we grew a local fire protection business's organic search traffic by 816%. And today, I'll show you how we did it step by step. And this won't be like most generic SEO videos you see on YouTube. Instead, you'll watch over my shoulder as I build a local SEO strategy from scratch for a random Fire Protection business based in Los Angeles. But I have one warning before you watch this entire video. It's not for passive viewing. It's intense and will move fast. But if you're up for the challenge, let's get into it. Okay, so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to begin our research process. So that means we're going to find keywords and we're also going to find link opportunities right away. And then we're also going to conduct an SEO audit. So really, this is like the foundational work that we need to do. So let's begin by going into SEMrush and go to The Domain Overview and go ahead and enter your domain. So once the analysis is complete, go to

organic research and click on positions. And then go ahead and Export your keywords. And then go ahead and copy these keywords and put them into a Google sheet. You can label this tab as keywords. And the next thing you want to do is go ahead and click on the competitors Tab. And then in a separate tab, open up the keyword Gap tool. And so what you can do is you can either just use the recommendations that Semrush gives you inside the keyword gap for the competitors to analyze. Or you can go to that competitor section and copy and paste the competitors that you want to take a look at. Either way will work. But in this case, I'm just going to use the recommendations. And so go ahead and put at least four competitors in here. And make sure you're at the top. And what this tool is going to do is going to help us see untapped keywords. In other words, these are keywords that your competitors are ranking for that you are not ranking for. And so we want to be able to fill that Gap. We want to be able

to narrow that topic Authority Gap, to ultimately drive more organic search traffic. So then, once the keyword Gap analysis is done, go ahead and click on the untapped Tab, and then go ahead and Export these keywords, and then put them in a separate keyword tab inside your Google sheet. So now, at this point, you should have a keywords tab, which are your existing keywords, and you should also have a keyword Gap tab, which are the keywords that you are not ranking for, but your competitors are ranking for. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to do some very basic categorization of these keywords. We're going to start with our existing keyword, so go to the keywords Tab, and highlight column A, and then go to format in the toolbar, and then click on conditional formatting. And now, what you can do is go ahead to the format rules, and there's a bunch of different options, but in this case, we're just going to use text contains. And what we're going to do is just enter keywords that are highly relevant to our core offers.

case, we really want to focus in here on Los Angeles because this is the core location that this business services. So, I'm going to start with Los Angeles, and then I'm going to highlight every instance of Los Angeles in green. And then all I need to do is go ahead and just repeat this process for all of the other secondary locations. So, that's going to be obviously California, that's going to be Inland Empire, and that might even be Orange County as well. And so, at this point, we'll have all of our commercial really important keywords highlighted here, that way we can prioritize these later on in this process. Next thing you want to do is go into SEMrush and open up the backlink Gap tool. And once again, very similar to the keyword Gap, you're going to enter your top competitors into this tool. And what I like to do is actually go into the search results for my primary keyword. So, let's say fire protection Los Angeles. And I'm going to pick my top four competitors that are ranking.

I'm going to put them into this tool, and I just want to see, do they have backlinks that we do not have, and if they do, this is an opportunity for us to go and get similar backlinks to narrow that gap. Okay, so go ahead and run the analysis, and once it's done, go ahead and export it and create another tab in the Google Sheet and add all this data in that tab. Okay, then the next important step is we're actually going to run a technical audit, and what that means is we're going to use a tool like Screaming Frog. And what Screaming Frog will do is it will crawl your website and ultimately give you a bunch of data related to every single URL on the site so we can improve the technical performance of your website. So go ahead and open Screaming Frog, enter your domain, and then go to the API tab. And we're because I don't have access to this, the Google Analytics or Google Search Console for this website since it's not a client of mine. Uh, what we can

do those we can pull we can use two different tools even if we don't have access. One of those is Google PageSpeed Insights. So you can connect the PageSpeed Insights API and what this will do is it will analyze every single page on the site and see its overall page loading speed. It will see its overall core web vital scores, all that good stuff that correlates strongly with better user experience. And then the other thing we do is we can either connect Majestic HFS or mods. In this case, I'm just going to connect HS API. And once again, this will allow us to see the link equity and the backlinks going to each individual page. You can also, in the settings, you can select keywords and traffic so you can actually pull that data directly from HRS. And that just gives us more data about these URLs. It's not as accurate as Google Analytics, obviously, because HRS is more of an estimate, but it's still useful data for making some good decisions. So go ahead and connect these APIs and

