How to Rank #1 in Google (Local SEO Plan)

- Speaker A is showing how to rank number one at Google for gutter cleaning, St. Louis. Speaker A is a website with a solid foundation and they need to make some tweaks to ultimately drive better rankings. - Speaker A tells Speaker B to run a crawl with screaming frog to see what pages are doing best on the competitors' websites. Speaker B advises Speaker C to delete the generic posts and the 404 page. - Speaker A tells the audience about the top ranking results of different companies and explains how to optimize the internal commercial pages and refer to the referring domains to improve performance. - To drive high quality votes to the actual domain, the first step is to build the site architecture. Then, they go to the main keyword that they're trying to rank for and take the top competitor based on their quantity of keywords. - The focus should be on building topic authority for gutter cleaning specifically in St. Louis, and building out the commercial pages first. - Speaker A tells Speaker B they need to build localized relevance and create content marketing assets and linkbait. Speaker B shows Speaker B ten link bait ideas for a gutter cleaning company in St. Louis.

Speaker A: I'm going to show you how to rank number one at Google for gutter cleaning, St. Louis. Let's get right into it. All right, so I just went into Semrush and searched the keyword, and it gets about 590 searches a month. And it has pretty low difficulty according to Semrush. And I went and picked a random business, so I picked Gutter STL, which is ranking number 45 for this important keyword for their business. Okay, so this is the website that we're going to be looking at. And I intentionally picked this one because a lot of the websites that I tend to analyze in these videos usually have like a ton of issues. But I wanted to really focus on a website where they have a really solid foundation and they just need to make some tweaks to ultimately drive better rankings in Google. So the first thing you're gonna wanna do is run a crawl with screaming frog. You always wanna start here because we just wanna be able to see everything that we're working with on the website.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So in the context of this situation, because this is, you know, not a client of mine. I don't have access to Google Analytics and Google search console. You can get around this. And by the way, you know, if you want to analyze your competitors, you can also run them through screaming fraud. So if you go to the Ahrefs section and go to metrics, you can actually click on this and then you can clear all these out and then just click referring domains and then go down here and click on keywords and traffic. So what this is going to do is it's going to show you the quantity of keywords and the quantity of traffic that each individual page on the website has. So this is a really good reverse engineer tactic to kind of see what pages are doing best on your competitors websites. But you can also obviously do this, this for your own website as well. Okay, so once the crawl is complete, just go ahead and paste it into a Google sheet and I just label it crawl. Okay, so what you want to look at are just the pages that are indexed. And so we're looking at a very small website here. And there's a few things that I noticed right away. Number one is we've got a bunch of kind of generic posts here or pages. And clearly, you know, this is, this is kind of boilerplate type of content. So I would just get rid of these completely because what you're going to see here in a second is the right way to build out this content. But all of this stuff is just it's not adding any value and it's not going to drive traffic either. So I would actually just delete this because you would want to start from scratch.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And the second thing is this page is actually a 404. So this, it looks like now there is some sort of calendly being used here, but I would still 301 redirect this page to the calendly just in case there is some referral traffic that we can flow to this booking page. Okay, now going through here once again, this is a small website, so we're not going to be dealing with a whole lot, but I want to bring your attention to one thing right here. So when we look at the homepage, you're going to see that they're trying to opt, they're trying to rank for a lot of different things on one page. And this is a very common issue and you'll see it quite a bit. And the reason why this doesn't work is because Google always wants to serve up the most relevant pages possible. So when you're dealing with new gutters, gutter repair and gutter guards, that's a lot of different intent for each of those keywords. So when we go over here and we look at the homepage, you can see, you can use the detailed Chrome extension here and you'll see that they're trying to hit on many different topics that each requires their own dedicated page. So more than likely the best thing they could do is on the homepage, maybe target something like St. Louis Gutter company. Right? Go a little bit broader to capture more ground in that regard. And then what they need to do, and I'll be showing you this in a second, is really get hyper focused on these internal commercial pages and optimize those the right way. And when you do study the results that are doing the best, we'll go ahead and look at the top ranking results. It's no secret that they're doing well, right? Every single result here has a dedicated page or the entire website is built around gutter cleaning. So like these guys, they just do gutter cleaning.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Their whole website is built around it. So that is a type of relevance that we want to build. And so this is a game of relevance. So you want to build the most relevant page. And if you're offering more than just gutter cleaning, then you're gonna need to have a dedicated page specifically for that gutter cleaning service.