Free Local SEO Course 2026 - Improve Local SEO Google My Business Rankings and Website Rankings

0:00What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today is going to be my free local SEO course for 2026. So, it's going to be a free local SEO training course that you can follow along, go through tutorial by tutorial. I'm going to ask if you do like this, if it is helpful, if you want more content like this, please share it, like it, leave a comment. All of those things help me. Subscribe to my channel. If not, you know, feel free to give me a thumbs down. But, what I did is I put together some of my tutorials that I had on my channel that I've been recently

0:29putting together more local SEO content. I know I do a lot of Google Ads content, but in doing Google Ads, you essentially need to know how to run local SEO best practices as well, cuz you're always going to have clients asking for other ways to get leads, and it's just another thing that goes hand in hand with with Google Ads, really. So, all of the timestamps you'll see here is when these actual videos starts. So, if you want to jump ahead to three local SEO tools, free feel free to jump ahead to there. I do have a page on my website that I'll put in the video description if you want

0:58to go to that page and see any more information. But, this will be my free local SEO course, and let's get started with what is local SEO. Today, we're going to be going over what is local SEO, why is it important, and let's look at some examples of companies that are doing it really well in Google, usually, and how well you're ranking for near me searches and searches for your direct city where you're located, and the

1:21cities that you're actually targeting. Now, keep in mind for local SEO, it's going to be really difficult if you're in county A to rank really well in county B, because local SEO is exactly that, where if you're trying to rank in Broward County, and you're also trying to rank in Miami-Dade County, it might be difficult if your only location is in

1:41Broward County or Miami-Dade County. It's going to be hard to rank outside of your local area. So, as I established with local SEO, the most important thing is just understanding that you're really targeting your local market. Take a 10-mi radius around your location, and outside of that, it can be more difficult to rank. It's not that you can't, it's not that your business profile won't rank, and it's not that your website won't rank, but it does help to be more localized. So, today what we're going to go over is what is

2:06local SEO starting with plumber near me. So, I prepared a presentation basically just what it is, why it matters, important things that we should go through throughout this. So, basically local intent, so Google signals will go over with that is, and the real outcome. So, ultimately when it comes to local SEO starting with local intent, when people are searching for plumber near me or plumber Murrells Inlet, it's really, you know, you can target them where they are at with your business. If your business is not located there, it's going to be very, very hard to rank a business profile and a website when you don't have the physical location in that

2:39area. So, you know, starting with that, it is a really important part of it. Next is going to be Google signals, so just understanding that how how many reviews you have, how many new reviews you're getting, your overall review scores. Your Google business profile in general is really just like a picture of here is our business. Are you uploading videos, photos? Are you replying to reviews? All of these things are really good Google signals. So, you just kind of want to make sure that you're putting these things out there and staying active on your business profile, putting a post up every week, making sure that you are replying to all the reviews that

3:10are coming in. Real outcome, the goal is not abstract rankings, it is to earn more qualified calls. So, essentially, you can rank, like for a plumber, you can rank and and put content on your website that's all about here is how to do plumbing. Here is everything you need to know about every different type of

3:26hot water heater and how to repair that. But ultimately, that's not really what's going to get you clients. What's going to get you clients is ranking for when I search this, I scroll down, and I see, okay, Benjamin Franklin Myrtle Beach is what's ranking the highest here. There's a few others that were ranking really well for me. And the one example I'll be using, and of course doesn't come up in this example, but every other one I was doing it did, is going to be this Murrells Inlet pipedream.com, which was ranking really well in, you know, some

3:51of the searches that I was looking at. So, we'll show some examples of that. But really, you're looking to rank for keywords and searches that have the intent of people looking for jobs. So, you know, I know plumber near me is kind of the obvious one, but we'll go over a few examples throughout this where it's like, okay, this kind of makes a little bit more sense for who we're trying to target. So, essentially, main thing about local SEO is going to be your Google Business Profile. It's going to be ensuring that on any business directory, a Yelp, any of these other where your business can be listed, you

4:22have the right information there as far as name, address, phone, and also have built out profiles in things like Yelp and Better Business Bureau and Angie and all these different things where, you know, you don't necessarily have to pay for listings if that's what they require, but just understanding that getting an organic listing in all of these is a really important factor. Same thing with Apple Maps, they are they are also have their own version. You have Microsoft who also has, you know, Bing Maps where you can essentially create your business profile in these different areas. It also doesn't hurt to have local pages for your face like a

4:53Facebook profile where you keep that active, go over your local business. The other thing is going to be your website. So, your website and your Google Business Profile are the two most important things, but these other these other channels are still really good channels and if they rank well in Google, like Facebook ranks really well in Google. Facebook communities and groups are ranking really well in Google. So are Reddit communities and groups or Reddit subreddits. So, essentially, if you're recommended there, great, but it's not really something that you can rely on. It's not something that's always going to be easy to say, okay, yeah, we'll just we'll

5:21just do that. But those are usually going to be your two main things and then you have all these others where it's like a Nextdoor, a Yelp. I mean, I follow I go on my local Nextdoor and there are people that I know run their whole entire business off of it and stay busy. So, if you're active on Nextdoor, that could be a great way to get more people, you know, calling you, requesting service just by being active in the local community, doing great work, getting people to leave reviews for you on Nextdoor, and then I saw a post today in mine that was plumber in

5:46Murrells Inlet. That was actually what made me think, let me let me do this topic for this video and people just gave their recommendations and one of them was actually somebody said Benjamin Franklin is great and somebody said Benjamin Franklin's, you know, horrible. So it's just one of those. You can't really control that but being the one that people do recommend is always a good thing. So I mean a huge huge part, there's just more paid ads, less room at the very top of for the paid advertising. This is really what I want to go over, you know, the sponsored listings that are at the very top, local

6:13service ads. These are things that I'd recommend running. So I do manage these for clients. I do manage paid advertising for clients and kind of figure out what's working best, what's driving the best results. But ultimately, if you don't have these things, it can be really challenging. If you're not listed in the local service ads results, your Google business profile is not listed high, if you're just getting started, then I would highly recommend running more ads to make sure that you're actually competing with, you know, the big players in your market. And I know you don't necessarily want to pay for jobs that way, but getting organic jobs early on is always

6:43going to be a challenge. Even coming down here, you have more paid competition. So the top result in the map section is sponsored. Sometimes I've seen top two sponsored here. I've seen ads in between. If we just scroll through the search results that I got for plumber near me and we scroll down, local service ad, another ad and then another ad. So Carolina Cool shows up three different times here. This is actually a really good example of effective advertising for a company like Carolina Cool where clearly have the budget, got themselves right in the local service ads, got themselves right here. This is a really good advertisement. They've actually had

7:17some They they definitely have a good advertising setup. And then we have another one here under businesses and I don't think they rank on the first page. Roto-Rooter dominates by me. So that's that's kind of the challenge, especially for some of these really competitive plumbing and all of these. It is a challenge to really rank organically when there's these huge players. But ultimately, it's about you need to also be running ads like these other ones are. Roto-Rooter's running ads because the ads help you get more customers in the door, help you get more reviews, and

7:44that's going to help your review score. It's going to help your review velocity. And those are going to be really important things that you really need to make sure that you're using. So, you know, just understanding that the local results is not, you know, not the same as it used to be. It It is more competition and more challenging to get those leads. So, next one that is doing really well is this Merrells Inlet Pipe Dreams. And

8:03they have services all built out here. And the reason why I thought they were a really good fit is I did a search for tankless water heater installation near me, and they were the very top result. So, if I do tankless water heater installation near me, and we look up what we get. So, we get Carolina Cool again. There's a really good ad by Carolina Cool. They're

8:24doing really well. Uh so, this is another thing. The AI overview is going to change things as well. You have Carolina Cool in here again. The one that we're going over is actually not here. So, you know, not the greatest example, but you could see water heater services in Merrells Inlet, and they're ranked at the very top, you know, after Yelp and Facebook. Some people are just looking for that website, get in there, and and fill it

8:43out. My Buddy the Plumber Park City. That is interesting. That is on a subdomain. So, you see there's definitely So, Carolina Cool could probably use a little bit of a SEO. They should be ranking higher than this subdomain on this website. But, what do I know? So, ultimately when it comes to local SEO, this company does a really good job of building out their website pages for the specific services that they're offering. And you can even get further down and say, "Yeah, we we do service Rinnai tankless hot water heaters. Yes, we do service insert every single brand new service." If you're an HVAC company, insert every single type

9:15of different one that you cuz those are all going to be really important as you're trying to rank for these keywords and people search for it. I had to search for Rinnai tankless hot water heater repair near me, and the company I went with had a page on their website that specifically said they do tankless water heater solutions, and they had Rinnai listed there. So, it is one of those things that if if you don't have that on your website, there's just no way for Google to actually rank you for those things. And then from a paid advertising perspective, it helps to have pages like that. So, they are

9:43ranking really well just kind of there plumber near me was ranking at the top when I looked at it. They are ranked they are Murrells Inlet so that probably helps them as well. But, more of these dedicated pages where it's like the tankless water heater I just showed you is definitely a a good way to make sure that your SEO is doing well. Tankless water heater repair near me, plumber near me and you can see it ranking higher than Angie's List, Reddit, different things like that. So, I want to see which Reddit didn't rank for this, but I just I guess I get the, you know, people talking about it, but

10:10these happen on Nextdoor everyday and it's not like Nextdoor is ranking really high. To me, Nextdoor is a little bit better. So, final thing is going to be, you know, ultimately when it comes to local SEO, you're really just trying to get visibility here. When people are searching for anything, it could literally be optometrist near me, you're you need to look at, okay, what do the search engine results look like? We have a big sponsored result here, okay, we have another sponsored result here. Then we start getting into the actual local results and I'm located here. So, usually what you'll see is these are very proximity based. This is

10:41fairly close to me. It's actually kind of far, surprisingly. It's that same thing. All right, so they have two at the top. One is for the actual doctor, one is for the actual practice. So, this is a really good really good actually this is very close to me. Um, yeah, the these are really good actually. This is another thing too is

10:57creating additional business profile. Now, if you're a local service business, do not do this, but if you're a medical practice, then yes, you can create one for your practice and for the doctor, the optometrist that's working there. Grand Traverse Retina and Eye Physicians, so pretty close to me as well. So, a lot of it's just going to be, you know, just based on where you're located and that's why sometimes with local SEO you get people that want to rank very high in these, but ultimately what your goal is is building a business profile that gets a lot of reviews, making sure that you keep that active,

11:26and then, you know, Inlet Eye Associates, if they're like, how do we how do we, you know, target some of these other ones and get, you know, ultimately it's starting to run some advertising, running some local service ads, which are now available for optometrists, and, you know, for plumbers running local service standard PPC ads. Those are going to be the best ways to make sure that you're showing up in the maps results more often, you're

11:45showing up in this sponsored result. There's three sponsored results at the very top. So, and you'll see it's Paul E. Associates, really good. I Mart Express, probably just a national company, and then LensCrafters, not not the highest rated, but located in the mall. So, ultimately for What is local SEO? It's essentially going through the process of optimizing your Google Business Profile, your Google your local presence, understanding that the things that are actually ranking for, you know, optometrists near me, and seeing how Google pulls those things, is to say, "Okay, are there any directories that we can add into, you know, for us?" So,

12:20Yelp in this case, we can add in Yelp. Not really anything else showing here, Vision Source. I don't even know if that's something that But ultimately, if there are specific directories for optometrists, make sure you're listed there, make sure you get all of your citations, and, you know, we'll go through more about what to do with local SEO, but ultimately it's about giving Google a reason to actually rank you by saying, "Look at all of our reviews, look where we're located, look at our website and all the different services we provide." And when people search for it, you know, hopefully you'll put us at the top. I do think the organic is It's

12:51It's definitely a challenge now with local SEO in general, but it's not something that you need to say, "Well, we're just going to give up on it." It's like, "No, we still need to build out our whole website. We need to run ads so we're getting reviews coming in, and then we need to, you know, just just

13:03focus on growing our business profile." If you're the biggest in the market, great, keep focusing on growing. If you're the smallest in the market, try to get more reviews than the biggest in the market, and if you're not, then ultimately it's just stay pace with them, and if you're in that second, third, fourth, fifth result, not the end of the world, but it is over time, you know, them having these two very top spots is huge, and probably a reason that if they contact me, they'd be like, "No, we get calls all day, every day cuz people search up optometrists near me and these are the two things you get. Highly

13:30rated, looks really good." So, again, if you have any questions about this, please leave them in the comment section. Today, I'm going to be going over my local SEO tutorial for beginners for 2026. Now, this is not going to be your standard, okay, we're going to build a Google Business Profile, we're going to build a website. It's really going to be more, here are the processes you want to put in place and what you're looking to actually do to rank higher in Google. So, this is going to be part of my local SEO series and I'm going to actually put out a local SEO, like a

13:56free local SEO course on my YouTube channel. So, if you're looking for all the information, you can watch that whole course. This video will be in there. So, basically, I broke this down into seven different kind of modules, you can call them seven steps, seven, whatever you want to call them. So, first, I start with local search in 20 in 2026, just understanding what's working, how it works, you know, and there's basically a question for each of these that I'll ask. Google Business Profile Optimization, so one of the most important aspects of local SEO is your Google Business Profile, your local website. So, the architecture, on-page

14:28SEO, how well is your website actually designed to rank? Reputation Management Reviews, basically, going looking at your Google Business Profile, how many reviews you have, reviews you have through other channels like Yelp, Facebook, anywhere that you're able to collect reviews. Off-page SEO and local authority is going to look at backlinks, citations, brand mentions. Do you have pages on Nextdoor, Facebook, all of these different channels that also have a good local presence? Are you have local backlinks built? So, those are different things that are going to help with your local SEO as well. Then, just looking at tracking, understanding what's working, you know, are you actually driving results with your local

15:04SEO? I mean, the most important thing, as we talk about it, is getting people to come in, call you, and getting a new customer. Doesn't really matter getting impressions, clicks, things like that if it's not leading to revenue for your business. So, that's really where SEO is. The main focus is how do we get more customers coming in when they're searching for this? Last but not least is going to be paid advertising and how that kind of plays a role within growing your local SEO presence. So, start with local search in 2026. Basically, the question to ask yourself with this local search in 2026, where does your business

