How to Pick Profitable Local Lead Gen Niches
How to Pick Profitable Local Lead Gen Niches
Total Read Time: 7 Minutes
Photo Credit
The Ultimate Guide to Picking Profitable Local Lead Gen Niches
In this article, I’m going to show you the best way to pick niches that have the best potential to pay you tens of thousands of dollars for years to come.
Why is Niche Picking so Important?
“We’ve got it down to a science…”
Picking the right niche has the potential to literally MAKE or BREAK your business – especially early on but don’t let that scare you because never getting started (because of picking a niche) will literally cost you your whole business.
Picking the wrong niche can cost you money and months of time you won’t get back BUT at some point you just have to pick one, stick with it (learn the process) and accept the fact that you will probably make a few mistakes along the way. That’s all part of the process, learn to love the process (or at least appreciate it) and you will crush it at this. That’s why we suggest you build at LEAST 3-5 websites at a time, especially to begin with.
Picking the right niche off the get-go will give you the highest probability of success and the highest earning potential.
Too often I see people picking up $100 – $250 / month residual clients on local lead gen sites when they SHOULD be picking up at least $750 – $2,000 / month+ residual in the right niches.
You can either guess at it OR take a scientific approach engineered for maximum success and profitability.
Outline of The Process here:
1) Choosing a Location
2) Choosing 5 Niches in Your New Location
3) How to Find More Niches
Tools Used: Ahrefs, Yellow Pages, Wikipedia, Google Search
Article Highlights: KPI’s – Key Performance Indicators
LOCATION KPI’S
1) Population Size ~ 100k
2) Weak Competitors in ‘Preferred’ Niches (we’ll explain that in a moment)
3) Enough business owners to send leads to (and gain potential client)
NICHE KPI’s
1) Choose Annual Niches – Non Seasonal are preferred
2) High Volume / Low Difficulty (meaning competitors don’t have a lot of SEO or backlinks (Low keyword difficulty in Ahrefs)
These KPI’s are big when it comes to picking your niche website. When it comes to choosing a location, you don’t want to overthink things. Choosing a location goes hand in hand with niche picking. That being said, we’re still only looking at a few main factors here:
1) Choosing a Location
LOCATION KPI’S
1) Population Size ~ 100k+
2) Look for Weak Competitors in ‘Preferred’ Niches
3) Enough business owners in the area to send leads to
Preferred Niches are pre-vetted niches that our team has used in the past that have given us successful results. IE: Niches that paid us lots of money, were generally easier to rank for, and those that more often have competent business owners.
Some of these include:
Taxi
Carpet Cleaning
Driving School
Dumpster Rentals
Massage
Windshield Repair
Personally, I like starting around my location and branching out from there. That being said, we’ve ranked many locations all over the USA and the world for that matter, and the rules apply almost always the same. For this example, we’ll be focusing on niches in the USA.
Wikipedia has a list of those cities:
Following the search term above will show there are more than 311 cities to choose from with a population of 100k or greater.
This population size is important because it allows for there to be enough lead flow for our local lead gen properties we intend to set up and monetize.
As we can see from the end of the list, there are many populations that are over 100k and increasing in size as documented by the “Change” column.
If you’re going through the effort of building out a lead gen property, you may as well maximize profitability and work to minimize your probability for failure while creating less work for yourself.
Taking a scientific approach like this has an exponentiating effect in growing the success of your business, especially when you do so in all areas of your business.
IMPORTANT NOTE: When choosing your location, you want to be cognizant of the annual weather patterns, laws, regulations, and any other factors that may cause failure or hinder a project’s success.
For instance, in certain areas of Illinois, the auto insurance companies cover payment for ‘windshield repairs’ making it difficult to compete for that niche in that area.
Another example, some states don’t require ‘behind the wheel’ or ‘dmv permit testing’ ruling out the driving school niche in those areas.
This shouldn’t hold you up, it’s motivation to get it right as quickly and as often as possible creating lead gen properties with maximum efficiency in success determining factors (as documented by the KPI’s in this article) to stack the odds in your favor.
Create your own luck: where opportunity meets preparation
Some of your sites WILL fail. So we may as well account for that by building more of them.
This is why it’s important to consider building 5 lead gen/niche sites at a time. It’s generally also important to stay away from seasonal niches like pest control, pool cleaners, and snow plowing.
Seasonal niches like these will most likely not pay you year round, depending on the city you choose. I stay away from seasonal niches like these altogether.
And while we’re on the subject, I can tell you firsthand from experience that GMB’s (Google My Businesses) do not work well in the locksmith or towing niche. I’d stay away from those as well.
NICHE KPI’s
1) Annual Niches – Non-Seasonal / Preferred
2) High Volume / Low Competition / High-Profit Margin Niches
3) No Local Regulation, No ‘Surprises’
4) Competent Business Owners
Now that we have a vast amount of cities to choose from, we can take a look at several different niches in a given city.
Personally, I like to find 5 low hanging fruit niches in any given city and drop 5 lead generation websites on them at a time. This takes into account the natural defection rate in market cycles.
Not all of them may win, but we are massively maximizing our probability of success.
For all intensive purposes, let’s look at Las Cruces, New Mexico from our list in the image above.
A quick search in Ahrefs of one of the top ranking competitors immediately shows us there is a lot of healthy search in one of our preferred niches.
It also shows us a very low keyword difficulty score (KD) of zero likely meaning it will be very easy to rank. More on this in the next image below.
A quick look at the top 10 competitors for our niche shows the average unique traffic visitors each site is receiving per month. We can expect around 141 leads per month when we rank as well as the first competitor in the image above (you can view this information by clicking any keyword in Ahrefs under the “Organic Keywords” section).
