Jesse Cunningham Explains His Approach to Google’s Ranking System

0:00What is Google up to right now? Google is coming for your business. Let's talk about it in this video. Google has been the mainstay for local businesses for a long time, but business owners better get ready because things are changing. So, let's get into it. Google is coming for your business. Do you know what this means? The map pack, the three pack.

0:19Most people make money because they get a website, they get Google reviews, and the map pack leads them to victory, right? But, things are going to change. To the left here is what it has been in the past, right? And to the right is what it is now. So, let's talk about what this means. It's a big disruption to what you have going on in your business if you do local SEO, if you have a local business. Now, look at this. This is a case study that's very interesting by Julie Hawkins. Very nice case study. Do you see a problem here

0:46cuz I see a problem. This is mobile view. Divorce attorney Las Vegas. If someone needs that term or they need a lawyer to help them with this, does anyone see a problem here? This is mobile view, right? I do. Where's the phone number? Where does someone click to call? Right? So, what's happening is business owners are seeing a downward trend in traffic, right? Clicks from Google Business Profiles are dropping.

1:08If you've seen this in in your business or your clients, tell me in the comments. I'm very interested. But, things are changing with Google. Now, if we haven't met, my name is Jesse Cunningham. Real quick, this is the community that I run. Hundreds of people in here. We get around the problems I'm going to tell you in this video. We do something that most people never thought of, number one, and most people don't do.

1:29And there's a bunch of reasons why people don't do it, but I'll give you some proof of how it works. So, Mark here, 18 calls yesterday. I was blown away by the number of calls I received across my sites. What type of sites? We'll talk about it. Tony here, best month so far. 2,800 euros in microsite commissions. Microsites are what we use to kind of get around the problems of this video, but there's there's more to it than that. Now, these three different searches are going to teach us a lot about how this works. So, the The one I typed in was Lawyers in Baltimore

1:57Maryland. As you can see here, we have sponsored results and then it comes down to the map pack. You can catch this sponsored here in the map pack. So, when you have very competitive terms, you probably will have a sponsored result in the map pack itself, okay? And then we have directories, the dreaded directories, right? You can build directories yourself to make money, but that's not what we're talking about here. Then, let's type in best roofer in Houston, a different query, just a different example. We have sponsored roofers up here. We have sponsored results, sponsored, they're sponsored everywhere. Everyone's getting

2:26sponsored. How does Google make money? Google makes money off of ads. So, anything Google does, we have to assume is to make more money. Therefore, it's going to push us to ads, right? Do you feel me? And then, who is the best roofer in Houston, Texas is our third query. This is where it gets interesting because it's totally different than the rest. Here comes the AI overview. Now, what was this prompted by? Well, it was a conversational query.

2:51In other words, if the user is talking to Google, right? As if it's chat GPT, because people are getting more used to this AI stuff, you're going to see more and more of this. The AI overview shows us what? It says the best roofer in Houston is these guys, right? Amstill, and then these guys, and then these guys. Where is the phone numbers, right?

3:12Very interesting. Now, if I click here, what happens? Here's the Google business profile, right? And then, can I find the phone number? Finally, I can find it. So, what Google is attempting is very interesting. To adapt to chat GPT, to keep people on their platform as long as possible. Why? Well, all comes back to Google making as much money as possible. Here's the problem for you. Ranking where you always did no longer guarantees the call. So, if you ranked really well in your local area, well, tough luck because you might not anymore. Depends on how your website's optimized. Depends on a lot of things. So, two findings

3:45from the same research stack up badly. First, the AI pack names different businesses than the old three pack. So, holding your spot in the pack does not mean you're in the AI result. We've seen this in a lot of situations. Just because you rank good on one system, even if it's Google system, doesn't mean you're going to rank well in Google's other system. Now, let's keep it moving.