15:39currently appear? And that's when you're doing a search for your main keywords and service. I'm going to do an example in 2 seconds. And then here are basically the main factors. Proximity, how close you are to the searcher themselves. How close is your business profile to the person searching? If I'm searching for irrigation services, I'm not going to get an ad in South Carolina for companies in another state or, you know, even another cities. So, relevance, how well your business matches the search term, and then prominence, basically the overall

16:08authority and trust that you've built. Competing for the local three-pack, Google Maps, AI overviews. So, when we're looking at local SEO and somebody goes, "Best tree removal service in Fort Worth." So, somebody is located in Fort Worth, for example, doing this search. Basically, these are the results they're going to get. You're going to start with local service ads. So, there's usually two or three listed here, generally two

16:30local service ads. I just expanded this. We scroll down, we have an AI overview. The top-rated tree removal services in Fort Worth include Fort Worth Arborist Co., Texas Tree Surgeons, Specialized Technical Removal, Highly Reviewed Providers like Balor Tree Service and A-Team Tree Service. Average cost range from 400 for medium trees, 2,500 for large or hazardous tree removals. So, a list of top-rated tree services. This is our first SEO aspect over here. We also have our references over here. So, being in AI mode is a really good really good

17:02starting point for a local business. They have get estimates, use Yelp's list of 10 best tree services in Fort Worth. So, that's actually you can actually see the resources that they're using here. If I click on show all, you'll see all the resources. Yelp, so we've opened that page here. So, this is what opens up when we go to Yelp. If we keep scrolling down here, we have Actually, we have our local pack. So, local

17:23three-pack are these three that show up. Usually have a sponsored one as well. This is why you want to run paid advertising cuz you get right to the top of the maps list here. But, if we look over here, I I expanded this and we can see the actual ranking. So, it goes RJ Tree Service, Neon Monkey, Felix's, A-Team Mercer, Ponce, Alvarado. So, we have a a list here. Keep scrolling down and we

17:43have Reddit page. So, we opened up Yelp. This is what's on the Yelp page. So, we have Texas Tree Surgeons. Alvarado is ranked here as well. We have the Reddit page. Who do you have good experience with for tree trimming tree removal? This is in the Fort Worth page. You can join the conversation and leave your own company right here. But, Blue Ox, I did not even see that. Okay, Blue Ox, don't even see that one there. Smaller group, Next Level Tree Service. So, not a ton of really This is why I'm like I don't understand why Don't understand why this is ranking. There's no good reasonable

18:17reason this page should be ranking on the first page of Google. There's not a good recommendation in there. But, if you see these here and you're doing local SEO and you can leave a comment, leave a comment. Go into the Fort Worth Reddit page and basically, I've had people make their own where they're like, "Who's a good tree service?" Now, the thing to keep in mind is if you're in these Fort Worth type communities, it's not always easy just to join, leave

18:38questions with a bunch of fake profiles. So, it does help to be active members of the community. And if you have somebody who's an active member actually leaving a comment saying, "Yeah, they're the best one that does it." So, we have Fort Worth Arborist Co. We're getting to our first organic listings. Look at it now. How far down you have to scroll to

18:53actually get to our organic listing. Besides the AI mode, you get here, but we have all the way down here is Fort Worth Arborist. And then we keep scrolling down, Tree Service Guys, Alvarez Trees, A-Team Tree Service. I would say when I looked at everything, A-Team had a pretty good presence overall. And truthfully, I mean, their their website wasn't overly, you know, this is their website. It's not overly optimized or anything, but they do have pages for all of these different areas that they service. I think their main page is kind of geared towards Fort Worth. They have all of their services here. Call us, fill out our online

19:26contact form. So, pretty simple yet effective. Texas Tree Surgeons, so they had a much better website. So, we have all of these different services here. Service area, so we could say, "Okay, let's look at the Fort Worth service area page." And we come in here. Our services in Fort Worth. They have Fort Worth arbor services, Fort Worth tree removal. They have this built out really well. So, coming back over here, this is my Perplexity where I made my presentation. But, if we scroll up to the top here, local search in 2026 to start. Basically, most important thing is ensure that your Google Business Profile is filled out. Where are you

19:59currently appearing? And if you're like, "Why are we not ranking higher?" It's generally one of these three factors. Proximity, if your Google Business Profile is way away from the main population, try to get a much closer business because close closer business location because if you're trying to target Fort Worth and you're two towns over in this small tiny Texas town with 5,000 people and you're like, "We're trying to compete with these Fort Worth companies." The problem is there's 10, 15 companies in Fort Worth that already have really good rankings, are centrally located, have their websites built out, and have proximity and relevance, which you do not have. So,

20:34how well your business matches the search query. So, if somebody's searching for landscaping services and you're tree care, you're probably not going to rank for it. So, focus on the services that you provide. And prominence, last but not least, is going to be, you know, what do your reviews look like? How long have you been in business? If you've just starting out and you just created your Google Business Profile, these are things you're going to have to build up. So, the best way to start is saying, "I'm going to build a huge website." If I build a huge website, that's going to help me rank much higher. That's going

21:00to help me do better with my ads. That's going to help me do better with my relevance, my prominence, and proximity I can work on in the meantime. So, getting started, where do you currently appear? What can you do to actually improve those results? Some recommended tools that you can use that can help be helpful. Google Search Console, highly recommended, and BrightLocal. Google Business Profile Optimization, we have BrightLocal again, WhiteSpark. I highly recommend using BrightLocal. It's

21:23probably my favorite local SEO tool. But, the next one is going to be your Google Business Profile Optimization. And this one, pretty simple, is your Google Business Profile fully optimized? Categories, services, attributes, and recent posts all in place. Main thing that you need to ask yourself when you're looking at all of these results here, you can use what's called GMB Everywhere and click on it and it's going to give you This will be the example that it gives us is dentist nearby. Does a local scan, gives us category analysis. So, these are all the categories that they're using. It gives us about the attributes that they're

21:55using, overall review score of the average and number of reviews, max rating, minimum rating, business hours. So, to see if your business hours match, if you're open enough compared to others. So, you can verify all of this by just using a tool like GMB Everywhere. They have all of these different individual tools related to this where you can say, "I want to analyze their customer reviews. I want

22:16to see what their posting strategy is." So, when it comes to your Google Business Profile, most important thing is filling it out, replying to reviews, answering questions, putting all of the information out there that you can about your business, uploading photos, videos, everything so that you could basically say, "Here is why you should go with us instead of the other guys." And the other thing to go along with that is getting a lot of reviews. It's just most important thing. You need to get a lot of reviews. Next thing is going to be basically your local website architecture, on-page SEO. Really good example was Texas Tree Surgeons. They

22:45did it exactly how I'd recommend. Service area pages, Addison. For Addison, they have tree trimming, tree removal, stump removal, all of these different services that they're trying to target. So, when it comes to local SEO, they have a page on their website that is Addison stump grinding services. This one actually is for Dallas, but it looks like they built it out for some of the larger areas. So, I would recommend building it out for them for all of the areas. If you're providing all of those services in all of these areas, it doesn't hurt to have an Addison, Texas tree planting page cuz even if it doesn't get a ton of search

23:17volume, the chances of you ranking higher for that page and also having that appropriate with your Google business profile is going to help your overall rankings in the long run. So, that is the next thing here is just your overall local website architecture and just ensuring that you have all of these pages built out and hyper-localized to the actual services you're providing all the way down to like saying, "Hey, we provide palm tree removal. We provide palm tree trimming. We can, you know,

23:44trim hedges. We can plant these trees." So, all of these different things having pages on your website, it it only helps by having more pages like that of the services you provide. Reputation reviews and off-page authority. So, this part of this is going to be what are called citations. So, with citations, you can build those using tools like either Whitespark or by using tools like BrightLocal. This is that, you know, the actual local grid rank tracking tools that you can see where you're ranking for your Google business profile with some of these different areas. So, you get kind of an idea of what your visibility is overall. But, when it

24:19comes to your actual authority, prominence, everything like that, part of it is building up local citations. So, local citations and you can see some examples, Superpages, Superlawyers for lawyers. Essentially, citations are business directories. You want to be listed in every relevant business directory possible. So, using a tool like BrightLocal or Whitespark allows you to easily get yourself listed. And the other thing here is going to be NAP consistency. That's name, address, and phone. So, these are some of the different tools that we have here. But, it it's one of those things where it helps to get a lot of reviews, a lot of five-star reviews. And ultimately, what

24:55really helps that's hard to do is getting reviews from like local guides. Someone who goes in who's already left reviews about 20 other places in the area and has a local guide next to their name and Google can trust what they're actually leaving as a review compared to somebody who just created their Google account and is their only review is your five-star review. That reviewer will actually help you because they're a local guide and they get more prominence than the person who just created their Google account who could be anybody. So, reviews and off-page SEO are both going to be really helpful things that are going to help with your overall

25:27visibility. Tracking analytics and measurement ROI. So, basically main thing So, this is looking at phone calls, form submissions back to the local SEO that drove it in. Going to be hard to do that, but using tools like CallRail you can track every single phone call and where it's coming from. BrightLocal helps just with looking at local search grid tracking. Same thing with WhiteSpark, so they'll both give you kind of that grid tracking look at where you're actually ranking. The main thing is I like to look at within each Google Business Profile, how many engagements we're getting, how many phone calls we're getting, how many website visits we're getting because

26:00then I can actually measure, okay, what is the success of our local SEO strategy? So, another one, Local Falcon, that's not one I use as often, but grid rank tracking tracking could be a really good way to say, okay, this is where we're currently ranking and looking at those rankings over time for a client can actually show, hey, this is how much we've grown over the last three, four, five months doing this. So, coming down here, paid ads and how they accelerate local SEO. This is our final module. So, main thing with our local SEO tutorial is get your Google Business Profile fully built out. That is always where

26:32you want to start and then you also want to start by building out on some of the other local channels like Bing Places, Apple Maps. So, anywhere you can have a maps result, you want to start by building your profiles. From there, running advertising is the quickest way to get to the top of Google. So, when you analyze, what is actually ranking in Google, you really come to a quick, you know, if I just quick quickly refresh this search, get rid of this, and we do a quick tree removal service in Fort Worth. We'll probably get something similar, but you could see we have,

27:00okay, local service ads at the very top. If you're not here, you're just losing out on leads that may be coming in. Even if you're at the bottom of the list. A Mat was actually one that looked like they did a really good job as far as their SEO strategy. There were some companies that get enough from SEO that they're like, "We really don't need to

27:16run that much in terms of paid ads." But, basically, when you're looking at how do we rank higher SEO-wise, if you're not in the AI overview? So, this is one of the challenges right now. If you're not in here, and you can see A Mat ranked here, then scrolling down, you really need to be in in one of these top areas. And sometimes the pages that rank, it's, you know, links are it looks like images are broken here, old website. I I mean, Google's just ranking old websites. I need to start building old websites again. But, what's ranking sometimes doesn't even always make a ton of sense. I don't believe this is

27:46sponsored. Yeah, this is just an organic listing. Then we get into here, Trinity Forest is clearly running ads. RJ Tree Service, A Mat. This is they're doing a really good job SEO-wise. A Mat to me is one where I would say update your website, but they don't need to, why would you? So, basically, when you're looking at how ads actually appear for local results, there's so many advertisements between the map pack, there's usually an ad or two, a sponsored listing, there is usually sponsored search ads listed. I might not be seeing any because I'm not located in Fort Worth. And then the other thing is going to be local service ads at the

28:17very top. So, you're going to get sponsored ads at the page, you're going to get all sorts of different listings in there. And for organic listings, you know, there are websites listed at the very top, but you see a lot of Reddits and those types of things. So, having a good overall having a lot of customers coming in helps you in terms of we're getting more reviews, we're growing our Google Business Profile, we have more people that are actually recommending us to other of their neighbors and friends and family that live locally that could also use us when they need tree services. Every time we set up in a

28:48neighborhood, we have our big truck out there with the big sign on it and we put signs out. You know, and there's also in a lot of neighborhoods you can't do this, but there's some where they knock on doors and say, "Hey, if you ever need tree service, here's $100 off your tree service." You know, basically to say if you need it, give us a call. You know, hopefully hopefully your neighbor gives us a good review. But and then also just following up and making sure you're getting reviews. But if you're doing one job a day versus four jobs a day, you're getting much more of a chance to be

29:15doing, you know, getting a lot more of reviews coming in. And it's essentially if you have one, two, three crews, basically keeping them busy, the best way to do that is with paid advertising. And your local SEO strategy is like this ongoing part of your overall marketing strategy. And it's not something where it's like, "How do we get our clicks from 100 to 5,000?" It's like there's just not going to be that many clicks out there. It's really, "How do we get our visibility from, you know, 20% to 60%?" So that, you know, something like A&A Tree Service, we've seen a bunch of times, when you scroll down the list

29:47here, there's usually going to be things where it's like, "Okay, I get all the way down here and I see Brown's Tree Service. Have I really seen that one yet?" I don't know. Tony's Tree Service, I'm not sure that I've seen too much about it. Maybe it's just something I'm blocking out. But ultimately, you have services down here that just don't rank nearly as high. They're tree services, but they're just not, you know, five-star tree services. One I didn't really see that much. So, you have other of these companies that, you know, have really good local presences trying to rank as high as them could be a major

30:16challenge. And it could be something where you're like, "How are we not ranking higher?" Well, S&P is in Grand Prairie. They're not in Fort Worth. So, proximity. Basically, there's a lot of different ranking factors. Even if you have a perfect SEO strategy and everything everything else looks great, it still could be really then they have a nice website it looks like. It still could be really challenging to rank high. So, again, if you have any questions about this, my goal was not to be like, "Here's the step-by-step for building your local SEO." It's basically an ongoing strategy of starting with your Google Business Profile, building your website, and just constantly

30:45focusing on getting more visibility in your local market. So, today I'm going to be going over local SEO ranking factors for 2026, and really the most important things that you can do for your website and your Google Business Profile, but this will follow a little bit more along the Google Business Profile and the local pack, and ultimately local organic visibility. So, we're going to first go over the top 10 ranking factors. These are somewhat in order, but nobody really knows how they're all perfectly weighed. And then we'll jump to basically our four-part checklist of the things that we want to do to make sure that we are