you'll see as I go through this process connecting the APIs. I am changing a lot of settings, so I won't go through every single setting here for you, but at least in the PageSpeed Insights part of this, there are some settings you definitely want to pick because it's ultimately going to do so much that's really just unnecessary. So for me, I'm pretty much unselecting almost everything with the exception of just a few simple metrics. I'm really just looking at kind of high-level stuff. So like the Core Web Vitals assessment is one that I think is pretty important. We're also going to go ahead and select the performance score, which is just another simple one, and then the speed index time, which is just the loading speed basically. At a high level, you could certainly use all of these metrics, but I think it's just overkill in a kind of a high-level analysis like we're doing here. So go ahead and modify the settings inside the Metrics tab and then switch over to HRS and

we're going to do the same thing once we've connected the API. We're going to go to the metrics tab, and we're just going to change some things. I'm only going to select basically referring domains, which is the amount of unique domains that are linking to a specific URL. And then I'm going to go down, and I'm going to select keywords, and I'm going to select traffic. And that's it, just three primary metrics. And we can use these three metrics to get a really good idea of the performance of every single URL on this website, especially, you know, a very small website like this one. So once you've connected both of those APIs, go ahead and start the analysis. Okay, so while the SEO audit is going through that process, what we're going to do is go back to SEMrush and go to the link building section on the left-hand side. Click on backlink analytics, and then go to backlinks. And what this is going to show you are all of the existing backlinks for this specific domain. And what I like to do is I like

to export these backlinks and add them to a separate tab inside the Google sheet. And then what I like to do is just go ahead and filter through this. And the first place I like to start is with anchor text. So I'll filter through and I'll look. I'll sort all the anchor texts by A to Z. And the reason I like to do this is because I just like to see, do we have initially any over-optimization issues? And in the case of this business, I'm already seeing some red flags. And one of those red flags is there's a lot of repeated anchor texts. So you can see there's, you know, fire extinguishing system Los Angeles has repeated many, many times. Fire extinguisher Los Angeles is repeated many, many times. Okay, these, that is not a good sign. We don't want to have a lot of repeated anchor text like this because it leaves a massive footprint and it basically signals to Google that you are trying to artificially inflate your rankings. So when I see this, to me, this goes into the

action list. Because basically, this tells me we need to go and redistribute this anchor text to reduce our risk, to mitigate our risk with this link profile. And right now, I would say this is a high-risk link profile in its current state. Okay, so now let's move on to looking at the local pack specifically. So, once again, you can go into SEMrush, go to the local section, and click on listings management. And then you can go ahead and enter the business. And what it's going to do is it's going to look at all of the main citations online and see how accurate your NAP information is across these citations. So, that's your name, address, and phone number. And if it's inaccurate, it's going to let us know. And in this case, there's definitely some opportunity to improve this. And once again, these are really easy fixes. Like, this doesn't require a whole lot of effort or strategy. It's just a matter of going through and cleaning these up. And it's not going to have a

huge effect on your performance, but it's something that at least you can mark off your list, knowing like, Okay, we've got that squared away, we've got our accuracy set up, we don't have to worry about that anymore. But it's just one of those things, if you don't fix it, just kind of hangs over your head. Uh, but don't, you know, don't believe that by fixing this, you're going to see a huge increase in performance. It's, it's going to be a very, very granular, micro factor, if, if at all, okay, but it's still something worth fixing. So then, because of the way that Sam Rush is set up, I went ahead and copied this, and I was going to paste into the Google sheet, but actually, this is a scenario where you can use ChatGPT, a very, very small instance, but you can use it to help you with formatting. So I copy this, run it through ChatGPT, and have ChatGPT create a table for me, and then it creates this perfect little

table. And then I can go into the Google Sheet, create a Citations Tab, and paste that table into the Google Sheet. And now, so far, just to review, we've got our existing keywords, we've got untapped keywords, we've got backlink opportunities, we've got our existing backlinks, and now we've got our citation profile. So at this point, you've got a lot of probably a lot of stuff that you could work with, like right now, but we're going to go to the next level, okay? So the next thing you want to do is what the tool that I personally use is Local Falcon for this, okay? And the reason I use Local Falcon is because this helps me benchmark my local pack rankings, okay? There's a lot of rank trackers out there, but unfortunately, a lot of them, if you try to, you know, track your local pack rankings, it can be a little not so good because it might just say like, you know, you're number three or something, but I'd rather see like how much real estate are we occupying, how