4:04Let's get right Where are we going to be? We're going to be right here. All right, so this is what we do. Now, I'm going to go down a little bit of a rabbit trail to teach you how to get around this, right? Let's get around it a bit. So, you can put a track number on every one of your websites. If you have one website, well, this is pretty darn easy. There's CallRail, there's What's What Converts, there's all kinds of things, right? So, for like $1 per number per month, you know, call tracking is cheaper. It can record and

4:29it can count. And this is how you're going to get like a baseline metric of if you're hit or if you're not, because if you don't have data to consume and kind of tease apart, what are you doing? We need data. So, part one, stop depending on the box that is shrinking. Okay, what we do, and the box that is shrinking is Google, by the way. Google has been suppressing everyone's reach for like two, three years now in a big way, because Google wants people to stay on their platform. So, what we do with microsites specifically is rank right below the pack or the map pack. So, your

4:59own site in the organic results next to the shrinking pack. We get tons of leads to our websites and we don't even care about the map pack. And that's because our websites are built in such a way that when a very particular niche or service or product or topic is brought up, we show up, right? And then we can be the business that AI names. There's a different way to do that. Get into being an AI answer. So, Bing grounds ChatGPT.

5:23So, ChatGPT uses Bing, right? That's that's how that works. So, you can optimize for GPT, you can optimize for AI overviews. Often times, it is very similar. And then, this is what I love. Let's cover the whole metro. So, most business owners, they just go after one area. Like, here's my area, and it's like a 20-mi radius. What we do is a little bit different, right? So, we have one business at the center in a star of sites around it, and we call this the star method. So, in the middle here you have a blue portion, and that's one website, and we call that a

5:56money site. This may look similar to a PBN back in the day, private blog network, but it's not because we don't internally link these microsites. So, let's say that you were in I don't know, is this Texas? I think it's Texas. Cuz these different cities are Texas, I think. Someone tell me. Sugar Land, it must be Texas. So, we have a primary business in the middle, and then we have this business, this business, this business, but they're not different businesses. They're just branches of your business. They're just different websites, totally separate from your main website. Where all the calls funnel

6:26into you. Why do we do this? Well, if we're getting shrunk down by Google every which way, we need to play a different game. Let's not do the same thing over and over again, and keep getting our heads banged in, right? So, this is microsites, specifically the star method. And when you see these guys in the community talking about 18 calls yesterday, and then commissions and microsites and all these things, what they're talking about is the star method or just ranking rent microsites in general. And if you come into the community, we have the microsite playbook. You can click in here, you can

6:54learn all about how we do it, picking your niche. Because the niche selection is is a major one. A lot of people have questions about niche selection if you're going to build to actually rank in Google and get leads. Now, most people miss the boat on this one. Check this out. Let's come down here to Houston, Texas. Let's go to sewer line repair. Now, there's a whole point to this, because you probably play a different game than I do on Google, and people in the Rank Expander Academy probably play a different game than you do. Why? It's because of fundamental

7:24understanding that I'm going to show you here. So, if I type in sewer line repair in Houston, Texas, and score it with this tool, I'm going to come here, it's going to pull live data, and it's going to give us a grade, a 69 out of 100, a grade C, not bad. Ticket price is a B, local demand is C, competition is C. And you can use this tool, by the way, right now. Like, go to tool.rankexpand.com.

7:45No problem. And it's going to give you an idea of whether or not that's a good niche to pick. Now, if you already have a business, let's say you were a plumber and you wanted to get ideas like, man, I want more leads. I want to do microsites myself. Come over here. And what I recommend is instead of just doing this, like just typing in plumber right here or plumbing, that's not the way. The way is you think of a subniche within a niche. Like go layers down. What is a very weird particular niche within your industry that has a high ticket price

8:16that most people don't need? Maybe they only need it once in their lifetime. That's okay because there's plenty people out there in the major metros and the sub- suburbs around it. Now, when you get your idea, your niche, and this is how we get around the whole Google issue we talked about earlier. And it's all going to wrap together here tightly in a second. We come over here and you can type in all your information. Tell us about your business, your services, towns. And what this is going to do, it's going to spit out a microsite for you that you can build in any AI LLM

8:42very, very, very easy. Now, coming full circle. We're coming full circle. Come back to the Rank Expand Academy. These guys, the people who are most successful, these guys like Mark right here, 18 calls yesterday. We talked with Mark recently. It's like, Mark, how are you having all this success? It's because he plays a different game than you. And the game is this. Instead of having one website, we have hundreds of websites.