31:15accomplishing everything we need to to be successful. So, the very first thing that I want to go over is when we look at searches, and this is really one of the best ways to do some research is to just take a search near you. It could be the exact service that you're offering. So, tree removal near me. And basically what you're trying to figure out is how do things rank where I am currently located. This is using results from Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. So, it's not using my precise location. It's saying for Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, this is what the local results look like. Very first thing I did is I

31:43saw a really nice advertisement, so as an advertiser, I was obviously [laughter] interested in this, but I thought this is a really nice ad, one-day bathroom remodel, get an exact price quote, 0% interest for 18 months. I was interested if they're actually local to me, and they're located in North Carolina, it looks like. So, we'll go over this company a little bit more, too, cuz their local SEO is really good. So, you can learn a lot from companies that do local SEO really well. The first thing I always look up is So, they have all these different locations here, and I always look up how well do they build

32:10out their location pages, where it is area served, Myrtle Beach, bathroom remodeling in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and see if they have any additional pages for it. So, contact us. I don't see anything linking separately, but when you go to the actual search results, you could see shower replacement and installation, Washington, North Carolina bathroom remodeling, Carolina, North Carolina bathroom remodeling. So, these are all important things to do is is creating these different pages for the different cities that you're serving and then linking them from your service area page. It's a good way for local SEO to rank a little bit higher for some of these local results and really reinforce

32:46that you provide all these services in these different areas. For the local pack, the ranking is going to be a little bit different cuz it's going to be based on the location of the searcher. So, if I'm searching near me, Google's saying, "Okay, they are in Murrells Inlet. Let's give them Murrells Inlet results." So, the top two results I actually get are Murrells Inlet, 18 reviews, 16 reviews, and then we see Westshore Home, much bigger, lot more reviews. Review score is actually slightly worse, but a ton more reviews, probably a lot more years in business, 15 plus years in business. So, a lot more ranking factors probably going into

33:17Westshore Home, but this just shows you how important proximity is. This is very close to me. Murrells Inlet is like right here. [snorts] So, when you start moving these around, it's really, "Okay, this one's Murrells Inlet. This one's Murrells Inlet." If we go to more businesses and look what else comes up, it's generally going to be things that are close by. So, it's been an ongoing thing that you just sub JSOC Construction, bathroom remodeler, RGB Home Improvements, construction company, not even a bathroom remodeler. BH Remodeling LLC, there's actually not too many here. I actually thought there'd be a lot more than this, but maybe it's just the area and and not that big of a

33:49population here. So, when you're looking up near me, it's really going to use that physical location compared to if you're actually looking up something like bathroom remodeling in this location. One of the things I did is I searched EasyPro Express just to find their Google Business Profile or one of them. And basically what I found, Google Business Profile and we have their base in Cary, North Carolina. This is a

34:10really important aspect of your ranking. So, I always, you know, want to point this out is that when you have a city and service here, that is kind of the main thing that you have a chance to rank for. Both with your website and your map, you know, your places, your maps, your local pack. Actually, ranking your Google Business Profile, this is the best chance you have. So, if I do bathroom remodeling Cary, North Carolina and we look at the results, Easy Pro Express sponsored, okay? Easy Pro Kitchen and Bath, that is the same company. So, I actually opened up the page. I was like, I wonder if that's the

34:39same company. Same exact Easy logo, so I assume it's the same company. Five Star Solutions of Cary, so we have another one here, and then Easy Pro Express. Now, this is one of the things that will always boggle my mind. There's no reason this should rank lower than this, especially when I'm previously interacting with Easy Pro Express. The only thing I can think is that from a Cary, North Carolina standpoint, Five Star Baths is a little bit more centralized, but it doesn't even seem like that's the case. So, a lot of times these things don't always make sense why

35:05one ranks above the other. Theoretically, this and this should be the highest. They have great review scores, longer year in business. The only thing I can think is maybe cuz they're closing soon. They're open till 9:00 p.m. So, let's get into our ranking factors, and just really understand why things rank, and looking at, okay, what are all the things that we can do, you know, next steps to improve our own ranking. So, first things first is looking at for most important thing is going to be the Google Business Profile signals. And when it comes to signals, that is going to be reviews, that is going to be

35:36as we scroll down here, the primary Google Business Profile category, proximity to the searcher, keywords in the Google Business Profile title. This is one I actually I actually don't necessarily agree with doing. I think unless your actual business name is like Myrtle Beach Bathroom Remodeling, you really shouldn't make that into your title. You should just make it match your actual business name, and Google's actually cracked down on that a little bit. So, it's not something I would necessarily do, but I do think it helps to actually have, you know, if you are doing a specific service, and that is in your business name, I do think it helps

36:06to have that. And the other thing that you can do is if you have multiple locations, you can actually say, "Okay, we are, you know, the one that was shown before was Amazing Solutions." You could say, "We are Amazing Remodeling, Myrtle Beach. We're Amazing Remodeling, Murrells Inlet." And you could do that for some of the different areas that you're targeting, if you have different physical locations. And now Google's really cracked down on that as well, where not as many local pages going up because it's a lot more difficult to verify them and Google's really looking for offices and businesses. So, open at the time of search is another big thing. If you're

36:35closed often, if your hours are set as closed often, Google's going to think that you're less likely to answer the phone. Now, there are other signals as far as answering the phone, responding to reviews, being active on your business profile that are also helpful ranking factors as well. So, number five, getting into reviews, quantity,

36:51recency, text, images, video, reviewer. So, the better the reviewer, really the better that you're ultimately going to see those results. So, starting with some of these top ones here, one of the things that you can do is if you go into your own business profile, so you do a quick search, I went to the Easy Pro Express, we're just going to use them as our example, and I just did the basic audit, and basically what you can do is come in here and say, "Okay, what is their category?" Bathroom remodeler, bathroom remodeler, perfect. We know they're, you know, that. We know that

37:18they're located in Cary, North Carolina. So, that's the thing they're going to be most likely to rank for. Total number of reviews, review rating, these are really important factors, but the other thing that goes along with reviews a lot that people don't always realize is not only how many new reviews and new five-star reviews you're getting, but also the details of the reviews, the photos that go along with it, any videos that are attached with it are great. I always say, if you can get a customer to post a review with an image that's very detailed, it is really good for your ranking because somebody just going on

37:48and saying five stars and leaving that is a lot less helpful than somebody going on saying five stars, we worked with, you know, we worked with Corey, he was great to work with, you know, yada yada yada, all that kind of thing helps with making sure that you are really appealing to people in your local market through word-of-mouth marketing. So, Google is not only saying, "Okay, we

38:07want 200 reviews, five-star reviews." They're also saying, "Who are the people leaving reviews in this?" Is it local guides who have left 20 reviews in the local market? Is it somebody who's left one total review ever that has no details and no images and no anything attached to it? There are times where there's profiles that have a lot of reviews and then profiles that do not have a ton of reviews and I think Google does a really good job of really verifying whether or not the reviews are real and whether or not they're actually useful to the end user. For you know, there's times where somebody might leave

38:36a one-star review with no data attached to it and it's not going to hurt as much as a one-star review with images, you know, documenting why you're giving that one-star review. So, that is all related to the Google Business Profile. Open at the time of search, keywords in the Google Business Profile title. Don't necessarily love that one. These are the two main things. Category, proximity to the searcher. The other thing is, I mean, fill out your whole business profile, your your bio, all the information that you have should all be filled out in detail and making sure that you really match what other profiles are doing that are ranking well

39:06and hopefully try to beat them. But, the other thing is going to be on your actual website itself, dedicated pages for each service. So, for your local organic results, basically having a page and I just went through it recently where it's bathroom remodeling Cary, bathroom remodeling, you know, New Bern, that bathroom remodeling. Enter every single city that you're targeting, write the content specific for that city, talk about the neighborhoods in that city, talk about the local market in that city, you know, you can mention street names if they're really popular street names. So, really what you want are, you know, bathroom remodeling in one city to

39:37the next is not going to be a huge difference unless there's local ordinances that you need to actually show. But, ultimately what you're trying to do is just say, "Yes, we serve this market and these are some of the neighborhoods that we work in. Here are some actual pictures of us working in this market." Which that's really how you take it to the next step. Oh, and here's a video for each market that shows, "Yeah, we do bathroom remodeling in Cary. Here is us doing it for one of our recent clients." So, dedicated pages for each service helps, having that dedicated content on each page helps

40:02even more. Geographic keyword relevance. So, again, pages clearly reference service areas, neighborhoods, locally meaningful context. I would say Orkin does a really good job of this. I always mention this a thousand times. But, Orkin on every single one of their pages, if it's Charleston, South Carolina, they'll say, "Here are the pests in Charleston, South Carolina. Here's all the different, you know, smaller city areas around Charleston or all the, you know, some of the neighborhoods that are a little bit larger, and they mention all of those on their pages, and it does help with the rankings when somebody's searching pest control Charleston, SC. It's like, okay, Orkin has a page for that. There's a lot

40:34of information about pest control in Charleston, SC, and look, they're a local business that's ranked well, and you can easily contact them for services. Next is going to be quality and authority of inbound links. This is still really, really important, especially for a local company. If you do have that, hey, everybody's linking to you locally, you are the company in the market that people go to, you work with you know, two or three or four different partners, and they also link directly to your website, you get inbound links from, and you can see the local chambers, community organizations, news mentions, partner sites, anything, you know, if you have directory links,

41:06if you're a, you know, a roofer, and you say, okay, here's the top roofing directories, and we make sure I get listed in all of these. Here are the remodeling contractors and home builders, and those types of directories, and just making sure you're in all of those for, you know, for bathroom remodeling is something where it's like, okay, I want to make sure that anywhere somebody might find a bathroom remodeler, I am listed there, and that's always a really important thing, and it goes along with the next one. Citations, and you're going to see

41:30consistent NAP across major listings. So, NAP is name, address, phone. So, that's essentially just making sure that on these websites, your name, address, phone is consistent everywhere. This is why I always say, if you're if you are creating, you know, your Google Business Profile, and you have Easy Pro Express, you don't need Easy Pro Express Carry Bathroom Remodeling. You really just need Easy Pro Express to show everywhere, and show your main category on all these pages. It also does help to have links to your actual Google Maps,

41:59you know, you can share the Google Map. So, having your Google Map embedded on different pages is very useful. That's why I think it helps sometimes having a bigger website, more pages, go to the share link here, and basically just copy this link, and make sure it's there. There is actually and you can embed a map. So, you can use the iframe source here and copy this and put it on different pages. This is one of those where if you can get these on some of those local business directories and other people link out to this this actual map, which isn't that common, it does help with your overall rankings

42:29getting a link to this because it's going to link directly to your Google Business Profile. And then just getting backlinks is still a huge important factor when it comes to SEO and something that actually when it comes to AI the really only thing Google's able to do is review local mentions, how many local searches that are happening around your brand, and really trying to figure out within each local market, what are the big players in the different spaces in different categories. For bathroom remodeling in Cary, North Carolina, this is clearly one of them. So, you can tell that they get a lot of jobs, they have a

42:59lot of reviews, and their marketing is on point, their local SEO is really good. So, it's something that you can copy. But, getting these backlinks, getting the maps in the embed section can be very useful. Last but not least, behavioral engagement signals. This is just about doing good business. So, clicks, calls, direction requests, listing engagement. Make sure that your website's fully built out, easy to access. Make sure that your you know, your address stays consistent, your phone number, you answer the phone. When people actually go through, you know, if you have appointment booking available, making sure that you are booking appointments through whatever you have

43:29through your Google Business Profile. So, ultimately all of these different types of engagements can be helpful. And I think the other thing that Google does in the background is if local people are more likely to click on your business and interact with it and look at the reviews and you have really good review score and you're replying to reviews and I do think those can all be really important. So, you know, quick quick thing to look at is when you are trying to improve everything on your page, it's like fill out everything, upload as many photos and videos as you possibly can. Make sure your business

43:59hours stay pretty open on the Google Business Profile. And if you need to get someone to answer the phone for for three or four hours, especially for bathroom remodeling, it's probably worth doing. So, them setting their hours to 7:00, 8:00, 9:00 p.m. and just kind of even setting appointments could be useful. Maybe they get after-hours calls and voicemails and it works, but it is one of those where answering the phone at 7:00 getting people on the way home from work might, you know, might just work. The other thing is responding to Google reviews. So, they're doing more things now where this is showing reasonable price, but you have a photo,

44:29you have a really good information, reasonable price. So, you're you're figuring out that Google's trying to figure out some of these types of things. So, if you consistently have the best price, this is saying overpriced, but if you consistently have good pricing and and different information like that, you're replying to these reviews, you're getting a lot of reviews, five stars. You can see here,

44:48so they have order and appointments. Let's see what This just brings us to the contact us page. And I don't even think they have a built-in thing. Yeah, so they just have it linking directly to their contact us page. So, ultimately, filling all those things out, making sure that you are sending back good signals to Google, answering the phone. Last but not least, four-part checklist. So, number one, it's going to say reviewer approve or reject suggested edits. Google's going to give those to you. Just basically review them. If they're good, yes. If not, no. Confirm normal hours, holiday hours, temporary closures. They will usually ask you about those. Upload

45:20fresh real-world photos from staff, jobs, products, or location activity. I think that's a huge important aspect of it. Check category drift, map pin accuracy, and unexpected profile changes. I Not category drift's not really one to worry about. Make sure your main categories are good. Make sure you know, your map location is in a central area, and then all of those can be useful. But GBP defense is basically just saying make sure there aren't major changes going on in your profile that are causing it to kind of get thrown out

45:44of whack. Relentless review generation. So, every satisfied customer text, email, QR, front desk workflow. So, basically, you're trying to get as many reviews as possible. On-page content, create dedicated page for every single service, and neigh- city, neighborhood. Last but not least, ecosystem sinking digital PR. So, NAP consistency across Apple Macs, Bing, Yelp, and top directories, check industry specific citation sources, local sponsorship, partnerships, blogs, and news mentions

