Local SEO / Google Business Profile

Garage Door company hired us for $18,000. They made 1.7 million back in 11 months.

Optimized Google Business Profile. This is what helps them show in Google Maps and the local map pack.

Collected at least 10 legit reviews as fast as possible. Used real photos, not cheesy stock images.

Please don't do that. Fixed hours, services, categories, description, everything properly.

Kill generic service pages on the website. Built hyper-specific money pages: affordable garage door repair in Houston, same-day service, no hidden fees.

That's what you should be making pages like. Fix their internal links.

The site has zero links between pages. What connected everything: the service pages, blogs, homepage.

Focus on real solid backlinks, guest posts on real legit local blogs and industry sites. If you wanna see an easy way to use AI to get local backlinks, go to free SEO knowledge.com, scroll down to the AI system to find relevant journalists, land coverage, and earn ongoing high-authority backlinks.

Built relationships with other local businesses for link swaps...

a podcast on this: 18,000 to 1.7 million in 11 months, the local SEO strategy that actually works on the Edward Show podcast. Is post is from sarvestrivastrova, who's a friend of the podcast.

He's been on twice already. He'll be coming back on the show tomorrow to break down this exact strategy: 18,000 to 1.7 million in 11 months.

If you're a local business, you can do it too.

Google is releasing its own playbook for how to rank higher in Google Maps. They have different playbooks for restaurants, cafes, hotels, accommodations, tour activity operators, service based businesses, plumbers, cleaners, general business playbook.

These things are major. This is how long the one for service based businesses is.

There's so much in here how businesses can make the most of Google. A guide for optimizing your Google Business profile.

If you want to get this, search this on Google. Google Small Business Bulletin.

Luck not required. Scroll down to this section.

You can get all the playbooks here and learn more SEO for free at free SEO knowledge.com.

If you're a local business, your Google Business Profile is probably even more important than your website. And this is why it seems like a good idea to pay a company $500 a month to manage and optimize your Google Business Profile.

But it's not. These companies are ripping you off.

Now to be clear, I'm not talking about all local SEO agencies. I'm one of them.

A good SEO agency is worth a lot more than $500 a month. I'm talking about a specific type of agency, if you can call it that, that only manages your Google Business profile.

The problem is that even though your Google Business profile is very important, there's only so much you can do on the Google Business profile itself to improve your rankings. So I wanna talk about what actually matters for rankings on your Google Business profile and what's actually worth doing on a monthly basis.

In terms of ranking, there are four things that matter a lot and then about a dozen other things that make a tiny difference. So let's talk about the four that really matter.

The first is your location...

last month. For some businesses like home remodeling, one review a month is plenty.

For something like a restaurant, you should be trying to get multiple reviews every day. Now again, there are other things like services and business hours to impact ranking, but those are the four big ones.

And at this point you might be saying, but TJ, my competitor has less reviews than me and is in the same primary category. Why are they outranking me?

If it can't be explained by one of those four things, it's probably not something on your Google Business profile. In most cases, your competitor is just a more well-known brand, which means more people are searching for them, interacting with their websites, talking about them online, linking to them.

All those signals are also important for ranking in Google. And there are dozens of effective strategies for improving those signals, but very little of that work is actually done on your Google Business profile.

So obviously I don't have enough time to go over all facets of an effective SEO campaign...

dit their profiles. This is remarkably easy to do and your competitor doesn't even know that you did it.

You should check Stirling Skies website to see if Google introduced any new categories this month that you might want to add to your listing. And if you have any offers, promotions or messages you want to share with your audience, you should make a Google post about it the same way you might share it in your email newsletter.

Now, despite what these local SEO companies will tell you, charging $500 a month posts do not impact ranking. This is just a bulletin board for you to share messages with people who are already searching for your company by name.