Local SEO Strategies for Trade Businesses 2024

[00:00:00]hi and welcome back in today's video I'll be sharing the exact method we use to rank our clients websites on the first page of Google let me Begin by quickly showing you one of our client's websites and how it's performing we're doing local SEO for them and in just the last 3 months they have 14,500 clicks and 1.7 million impressions on their website they're getting a huge amount of traffic on their website and when we take a look at their M pack they've generated 176 phone calls in just 3 months so today I will guide you through our exact process step by step so by the end of this video you'll be able to start ranking your website on the first page of Google and get similar results now if you're new here hi I'm K from one based media and I'm here to help you get more leads for your trades business using online marketing so if you don't want to miss any videos join our community and hit that subscribe button and the bell icon to get notified okay let's get started for this video as an example I'll be doing SEO for a roofing company but all the tips techniques and steps I show you can be used for any business such as Plumbing roofers or anything else we'll be using this Google spreadsheet to organize our data and track our SEO inside the spreadsheet I've created different tabs the first one helps us monitor our website's Pages the second sheet is for competition research the third tab assists in building our content strategy the fourth will help us get listed on local directories the fifth is for keeping track of our optimized content for local SEO and the last tab is the task list now don't worry if it all sounds confusing right now by the end of this video I promise it will be crystal clear on how to use this you can find the link to this spreadsheet in the description now the first thing we're going to do is pick a website that isn't doing well on Google and isn't showing up on the first page now this isn't a website that we've built we've just picked this for the purpose of the video I'm going to use Metro Roofing in London as an example our first step is to do an audit of the website to see where we stand I'm going to use screaming frog and paste a website link over here change the setting to HTML and then export all the pages Pages rename it Roofing London and hit enter screaming frog has downloaded all the URLs from our website and we're going to paste them into our page URL column now we'll assign page types the homepage and the flat roof page will be labeled as main navigation pages and the contact page will be site info you want to assign a page type to all the pages and then sort them by A to Z Now we will fill in the content action column in this column we'll put in what corrective actions we need to take to rank each page higher on Google so let's go to our first page which is the homepage and put in our main keyword we're targeting which in this instance is Roofing London we can see we're currently ranking at 65 in Google Now when we take a closer look at our page we can see that we're a little light on content let's go back to Google and search for roofing London click on the top page which is element roofing company and we can see their homepage has much more content and is Better Built so in the content action column let's put in optimized content because we need to improve the content so that our home page can compete with our competitors let's check the flat roofs page again we see there is not a lot of content when we search for flat roof in London we'll click on the top results and again their page has more content so we'll go back to our sheet Mark optimize content for the flat roof page and for every other navigation page as well for the technical action column we'll mark all the navigation Pages as leave as it is because we just need to optimize the content here except for the index page this is because the index page is a duplicate of our homepage and we don't want two pages competing for the same spot therefore we will redirect the index page to our homepage so now we know what we need to do with all the current pages on our website so the second step is to do competition research switch to the competitor's list and we'll start filling in all the details in the client's website column put in a website we're trying to rank to find our competitors we will simply Google Roofing London and take the top two ranking websites now copy and paste the website link in the competitor's column put in the business name for our website and our competitors next let's find age of the domain for that just click the link in the how to find column put in our competitors website link and we can see the main Authority is 19 and the age of the domain is 13 years old so for London roofing company we put 19 in domain Authority row and 13 years of age in the domain row domain Authority and age of domain play an important role in ranking websites on the first page now let's do the same for our example website we can see our website is 5 years old so let's put that on our sheet next task is to find out local ranking for main keywords and overall sem Rush traffic let's go to S Rush put in our competitors's website and hit enter we can see they're getting over 700 organic search traffic each month so let's put that in the sheet now let's go back to semrush and see what keywords they're ranking for we can see these are all the keywords so let's export these into a CSV file and then upload the file in a new sheet now we have all the keywords that London roofing company is ranking for let's head back to sem Rush click on pages so we can see all of their top pages now click on export make another new spreadsheet and paste the data in this sheet now we have the data of all their top pages as well copy The Links of the top keyword and top page spreadsheet and paste them back into our sheet to find out the number of reviews on Google let's Google the name of our competitor and click on their Google business profile we can see they have 19 reviews so we can put that in our sheet and for images they have only two images so we'll put that in our sheet as well for website speed we'll go to GT metric and put in our competitors's website link and change the location to UK they're scoring a B in the website speed so once again put that in our sheet for referring domains go to ah back link Checker and put in the website link this tells us to have 42 back links that will go in our sheet as well and finally to check Pages indexed go to Google put Insight in front of the website address and we can see that they have 107 pages indexed on Google that means we need at least 107 pages to compete with a London roofing company we're going to repeat the same process and fill in the detail for our other competitor you can see that all the details have been filled now we can compare and Carry Out analysis on where we're falling behind our Google listing has more reviews and images than our competitors but we still need more to rank on the map pack so let's Google Roofing London and we'll see in the M pack that the top