Transcription
For most business owners, the frustrating part of using Google to grow their business is this. SEO is an industry overrun with overpriced experts, clueless beginners, and flat-out charlatans. So, if you only watch a few minutes of this video, make it this part because this is how you know your SEO company is doing a good job.
If you're a business owner trying to rank number one on Google to bring in leads, this is exactly what you want to see when you search for your own business. And despite what most SEO companies will tell you, there's no reason this should take more than a month. Ranking number one on Google isn't about developing some revolutionary cheat code that hacks the algorithm. It's about doing a better job than 99% of your competitors at giving Google what it actually wants and none of what it doesn't want.
Now, if that sounds familiar and you've heard it all before, the example I'm about to show you will make it crystal clear. I'm Caleb and honestly, I'm not part of the SEO hype crowd. I'm self-taught, battle-tested, and results-obsessed. And I help local businesses generate a steady stream of customers without guesswork.
Now, take this company, an HVAC contractor in Washington, DC. They came to me after months of frustration because in the map listings, they were stuck below position 3. Barely any green coverage beyond their immediate area, especially as we get farther from their GBP address. They had a decent website. They had decent content and they had decent links. But unless someone was searching right around their office, they just didn't show up. Not in the three-pack or in Google Maps. Not in the organic results below. Meanwhile, the SEO company just kept telling them it takes time.
Now, I didn't do anything fancy. I didn't build a 100 backlinks or write 50 blog posts. I just changed the approach from doing traditional SEO to a local focus and started giving Google exactly what the algorithm is built to reward. In less than a month, the HVAC contractor wasn't just ranking, they owned DC. And in this video, I'm going to break down how to do the same thing for your local area in five simple moves. Whether you're a business owner or managing clients, this will work.
So, what does Google's local algorithm actually want? There are three specific things. And if you miss any of them, you'll be stuck in local SEO purgatory, no matter how good your traditional SEO is. Google wants proof you're a real business. Proof that you serve the area and proof that other local entities recognize you. If you miss any of these, you're invisible.
When someone searches "HVAC near me," Google needs to show businesses that can actually drive up and fix the broken air conditioner. They don't want to show some national company writing blog posts about maintenance tips. Google has spent 25 years trying to figure out if a business is worth recommending based on nothing except what Google can see about that business online. So once I understood this, everything clicked. I developed this five-step system that gives Google exactly what they're looking for. So let's break it down.
Step one, align your website with Google's expectations. Now, most businesses have a website that's technically fine, but it doesn't match what's on their Google Business Profile. And that mismatch, it tells Google this site might not be real. It might not serve this area. It might not be trustworthy. There are two mistakes most people fall into. Either they've got just five basic pages: home, about, contact, maybe a service or two, or they have 300 pages, but they're mostly pointless blog posts that nobody's reading and Google doesn't care about. Neither one of these will help you rank. It's not about having more pages, but it's about having the right pages. Pages that match your Google Business Profile, pages that prove to Google "we serve this area," "we offer this service," and "we're legit." Please stop writing blogs that no one reads and Google doesn't care about. Instead, build what I call the core 30. One dedicated, well-structured page for every single category and service in your Google Business Profile. And when I say well-structured, I mean the title tag must match your GBP primary category and include the city name. It must look and feel local. That way, Google sees your website and your profile are talking about the same business. That's how you build confidence in Google's eyes. And if that sounds like a lot of work, honestly, it doesn't have to be. Let me show you how we shortcut this using AI the right way.
So, our step two, we're going to use AI to write locally relevant content. Google doesn't care who or what writes your content, but it cares a lot about whether that content is actually useful. Right now, the common misconception seems to be: type a prompt, hit generate, skim the output, and publish it. But honestly, that's not enough. To convince Google to promote your business, your pages need to prove that you are a real business in a real city serving real people. So instead of pumping out generic HVAC advice, you want to use AI to write content that sounds like it came straight out of DC. Talk about the neighborhoods you serve, the weather your clients deal with, the building codes your techs actually work under. That's what separates content from local authority. "We've repaired air conditioning units in the Capitol Hill neighborhood for over 10 years. We know how DC's humid summers affect your AC system. We're familiar with DC's historic district permit requirements." That's the kind of content that makes Google go, "Yep, local, real, trustworthy."