It also shows us that the competitors have little to no backlinks and that there is a weak SEO presence in the area likely meaning it will be easy to rank.
We can even see that El Paso may be an even better city to consider with even more search volume for one main keyword.
The next thing we want to do is call a few potential clients in the area to source some information and make sure there are enough businesses to send leads to.
A quick Yellow Pages search shows us there are at least 20 auto glass companies in Las Cruces, NM. This is only the first page of the search and we can already see companies without websites.
It’s very important to call a few companies to field for information.
Be friendly, be willing to help, even telling them their website isn’t listed on Yellow Pages, and build some rapport so that these companies will trust you enough to give you some insider info on the local industry.
So far we’ve found Las Cruces makes for a great candidate to launch five niches on. However, we do still need to find four other niches in the area for it to be worthwhile.
2) Choosing 5 Niches for Your New Location
Now that we’ve found a potential location to launch a ‘5 Lead Gen Property Campaign’ on, we’re going to need our other niches.
When choosing niches, you want to stick to preferred niches that have already been tried, tested, and proven.
Don’t worry if this is your first go around, you can borrow some of ours.
IMPORTANT NOTE: When selecting your own niches, make sure they match up to the NICHE KPI’s and LOCATION KPI’s listed on this article!
Immediately we can see there is another low hanging fruit niche in our desired city that has high search volume and a low keyword difficulty. There is a problem here though.
Right away, we can see there are only 5 business owners listed on Yellow Pages to speak with.
A quick Google search to page three and four quickly backup this information showing there are not many businesses to send leads to in the area (feel free to check other sources like Angie’s list to make sure if there are enough business owners to send leads to or not).
This may become problematic in the future. In a scenario like this, it’s even more important to call these businesses upfront and see how much interest is available and ultimately determine whether the niche is worth going into or not.
Next, we can take a look at one of our third preferred niches:
This time around, we’re looking at the ‘massage’ niche.
Again, we can see the high volume to low keyword difficulty ratio that we’d expect from one of our preferred niches.
With 30 potential clients showing in the local Yellow Pages Directory, our third niche gets the green light.
From these three niches and our KPI’s we can derive the following information:
As we can see, two of our niches are pulling in strong meeting the mark, with driving school falling a bit short. However, if we can find three or more businesses willing to accept leads for driving school then it may be worth going into the niche.
This is rinsed and repeat for each city based on our KPI’s and pulling data from these preferred niches and new ones we uncover.
Next, let’s take a look at some good ways to find some more niches. You’d be amazed at some of the niches you’re able to find with a couple searches on Yellow Pages or Google Search.
3) How to Find More Niches
Finding more niches should not be challenging. There are literally thousands of industries in almost every city around the world. Sometimes it just takes a more creative effort to find obscure niches.
One method is to type a couple letters into Yellow Pages and see what suggestions pop up. You’ll find a wealth of niches by using this tactic.
Yellow Pages will give you some of the most popular industry suggestions as you begin to type in phrases. You can click any suggestion to see a full list of local businesses in the area, including phone number. Need I say more?
If you’re ever struggling to find a niche, this is a great way to get some ideas and even find some interesting businesses to call.
You never know when you’re going to find a super money niche that ends out working for your big time.
The process of vetting is the same for new niches. We want to run them against our KPI’s and search the competition just as we did with our preferred niches before.
These niches should score high against our KPI’s or they are not worth the time, energy, and funding it takes to create a lead generation property.
CONGRATULATIONS!
You now know how to pick high-value niches in low competition areas to maximize success and build a lead gen monopoly!
Picking 5 niches per location will help with any margin of error or lapse in securing a business owner to take leads for a given property.
It’s a great number of niches to maximize all five locations needed on one physical address. This way, you can choose one UPS box, craigslist residential location, your home address, or similar for all five of your Google My Business pages to each lead gen site/niche.
Building 5 projects out at a time will give you a good number of products to sell. While you are waiting for your projects to rank, you can begin building out new lead gen properties or start selling recently ranked sites to fill your time.
Being able to focus on niche picking with a bird’s eye approach like this allows you to build a streamlined system.
You can start finding golden niches that will pay you all day long for years to come with this process. You could literally just do this one task and then outsource 100% of the lead gen build and SEO work to a company like ours or you could grab an employee and show them this training and you’re off to the races!
That’s all for this one, I’m double cooked like toast.
I’ll catch you on the next one!
Training Video:
How to Save Money on Taxes
How to Save Money on Taxes
(Please Note: This is not tax advice. Instead, these are the methods we use to minimize our tax burden that our CPA has advised for us. If you need a certified tax professional for your business, please contact Ingrid as we have a stellar tax pro we can refer you to. Please speak with a tax professional for legal tax advice.)
Photo Credit
Taxes are a very complicated subject in the US but I am going to attempt to break it down into very simple terms so that you can better understand how the government taxes us and the best ways to legally minimize our tax burdens. Because more money for you and me, means more tacos for us and our families, period.
1. Business Write Offs: Charge it! (Corporate 21% tax)
One of the best and easiest ways we use to legally minimize our tax burdens are tax write offs. Some great examples of tax write offs are any business expenses (examples: your internet expense, your business / cell phone expenses, Influence expenses, domain name and hosting expenses, ‘business’ travel expenses, One Click Credits, and anything else you may purchase on behalf or because of your business).