much ground have we covered, and this is the beauty of local Falcons. Actually, show you how well you're ranking in specific areas uh in the city that you're going after. Okay, so go ahead and and create a campaign, and then you're going to do a campaign scan. Within this campaign scan, you're just going to go ahead and enter obviously all of your important details, uh enter the location, and then enter your key words that you want to see how well you're ranking for. And then once you've done that, run the scan. And then what we're going to see here is two things. First, we're going to see this scan here for fire protection Los Angeles. And what you're seeing here is this that they're not doing super well for this really critical key word in the local pack, and there's a few reasons for this, and I'll be showing this later on in this video. But one of the main reasons and and like one of the biggest ranking factors in the local pack is literally your address, like your

address is one of the biggest ranking factors. If you don't, you could do everything else perfectly, but if your address is not in that core location, it's going to be almost impossible to rank. So in their situation, unfortunately, they do not have a specific Los Angeles City address. They have Kenoga Park, and you know that's going to be constantly make it difficult to rank for these Los Angeles-based keywords. Okay, and you can tell, you know, this is what they're dealing with. On top of it, their category is also not set for fire protection. Okay, it's actually set for fire protection equipment. Okay, so it's not set for Fire Protection Service, and so you can see Local Falcon gives some really helpful suggestions here that you can use, but having the right address in the city they want to go after is critical, and then having the right category is also critical. So just those two things alone is more than enough to make them not perform well. Okay, now on the opposite side of the spectrum, look at their performance for

fire protection equipment supplier. You'll see how well they're doing for this. Once again, this is a lower competition phrase so they probably don't need to have as much proximity to rank for it. However, if it became more competitive, they would likely start to, you know, lose a lot of ground just because, once again, they're not in Los Angeles specifically. But because their category is set to fire protection equipment supplier, that allows them to perform pretty well for this. But there's also, you know, I would say there's a lot of risk to this ranking and it's not super stable because of the situation of their actual address. So keep that in mind as you do this. But this is a really good way to benchmark your current positions and that way you can, you know, slowly, you know, build upon this over time. Okay, so the next thing I like to do to run another scan. I know we're using a lot of tools here, but the next thing is actually to use Sideline. I just love

using sideliner for two reasons. Number one, it helps you identify duplicate content on the website. And then number two, it helps you identify broken links really easily. So, I just run a premium scan. You'll have to, you know, put some credits in there and then go ahead and start the analysis. And Sideliner will do its thing. And then we're going to go ahead and export any instances of duplicate content, any instances of broken links. And once again, we're going to put that into the Google Sheet in its own individual tab. Okay, so now at this point, the Screaming Frog crawl should be completed. And we're going to go into Screaming Frog and we're going to begin to do a couple of exports. So, the first export you definitely want to do is go ahead and just export everything. So, in the internal tab, you're going to see the drop-down is all. Just go ahead and export it as is. And this is going to export everything. It's going to export, you know, the pages, the images, the

CSS files everything you technically don't need to export everything you could just export the text HTML only. But in this case, I'm just going to go ahead and export everything, and I'll filter it out later. And then once you've done that, go ahead and create another tab inside the Google sheet. And you can call this crawl or whatever you want to call it. And then just go ahead and paste all of this data in here. And then of course, make sure you freeze the top row and add a filter. And then we're going to do one more export from Screaming Frog. So go back to Screaming Frog, click on reports, go to redirects, and then click on redirect and canonical chains. So based on what I saw inside the sitemap report, I knew that there was a high level of duplicate content. And based on what I saw, I could tell that it's being caused by the category. So now that I'm in here in the crawl tab, which is directly from Screaming Frog, I would highly recommend in this instance cleaning up the categories. And so these

categories are created specifically for WordPress. These are not eCommerce categories. Very important nuance here. For e-commerce websites, you want your category pages to be highly optimized. You want them to be indexed. You want them to be crawlable like they're critical pages for an e-commerce SEO campaign. But in the case of local, these category pages are created on WordPress are not valuable at all, and you should not be targeting your specific keyword phrases in these categories. So you can see what they did here is, you know, they have, you know, ABC fire extinguishers, Kenoga Park. Okay, that is a good keyword to target, but it should not be targeted on a category page like this. It should be targeted on its own individual page where you can properly build the right content, the right page, the right optimization. These categories are not appropriate at all. So what I would do if this was my website, I would, these would go on the chopping block, and I would delete every single one of these keyword-rich categories. And if we wanted

