Transcription
All right. What's up, guys? Um, today Tristan and I are going to talk about local SEO. I think this will be like quite a complete local SEO course. Enjoy.
So Tristan kind of prepared an an 8020 document for local SEO and I thought it'd be fun for us to, you know, just walk through my buddies Samson's uh local business like just to see what we do. Um I had a couple suggestions. So I think what we'll do today is Tristan will cover the 8020, walk through it, and then we'll use a live example and we'll walk through how we'd fix it up. I've been trying to get the login this for a while. uh to actually like to maybe make the changes. But um maybe we'll do that next time. It could be part two. Let us know in the comment section if you guys want to see something like this uh in the future. But yeah, let's um let me just share screen and then you can talk over your doc.
>> Cool. Let's do it.
>> Yeah, let's rock.
Cool. Awesome. Yeah, I mean uh 8020 in local SEO, it's uh you know the thing is and there's a lot of voices in the SEO world, right? Like everyone's saying do this, do that, but you just got to look at what the data tells you. And uh with local SEO, 80% of your results will come from like really five core things. You know, I added a six thing as a bonus just based off like what we're doing that's working well. You know, maybe I missed one or two things, Jackie. So, if I if I missed something, just let me know.
But, I mean, I would say, right, number one thing, you could you could low-key, like in some industry just have a dog water website, right? Like absolutely disgusting. But if you have just if you're just ripping reviews, you know, you have a a strong review, I guess, generation system, like you can still rank in my opinion at least, you can still rank, you know, in the map pack. Um, just because I think reviews are are that emphasized right now. But, you know, it's not just like, oh, like 50 blank five star reviews, right? It's like you need strong reviews that kind of talk about what what service was provided ideally, you know, where the service took place. I think, you know, I I've read some in some places that like mentioning who who did the service is actually a negative right now, but I I don't know.
But like >> that's also the company did it >> is a negative.
>> Really interesting.
>> Well, I read it on Twitter. It was like I I don't know everything you you kind of have to discount what people say on on Twitter sometimes, but they were saying like, you know how like people will go and do roofing inspections for free and >> um and try to get a review and the person will be like, "Oh yeah, like Jason was so nice and you know this." I don't know. That's what I heard online. But um either way, it needs to be a strong like well-written review. Um, and you know, it's a bonus if you know they answer the questions that people ask before they decide to book the service, right? So, that's kind of what a strong review looks like. I would say maybe between 50 to 100 words with all of that stuff. You know, you're not going to get every single person to be able to leave a review like that, but if you can get at least, you know, 50 to 70% of people doing that, that's that's pretty really strong, right? that that's probably I would say most of the 80% there at least on the GBP side.
Uh also definitely matters how fast you're leaving those reviews, right? Or not fast but like how frequently those reviews are coming in. Um, you know you could have like a hundred reviews but if they came in last year and and someone's consistently stacking six to eight reviews a month, they might lap you and they might outrank you just because of review velocity. Google sees this Google business profile is consistently getting way more reviews and so um like they're getting way more reviews every single month um and they're all new, they're all well written and so Google would, you know, we've seen they they will prioritize that just cuz it's a little more relevant, right? The reviews are new and they can base their suggestions off of that.
Um, one thing though is like if you're working with a new Google business profile, you want to be a little careful, right? Like especially if you're doing like a sprint style campaign for someone, you want to, you know, you want to get results fast, right? So you might like want to build as many reviews as possible. Um, but it can, you know, in my opinion, it can look a little unnatural if you just you go from like zero reviews to like 30 within a week. In some industries that might be fine, but typically with like new GBPs, we're like when we open it, we wait a week. We don't even touch it, right? We don't touch anything with the GBP and then after a week once it's warmed up, that's when we kind of go in and we start talking to the client and telling them like you need to go and leave reviews. Like there's there there's no how however many reviews you're able to get that determines the ceiling on your local SEO, you know, campaign. Um, so review well-written reviews and review velocity. That's number one.