Tax write offs are necessary and legal because they are costs associated with doing business – or costs that otherwise could not be foregone to run our businesses. Example: Your client is paying you $1,000 to run ads for them and you spend $800 in Ads. Should you be taxed on money you don’t even earn and money that you don’t ever realize as profits (the $800 spent on ads)? No. Hence why write offs are legal and effective. And dare I say, we have some wiggle room here. (For reference, the $200 you didn’t spend in ads, yet that you earned as profit or income is taxable. But don’t forget, you have phone bills, internet bills and other things to write that $200 you earned off with).
The great thing about owning a business, OR even just receiving money directly from clients (and not through a W-2 form as employees do), is that you receive your money pre-tax, meaning you get 100% of your money upfront. This is true for most 1099 contractors, S-Corps, C-Corps, and Sole Proprietorships.
When you receive your money pre-tax, you can take expenses ‘off the top’ and those expenses work as tax write offs for your business. And any money that is an expense or tax write off is not subject to taxation (please keep in mind in the USA there is a corporate tax of approx. 21%, so that can be a very substantial amount of money that you don’t have to pay taxes on, legally, very quickly).
Picture it another way: when you receive your income through a W-2 form, as employees do, (most wage earners or employees receive their income via a W-2 form), you are subject to a 7.5% FICA tax, state income tax, federal income tax, social security, and so on which quickly eat away at your hard earned money. The average W-2 employee will only ever see ~70% of their income from each paycheck: taxes are taken before they even see the money, so they receive their money post-tax.
Because the money earned in our business hasn’t been taxed yet, we essentially have 100% of our money before tax season whereas a W-2 employee will have about 70% of their money because the government taxes them before they even get their bi-weekly paycheck. Yes, you heard that right: 30% has already been taken out before they’ve even seen a penny. And tax write offs for employees? As far as I know, it doesn’t exist. Enter the beauty of owning your own business.
Even though as business owners we get 100% of our money upfront, we will be responsible for paying taxes to the government on the profit leftover in our business, or, the income less expenses: ($1,000 from client less $800 spent on ads, for the $200 profit leftover in our business). But again, you can minimize that big tax burden with expenses, or your daily operation costs. And there are lots of business expenses, aren’t there?
Ever seen your boss get a nice new vehicle, new office supplies, or take a big company trip before the New Year? That’s because they were minimizing their tax burden by creating tax write offs – they were investing (or expensing) with their company’s money (pre-tax: 100% of the money) vs. their own W-2 Employee income (post-tax: 70% of their money).
This is why business write offs are one of the best ways to ‘save’ money, or at least reduce tax burden. This is also why so many companies (like Uber and even Amazon) break even for so many years. If you break even on the books (showing zero profit gained or zero money leftover in your business at the end of the year) there’s no money leftover in the business for the government to tax you on. And mind you, paying yourself as an employee from your company, is an expense for your business as well. So you can still pay yourself a great salary (yes you will get taxed as a W-2 on what you pay yourself as an employee of your company) but your company gets to show the money you pay yourself with as an expense (confused yet?).
Yes, if your company is structured as an S-Corp or similar, you will have to pay yourself as a W-2 employee, but guess what, we’ve got a solution for that as well. Enter the next subject of topic today: Distributions.
But before we get into distributions, I want to take a moment to introduce you to One Click Credits.
For those of you who did make a profit this year (those of you who have money left over in your business at the end of the year). For those of you who still have that $200 from the $1,000 your client paid you to run ads for them after you spent the $800 in ads, we have a solution for you to play like the big boys (Uber and Amazon).
If you know you’re going to be using our services at One Click Influence in the future, you can invest the profits from your company into One Click Credits – good for any purchase in the store at any time in the future on a $1 per $1 basis. Think of it like buying a gift card for your business, these are credits you can use at any time – however, you are taking the expense on your business now to reduce your tax burden legally for 2018 (just like we illustrated in the examples above) in the same way big companies do.
The best part about One Click Credits? We’ll give you a 15% bonus in all credits purchased before January 1st, 2019. So you’ll get 15% more on your money, good for any purchase in the One Click store in 2019 onwards (example: every $1,000 invested is good for $1,150 in store credit). Now back to distributions and how to save you even more money on your 2018 returns.
2. Distributions: Don’t Pay it All to Payroll Tax (15%)
This is one I actually just found out about recently thanks to my pro CPA I was lucky enough to find earlier this year. Distributions are a great way we are going to use to save a bunch of money on our 2018 tax returns. While this will only work for you if you have an actual company, (sorry sole proprietors and 1099ers), it is absolutely amazing.
Here’s the gist: when we pay ourselves from our companies, we have to do so via W-2 form which puts us in the same position as an employee with lots of money already taken out, receiving our money post-tax. We spoke about that earlier in the examples above.
I’m going to make this super quick for y’all, but basically, just remember, when paying ourselves via W-2, we’re subject to a 15% payroll tax. Ouch.
The great thing about Distributions? Well, you can distribute the profits earned by your company (the leftover money in your bank account) to yourself and completely bypass payroll tax. Yep. It’s really that simple, and any experienced tax professional should be able to further enlighten you to that fact. Those profits will still be subject to corporate tax, and you will still have to pay yourself some income via W-2 payroll, but you will be saving yourself another 15% by not having to put down all cash through payroll tax by paying yourself via W-2.
That’s really all I can say on the subject. If you’re looking for more info on the subject, please contact a tax professional.
I hope this tax guide was extremely informational and informative to you and will help you and your family build a good ‘taco fund’ this tax season. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can earn back another 15% with One Click Credits, please message Ingrid on Facebook! Thank you for tuning in!
3. BONUS: Credit Card Points
Guys, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t help myself. I had to give you a BONUS. So here it is. If you didn’t already know, credit card points are amazing. For the last 2 years I have literally flown dozens of times across the USA completely for FREE.
