Transcription
Most SEO agencies tell local businesses that it takes six months to see results. Well, I just rate the plumber in the top two in Google Maps in just 14 days. Not position 20, not position 10, position two.
So, in this video, I'm going to show you the exact process that had this client's phone ringing off the hook in just 2 weeks. No complicated blogging, no expensive ad spend, just the exact system that stopped my $2,000 per month client from cancelling SEO after a month. And it works even in competitive cities.
So, I've been running my SEO agency since 2016, and I built it to seven figures in under 3 years. I've also helped hundreds of agency owners keep their clients longer and grow their agencies faster using systems just like the one you're about to learn. So, let me show you exactly where this all started and why we had to move fast to save this client.
Now, last month, a gruff, old school plumber in Plano, Texas, called me and said, "I've been paying for a month of SEO and my phone isn't ringing. Either make it ring or I'm out." I don't know why he sounded like a pirate there, but that's okay. This wasn't just about keeping a $2,000 a month client. This plumber had five employees depending on him for their paychecks. his truck payments were coming due. Every day without new customers meant he was closer and closer to letting people go. The stakes were real and that's why we couldn't settle for SEO takes time excuses. But I also couldn't pay for ad spend.
We'd started by looking at his data and then after the first month we'd already made some progress. He became our client on January 19th. His Google business profile was averaging a position of 20 plus which is absolutely invisible. Now, we did our first month of work and after that, we'd improved it to position 17 and a half. That was February 16th. We'd optimized his GBP. We'd fixed some technical issues and laid out a solid path forward for content. And for most SEO agencies, that's pretty good progress for 1 month. Like I said, this particular client, he didn't care about steady improvement. He wanted his phone ringing now.
So, this is the reality that most SEO agencies don't want to admit. Traditional SEO tactics often fail completely for local clients. Those weekly blog posts that are supposed to build authority, they're not getting your local clients any calls whatsoever. So, we had to do something different. We had to go beyond what most agencies are willing to do. And that meant understanding something critical about local SEO that most agencies completely miss.
There are exactly three components you need to get right for this strategy to actually work for you. And I'm going to walk you through each one in a second. But first, let me ask you, do you know the biggest mistake that most agencies make with local SEO? They focus on the wrong target entirely. When someone searches for plumber near me or plumber Houston, what happens? Google shows a map with three businesses at the top. Those map listings are Google business profiles. They are not websites. And 60 to 70% of all clicks, traffic, calls are going to go to one of those three listings. So, if you're not in that map hack, if you're ranked number four or worse, you're essentially invisible.
And here's where most agencies get it wrong for local. They focus on ranking the website for keywords like best plumber in Houston or affordable plumbing repair. But even if you rank number one organically, you're still below the map pack. And because you're below the map pack, you're really only playing for 30% of the clicks. Most of them already happened in the maps. So this means that every single page on your local client's website exists for one reason, to rank the GBP higher in the map pack. We're not trying to rank URLs or the website itself organically. We're not trying to rank individual articles for their own sake. We want to build signals that help Google understand and trust that GBP enough to show it in the map section.
So, do you want to know why so many local businesses get terrible results from SEO? Their agencies proudly show traffic graphs increasing while the phone sits silent. That's because of bringing in readers from all over the country who are looking for information, not locals who are looking for services.
So, let's get into component number one of our threepart system. This is an easy one. a perfectly optimized Google business profile. This is our first step for any new local client, optimizing the Google business profile. Most businesses barely fill out the basics, but a fully optimized GBP can make a big difference in rankings. So, when we first checked, we found what we see with almost every new local business that we look at. They only had one category. But did you know Google allows up to 10 categories? Having just one is leaving ranking on the table. So, the first thing we did was add four to five relevant categories using a chat GPT prompt to help make sure the categories we were adding were relevant. Here's that [Music] prompt. Now, you can grab this prompt and all the other ones from this video in my school community, or you can pause the video and grab them yourself. Once we got those categories, we next added over 30 specific services to his GBP. And here's that prompt to get AI to suggest those services. Then we completed every single box in the GBP. Business description, hours, attributes, everything. This basic optimization, this is what really moved him from position 20 plus to 17. But this client needed results faster than continuing this traditional SEO was able to deliver.