Uh, number two, it's like a fully optimized Google business profile, right? You want the keyword in the business name in the title. You want the key a keyword friendly business description. Try to make sure it's completely filled out. Um, fill out every relevant service and product listed. Um, and then yeah, just basically just make sure everything on the Google business profile is has something is filled out, right?
Um, one thing is like it's it's a competitive edge right now if you have the the target keyword in your uh your your Google business profile name. Like if your if your company is like Bob's um I don't know Bob's servicing, right? but you're a roofing company. Someone's company where their their name is Bob's Roofers tends to do better just cuz the keyword name is in there. Like we tested um me and my buddy, we opened a GBP here in Houston. I'm not going to say which industry. It's within like the HVAC area. We just did a uh like an exact match business name, right? DBA stacked three reviews on it. It's like in an industry with where the average review count in the map pack is like uh I want to say like around 40 to 50. We had three reviews and we're in the map pack for that keyword just cuz our business name is the keyword. It's like it it's actually so broken right now.
>> It's so
>> what's up?
>> It's it's been like that for like a It's been like that for like a year. It's so broken. It's like
>> op as hell. Like it's it's it's actually over if you have it directly in your GVP.
>> Yeah. Exactly. We sometimes we talk to some like local operators and like we want to open up like a new >> cleaning company. I'm like >> don't call it anything cute. Just call it like >> Dallas Cleaners. Don't don't don't get too complicated with it. You trust me. Um
>> but yeah, I mean it's it's it's a huge competitive edge right now. So, um, but really outside of your website, like the things that really matter the most are like the reviews, the GBP, and then back links. It's like backlinks. It's a little different from I would say e-commerce and SAS where you can get good backlinks that don't necessarily have strong metrics if you're working like with local backlinks, right? Like if you're based in let's say like Lafayette, Louisiana, your business is there and you're getting links from websites or businesses in that city, that's a really good signal for for you guys. Um so local backlinks work really well here, but you know, it's not a dealbreaker. We we've been able to, you know, get people um into the top three with just normal link building services. you know, we've used um Indexy, we've used Get Me Links, SER Ninja. Sometimes I'll just have my link builder just crawl like a million vendor lists and find things that work. Um it's not really, you know, it's it's it's not that there's no like crazy sauce with backlinks. It's just good local backlinks and um e if you don't have that, just regular strong backlinks with good metrics. So yeah.
Um, so that's like all the off-site stuff, right? Then when you're getting to the the website, I guess um it's really not that complicated. You you just want really good site taxonomy, which I guess we can we can go over a little bit, you know, when we look at your your buddy's site. But like even then the things that really really matter like you don't even in some industries you don't need a crazy taxonomy, right? Like a site structure. you just need, you know, the keyword and the page title, keyword variations in the header tags. So, what we like to do is page title has the main parent keyword um and the city or the the area that they serve um and then like the H1 tag will have a slight variation of that and then the H2 and H3 tags will just be se semantic or secondary keywords related to that parent keyword, right? Um, and then this is just something you know you should just do in general is just like primary keyword within the first 20 to 25 words of every page you're trying to rank for a commercial keyword. Like this applies to the homepage as well, but like service pages, location pages, you know, if you're if you're like a tax firm, right, and you have a tax planning service page, I'm frontloading the word tax planning um as as soon as possible in the first, you know, first sentence. So, that's it's really all you really need. I don't want to say it's all you really need on the website, but those are like the big levers you can pull.
