Transcription
Did you know you can rank in Google searches 10, 20, even 30 miles away from where your business is located? Most local businesses only show up in searches near their physical location. But what if you could expand your reach to cover your entire service area?
In this video, I'm going to show you a proven method that's helping local service businesses rank far beyond their physical address. I'll walk you through the exact website changes you need to make and simple addition to your Google business profile that make everything work together.
As someone that's been doing local SEO for over 10 years, I'm telling you guys right now, most YouTubers are sharing old basic tactics. My tactics actually make money. Today, I make over $50,000 per month generating leads for local service businesses. And [music] I taught this to over thousands of students over the years. Majority were completely newbies that just wanted to make money online and quit their 9-to-five jo. Some were business owners that were able to massively grow their online business.
According to search engine roundt, 46% of all Google searches have local intent. Nearly half of all people searching on Google are looking for local businesses and services. It's easy to rank in map searches when people are close to your business location. But as searchers get further away from your physical address, your ability to show up in their search results drops.
Let me give you an example. Let's say you're a roofing company located in Oak Park, Illinois. You want to get customers nearby cities like Chicago, Evenston, or Elmhurst. The problem is that your business location is in Oak Park isn't close enough to rank well for people that are searching from those other areas. This happens because distance between your physical address and the person searching is still one of the biggest factors that Google uses to decide which businesses to show.
This is a huge problem for service businesses where customers don't actually have to come to your location. Think about roofers or construction contractors who travel to their customers homes. If you are one of those local service businesses, you're most likely not being found by potential customers who are just 5 or 10 miles away from you. Think with Google reveals that 76% of consumers who search for something near me on their smartphones actually visit a business within one day. That's a lot of missed opportunities and loss revenue.
Fortunately, there's ways around this problem. The strategy I'm about to share with you involve creating specific pages on your website for each services you offer in each city you want to target. Then you connect these pages to your Google business profile in a way that tells Google that you service those areas. There's also a way to leverage the reviews section to appear in more locations. This is going to be the bonus hack of this video that most people don't know about.
Let me break this down into simple steps that anyone can follow.
Step one, list your services. Start by writing down every single service your business offers. This list will be basis of your expansion strategy. Don't leave anything out. Even small services that you don't do very often. For example, if you're a roofing company, your services might include roof installation and replacement, chimney flashing, commercial roofing, flat roof services, leak detection, [music] and skylight installation. If you're a construction business, you might offer residential and commercial construction, renovation, project management, design build services, carpentry, masonry, the list goes on. But make sure all these services are relevant to your main service. Take your time with this step. The more complete your list is, the more opportunities you'll have to reach new customers. You can prompt chat GPT, list me 50 relevant services for a roofing company and then pick and choose from this list. Bonus tip, if you really want to rank for commercial roofing, find adjacent services related to that, for example, industrial roofing services. And then I would interlink those two pages together. This is what's creating topical clusters which enhances your topical authority which in of itself helps you rank for the commercial roofing keyword even better.
Step two, identify your target cities. Make a list of all the cities where you want to get more customers. These should be places where you are realistically willing to travel to do the work. Don't include cities that are 80 mi away if you're not actually willing to serve customers that distance. Think about current service area and expand it a little. Where most people make a mistake is they forget to build pages for cities that are 2,000 3,000 population because they think that those cities are too small. But I've gotten plenty of highquality leads from those location. Especially when those cities are 15 to 30 m radius within your location, then you really should include all the little suburb cities that you can find.
