James Dooley: Hi, so today I'm joined with Kasra Dash and today's video is on local SEO. I get quite a lot of clients coming to us wanting inquiries and leads for specific businesses and niches in a local area. Generally speaking we prefer to work at FatRank on the lead generation model with companies that cover quite a large area of the UK. For anyone watching this who specifically wants to generate more leads in a local area, first and foremost, why is it important for these companies to try to generate their own leads? We always say the holy grail of a successful business is to generate your own leads, why is that?

Kasra Dash: Because you are not relying on anyone. A lot of businesses now rely solely on Yell, Bark, Checkatrade and similar. If one of those companies gets bought out or goes bust, your lead source disappears and your business can struggle or go under. You should be diversifying your traffic sources and where your inquiries come from. Do not rely only on word of mouth, do not rely only on Checkatrade and Bark. You should also be generating your own inquiries through your own website.

James Dooley: So if these companies have come to us and said you have a no risk supply of inquiries and a pay on conversion model, but for some reason at FatRank we say the time, effort, money and resources we put in is not worth it because you do carpet cleaning only within 20 miles of Kent, or blinds and shutters only within 20 miles of Yorkshire, then for us it is just not worth doing. For you, to rank your own website, first and foremost you need a website. Let’s go through the next steps of what you can be doing. First, let’s talk about a Google Business Profile. Let’s presume they have a GBP, a Google Business Profile set up so they can start ranking in Google Maps. If they have not, go and get yourself a profile. If you have a physical address, go on Google Business Profile, create one, put your address and your telephone number in. What are the next steps after that they can do to try to rank for local SEO with the Google Business Profile?

Kasra Dash: With a Google Business Profile it is basically the modern Yellow Pages listing inside Google. You are saying this is where I am located and these are the services I provide. The next step after claiming your profile is to fill out the services. If you do not, Google will not know which category to put you in. It will not know if you are a carpet cleaner, and it will not know what carpet cleaning services you provide. Maybe you only do commercial carpet cleaning, or only office carpet cleaning. Once you have claimed your profile, spend a good couple of hours filling out all the services you actually provide as a business. Then Google can understand that you do office cleaning or whatever your niche is, so when someone searches “office cleaning company near me” you have a much higher chance of showing up for that keyword.

James Dooley: For sure. One of the biggest ones for ranking the Google Business Profile is reviews. The amount of times we speak to businesses and they say they have been trading 20 years and they are the biggest carpet cleaning company in Bristol. That sounds brilliant but you have two Google reviews. Go and get yourself more reviews. If you have a happy customer, get them to leave a Google review. That is your business card online. If someone searches “carpet cleaning Bristol” and you show up with two Google reviews in position two, but position three has 35 Google reviews, they will probably click result three ahead of you. The more people click result three, the more likely that listing leapfrogs you. Go out and get those Google reviews. That strengthens your Google Business Profile. From there you might start generating more inquiries and you start winning more in local SEO. Talk a bit about local SEO Sharks and citations. At localseosharks.com they provide citations. For anyone that might not know, for local SEO for beginners, citations are business listings. We normally recommend doing 500. Some SEOs say 100 or 200, but if you are going to get them done, just get 500. Go and get 500 business listings. This means putting your name, address and phone number into as many business listings as you can in the UK, US or wherever you are based. Get yourself in Yellow Pages, Thomson Local, Cylex and all these directories. What is the importance of having those listings specifically for a Google Business Profile?

Kasra Dash: When you get business citations or directory listings what you need to realise is that those websites are categorised. Take Yellow Pages in the UK. If you get listed there, the site is categorised by location and by service. So if you are a lawyer in Bolton, first it groups you with other Bolton businesses, which helps Google understand your location. Then it groups you on a page with other lawyers and maybe even a subsection like commercial law. When Google looks at your website, especially if it is new, it can see that James Dooley’s Law Firm is listed as a commercial law firm in Bolton on that directory. Google can tie that together with your Google Business Profile and your website. You are connecting the dots for Google by getting those directory listings.

James Dooley: For sure. So if you are a business owner looking to generate more leads in a specific local area, go to localseosharks.com, go to the citations page and get 500 citations. That will power up your Google Business Profile. Moving away from the profile, which is the maps listing, let’s move to the website. People need to mirror the services they put in GBP on the website. If they do carpet cleaning for offices, or carpet cleaning for hotels, that is different search intent and deserves different pages. You need a separate page for office carpet cleaning and a separate page for hotel carpet cleaning. Same with lawyers. Immigration law, family law, personal injury law, commercial law are all different services with different intent, so they require different pages. The amount of people that come to us with one page that says “I’m a lawyer in Bolton” is crazy. You have 15 different services but one page. What are your thoughts and what do people need to do for local SEO here?

Kasra Dash: The main struggle for business owners is they think of everything as one service. With the cleaning example, they see it all as “cleaning”. In their head it is one service. Google does not see it like that. Different users type very different queries. Office cleaning, hotel cleaning, stadium cleaning, gym cleaning, carpet cleaning, oven cleaning, commercial cleaning, each has its own intent and its own queries. You want to show up for as many of those as possible. So you need to step back and ask, if I wanted my own service, what would I type into Google? Then build pages around those variations. Also, if you create a dedicated “gym cleaning” page and a competitor does not, you stand a better chance for “professional gym cleaners”, “gym cleaning company”, and all the related long tail searches. If the only page they have is about office cleaning, and a user searches “how much is it to have my gym cleaned”, they are less relevant. Your dedicated gym cleaning page stands out as the specialist. Users want an expert. They do not want a company saying “we clean offices so we can clean gyms”. Dedicate pages to each service and to each location. If you work in Bolton, Leigh, Wigan and Manchester, create separate location pages too. That works much better for local SEO.