Um, we can get Honestly, um
>> yeah, real let me jump in real quick. Um what Trisen mentioned today, I think unless you're in like personal injury, I think if you do everything we mentioned today, you'll rank like 95% of the time. Unless you're in those high competition niches, but like let's keep it a buck. You guys probably aren't in in those niches. Like otherwise, you wouldn't be like scouring YouTube watching our videos. You know what I mean? Um, like all you have to do is follow this and uh just real quick real quick plug um we have Local Rank Academy where Tristan goes through stuff like this. He audits other people's businesses for no reason. Like he he's literally Oprah of SEO in the school community. So, uh what we're going to do today, we're going to transcribe every all the actionables from this video. um add it into this like merge it in with this 8020 of local SEO and we're just going to have like some sort of document that you're able to just feed into ChadBt or Claude and then you can just optimize it yourself, you know. Um or you can just join the school community and just try to try to like work on it to all all together. Um, but uh yeah, so that document will only be available in school. Um Trist and I will post it after this video goes live. But um yeah, what what were the supporting tactics that you wanted to mention or the bonus? What was it?
>> Oh yeah, the bonus is is down here. Number six,
>> um I I forgot to mention number five. I said like, you know, the GBP, you know, that's it. But I forgot to mention the primary category does matter a lot. It's like it's one of the stronger signals, right? Like I would say it's right behind the the you know a keyword friendly business title or business name cuz like I don't know there's a there's a pretty good example. I I read a good tweet on this. It's like during the summer if you're if you're like an HVAC company during the summer if your primary category is like a furnace repair um >> set to furnace repair what typically happens you get no leads because no one's searching for furnace repair during the summer right you want to switch the primary category it's like AC repair or something like that some some primary uh whatever that primary category was um so yeah pretty much like what your primary category is will determine the type of searches you show up for locally. So, if you're not if you're like an electrician or whatever and you're not getting leads, I would 100% check your primary category cuz like one of the biggest things we see is like they'll just set it to like general contractor and it's like, yeah, of course you're not getting leads because you're set to general contractor and not electrician, right? So, that does matter a lot.
Um, and then the bonus. So, this is what we've been doing. This has worked well. It's actually, it was mainly an e-commerce tactic, right? Like for e-commerce clients, but now I was like, why don't we just do this for local SEO as well? Maybe I'm just late to the game, right? Maybe I'm just like a little slow. But like what what we started doing is like all these service and location pages um were doing like scans of in Google Search Console. We're just scanning their site on a weekly or bi-weekly basis looking for the keywords that they rank for that are not their brand's name, right? Like non-branded keywords. Anything really position above position 10, we are taking we're inserting back into the content, right? It doesn't need to be word for word cuz some of the, you know, people search for keywords pretty lazily, not like English friendly. So, you just got to make it, you know, sound natural, but reincluding those keywords into those money pages, things like that. It it definitely helps with like boosting, I guess, rankings for supplementary keywords. Um, so we've been doing that as well. Gives a nice little boost, but I would say the other five things have a way bigger weight um towards your towards your um I guess ranking number one in in the map pack and and in organic search. Um.
>> Mhm.
>> Yeah. But when you look at the 20%, like you could honestly like you could do all of these very consistently and I still don't think they're going to they're going to move the needle as much as what we just covered before, right? All of this stuff like they're supplementary. They're good to do, but they're more good to do as like um one, a thing you can report to clients, but two, like just stuff to kind of like support those like first six tactics we said, right? Like >> blogs, everyone knows that blogs are are really just meant for topical authority. And even at the local level, it doesn't really matter that much unless you're doing like local blogs. Like we were working with u we were auditing like an ABA therapy clinic and this guy was like we we were getting like 10,000 views a month and I like audited where they were getting their views and it was like is Elon Musk autistic? Is Mark Zuckerber Zuckerberg a it was just like all of these like programmatic keywords? No leads came from it. So, it's like it really is just not that much of a like a mover unless you're using it to like try to, you know, get links for your website.
