We are live! I’ve spent the last 5 years doing SEO for small businesses, dozens of them are now ranking number 1 in Google.
After months of hard work I put everything I know into a single document:
The Local SEO Playbook — An A to Z Guide on Getting Your Small Business to the
my mom owns a service business in a big city
I built her a site with an exact match domain and got it ranking well without telling her
I’m silently funneling all traffic to her phone number or online form submission
she keeps telling me how well work has been going recently
If I were starting a small business, I would do everything in my power to get 250 reviews on my Google Business Profile as fast as humanly possible.
I would offer insane incentives for employees who get reviews. I would offer so much free stuff to people. Whatever it takes.
95% of the algorithm is
link building
keyword in meta title
keyword in H1
keyword in URL slug
500 words of copy about keyword
matching search intent
I really wouldn’t stress about anything else
I’m going to tell you exactly what I do for my local SEO clients. Bookmark this and save for later:
KW Research: This isn’t super hard on the local level, you normally just need to plug in the city + service to AHRefs. For example, if you’re an HVAC company in Richmond, VA,
Thinking about writing an extensive guide to local SEO. It would include case studies, hacks I use, and my entire process outlined A to Z.
Would charge $10 for it, will donate sales to charity. Any interest in me doing something like this?
🚨 I am opening up a giant can of worms by posting this but here we go — what I’m about to explain is far and away the number 1 SEO strategy for local business owners that exists. Nothing else comes close 🚨
Everything I say here is meant to be informative, remember that
If I were starting a small business, I would do everything in my power to get 250 reviews on my Google Business Profile as fast as humanly possible.
I would offer insane incentives for employees who get reviews. I would offer so much free stuff to people. Whatever it takes.
I’ve been asked before what the 80/20 of SEO is. Here’s my answer:
Put the keyword in your meta title.
Put the keyword in your H1 tag
Write 500 words of copy about the keyword.
Put the keyword in the URL.
Build links to the page.
That’s literally it.
Yes there’s a number
Regardless of what you hear, digital marketing is still the Wild West.
For most cities in the US you can buy an exact match or partial match domain, build 30 or so links to it, and rank in 6 months.
In many markets you can rent a $200 a month coworking spot in the middle of a
meta titles =
keyword | brand name
example: Las Vegas DUI Attorney | Smith Law Group
H1 tag =
Location’s Premier Keyword
example: Las Vegas’s Premier DUI Attorney
It’s the time of year (tax season) that I start looking at the logistics of moving to Puerto Rico.
The Pros — No Capital gains tax, low income taxes, low property taxes. Great beaches, great food, absolutely elite weather. I already speak Spanish. SEO can easily be done remote
Here are 4 biggest things I could ever tell a local business owner. Bookmark it, write it down, and commit it to your memory. It can change your life.
1. Figure out a way to verify as many Google Business Profiles as humanly possible.
2. Do whatever it takes to add 2, 5 star
Regardless of what you hear, digital marketing is still the Wild West.
For most cities in the US you can buy an exact match or partial match domain, build 30 or so links to it, and rank in 6 months.
In many markets you can rent a $200 a month coworking spot in the middle of a
I’m not sure how long it will last, but Facebook is being used as a parasite for local searches.
I’ve seen people rank in very high ticket niches. I won’t give you the name of the city because I already have a client leveraging it, but there’s a major US city that has a
on page seo
keyword = service + service area
examples: roofer phoenix, pest control denver
keyword in meta title
keyword in H1
keyword in H2
500 words of copy about keyword
keyword in URL
the biggest hacks in local SEO
exact match google business profiles
exact match domain names
owning a private blog network
CTR manipulation
multiples GBPs in target service areas
ranking different sites for the same keyword
ranking different GBPs for the same keyword
🚨How to Show Up at the Top of Google in 2024
You own a small business. You want more leads or sales. You want to be at the top of Google when someone searches for your service or product. You don’t know how. This post is for you. I’m not holding anything back. Bookmark this and
This may be a huge hot take for some, but stop focusing so much on blog content. If you choose to keep pumping out blogs, try to localize them as much as possible.
Let’s say you are a cleaning company in Nashville, Tennessee. You decide to write blog posts for your site like
The best opportunities in SEO right now are at the local level. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I can’t even begin to describe how easy it is to rank.
Most of my time in SEO has been spent working on national brands. Transitioning to small businesses has been a blast.
If
I’ve been asked before what’s the 80/20 of SEO. Here’s my answer:
Put the keyword in your meta title.
Put the keyword in your H1 tag
Write 500 words of copy about the keyword.
Put the keyword in the URL.
Build links to the page.
That’s literally it.
