Local Business SEO Journal

phoenixrising

phoenixrising

New member
Apr 14, 2010
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San Diego
Sup Dudes,

I had an old journal related to PPC that I let die in here a while back - since then I've been working on SEO, building a couple properties to learn the game.

Luckily, my first property has actually at least paid for itself, and my second one has profited slightly. I've learned a bunch in the last few months and even though I havent put it into MASSIVE action, I've definitely made some progress.

A few days back I landed my first Local SEO job through a friend. The guy that owns the company basically realized he needed someone like me when longtime customers were coming to his store wondering why he had no web presence, barely any reviews on review sites, etc.

I plan to update this journal with thoughts and notes as I go through my first relationship with a client. I find this sort of stuff really helpful when I learn things so I figured it would help me learn and hopefully help some nubs along the way.

Strategy

The owner has had a few malicious customers (which are heavily outnumbered by the positive reviews) take over top spots on sites like Yelp, Local Yahoo, etc. His main concern is getting a fair representation of his business online, which I plan to do by creating dummy accounts and posting real customer reviews on them on the various review sites.

His website is optimized for "geography" + "business niche", which is pretty solid for grabbing the top spot. It's pretty fuckin' niche, evidenced by the fact that he's got 8th spot after only a month of the website existing. I plan to get him up to first using the following strategy:
  • Bookmarking with top 100 Social Bookmark Sites
  • Optimizing onpage SEO

Honestly, I think that's all it will take to get him to the top, but I might pick up a link building package and do some article marketing if I have to to nudge him to the top.

Onsite Shit

The guy who built the page used WP, which is great because I know it pretty well. He's only got a homepage and a specials page, so I plan to create an about us, company history, detailed contact us, and reviews page and add them to the site, optimizing keywords/etc within the pages.

Directories

I'm going to be registering his business with about 8-10 of the most prevalent online business directories (I found most of them in the Traffic/Content stickies section)

Questions for Non-Noobs:

What is a fair price to charge? I'm semi-noob at this, but I really feel like I'm qualified to do what he needs. I was thinking of some sort of pricing scheme like $xxx for the initial deliverables, and then $xx for a monthly maintenance fee to keep his web presence and online reputation in check. Any thoughts on this and about how much the $xxx and $xx should be?

Thanks and I hope this journal will help some of you guys!
 


A three figure sum is the base tag that SEO professionals charge. Check out to see the financial situation of the company. New companies do not mind paying to get started. Older ones will want to cut costs. Also you need to prepare two quotes for them. One - a time oriented quote and 2 - a result oriented quote. Giving them options is always the best way to go. Make sure that whatever you charge them is providing you a net profit of atleast 25% for the first six months and around 75% for later. If you are working alone on this, make sure you dont tell your client that. You can get a fair idea of what rates are like by having a look at the BST section. Optimization can be a pain in the ass if your'e doing it wrong. So make sure you are prepared to cut your losses as well. You will also need to take into consideration from which part of the world you are from and which part your client is from.
I would recommend $299 a month if the keywords are not too tough to handle.
 
Sent the site in to lalit.burma for the 100 social bookmark package, should be done within a few days I hope.

Still waiting on the wp-admin details from the dude who 'designed' the site for 1.5 years (just bought a domain and put a wp theme up, lol), so I can't do any onpage optimization or add any content.

Going to be signing him up for google places and about 7-8 other business listing sites, and then creating some more reviews on yelp and local yahoo today.
 
Social bookmarking has been done, I'm currently working on a bot that will pull data from a .csv and automatically register for about 10 business directories like Yelp, Local.com, etc. I figure putting in the time to automate it now will pay off when I have future clients.

I'd be down to release the bot when I get it working so its pretty much fully automated besides entering the business details.
 
got a message back from the designer of the page, he says he'll be done by the weeked so i'll have a login and pw for the website. Can't wait to get started (and finished) doing the onpage stuff, shouldn't be TOO difficult.

after that, i'm going to meet up with the guy on Monday to take a look at the business and try to figure out how much a jacket costs so I can figure out a way to charge him. Talked with dchuk and it seems like a good way to charge him is based on the amount of potential customers i can add to his business.

if a jacked is $150, which doesn't seem unreasonable, even just delivering 3 customers a month would be a 5.4k increase in revenue to the guys business.

Need to get on the review sites as a next item though.
 
I just got off the phone with my client. We chatted and I told him that since the 'designer' (using that term very loosely) of the site has been commissioned to produce for about 12-13 months and so far has produced an essentially blank wordpress template, that I would prefer it if those duties were also handed over to me and I had sole authority over his businesses' online presence. He was very excited to hear this, I think he's been frustrated that the guy has been SO slow to act.