listing has 70 reviews we on the other hand have only 22 reviews we need to make sure we get at least 50 more reviews so we can start showing up on the map pack our domain Authority is two and our competitor have a higher domain Authority than us indicating they have more content on their website and more backlinks to improve our domain Authority we need to upload more content to our website we're lagging behind in our website speed as well we've got a D we also have a feeble amount of backlinks only three whereas our competitors have 42 and 55 backlinks our website has only eight pages indexed while our competitors have 107 and 20 so we really need to improve on all of these metrics so let's go back to our task sheet and put in get an extra 50 Plus Google reviews this might sound like a lot but we need it to be competitive okay now we can go to our competitors's keyword sheet and see what keywords they are targeting we also want to start ranking for these keywords we can see how many searches each of these keywords are getting every month so with all this data we can start building our own content strategy go to their top pages sheet these are the pages that are pulling all the traffic we can take ideas from this data and use it to build our own pages to generate traffic let's take a look at the other competitors's keyword sheet we can see roofer Southeast London is getting 5050 searches a month making this a good keyword to Target for a local landing page chimney Flash and repair could also be a good blog post to get more traffic to our website you get the idea we want to go through each of these keywords and pages to see what we can improve now the next step is to build our content strategy to build our content strategy let's go to our top competitors websites we can see in the navigation bar they've got all these different service Pages let's go through to chimney repair and we can see the Target in the whole County of London we want to start building Pages based on these competing pages so let's start with drone survey repairs and Mark it as main navigation page let's do the same with other Pages we'll put in chimney repairs Roofing repairs gutter repairs and roof insulation we can also build Pages for different roof types so let's put in slate roofs as well Mark them all as main navigation Pages for main navigation Pages we want to Target the whole County which in this case is London now let's build local landing pages let's go to se Rush again and type in rofer London and when we click see all keywords we can see roffer North London has 70 searches a month making it a good keyword to Target we'll put that into our sheet along with roffer South London and roffer West London as well we'll also check our competitors's keyword list and we can see roffers in Wembley has 140 searches another good keyword to Target so let's put that into our sheet and Mark all of these as local landing pages we want to go to chat GPT and put in the prompt give me all the bars in London you'll see it will generate a list of all the burrowers so let's take Bexley and put roffers Bexley in semrush we can see it gets 10 searches a month not a lot of search volume but we still want to build a page for this keyword next let's take roffers Bromley and check the search volume we can see this one has 170 searches so another good page to build repeat the same process using semrush chat GPT and the keywords from our competitors to build more local landing pages next we want to build blog posts I recommend building at least 20 to 30 blog posts for your website to get blog post ideas go to semrush and type tied roof sem Rush gives us questions that people are asking about a tied roof how to replace a roof tile has 170 monthly searches so let's open this on Google we can see that this website Roofing Megastore has published an in-depth blog post on how to replace roof tiles because such blogs get a huge amount of inbound traffic which will turn into leads another way to get blog ideas is to use Google when we Google flat roofs Google gives us questions that people frequently ask we can take these questions and start building blogs for our own website so let's go back to our sheet and put in how to replace roof tiles and which is the best flat Roofing using semrush we can see people are searching for how to insulate a flat roof 210 times a month this will also be a good topic to build a blog post about Mark all of these as blog posts we want to fill in this entire sheet with lots of navigation Pages numerous local landing pages and plenty of blog posts that way we'll have a well-built substantial website the next step is to get listed in the local citations or directories we've already provided a list of directories for you to submit to so go ahead and submit your information to them for a local citation audit visit semrush and input your website link you can see our online presence is bad listings to fix are 22 and down here we are not present in all of these directories now for a fee we can get semrush to submit to all of these directories for us if you want to submit to all of these directories manually you can use this sheet as a checklist and fill in all the details in the columns as you make your way through each directory we also need to get listed on Niche specific directories simply go to Google and type in roofin directory and Google will show you directories related to Roofing we can submit to these directories over here and get listed on them as well use this sheet and get listed on all the local directories mentioned here and get listed on at least 10 Niche specific websites as well this will help you outperform your competitors by a mile our next step is to optimize our content using Surfer SEO now we want to optimize all of our main navigation Pages we'll cop all of them and put it in this sheet let's take our homepage the key word we want to rank for is Roofing London and by using Sam rush we can see that it has 1,300 monthly searches now let's go to Surf SEO and put our main keyword roofer London it will provide suggestions for similar keywords to rofer London select all the variations suggested we'll use one credit for this and copy and paste the content from our website into Surfer SEO once we put in our content we can see that we have a score of 36 now check the scores of other websites on the first page we need to ensure that our score is the highest to rank on the first page Surfer SEO also tells us how many words headings paragraphs and images we need to start ranking on the first page it also gives us suggestions for headings like roofer London so let's change this heading to rofer London and we can see our score goes up to 37 so basically we want to optimize our content using the suggestions Surfer SEO gives us now you can see after I've optimized the content our score has shot up to 68 that's a much better score now this page will rank better on Google we want to do the same for all the other pages that is put them into Surfer SEO and start optimizing the content next we want to change the url of these Pages we want the keyword London in all of the