Yes there’s a number
local SEO can be divided into two buckets: map pack rankings and organic rankings
90% of map pack algo is a physical address, correct business category, review count and citations
90% of organic rankings is keyword in meta title, H1, URL, and high quality backlinks
for my family’s businesses I build 3 or 4 websites all trying to rank for the same keyword set. customers see me 4 times before they see the competitors
i also run ads on competitors brand names, so the competition is really screwed
created an exact match google business profile for my pest control company
I’m already ranking number 1 in the map pack
I have 2 reviews
my competitors have more than 200
give the algorithm what it wants
I already wrote “the local seo playbook”
what type of interest is there for “the black hat local seo playbook?”
reason I ask is because if you’re willing to take some risks, you can run circles around the competition
I recently was asked if I were to start a service based business, how would I handle my marketing?
My response:
Very first thing I would do is build a basic website. If I was broke, I would build it myself. There’s so many easy platforms. I’d watch YT videos and figure it out.
Got an email from someone saying that they are currently paying for SEO but they want to make a switch.
My team sent them an email with a scope of work and a quote of $1500 a month.
The business owner emailed back and said that he needs us to charge 1k a month or less if we
exact match website domain
high quality link building
exact match GBP listing
high 5 star review count
do these 4 things and your phone will ring non stop
I get a lot of DMs asking me “what’s your secret?” or “any SEO tricks that I don’t know about?”
The genuine answer is no, we don’t have any special sauce. Our SEO can really get boiled down to a 3 step process:
1. Accurate keyword research. Our team is legit at evaluating a
If you want to game the system as much as humanly possible, here’s how you do it —
Buy an exact match domain. For example, if you live in Tulsa, Oklahoma and are an orthodontist, you’ll want to go out and buy the domain tulsaorthodontist(.)com. It’s available on GoDaddy for
If you’re a local business and you want to win in Google, keep it incredibly simple —
1. List a Google Business Profile with a physical address.
2. Push as many reviews as humanly possible to the GBP.
3. Publish an individual location page for each city that you service.
4.
I personally know someone who sold his bootstrapped business for more than 1 billion. He owned about 50% of the company at the time of the exit.
He used to be the most down to earth dude in the world. Now, he only looks up to people who are worth more than him. Everyone else is
With the amount of times Reddit pops up in Google now, every small business owner should be giving themselves a shoutout in their local subreddit.
For example, If you run a cleaning biz in El Paso, go to the subreddit /ElPaso and make the title “El Paso Home Cleaner
on page seo isn’t complicated
put the keyword in the meta title, the H1 tag, and the URL slug
write 500 words of copy about the subject
write with the intention to convert, and don’t stuff the keyword
you’ll be golden
Happy to announce that The Local SEO Playbook will go on sale on March 1st.
It will cost $30 with 100% of sales going to charity:water
It will include an easy to use game plan on how a beginner can carry out an effective SEO strategy for their small business in 2024.
You’re going to want to read this:
I have a client that has really caught the vision of SEO. They are a small business consulting group. He understands full well that ranking for a national term such as “small business consultant” is going to be a nightmare.
What he does
I am continually astonished at how easy it is for small businesses to rank in Google for local terms.
I started my career in SEO working for cruise lines, national insurance companies, and big e-commerce stores. We were building thousands of links a month and producing dozens
tired of talking to small business owners who pay 10k or more on a website build that I can do in an afternoon
you can find high-quality site builders for a few grand
one of the biggest things I’ve learned from running an seo agency —
sell the most expensive thing possible
that may sound gimmicky, buts it’s true
i don’t want to sell 20 pest control accounts. i want to sell one roof instead
i don’t want to sell 20 home cleaning jobs. i
I started a pest control company. A couple things we are doing to get off the ground as quickly as possible from an SEO perspective:
1. Techs are knocking doors offering free sprays in exchange for a Google review. They don’t try to push a sale at all. They do a full spray of
WHY BACKLINKS MATTER:
Let’s get something straight. Google’s algorithm is a link based algorithm. Full stop. If you want to rank well in Google, you need high quality links. It’s as simple as that.
Let’s say the year is 2017. AI written content doesn’t exist yet. At least not
I’ve been working on a mini ebook about link building. It will contain every single thing I know about how to run a proper link building campaign whether you’re a local business, e-commerce store or niche site.
I’ll show some of my favorite link building vendors (not just my
The biggest opportunities in SEO are at the local level and it’s not even close.
If you have an e-commerce store you’re going up against big box retailers with war chests of capital.
If you have a niche site you’re going up against Google themselves.
If you have a local
Want to know one of the quickest ways to burn down your website's rankings?
Exact match link building. When you yourself are building back links or when you order backlinks from a vendor, you often have the ability to select anchor text.