We chatted a bit more and I told him some basic details about what I've done for his site so far. I have gotten it from #9 to #3 for his exact match domain with just some simple social bookmarking.

He mentioned he's been getting business from customers in locations that he's never serviced before, and asked them where they heard of his business. Their response? "Online." It makes me feel awesome to know that I'm already impacting this guy's bottom line and I'm literally only getting started.

I've got some great ideas that I thought I'd share:

1. Get him ranking for any iteration of [business type][geography] that I can, for example:

Culver City Blue Widgets
Blue Widgets Culver City
Blue Widget Culver City

etcetcetc.

2. Have him include a form for his customers to see where they found out about his business (this is in order to have some tracking on the leads that my services have delivered and determine a fee to charge)

3. In addition to getting his main site to rank at #1 for his keywords, I might as well get business directories and review sites that feature his business to rank below him, see if I can take up as much traffic for the words that I can.

4. On his site, feature the handwritten reviews in a 'Reviews' wp page to add a trust building element to the website and give it more of a local feel.

5. Optimize his onpage SEO and landing page (might need help with the latter, I don't have much copy/design xp)

TIME TO OWN, BITCHES!
 
2. Have him include a form for his customers to see where they found out about his business (this is in order to have some tracking on the leads that my services have delivered and determine a fee to charge)
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Worth a try, though people often ignore these.

To do something similar for website visitors, it should be a fairly simple matter to pass the search terms to the contact form.
That way every customer (if they dont use the phone) that contacts him via the site will automatically send their search terms.
You can set this up to be included in the email he gets, or just in one to your self.

I think i have a current customers site set up like this using contact form 7 (excellent WP plug in). If i can find it i'll post more details if your interested.

Also get some tracking on the site asap, might a well use GA but set them up with their own account. That way you can monitor all sorts of things for yourself, and send them monthly updates along with your invoice.
 
l3m, thanks for the info.

Contact form 7 is awesome, going to be putting it on his Contact Us page as soon as I have the wp-admin details. Can it pass the search terms? That would be incredibly useful from an optimization standpoint.

Thanks again!
 
Great to see you getting your local SEO business started. Inspiration for others who are yet to take the leap and start a business of their own.

If you want some really awesome tracking for visitors and keywords, one that I use is getclicky.com. Even though it's not free, the amount of detail it goes down to for each individual visitor is awesome. Well worth the money imo.
 
Thanks for the info jackie

Update:

He's #1 now for his exact match domain, and he said that he's been getting business from areas of my city that he never has before. Great news, now I need to get him ranking at or close to number one for a bunch of iterations of his business+geog
 
Glad to hear exact matches are still pwning. Supposedly, they might be losing their mojo soon. I've got one now that I just started with last week, fairly competitive (for local) is already on page 2 for bing and yahoo but not in the top 500 on google yet so I was concerned this exact match thing had already started.

Perhaps I should give it more than a week before wigging myself out :-/
 
God damn this 'designer' is taking his sweet fucking time handing over the admin details. Charged the guy $1300 to reg a domain, get hosting and throw up the simplest WP page you could imagine past "Hello World!"

RAGE
 
turbolapp said:
Glad to hear exact matches are still pwning. Supposedly, they might be losing their mojo soon. I've got one now that I just started with last week, fairly competitive (for local) is already on page 2 for bing and yahoo but not in the top 500 on google yet so I was concerned this exact match thing had already started.

Perhaps I should give it more than a week before wigging myself out :-/
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google has been slow as fuck lately. make sure you get some amit bookmarks on your site asap to get it out in the open and on the radar
 
i know you dont have the wp-admin u/p but do you have the hosting auths? if you do, you can do a db rewrite and if the site is as simple as you say, you can just wipe it clean and throw up a new site in minutes...

just lookin out. my local seo company has been up and running for a few months now, let me know if you want to exchange ideas. ive made some mistakes but have also had some great ideas that got me some good clients.


phoenixrising said:
Meeting with the guy tomorrow, he's been swamped with christmas work. Hopefully I can get the fucking wp-admin details.
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Hey shawn -

Don't have the hosting auths either, he wasn't able to meet the day I posted that, HOPEFULLY I can meet and touch base this week as it's getting annoying that I can't get this really basic information. Would love to share some ideas with you though, will send pm soon. :)
 
I primarily work in local. Have you considered call tracking? In my experiences calls occur 4-5 times the amount of email submits. It allows much more accurate tracking of progress - especially if you serve a different phone number per medium (organic & paid).
 
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