URLs this is because these are our main navigation pages and we're targeting the whole County with them which is London also we want all our titles and descriptions to be perfect let's go to our pitch roof page and we can see the title so we want pitch roof London in front and Metro roof in at the end in the title for the description we can see they are just spamming keywords but we want the description to specifically mention pitch roof so we want to rewrite the title and description for all our Pages both the title and description should have the service that we provide and our location in them so you'd have Roofing London or drone roof survey London the next step is to build back links for our website go to Google and search Roofing right for us websites like roof Pros another Roofing site are looking for guest posts here we'd reach out to them to inquire if there's a cost or if we can do a guest post for free if we write a good piece of content for their website they'll link back to us we can write a guest post on TI roofs or slate roofs and publish it on their site and that blog will link back to our TI roof or slate roof page next we will do a site audit go to S rush in the site audit section put in our domain and it will tell us technical errors and warnings on the website when we click on errors it will show us all the issues we have and similarly when we go on the warnings it lists us all the problems as well now some of these issues are technical for which you'll need to get a developer to resolve them what we recommend is to First upload all the content and then do an audit and start resolving the issues next we want to build our site structure so our homepage which is targeting rof for London will have all our main navigation pages in the navigation bar on the website these are all the services we offer so they should show up on the website like this we also recommend having an about us page a gallery page and a contact page as well now for local landing pages we can have an area we cover page on the navigation bar on the homepage or we can have them in the footer but make sure to internally link all the local landing pages to the website now for the blogs again you can have it in the footer or in the navigation bar but for a service websites like Roofing I would recommend putting blogs in the footer so that's the site structure you want to have for your website next we'll move on to ranking on Google my business Google my business is really important for local SEO to access your Google my business profile type in your company name in Google with the Gmail account you use to create your Google business profile from here you can edit your profile read your reviews or messages add photos and and so on let's start with reviews we can copy this link and send it to your clients via email or text message and ask them for reviews another great way is to go to a QR code generator website paste in our review link and it will generate a QR code for us now we can print this on the back of our business card and give it to clients so they can just scan it to give us reviews in our business information section our business name has to be the same across all the directory citations like yelp.com also make sure that our business category is filled out properly now to find out our business Cate download an extension called gmbb everywhere so let's say you're a plumber in London open the extension and type in Plumber London then go to the top listing we can see all the categories these top listings are using you can use the categories for your own listing now you can put in your main category and then the additional category using gmbb everywhere make sure your contact number and website information is correct put in all your social media accounts again your address should be the same across all the directories and your opening hours should be accurate also fill in the more section a lot of businesses will miss this out but we want to go to the extra mile and fill all of it in in the edit service section inut all the keywords we want to rank for along with listing all the services we offer in the product section you can include your services because as a service business the services you provide are your products for instance with our client create room essic in the product section their services are listed clicking through explains more about their service and leads to their services page we also recommend posting at least once a week on Google my business it really helps in ranking a listing if you don't want to do it manually you can use a tool called sendable to schedule your posts next step is to create your local schema for your website local schema is a code that gives Google information about our business so go to chat GPT and put in the prompt write me a local schema for our roofing company based in London and it will generate a code for us that we can copy and paste on our website we just need to put our business details in we can go one step further and add details about our business in the prompt itself so in chat GPT generates the code it will have all our information in it and then we can just simply copy and paste it on our website next step is to get sitemap on our website a sitemap is a structured list of all the pages on our website is a guide for Google and it helps it navigate through the site more efficiently so go to a sitemap generator website put in our link and then you can download the sitap and upload it to your website do this step after you've built all of your pages now the final step is to go to our task list and take off all the tasks that we've completed the very last thing we need to tackle is a visual change on our website we want our contact number on top of the page usually in the navigation bar once we've done it we can tick it off for the sticky navigation the navigation bar needs to stick to the page when we scroll down so we already have that so let's take that off for a clear call to action we need a big call to action button like get a free quote we need to have it either in the navigation bar or as a popup we also need reviews on the homepage because ads credibility we also need to have a gallery page and also images of our work on the service page for examp example if you have a service page for flat Roofing we need images of flat roofs on that page and there you have it this is the entire strategy that we use to rank our clients page higher and get more leads thank you for watching until the end I hope you got a lot out of the video so our goal here is to help you generate the best quality leads so you can fill out your diary with more customers and grow your business and that's it from me and by the way if lead generation is a problem for you right now then there's a link in the description that will help you solve that problem in under 3 minutes I want to say a big thank you again for watching this video if you want to see more content like this please like And subscribe and leave a comment in the comment section we read and respond to all the comments we get have a great day I'll see you on the next one