46:11like backlinks are just really useful. So, ultimately what you're trying to do is get the Google Business Profile category, title, address, map pin, and hours right, build a repeatable review engine, publish the correct service pages and local contacts on your website, and then reinforce the entity with citations, local mentions, local links. All of those are going to be really your best local SEO ranking factors, and then tying into your Google Business Profile as well. So, today I'm going to be going over three of the best local SEO tools. So, these are all paid tools. I have a free tool that just goes over how to see what's actually

46:41currently ranking, but these are three different paid local SEO tools. I've used all three. Sometimes businesses have had them. The one that I generally use the most is going to be BrightLocal. So, to get started with the video, the three and I'm just on the Google Business Profile page cuz this is where you really want to get started is is getting your Google Business Profile live. The whole point of this video is how do we get our our Google Business Profile ranking higher in the local maps

47:05results? The other thing you want to do is always keep in mind the organic search results. There's they still exist. Still something that people get a lot of clicks to. So, I opened a few of these just to kind of look at the websites, and then, you know, basically when anybody's doing any search locally now, you're basically getting hit with two local service ads. A lot of times you have two different sponsored ads at the top here, two or three, sometimes just

47:24one. Um and then you kind of get into the maps results, and usually have a sponsored one there as well. So, good way to kind of get make sure that you're at the very top. This is, you know, sometimes people ask, "Well, why do I need to run ads? I'm here, and I'm, you know, third or fourth." But if you're like Braun & Renovations, they have a local service ad here. They have the top

47:40result right here in the maps results. So, two out of the three ads they're running. They could even potentially if No, I guess if you're running a Yeah, so so don't listen to me. But basically you have two ads running on the page. If you're able to actually get your profile here, and you're able to actually rank on the first page, that is the ultimate ideal scenario if you're really looking for growth and leads. So, the goal today is how how do we get our profiles to rank higher? So, if you're you know, if we scroll down here a little bit and let's just say we are Southern Now,

48:07let's go to Top Zone Hardscapes. So, it might just be something that patio installer is not something they highlight that well on their Google Business Profile. So, the very first thing I want to go over is first off making sure Okay, so they have pavers, concrete, retaining walls. This is one of those where maybe creating a patio page on their website might help. And then if we go into their Google Business Profile, you always want to see what the actual services are that we have. So, they have patio in here, patio pavers. So, they do have it all. So, for patio installer Marietta, Georgia, this is what they

48:35are. They you know, they might look at how do we go from here all the way up to here. So, the most important thing truthfully is review velocity. How many new five-star reviews do you have in the last 30 days? I think that's one of the most important things cuz Google's looking at which companies are actually doing the most work, getting the most reviews. There's also an element of

48:54who's leaving reviews on the profile. Outside Designs here has 116 reviews. And if we go in here and we look at all 116 reviews. And you know, basically what Google likes are local guides leaving reviews, people who leave a lot of reviews, people who put photos with their review. So, this a local guide 13 reviews three photos Outdoor Designs with pictures. Pictures look great. You know, this is probably why they rank so high cuz they are getting reviews from a local guide. Now, you might say, "Well, how do I get you know, how do I get that?" Ultimately, the number one thing is first off making sure you're getting

49:25the leads, servicing the leads, doing the jobs. Like that's kind of I mean I seems obvious, but sometimes you know, there's a company listed at the top here that's getting and you can see two ads listed here when I go into the actual places section. But ultimately, if you if you're not running ads and you're relying on word of mouth, referral, repeat customer, you know, things like that, then a lot of times you're just not getting the amount of people in to actually get the number of reviews that your you know, other other competitors are getting. So, when you do this for like an HVAC company, you know, HVAC

49:54repair near me, this should pull up right by me. You know, these have tons of reviews. And this one's These are two are sponsored sponsored three sponsored results. 143, 213. Actually not that crazy the amount of in Chicago. This one's 859, 251. Got HVAC repair. If we go by me, it's like 5,000, I feel like. See a beach air. Actually just had them in my house. 8,300 for 1 hour heating and cooling. 5,300. So, if you're just getting started and you're like, all

50:21right, how do I even compete with them? It is going to be a challenge, but ultimately if you're Polar Air Mechanical, they have 208 reviews, five star. They must be getting reviews probably fairly fast. Coast Air Plus. So, you could still rank here. Ocean Air Cooling, 93. What you really want to do is, you know, if you're not getting the leads that you need and you're trying to

50:38Hey, we're trying to increase this here. Paid advertising, it's not going to help your actual local rankings, but using paid advertising to get more leads in the door and get more reviews is really one of the best ways to to increase your Google Business Profile. The other thing is just making sure that your overall business profile. I always say, look at all the business profiles in your area and just see, are we doing everything that they're doing in terms of Okay, are

51:01we posting photos regularly to our page? Are we doing posts to our page? Are we, you know, getting reviews and replying to reviews? What is our review score? Are all of these things filled out the best way they can possibly be? I don't think it hurts to have appointments, you know, linking to a separate page on your website. Ultimately, what Google wants is to give people a good user experience. You have social media updates, so make sure your your social media is connected. And then we have some competitors coming up. So, ultimately, you know, what you want to do is make sure that you're constantly putting up photos, videos, replying to

51:30reviews, getting reviews. One of the best ways to do that is with software. So, the one I'm going to go over first is BrightLocal. This is probably my number one choice. BrightLocal is really good in terms of pricing. So, I'm on the pricing page. Basically, their top plan, the Grow plan for one location is $44 a month. If you get to the point where you're like, "Okay, we're you know, we're monitoring eight different locations or something like that." It's actually really not that terrible,

51:53truthfully, the overall pricing for it. So, pricing per location, not really that expensive. Pricing as you grow locations, not expensive. The things that you're going to get are kind of the main, you know, you get your rank tracker where you figure out, "Here is what we're ranking for this keyword, dentist." You also get things that look like this. This is a different tool, but

52:10they have a good good screenshot here. But, you get like the local ranking grids. This is going to be the next tool is Whitespark. But, ultimately with local SEO, in the manage and grow, I would highly recommend using the grow cuz it helps you get customer reviews, email, SMS, in-store campaigns, publish them on your website. Ultimately, you can help automate some of that follow-up and making sure that people are actually, after they book with you, after you get, you know, complete the job, you start sending them some reviews, you know, some some go give leave us a review on Google. And ultimately, that's going to be the best

52:36way to get your ranking higher. So, as we scroll down here, we have the three different plans. Basically, you get everything even with the middle plan. The only thing is really the reviews. So, if you're don't care about, you know, using them to monitor, get reviews, showcase reviews, then ultimately, stick with the middle plan. That's kind of the main thing that you

52:53need. But, it's reputation management. So, you can see what your average rating is, rank position, listing coverage. You get really all the information you need. So, BrightLocal, this is the one that I generally use the most and the one that I recommend because pricing-wise, it's pretty, you know, pretty affordable for what you're getting, being able to track your rankings and understand, "Hey, here's the steps we need to take this

53:13week to try to improve our rankings. Hey, here's the steps we need to take this week to improve our ranking." Just kind of ongoing until you're getting hundreds of reviews, until you're, you know, more consistent in terms of the number of reviews you're getting, how many jobs you're completing. There's also other things in terms of why Google is ranking some of these websites. I don't think it hurts to have a fully This this one ranks pretty well even though the review score was a little bit

53:35lower, but their website is really nice. Like, it's a nice website. It's fully built out, our work, about us, our services, some inspiration before and after, cost benefit. But ultimately, you have all of these different pages here. So, when I come in and I say, "Okay, custom sunrooms in Atlanta." You know, kind of seems self-explanatory sometimes, but it's one of those where nice website, they have it all built out for Atlanta, and I'm sure some of the other locations they might have some some pages, too. And they're located in Marietta, that's where their Google Business Profile was. So, couple other ones. So, nice website, and the other

54:06one here, nice website. So, make sure you like they have a ton of pages on here. Make sure you're building out your pages, locations, services, all the things that you do, and all the, you know, the important things to make sure that you're you're actually showcasing all the things that your business does. And then ultimately, what you're trying to do is you're trying to just consistently provide a good service and get those reviews, cuz that's ultimately

54:25what Google's going to be looking for. Now, your next step, obviously, could be potentially creating additional Google Business Profiles. Maybe you have something, you know, my locally, Myrtle Beach, you know, there's other cities around here that are, you know, an hour out that you're probably not going to rank in there. And it's one of those, okay, maybe we want, well, we're expanding to Wilmington. Okay, get a Google Business Profile in Wilmington, because it's not going to hurt having additional Google Business Profiles. I actually have a client who has multiple Google Business Profiles in the Myrtle Beach area, and it helps because it's just you're closer to people, you're

54:54more likely to rank, and it's just get the Google Business Profile, get the rankings, and ultimately use one of these tools. So, BrightLocal's number one. Number two is WhiteSpark. Very similar in terms of what BrightLocal gives you, but just a little bit more expensive. So, local platform, cheap local ranking grids, $10 a month, local rank tracker, plans ranging from $14 a month. So, it's almost more of like an a la carte type type platform, and then they have services that they offer as well. So, SEO services, listing service, Yext replacement, enterprise. So,

55:23reputation builder, this is for reviews. This is why if you're going to go the review route, generally, there's also other things that can do specifically help you with getting more reviews, especially if you're using a specific software for your business. So, WhiteSpark is another good one. They actually have a really good, you know,

55:37kind of the things that you see here. So, what is your overall ranking? You know, how many things are you ranking for? Visibility score, keywords, etc., etc. So, a lot of different things that you can do with WhiteSpark. The third and last and final one is going to be SEMrush. So, this is just SEMrush, but

55:51basically with SEMrush or Semrush local. So, base or pro, really would rather have the pro plan. The only problem with Semrush is like if you're looking for the SEO plan and the local plan, it does start to get really costly. So, it's one of those, do you want to pay $60 a month per location for your one location, or you could pay a little bit less with BrightLocal or, you know, WhiteSpark, depending on what types of services you're looking for. So, these are the three that I would recommend using for local SEO tools that I I've used,

56:19recommend, they work pretty well. There's other ones out there. The last thing I'll go over here is this technicalseo.com tool um tools local search. If you go to technicalseo.com, they have a bunch of really cool tools in here. But, basically, region, language, location. I did Marietta, patio installation, iPhone. And you can see what's actually ranking here in the top three. So, good way to kind of figure out, okay, how am I ranking in in Marietta? How are we ranking if we go to Atlanta? And we'll open This will actually open it. Um got a VPN on. Uh so, basically, they really don't want to show it to me. Uh if you

56:51click on open it, it will actually open it in a new browser and you're able to see it that way as well. So, this is the way it opens. So, you can see patio installation. But, good way to kind of figure out where you're ranking, especially if you're working with other clients and you need to figure out what, you know, who the top three are and

57:06maybe do a quick competitive analysis. So, doesn't always make sense the rankings. There are times where companies with more reviews, better review score, rank below, above, you know, other companies where it doesn't always make sense. I work with a client who is constantly rated like in the 15th spot for their area, and 15 is is pretty low, honestly. Like, it just doesn't drive much because most people are are staying in the top three or four. But, it's like he has better reviews, good review score than some that are in the top 10. And he does everything right and it's still we can't figure out what how

57:36to get it any higher and sometimes just location based and sometimes it's, you know, basically how many new reviews you're getting in Google is kind of a big thing for how you're ranking on that specific day. So, if you have any questions about any of this, please leave it in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC

57:51YouTube channel. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today, I'm going to be going over local SEO Google Business Profile best practices. So, how to rank your business profile, basically after you create it, get it verified, here are the things that I would try to do to make sure you're getting as many clicks, calls, engagements, directions, all of those good things going through your Google Business Profile cuz it's going to help you drive additional leads. So, this is all going to be focused on SEO and not the actual paid advertising portion of it, but I will have follow-up videos about paying, you know, to essentially enhance your Google

58:26Business Profile using Google Ads. So, very first thing is create your business profile. So, start now. You can just go to business.google.com. So, go to this URL. It'll bring you right to this page. And then start now. And what we can do is say this profile is for another business and you're going to go through the process, name, category, address, enter all of your business information here. So, it's going to look something like this as you're setting it up. It's a bit sample, you know, just a sample creation that I have, HTML creation. But about your business, Surfside PPC Hardwoods, business category hardwood flooring contractor, flooring finishing, cabinet

59:00maker, tile contractor. So, basically for business categories, anything that you do, you want to add in there. You don't want to do things you don't do and you want to make sure you have a primary category as well. Put your description there, opening date, contact information. You can actually backlog your opening date so it makes like your business has been in business longer. I don't know how much that really, really matters. Um it's one of those where I think there's some businesses like in business for 80 years. It's like,

59:24really? Um contact, website obviously. So, you want to make sure you have an SEO-friendly website. Any of the additional information you have here, this doesn't exactly match the way Google's looks. Service area, business location is a fake address. Um, yeah, we have our hours, and then any additional information here. So, that's going to be your first step always is fill all this information out, and then from there it's like, okay, how do we know we're doing everything we can to rank our Google Business Profile

59:48high? The first thing I would recommend doing is downloading GMB Everywhere. It's a Google Business Profile audit for local SEO. Right when you download it, it's going to open up this page. So, it's going to say dentist nearby, local scan, compare all the Google Business Profile. So, if we click on that, this will do a local scan right here. Stay on this tab to continue processing. While it does that, our next one I did is hardwood floor installers near me, and I was just

1:00:14looking at what ranked the best near me. And the thing that I always look at when I'm actually analyzing rankings. So, these are the exact rankings for where I'm located. I am currently located about right here. So, that's probably where I'm located, somewhere in that general vicinity. So, you can see there's a lot around me, but Flooring Plus, pretty close, huge company, they're actually the ones that installed my floors. Lumber Liquidators, obviously a national company. Might be a franchise, though. I don't I don't

1:00:39really know how their setup works. Creative Flooring Designs, Carolina Hardwood Flooring, Grand Trend. As you can see, these are all very close to me. So, there's some that are a little bit further out that actually have some pretty good review scores and things like that that come up further for me because basically what happens initially is Google's going to show me these are the companies that are essentially the closest to you, best review scores. It's not always perfect, though. What's interesting is like Flooring Decor is down here. We have Get Floored, which is pretty close to me as well. American Dream Flooring & Tile. So, sometimes