How did I fly dozens of times across the USA for free while still having more than $1,500 in points available right now? The quick answer: Credit Card Points.
If you don’t already know, many major credit card issuers like Visa (through Chase bank) and American Express offer huge incentives for signing up for business credit cards.
When I signed up for my Chase Ink Business Preferred Credit Card and spent around $5,000 in business expenses in the first 3 months, they gave me something like $1,000 in free travel credit card points. And I’ve spent enough each month since then to be able to fly for free everywhere (literally everywhere) for the past two years. That’s a lot of doe saved there.
No affiliate links here, you know the scoop. The best two cards I can think of for this are definitely Chase Ink Business Preferred and American Express Gold. The American Express Gold annual fee can be pretty hefty but a great credit card hack here is to sign up for free the first year, spend the minimum to snag the points in the first 3 months, and then downgrade to a lower American Express credit card to retain those massive point bonuses you received.
That’s all folks.
Please don’t forget the amazing products and services we offer at One Click Influence including the new One Click Credits (which you should really load up on). It’s an honor to bring you the highest quality products, services, and freebies that we can shelf. Thank you for your continued interest in what we offer and I look forward to bringing you even more high quality services in the coming year. Have a great holiday. – The One Click Team
This is not tax advice. Please consult a tax professional.
The Complete On-Site SEO Strategy Guide
The Complete On-Site SEO Strategy Guide
Total Read Time: 9 Minutes
There are only two prods to the fork of SEO: on-site and off-site factors. On-site SEO includes everything we can work with that is on your website – the SEO we can create from your content, images, inter-page linking structure, and keywords that are directly on your website. All other factors that are off of your website are opportunities to strengthen off-site SEO factors.
In today’s article we are going to cover 5 Easy Steps to completing the on-site SEO for your website. The topics we’ll be covering today include everything.
Outline of The Process here:
1) Where to Find Your Best Keywords
2) Placing Your Keywords Strategically
3) Optimizing Your Images
4) Local Signals and Reputation Management
5) Optimizing Your Website Structure
Bonus: Your Content Strategy
Why is On-Site SEO Important?
Without proper on-site SEO, you’ll never be able to correctly tell Google what your website is about! Afterall, they are a search engine so they will be looking for the best search phrases to match your website. Optimizing your on-site SEO, for keywords that have a lot of monthly search volume, will in turn make you a better candidate for Google to show at the top of the search results for those high value search phrases – which means organic traffic for your website that turn into paying customers.
Without any further adieu, let’s get right into things:
1) Where to Find Your Best Keywords
Look up your best keywords by using any popular SEO Agency tools such as Ahrefs, Spyfu, Google Adwords Keyword Planner, ‘Keywords Everywhere’ Google Chrome Extension, SEM Rush, Mangools kw finder, Traffic Travis, or any similar keyword finding tools.
Your best keywords hands-down will be the ones with the highest monthly search volume. It’s also important to strategically pick ‘low-hanging fruit’ keywords, or those that won’t be difficult to rank for. After we have successfully found even a few of your best keywords, we can get started with your on-site SEO campaign immediately.
If we were looking to build a website in Las Vegas to rank for pool cleaning, we already have a couple great keyword ideas immediately by searching with the Keywords Everywhere (Google Chrome extension). As illustrated in the image above, ‘Las Vegas pool cleaners’ gets 210 searches per month.
With these newly found niche relevant keywords that have high monthly search volume (and preferably have buyers intent, or intent of action for your service), we can now build a strategy to strategically place them in your website.
Opt for finding 5-10 keywords with 50-100 searches/month or higher, we’re about to place rocket fuel on your website’s search potential!
2) Placing Your Keywords Strategically
When it comes to placing your keywords in the content of your website, including the Title/Header Tags, body text fields, encoded meta description, and website images; it is invaluable to utilize the best keywords that you found in the prior step.
In the image above, you will notice a pink box with an H3 tag for the “Content Marketing” section of this website. This is a great example of segmenting your content with various Header Tags, which run H1-H6 and stand for a ‘Heading Tag’. The act as a ‘Title’ for the next section of content.
These are great opportunities to include keywords that you want to rank for, and let Google know that your website is about a certain topic. An example of the ‘body text’ is the white text in the image above, or the supporting text of the Title/Tag above. Think of it like ‘Title & Subtitle’, with each of your paragraphs being supporting evidence for your topic.
Below is a great example of how to properly structure your Header Tags:
Structure your website content like this and you will be able to place your keywords in many various H1-H5 Tags as well as the supporting text below each header tag.
You only need to use the H1 tag once, H2 for large section breaks, and otherwise use H3-H5 for most of your keywords.
Use each of your main keywords in a ‘Title’ and ‘Text Body’ style. When you have many keywords that are very similar, you only need to use each keyword about 2x for Google to pick up your on-site topical relevance.
When your best keywords are: ‘pool cleaner las vegas, pool cleaners las vegas, pool cleaning las vegas, las vegas pool cleaners, pool cleaners, pool cleaning, and pool cleaner near me; you can easily see why you only need to use each keyword variation twice. We start to get a multiplying effect when they are so similar and we don’t want to over-optimize.
Once you’ve added each of your keywords twice (one time in a Header Tag and another in the text body below the Header), you’ll want to link some header tags to their inner service pages of your website. You also want to link from your inner service pages back to your home page, and to each other!
One important thing to mention here, is we do want the content to appear very natural and easy to read for our customers, and not robotic sounding.
Any time you backlink to another page with blue hyperlinked anchor text, it is an opportunity to use a keyword in the anchor text, to describe that page.
