Two mistakes made: 1) hit create post instead of save draft - mea culpa; 2) Edit post and spend more than 30 minutes writing = timed out. Luckily I saved my work on textedit, but I lost my ability to edit post. So let's try this again ;-)
Like so many of the other threads in this section, I wanted to put my ass on the line and get some external accountability.
I joined BHW several years ago and half heartedly jumped into the SEO game. I was coming from a programming/networking background, but truthfully was burned out. I had a job working for the government, making pretty decent coin with great benefits, but it was ripping my soul out. Not trying to be a jerk, but the environment that CAN occur with government employees is a race to "who can do the least amount of work and get paid". I hated it.
So I started grasping at straws on ideas. Chasing way too many rabbits, way too many ideas, way too many journeys. This is a great way to fail and to deflate anyone's motivation. FYI, I walked away from $8k/mo job with incredible benefits and retirement. I know some of you will throw your shoes at me, but that job made me feel like shit almost daily.
Luckily, I latched onto one journey finally and have had some pretty decent success. Here is what I did and here is what I am planning for 2020.
I had a buddy who had a local construction company and he was paying for SEO, etc from a large National (International brand?). He felt like they were not doing a great job and knew I wanted something else in life, so he "challenged" me to take over his SEO and do better. I was hesitant, but also excited and needed the focus of an existing "property" and friend that needed me to step up.
I jumped into LocalSEO and started my education. That was 3 years ago and his website (and all of my clients) is on the first page for his industry searches.
Website
The company had built him a Wordpress website with a ton of plugins, generic theme, etc and put him on a shared hosting plan. The website did not score highly with Google Page Speed (https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/) at all. It was slow on desktop & mobile and half the images were huge on mobile. It was loaded with tons of "useless" plugins. It felt like a box of tangled Christmas lights. The previous SEO company was publishing "articles" for him at about 1 a month pace. They were 250-400 words, with a generic image at the top, aka useless. Initially I decided to clean up the site and hold off on a complete revamp. I removed several plugins, moved him to a better hosting environment and consolidate several of the short articles into much longer articles of 2,500+ words. I had his workers take pictures of projects they worked on and I started to replace generic images with real ones. If you look at my previous posts you will notice I was looking for PBN setup and backlinks around this time too. I still do not really understand LocalSEO yet.
I added some wp plugins like WP Rocket, WP Smush & Wordfence to get the site to perform better, as well as to try and keep it from getting hacked. When I had moved it over to better hosting, I could see that the site was getting hit A LOT by known WP hacks. I decided to implement a strategy using a plugin called Simply Static and actually deploying the website as a static website with an embedded form in an iframe. At this point, the site got some pretty good Google Page scores (90+) and I felt like that was good enough.
Because of my background, I lean towards "technical" solutions and so one of the next things I focused on was Schema. Ensuring the website was "tagged" properly with data that was inline with everything else on the site (name, phone, hours of operation, locations, etc). I originally was using a service online that I could fill out the data and then use their tool to dynamically embed the proper schema. Now I do it all on my own with a new platform.
This thread is already long and I have not gotten to my journey, so I will say that I currently have my own website platform that was completely designed to make both humans & Google happy. It is a 100% static solution that deploys across Azure/AWS/GCP's CDNs. I plan on writing a post about it's architecture and how it came to be, because I am proud of it and think it is pretty cool.
Google My Business
This is the big dog, everyone here I am sure knows the power of GMB and how arguably this is more important for LocalSEO than the website (flip a coin). Making sure all of my clients have a fully flushed out GMB profile and that it links back to their website is the 2nd thing on my list now (1st is website). I have not implemented it yet, but I just "learned" that we can use call tracking with GMB if we use a forwarding number as the primary number and the business' actual number as the secondary number. I have not had enough time to implement/test this, but I found this information from highly reliable sources that do this now.
Facebook
Like GMB, ensuring that the business has a Facebook Business Page and that ALL the information is filled out fully and IDENTICAL to every other data point (Website, GMB, Citations, etc) is HUGE towards Local ranking. I have had clients where all I did was clean up their data and in a few weeks they were on the first page for local related searches.