1:01:09it's like, why is this one have the best review score, the most reviews, it's pretty close to me. Doesn't really matter how close it is to me, truthfully, because ultimately it's like one of those things that it's a flooring company that's going to come to my house. So, if they're willing to come to my house, that's all that really matters. So, sometimes I wonder why ones like this don't rank a little bit higher, but ultimately the most important thing is within your profile. Like if I were them, what I would do is I would say, "Okay, we have some original content here. Why don't we make sure that we

1:01:39have some more pictures of the inside section." Maybe what we do now is we add a video of the inside portion of our store. Some of these inside photos do not look like the inside of the store, so maybe another category here for pictures of their actual products and services, you know, them finished jobs. So, things by owner, that could be

1:02:00actually where some of those things go. Some of these look like they could potentially be Yeah, these are all houses. So, Street View and 360, it's going to give us kind of the overview of what See, like this type of image I think would look good in the on the actual page, and then I would start adding some videos here. So, go in, take some videos of the store, walk in the store, take a video of Here's all the

1:02:19different things you can do. As the owner, upload that. So, upload that photo and video there. The other thing is as you're getting reviews, I always say the number one thing to do is ask your clients, "Please, you know, do a before-and-after. Do a, you know, before-and-after video. Do a before-and-after pictures. Take pictures and put them up with your review." And it's one of those things where you can say in the process of like, "Hey, just letting you know you do that. It really helps us out." There are rules against Google where saying, "We're going to compensate you for this." Or we'll do, you know, you scratch our back, we'll

1:02:49scratch yours. So, that's what you're trying to do. You're essentially saying, "Hey, if you have any issues with this, contact us. You know, if something breaks or something needs to be repaired, we will come back and and we will come back and fix it. One thing we would really like is if you go on Google and add us a review." One of the things to know about the actual reviews and review scores is it's not overall just total number of reviews, total review score. There's actually scores for every single Click the wrong thing. Only problem with GMB Everywhere is it loads a second later, but there actually scores that

1:03:21look at how many one-star and two-star reviews do you have, how long ago did they come in, how many new reviews are you getting, and what does that review score look like? So, you're not just looking at, "Hey, here's our all-time reviews and review score." You're also looking at last 30 days, how many

1:03:35reviews did we get? So, if you're a company that's getting a lot of new reviews and a lot of new five-star reviews, that tends to help your rankings, especially when other things are equal where it's like, "Okay, distances are close, been in business same time, everything is pretty similar." But, you could see a week ago, we worked with Mana Smith at Flooring Plus, they're ranked the highest. A lot of details, we have a picture here. So,

1:03:55this is a really good review for them. Three weeks ago, five stars. A month ago, five stars. So, another one with an image. So, the other thing that helps is having reviewers, so this she has nine reviews, 12 reviews, three photos. Having reviewers that actually have a ton of local reviews in the market is really helpful, because what is Google trying to show? These are people that are using these companies in the local market, they've reviewed an HVAC company, electrician, the flooring company, yada yada yada, and basically what we're doing is we're saying, "Okay, Google is trying to figure out which of these local companies are providing the

1:04:27best services through what we're actually seeing here." Now, there are some tools with GMB Everywhere, so when you say, "Okay, we are currently, you know, if we scroll down and we say, 'We're currently American Dream Flooring Tile.' How do we rank higher?" So, essentially within GMB Everywhere, this is where I would start doing some of these audits. So, audit the core business details, review website local SEO signals. One of the

1:04:49quick ones, audit core business details. Now, we're going to click on this. While this loads, we also have this other thing with rank checker. So, this is enter a search term to find rankings for flooring store. And we're going to see rank check right, you know, let's just say this is kind of a central area

1:05:08right here. And we'll check our rankings there. So, we come over here to the local scan tool. So, this is the one that we did earlier. This tool shows you what your local competitors are doing. So, 20 total businesses, 17 unique categories, five unique primary categories, average categories, max categories, min more minimum categories. These are all related to dentistry. So, we're changing our niche a little bit here, but the different categories, there's 20 total businesses. The business rank verse number of categories, this is essentially saying that if we look at rank number four, one category. Rank number three, one

1:05:41category. Rank number two, one category. Prince Creek Dental Care has one category. So, they're one category and they are ranked number one, number one. So, they don't have all these different categories. Aspen Dental, 10 different categories, rank number five. This is specifically for believe dentist nearby. The search is dentist nearby. So, what they Aspen Dental might do a little bit better with is cosmetic dentist, dental hygienist, some of those different keywords, but for dentist, it really showing that it doesn't help that much

1:06:09by having all those other things listed. Category count distribution, number of categories, 12 businesses only have one category. 10 categories is the only one that's Aspen Dental. Five categories. So, for the most part, not that many categories, but if you do provide these services, my general thought would be add those categories in. Services. So, if we go to the services section, 20 businesses, 12 with services, 127 unique services. Here's how you find a bunch of services really quickly. So, if you do teeth whitening, family dentistry, general dentistry, it doesn't hurt to have more services. This is showing the number one ranked business, Prince Creek Dental Care, has

1:06:46a bunch of services. They are actually the top along with it looks like Low Country Family Dentistry. Um no, they're way down here. So, yeah, they're they're the top and they have the best. So, quick takeaway, categories, having a ton really doesn't matter, but doesn't hurt to have a ton. Services, definitely helps to have more services listed. Review score, business rank verse number of reviews and review rating. So, this is actually a really quick way to say, "Okay, they're ranked number one, they have this many reviews. Let's see who is ranked number 16, they have 352 reviews." So, this is the only thing that's always Coastal Endodontics, 13,

1:07:18737, five-star rating, but it might be something where they are ranking really well for endodontic keywords. Location. Business locations maps. You can see this is a very tight area, actually. This is not a huge area whatsoever. Um a lot of competition right in this small area, which shows the importance of trying to get your ranking as high as possible. The other thing that I haven't mentioned yet is Thomas D. Flanders works at Prince Creek Dental Care. So, you could also create separate business

1:07:46profiles for your practicing dentists. Business hours. So, you know, probably not a huge difference for this, but it probably doesn't hurt to have more business hours. Business rank versus attributes, pretty similar for all of these. They have 15, they have 16. It's going to be one just to make sure you have all of them listed. Miscellaneous.

1:08:03Business rank versus profile features. So, has website, has phone number, has full address. This one has online appointments. So, one of those things, I don't think it hurts to have online appointments as well, but you'll see a lot of these where you're like, "Okay, this, you know, Prince Creek Dental Care makes sense cuz they have the most reviews." So, it's pretty obvious why they rank first. The ones after that, a lot of times it's location, it is review score. So, the other thing that we can look at, too, is when you're going through all of these different, you know, I always look at the top two companies, top three, look

1:08:34at where they're ranking, and basically, what do they do a little bit differently? So, do they have a lot of images posted here? If we scroll down, I know for the dentist, we'll use this example cuz I know it's there. If we scroll down here, they have from the owner, and they have posts. So, they last post is April 2nd. It's April 27th, so probably do more, but April Fools' Day, we have Happy World Oral Health Day. So, this is one of those, just like get a calendar, come up with content, and make

1:08:59sure you're writing things consistently. This is March Madness. You know, run it around some of the main things that are happening, but the thing I always say with posts is it doesn't hurt if you're doing posts to talk about your local market, talk about your customers if they're interested in that, depending on what you're doing. Obviously, if it's health, I wouldn't do that. But, basically, what you're trying to do with your um posts is just come up with "Hey, here's some more information about things we're doing. We went to here

1:09:23today. Here is our, you know, dentist. Here is our dental assistant. Here is our security, you know, not security. Here's our, uh, you know, front desk, our our administrative assistant." So, essentially, it's like we have "Here's all the people that work with us. Here's all the information you need, you know, here's our marketing team." So, all of those things put a face to the business, and it doesn't hurt to have that additional information. And also, when you're uploading those posts, adding additional images in here, adding videos in there is definitely something I would recommend. Filling out every single last field that you have. We kind

1:09:52of went through that in the beginning. But, ultimately, if you're really trying to rank higher with your Google Business Profile, then the two things I would recommend, you know, more than anything beyond you do your audit, you know, you do the GMB everywhere audit, you go through everything. So, here's an actual basic audit for American Dream Flooring and Tile. This is basically saying

1:10:11good, good, good. Review request link, review display link, not really showing any major issues or anything like this. Um, basic audit, profile external. So, not really seeing any major issues here. So, ultimately, the the things that I do, it's like do your posts, respond to every single review that's coming in. So, they do a really good job of responding to their reviews. So, I've been a patient here for many years, blah blah blah. Thank you, we're dedicated to

1:10:37providing patients. Thank you very much. So, respond to them. With your responses, having them a little bit more informative, more information does not hurt. But, ultimately, all you're really trying to do is you're saying, "Let's put a lot of information on the profile, get a lot of reviews, reply to our reviews, put images up here, make sure we are you know, fully comprehensive in terms of the services we provide, the categories that we provide. Go through

1:11:03these GMB categories. When you do all of that and when you are getting reviews and you're like, all right, it's time to take the next step. The two The thing that I I mean, I really like using BrightLocal as a local SEO tool cuz it helps with rankings and understanding where you're ranking. The number of the two things, citations. So, they have over 1,000 citations available. You pay a certain amount per

1:11:24site per citation. What this does is it makes sure that your name, address, and phone are consistent across all sorts of local businesses, you know, business directories and things like Yellow Pages, Yelp, like these really big websites and then some local directories as well. So, if there's local flooring directories, making sure that you're listed there with consistent citations, name, address, phone that ties back to your Google Business Profile, and links to your website. So, you're getting backlinks, citations. It's going to help your SEO from a website perspective and from a local perspective. The other thing is through some of these solutions, and there's different ones that can do this, but there are things

1:12:00where with their platform, you can get more reviews. So, grow your online reputation by monitoring, managing, improving reviews, build trust, stand out locally. So, using BrightLocal, you can manage if you have multiple listings, you can track your local visibility, build citations. The local search grade essentially tells you where you're ranking in different areas around your city, so you can kind of figure out, okay, we're doing really well northwest, we're doing really bad southeast, you know, just different ways to find kind

1:12:26of figure out what's working well. AI insights is new. So, but basically within this platform, the pricing is pretty reasonable if you do like even the monthly plan. It's like $50 a month essentially. If you buy it annually, it's $500 a year. And to me, it's like if it drives a few extra jobs, definitely worth it. But, BrightLocal is the paid tool I recommend. GMB everywhere is free tool that does have an upgrade option for it, but upgrade is really more for a local agency. If you're just using it to audit your own profile and look at what others are doing, last but not least, fill out

1:12:58all your fields. Make sure you have a really good details in here. Fill out your categories, your services, compare yourself to your competitors, do a basic audit, then upload content to your profile consistently. Images, videos, posts, jobs you're doing, any information that could be useful to people won't hurt your rankings and over time, you know, if you're really trying to get into a market, sometimes you got to open up a second Google Business Profile because if you're trying to rank in Boston and you're 30 minutes away, it's going to be really difficult when there is local companies with a more local presence and that's been one of the

1:13:31biggest competitive advantages having business profiles in different areas that are built out with really good review scores if you have those separate business listings. So, if you have any questions about this, please leave in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. What's up, everyone? Today I'm going to be going over local SEO keyword research. So, it's going to be a pretty quick tutorial, but going to go over how I would do keyword research for a local plumbing company. So, the one I picked today and just kind of went random and searched for a company in the town I

1:14:05grew up in. So, I grew up in Bridgewater, New Jersey, so I was like, let's look up a Somerset County plumbing company. This one came up, small plumber, no website. So, let's just say they said, "Hey Corey, we want to build a website. We want to make sure it's SEO friendly. We're, you know, making sure we're targeting all of the main services that we provide." So, generally what I would ask for is, "Please send me your full service list." And that's something I would work off of. In this case, I kind of went over, let's just say, you know, they're like, "We do everything plumbing. Anything related to plumbing

1:14:30we'll do. So, go out and find us our services and here's basically our service area. So, we want you to come back to us with a basically strategy for how we're going to build our website, how we're going to rank better for local SEO keywords, and how we're going to basically take our our website and our business from, you know, point A to point Z and make us very optimized online. So, the best way to do that, I would say my, you know, number one, I just did a a video with free keyword research tool. So, if you're interested in more keyword research tools that are

1:14:59free to use and give you a list of keywords like this, go view that video. I can put it in the video description so you can find it. But, essentially, my number one keyword research tool, it's free to use, is the Google Keyword Planner. All it requires is a Google Ads account and you do get more of the actual average monthly search data once you actually start running an active campaign. Now, this this actually this

1:15:19account does have an active campaign. I've spent money in it. So, I'm actually surprised I don't have anything here yet. So, there must be some threshold you have to hit eventually. I think I've spent like $50 over the last 5 days. So, not something I'm spending a ton in. But, essentially, you can get a lot of data here even without that. Number one thing is I added two keywords. So, when you go into the Google Keyword Planner, basically, you're going to see something that looks like this. Go and go directly to this URL. If you search Google Keyword Planner, it'll pull up the page and all you need is your Google account

1:15:45to sign in and access it. And then you go in here and you can search really anything. So, plumber, plumbing. I'll show a few different examples throughout this. So, using these two keywords here, we have all of these keywords pulled up. Gives us a ton of keyword ideas. 250 total keywords. All basically relevant

1:16:02services and things that people search. So, this is usually my starting point. What are the things we actually want to target? Now, some pretty obvious ones, plumber near me, emergency plumber near me. You're not necessarily going to target near me as a specific keyword, but, you know, you're going to create a page on your website for this case where it's plumbing services Bridgewater, New Jersey. So, that's going to be your way of when people do search plumbers near me, they're going to see a page for a location that's near them. And Google's going to use the Google Business Profile and the actual page in the website