Don’t undervalue the importance of interlinking between your website pages using strong relevant keywords as anchor text to describe to Google and your customers what that page is about, those SEO points are worth a lot in the grand scheme on on-site SEO.
You can pack a lot into just those three words: ‘Pool Cleaning Service’, as illustrated in the image above.
Next we’ll need to quickly create the meta description:
Something as simple as the example above is pretty spot on. I like to add the state in there if I’m going for local, but again, utilize your best keywords and optimize for them slightly more than your other keywords.
Depending on how competitive your market is and how many pages, products, and services you want to rank for, you’ll want to repeat each of these steps for the inner pages of your website (that you want to rank).
3) Optimizing Your Images
Now that we’ve placed our keywords strategically throughout our website, we’re going to want to properly optimize the images on the website. There are tons of great opportunities to raise our search potential in the images including adding local signals, niche signals, inserting keyword variations multiple times in an image, and much more.
GeoTagging Photos:
When working on image SEO, it’s easy to take the images directly into a tool that will help you optimize the image all in one location. I use GeoImgr.com to optimize all my images quickly and effectively, including massive local signals meant to push Google My Business (GMB) Listings up the Map Pack rankings.
Leveraging Local Signals:
Using the GeoImgr Tool, we’re able to GeoTag your photos anywhere in the world. We can also quickly name and describe your image with two keyword variations maximizing relevance and passing local signals.
We can get pretty dangerous with this, as we can save many keyword variations in the images, and we also get the opportunity to dominate local signals:
The image above is from LocalFalcon.com and will show us our local map pack rankings among the entire city and surrounding areas that our website services.
We can see the orange and red colors are in much lower positions than where our GMB Listing address is located. Let’s work to improve these using the GeoImgr tool!
If you look closely at the image above, you will notice ‘pink stars’ located on the outskirts of the city that we service. Utilizing the GeoImgr tool, we can quickly geotarget images to those areas on the outskirts of the city to help improve our rankings in the local map pack (as shown in the Local Falcon image earlier).
After geotargeting images for local relevance, including many keyword variations, our images are fully optimized and ready to be placed on our site.
Adding Niche Relevance Signals:
When you’re creating and saving your images, make sure you have plenty of keywords that directly relate to your niche in the Image Title and Descriptions.
Upload these images to your Google My Business (GMB) page and your website to maximize your on-site SEO and place yourself in the Local Map Pack ranking box with the relevance needed to also snag the top of the organic search terms list!
4) Local Signals and Reputation Management
Now that we have our keywords strategically spread throughout various Header Tags and text body, strategically located in images, meta description, healthy interlinking between pages, with supporting unique content, there are only a few ways we can optimize from here.
If you’re focusing on local niches, you can add a NAP citation directly to your website (as illustrated by a large Franchise lead generation website below).
If you look closely at the image above, you will notice ‘pink stars’ located on the outskirts of the city that we service. Utilizing the GeoImgr tool, we can quickly geotarget images to those areas on the outskirts of the city to help improve our rankings in the local map pack (as shown in the Local Falcon image earlier).
After geotargeting images for local relevance, including many keyword variations, our images are fully optimized and ready to be placed on our site.
Adding Niche Relevance Signals:
When you’re creating and saving your images, make sure you have plenty of keywords that directly relate to your niche in the Image Title and Descriptions.
Upload these images to your Google My Business (GMB) page and your website to maximize your on-site SEO and place yourself in the Local Map Pack ranking box with the relevance needed to also snag the top of the organic search terms list!
4) Local Signals and Reputation Management
Now that we have our keywords strategically spread throughout various Header Tags and text body, strategically located in images, meta description, healthy interlinking between pages, with supporting unique content, there are only a few ways we can optimize from here.
If you’re focusing on local niches, you can add a NAP citation directly to your website (as illustrated by a large Franchise lead generation website below).
When creating a Local Citation on your website, make sure the Name, Address, and Phone Number (NAP) are clearly visible in text on your website. Place the information exactly the way you have it in your GMB.
Whether you’re focusing on affiliate websites or local niche websites, it’s wise to increase the reputation of the website by adding Guarantee stickers, or other social proof that will help the conversion rate of your website.
For instance, you can install a ‘Reviews Widget’ to help obtain more reviews that can help your map pack rankings significantly. At the very least, strongly tying your website to your local business address that you have listed in GMB and many other online local directories is going to pass even more local relevance to your website, beating out the competitors.
5) Optimizing Your Website Structure
Now that we have all the pieces of the puzzle we can put them together in one neat and easy to repeat framework:
- Gather your ‘best’ keywords (highest search volume, lowest difficulty)
- Use your top 10 best keywords in Header and text body on your site
- Utilize proper Header Structuring, add keywords when appropriate
- Use Main Keywords in the first sentence after each subsequent Header Tag
- Interlink between pages from various keywords pertaining to that page
- Strategic Image Optimization for niche keywords and local signals
- Strategically place images in GMB and website corresponding pages
- Strategically geotag photo coordinates on outskirts of the city for optimal rank
- Add local relevance by creating a NAP citation listing on your website
- Add social proof and increase reputation management with reviews
- Focus on Conversion Rate Optimization to obtain even more clients
That’s pretty much everything on the subject of on-site SEO for local. Remember to have your phone number and customer acquisition forms readily place early on your website for easy access to your customers.
Nobody likes having to press back on your web browser because you can’t find a way to contact the business whose website you’re on.
Some Final Thoughts:
In closing, optimizing your on-site SEO shouldn’t be something scary at all. By following the detailed guidelines we’ve laid out in this strategy guide, you are on your way to being able to quickly optimize just about any site on the web.