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then I'll bring your attention here to the h one tags. And once again, what you're gonna see here is we have St. Louis popping up on the homepage, but these critical service pages aren't even mentioning St. Louis. So this is like the easiest win imaginable is we just need to literally add the location that we're targeting in the title tag and the h one. And that should dramatically improve performance. Just doing that alone, which is, you know, we're talking about a minute of work just to see a significant increase in performance. Okay, so very, very simple change with big impact. And then the final column I want you to take a look at is the referring domains. So this is very common for a relatively new website or a local site. There's a lot of pages that don't have any backlinks. So if you view backlinks from the perspective of votes, then this website is not getting very many votes from the Internet. Okay, so to make a website perform better in Google, we need to drive high quality votes to the actual domain. So I'll be showing you how to do that in a second. All right, so the next step in this process is to build the site architecture. So what we want to do is go to the main keyword that we're trying to rank for. And what I like to do is I like to actually take the top competitor based on who has the most, like the quantity of keywords that they're ranking for. So when we look at this, there's a few options, but I'm going to take these guys in particular because they have the highest amount of traffic going to their page and they have about 60 total keywords. So if we go and look at this, you're gonna see that they're ranking for a lot of things that we're also gonna wanna rank for.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So obviously, everything related to St. Louis is all very important. But a few things that I noticed right away is some secondary cities like Oakville and Arnold. I believe there's Chesterfield in here. So there's a bunch of other secondary locations that will help us build support around St. Louis. And when it comes to gutter cleaning, most of these companies do service a broader area. So what you're gonna see here is I've actually already gone through and started to build out this site, sitemap in the right, in the right way. So what you can see here is we have, in one column, we have the keyword target. Okay, so gutter cleaning plus city. Okay, so St. Louis, Oakville, Arnold, Fenton, Chesterfield, Baldwin and St. Charles.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: There might be more locations, but these are the locations that actually have search volume. So these are definitely going to be the ones that we, we want to focus in on.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: The intent here is commercial. So there's a lot of different types of search intent, but most of them can be bucketed into either commercial or informational. And in the context of local, there's really no point of getting super granular. Just stick with commercial and informational, it'll be a lot easier. Okay, now what you're going to see here is we can see if we look at the St. Louis URL here, okay. This is their current URL structure.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And I'm not a big fan of this URL structure. The reason is because when we look at this, if we just, if we eliminated the root domain and we just saw this, we wouldn't really know what they did and where they're from. Right? So gutters, gutter cleaning, where are they located? Right. We just, we're not entirely sure. So, you know, in a situation like this, I would, I personally would probably change the URL structure because they're not performing well. Right. They're ranking number 45 in this case. So I would probably change the URL structure to mimic something like this. So it'd be gutter cleaning, St. Louis, Missouri. And you can see I've done this with all of these. And the reason is once again, because we want to see if the root domain did not exist, would Google be able to understand what this page is about? That's just my opinion. I think building really highly relevant pages is a really good option. So that's what I would do as far as building out the commercial pages.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And remember, we're not talking about the other gutter type of services that they offer. We're just hyper focused right now on building topic authority for gutter cleaning specifically.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: That's the focus here. And this is really important just to mention because a lot of people underestimate how much you can do just to build kind of this localized topic authority. Okay, so that's the first part is we want to be able to build this out and then we want to have a really good title. So gutter cleaning, St. Louis, I actually just pulled this specifically from the top ranking competitor. Alright. So we're just going to replicate their format, which I think is sufficient for the title tag.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then the h one is slightly different. Right. It's a little more natural, a little bit cleaner. But remember, this is what's showing up in the search results. This is what's showing up on the page when they actually go there. Right. This is what they're seeing right here.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So with that in mind, once you have built out your commercial page, which should always be your priority, always build out your commercial pages first. Then what you're going to do is you're going to think about how do we build topic authority around this concept of gutter cleaning, but specifically making it specific to St. Louis.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And so what I did is I found these ideas, and what I actually did is I went into Semrush and I searched gutter and gutter cleaning in Semrush broadly. And then I exported that and I put it through chat GPT, okay? So I ran all these through chat GBT, as you can tell, and then I told it to add St. Louis to the queries when it makes sense.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: Now the key here is it needs to have variability for St. Louis. So when you look at the results that I ended up with, how much does gutter cleaning cost in St. Louis? Okay, this is a variable idea, meaning that in St. Louis, there's a different, a different answer than there's going to be in Los Angeles or Chicago or Minneapolis. Right. There's going to be a different answer. So those are the types of pieces of content that you want to create. Another one here is how often should you get your, how often should you do gutter cleaning?