1:16:32that's connected to it to be able to say, "Okay, this is connected to this local company. We're going to rank them at the top of Google." So, essentially, those are the obvious ones for local SEO. It's like, "Okay, what are what are the very obvious things and pages that we need to create?" But, we want to go beyond that. The example and the reason why I'm creating this video is I recently had to get my Rinnai tankless hot water heater fixed. So, it actually made me kind of think of the marketing perspective of it that if somebody goes Rinnai tankless water heater repair, very long-term keyword, near me. Now, my

1:17:04location Murrells Inlet. So, first you do get a couple of local service ads. Those are just there. Next is going to be a couple of sponsored results. We have Murrells Inlet Plumbing, Murrells Inlet Pipe Dream, Rinnai Repair, Plumber On Call. This is probably one of those national and basically what they do is they connect you same-day service. They have the set as today's date. Basically, what they probably do is connect you with a local repair person. So, same thing with Rinnai here. But, as you get further down, what you're going to see is you have At Your Service, SE Plumbing & Drain Cleaning, Carolina Temperature Control. And sometimes what you'll see

1:17:34is they actually have in the review or in some of the information, it'll show they mention that they do tankless water heater repair. Or, you'll see in the review, "They came out and fixed my Rinnai tankless water heater." So, that's why we say having a lot of reviews and making sure your reviews are

1:17:47really detailed is really important. But, as you get further down here, you start to get into tankless hot water heater contractor. Now, I I don't know if Google's just broken for me. Giving me my location as Murrells Inlet. This is like 2 hours away from me. So, and then it's giving me Summerville, South Carolina. So, maybe probably not the greatest example. The crazy thing about this is the amount of sponsored results on this [laughter] page. I mean, they're just everywhere. It's just sponsored results here, and then you get down, you have another sponsored result at the bottom here. Then, we have the people also ask section. Only a couple

1:18:17organic listings, two more sponsored results, and then we start getting down here. Basically, what I did find when I did this is there were a few places by me that actually had places specific to Rinnai tankless water heater repair. So, there was a few local companies by me that had pages like this. And it's like one of those if you don't have the page, it's going to be much harder to actually rank for that keyword. And then when you are running ads, so for a company like basically Beach Plumbing SC, this is actually who came out and fixed it for me. Beach Tankless Water Heaters, Hot

1:18:45Water Heater Repair, Expert Tank and Tankless Water Heater Installation, Repair, Maintenance. So, they basically just say, you search for anything, we're going to give you an ad that's relevant. This one is Merl's Inlet Plumbing, you know, not the greatest ad, a little bit generic, but this one is targeted a little bit better. Need to capitalize

1:19:00each of these. But overall, looks good. Get verification, so we get some logos in there. But otherwise, you know, ultimately what we're trying to do is say, we want to create all these different pages so that we have everything filled out, and when people are searching near us, we have all of these different things uh done. So, we

1:19:16find all these keywords here, great. This is where we start. The other thing that we can do is basically just going into Google Gemini, what are 20 services that plumbers provide? The other thing that you can do is you can go into the actual business profile itself, and if you're using GMB everywhere, you can actually see all the information, like the core business details that'll show here, and it will pull up basically all

1:19:36the services they have once you sign in. So, they also have that if you search GMB everywhere over here, so they have this this opens dentist nearby and shows all of these different categories, but you can see the category analysis. This can sometimes give you an idea of like, okay, these are the different services that people are providing. If we go to our plumbing service, and then we look at category analysis over here, we have a few more different examples. So, not perfect. The other thing that we could do is just go into Google Gemini. This

1:20:04is one where I lean on the client a lot. I'm like, can you send me a full list of all your services? When they send it, I'm like, is there anything else that you do? And sometimes if you send them a list back like this, like, hey, here's 50 standard services for Is there anything in here? You know, basically send me a check mark back next to a box for all of these ones that you do. So, it started with 20. I eventually said, give me 30 total in a list, you know, one list at a time. So, this one starts with kind of leak detection, leak

1:20:28repair, drain cleaning, toilet repair. You might say, we don't want to do some of these things, but it is these are all the different main services that plumbers are going to provide. So, let's just assume that I meet this plumber, they do all of these different services, 30 total services that we have. So, that's our starting point. Next is going to be trying to figure out, okay, we have their service area here. So, I took the service area and I actually put it directly into Google Gemini, put the picture in there and basically said, you know, what are all the cities in this photo that are that are in Somerset

1:20:58County, New Jersey? Because their whole service area is not specifically Somerset County, like Hillsborough right here is not in it. That is Somerset County. So, they probably do Hillsborough, I'd assume. It's probably just the way this is set. But, let's just assume these are the ones that they did. Okay, we have Hillsborough. So, basically now we have all of these different key locations here. So, what we want to do is we want to combine locations with the services that we're

1:21:19providing. That's first and foremost. The second thing that we want to do is make sure we have pages on our website, deep detailed pages of all of the different services and even like micro niche services that we provide within things like tankless water heater repair, Rinnai tankless water heater repair. You know, there's other big brands that people will search and what people are looking for is an expert to go fix that specific product. So, a lot of times it's like, yes, a plumber knows how to come in and fix that because they work with tankless water heaters, they work with all of those different products. So, what I eventually did is

1:21:51we got to Claude and I said, Claude, please build me, and here is my prompt, doing keyword research for a plumber. What I need is a spreadsheet with one sheet list all of our service pages that we need to create. Main city Bridgewater, New Jersey, but we serve all of Somerset County, New Jersey. So, these are our cities, these are our services. For the spreadsheet, I basically said, give me the city service pages, give me a list of some sub keywords for each of my services. For example, we do sump pump repair, please do a sentence for each service about some additional SEO keywords we can

1:22:20target like certain brands, specific issues people search, etc. So, I'll go over why this makes sense. Last but not least, I attach a list of additional keywords. What I need are 100 blog post ideas. So, we have three different pages in here. You're going to see for each of these, we have things where it's like and we'll just open this in Google

1:22:36Drive, so it looks a little better. Okay, now you're going to see we actually have our suggested URL slug over here and then we actually have the service, the city, the page title that we need for all these. So, from an SEO perspective, this is a great starting point. For a company like this, they don't even have a website. So, you know, it's one of those where it's like doing this as a starting point would basically put you ahead of everybody. Um a lot of people Yeah, this is This is current website [laughter] and this new website. So, essentially this is what you're trying to do. If

1:23:04you're geared around Bridgewater, your main pages are going to be Bridgewater drain cleaning. I wouldn't do it like this. Drain cleaning ser- You just need Bridgewater, New Jersey drain cleaning services. Just do it once and then you can do, you know, Corey's Plumbing Company, whatever it's called. We have our URL over here. So, we have all of our services now. So, 30 pages

1:23:20essentially for each of these locations. You might be like, this is kind of overdoing it. But, when somebody in Basking Ridge searching for sump pump insulation, now we have a page on our website that says that. Google can actually say, "Okay, this company provides this service based on this page they have and based on the reviews that say they provide this and based on their Google Business Profile that says they provide this service." So, really that's what you're trying to do. You're like, "We are a very good company that answers our phone and does services and these are the services we provide in these areas." If you don't have that, you're

1:23:49basically Google's just basically left to work off of your Google Business Profile, which could work, but it's one of those where why not have the website to go along with it. So, we have all of our pages here. Let's see how many total pages we'd have to create. So, to get started, we would have 372 pages. Now, I know that sounds like a lot. This would also be a for a massive plumbing company that does 30 total services. So, you would assume it's probably a pretty big plumbing company if you're doing all of these different services here, but it is how you would want to build it if these are the things

1:24:19you're providing. Page titles, would not recommend using these, but this is perfectly fine. The second half of the page title is perfect. Next is going to be service sub keywords. This is really where I think it's an important thing to do. Using this when you're building each of your pages is basically saying, "Okay, leak repair is a popular popular service that people search." But not

1:24:37everybody's searching for leak repair. Some people are going to say, you know, "Copper pipe is leaking." Some people say, "I have a leak in my ceiling." So, what you're looking for here are what are the things people are searching for? Slab leak repair cost, water leak repair cost. Those can be blog posts, basically the huge range of what the cost cost the costs are. Cost cost. So, basically you could have, "Okay, it starts, you know, water leak repair cost starts with a $100 service fee, and usually the starting price ends up being close to $500, and goes up from there, and can can be as much as 5,000 plus dollars

1:25:10depending on total amount of damage." So, that's one of those like, "Okay, we can really do this as a, you know, really intensive long-form type of content." Toilet installation, brand-related terms like, so you could say, "We do install Kohler toilets, Toto toilets, American Standard." Include all of these, and it's not going to hurt you from a content perspective. The worst thing you can do from a content perspective is say, "We're going to take these and write 10,000 blog posts." But a plumbing company that writes two blog posts per per week that are relevant, that are helpful. "Why does my drain keep clogging? Seven common causes. How

1:25:44to unclog a toilet with a plunger. Nine methods that actually work." I don't know that you need nine methods, but basically here's a primary target keyword we have. Ultimately, what you're looking for is somebody with a clogged toilet who can't unclog their toilet, who eventually ends up on your website, might eventually be searching for,

1:26:01"Yeah, I need toilet repair services." Or I need toilet plunging services. Basically, I need a plumber to come out to my house to help me fix this issue. So, a lot of these some of this content is going to be this is helpful content that people can use, and potentially they don't need to call plumber. That's fine. What you're doing is you're essentially saying, "We're providing helpful content to our customers and we have it about all of these different categories sewer line, sump pumps, garbage disposals, seasonal and emergency, and some of them are even how to prevent frozen pipes this winter New Jersey." That's a helpful post that when

1:26:30you have frozen pipe burst issues, what Google's going to say is, "Oh yeah, well this company has three different content three different pieces of content about frozen pipes and how they work, how to fix it, how to do all that." And they also have a page on their website saying they do frozen pipe repair in Hillsborough New Jersey and now they're going to recommend you when somebody from Hillsborough repair goes, "My pipe just burst, what do I do?" So, people search in all these different ways. Your goal is to essentially say, "We do all these services, we have all this information on our website, and these

1:27:01are all of our target keywords." Now, you might be saying this is a little bit ridiculous. Why don't we just create a plumbing website and see what happens? And sometimes you do a you know, I just did a search with Rinnai tankless water heater repair near me and if we scroll down and see, okay, Acre Repair Myrtle Beach is ranking. So, this is actually

1:27:17four star which is a big company by us. This is interesting. This is definitely not their main website. All right, we'll we'll have to dig into this later, but essentially you'll see, okay, we have plumbing, we have HVAC, we have duct cleaning pages. Now, they could do a lot more. So, under the plumbing pages plumber near me in Myrtle Beach SC it's not how I recommend doing my but you see they have all of their different services here. Creating a page for each service will only help. It's not going to hurt your SEO by building more pages and more things on your website. It might be slow. Might be one of those

1:27:46where you know, over the next three months you're like, "I'm not seeing much movement." But I promise you in a year, two, three years from now, when Google's looking at every single website and trying to rank the best websites and best businesses, if you have a really good Google business profile with a lot of good reviews and you're answering reviews, this is fully built out with all of your different services you provide, and then you have a website to go along with it, it's going to help you in the long run from a paid perspective and an SEO perspective. So, local SEO keyword research, hopefully this is

1:28:13helpful. Kind of did a long form of this video. I might do a short form form of this as well, just like a quick two to three minute video that you can kind of quickly get through. So, if you have any questions about this, please leave them in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC

1:28:27YouTube channel. What's up everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today, I'm going to be going over how to get more local backlinks. So, for a local company, how you can actually find backlinks within your local market. So, one of the hardest parts of any local business when it comes to ranking is getting backlinks from other local websites. And it's it's not something that's really like there's an easy process to it. So, what I went over today is an example of let's just say this company came to me and said,

1:28:55"We want to get more backlinks. Specifically, we're doing gutters and we're trying to really, you know, have the biggest year we've ever had when it comes to gutters." So, let's just say they're doing great with roofing. We want to make sure we're doing better with gutters. So, we want to basically put together a strategy for how do we get more backlinks for a company located in Atlanta that does gutters. So, the very first thing is most people aren't just going to immediately be like, "Let's link to this gutters website." Or

1:29:18"Let's link to this local website." Because ultimately, people link to things because there's something of use there or something of value that they found that they say, "This is worth linking to." For a local company, the best way to do that is going to be things like sponsorships, is going to be things like, you know, if you do some type of partnership with a company like in the example here, they have Atlanta Falcons associate partner. So, can they get a backlink on the Atlanta Falcons website? That's one of those things where it's like, "Hey, we'd love to be featured on your website." So, that is actually where for a local company, if

1:29:49you're able to be featured somewhere or if you have a partnership with other local companies in the area, that is really where you want to say, "Okay, why don't we do a page on our website about about our partnership? We'll link back to each other." And from Google standpoint and from, you know, any tool that is looking at backlinks, it's going to be able to say okay, here is a nice natural backlink that came in even if you're linking to each other. It's not something where you want to say, okay, let's get this network of 20 companies together. We'll link our websites together and it's going to make us all

1:30:18jump to the top. Don't really think that's going to make a huge difference in terms of your overall ranking, but that is one way to kind of say, okay, we have a partnership with the Atlanta Falcons, but really hard thing to do obviously and if you're a small local company, it's like, yeah, don't have a partnership with the you know, big

1:30:33sports team that's, you know, next door. So, what I generally do and this has been my the best way for me to find local backlinks or backlinks for any type of niche is really using deep research. So, this could be through like chat GPT. I just did it through Gemini Pro. I think Gemini Pro does really good deep research. So, basically here click on well, it's going to be one of the options is deep research. When you're starting Gemini, it's like create image, deep research. So, click on deep research. You can also ask for it in your actual prompt, but really simple prompt for me. Basically, I'm a local

1:31:07company in Atlanta. We specialize in gutters. We want more local backlinks, relevant backlinks over the next 12 months. So, basically give me a list of local websites in Atlanta, Georgia, websites that are relevant to me that I should be trying to get get a backlink from essentially. Scrolling down here, they put together a Atlanta gutter SEO backlink strategy and we got all the way to the point where they put together this basically step-by-step process for me where it's like foundational profiles. So, this is always where you want to start. Create your Google Business Profile, create Apple Maps profile, Bing Places, create a Facebook page, create your Yelp page,