to have categories, I'd make them extremely broad. So, it might just be like fire extinguishers, or hood cleaning, or restaurant fires. It'd be something very broad, but it would not have location-specific modifiers in there. This is a very bad thing to do, and will lead to a lot of over-optimization, and will likely lead also to some keyword cannibalization, which is also something I noticed already. So, I'm going through, and I'm highlighting all these categories that I believe should be basically eradicated. And then also the tags, same exact situations as the categories. So, all of these right away, you would greatly clean up the site, and you'd really under-optimize the site so that now it's in a better position to succeed. So, this is a very simple fix that can have pretty big results. All right, so next thing you want to do is similar to what we do with the keyword research. We're going to actually highlight the column, and we're going to use that conditional formatting again to begin to identify instances of keyword.

cannibalization. So what I do is I like to go ahead and look at a location basis. So you'll see I started uh by doing Los Angeles, and then I did Kenoga Park, and San Fernando, and I did all of these different locations. And what I'm doing here is I'm just looking for instances of keyword cannibalization. So in this case, you can see that, you know, as we go ahead and sort through this, we'll go ahead and see that there are clearly instances of keyword cannibalization. So for example, if you look at row 77 and 78, you'll see the about page is optimized for fire protection Company Los Angeles, and the hood cleaning page is optimized for fire protection Company Los Angeles. Just this is not the right way to do things. Generally, we just want to focus on one primary keyword per page, okay? So on an about page, it shouldn't be keyword targeted. It should just be about us and your brand, and that is it. It should not be keyword targeted because it's not an appropriate page for that.

doesn't match the intent of what someone is looking for. If someone is looking for an about page, they it should be structured and built as an about page, okay? And then for the hood cleaning page, if you want to rank for Hood Cleaning Los Angeles, well, you definitely want to make sure that's in the title tag. So, this is basically just a lot of mismatching of intents uh across the site, so we would have to go through and clean all this up. Now, the good news is by cleaning up the categories and tags, that will clean up most of these issues, and then basically I'll be showing you in a second how to rebuild the S map, and then kind of, you know, re-attack this website the right way, okay? So, then I just go to the metad description column, and once again use conditional formatting to highlight uh any page that does not have a meta description. Metad descriptions are not a big ranking factor, but it's certainly not a good idea just to have them completely blank in most cases, okay, especially if you

don't have a lot of content for the crawler to work with you definitely should fill them out. So now moving on to the H1 tag, which is a really critical tag for on-page SEO. And when I saw that there was a bunch of blog as the H1 tag, I knew there was going to be a problem. So immediately I highlighted that, because when you go and look at the pages that currently have this H1 tag, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Like, so we're right now we're looking at the restaurant hood cleaning in K K apart California, and the H1 tag is blog. And then there's another H1 tag for local source for Restaurant Hood Cleaning. So this basically just needs to be restructured. And honestly, for this type of situation, I would just eliminate this whole header section where the blog is, and then just push the content higher up the fold so that the primary headline, the primary topic of this page is at the forefront.

is above the fold. So, this is just a very easy, easy kind of design fix to push that headline above the fold. It will make everything much better. And this is just kind of UX11. Users need to know specifically kind of where they are, what this page is about, and blog is not descriptive. And plus, Google uses the H1 tag to understand what a page is about. So, you're basically missing out on a massive opportunity and you're adding priority to this blog concept when it's not the true topic of this page. So, it needs to be completely eliminated and the page needs to be restructured. And then the final piece of this is there's actually two H1 tags on each of these pages. There's nothing inherently wrong with using two H1s, but as general best practices, it's probably wise just to use one H1 tag per page. The only situations where using a second H1 tag makes sense is if the page is enormous, like it has multiple huge sections that need to be broken up in that manner, but it's much

better just to have one H1 tag, and then slowly, you know, progress to the H2s and the H3s and the H4s through that page. That's proper structure. So I would just, these pages need to be restructured so that there's one H1, and that H1 is the primary topic of that page. Okay, and then now moving on to the canonical element, which I noticed right away because it was a little odd. I saw that the under canonical link element one, the homepage is the canonical for every single page, which basically is telling Google that every other URL on your website, that actually the preferred version of that URL is the homepage, which obviously you do not want. That is throwing some crazy, crazy mixed signals to Google and very, very confusing for the search engine to understand. So basically what you want in most instances is just to have a self-referencing canonical tag. So to go ahead and check to see if you have that, you can just open up any URL and then go to