So, without AI, building 30 pages like this would be a grind. But you can still use AI to do the heavy lifting as long as you feed it the right inputs. And that all comes down to having the right prompt. So instead, when we have AI write content, we're going to make sure that it knows what exactly we're writing. So we're going to feed it the primary category, the city, the target keyword, the target category we're writing for (often it's going to be the same as the primary category, especially if this is your homepage). We're going to give it a target length. We're going to give it all the secondary categories from the GBP. We're going to give it all the services from the GBP. And then we have a long prompt that gives very specific writing instructions for the AI to write, including a list of words to avoid. If you want this prompt, you can grab it in my school community in the prompt catalog. There's a link in the description, or pause the video and write it down.
If you missed this next step, those first two steps really don't matter. So, our third step is to expose the invisible SEO gaps. So, let me walk you through exactly how we use AI to diagnose and fix a local SEO problem. Okay, first I'm going to have to use an example. I'm not going to use my actual client because, well, we're on YouTube. So, I'm going to find some random business in Fort Wayne, Indiana. So, what we're going to do is find an example in Fort Wayne, Indiana. I like Fort Wayne because it's a large enough city to be competitive, but it's not looking at like Houston or Chicago or anything like that. So, I'm going to search for "air conditioning repair in Fort Wayne," and I'm going to skip over the top three results and just hit "more businesses." This is how you see results that are number four and lower. No one clicks on this, so basically they're invisible. But this is what we want to start with. Uh, so I'm going to scroll down. And what I'm looking for is someone who's not in the top three, but they have a lot of reviews. And Ralph Griffin looks pretty good here. So they're well out of the top three, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. So they're ranked sixth, but they have 3,400 reviews. So uh, that's more than two of the players in the top three. Home Comfort has 8,000, but Ralph definitely has reviews to play. They're just not in the top three yet. So, I'd already looked at this, chosen Ralph for those reasons.
The first thing we're going to do is run a uh local rank map for them. So, this is the tool we use for it is called Lead Snap, and it's going to basically uh run this local rank map. Now, what these dots mean is every single dot is the position that your business shows up when you type in "air conditioning repair near me" in this location. So, here you'd be third. Here you'd be fourth. Here you'd be number one. And up here you're 20th, essentially invisible. Now, Ralph here, what I care about is top three. That's basically uh how visible they are. So they are visible across 14% of Fort Wayne, Indiana versus Co-heating and Air is visible across 26% of Fort Wayne, Indiana. That's twice the visibility that Ralph Griffin has.
So now we're going to do a very quick site audit. So let's take a look at Ralph's site. This is their website and we can see their title tag. Let me pull this down so you can see. Their title tag is "HVAC service and seasonal AC furnace." So HVAC service, not "air conditioning repair." This is a common mistake. A lot of HVAC professionals put "HVAC professional" in their title tag. They should be putting "air conditioning repair." Much more common that people search that. Okay. Beyond that, one of the first things I want to do is see how big the site is. To do that, we do this site search. So "site" and then the domain. I can hit tools and I see 352 results. Uh, that sounds like a lot, but uh, considering how poorly the site is ranking for this size, they've probably been putting out a lot of blog posts. And you can see even here we have "Ralph Griffin Service Experts blog." Blog posts just don't target the right keywords, the right phrases that Google wants to see.
