Anyone own a local business?

[Daddykins]

I own a good business online and wondering if anyone has experience with local businesses. We have the advantage over most for proper seo knowledge.

Any profitable businesses you own in your area? I was looking into a cleaning business, but decided against it.

 

[MarvinMartian]

If you are going to do that you might as well sell the leads and to another company or rent the website out to them.

Assuming your in America. Using a cleaning business as your example you would need an llc,insurance, employees, and you'd probably pay them as independent contractors, unless you want to do all the cleaning yourself. That's just the tip of the iceberg we are also talking sick days, scheduling, accidents, training etc. Lots of stress and unless you can devote 100% to it, it might get out of hand. That's with any niche in the service industry really.

So id say do the first option. Cut down on your liability, lower your risk and find the best profit margin that you can.

 

[Vapys]

I gave up on B&M years ago besides real estate. I flipped 4 optical stores and got out when luxitica started buying everyone out.
Do yourself a favor and take Marvins advise.
Besides getting a haircut I hardly walk into any store.

 

[GrandPlaton]

I own a good business online and wondering if anyone has experience with local businesses. We have the advantage over most for proper seo knowledge.

Any profitable businesses you own in your area? I was looking into a cleaning business, but decided against it.

As others suggested it is not worth to start offline business nowadays. Especially if you are running good and stable online one now. Try to expand your online business instead.

 

[blackouts]

Some offline businesses still can get you good money! Get a few taxi licenses, build a taxi website for your area and you have a steady income for years to come.

 

[overdrive2016]

If you are going to do that you might as well sell the leads and to another company or rent the website out to them.

Assuming your in America. Using a cleaning business as your example you would need an llc,insurance, employees, and you'd probably pay them as independent contractors, unless you want to do all the cleaning yourself. That's just the tip of the iceberg we are also talking sick days, scheduling, accidents, training etc. Lots of stress and unless you can devote 100% to it, it might get out of hand. That's with any niche in the service industry really.

So id say do the first option. Cut down on your liability, lower your risk and find the best profit margin that you can.

Let's say you ranked #1 for a local SEO term, does renting the site out still work given Google places appear above?

 

[Abudence]

Some offline businesses still can get you good money! Get a few taxi licenses, build a taxi website for your area and you have a steady income for years to come.

My area has Uber

 

[MarvinMartian]

Let's say you ranked #1 for a local SEO term, does renting the site out still work given Google places appear above?

Yeah you just look to see how many calls you are getting or leads you are getting from the website each month then set the price to that. It doesn't really matter if businesses appear above you on google local maps since you are still going to be getting some organic traffic. I have seen some clients pay like $500 a month to rent a website out. I thought he was a complete fucking moron since he never tracked how many deals he got through it to see if paying for PPC made more sense, but some people will pay a fixed price for it a month if it makes sense since they will be paying less than they would if they had to pay for adwords or bing.

 

[overdrive2016]

I thought he was a complete fucking moron since he never tracked how many deals he got

Haha. Thanks for the response buddy. So do you still do this/generate income from this? Any info on best niches/ones to avoid? I definitely see the value in this as my fathers a tradesmen and about a whole year ago we got a site set up and someone did barely even a months SEO work (guy sucked, was unresponsive so we just parted ways and my dad just never got anyone else because he's an old schooler who can barely check his emails) and our site still ranks 4 for a local keyword that he still gets 2-3 calls for a week. Any tips would be appreciated here or PM if easier! Really keen to get a bit more insight from your experience!

Edit: I'm new to SEO so apologies if tough to answer but typically how many keywords and articles do you need to rank?

 

[MarvinMartian]

Haha. Thanks for the response buddy. So do you still do this/generate income from this? Any info on best niches/ones to avoid? I definitely see the value in this as my fathers a tradesmen and about a whole year ago we got a site set up and someone did barely even a months SEO work (guy sucked, was unresponsive so we just parted ways and my dad just never got anyone else because he's an old schooler who can barely check his emails) and our site still ranks 4 for a local keyword that he still gets 2-3 calls for a week. Any tips would be appreciated here or PM if easier! Really keen to get a bit more insight from your experience!

Edit: I'm new to SEO so apologies if tough to answer but typically how many keywords and articles do you need to rank?

I've been doing website development with SEO as a secondary focus for about 2 years now, 1 year consistently. I don't rank websites to sell them off or rented them. I just had a client that rented from someone without tracking anything, which is completely stupid. He paid a good amount without knowing if it even helped him in the end. He never wanted to invest in back linking, press releases, blog postings for his site, so he never ranked well at all. You will find sometimes if a website doesn't rank, its a clients fault if they didn't take the correct precautions. Also remember that if you rank someone for a website they will make thousands if not millions of dollars in extra revenue in the next couple years just by what you did, so always charge a high rate.

If you want to rank a website more just look at the forum on here. Find the competition, analyze them, do a better job then them in either on or off page seo and wait to see if your work has been beneficial. Don't do anything that might hurt your website so it might be best to learn for yourself and do it yourself unless you find a good reputable seller, which their are a good amount on here.

As far as how many keywords you need to rank it depends on the volume the keyword brings in. If you have a high competition keyword that gets a good amount of traffic and you rank #3 that might be better than ranking a low competition keyword that has little to no traffic #1. Also ranking 1 keyword in high competition might be good, but ranking 10 keywords in low competition might bring in more traffic than the 1 or 2 high competition keywords.

 

[sully1975]

I come from a family business of electrical contracting in the North East of the United States. My dad has two state's licenses in electric. I have my own in my state along with a HVAC license. We are a service business coming to the customer.

I try to put a more unique spin between a contractor and an BH marketer. I got tired of paying $520.00 a month for 2 blog entries. So, I attempted to undertake it myself.

 

[Miketheguy]

I own a Brothel,but since Thailand was discovered by my fellow citizens very few actually visit the brothel. I suppose i need to hire some Trannys.

 

[parklands]

I owned many offline businesses over the years and the hassle with staff and stock was always a problem, just wish I was younger starting out now the opportunities are endless.