking. Look at those pages, and measure what is on the page.

SEO may not be the best approach to generating leads for your business. When we think about marketing, we also have to think about opportunity cost. Is it worth it to spend $1,500 to two grand a month, Or 10 to 30 hours a month figuring this out? Or is it worth it, opportunity cost wise, to go and run paid ads and create content? There are so many different variables. Start with your competition. If you're in a low competition environment, it is easier to rank. The people you're pushing out of the way to appear in that top spot are a lot easier. It still takes SEO. But it may not require the amount of SEO needed in a super competitive environment like downtown Fort Worth. If you're a service area business, it's an uphill battle the whole way. You may not even get above the hill. Then seasonality. Start the campaign three to four months before the peak. With SEO you've got 10,000 moving parts. That's why there's such varying results. So before you commit: go and search. See what is currently ranking. Sometimes the answer is to go run paid ads and create content. And there's tons of other ways to generate leads or market the business. Helping out in the Facebook groups. Door knocking. Putting up yard signs. Having a referral network. Doing affiliate deals. SEO is one of them. It may not be the best one.

Social posts are showing up more and more in Google. Also in A.I. search results. Your social media posts can rank in search. Someone goes to search roof replacement Pensacola, and there's a chance that your Instagram, your YouTube, your LinkedIn, your Facebook and maybe your Twitter posts can rank. That can get you that click. In an experiment I did, Google crawled Instagram. Two of my Instagram posts are now indexed. Before, those were not there. Google just rolled out something in Search Console where you can start seeing the traffic your social media posts are getting. ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini are search engines now. They only know what they can crawl. So how do you create hundreds of posts? Record a podcast. 1. Before recording, Google the main keyword and open People Also Ask. Those are the questions your customers already type. 2. Record once. Answer the questions rapid fire. 3. Feed the podcast video to Claude. Have it transcribe and create 10 short form videos. 4. 10 short form videos turn into 60 when repurposed. 5. Each short form video turns into a still carousel on Instagram. That's another 60 posts. 6. Take the transcripts. Write tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube community posts and Facebook posts. Each post targets a keyword. Each post links back to the site. Do this four more times, and we're at 1,000 posts. Now connect them. You can create a link network with these, and the press release. 1. Every post links back to the site. A tier 1 link points at your website. 2. Buy a press release. It links to your site and your Google Business Profile, with the map embedded. Around 500 backlinks and 500 referring domains. 3. Now point some of your social posts at the press release page instead of your site. The release has backlinks of its own now. That's tier 2. A tier 2 link points at a page that links to you. 4. On your website, have a social posts page. On that page, it just has links to all of your social media posts. That gives Google a direct way to go and find all of them. Your posts link to your site. Your posts link to the release. The release links to your site. Your site links to your posts. It just creates that whole loop. Now your links have links. Google and the A.I. crawlers read all of it.

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I put a different keyword inside every HTML tag to see what Google indexes. 130 HTML tags. 130 different keywords. All prehistoric plankton, because it's low competition. I waited for the page to be indexed by Google. Then I searched each keyword on that URL to see if Google would show a result. Your title is indexable. Your H1s all the way to H6 are indexable. Your meta description, image, body, paragraph. Indexable. A title attribute is not indexable. What really spiked my interest is JSON-LD. We know schema is a ranking factor. But it won't index the keywords in there to where you can be searched for them in Google Search. Now, just because something doesn't index doesn't mean that it can't help you rank. What you end up having is kind of like a logic box. Indexed, and a ranking factor. Not indexed, but a ranking factor. Indexed, but not a ranking factor. Not indexed, and not a ranking factor. That is the next test. I have 38 new tests to run. Every time you test, you get more and more ideas of what else to test.