So, you might be thinking, if the GBP optimization only moved him to position 17 1/2, what's the magic that pushed him all the way to number two? And that brings us to the second component, the perfect website structure. His website simply wasn't speaking Google's language for local search. Most website designers build local business sites completely wrong. They focus on pretty images, generic service pages, and maybe some testimonials. But you know what? Google doesn't care about pretty. It cares about relevance and trust. The simple but perfect site structure I'm going to break down will outrank a fancy $10,000 website easily.
Now, the previous SEO that worked with my Plano plumber had him creating blog post after blog post about plumbing tips content that might rank nationally but did absolutely nothing for local visibility. So, what does Google's local algorithm actually want to see? Honestly, it's something completely different than what most websites offer. That's why if you give it to Google, you're likely going to see a massive increase in rank. Google is going to look at one thing most SEO agencies miss. Does your website match what you say in your Google listing? If they don't match, Google thinks this business might be fake. If they do match perfectly, that's a great step toward Google thinking this business is real and trustworthy.
So, what did we do? We completely restructured his website to mirror his GBP. Exactly. Now, we started with the homepage, and honestly, most local websites just say home in the title tag. Instead of that, we put his primary GBP category plus his city name, professional plumber in Plano, 24/7 emergency service. Then, we used each GBP secondary category as an H2 section on the homepage with a few hundred words about each one. For drainage service, we talked specifically about drain cleaning in Plano. for gas installation service. We discuss city permit requirements and local gas line regulations. It's like telling Google, "Yes, this business really does offer exactly what the GBP claims and they offer it in this specific location."
But we still had a major problem to solve. Even with this improved homepage, the plumber was still nowhere near the top three where he needed to be in order to get consistent calls. Why? His website only had five service pages in total. Google couldn't see the full scope of his services or areas he covered. To Google's algorithm, he looked like a small limited business compared to his competitors with more comprehensive and authoritative websites. So, we needed a complete content hierarchy that again we wanted to perfectly mirror the existing Google business listing. So, for each secondary GBP category, we created a dedicated page with a URL structure that includes both the category and location. For example, his heating contractor category got a page at domain.com/heingcontractor Plano with sections about different types of water heaters he installed in specific Plano neighborhoods. Then for each service listed on the GVP, we created an individual service page. Instead of one long generic services page, we built specific pages for toilet repair, sewer line replacement, water heater installation, and more. Every single page had the service and city name in the title tag, the H1 tag and the first paragraph. Now remember, we have five GBP categories and 30 services. So this is roughly a 40page structure and it did something powerful. It showed Google this plumber was a comprehensive authority in his service area. It built both geographic relevance by mentioning specific neighborhoods and topical relevance by covering every service in great detail. and it was all perfectly aligned with this GBP information.
So the quick question, what do you think happens when a business suddenly adds 40 new pages to their website? Now a lot of people might assume that Google would see this as suspicious activity, but that's not actually happens when you structure it correctly. Google will trust the site more. Now, of course, we faced a seemingly impossible challenge. Creating 40 pages of content would take months and cost thousands if we hired copywriters. But because we only had days, then the plumber certainly wasn't going to pay extra for any rush content creation. So this is where a lot of agencies hit a wall. They know it needs to be done, but the implementation seems impossible. Write 40 pages of unique, locally focused content in a couple of days. No human writer could reasonably do that. So we needed content that was unique, not templated content. It needed to be locally specific, mentioning neighborhoods and city details. And it needed to be highquality enough to satisfy both users and Google. And of course, we needed all 40 pages pretty much immediately.
And the solution, you're probably expecting this, a very specific approach to AI content creation. We're going to use this chat GPT prompt and have it create the content for us. So, the reason this prompt works so well is how the prompt is structured. We of course don't just say write content about plumbing. We specified the exact category, service, and city. We instructed it to include mentions of specific neighborhoods. We told it to write from the perspective of a local expert who knows the area. And the result was content that reads like it was written by someone who actually works in that specific location. Not generic we service all areas type content, but specific here's how we handle water heater replacement in this neighborhood of Plano type content. So with this prompt, we built out the entire 40page structure in a single afternoon. Then we made small edits to personalize it, adding the plumber specific approach and some local references. But honestly, 90% of the work was done by AI.
