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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 do 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 so in this 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 and 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 app 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 AP I 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 page speed insights so you can connect the page speed 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 uh the link equity and the back links 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 uh it's not as accurate as Google analytics obviously because HR is more of an estimate but it's still useful data for making some good decisions so go ahead and uh 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 page speed insights part of this uh there is there are some settings you definitely want to pick because it 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 highle stuff so like the core web vitals assessment is one that I think is pretty important uh 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 in a kind of a you know 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

back links and what this is going to show you are all of the existing back links for this specific domain and what I like to do is I like to export these back links 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 Tex so I'll filter through and I'll look I'll sort all the anchor Texs 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 Tex 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 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 this is 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 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 chat gbt a very very small instance but you can use it to help you with formatting so I copy this run it through chat gbt and have chat gbt 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 our existing keywords we've got untapped keywords we've got uh 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 you 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 how much uh 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 and 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 that's going to constantly make it difficult to rank for these Los Angeles based keywords okay and you can tell you know this is 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 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 this is a lower competition uh phrase so they probably don't need to have as much proximity to rank for it however if it 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 um but because their category is set to fire protection equipment supplier uh that allows them to perform pretty well for this but I there's also you know I would say there's a lot of risk to this ranking and there's it's not super stable because of 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 sideliner I just love using sideliner for two reasons number one 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 and seliner

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 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 in the internal tab you're 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 the pages the images the CSS files everything you technically don't need to export everything you could just export the 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 seliner 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 index 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 phrase

phes 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 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 i' 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 um 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 highlight in 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 is 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 this is not the right way to do things generally we just want to focus 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 it 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 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 is 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 for the 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 onage 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 uh because when you go and look at the pages that are 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 uh so this basically just needs to be restructured and honestly for 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 the primary headline the primary topic of this page is is at the Forefront and 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 uh 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 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 uh through that page that's that's proper structure so I would 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 uh the homepage is the canonical for every single page which basically is telling Google that every every other URL on your website uh that actually the preferred version of that URL is the homepage which obviously you do not want that that is throwing some crazy crazy mix signals to Google and very very confusing for the 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 uh 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 again this is 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 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 uh is the secure version without the without the WW do 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 read 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 a the homepage through Google page speed insights just to get some secondary confirmation of the speed of this very important page on their site and in most instances if the homepage is slow most of the other pages are probably going to be slow as well and 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 and later on 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 and 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 to 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 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 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 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 the 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 to 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 in 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 uh I would also remove blog and the reason for that is because we want to make sure that our navig 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 at 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 fasted navigation it's not to manipulate Google the the purpose of a fasted 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 separated 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 a little vague it's not really you know 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 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' be like free fire safety audit and then next to it would be the call to action which is really just the the phone number in a button okay um so that is 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 websites above the fold it's really important so you don't want anything that's going to take users uh 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 number one is 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 uh you know add that to the action list to go ahead and set that up uh the second thing is I went ahead and did a Google search on here just searched the word Google uh 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 uh 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 a lot of the files in here and what I noticed is a lot of it is uh time standand for 2017 and 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 uh 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 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 proc uh this actually creates a lot more trust people will trust you more because they 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 um 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 Sy 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 gole 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 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 uh there's there's multiple Chester fields 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 Dy 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 chat gbt and I'm going to create a very simple prompt

to ultimately create create the first draft for this commercial driven page so create this prompt paste the NLP keywords in there from rankability and then what chat GB chat gbt will do is create a very very basic first draft for you for this commercial page and then 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 Rel 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 uh and you can see this is one thing that I 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 phame phrase there's some other you know onpage SEO tools out there content optimization tools out there that will tell you you need to write 3,000 words and it it's just not that's not what we do what we do is we focus on the median word count and so you're never going to overinvestment you're going to create the the appropriate amount of words specific to that key word 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 is 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 chat gbt 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 giv 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 back links naturally and 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 had get they've gotten clients links from NASDAQ and 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 uh be a ghost writer for you and they'll they'll submit expert level tips to these 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 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 so 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 Don to 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 uh 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 the organization that they could potentially

be donating to and then they just approve or disapprove those organizations uh as 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 highquality 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