1:31:43and then also create a Nextdoor profile. All of these things are going to be helpful for you. They give you a backlink. They're going to be, you know, huge channels for your business where when Google's looking up, okay, what are all the different gutter companies in Atlanta, if you have all of these pages filled out and for example, if you have a Facebook page that has that's active, that has page likes, that has posts going out. If you have a Google business profile that's active, that has a lot of reviews, that has pay posts going out, it's going to help you from the standpoint of like, okay, we did a blog

1:32:14post about here are how our seamless gutters, you know, XYZ. Here's how they help your house and make it so that there's less overall maintenance for your house on a yearly basis. Write a blog post, put that article out on your different channels, and you know, just writing useful content like that, or how much do you seamless gutters cost? And basically do an example of this is usually how much they cost depending on, you know, the size of the house, the types of gutters you select, and whatever other factors there are. So, those are the types of things when you're creating content like that, not only right having profiles like these, I

1:32:45don't think it hurts to have a LinkedIn page, even if you're, you know, if you're publishing information there, it's not going to hurt to have that. It's one of those where you're like, is anybody going to read this? Is this going to do anything for me? Maybe not, but if you're already writing the content and it's just one more channel to post to, then that's another one that you can build as well. So, foundational profiles, I look at really any social media channel, any local profile that you're able to build. And these are kind of the obvious ones that apply to every single company. These are almost like,

1:33:13let's start with some type of floor before we really focus on raising our ceiling. Let's just make sure that we at least are having these profiles in place. The next thing is going to be free general and industry directories. So, Thumbtack, Porch, Foursquare, Yellow Pages USA. Some of these can be handled through a citation building service. So, I've gone over BrightLocal, I've gone over WhiteSpark. These are two tools where you can build citations. So, within their actual local SEO software, they have a local citation finder. So, with within WhiteSpark, you can build

1:33:44citations per citations that you build. Same thing with BrightLocal, if we scroll down here, they have citation builder. You can find local citations, you can find the large citations. And basically, look up all of your information on these citation builder and it's one of those where you pay once, you have your citations for life. So, you you pay per citation. They have over a thousand niche websites and directory, one-time payment, zero hidden costs. So, you're paying for these citations basically to say, "Okay, we want to make sure our website is out there in all these different, you know, business directories that we should be listed on." So, that is the most

1:34:20important thing when it comes to, you know, getting started with your backlink strategy is like, "Are we on these main general directories? And then if can we find any industry-specific directory?" So, for home services, it doesn't just have to be gutters, it could be home service-related. I have submitted carpet cleaning clients to a carpet cleaning and then a house cleaning directory. So, there are directories like that that exist that will give you a backlink that is a recognized backlink and it's something that might not catapult you to the top of search engines, but if you get on enough of them, it's not going to hurt your overall rankings by getting

1:34:51listed in as many directories as possible. I always say these are the two places to start cuz these are where it's generally free, it's generally the process is creating a profile about your business. So, when you're doing it, go through the process of spending a day or two being like, "We're going to build up a bunch of profile pages about our our business." And then they're going to exist and then they're going to be there. We have a Better Business Bureau page or whatever it might be. Now, speaking of Better Business Bureau, some of these start to get into paid types of authority links. So, Better Business

1:35:17Bureau is a membership that you have to pay for and then some of these other ones with the Chamber of Commerce and joining different types of business membership or business groups or business networking groups where essentially you do pay to be a member of, but there are benefits in the sense of, "Okay, we can also be recognized by these different companies and linked to by these different companies. Oh, and then we also get a badge that we put on our website that shows, 'Hey, we're a member of this this specific group and this is, you know, we have skin in the game just like you do.'" So, sometimes

1:35:47paid links can work as well. It's not going to hurt you to have a paid link. The main thing when it comes to paying for backlinks, I always say is we'll go over this in a little bit in more detail, but you know, the big thing is you can just go to Fiverr and buy backlinks. And it's like these are

1:35:59basically useless for the most part. Usually they're going to do more harm than good, especially these, you know, 950 manual backlinks. Nobody's building you 950 manual backlinks for $20. It's going to be a submission service that a bunch of other people are doing. So there's thousands upon thousands upon thousands of websites doing the same thing. So when it comes to actually paying for backlinks, really the best way to do it is these types of paid authority and chamber links. All right, so come over here. We actually put together this Gemini put me put put me together a little page, although it's not not the greatest looking page. I had

1:36:29Perplexity do me one that looks way better. So basically joining local chambers of commerce and business groups is another way to get backlinks and be recognized by their website and be listed on, you know, wherever their business directory is, which online it will link to your website. Sponsor local youth sports and fall festivals. So my kids school has sponsorship opportunities. Not that expensive and you get a link from the school saying, "Hey, they're a local sponsor." So to me it's like it this is another paid link and when it comes to sponsoring a local youth sports, there's not a guarantee that you're going to get a backlink. Now

1:37:01a lot of youth sports now have websites, have, you know, a list of their sponsors and link out to their sponsors. So it's one of those things, check beforehand if you're doing it for the purpose of saying like, "Yeah, I'd like for this to also help me with my digital marketing efforts as well." Fall festivals is, you know, the example here is the Candler Park Fall Fest. So this is why I like doing deep research through Gemini is they basically give me the exact things where it's like, "You should try to

1:37:24sponsor this specific fall festival. This is the Northside Youth Youth Organization that is available in Atlanta." Local PTOs, donate to local schools or, you know, for highly trusted educational links. Getting links back especially school type organizations can be a very very good very good way to drive you additional backlinks. Now the other thing is going to be doing guest posting, local media. So if you're able to find Georgia specific, Atlanta specific blogs, websites. This one is showing a few. Atlanta real estate forum, David real estate blog. I'm not saying you need to join the real estate forum and be really active there and post back to your website. But, if

1:37:59there's opportunities for some of these where you could say, "Hey, we're you know, we provide this gutter service. We're looking to basically write about this or talk about this. Can we use your blog to do it? Get a link back to our website." Basically, guest blogging tale is old as time. The hard part with a local website like this is a lot of times backlinks come in because you wrote something that is useful or you've done something or like there's something on that page that's like you need to go to this page. When it comes to local services, it's just not the way the internet works where a lot of people are

1:38:31saying, "You need to go to this gutters page and go book your service." You know, somebody might mention your company and that's a good thing to do as well, but it's not really a local backlink. I do think mentions help like I think of Google scouring Nextdoor and they say, "Oh yeah, Peachtree Restorations is listed tons and tons of times on Nextdoor and it's positive, you know, in terms of the way people talk about it and you have a five-star rating on Nextdoor Nextdoor and Google." I do think all of those things are going to help your rankings, but it's not necessarily a backlink. So, getting a

1:39:00backlink to this page and getting a backlink to your website is really for a local company going to come more down to getting into local directories, making sure any type of local business opportunity that you have to get your name out there and be listed as a sponsor, a partner, whatever it might be. That's the best way to get backlinks. If there are op- opportunities and you can search for guest blogging opportunities, you know, ultimately there's probably national home decor websites, national websites like you know, that do things related to home services and architecture and you know, whatever else it might be. And those are opportunities for doing guest

1:39:35blogging and linking back to your website. Is it going to move the needle that much? You don't really know, but it's one of those things, hey, can we do one a month? Can we do 10 total a year and just get 10 additional backlinks per year? The way that I kind of look at it is if you're using something like BrightLocal or you're using something like WhiteSpark to help you build citations and get into local directories, that's going to be one of the best things that you can do cuz not that many companies are doing this. The companies that are, it's, you know, over time their rankings will improve

1:40:03organically and within their Google Business Profile because you have all these backlinks and good reviews and you're basically doing all these different signals to show, yes, we are the best at gutters in the area. So, using these two services will be helpful. You know, you can use things like this where it's like Feedspot, 25 Best Atlanta Real Estate Blogs to Follow in 2026. Some of these are not overly active. Blogging is not a huge thing anymore. So, the other thing that you can do to get more local backlinks is to say, what if we publish one YouTube video a month that goes along with our blog article, we link that YouTube video

1:40:36to our website, we link our website in the YouTube video description, we share this video, we share the links to our video, our, you know, our our post and, you know, talking about gutters, for example. Just come up with the 10 biggest questions that customers have about gutters. How much do they cost? You know, what is my maintenance going to be? How often do I need to clean my gutters? What are seamless gutters? So, just build some of this content and over time you're going to have a base of content, a YouTube channel, social media channels, all of these different things

1:41:05that are linking back to your website. And when Google's looking at, what are all the backlinks they have? These are this will show all of those backlinks in a lot more detail. Now, if you're a multi-location business, you might want to look at something like Yext. They also have reputation.com. These are and this is pitches itself right as the the Yext alternative, but Yext is a really basically a larger platform for generally multi-location businesses, but they also help you with your listings, managing and optimizing them. And then they have different publishers here as far as like pages you can create, so Yext is another platform like

1:41:39BrightLocal and Whitespark, more expensive and a little bit more more of your enterprise type platform. And then as far as reputation management, BirdEye is really popular for reputation management. When it comes to paying for backlinks, there are services and these are two popular ones, so fatjoe.com, you can pay for backlinks. So 10 backlinks, this is two blogger outreach, three blogger outreach, one blogger outreach, two niche edits, two

1:42:03niche edits. Only about $1,100, $1,200. So backlinks are really expensive like this. And the thing with buying backlinks from a service like this is it's generally what they're going to do, they're going to try to find blogs and niche edits that are relevant to a home service or a gutter company. So that these look like natural backlinks, they're built over the course of a month, so you're getting 10 new backlinks in a month. Not really going to be a huge alarm bells for Google just

1:42:29building that small amount of backlinks. And if they're high-quality websites that you're getting backlinks from, this will help you as well. But it is one of those things where the cost is pretty damn expensive and sometimes is it going to really move the needle that much? And that's kind of the question with is this a worthwhile investment? And really these all there's only one way to find out. I generally advise against doing these, but if you're really like, "Hey, we're just trying to build a few backlinks. We have, you know, some some marketing budget to spend and we're really focused on SEO and we used to spend 2K per month on an

1:42:58agency that we're not spending anymore. So sure, we'll spend $500, $600 a month on backlinks and see what happens." This is a service that's that's pretty popular. Link ran is another one that's very popular. I would definitely avoid things like this. So this is just one that came up when I was searching. Local links cupid first looks like an AI

1:43:15website. They were ranked really high. Basically buy five local backlinks, $300. So, you know, we make no guarantees in regards to this or site traffic. We make no guarantees if we lose the links, you know, for some of these like Fat Joe, the one good thing is if you do purchase links, you could have a spreadsheet where you say, "Okay, I'm going to check on my links once a month and just make sure these are still working and and active." So, that would kind of be your workaround. If you're looking for cheap backlinks, you're like, "I still want backlinks. I don't mind paying for backlinks." If you do

1:43:45the Fiverr route, what I would say is avoid things like this where it's like, "We build you 10,000 links." Find things like this where there's a small number of reviews. "I will provide home and gardening backlinks." So, finding backlinks that are contextually relevant. When you go and it's basically, "Okay, I could do one guest post for $10." These are probably useless. Truthfully, like five backlinks for $45, five guest posts on This looks

1:44:10like on the same home home garden blog. I wouldn't recommend five on the same. Do one on this home and garden blog. Do it on another, you know, find another gig that's similar. Find another gig that's similar. You could easily come in here and spend $200, $300 on backlinks. They'll give you a backlink. You're going to see a guest blog and there's going to be, you know, it's going to link back to your website. Google will generally recognize these. The thing I would say is some of these are basically just link farms. That's probably what this website is where there's just a ton of guest posts. They're all linking out

1:44:39to a different website. It's not the end of the world. I mean, there's big websites that kind of operate like this. But ultimately, it's one of those things where is this even worth your time? If you're going to spend the time on or the the money on backlinks and the time saying, "Okay, let's, you know, write a

1:44:53write a guest blog post and do this." Sometimes, I think you're better off really trying to go the route of saying, "I'm going to reach out to all of these different Atlanta real estate blogs." These ones actually have where you can get the information. So, for pricing, you can actually export the leads. So, these media contacts, you could basically do that. And, you know, getting local media, I think the hard part with something like a gutter company is your local news website's not just going to write about you. Now, if you're involved in something that some event or there's some reason to write about you, but it's one of those they're

1:45:25not going to be like, "Yeah, Peachtree Restorations is doing gutters for homes." You know, it's not like newsworthy. So, getting in the news is going to be more of a thing where it's like, you know, local homeowners, you know, homeowner companies come together to say XYZ and you know, they link end up linking to your website cuz you're one of them in the process. It's It's not really something that's It's easy to get on these local websites. So, when it comes to building local SEO backlinks, I would generally say start with doing deep research for the local market for the individual service that it is and

1:45:54from there you'll probably have a list of different things that you can target. And, you know, it'll help you overall from getting the initial list of backlinks that you need to build to actually starting to build them and starting to hopefully improve your rankings by getting more backlinks. Cuz in an AI SEO world, it does help to have more backlinks and brand mentions. For local service companies, I don't think that Google's looking at, "Okay, well, this company has, you know, 50,000

1:46:19backlinks. The other one has 10." There's not really an expectation of having a huge number of backlinks and you're only going to against your local competitors in the market. You're not competing against Yelp and Angie. Like they have their own backlink profiles. You're going up against Atlanta Gutter Company ABC and if they have all of these things in place and you do not, there's a chance they're going to rank above you if, you know, everything else is equal. So, goal is slowly build some local backlinks and over time it's going to help you with the amount of backlinks you have and your SEO ranking. So, if

1:46:50you have any questions about this, please leave them in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. What's up, everyone? Today I'm going to be going over how to build a quick SEO content strategy around a specific keyword in about 2 minutes. So, this is where AI tools have made this a whole lot easier because I just sent one of these off to my clients and basically I needed to do it for myself because I am looking into creating more content and I want to rank higher for the keyword PPC advertising. I realize that in a world