So let's take a look at what they should be writing about. And for this, we need to grab some data from their Google Business Profile. So for that, I'm going to use a plugin. It's called GMB Everywhere. So to do that, I'm going to go to Google Maps. I'll search for Wal Griffin Service Experts. And then I can just hit "basic audit" here. When I do that, I get shown this page here. Basic audit. This is from GMB Everywhere. And here I can see their full list of services and categories. I can hit copy and basically export the full list. This tells us what Google thinks this business actually does and your website will need to reflect that.
So I'm back over my school community. This is another prompt we're going to use. Foresight competitor analysis tool and we're just going to grab this prompt and I'm going to head on over to Claude and run it. Okay. So, I'm going to select Opus 4.5. I'll paste in the prompt. And now we need to give it the right information uh in this prompt. So, here we're going to say "Ralph Griffin" and then the top three ranks. We're going to grab "Brockman Heating and Air Conditioning," "Mast's Heating and Cooling," and "Home Comfort Experts." Okay. And now we're going to grab the homepage content. I just hit control C. Come back over to here. And now we need to run Screaming Frog. So this is the tool Screaming Frog. Uh, it's free for up to 500 URLs, so you should be able to use it and run it. Um, this particular website, Ralph Griffin, they actually had Screaming Frog blocked, so I had to do a couple of things in order to get this to work. The big one, normally you're going to use mode in spider. I set it to mode list. That means we basically gave it a list of URLs, and I got that list of URLs from their own sitemap. So for most websites, you can pull up the sitemap by typing the domain and then just doing a slash sitemap.xml and that pulls all of the sites on the domain. Then we can plug that into Screaming Frog and and run it. Most sites you don't need to worry about that. You'll just put the domain in and hit crawl. But we have this crawled. So I'm going to export the internal all. And then I'm going to come over to links. Here's links. And then I will export all again. And back over to Claude and we'll give it those two files. I'm also going to run back over to here and I will grab the Brockman, Masters, and Home Comfort websites. Paste those in Masters and Comfort Experts. And you can see we're asking for some very specific information for the AI to analyze and output. So we'll go ahead and run that.
All right. So, the output is finished and we can see uh what it's giving us here. Some technical SEO on-page content analysis. Excellent. So, what I'm going to do is go ahead and start a new chat. We'll start by uploading the same internal all and links all files. Then I'm going to come in here and copy all the services. Paste that to Claude also. And I'll come back to my school community and grab our next prompt which is the core 30 structure checker. So here we're going to ask the AI to double check to make sure that the website has the full core 30 structure, which means one page for every category and every service. Excellent. Okay. And then we'll run that analysis.
All right. So this has finished running and it's giving me the category page gaps, homepage gaps, service page gaps. And with this information, we now have a solid path forward for what content we need to write for this client, Ralph Griffin, to rank better in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And to write this content, uh, we are going to use this local SEO content writer. So, we'll adjust it whether we're doing the homepage or the secondary category page. We'll grab this prompt that I already talked about. We'll put all of the necessary information in here and have Claude write this content for us. And that makes sure that this content is going to be human-readable, is going to be locally relevant, and is going to be perfectly aligned with the Google Business Profile. But this is where most people stop and where it all can fall apart. They'll post the AI content, check it with the detection tool like Zero GPT, and call it good. But Google doesn't care if your content sounds human. Again, it cares whether your content is valuable. So, we're going to take one more step that most SEO companies skip. We're going to source one solid backlink for each page. Nothing expensive, nothing spammy, just enough external validation to show Google that this content has value. Now, for this, I use my own private network. And if you want access to the exact same inventory I use, I open it up here at ice cream truck.shop. But feel free to use any links that you want to. But this one step, getting links, is what turns AI content from slop to ranking locally in just a few weeks.
So, to recap: find yourself a business to analyze. Skip the top three. Use Lead Snap to run a local rank map and expose ranking gaps. Crawl their site with Screaming Frog and use AI with the right prompt and feed it that data. Then create missing pages that align with the Google Business Profile. Back every page with a solid backlink. That's how we turn a stuck business into a local leader in a matter of weeks.