>> Also, I I will say it looks good for clients. Um, but it's like a very common thing that SEOs do that they just like rank for these low competition niches and then show that the traffic's coming in from their efforts and then they're like, "Yo, we did our job." But like, you're getting absolutely zero leads from that Like it's actually sometimes it's almost damaging because if you're doing all that programmatic blog content, your cheeks are going to get clapped eventually, especially if you're doing like hundreds a month. Some some of these guys are crazy, man. They're like doing a thousand articles and then they kind like it'll obviously jump in like GSC, right? Like the rankings will jump. Um all the impressions will jump because you're just blasting um these blogs. But uh yeah, I think um actual impact is like zero to none. So be careful out there.
>> Um
>> yeah. Um
>> yeah. Uh I think one one thing I did want to talk about is um so like the 80% I actually agree with most of the all these um 80%. Yeah. And I would say these 80% is like foundational stuff. It's like you must do it in 2026 otherwise like you're not you're not going to show up. So after you do all this the 20% they're not useless. It's more like they're more of a tiebreaker. So the 80% is foundational stuff. You do it and you'll probably be already number one in your like boon ass town, you know what I mean? But if you're in New York or like LA or some um there's no way. So that's where the 20% comes in, you know? So, if you're in these like tier one cities, high competition niches, that's this is like where you can kind of tip the scale in your favor. Um, but yeah, if you guys want us to go through the 20%. We got to be mindful of time. Um, so if you want us to go through the 20%, we can do it, but maybe next week instead. I think right now maybe we can go through my buddy's site. Um, I'm just going to lay out lay it out for you. Um, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to lay out the site. I'm going to show the GBP. Um, and then I'm going to show you what I plan on doing. Okay. Uh, but before we move on, is there anything you want like one couple last point pointers you want to touch on or are you good?
>> Yeah. No, that's um that's a good like what you said was right. Like this is uh I don't want to say the 20% is useless. It's more like um that 80% will usually get you very very far in like in rankings
>> um both in maps and search. But in those pretty competitive those pretty competitive spaces, that's where the 20% comes into to kind of help you differentiate yourself from the other people
>> who are also doing SEO. Like any any big city, you're going to be going up against a couple other decent SEOs. And the 20% is where you can kind of uh I guess differentiate yourself.
>> Yeah. Yeah.
Cool. Um so first off, site uh site that we're going through today for the OGs, they already know this movement room. I'm sure Tristan, I don't know if if you've seen this site before, but um yes, my buddy's business. It's a physio clinic in East Vancouver. Um previously I did help them rank uh for physio East Vancouver. I think since then I we we haven't really touched it. They have some service pages. Um the URL is movement room.prsphysiootherapy. So you know I I didn't do this. I don't remember who did this but um probably some stuff needs to be done. Um so what I did was I asked Claude to go through based off of like these parameters I set to fix it up. But before then, I want to show the GVP because they're not starting from zero. One of the things I told my buddy Samson to do was number one in your 8020 list, which was, yo, just uh get a ton of reviews. All right, so they have 333 reviews. They any customer that walks through the door, their main goal is to get a review. And I think their business their business is like booming just from that. So, I think this is just like evidence that if you just get reviews, you're going to be fine, but obviously their foundation stuff is set, right? So, 333 reviews, which is a ton for their niche and definitely in their area. Um, in terms of performance, I think it's good. The profile strength is well, it says it's solid, but um, let me see their category page. physiootherapist which is which matches all their competitors. In terms of performance, I think I remember it was like pretty solid. Let's see. I think I have way too many tabs open. My laptop's getting cooked. Um, yeah, maybe summer is a bit slower,
>> but uh yeah, it's this is a solid amount of leads searches that showed up for physiotherapy.
>> There we go. Let's go.
>> Yeah. like solid, right? This all this is solid.