Step three, research and create service city pair pages on your site. Take your two lists, which are your services and your target cities, and combine them. Each combination represents a new page you'll need to create on your website. For example, if you have five services and six target cities, you may need to create more than six separate pages. If the services that you offer are very semantically different and depending on your competition, let me give you an example. If you want more leads for Skylight installation in Elmherst, Illinois, do a quick Google search for Skylight installation in Elmherst, Illinois. If you see bunch of pages in the SERs with the page title that contain those words, you most likely need to create that page as well. Don't worry about directories like Yelp because those pages will always exist. Page one of Google is always going to be reserved for Yelp or some of these directories. What you're looking for are actual companies that have built these pages. But if there isn't any pages from these other companies with those keywords in the title, then you most likely can get away with sticking skylight on a general roofing subsidy page. For example, if it's a small enough city, most likely you can get away with creating a page that targets the most important keywords such as commercial and residential roof replacement and repair in Elmharst, Illinois. And then I would stick that word skylight in the meta description. This way this singular page can rank for the most important keywords which are roof replacement and repair especially commercial and then also pick up traffic for anyone looking for skylight installation as well because it's in your meta description and it's in somewhere within your page. In SEO it's always a balance of looking at the competition and then only creating new pages when necessary. Ideally, you want to create pages that ranks for multiple keywords as opposed to creating bunch of separate pages because if [music] you create too many pages, there's also a negative consequence of decreasing overall page rank across the site as well as increasing unnecessary bloat on the site which can hurt the crawlability of your site. Keep in mind, roofing Chicago will be very competitive and you might not really rank for that with a sub city page. However, maybe you're willing to travel beyond 80 mi distance if it's a commercial roofing job. So, you could create a page like commercial roof replacement and repair in Wonder Lake, Illinois, which is only a 4,000 population small city. But when one commercial job is worth so much, it quickly begins to add up when you begin targeting dozens of these small cities. Google Keyword Planner is free and gives you basic search volume data. You can always use my keyword research tool on my website to get relevant and longtail keywords for free. If you want more detailed information, paid tools like keywords everywhere, which is quite inexpensive, can provide more insight into which keywords provide more search volume. But if you're a business owner, you should already know what keywords that you really want to go after.
Step four, create three to four highquality service pages. Each page you create should look almost similar to your homepage, but even more specific, useful information about that service. Remember, for many potential customers, this page will be their first impression of your business. It needs to look very professional and it should be very persuasive and convince them to contact you over other competitor companies. Use your homepage as a template. Include a strong headline, clear benefits of working with you, your unique process. On our site, we include sections about how we work with insurance companies to get proper funding for storm damage roofs. Include an FAQ, customer testimonials, and a clear call to action. Make each page feel like a complete standalone website [music] for that specific service in that specific city.
Now, I'm going to add this in here because I get this question all the time. What sort of pages should I link to from the homepage? Well, the homepage should realistically only link to about three to four pages. that is like the most highquality service pages on your website. Don't use the homepage to link out to all these subsidy pages because the more pages you link to from the homepage, it decreases the page rank that you are going to distribute to those pages. The service pages you link to from the homepage should really just be that service page instead of linking to a subsidy page. It serves two function. When people click on these links and read more useful information on these service pages, it is increasing their dwell time on your site, thus increasing user behavior signal, which becomes massive [music] ranking factor over time. Pro tip, I wouldn't link too many pages from your homepage. Longtail keyword service pages that doesn't get heavy demand, I would just leave those in the menu navigation of your website instead of linking out to it from the homepage. Again, you don't want to dilute the page rank. But another second function is that each link on the homepage tells Google what that company is about. So, for example, if you have a lawn care site, but you start linking to a bunch [music] of tree service pages from your homepage, you will begin to confuse Google on what your company's true focus is. This is called semantic drift, and it can actually hurt your chances of ranking for your main keyword. This is why for example if I have a roofing site I will never create a link on the homepage for a gutter repair page because one gutter repair is low ticket and two I don't want to create unnecessary dilution of central focus of the site for a roofing site I would think about linking for sure to a roof replacement page roof repair page and a commercial roofing page as the top three for sure because those are going to be the heaviest demand highest ticket types of jobs that my main site even the homepage wants to rank for.
Step five, optimize your content. Each page should be improved by using its specific keyword phrase or the combination of service and location. For example, this is often called onpage optimization, but the words and the place you put those words on the actual page itself matters a lot. For example, commercial roof replacement and evenston Illinois. If this is the main keyword for that sub city page, these keywords need to be at the very top of the page as heading one. Then think about creating a heading twos and heading threes below that to further reinforce different attributes about commercial roof replacement. Maybe you will talk about why you're the best at doing this service, different commercial roofing materials that you may use, your unique process about doing commercial roof replacement, and so on. Each of those sections should be H2s or H3s with specific keywords in those headings. Never ever make random H2s or H3s like contact us or we're the best like never use these ambiguous vague words in the H2s or H3. Always think about sticking quality keywords in these headings. Now, to make this easier, you can use tools like ChatGpt to help rewrite or to help you provide you a H2 H3 outline and then you can have ChatGpt write out the content. But be careful because what you'll find is that depending on your competition, ChatGpt's output might not be high quality enough. Which is why I have developed my own AI content writer that uses Gentic Workflow that does realtime keyword and entity research to [music] improve the quality. You can check it out at eay.comfree-riter and you can try it out for free. Let me explain also that I have a paid version where you can actually put the link of a Wikipedia page about the city and the agent will extract unique information about the city and place it into the content as well as you can put your own outline into the AI content writer which also enhances quality because I also provide specific outline format basically already defines all the H2s H3s on the page which is the most important thing to master when it comes to on page.