9:05And literally hundreds of websites just like this. So, let's pretend this was Houston or Dallas, right? So, you take this concept of six websites and put it over here in a different city. So, we have six over here, we have six over here. Let's just take over all of Texas for a niche. Let's do every city. Let's do every suburb around that city.

9:21Hundreds of websites. Now, I'm going to teach you whether or not you want to do that tactic, which is microsites. That's okay. I'm going to give you some actionable things right now to kind of attack this issue that Google's posing to us, right? So, number one, make your number huge everywhere. So, on the surfaces you control, put a huge tappable tracked number in the header of the hero, the sticky mobile bar. Listen, I've had people come to me like, "Jess, man, I think my website's good. I'm getting all this traffic, but no one calls me." And then we do a little bit

9:47of CRO, conversion rate optimization, and we're off to the races, right? Complete the profile. If Google gives you a field, fill it out, and answer the phone. Did you know Google can tell whether or not you answer your phone? They know if your website shape satiates people. Basically, if people are happy after coming to your website, that's what they monitor for. All right. Have some reviews that name the service and the speed, because a lot of people want 24/7 access to whatever service they're looking for, like it matters. And then write the page that answers, "Who do I call now?" Like liftable, specific,

10:19local, make it easiest the easiest thing for AI to quote as the recommendation. So, if someone is having a conversational thing with Google, it's going to use its AI, right? And if your website is optimized for AI with liftable type of things, you're going to be doing better. Optimize the number you can count, not the ones you can't. So, track and record every call that deletes daily, cut the dead, scale the winners.

10:44I'm going to come back to that. Answer fast, follow up faster. So, with our websites, we have someone answer the call 24/7, no matter what. 24/7, no matter what, someone answers our phone calls. It's because we use AI to answer, right? But Google all Google perceives is long conversations with our websites. It's crazy, right? I can show you conversations today that ran 3 minutes.

11:05A human talking to an AI, and the AI is qualifying the human for a lead. It's crazy. And if we're going to build hundreds of websites, how much does it cost, and why would we cut the dead ones, and how do we identify the dead ones? Like I said, we're playing a different game than most people. Build many websites, figure out which ones work. Let's keep the ones that work.

11:24Let's get rid of the ones that don't work, and let's iterate and do it again. Why? It costs hardly anything to build a website nowadays if you do it right, and you're not going to hit you know, home run on every website. That's just the facts. So, the people making the most money right now are just playing a different game, and the game has to do with scale. It's that simple. So, we built this website, this microsite together on this channel. The game is scale. So, this is one website that has many, many pages, service areas, frequently asked questions. It's for a

11:50specific problem in a specific niche. We have Houston slab repair. So, listen. Slab repair is very, very specific, right? But, it's high ticket. High ticket matters. And if you scroll down here, you'll see some customizations look nice. Let's come over here to service areas. We built this kind of map thing together to give the user an idea of where we are. If we click on any of these, we're going to go to the specific page, the service location page, which matters a lot. But, this is one website.

12:17Now, imagine having hundreds of these websites. It can be a daunting task to do, right? That's no joke. But, people are doing it. People are doing it in the community. They've already done it. So, the people right now who have one website on Google, they're going to eventually get squeezed out. You know, you have your behemoth websites with a lot of reviews. I get it. You're going to do well, and you're probably have to go to Google Ads more and more. Google's going to squeeze you for Ads more and more. That's just how it has worked forever. And the Ads are

12:43going to be more and more expensive, inflation, all these things. But, the people who get wise and realize, "Darn, I can have a website for every specific sub-niche within a niche, and I can dominate a whole metro because of this." Those are the ones that will make the difference.