So you might be wondering, won't Google detect and penalize AI generated content? So here's the truth a lot of people don't understand. Google doesn't care if content is written by AI or humans. It cares if the content is helpful and trustworthy. So, the reason most AI content doesn't rank is because it's generic. It's templated. It's dribble. But when you create locally specific AI content with our prompt and back it with quality links, Google rewards it. We've tested this across dozens and dozens of clients.
Now, we had great content, a perfect website structure, and an optimized GBP. We expected to see this plumber jump to the top three, but we checked his rankings, and he's still position 10. Something was missing. And that brings me to component number three, the critical technical and trust signals that a lot of SEO agencies overlook. Google needs to verify that the website and the Google business profile actually belong to the same business. Without this verification, all our work is wasted.
So there are actually three specific technical signals that Google looks for when verifying a business. Most SEO agencies are only going to implement one of them. So the first one I'm going to talk about is schema markup. The second is a direct map inv. And the third one, something that even an experienced SEO often miss, consistent name, address, phone number in the exact format across your website, across your GBP, and across any external citations. Now, think about this from Google's perspective. They see thousands of fake websites claiming to be local businesses. How can they be certain that this website belongs to the actual plumbing business on the ground with a trained plumber with a plumbing license?
We implemented local business schema markup on the homepage, matching his GBP information character for character. This structured data is like giving Google a business card with all the exact same information that the GBP has. Now, the prop for this is really quite simple, but take a look. Here's the prompt that gets chat GPT to generate it for us. We also embedded his Google Maps profile directly on the contact page, creating another strong signal connecting the website to this exact GBP. Now, finally, we got new citations created that match the name, address, and phone number. There's no reason to worry about updating old listings. Just create new ones if you aren't completely sure the old ones are all consistent. My team can do this for you if you place an order at icecreentruck.shop, which is my SEO fulfillment website.
So, after adding all these technical elements, we moved up again, position eight, but still not in the top three where the phone would actually start ringing. We were so close, but we needed one final push to get this plumber over the finish line.
Now, at this point, we had the perfect foundation. We had the content right. We had the technical elements right, but Google still wasn't fully convinced this business deserved to be in the top three because anyone can create a website with good content. What Google needs and what most local businesses miss is external verification that a business is legitimate and trustworthy. And that's the final piece of the puzzle, the one that so many people skip entirely, thinking it's too expensive or too timeconuming. But this is what separates businesses stuck on page two from those dominating the map pack.
Every single page on the site needed at least one quality external link pointing to it. Now, this is not optional. This is mandatory. Google uses external links as a quality verification signal, especially for AI generated content. Without links, even the best content looks suspicious to Google. But with quality links, that same content becomes authoritative and trustworthy. So, we sourced quality links from my website, icecreentruck.shop, for about $35 per link. These are the same links that my agency uses all the time for all of our clients. For the homepage, we got him listed in the local chamber of commerce. worth every penny for the local authority it provides. Now, we also made sure he had complete social profiles matching his business name exactly, and we even sponsored a local youth sports team for yet another quality local lake.
Was it worth the investment? Absolutely. Within 14 days of implementing this complete system, the plumber's GBP jumped from position 17 1.5 to position 2.35. Our impatient plumber became our biggest advocate and that $2,000 per month client was saved. Not only did he keep paying us, but he's now referred three other business owners who have since become clients.
So now you know exactly how to take any local business from invisible to the top three on Google Maps in just 14 days. This works in like 90% of local markets because the competition simply isn't doing it. They're either doing nothing or they're writing random blog posts that won't help local rankings. But here's something important. We didn't just stop at the website and technical elements. As I mentioned, we also joined the Dallas and Plano Chambers of Commerce, sponsored a youth softball league, and use a special prompt to find even more quality local links to have this success story.
So, click on the video right here to get this exact local link building prompt. Without these specific types of links, the entire strategy I just showed you won't work at all. This is the difference between a 14-day ranking transformation and waiting six months for results. Watch that video now to complete the pull strategy we used to move our client from invisible to fully booked.