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Or what does gutter cleaning include? Why is gutter cleaning important in St. Louis? And what's the best time for gutter cleaning in St. Louis? So notice that we're combining that core topic, which is gutter cleaning. Right. This is really, really important, but we're also combining the specific location that we're going after. So you could theoretically just do how much does gutter cleaning cost? But you'd be missing out on a massive opportunity to build localized relevance. And when it comes to local SEO, we need to build localized relevance. It makes a huge difference. Okay, so those that right away we already have about, you know, twelve pages that we need to build or rebuild.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: But then from there, we also want to be thinking about how do we create content marketing assets and linkbait. So once again, we can just go right into chat GPT and we can have chat GPT help us with this. Okay, so I'll show you an example. So what we can do here is use a prompt like give me ten link bait ideas for a gutter cleaning company in St. Louis, Missouri. And it once again, very important, make sure you mention the type of company that it is and the location that they're serving, because we want these to be hyper focused on this one location.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And so what I went ahead and did is just pick the best ones. And what you can tell here is these are, these are really good topics that are specific to St. Louis. Now remember, these are more for content marketing purposes. These are more for potentially acting as link bait.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So we're going to try to add data to these. We're going to try to make them super high quality. These are not necessarily going to drive a lot of organic search traffic, but they're going to help drive, they can actually be used in ads, right? So if you're running ads specifically on Facebook that's targeting St. Louis, we could use this marketing collateral, this content in our ads, to drive awareness for the brand, right? So there's a lot of value in doing this, and it's not just for that purpose, but it's also for SEO purposes as well. And there is evidence by creating more content around your core offer like this, you're likely going to inform Google that this is your core competency.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you just don't want to go overboard, right? And notice that each of these have different intent. I'm not like creating the same content over and over like one is, you know, reasons why you should do it. This one's an ultimate guide for maintenance. This one's are about mistakes, this one's about the impact on rain. This one's about the cost of ignoring your gutters. Right? So they're all different. Okay, so with that in mind, we have multiple pages that we need to rebuild. We're talking about just like in a very short amount of work, we've already got 20 pages that we can build to build a lot of topic authority. All right, so once you've established your sitemap, what you want to do is you want to optimize each individual page. So based on this scenario, we're really just looking at one existing page and then a bunch of new pages that need to be created. So in this context, let's go ahead and take a look at the existing page and how well this content is actually optimized. So as I mentioned before, even at the most basic level, the keyword is not really in the title tag. It does have technically STL, but it doesn't have St. Louis. And I would prefer to have St. Louis in there. There isn't a meta description. And with the headings, we don't even have St. Louis in any of the headings at all. Okay, so really just basic on page SEO can, can work wonders here, but we want to take it to the next level.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So what I did is I ran this page specifically through rankability, the content optimizer. And this is what we're looking at, okay? So you, as you can tell, this content is not very optimized. Meaning when I talk about optimization, I just really mean relevance. This page is not that relevant. And so this score here is really based on relevance. All right? Now the one thing we can do here is we can actually sort this by unused so we can see all of the things that they're not mentioning. So just by adding something like this in the h one tag, this is immediately going to improve the relevance of that page. Just like that.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And we can even just add mo just to take it to the next level.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And right away we already have improved the relevance of this page with just, you know, a couple seconds of work. Now we want to do is go through and identify all these different topics here that we need to create additional sections about or find opportunities to talk about these topics in the content. Now keep in mind, we are not just looking at these ideas and just finding areas to inject them. We're looking at these ideas as opportunities to build out more content on this page. Because even when we look at the word count here, it's about 900 is the ideal. They're even below that. So this page just needs more content in general.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So, and we've got plenty of opportunities. Now what I would do though is I'd probably rebuild this from scratch, right? I would probably rebuild this from scratch. I would copy all of these NLP keywords and I would do something more like this, okay? So I'd say create an SEO content outline for gutter cleaning, Chesterfield, Missouri using these NLP keywords. So you can tell here, I went ahead, I copied these and then I ran it through chat GPT. But here's one little trick, okay? What you want to do is go to the about page, okay? And this is one way that you can really personalize your AI content. So what I like to do is I will go ahead and pretend like I'm going to print this, okay? And I'll save it as a PDF, alright? And then from there I can actually upload that to the prompt. And so what it will do is it will personalize this content specifically to this one company. This makes a massive, massive difference when you're trying to, you know, go against other people who might have just generic content. This can help you have that differentiation, okay? Now you'll see here, created a nice little outline. And then I actually had it create the content for me from scratch.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you can tell here just from the first draft alone, it's already at a 76.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And this is just the beginning, right? This is just the beginning. So what I would do from here is I would send this to an editor, but this is the same process that we would go through for all of these pages, the commercial pages, the informational pages. This is same exact process. Right? So we're going to, we're going to go into rankability, we're going to copy the NLP keywords. We're going to create that first draft with chat GPT, and then we're going to have a human editor go through and clean it up.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: So you can get all of this, right? You can build out a great site map, you can build out great content, but if you do not have enough authority, you're really going to struggle.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And so when I'm speaking of authority, I'm speaking in the context of backlink authority, your overall backlink profile. And so we look at this particular website, you can tell there's not a whole lot of authority going on at all. And if we approach this from the perspective that backlinks are votes, then this website needs more votes. Now the good news is there's a lot that can be done here because you're basically starting at ground zero. Now the first thing I would recommend doing is always start with the backlink gap analysis. So you can actually go look at the top competitor for the keyword and then just go ahead and look at, go into the backlink gap tool and run them through. So you'll see here, this is the competitor and this is us.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And we want to see what's the, see what opportunities exist. All right? Now what we're going to find here though is this is why you got to be really, really careful, okay? Because, you know, although this competitor is doing really well, what we don't want to see is, is the types of links that they're getting, okay? So when we go ahead and look at this particular link here, this is just your classic spam link, all right? This is a profile link. These are just not good. Yeah, these are not what you want at all.