James Dooley: Exactly. For local SEO, we spoke about citations for the Google Business Profile and you touched on how those citations help the website rank too. We call them foundational links. Is there any other type of links you would look to build if you want to rank your website in local SEO apart from citations? Anything else you would set up?

Kasra Dash: For sure. It depends on how competitive the niche is. Not everything I am about to list applies to every site, but a base layer beyond citations would be niche edits, guest posts, press release services and digital PR. That is four or five different link types. If you want to rank for “cleaning company in Bolton”, which is relatively easy compared to “lawyers in London”, I would still start with the foundations. Citations, social profiles, maybe a press release and a small number of guest posts and niche edits is often enough.

James Dooley: Cleaning company in Bolton is not Manchester, London or Birmingham, and cleaning is not lawyers. So with it being easier, I would still do the foundational links. First, 500 citations from Local SEO Sharks, which helps the GBP and the site. Second, 10 social profiles. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and similar. Get those same brand profiles and link them to your site, even if you are not very active. Third, a press release. Places like SeedingUp or similar, or Local SEO Sharks’ own press release. That press release is a news story like “we have updated our website”, “we have hit record sales”, or “we have bought a new carpet cleaning machine”. It syndicates out to 200 plus news sites and gives you a batch of backlinks. I am not saying it will bring huge traffic or loads of customers, but it gives you a lot of brand mentions and links back to your carpet cleaning site. After that, I would buy around five guest posts and five niche edits. Guest posts are new articles on third party sites linking to you. Niche edits are link inserts in existing articles with some power. That mix is usually more than enough to reach position one for “gym cleaning in Bolton” or similar local terms.

Kasra Dash: If we wanted to rank for “lawyers in London”, which is far more competitive, we would still start with the same foundation. Citations, press release, social profiles, then guest posts and niche edits. The difference is volume and quality. You might need 20 guest posts and 20 niche edits, then tier 2 backlinks to power those up, and then digital PR on top. For serious money keywords like “lawyers in London”, I would want a fractional SEO or a strategy call with an expert so we plan things properly. That is where booking a consultation with someone like me makes sense.

James Dooley: The truth is when you start chasing “lawyers in London” and close similar terms, if you rank you are making serious money. At that point you want a fractional CMO or SEO strategy call with someone like Kasra. Sit down, do the citations, press releases, social profiles, guest posts and niche edits, and then ask “what next”. Next could be more articles and case studies, more reviews, highlighting awards you have won, more press releases, more guest posts about those awards, with images and videos. There are many other marketing activities beyond pure SEO. You might look at Facebook ads and PPC. For cleaning companies in Bolton, PPC can be expensive relative to profit. For a London law firm, you might have the budget to put three or four thousand a month into Facebook ads or paid search and tie that into your SEO strategy. If a lawyer in London is watching this and thinking they only work within a 40 mile radius of London and want strategy, what would you walk them through on that call?

Kasra Dash: First I would challenge the 40 mile restriction and ask why, because many law firms now use Zoom consultations and rarely meet clients in person. But if we keep the 40 mile rule, the starting point is still making the Google Business Profile dominant. Get more reviews, fill out all the services, upload photos and videos, office tours, staff introductions, FAQ style videos, anything to bring the profile to life. That improves conversions and rankings. Then we go back to the foundations. Citations, press release, service pages on the site for each type of law, and then guest posts and link insertions. That is the base. We let that run for two or three months, see where rankings move, then decide whether we need more links, more topical authority through supporting blog posts, or more off page activity. From there it becomes an ongoing strategy, not a one off.

James Dooley: When you are providing that strategy and blueprint, and someone watching has budget and wants to invest, how can they book a call with you?

Kasra Dash: Check the link down below. Go to FatRank.com, fill in the form and say you want a call with myself or with James Dooley. We will figure out who is the best fit. If it is more e-commerce or more pure lead generation, it might be better they speak with you. If it is more technical or SEO strategy, it might be me. Head over to FatRank.com, fill in the form and we will get back to you.

James Dooley: If you are a local business and you do not have the budget to pay someone for a full strategy yet, is there anything else on top of creating the dedicated service pages and doing some citations that you feel is a quick win they should do? I think in general service pages, press release, social profiles and citations for the brand are the main things I would do as a base for local. Is there anything else you would add?

Kasra Dash: I am going to assume people watching this have a website and at least a couple of social profiles. If I had to pick three priorities from everything we have talked about, they would be: get all of your service pages live on your website, get your citations done, then get a press release out. Those are the three things I would want done by the end of the week.

James Dooley: So we hope you like the video about local SEO and how you can generate some of your own leads in house. In my opinion that is the holy grail. You should still use lead generation companies, still use paid ads, still try leaflet drops and any other channels that work and give a return on investment. In general, the first steps from what Kasra is saying are: build out the service pages, go over to localseosharks.com and order those citations, and get that press release ordered to push more power through to your website.