the detailed Chrome extension, and then look under canonical. You want to see that it's that the canonical is usually the same as the URL that you're currently on, so you can tell in this case, on this author page, the canonical is the homepage. So basically, we're telling Google that the preferred version of this author page is actually the homepage, which obviously, that's not the case, right? So we don't want that. This should be just a self-referencing canonical tag. All right, so we're going to go back over here, and you'll see there's many other instances of this, but once again, this is not good. So I would highlight this in red. This needs to be fixed. This is probably just a plug-in related issue that needs to be resolved. And then just to verify one more time, I wanted to see on the homepage what was happening. So we'll go to the homepage, and we'll see what the issue is here. And once again, I went to a specific version of this homepage URL that doesn't have the

www. subdomain. And once again, this is not the appropriate strategy for multiple versions of a website. The appropriate strategy is that all unpreferred versions, the nonpreferred versions, 301 redirect to all the preferred versions of your domain. So in this case, if the preferred version is the secure version without the www, then we would want all other instances to 301 redirect to this preferred version. That means if I were to go to this specific URL here, that this would 301 redirect to the preferred version. A canonical tag is not the appropriate use in this instance. We want to use 301 redirects. Okay, so now at this point, we've got a pretty good idea of what we're working with at a very broad level. So now we're going to start to get pretty specific here, and I'm actually going to start building the recommendation sheet, and you're going to watch me build this thing from scratch. So first thing that we're going to want to do is we're going to want to go ahead

and run the homepage through Google Page Speed Insights just to get some secondary confirmation of the speed of this very important page on their site. In most instances, if the homepage is slow, most of the other pages are probably going to be slow as well. So then, we can see here on mobile and desktop that there's a lot of room for improvement. And so, we're going to want to go through and just work on making the loading speed much better. Later on in this video, I'll show you some things that I found. But the point is, this is really important to benchmark because we want to go and improve this. This is a very easy win. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to go from, you know, kind of a low score of 33 to get this up to about an 80. 80 is usually where we try to hit because basically, once you hit 80, there's probably going to be the law of diminishing returns will kick in. So, I wouldn't be too concerned at

beyond that point, you're not going to see a huge benefit going from 80 to 90, but you're going to see a massive benefit going from 30 to 80. That's a huge, huge difference, so I would highly recommend prioritizing this within your actions, okay? And it doesn't, once again, doesn't require a whole lot of strategy, not a whole lot of creativity. We just need to go through and fix the technical performance of the site, okay? So add this to the recommendations, and now what we're going to do is we're going to start to... This is totally a qualitative analysis of the website, so this is my own subjective opinion of things that I believe need to change on this website to a) improve conversion rates, and b) ultimately serve the search performance as well. So all these things are kind of linked together. If you have good user experience and you have good conversion on your site, that will indirectly support SEO performance because now we know that Google definitely uses Chrome data to inform how well a site should do.

inside of Google's organic search. So couple of things that you really want in your website is you want a lot of good user signals on your website. You want people clicking around. You want people calling your phone number. You want people submitting forms. You want people scrolling. You want people to be doing these things. And if they're not, that is a negative signal which could potentially hurt your SEO. But more importantly, don't even prioritize SEO. We should be doing this because we want more conversions. We want to make more revenue in our business. So we should always begin with user experience and conversion rate optimization. That is where every single campaign should begin. Then once that's squared away, then we use our SEO methods to pour gasoline on the fire, which is to drive traffic to the foundation that we know can actually convert. Okay, so right away you can tell just in the navigation alone, just starting from the top and going down to the bottom, there's a few things that we can fix almost instantly. First, I would remove the Home tab because most people

these days are pretty much trained and conditioned to click on a logo to go back to home. So having home there is just a waste of space and is not really necessary in this day and age. I would also remove blog, and the reason for that is because we want to make sure that our navigation is built for the objective that our website is built for. And I would assume that the objective of this website is to get more calls, get more leads, get more contact submissions, like to actually get some deals in the door. It's not about trying to get people to read our blog, okay? That's not the objective. I'm all for blogs, by the way, but that's not the objective here. So you don't want to put that in the main navigation as a priority. You want to move that to the footer, okay? And use that, you know, in a different component of our marketing. But as far as what our website is trying to do, we need to drive leads. So I would remove that. Once again, it's a distraction from potential leads.