Yelp
These guys are absolute crooks. When I started I made sure every client had a Yelp Profile and we flushed out the profiles like we did with GMB & Facebook. After a year or so a pattern arose. My clients would get a few reviews, say 9-15. Everyone is happy, life is good. Then suddenly, several of their 5 star reviews would be gone and there would be a 1 star review. Usually within 14 days my client would receive a sales call from Yelp explaining their offerings. The client would usually ask about their lost 5 star reviews and although Yelp never offered or ensured they would get them back, Yelp would explain they had a process for verifying reviews. They never say "pay to play", but it is most certainly implied. Since then, I have a different strategy with Yelp. It is a necessary evil for sure. My suggestion is that if a company can get 5-7 5 star reviews and stop there, that is probably the best case scenario.
Industry Profiles
The next place to go is industry focused websites like houzz or healthgrades (there are several for almost every industry) and ensuring the client has an account/profile and that it is filled out properly. Just like GMB/FB, just not as powerful (or is it?). To me, these are all in the realm of great backlinks. I will let the experts on here tell me if I do not know what I am talking about, but I can say my clients are doing well with LocalSEO.
Citations
I have used several different citations companies and currently I use Yext. FAR from ideal for sure, but until I am ready to manage a bigger process, putting all the client data into 1 UI and then paying a monthly fee ($30/mo per client for my agency) is the path. I have on my to do list, replace Yext. I simply do not have the time right now. I have looked at services like whitespark & brighlocal. I have even purchased citations service on BHW. If anyone wants to share the best citations company and why, I am all ears.
Reviews
I was a reseller for grade.us and I can say that getting your clients reviews is one of the BEST things you can do for SEO and for sales in general. I think there was a user
@7878 that mapped out a method he built for getting reviews. Well I think several developers read that thread and then went and created all the review companies out there (there are a lot). I have since built my own and migrated all clients from grade.us. They were a good solution, but one day I got an email saying that my legacy account (with legacy pricing) was getting upgraded and my bill was going up 280%, starting next month. WTF?! I quickly built my own version (using zapier, twilio, slybroadcast & sendy = another thread I will post).
PPC Ads Management
Part of my solution is to offer Facebook & Google ads. I bit off quite a bit in trying to learn both LocalSEO and PPC management. I had some "fails", but truth be told I still out performed anything my clients could do and better than most agencies. I say that last part, because I have inherited campaigns with some of my clients and I am blown away by how generic and poorly put together their existing ads campaigns have been.
So this thread is substantially longer than I had anticipated and I have not gotten to my 2020 goals. I have 30 clients now in several different industries (service based contractors, real estate, lending, medical, etc). I feel like my initial education and thus my solution is very stable and it is time to focus on specific industries. My goal for 2020 is to get to $50k/mo in net recurring sales (I am currently at $18,500/mo) with a gross pre-tax profit of $38k/mo and only working 3 days a week. My focus is shifting from "what's next" to how do I automate portions of this solution and how do I empower my sub-contractors (they represent $10k/mo of the $12k overhead) to handle things without my supervision. A combination of tools like zapier, airtable, activecampaign, gsuite, mailparser.io, twilio, google ads scripts, etc will do as much of the daily work as possible.
Long term goals include building out a CRM for my clients. I did this for an industry almost 20 years ago, so I have a background in it. I simply cannot find one that I like now that meets all criteria and is cost effective. I have a hodge-podge solution that is AirTable + Zapier + ActiveCampaign, but I know I can build out exactly what I want for my clients. I think that is a great goal for 2021.
I want to shift to sales. Webinars, presentations and just straight sales calls. I forgot to mention that up to this point I have done no advertising, every client was referred by another client. Partly because I do a great job and partly because my pricing was pretty darn low. I will not up the pricing on my existing clients, but moving forward I have increased my pricing and will do so at 10 client increments. My model is a service based one, no contracts, but month to month. I focus on providing REAL value for my clients and measuring it (their phone rings a lot, they do searches and see their ads, their listing in Google Maps and the site in organic results).
So exact next steps:
1) Make my solution as scalable as possible. Implement automation where it fits.
2) Put quality assurance mechanisms into the manual parts of my solution, so that quality is not lost as we scale and get more clients. This is the part I have no idea on how to pull off yet, but I feel comfortable it will present itself at that point.
3) Build out my sales materials to include webinar videos, Facebook, Google & YouTube ads. Build out my own sales funnel and spend 1 day per week just in sales mode.
I will try and post here once a week on things I am working on and some tools/workflows I have built already.
) Good luck