How I do Google Business Profile research. 1. Install the Chrome extension Pleper. It gives you a whole bunch more information when you are looking at Google Business Profiles. It only enables when you actually click on the profile. 2. Look at your local competition. Go and search. See what is currently ranking. 3. Then look nationally. Go across the entire U.S., looking at all of the biggest cities. I'm not in Los Angeles. But I can go and look in a super competitive environment like Los Angeles, and I can see what they are currently doing to rank. DUI lawyer Los Angeles is one of the most competitive keywords you can target. One profile there has 57 services. Hit and run DUI. DUI and bodily injury. Not just the top level version of the keyword. What I look at on each profile: The primary category, and all of the secondary categories. How many services. The keyword variations in those services. The descriptions on those services. The attributes. As you look at more and more competitive environments, you'll see different SEO tactics being used. When something is common across everything I've looked at for that keyword, I have more confidence that I want to apply it. The more boxes you can check on that Google Business Profile, the better.

The Google Business Profile now explicitly says what your website mentions. I searched second DUI lawyer in Chicago. Right here it says: "Their website mentions second DUI." That's like a rich result on the Google Business Profile, because on their site they mention providing the service for second DUIs. That is something I would have never considered. If you are a DUI lawyer, you also want pages that mention you help people with their second DUI, their third DUI. Not everybody searches the same keyword that you search for. Everyone has a different way of searching for the service they're looking for. Where to find yours: 1. Your Google Business Profile. Go to Performance and scroll down a little bit. You'll start to see the search terms people are using and your profile is appearing for. 2. Google Search Console. It shows the queries your site already shows up for. 3. Google Trends, past five years. Stack every way people say the service. Then scroll down. The related queries are keywords I hadn't thought of. 4. Keyword Planner in Google Ads, for average monthly searches. It's free. A broad brush stroke, not a guarantee. 5. Google it. The bolded words in the results are what Google thinks the keyword is. 6. Your competitors' profiles. Install the Chrome extension Pleper and look at their services. Hit and run DUI. DUI and bodily injury. Those are keyword variations. 7. Your customers. How they call in and ask for the service is how they type it into Google. 8. The reviews. Yours and your competitors'. Customers describe the service in their own words right there, and those words are keywords. You want pages that mention those. How many do you go up to? I would look at the search volume.

People have this misconception about keyword stuffing. Go search DUI lawyer Los Angeles. Click some of the top ranking sites. View source. Control + F. Look at how many times they use the keyword DUI or lawyer. When I looked, the site ranking in the first position had lawyer on the page 1,249 times. DUI, 303 times. Just think about that for a second. Then you scroll on Instagram and it's "keyword stuffing's bad." "You can only put your keyword on the page 100 times." What are we defining as keyword stuffing? You can go search DUI lawyer Los Angeles and break every keyword stuffing rule out there. Anytime someone tells you that you can't use your keyword more than a certain amount of times, completely ignore it. Go search your keyword and look at the top results. What are they currently getting away with? Then the second question: why can't I? Look at what's currently ranking, not what somebody told you.

So I've done testing where we will place code on a page to see how Google renders the page. It is entirely different than using the URL inspection tool.

Have you heard of tiered linking? A tier 1 link points at your website. Release #1 linking to your homepage is tier 1. A tier 2 link points at a page that links to you. Here is how I do it with press releases. You do the first one. Then you do a second one. In the second one you get five links. Instead of using all five going to your site, one or two of them go to some of the major publications from the first one. Think of it like this. When we're building links to your site, you're building that website up. Now we're building links to a press release page, and that press release page is linking to you. It's kind of the same thing. The newer releases pointing at the older ones are tier 2 links. They don't point at your website. They point at your press release pages. That makes the earlier releases stronger. And those earlier releases already link to your site and your Google Business Profile. Social posts can be tier 2 too. Link some of them to the release pages instead of your site, and each release gets stronger from two directions. Give the first release time to work. Around the four-month mark, look at the next release. Now your links have links.

Should you buy press releases from a second provider? Absolutely. A different provider is going to have different media outlets. And one of the big factors is referring domains. Referring domains just means the count of unique websites that link to you. Ten links from the same site count as one referring domain. So if they have a whole bunch of different referring domains than what I have, that adds to you. Do a little bit more research first, because you also don't want to get burnt. Meaning it hurts you instead of helps you. Go on one of their pages. If it's a link farm you'll see it at a first glance. Heavy in spam. One page linking out to tens to hundreds of thousands of pages. Massive amounts of blog content with no real value, only there to link out. A link coming from a news organization instead of a link farm is a higher quality backlink. Google is looking for external sources to verify that you are who you say you are. Referring domains are the number one backlink ranking factor. Count them before anything else.