>> Um
>> let's show the local rank ranking report. So this is while this doesn't look very good, I will say this area like within this circle I I kind of zoomed out a bit too much, but within this circle is pretty high population density. So probably they cover like 50k people in that center. So they're probably number one for like 50k with like 50k people for that keyword. Physiootherapy Vancouver decent, you know, physiootherapy East Vancouver really solid. Um they probably like cover a lot of East Van, but so the good thing here is now they're expanding, right? So they're creating a they're going to have a new GBP. And then I was like, yo, it might be a good time to restructure your site, restructure your GBP because right now, for example, their GBP, the URL goes to their homepage. And I think they could probably start creating location pages if they're multilocation, right? Um, let me pitch you the idea, Tristan, and then you can like kind of poke at it. All right. So, right now, this the website goes to the homepage. um which is fine be because they're just a one location site and their service pages are going to um they're targeting like Vancouver for the service pages. So I'm not sure if that's something I want to change change up. But yeah, it's unbelievably slow. But I think what I want to do is I want to show you the what I uh what Claude came up with in terms of the location pages and how it's going to be structured. Uh, okay. Yeah, that's crazy. I'm I'm going just show you this. It's way faster. Um, so because it's rendering locally, of course. So, this is the homepage. Uh, ignore the design. I just asked Cloud to do a real quick styles. Um, but what happens is I believe once you get two locations, you should start having location pages like this. And the URL will just be movement room/ east Vancouver or movement room slashloation/ east Vancouver. So this is what um I kind of So you can see from the uh what is this called like the crumbs? Uh
>> yeah breadcrumbs. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
>> Um, so the page uh the URL goes like movement room movement roomlocations which show the two locations
>> and then move room/loations/ east Vancouver is what we're going to be aiming for. And then this will be the landing page that links to the GBP and it will have like you know the NAP. It'll be all schema up like right here. So yeah, like I think this site pretty optimized will definitely, you know, goo I think Google will love this. Um, only question for you Tristan, would you create these service pages underneath that East Vancouver page? like would it be movement room/lo east Vancouver slash physiootherapy and then on that physiootherapy page it'll be like physiootherapy east Vancouver if it's like a new location or like uh you know what I mean?
>> Mhm.
>> Or would it just be homeservices slashphysiootherapy? I guess um let me just I could write it out. Maybe it'll be more clear cuz like I think at launch we could just get away with just the location pages and then but I think maybe if we're if I'm like doing making all the changes for my my buddy I might as well do it right. You know what I mean? Yeah. Um, but what would you do if you were in this position?
>> Yeah. I think uh definitely two location pages, right? like one for each now
>> now now your your website the website link on each GBP is pointing to the location page
>> it's it's tricky I mean I think we've we've done we've done both before right where it's like you know we just link to the same service page and it's fine um versus you know we've we've created specific pages I think it just depends on if like they're going to cannibalize each other and I it yeah you know I'm I'm not too familiar with with the Vancouver area, but like if they're
>> Yeah. You know what I'm saying? If they're far far enough apart.
>> Yeah. But um like let's just take Texas for example.
>> Um, if you're I don't know Dallas Fort Worth area, but like let's say uh one location is in Dallas. Uh what's another location in that area? Like what's another city? Like if we if it was like let's say Fort Worth, I would say 100% create like separate um like service location pages, right? Kind of like um like Fort Worth is like an hour hour and a half away from
>> from Dallas, so it's like far enough where I don't think they would cannibalize. They're also kind of like registered as like separate cities, if that makes sense.
>> Mhm.
>> Um, so yeah, I think that would be a situation where we have like it's like home, I click is it I think it was locations, then the actual location itself and then the different services offered at that location, right?
>> Um, but if they're pretty close together, I'd probably just keep it the same, but it doesn't seem like that's the case. So yeah, I'd definitely probably just create separate ones. like I would do on Linkort's homepage locations, link out to the two location pages from each location page, link out to those different services offered at that location, right? So like uh massage therapy, right? massage therapy. The first one would be um the first link would be to the the first like East Vancouver location service page and then the second link would point to the new location uh service page.
>> Yeah. Yeah. I think I think that's what I plan on doing. Um, but yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Uh, I think besides that, how would you Oh, right. Um, in the footer, would you put both like locations like this?
>> Uh, I think it's a Oh, here we go. I see it now.