1:47:19of AI getting recognized around the keyword PPC advertising will be really important for my business long-term. So, I need to start building out more content related to PPC advertising. Now, I do plenty of Google Ads tutorials and things like that, but what I'm trying to do is find more of these long-tail keywords so that when a dentist or an agency or a plastic surgeon in this case or a physical therapist is looking for advertising, paid advertising, PPC advertising type articles, they're able to find them on my website and hopefully I can drive some more clients. So, what we're going to be doing today is quickly going to free tool. So, you can use any

1:47:54free tool that you want. keywordtool.io is completely free and gives you a ton of keywords, which is why I like a lot. Gives us 346 total keywords just on the Google side, just for the Google search engine. My content plan is also going to be part of YouTube. So, my goal is also ranking on YouTube as well. Any of these other ones really going to be redundant when it comes to Google and YouTube for the most part unless it's product-based on Amazon. So, what we're going to take PPC advertising and all you do is copy all of all of these here. Now, before that, you can click load more, go all

1:48:24the way to the bottom. We have 200 total now. So, these are plenty of keywords, honestly. I don't need 200 keywords. I just need a set of keywords. So, what you do now is you're going to go back over to Claude and I pasted that content here. So, just right here, we're just going to paste that content. So, paste all of those keywords in there. What we could do next is I can go over to YouTube and do the same exact thing. So, if we go scroll to the very top and we actually get up there and click on YouTube, then we're going to find a

1:48:48bunch of PPC advertising ser- searches specifically for YouTube. This one only has 80, so probably a little bit better to use, but we're going to copy all of these, put all of these here as well, and and leave those right there. So, 80 keywords might actually be better than having 200. And then last but not least, we're going to open up the Google Keyword Planner. This is where we actually get some average monthly search data, some bid ranges, and typed in PPC advertising, we're just going to do the top 500 that we can find. This is based on relevance. So, we're going to copy all of these now. And basically, what

1:49:20we're doing is we're just saying, "Here's a bunch of keywords that are recognized by Google, by keyword tools. You know, these are the things people are actually typing in." What we need to do is go from keyword to content plan. So, we copy all of this, say, "These are my current PPC advertising blogs. I want to create more blogs, not specific to Google Ads or Meta Ads. Can you build me

1:49:38a content plan based on these keywords?" So, all of this, basically, one shot, and we got a Surfside PPC content plan in Microsoft Excel format. And now, if we go through it, I have a publishing calendar now for the next 12 weeks. The next 3 months, I have one article one article, one video that I can do for each of these. And what I always say is like, "With the SEO and with the content strategy, your goal is essentially saying, 'How do I do things consistently where I'm actually targeting specific keywords, specific pillars, clusters?'" Which, if you're not familiar with pillars and clusters, essentially, cluster one, this says mechanics. You

1:50:13know, this is basically kind of your main main overview type thing. Strategy and execution. So, strategies, checklist, examples, mistakes, holiday, funnel, email list, another mistake. So, probably just can do a few of these. But ultimately, what I can do, and this is nine benefits of PPC advertising. What these are ultimately targeting when you're looking at the keyword pool, is you're saying, "I'm going to target PPC

1:50:35advertising." What is PPC advertising? Meaning, definition. What is You don't need separate articles for all this. These are assigned to this specific post. The online advertising acronym PPC stands for. So, this is in your glossary. Define PPC advertising. Glossary. How PPC advertising works. So, all of these over here are essentially the different articles I'm writing. PPC sales funnel, PPC for doctors. This is something I already had. These are ones that are just popular. PPC for mortgage, PPC for lawyers. So, you can either go into Claude and say, "Please give me a content plan." For me, I've been doing content long enough that really I just need, "Give me some topics." So, where

1:51:11my main starting point as we did this is going to be, you know, looking at their actual publishing calendar and I'm going to create a video, what is PPC advertising? This is something I actually created a video for years ago and it got a decent amount of views. I had a video page on my website. Since then, my website's kind of been wiped and I've switched platforms and a lot of issues with content on my website in itself. So, I'm basically redoing and revamping my SEO strategy, which has been pretty terrible for the beginning of the year. So, almost feels like I'm starting from scratch a little bit. So,

1:51:42from the PPC advertising perspective, I mean, I know I already have some type of foothold in PPC advertising companies, but it's not something where I'm ranking high for any of these keywords. So, where do we start? We start by creating these pages and putting together pillars and clusters and over time my plan is to release PPC advertising tutorials and a free PPC advertising course that's essentially, here's everything you need to know about PPC advertising and how to get started with it. So, this is

1:52:07essentially our quick SEO content plan. Like, how to create one very quick using Google Keyword Planner, AI and keyword research tools. So, you can do this completely free. I didn't use any paid research tools. Copy and paste all the information there. Get yourself a nice content plan. What I really like is the pillars and clusters, but with the content plan, you basically have, here's all of the different things you should create. 25 total articles. So, if I do these 25 articles and I get them all ranked by next year, there's a good chance that I'm ranking for these keywords and all I have to do is go back

1:52:36in and update all of my content again. So, if you have any questions about this, please leave me in the comment section. Main thing actually is looking at these URL slugs. I think this would look really good creating all of these because essentially, it's going to answer all the questions that people have and it's going to help me rank for a lot of these keywords and, you know, essentially the goal is long-term. I have 25 articles about PPC advertising, then when I create a page, PPC advertising agency and I try to, you know, rank for that keyword, it gives me

1:53:05a much better shot doing that long-term. So, again, if you have any questions about this, please leave them in the comment section. Thanks for watching my video today and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. What's up, everyone? Welcome to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel. Today is going to be fast marketing strategy. So, this is going to be a pretty quick video and it's the age-old question where my answer has changed over time, but what should I do first? Should I do SEO or should I do paper click? So, should I run Google Ads or should I try to optimize for search engines? So,

1:53:34ultimately, to me, I always kind of went the idea of build your website, get your SEO working, get everything working that way, and then from there, go and start running ads as soon as your SEO is actually working. So, as soon as you have a little bit of an audience built, if that's what you're going for, if you have some clients in the door, if you have some cash flow essentially with SEO, then what you want to do is start running paid advertising. Google is basically becoming more of a pay-to-play every single day, it feels like, and this is coming from somebody who has kind of long said you really don't have

1:54:04to use paid advertising if you're very, very optimized and your business runs itself okay from a, you know, search engine optimization perspective, but for most tools, local service companies, you know, if you're like a software company, if you're an e-commerce company, you know, there's just constant competition entering the market. So, ultimately, you need to understand what is my overall competition. If you're the only person in your market that creates, you know, the the whatever product this is, like let's just say you have some some product that fixes knee issues instantly, you probably don't need to run ads. You could just do some SEO and once a few people review you, you're

1:54:39fine. So, in this case, let's just say Surfside PPC comes out with an AI video generator. Now, this example is obviously something that's very, very competitive, so it's not something where I'm picking a niche that, you know, there's 10 people in or that it requires a huge, you know, that basically for this niche, it requires me building a website where people can generate AI videos. So, let's say I do that, okay? Now, it's time for me to start promoting it. My first thought process would be making sure I have optimized pages on my website for paid advertising, making sure my website is ready to drive conversion. So, I have a

1:55:14few different examples of websites I opened today. And And basically what I did is I just went through best AI video generator. To So, to answer this question, like, what actually comes up when people are searching your targeted keywords? For this one, there's three ads at the very top, then an AI overview. Now, this is where it's like, well, shouldn't we be doing SEO? Yes, but even the AI overview, it's people on YouTube channels, best AI video generators, best AI video generator list. You need to get on these lists to truly optimize for SEO. To me, the only real way to get on these lists is to

1:55:47promote. InVideo has reached out to me probably a thousand times. I've seen their ads everywhere. I know they have really good SEO. So, they have all of these different things that they're doing, and that's the only reason I know that InVideo exists. As I went through this process, I scrolled down, just looking at what was ranking. So, we have

1:56:03Zapier, Facebook, Quora, Reddit. Basically, some of the sources that Google's using to basically say these are the sources we trust for AI video generation. Reddit again, Manis. I opened this one. Basically, your job is to get on these lists. And it's not easy to get on these lists cuz these are like the best AI video generating tools in the world. So, getting on these lists is incredibly difficult, but you could see Manis is saying AI-powered workflow

1:56:28automation. Here's our starting price. So, they're like, yep, we're on the list. So, a lot of companies will just put themselves, you know, we're the best AI video generator. And that was a huge thing that I saw throughout this. I always wonder how Google's going to handle that long-term. But, we have maybe six or seven organic results on the first page, and then we have mainly everything else is an ad or a video or content. This one goes AI video generator to an app on Google Play, Google AI video generator powered by Vio, 10 best, Atlas Cloud, again YouTube again, Quora again. So, we're really only getting, you know, to rank first or

1:57:02on the first page, we have one that Gemini is the one that actually goes directly to a video generator tool. This is a blog. This would go to a video but the App Store. Sponsored, sponsored, Manis is a blog, information, information. So, even from an SEO perspective, you're getting a lot of information and then these are really where a lot of people are going to find their recommendations. So, how do you actually get here is getting put on lists. If I launch my AI video generator tomorrow, I'm not going to be on any of these lists. I can write as much content in the world, I can create every video

1:57:34in the world. So, to me, when you're first getting started, unless you already have a moat. So, one of the examples I pulled was Viggle.ai. So, I found them in the search engine results somewhere and I clicked on there. So, it is Nope, not that one. I saw it on the 10th page or the 14th page. I was opening a few of these. So, there it is. Seven best AI video generators still 2025, so it needs to update the article. I've been there, so not not going to be something I'm actually telling them to do, but they should. AI video tools worth deep diving. You can see they recommended

1:58:04themselves first. Viggle does not spend a dime on paid advertising. So, this is Vito.ai. This is Viggle.ai. So, this is Viggle. It looks like they've kind of pitched themselves if it wants to open. They pitched themselves essentially as like a meme creator. So, these are like some of the community highlights. So, you can essentially create videos, memes that are really popular and recreate them using Viggle. Viggle does not spend a dime on paid keywords. It says they have no paid search history, but they have a really good organic search results. So, essentially what they've done is said, "Okay, we have picked our lane." They have a few other competitors

1:58:38here and essentially they're all about memes. Meme maker, meme creator, meme generator, Viggle. Make a meme. So, one of the things I like to look at is how many SEO clicks every company gets on their brand because generally that's going to drive a lot of your clicks, but you can see here they rank first overall for for Viggle obviously, but this is a good amount of clicks for just a brand name for their homepage every single

1:58:59month is getting 3,000 clicks it says. Now, these numbers aren't perfect, but you can see some of the different pages they have that are ranking well. If we go to all top pages, we can see basically all the pages they've created to rank for SEO. So, they probably don't necessarily need to run paid advertising, but if they were trying to say, "Hey, we want to get more people in the door." The best way to do that is run paid advertising. If you don't have this SEO already working in this way,

1:59:22then you need to run paid advertising. In a different example, so you're going to see viddyo.ai. Don't know really what the tool is, but organic and paid keywords pretty similar, but you can see estimated monthly SEO clicks only around 300. So, 10 clicks a day is not going to drive your business. I can tell you cuz my website gets only slightly more than that. So, you really want a lot of clicks coming in every day, especially if you have a tool like this, so you're

1:59:43getting new people coming in the door. Unless you have some type of social strategy or influencer face on top of the tool, it's really difficult to get a lot of people to see your tool every single day. So, with paid advertising, now they're spending $20,000 a month. So, granted you would assume if we go to viddyo.ai, let's try to figure this this website out. All-in-one AI video and image generator. So, AI video, AI image, AI voice, AI music. So, pretty good looking website overall. Pretty much they're

2:00:12like, "Hey, we do everything in here. Come in here, start you know, start paying us something and you can get access to all of these different models." So, viddyo.ai, if they're trying to say, "Hey, we want to be on the top list. We want to be recommended as we are the best." This is one of the ways to do it. It's basically say, "We can do everything. Join us. We have, you know, the best pricing. We have the best service. We have the fastest generations." You know, whatever it might be. So, SEO versus PPC age-old question. The answer, if you were to ask me today for brand new business, is run

2:00:40paid advertising. I think once you are kind of ready to take on customers and clients, running paid advertising is one of the best ways to say, do we have a good offer for what we're offering our our customers and our clients? If I launched a pest control company tomorrow, so let's just see if I do Myrtle Beach, I always like to do this every now and then, Myrtle Beach pest control. Now, these are running ads. Rocket Pest Control does pretty well, HomeTeam does pretty well in the area. They all trucks everywhere, so I I see these, but sometimes I scroll down just to be like,

2:01:12let's see Coastline Pest Management. We'll go to the website. This is a company that probably gets enough that they don't need to run paid advertising, but if we do a quick search, let's see if they're running any SpyFu. If they start running paid advertising, I bet it would See no paid keywords. Estimated monthly SEO clicks are very limited. They are getting through their Google Business Profile most likely. So, for over 20 years, probably a lot of contracts, probably just operate that way and that we're going to visit our contracts. But, as you scroll down here sometimes, I I like to do this just to kind of see, okay, what other businesses

2:01:43do we have in here? You know, as you as you scroll down, Beach Bugz Pest Control. Okay, let's go to the website. We have Beach Bugz Pest Control. We have a local with over 15 years of experience. If if he was trying to say, hey, I I need more clients, SEO is not the way to do it fast. The way to do it is paid advertising. You say, okay, we're going to run paid advertising. In this case, what you would probably want to do is make sure you have a landing page with a call button, maybe send people to the contact form, get people right here and say, contact us and we

2:02:11will come out, spray spray your bugs, you know, whatever it might be. So, this would be a website you'd want to build out a little bit more, get pages for all, you know, build out your local pages. Now, you're like, well, you're doing SEO now. No, basically what you're doing is paid advertising and then SEO you're constantly doing in the background. For Surfside PPC, I've kind of gotten back to doing more SEO cuz I would like to be a company that gets recommended in the AI results. However, if I'm looking for clients today, it's paid advertising. Like, that's how you you clients. So, if you have any

2:02:41questions about this, please leave them in the comment section. This is supposed to be fast marketing strategies. I probably rambled a little bit, but SEO versus PPC, my answer would be PPC first, SEO ongoing. So, thank you for watching my video, and make sure you subscribe to the Surfside PPC YouTube channel.