Don’t overthink it and don’t overstress it. There is always something more you ‘can’ do, but generally, nine times out of ten, this is more than enough to properly optimize your on-site SEO.
Bonus: Your Content Strategy
Alright, I caved. Here’s another bonus on the heezy:
Your content strategy can be huge depending on the market and niche you’re in. Having hundreds of thousands of pages with detailed keyword rich content properly optimized can amass a powerhouse website baked in high Authority, Power, Relevance, and Trust signals that Google loves to see.
All the while providing valuable content that engages the users. This is invaluable to the success of your campaign. Having natural organic traffic, of those whom navigate through many of your website’s pages ultimately place you in great light with Google because they want to provide the highest value to their users and customers, the searchers.
By providing great valuable content that keeps users engaged and active on your site longer, and overall boosting everything from Trust, to Relevance, Authority, and Power – all being passed around your website similar to a wrecking ball tearing the innards of an old city building cutting right through like butter. You never know which piece of your content will get picked up – maybe snag a link from Forbes or get featured on a major news outlet. Heck, you may even have something go viral. All of this will bring more visitors, users, and traffic to your website – people who are interested in your services and who want to be your customers.
As it goes with all marketing, there are many various channels and sometimes even just having your email opt-in feature installed on your website might provide enough business for you to accomplish your revenue goals and then some. “The money’s in the follow-up”, as they say!
Please let us know if you would like any help with your SEO campaigns as we do provide full concierge done-for-you SEO services to the highest level for SEO professionals and large agencies alike.
Thanks for tuning in fam, we’ll see ya on the next one!
– IN
New Service announcement:
DFY DEDICATED SEO REP’s…Coming Soon
Score Exclusive Updates, Offers, and Insights!
Click the button for more info!
How to Create SEO Audits that Sell Deals
How to Create SEO Audits that Sell Deals
Total Read Time: 9 Minutes
Photo Credit
Outline of The Process:
1) Need the Right Tools
2) Competitor Research and Analysis
2a) Competitor Keyword Research
2b) Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis (optional)
3) Local and On-Site SEO Audit
4) A Hint of SEO Fairy Dust
Step 1: Need the Right Tools
Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Potentially SEMRush
Now before we get too far, I must let you know that this is meant to build on the training you’ve already learned from JK – if you aren’t a part of that and want to learn more, follow here and please send an inquiry.
To get started, you’re going to need the right tools. The top tool I recommend for SEO audits: Ahrefs, with SEMRush in close 2nd. With this tool, you are able to quickly analyze the top keywords for your niche and top 10 competitor’s backlink profiles with a few simple clicks. This tool will display all of the corresponding information on just two simple pages, making it easy to perform niche and keyword research quickly.
Majestic is another great tool, however you are not able to do full SEO Audits because of a lack of keyword research data. There are many other reasons that you will find in the Top SEO Tools Comparison (coming soon). An easy way to streamline your research is to use Ahrefs.
2) Competitor Research and Analysis:
2a) Competitor Keyword Research:
You’ll want to start with some of your more common keywords to get started. In this example, we’ll use dog toys and dog grooming New York City for local.
For national campaigns, start by searching: “niche + buyer intent keyword”. For example, “buy dog toys” or “dog toys for sale online” will work fine.
For local, start by searching the “niche + city” as the keyword, “dog grooming new york city” will do just fine for this example.
From here you’ll want to analyze the top Competitors along with their backlink profiles and top keywords. Ideally, we’re looking for low hanging fruit (LHF) niches and keywords. More on that in a moment.
Visit here if you’re looking for even more information on low hanging fruit niche picking (coming soon).
Hint, I try to go for a top competitor that is in both the local box and the top of organic rankings, since Google is displaying them for one of your main keywords, you already know they’ve done what Google is looking for to rank. It’s also best to grab the most relevant competitor, you will probably want to analyze two or three as well.
Now that we’ve found one of our top ranking competitors, we’re going to want to head over to Ahrefs and enter their website. You’ll see a screen like this:
Immediately we can see that the competitor has 136 referring domain names pointing 1.15k backlinks to the home page of this website.
That’s a lot of backlinks and while I usually just check the number of referring domains a competitor has, it’s still smart to make sure their backlinks are not too ‘juiced up’.
We can also take a look to see how many links an inner page of the website is receiving. This is especially important when ranking against the inner page of a site.
This competitor has 2,700 keywords:
While in your Ahrefs Dashboard, you can easily access the competitor’s keywords and backlink profile by tapping the numbers in the highlighted boxes above.
Notice the traffic value in the blue box, that can be used to help sell a lead gen property because it shows the average PPC cost of the traffic if the displayed competitor were running Adwords.
**Please note: Ahrefs is a tool and is not always 100% accurate. For example, the ‘Traffic Value’ display usually way off but still useful nonetheless.
We will first take a quick look at the competitor’s Organic Keywords before analyzing their Backlink Report.
Click the Organic Keywords Number from the image above to open up the following screen shown in the image:
Here are the competitor’s top Keywords as underlined in black – we’ll be finding some even more amazing keywords through competitor analysis so pay close attention Willis!
Because we’re analyzing competitor difficulty now, we’re only interested in the underlined KW’s from the image above.
Follow here if you’d like to learn more about using Ahrefs tool for SEO (coming soon).
The ‘Ranking Position’ in Google is listed on the far right and the KW’s are listed in order of ‘most traffic received’ for the website we’re looking at.
It then makes sense why keywords with a lower position are receiving less traffic.