Anchor text is the text in an article
I own a pest control company and I’m thinking of making it the most black hat campaign that I’ve ever run. I won’t be able to share the specific name of business / URLs but I can try to update as much as I can.
Organic rankings will largely be built through homepage PBN links.
I have been doing SEO for a large number of remote cleaning companies the past year or so and man do I love their business model.
All of the owners I chat with have fantastic work-life balance and are absolutely printing cash.
If you are a small business owner and want to optimize your own webpage in Google, here are the 4 major things you should focus on —
Meta Title
H1 Tag
URL Slug
Copy
Let’s say you’re a personal injury attorney that wants to improve rankings in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
You want
build location pages for every single city you’re willing to service
that includes country clubs, master planned communities, and big neighborhoods
I don’t care if there’s a formal city established or not
if there’s people they need businesses to serve them
dentists, doctors, surgeons, and other medical practices have no idea how to run a business, nor should they
their expertise is in their profession, as it should be
many of them don't know what SEO stands for, let alone how to monetize it
some of my biggest wins have been in
Just spent the last 30 minutes writing a mega tweet on how to rank at the top of Google in 2024. It’s a high level overview of exactly what I do for my local SEO clients. If you’re a small business owner, you’re definitely going to want to give it a read. Posting it tomorrow AM!
The day has come — we are no longer accepting full service SEO clients.
Here’s why:
1. I made a promise to many of our current clients that we aren’t trying to scale this agency to the moon, and that they would always work with my partner and I directly. We’ve reached the
digital marketing can’t be taught
it evolves every day
colleges will never find professors on the cutting edge because those dudes make way too much money to teach
I’ve met with a number of business owners who are paying 1k+ every single month for optimized blog posts.
The problem? They are local business owners.
Blog posts will play a very, very small role in ranking local businesses in Google. When you write a blog post like “how much
If you own a local business and aren’t separating your location pages, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
I have seen way too many websites with a “locations” page that aimlessly lists out 20 different municipalities that they serve. While this is helpful to the user,
🚨 For the next 24 hours The Local SEO Playbook, an A to Z Guide on getting your small business to the top of Google, is on sale for $1 🚨
When I originally wrote this I had it on sale for $30. Tomorrow it will go back to that price. As always, all proceeds go to charity.
A couple quick tricks for SEO that you’re going to want to remember:
1. Front load your keyword in your meta title. Something in the algorithm gives more weight to the terms at the front of meta titles.
2. Use an exact match domain when you can. I don’t care what Google says -
The best opportunities in SEO right now are at the local level. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. I can’t even begin to describe how easy it is to rank.
Most of my time in SEO has been spent working on national brands. Transitioning to small businesses has been a blast.
If
what’s stopping you from knocking doors full time for a month
offering a free service in exchange for a review
stacking 150 reviews on your Google Business Profile
and getting inbound calls forever
have a new client that charges 40k for a new set of veneers
businesses in the map pack don’t have a physical location and have less than 20 reviews
there are DR 0s ranking on the first page
I legitimately may make this guy a couple million in the next 12 months
Local business owners should be leveraging every parasite imaginable with the current algorithm.
Reddit, Quora, Facebook, LinkedIn Pulse, Medium, etc
Get the page live, index it, build a bunch of tier 2s at it. Until they switch up the algorithm, you want to swarm the first
if you’re a small business owner you likely have 10 to 20 direct competitors
I promise you only 3 to 5 of them have meaningful digital marketing strategies built out
if you’re willing to invest, you’ll run circles around them. I promise
🚨 Local SEO Tip
#5
🚨
This may be a huge hot take for some, but stop focusing so much on blog content. If you choose to keep pumping out blogs, try to localize them as much as possible.
Let’s say you are a cleaning company in Nashville, Tennessee. You decide to write blog
SEO for high ticket services is one of the biggest cheat codes I’ve ever seen. We have roofers that pay us $1250 a month for SEO, so 15k for the year. If we get them literally 1 person who needs a new roof, SEO paid for itself. Everything after that is profit.
We have a client
I’ve been asked recently “can you run an SEO campaign for me that 100% follows Google’s guidelines?”
Theoretically I could, but the client would be lighting money on fire.
Google lies. Full stop. They tell you something doesn’t work and it works very well. They tell you
starting a local business?
call 4 friends. ask if you can put a GBP at their home
plant a “permanent” sign in the front yard with the name of the business and the address
deck out their garage with equipment as if a business is actually operating there
take your
I got on a call the other day and the business owner told me he had no inbound leads, was going to lose money that month, and got a job to make sure he could pay his bills. He wanted me to start an SEO campaign for him.