>> You know, it's debatable. Uh,
>> right.
>> You know that.
>> That's one thing I I didn't even know. Um, but I think that might be a question for AI. Like, why are we even contemplating? We should just be asking AI. I'm pretty sure they
>> I I mean, I'm not going to lie. Like um I I was going to I was going to it's on the plan to show the local rank members this, but like literally all I do now I don't even I mean this sounds bad, but like I kind of outsource my thinking, right? Like every I have like a I have an SEO agent where every single time I read like some sauce, I'm like this is really good. What I'll do is I'll just feed it the entire document. I'll be like, "Take this, learn it, and like use this in your
>> All right, cool.
>> Yeah. Um, like I'll just I'll just feed um I'll feed my my AI agent like every piece of like local SEO sauce or ecom SEO sauce I find and I'll just be like, "Learn this, use it, and like just remember it, right? like put it within I I don't remember how it's organized, but it's like anytime I need it to do a specific task, I just find as much like information on it as possible before and then I just feed it to the skill file and I just tell it like next time you do this, make sure you're you're you're referencing that doc. So yeah, I mean I just outsource my thinking right now and then I just I'm more like a manager now. like I just I just kind of tell it what I want and then I just review it and I tell it like no, you did it wrong. Um or yes, you did it right. But in this case, what you were saying for like the um the two locations in the footer, you know, it's crazy is uh like I read a lot of that like you know like Bod's tweets and I remember there's one that stuck out cuz he was like he's like you don't want to include I think he said maybe it was him, maybe it wasn't him, I don't I don't know, but there was at least a tweet I read it was like you should not include multiple addresses in the footer because it it'll confuse it could confuse Google. I've never tested that, you know, but
>> um it definitely needs to be there definitely needs to be or maybe it was a map embed, but at least there definitely needs to be a map embed on each location page and the honestly I would say the location service pages as well if you built that out. Um, but yeah, I honestly like I would keep the I would keep the the addresses there and then like anytime I'm unsure, I just test, right? Like I'll I'll test
>> do one week without. Honestly, one week isn't enough. Maybe like two weeks, three weeks without, three weeks with, see what happens, you know. Um, but and then one thing I noticed was like the uh I don't know if you're sharing your screen, but
>> No, I stopped. Also, like I'm laggy as hell right now, so
>> Okay. I was I was gonna say I thought it was me, too. like I I'm like low-key lagging too as well, but I don't know if it's showing that on on on your end.
>> Cool. We we'll find out later. Um, but yeah.
>> Um, what was I going to say though? Yeah, the services right thing that I found at least that works well is like the menu nav. Anytime I put a page in the menu nav, it like it it's just uh it always helps in with rankings for some reason. as long as there's like a target keyword for it. Like you know the contact us, about us pages, those don't always those don't matter for rankings like direct rankings, right? But like if I want a specific location page to rank, I usually almost always put it in the the menu nav, right? So I'd put like both locations in the in the menu nav and then with the services, I'd put all those services in the menu nav. I don't I don't think I would put the the location service pages because that's a little too granular, but I would I would definitely put the service pages there and then the footer as well. Put all the services and links to both location pages um there as well. So
>> sick, sick. Um, yeah, let's just cut it there. Guys, let me know if you guys want to see more stuff like this where we go through topics in detail and then show an example. Uh, but yeah, if you guys want more of stuff like this, Tristan's killing it right now in Local Rank Academy. So, uh go to the comment section or first link in the description if you guys want to sign up. And uh yeah, maybe this will be a weekly thing. We'll see you guys next week.
>> Maybe we can uh do a little like build in public just
>> Yeah.
>> see what happens, you know? We can we can send links to it, send reviews,
>> citations. We'll we can run a little local rank citations plus Kevin's PBN. See what happens. Just
>> Yeah. Let let us know down in the comment section what you want to see. We'll we'll just make it happen. Cool.
>> Let's do it.