Please Note: The KD highlighted in pink (keyword difficulty) is on a scale of 0 – 100 with KW terms under a ‘KD of 20’ being generally much easier to rank for. You can see one of the keywords is over a 20 KD. We’ll stay away from that for now BUT we’ll still target it for long-term. Traffic and Position have been highlighted for relevance.
Now that we can see the average KD is around ~ 5 – 7 or so, we can take a deeper look at the difficulty of each keyword by clicking any of the underlined keywords above.
In the above image, you will notice a Keyword overview. Please notice at the top, there is an update button – you may want to go ahead and update the results.
After updating this search, I found the KD has moved up to a 6.
You’ll also notice in the Pink Box, Ahrefs gives you an estimate on how many backlinks you’ll need to land in the top 10 search results – notice – very clearly they did not say the ‘top 3’ or ‘top position’, but top 10 search results.
Finally, we are given a parent topic that you can also click and explore for other keyword ideas. More keyword ideas will populate below as underlined in black.
Alternatively, you can see on the right, a higher 22 KD requires more links to rank as shown in the highlighted pink box.
Something interesting happens when we scroll downwhile still on the same screen:
When you scroll down, you will see the top 10 search results for the keyword you are analyzing.
The first black column labeled DR stands for ‘Domain Rank’ and is a power score based on how strong the domain is including how strong it’s backlinks, number of pages, content, and a few other factors.
You will notice the DR is particularly high for Yelp and Huffington Post, more on that in a moment.
On the right in blue we can see even more amazing keyword to target for SEO, and finally, in the middle pink column, you will see how many referring domains each of the top 10 search results each competitor is receiving.
At a glance, we can quickly see the top 10 competitors do not have a lot of referring domains and that they may be an easier search term to rank for right?
! Ahref Faults ! IMPORTANT NOTES: While the KD tool is great at finding low hanging fruit keywords and niches (under a 20 KD), it does have its flaws. The two biggest hindrances are that:
1) The KD tool does not heavily take into account DR (domain rank), or put another way, a website’s authority. Websites like Huffington Post and Yelp have a lot of authority.
2) The data in Ahrefs may be outdated and not properly displaying the competitor’s full backlink profile to date.
3) You can ‘only’ rely on keywords that have the ‘city + niche’ and not just ‘niche’ keywords. You can still get ideas from Ahrefs, but double check Google’s Keyword Planner Tool to make sure the traffic amount matches up to Ahrefs.
Some Pro-Tip Final Thoughts:
1. I highly recommend searching many different competitor sites, keywords, parent topics, and keyword ideas in Ahrefs to find the best keywords and to quickly become familiarized with the process.
2. It’s also a smart idea to check Ahrefs top 10 competitor results against the real Google search result to see how accurate it is. This way, we can gauge the accuracy of the KD tool.
3. When choosing keywords to target for your client, spend much time looking for different high search / low KD keywords. Target lower KD search terms in the short-term to quickly impress your client and get them more customers while targeting higher search / high KD keywords in the long-term.
4. Also, now that we have a firm understanding of the average KD for the niche, in this case about 5 or so, we can use Google Keyword Planner tool to find Keywords that do not have the city in them.
Load the free Google Keyword Planner Tool and click the ‘LOCATIONS’ button highlighted in pink to enter your location before searching with your keyword without the city name in it.
For this example, I used dog grooming, dog groomers, and dog grooming near me:
And voila, we’ve found a TON of valuable keywords that have around a KD of 6 or slightly higher… just without the city name in it.
**Notice the low hanging fruit KW: cat grooming near me with an incredible 590 searches per month for the area of New York City.
Now that we’ve done thorough keyword research and found many Gems with HIGH search volume and LOW KD, we’re ready to analyze our competitor’s backlink portfolio.
2b)Competitor Backlink Profile Analysis (optional)
Thankfully, this part is optional because researching your competitor’s backlink profile is almost redundant thanks to the ‘KD’ (Keyword Difficulty) Tool. I still recommend go through this material to learn how and why the KD tool works.
Heading back to the very first page again, you will want to click the Referring Domains: ‘136’ in the button above in your Ahrefs dashboard.
Now we are taken to the referring domains. You can see the first referring domain, ‘bringfido.com’ has 604 DoFollow links going to the website (a Do Follow link passes along more SEO credit than a No Follow link).
We can also see the competitor has several Blogspot links (highlighted in pink) which are indicative of an SEO’s work.
This is important to note because the lowest hanging fruit niches will NOT have any signals that SEO has been performed.
We can also see relevant websites linking to our competitor Highlighted in the black box above, for example.
Pro Tip: You can scout your competitor’s websites listed in the image above and, using the Copycat Method, you can poach competitor links for your own site.
From the basic analysis above, we can see the competitor definitely has been doing SEO which will make the competition slightly tougher.
They also have relevance – we need to beat them at their own game by outperforming them in every way.
In the above image, I’ve opened the drop down of 604 links as highlighted in the blue box above. These are the 604 do follows from bringfido.com.
We can see each of these domains have very few Referring Domains so the only thing really working for the competition here is the relevance in the URL (as documented by the black boxes) and a bit of power from the link.
The final thing to note is the power that our competitor receives from the DR / UR of bringfido.com linking to them.
The DR or domain rank is pinned at a high 75, this can be easily negated by relevant Influence Links and Guest Blog Posts from high authority websites as well.
Again, the Copycat Method also works great here.
A deeper look into the “Backlinks” tab in Ahrefs shows us that some of the stronger DR backlinks are actually only press releases (as highlighted by the black box).
Again, we can actually see the number of referring domains linking to the competitor’s backlinks sites (bringfido.com, dogfriendly.com, intuit.com, etc), is actually very low and not that competitive.