the other thing is I would also create a faceted navigation in the under the services. So when someone hovers over Services, you want to be able to see all the different services that you offer. It's going to be, you know, showing fire extinguishers, showing fire suppression, showing fire protection, showing fire alarms, whatever it is you want to show those different categories because not everyone is coming for the same exact reason. So you need to at least give them the opportunity to click through and give them the freedom to find what they need. That's the beauty of a faceted navigation. It's not to manipulate Google. The purpose of a faceted navigation is to make it easier for the user to find what they actually need. So I would highly recommend adding that. And now the next most obvious thing is looking at the call to action and the navigation. And unfortunately, the way this is structured, it makes it look like this is all one big button. And you don't want that. You don't want to look like it's

one huge button because this causes confusion for the user, and so I would just kind of separate it and make sure that whatever that call to action is, is like that is the button. The free consultation part should be separate. It shouldn't look like a button. So, and on top of that, just to kind of take this to the next level, I would consider kind of making the language a little more spicy, a little more interesting. Free consultation is a little vague. It's not really specific to what you do. So, I would probably do something like free fire safety audit and then say, you know, call or whatever it is. And honestly, I probably wouldn't even have call in there as well because it's just kind of an unnecessary call to action when I think it's pretty Universal that if you see a phone number, calling is an obvious thing that you would do, right? So, I'd focus more on like the offer, kind of like that free offer, and then just have the phone number there. So, it'd be like free fire safety

audit, and then next to it would be the call to action, which is really just the phone number in a button. Okay, um, so that is a very simple fix, and then I would also highly recommend removing the external link from the Better Business Bureau in navigation. In fact, I'd probably honestly move that to a different section on the page. It's just a, it's kind of a distraction, and you really want there to be good contrast with your call to action out there because this is like one of your most important calls to action on your website, above the fold. It's really important, so you don't want anything that's going to take users' focus away from that kind of core CTA. Okay, so then what I like to do is I like to go ahead and do view page source on the page and just start to kind of investigate the code and see if there's anything that kind of pops out to me. So right away, a couple things popped out to me right away when I looked into the code.

one, it looks like they're using W3 total cache, which is a plugin for WordPress, and that kind of stood out to me because of the poor loading speed performance. So, the fact that that is actually installed on the site is an indication that it's not set up correctly. So, that would be, you know, add that to the action list to go ahead and set that up. The second thing is I went ahead and did a Google search on here, just searched the word Google, to see if they have Google analytics installed. And in this case, they do have Google analytics installed, but it's the old version of Google analytics, which means this website is not tracking traffic, is not tracking conversions at all anymore, because Google, you know, has completely deprecated that old version. So, now you have to use Google analytics 4. So, that needs to be added to the action list, is to move this website to Google analytics 4, so we can get proper tracking set up. That's really important. And then the next thing that really popped out to me was looking at a

lot of the files in here and what I noticed is a lot of it is uh time standard for 2017. So that is really really old. We're talking 7 years old as far as the design of this website. The assets on this website design changes a lot over time. Like you can go and look at the old version of amazon.com to see how much design uh has changed over the years. It's always changing and that means you need to kind of stay on top of this. So I would say 7 years is a little too long. You probably need to be adjusting like upgrading your design just based on how fast things move. Probably at least every 3 years or so is probably a good threshold um and so in this case I I would obviously move it to the top of the list to build a more responsive more modern design with this website. And then obviously as you do that all of these files will update to the current year which then brings level of freshness to this website and there.

is some uh some evidence that freshness is a part of Google's algorithm as well. Google does favor freshness so I would highly highly recommend considering investing in some kind of proper, you know, modern design that's built for conversions. I think that would fix that would be a lead Domino that would fix a lot of the challenges, uh, you know that we're seeing here. As far as the design, this is an opportunity to really once again upgrade the aesthetics of this situation so I would honestly I'd make the investment in hiring a professional photographer to come to some of your, some of your job sites and actually take professional photos of the before and after like document every single thing, take pictures of, uh, of your team working on these things and make it like really high quality pictures show the before and after. This will tap into what's called the labor illusion, right? And when people see that there's been a lot of time and effort, they can see your process, uh, this actually creates a lot more trust. People will trust you.

more because there's this idea that oh because you put more time and effort into X, therefore, I should trust it. Now, this happens subconsciously, not consciously, but this is something that I would greatly consider doing, is just documenting everything, whether it's through using a professional photographer or using a videographer for a few projects, and so you can build out that marketing collateral that can last you for years and years and years. You can reuse that collateral for a very long time as long as it's high quality. Okay, so now at this point, we're all set to build out the new sitemap. So go ahead and just create another tab inside the Google sheet, and then you can just keep these very, very simple. I just have a couple columns: one for URL, one for service focus, one for location, and then one for title. And I'll be adding to this as we build this out, but basically what you want to do is just start to build out your kind of like your dream sitemap from scratch. And I do this, honestly.