Domain authority is not a Google metric. Google has no association with it. It has not publicly said that this matters at all. Domain authority is just a measurement of links. A tool visits all of those sites. Your competitors. Your local chamber of commerce. Every single company in that area. Then they come up with their own math formula of what adds up. Now you're at a two. Thirty links from thirty different referring domains, now you're at a three. They come up with their own measurements. People use it as a proxy because a billion dollar company makes it and it's easy to understand. Google is looking for external sources to verify that you are who you say you are. There's two types of relevance. Relevance to the niche, and geographic relevance. A whole bunch of links from an e commerce site is not going to really help you if you're a roofing company. A whole bunch of links from other local businesses in your area will. The referring domains to backlink ratio is also really important. One referring domain with a hundred backlinks all from that one referring domain doesn't look natural. It looks spammy.

So I've gotten a ton of DMs about Press Releases. One of the biggest questions is: "What results can I expect" "What should I see from this" "Can I see a before and after" "Show me examples of you applying this" So today I'm going to rank a Brand new website with only Press Releases links. I've already got someone that's okay with me using their brand / company information. I needed a place to send the leads once the site ranks. Now you might be asking, why not just answer their questions instead? It's a great question, there's two main reasons. 1.) My respect for my clients Privacy 2.) Security reasons With SEO it's very common for people to "Negative SEO" your site. They will point bad backlinks at your site. They will do a Denial of service, where your server crashes or it's resources are so full that Google cannot reach it. So you're entire site drops out of the index. They will point Adult links (Think XXX) at your site and get it taken down. Then there's also snitch SEO, where someone will literally go tell Google you're breaking the rules. When you look in reality, almost everything is breaking the rules. So instead of exposing previous clients to all of this and having to worry. I'm going to kill a few birds with one stone. 1.) Setting expectations of a Press Release 2.) Have a VSL or a resource I can show people without having to answer questions. 3.) Show I can rank a site 4.) Document the process showing off my product I've already paid for the Domain. I've paid for the Press Release. I will incur all costs. I'm not charging per lead or a monthly rate for the site to be up and generating leads. This is entirely Pro Bono or Free. I will not reveal the Domain until after I've shown what you can do with Press Releases.

ChatGPT has never ranked a site. It has only been fed Google documentation. And Google is not going to tell us what it takes to rank. There's no incentive. The majority of their money comes from ads. So you take advice that works, you plug it into your A.I., and your A.I. says Google's documentation and a random Reddit thread said this is spammy and bad. Check it yourself. Search DUI lawyer Los Angeles. Click some of the top ranking sites. View source. Control + F. Look at how many times they use the keyword. You'll see it a couple hundred times. Thousands of times. Then you scroll Instagram and hear keyword stuffing's bad. What are we defining as keyword stuffing? Look at what's already currently ranking. That will tell you what's allowable and what you can get away with. Then go look at other competitive environments. Los Angeles. Beverly Hills. Fort Worth. Dallas. What are those companies doing? And test. I'm at 25 domains where I'm just throwing shit at a wall. I just want to see what works.

Be careful with A.I. tools creating 100 page or 200 page websites. I've done a lot of audits recently, and people are starting to make these insanely big websites. 50 pages. 100 pages. 200 pages. Because it's so easy with these A.I. tools. This is normally how it goes. You create a whole bunch of pages at once on a brand new site. Google loves it at first. Traffic explodes. It goes good for the first month. Then the second month you are taken out of orbit. A whole bunch of pages at once on a brand new site is a huge spam signal. It doesn't look organic or natural. To rank a local business you may not need more than 15 pages. You can rank a one-page website. I have a client right now on just the homepage. What I do instead: 1. Start with the homepage. Get the on-page optimization really well. 2. The privacy policy, the terms of service, an About page. The sitemap, robots.txt, ads.txt. 3. The Google Business Profile linking back to it. 4. Then three to five pages. Then blog content that links back to the service pages. Already published them all? Slow down your content creation pace. Start interlinking them. Build links to the root domain, then to the individual pages.

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