Step six, connect your Google business profile. This step is crucial and often ignored. For each service location page you create, you need to add corresponding product or service in your Google business profile. Log into your Google business profile and add a new product. For example, if you created a page for commercial roofing in Chicago, add a product called commercial roofing in Chicago and the product details include a link to your new web page. [music] This connection tells Google that you offer this specific service in this specific area and it gives Google a direct link to your relevant page. Also update your service area in your Google business profile to include all the new cities you are targeting. It shows potential customers that you service their area. According to Google, customers are 2.7 times more likely to view a business as trustworthy if it has a complete Google business profile. And businesses that have a complete Google business profile are 50% more likely to be considered by customers for potential purchases.
Step seven, build authority and trust. To really rank well, you need to build authority for these new pages through citations, business social media pages, and backlinks. Citations are simply mentions of your business online, specifically the NAP, which stands for name, address, phone number. Submit each new service location page to online directories or websites that list all the information of different businesses. Focus on online lists that are industry specific. If you're a roofer looking for roofing directories. If you're a construction contractor, get listed on general contracting websites. Also, target local directories for each city you are trying to rank in. If you want to rank in Chicago, get listed in Chicago business directory and the Chicago Chamber of Commerce website. Now, if it's like a small city, you most likely don't need to build these specific city backlinks. However, if you are trying to rank in a more competitive city, it might be worth creating a separate citation at least 5 to 10 or so for these specific city. Back links are basically links from other websites to your pages. These are harder to get, but very valuable. You can earn them by writing guest posts for industry blogs or partnering with other local businesses. Again, if you can get like a guest post with a city in the URL and then target that link to one of your sub city pages, if it's a more competitive city that you really want to rank in, that goes a long way. For those of you that got more money than time, you can simply pay for backlinks. But make sure you do not buy spammy back links from Fiverr because these spammy backlinks can actually hurt your site. The site where you get links need to be vetted very carefully. I offer these highquality backlinks. You can check it out at eay.com/backlinks. These are literally backlinks that I use for my own websites.
Now, here's a bonus tip number eight. Did you know that words in your review and responses to those reviews carry significant weight in how you show up in the SERs? If you want to get more leads for roofer replacement from Google Maps, make sure you make customers use those words in their review. Also, the real hack is when you response to those reviews, when you add keywords to your responses, that also counts towards making your map listing more visible for those words. And this can also be utilized for cities. For example, if you want to show up more in Evenson, Illinois, your response to the review could be, "We appreciate your feedback and thank you for giving us the opportunity for providing our expert commercial roof replacement for your beautiful salon business in Evenson, Illinois." Guys, this hack is massive because you ultimately control how you respond to those reviews and you can begin sticking in not [music] just keywords for different services, but various other cities that you want your map listings to show up more in. Most people don't know this hack and for me to give it away for free. This means you guys have [music] to hit the like button and subscribe to this channel because I got even more hacks like that I will be sharing exclusively on this channel.
Again, I've been doing local SEO for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing in this space. Now, let's take the roofing industry for example. According to Glass House, roofing companies face some of the highest customer acquisition costs in a home service sector with Google Ads leads alone averaging around $187 per lead. That's expensive, especially when you consider that typically closing rates range [music] from 10 to 20% for third party leads. With local SEO, you're not spending money on ads. You're taking advantage of free marketing with Google, but it's only awarded to those with knowledge and skill set. Also, keep in mind when you show up organically in Google, you are automatically getting more trust from customers as opposed to showing up as an ad. Think about what happens when a homeowner needs roof repair after a storm. They're not just searching for roofer. They're searching for roof repair [music] and XY Z city, emergency roof repair and XY Z city. By creating dedicated pages for roof repair in Wonderlake, Illinois or storm damage roofing in Vincent, Illinois, you're meeting them exactly where they are in the buying process, which is that these people want to find a local company. They don't want to go to the ad and accidentally hire some sort of a national roofing brand. When it comes to local services, local businesses hold the most trust.
Now, this strategy doesn't just help you get more customers right now. It builds long-term value for your business. Once your page starts ranking well, they continue bringing you customers for years to come with minimal additional work. I've been doing this for over 10 years, automating the entire process from building the website to creating content to being seen on the first page of Google and earning over $50,000 per month because companies pay me commission on roofing jobs and other home construction jobs that I generate for them. Click the link in the description if you want expert guidance on how to make full use of local SEO to get tons of leads that you can make money from or generate more lucrative leads for your own service business.