Now, this is where a lot of SEO companies think they're done. They have the content, they have some links, maybe even a few basic citations. Let's look at the next step. Step four is the citation strategy that's even more powerful than a lot of these links. There's a specific kind of citation that is 10 times more powerful than the regular citations. At my agency, we actually call them "super citations." Now, these are listings on 50 or so sites that most businesses never touch because they require real verification. Now, this is platforms like Bing for Business, Apple Maps, BMW's built-in navigation system, and yes, even voice AI systems like ChatGPT and Alexa. These listings tell Google and other AI systems, "this business is real. It's verified, and it has a strong local presence." These super citations also influence whether ChatGPT or voice assistants recommend your business when someone says, "Find me a roofing company nearby," or, "Who's the best HVAC tech in my area?" So, this is the future of search and these citations power it.
Let me show you how to actually get these. I'm going to use Lead Snap. It's the same tool that I used earlier for the local rank maps and it's the tool that I use at my agency. These are the citations that Lead Snap is going to get for us. You can see we have the client location over here and then all of the listings along with how many of them are live, submitted, updated, and action required that we need to be able to take. If you want to try Lead Snap for yourself, there's a link in the description. It is an affiliate link, but it will extend a free trial and give you half off your first three months if you stick with it. So, the bottom line here, super citations aren't just another checkbox. They're a trust signal for Google, a data source for AI, and a competitive edge most local businesses will never even hear about.
So, now we're about to deploy the final move. And as I promised at the beginning of this video, this last step is the difference between clients seeing results in 6 months and seeing results in 2 weeks. And it's also the one most SEO agencies either overlook or avoid because like the pursuit of excellence of most things in life, it requires going the extra mile, literally.
So, step five, the fastest way to go from ranking okay to ranking everywhere. This is what we did that took our HVAC contractor in DC from decent rankings to owning the map pack. You need to build real local trust. Not just in Google's eyes, but in the eyes of real people and local organizations. So, here's what that actually looks like. Join the local chamber of commerce. Sponsor a youth baseball team. Get listed in your city's preferred contractor directory. These aren't just links. These are massive signals of trust. And Google knows exactly how to read them. So does ChatGPT. So does Gemini. So does Google's own AI overview and every other AI that pulls verified local data.
Another one of my clients, a personal injury attorney in New Orleans, they were stuck at position 8 for months. Great site, good content, still invisible. So then we joined the New Orleans Chamber of Commerce. We joined 10 other nearby chambers of commerce. We sponsored a local event, the Bayou Bash or something, and overnight they jumped to position three. The next morning, their first lead was a $14,000 case. That's not SEO. It's trust, proximity, and authority in action, and it works fast.
So, let me show you how we scale this using AI for that Fort Wayne, Indiana example. Back in the school community, we have another prompt here, the local link builder. Uh, basically, you're going to put in the city name and the type of business, and then you're going to run this prompt. The AI is going to find and sort by order of importance all of the different uh types of local organizations that you can join and will give you high-powered, locally relevant links back to your business or your client's business website. These are powerful, locally relevant links that prove you're embedded in your community. You're not just trying to game the algorithm. And when you stack these on top of the right content and those citations, that's when you stop ranking in one zip code and start owning the entire city.
Now, look, I just gave you the exact system that took this business from invisible to fully booked. But if you're being honest with yourself, ranking might not be your biggest challenge. None of this matters if you can't grow your agency and land clients. I see SEO agencies all the time, super talented, amazing case studies, but they're still stuck trying to hit 10K a month because they've never figured out how to sell their services to local business owners. Maybe they could rank a business in 2 weeks, but they can't get a business owner to pay them $2,000 a month. Why? Because the ranking game is completely different from the client acquisition game. Different psychology, different objections, different process. So, if you want to see the exact system that got me 97 clients in 6 months, click the video right here before you waste another month with amazing skills but an empty bank account. Siru, you're one shift away from turning all of this ranking power into real revenue.