I told him I couldn’t. SEO would be the worst possible
to all my fellow agency owners out there, I’ll tell you a big secret of mine
it took me awhile to figure this out, I’m an idiot sometimes
clients don’t care about link velocity, meta titles, alt tags, map embeds or citations
they just want to make more money this month than
🚨 MEGA SEO GIVEAWAY🚨
@irentdumpsters
and I are giving away everything a business needs to start getting organic leads for their small business.
Bodhi and his team will be building a brand new website for the winner + doing 1 hour of GBP optimization.
My team will be
Late night thought: far too many local small businesses reach out to an agency for SEO services, only to get quoted 3k-5k a month. Of course these business owners run for the hills, paying that retainer doesn’t make any financial sense.
The thing about local SEO is that it
🚨 If you’re a small business owner you’ll want to bookmark this and read carefully
The most common question I get —
How many links do I need to perform well in Google?
The quickest way to answer this is by saying “it depends.” There are so many factors at play:
is your on
Story Time:
My team and I have been planning to launch a link building agency for more than a month now. We have had everything ready to go since March 1st — employees, systems, business bank account, entity, etc
Then we hit a major wall. Stripe, who we had planned to use for
I normally never do business through Twitter, but here’s an offer I think some of you may be interested in:
I have 2 different DA 80+ sites that I have an in with. $100 per link. Both of them are do-follow, in-text links.
Shoot me a DM and let’s chat.
hyper specific exact match domains are absolutely printing right now
something like losangelespersonalinjuryattorney(.)com is too broad
think pasadenacaraccidentattorney(.)com
search volume is low, but conversion is high
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again —
The number 1 takeaway that I have from running an SEO agency is that business owners have absolutely no idea what the hell they are doing. That includes me.
I am in the unique position of talking to over 75 different business owners
the full court press approach
1 — rank your website as high as you possibly can in google
2 — run ads on the same keywords your website is ranking for
3 — rank number 1 in the 3 pack for your keyword
when you have LSA, google maps, and organic rankings all firing at the
A few hundred people bought The Local SEO Playbook. We promised that all sales from the book would be donated to charity. The communists over at
@stripe
have been holding onto our money until today.
Money hit the account so we made the donation. The proceeds that were donated
Here’s something you won’t hear a lot SEOs talk about, simply because they want to keep you on retainer forever —
Local businesses really only need to invest in SEO in a meaningful way for 12-24 months. That’s it. After that, they more than likely can turn it off and they’ll
The most lucrative use case I have ever seen in SEO is the combo of a real estate agent in a high income area and an SEO expert. Here’s how it works:
If you were to search “x homes for sale” or “homes for sale in x” with x being a high income location, your search is going to
it blows my mind that local businesses aren’t afraid to drop 8k a month on LSA but not 1k in SEO
a well dialed SEO campaign can bring just as many inbound calls as LSA does
map pack rankings
physical address
correct business category
average review greater than 4.8
more reviews than competitors
keyword rich description
detailed products section
updates few times a month
keyword rich reviews
College is stupid. If I had an 18 year old son and he didn’t want to be a doctor or lawyer, here’s what I’d encourage instead:
First things first, he would go on a 2 year mission for our church. There’s 100 reasons for this that are more important than career or business
🚨 Local SEO Case Study 🚨
6 months ago one of my best friends called me. As a background, this kid scaled a window washing company to 30k a month from knocking doors.
After being at it for sometime, he obviously reached the point where he was done with knocking doors. He
there are so many little things you can mess up in an seo campaign
I know a garage epoxy flooring business with 600 different 5 star reviews. they should be crushing it in the map pack
they aren’t because their previous seo agency was dumb enough to make their business
I see too many business owners trying to wear too many hats in their SMB.
I know of one dude who has an 80k MRR business who is insistent on learning Google ads and running them himself.
He spends 1 to 2 hours every night after normal work hours learning.
I’m of the opinion
Please stop listening to Google. The casino is never going to tell you how to win. If we followed Google’s advice on how to run an SEO campaign we would end up providing zero results for clients.
The only real way to understand the algorithm is to be in the SERPs everyday. Study
seo will be your cheapest customer acquisition channel, but it likely will be the slowest
paid ads will be your most expensive acquisition channel, but it likely will be the fastest
team and I are finally building our own private blog network
going to use it to blast clients sites with homepage links to get them out of the sandbox early
Local SEO Tip (Number 1)
Optimize your meta titles for your target keyword. We work on way too many sites who have “Homepage” as the meta title for the homepage of their site.
The Meta Title is an absolutely massive opportunity to tell Google what your page is about.
say it with me
I will not rely on only one marketing channel
I will not rely on only one marketing channel
I will not rely on only one marketing channel
this tweet is for all the dudes who have a 10k a month lifestyle that is being propped up by Google LSA