The competitor can be easily beat by doing everything they’ve done and more. Influence obviously helps in place of powerful, relevant links.
Some Pro-Tip Final Thoughts:
1. Thankfully, researching your competitor’s backlink and referring domain profile is almost redundant because of how well the KD Tool works.
2. That being said, being able to quickly skim through your competitor’s backlink profiles will give you confidence when auditing a potential client website, and also insight to disavowing spammy links.
3. With this, you can now show your prospects, not only how difficult it will be to rank, but why it will be difficult to rank and you can adjust cost appropriately.
3) Local and On-Site SEO Audit
On-Site Outline:
1. Main KWs on Page 2x each 2. 1,000 Words Fresh KW Rich Content 3. Headers, Meta, and KW Insertion 4. Interlinking of Pages, SEO Architectural Overview 5. Spam is 2008
When you’re doing an On-Site SEO Audit, there are really only a few things to consider.
What ever you do, just make sure you put each of your main keywords on the page you are trying to rank, two times per main kw. You may have 5 or 20 main keywords, just get them on the page you want to rank two times, each.
You will want nice fresh content that has not been duplicated on any published website to the tune of about 1,000 words on the home page and circa 500+ per (inner) page you want to rank. Make sure your content is keyword rich from the KW research we did above!
You’ll also want to make sure your Header Tags (H1 / H2 tags) are a good mix between natural headings and matching the main KW’s for your niche and area. There’s no need to overdo this, but you want your biggest keywords in those headers. View the following example:
Your H1 / H2 = Main KW / Secondary KW or vice versa with NATURAL HEADINGS as well. Meta Description: Main KW + Secondary KW + City, State.
Example: “Dog Groomers | Dog Grooming Services in New York City, NY”
And finally, in more competitive niches, you’ll want to analyze how pages interlink to one another and how the navigation flows through to each site. If you’re running on WordPress, add your local schema markup.
Notice the local information highlighted in the pink boxes below, including Business Address and Hours of Operation are listed on the page that is ranking.
**If you do not want to show this information but still want the SEO credit, put it in the footer or low on the page and make it the same color as the background. Also make sure to add it to your schema markup.
If you’re uncertain how your meta description should look, here is an example of the competitions:
As shown in the image above, you can find the meta data by hovering your mouse over the tab in the browser.
Since we already found our main KW’s earlier by searching our competitor, we know which keywords to add to the page we want to rank:
IMPORTANT NOTE: Ahrefs shows more dependable data for ‘CITY + KW’ variations as opposed to keywords without the ‘city’ in it. I only search ‘KW’ phrases with no city in Google’s Keyword Planner Tool because the data from Ahrefs is inaccurate for kw’s without the city in them.
You will want to make sure each of your TARGET KW ‘s is on the page you are trying to rank 2x each. You can see here the competitor does not have many of the main KW’s on their page:
You can use this feature by pressing ‘CTR + F’ on your keyboard to bring up the “Find” feature.
From here we can quickly see, which keywords to add to our client site and areas our competitors are weak.
When adding your keywords, don’t try to stuff them in. Spam is not worth the trouble or risk. You can easily place your main keywords in the content contextually as it relates to your website.
4) A Hint of SEO Fairy Dust
Putting together the pieces of the puzzle
Now that we have all the pieces of the puzzle, we can create the full picture for ourselves and our clients.
We’ve determined the average KD to be about 5 and the search volume is well into the thousands for multiple keywords.
We’ve seen that the competitor is doing SEO (Blogspots, etc) and is ranking by relevance from the backlinks. They are also receiving very minimal power from minimally strong website backlinks pointing to them.
We know the competitor is using Blogspots, local citations, relevant niche Influence type sites, and at least one press release for their off-site SEO. Minimal social signals from popular social media websites always help too.
When it comes to their on-site SEO, we know the competitor has local ranking factors along with KW rich meta description and H1 / H2 tags.
We know the competitor is weak when it comes to power rich backlinks, on-site KW rich content, and right now they have weak Blogspot links.
This means we can easily beat them by having KW rich content on the page we’re trying to rank. Also, it would be a good idea to match all the SEO they have done, including Press Release and some Link Copycats, along with hyper local directory listing citations, and of course out-power them by using Influence websites. This alone will be able to rank you on the 1st page of Google, no problem.
Don’t forget to check site age and GMB age. There are some more advanced auditing tactics we’ll be able to get to in future articles together.
Perform this in presentation form (the same way it’s presented in the video training attached to this article) to engage your clients and show them the strategy that will be able to get the results they’re looking for.
Nice Moves SEO Pro!
You just ‘d Your SEO Skill
They say getting started is the hardest part and you just finished.
Now perform live SEO audits or outline the details you find in Ahrefs to show clients how you will be getting them results!
You can now perform highly qualified SEO audits in 5 minutes or less.
Here’s a bonus too, this competitor is also weak in KW rich anchor text:
Meaning, we can beat them out by having our main KW’s as our ‘exact match anchor text’ on our Influence websites for even more relevant powerful backlink juice boostin’.
More on that topic, in another article.
That’s all for now!
– Mr. One Click, signing out
Please Share YOUR Thoughts in the Comments Below!
1. How will implementing SEO Audits with this strategy allow you to make more sales?
2. How will implementing the things you’ve learned help improve your SEO audits?
3. Who are 3 HOT potential clients you could send an SEO Audit to right now to help push a deal towards a sale?
If you have questions, please don’t hesitate to use the chat box feature on our site or contact us at any time.
If you need Influence, please feel free to check out our various packages!