every single campaign that I build, I always do this. Even if they, even if they're doing well, I still will build out what's my dream sitemap. And if they've already filled a lot of these gaps, I'll, I'll go ahead and make note of that. But they haven't, that's what I want to do. I want to focus in and fill those gaps. So as you can tell, we just start to build this out and it's pretty simple. We're just going to go ahead and put the ideal URL structure. We're going to put the service Focus so you know Fire Protection Services, fire extinguishers, fire suppression systems. We're going to do all that. And then we're going to put that core location. So they might have a lot of secondary locations, but in this case, we're just going to focus in on Los Angeles. And then in the secondary tab, I start to just add a few things where there might be some secondary ideas associated with that, with that topic. So like in the case of fire suppression.

systems. There's a lot of kind of secondary things that occur with that. There's installation, there's repair, there's maintenance, there's inspection, there's compliance. Like, there's all these different things, so deciding whether to kind of target these on the same page versus creating an individual page is always tricky. But the one thing you can do is you can always go into Google and just see, uh, is Google serving up different results based on those different ideas. So, if you go and search something like, you know, uh, fire suppression, or, uh, installation fire suppression system installation Los Angeles, and you see a bunch of pages that are ranking with that specific optimization, then you know we should have a dedicated page for that. You do the same thing for repair, and you see there's a bunch of pages ranking that specifically talk about repair, we would want to go ahead and create dedicated pages for that. So, use Google to kind of inform you on how to do this. So, basically what I'm doing is I'm looking.

at our website, I'm looking at competitors, and I'm building this sitap to be the most comprehensive thing possible. Now, the client may not target all of these things, but I still want to build out every possible topic, every possible service offering in this particular industry. So, this is where it makes a lot of sense to look at competitors that are doing this really well and kind of, you know, model what they're doing to kind of build this out. So, as you can tell, for me, my URL structure is, I love to go right off the route, and I love to have the primary service, whatever that is. So, let's say fire extinguishers, and then always that location that we're going after. So, Los Angeles, California. And I do like to add the state in there because at least in the United States, there's a lot of cities that are the same name across the whole country. Like, for example, there's multiple Chesterfields in the United States. So, it's just good to kind of, you know, give that little

signal to Google, so there's not any confusion or any ambiguity. Okay, so this is the way to build out the site map. So now the site map is done, we're going to go into rankability, and we're going to start to prepare these pages for proper optimization. So go into rankability, go to the content optimizer, and enter your primary keyword that you want to rank for. And then what I'm going to do here is just to get a first draft. I'm actually going to go in here, and I'm going to go to the optimizer section under the keywords tab, and I'm going to copy all of these NLP keywords. And then I'm going to go into ChatGPT, and I'm going to create a very simple prompt to ultimately create the first draft for this commercial-driven page. So create this prompt, paste the NLP keywords in there from rankability. And then what ChatGPT will do is create a very, very basic first draft for you for this commercial page.

watch what happens when we copy this and we put it back into the rankability content optimizer. This is literally on the first draft. This already hits the optimal score inside of rankability, meaning this is a highly, highly relevant piece of content already without any additional edits. So this is like literally the first draft. So what I would do from here then is go through, clean this up, add our own unique flare in here, add our own unique stuff in here. This is obviously a lot of placeholder stuff but just make it super unique to our brand. But this gives us a really, really nice place to start with. And you can see this is one thing that I personally love about rankability and this is one of the reasons why we created it. Is you'll see the optimal word count range is much more appropriate for this specific keyword phrase. There's some other, you know, on-page SEO tools out there, content optimization tools out there that will tell you you need to write 3,000 words and it's just not that's not what we

do what we do is we focus on the median word count. So you're never going to over-investment. You're going to create the appropriate amount of words specific to that keyword. And so that's why, you know, we're right in range about 400 words for this page. If I had to guess without using a tool, this would have been the range I would have said. I said, maybe let's do 500 Max for this page. And so this is a perfect, perfect example of what this should look like. So this is how you can use a simple way to use rank ability. Just use the NLP keywords to your advantage to build out highly, highly relevant pages. Okay. And now we're on to the final piece of this equation, which is acquiring backlinks or building our website Authority. This is critical not only just for the local pack, but also critical for our traditional organic rankings as well. So there's a few things we can do, but my favorite thing to do is to focus on building content assets or linkable assets so that we can try to get passive