Speaker B: Okay?

Speaker A: And so we don't want to model them is the point. We don't want to model these links and we're going to go ahead and look through and see are there any that we should try to model once again, you know, same type of profile link building here with kind of keyword rich anchor text. So this might work short term, but this is a path to penalization. With this in mind, you're going to have to kind of build this from scratch because you don't have a competitor that's already done all the good work for you. So what we'll do in instead is the first thing I would want to do is build what I would call foundational links. So you want to just build straight citation links. So you can use a service like Loganix, you can use bright local, you can use Whitespark. You know, those are the three. They're all kind of different, but Loganix just manually goes out there and builds them for you. The other ones are kind of a little more automated, but I just, I prefer using Logenix, just my personal opinion. But basically what you want to do is build out at least 50 to 100 citations. And these citations are not going to massively move the needle, but they're going to give you a nice base layer of high quality links from good websites that are trusted. It's going to really give you a nice diverse anchor text profile. Start here, get that nice base layer. Then from there I would immediately start looking for sponsorship opportunities. So you just search something like sponsors plus St. Louis want to get really specific to the local level. And ideally we want to find a page like this.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So the way to kind of qualify these prospects is going to here we want to see that they're actually linking out to the companies.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Sometimes they don't, sometimes it's just kind of like a logo and they don't link out. We want to see that they're actually linking out, okay. Because then we're going to reach out to them. Say, hey, we saw your sponsorship page. We love to sponsor you. What's the investment to get on this page? Okay. Simple as that. Don't overthink this.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So try to get as many of these links as possible and start with the broader city first. So like St. Louis. But then don't be afraid to look at some of these smaller cities. You'd be surprised how many sponsorship opportunities you can find just in, you know, a small city like Oakville or Chesterfield. There's tons of opportunities, so don't underestimate that. But the kind of nuance here is like, let's say you get a sponsorship link for, let's say some sort of organization that's based in Chesterfield. You would want that link to go to your Chesterfield gutter cleaning page. Okay, that's ideal. Now that's not always going to be possible, but if you can try to drive it to that internal page.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then the next thing I would do is once you've had kind of built up a nice base of citations, you've built up a nice base of sponsorship related links, then you may want to start to invest in some very strong backlinks, links that you're really focused on, quality over quantity. And that's where a service like search intelligence can come in. This is a digital pr strategy. And so what they'll do is they'll basically act on your behalf and they can do what's called like expert commentary. So they'll act as the expert, they'll respond to journalist queries, and then you'll get a really strong backlink from a very authoritative website back usually typically back to your homepage. But don't worry about that because driving links to the homepage is still incredibly effective as long as you have built proper internal linking. So if we look at this, you'll see, you know, they've already got this set up really well. So any link that goes to the homepage is just going to flow to these commercial pages as well. So it will be extremely beneficial. So definitely recommend them. If, you know, if the budget is there for this, it's definitely not a small investment, but these are the types of links that you want. You do not want to focus on quantity of backlinks. Kind of similar to what you're seeing here. This is not the path to go. You want to go this path if you want to really focus on building long term results.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: And then the final piece of this is on the local pack level. So when it comes to gutter cleaning, you know, this is definitely a service area type of business model. So you know, you're not going to need to have to show your address, which is a good thing. And in fact, Google doesn't like when you show an address when it is a service area type of business. And as you can tell, the number one result is acting as a service area business and they're absolutely crushing it. But keep in mind they also have a ton of reviews. So what you want to do is kind of get that median review count and then just make that your target. But you do want to add at least ten to 25% on top of that median review count and try to hit that because you don't want to just get the same amount of reviews. You want to exceed your competitors in reviews. So if you really want to take it seriously, maybe don't even get the media and just look at your top competitor. So, you know, 232 reviews make that your target. Make 250 your target. Right. Because you're just not going to beat them unless you get, you know, a similar amount of reviews.

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: So when we go down and look here, we'll look at the website that we've been studying here, and you'll see they are acting as a service area business, and they've got 13 reviews. But, you know, a lot of room to grow here. So if they want to be able to go to the next level, they're going to have to take review generation very, very seriously. So that is how I would go about ranking for gutter cleaning, St. Louis. I hope that was helpful. And as always, please like the video and subscribe for more free SEO training videos. Thanks for watching.