backlinks. So, you can of course create these ideas on your own or just go into ChatGPT so you can see. I did a very, very simple prompt here, and what it's going to do is it's going to go ahead and pump out a few. You know, 10 different ideas that we can, you know, these are seeds for ultimately exploring, right? These aren't all going to be great. They're not all going to be perfectly fleshed out, but these can give you some ideas on things that you can build, build. And I've done this probably about a few hundred times now at this point, and I can tell you about 60% of the things that you give there are pretty legit. They're pretty legit ideas that you can build upon. So I highly recommend doing it. And then I would also consider, you know, once it's given you kind of these broad ideas, also have it give you some data-driven ideas. I love building data on the local level. It's one of the best ways to get backlinks naturally.

passively. So once again, use another prompt and it will come up with a bunch of data-driven ideas. And then all you have to do is just start creating these assets. And then once you build out your linkable assets, one of the things I highly recommend in this day and age is to try to get the most high-quality links possible. This is totally a game of quality over quantity. And that's when a service like Search Intelligence comes into play. They do digital PR, which means they actually will go out there and get you literally the highest quality backlinks that you can get. And you can see from their portfolio, they have gotten clients links from NASDAQ, Forbes, and Bloomberg, and all kinds of amazing backlink opportunities. And they do it in a few different ways. Number one, they could actually go out there and drive links to the linkable assets that you've created. But they can also do reactive PR. They can do expert commentary, which means they'll actually be a ghostwriter for you, and they'll

they'll submit expert-level tips to these publishers, and then you'll actually get a link from these publishers as an expert. There's so many things that they can do to help you acquire links from Absolut, literally like the best websites that exist online. So they're definitely not cheap to use, but if you have a little bit of budget to deploy, this is the way that you build website authority in a safe and effective way just from getting links from the best websites on the internet. So I highly recommend checking them out. Just go to search-intelligence.co.uk to learn more. So there's a ton of local link building techniques you can use, but one of my favorite go-tos is to look for sponsorship opportunities. So what you can do is go into Google, enter the city that you're going after, and then just do something like our sponsors or our donors or donate or whatever it is. And what I'm doing is I'm looking for pages where there are outbound links on the sponsor.

pages. So you're going to have to scan through a few of these. So like, this one doesn't have any outbound links, so this is not a good fit. But then we find this one that has outbound links, okay? And ultimately, the goal here is if they have outbound links, we need to see how much of an investment we need to donate to be, to ultimately get on these pages. So if you're doing this for your own business, obviously, you know what you want to donate to and what you don't. So obviously, you build a list and then obviously, you know, narrow down that list to the ones that you care about and then do some outreach to ask like, hey, you know, how much does, how much of an investment do we need to ultimately get listed on this page? It's as simple as that. If you're working with clients, though, there is a slight nuance here. I'd be very careful to do this without their authorization. So what we do in our agency is we build a big list, then we

send that list over to the client with the potential investment, and obviously, the organization that they could potentially be donating to, and then they just approve or disapprove those organizations, uh, as far as it being a good alignment with their brand. So highly, highly recommend that. But this is one of my favorite ways to get hyper-relevant, high-quality backlinks from trusted entities. This is the key. So that's how you build a local SEO strategy from scratch. Please like this video if you got value because it will help other people learn how to grow their businesses. And if you want to learn how to start an SEO agency, check out the SEO entrepreneur book. Or if you're ready to scale your agency, apply for Gotch SEO Academy. Thank you so much for watching.

Free Local SEO Course ($5,000 + Value)

Subscribe for elite SEO strategy (that works)!

When you subscribe, you'll get:

1. The most cutting-edge SEO and digital marketing strategy backed by data, testing, and in-the-trenches experience
2. Better rankings, more traffic, and more customers from search engines

If you're new here, welcome! 

I'm Nathan Gotch, an SEO practitioner with over a decade of experience leading hundreds of successful SEO campaigns in the most competitive industries, such as health, B2B, SaaS, and legal.

This channel is the place where I share everything that I'm learning, leading campaigns, and growing my businesses.

I look forward to helping you 👍


Free Local SEO Course ($5,000 + Value)

Free Local SEO Course ($5,000 + Value)

Scripts