Jesse Cunningham Explains the Star Method for Local SEO

0:00The STAR method is only possible because we have AI now and it makes it very cost-effective to do this strategy. So if you want to make more money this year using a very simple and cost-effective way, the STAR method is for you. If you're familiar with this, this is where most local businesses get leads on Google. Let's type in roofers in Topeka, Kansas and see what's up.

0:18Sponsored. Sponsored. Matpack. Okay. You need money to play in that game right there, right? Topeka, Kansas is a city. Has a lot of population. How can we get around it? Well, the STAR method can definitely help. So come into maps, you'll see, okay, Topeka's here with all these things. But here's my question, right? Here's my question to you. Do you have to win in Topeka, Kansas if this was your area? Do you have to dominate there only? If you do, you can be the big dog on the block and no doubt this top guy eating roofing and this guy and this guy, they probably make a lot

0:48of money. Great. But if I come in here to a smaller town or if I zoom out and I come to any of these suburbs around Topeka, right? Let's go in between these two, Kansas City and Topeka. How about Lawrence right here? If you can dominate here as well as other suburbs in the area, you can make a lot of money. And that's the basis of the STAR method. One business at the heart and then you have five points at minimum around it. Local businesses are not playing the same game anymore.

1:14You have your primary website, which you may have built over the years. Yes, make that excellent. Make it good. Make your Google business profile crush. That's right here. That's Rome in the middle. Now what we do is we build assets around it kind of in the shape of a STAR, right? That is the STAR method. So your Google business profile is on a leash. Think about it. You rank here, like you have an epicenter of where you're going to rank and then the rankings fade every mile. No matter what you do for your business, you will not be able to dominate a humongous geographic area.

1:46That's the whole point here, right? Eventually, you can see these outer rings. They dissipate and how well they rank. And that's where this whole STAR method starts to really work. Now you might be one of two people, right? And realizing this right here, this is the unlock period. So pay attention to this because if you're a business owner, it matters for you because you'll be spending the money over here. Or if you do rank and rent, which we talk about on this video, it matters. So there's three ways to chase the suburbs, right? The ring outside of your epicenter. All of

2:13them are typically painful. So ads, we can run ads forever, 3000 plus a month. It works until a day that you stop paying, right? You're renting attention. You're never owning it and click prices only go up. So ads, it's like if you're hungry or if you're thirsty, you go to the bar and you get a drink because you're thirsty. You pay the bar the money for the drink. But if you can get organic traffic, it's like digging a well in your backyard and you have the water whenever you want.

2:43That's the metaphor I like to use. Now you can also, if you want to dominate the suburbs, open a second location. That hurts. It's going to be a hundred thousand dollars plus. You're going to put people up in Airbnbs and do all that. I've seen that happen. Very interesting, but it's very expensive. And then you can also have city pages on your website. It's weak, but it does work to an extent. But the further you get away from the epicenter, the weaker it becomes. And then the fourth option, almost nobody uses and it costs about 700 bucks a year is the reason we're here. Now, this is it right here. Draw a star over your metro. You're going

3:15to know your area better than me. But if we zoom in here, you're going to see each one of these circles is a different website. So effectively, business owners who are doing this and they're getting wise to it, they have their primary website, whatever.com, and then they build five plus extra websites. Right. Rome is your business. All roads lead to Rome. It's your main website.

3:34Lock to your Google business profile. A huge asset. Keep it, crush it, keep growing it. And then the points, the five microsites. It's one per suburb, each with its own exact match domain and its brand. And the way that you tie them together is not via links. You don't want to link these websites together. That's a definite no go. Now we're going to get more into that, but this is what the star method would look like over Miami. I know it looks not like a star at all because there's water to the east. Right. But your real address, your real business might be in

4:03Miami. And then you are going to go out to these different suburbs. Right. Another instance would be say, I don't even know what city this is. Oh, Indianapolis. Right. This is more indicative of what a star would look like. But the whole point here is if you have your epicenter, you cannot do a good job reaching clients in the suburbs away from your epicenter unless you pay for it or you use this method. Now I need to be clear here. I'm going to zoom in. Do you see this? We're never, ever, ever going to do this. I kind of alluded to it previously. This is a PBN. We don't want to

4:31build PBNs here. PBNs stand for private blog networks. A private blog network is where you have your money website, which is probably your primary website right now. And you have these little websites everywhere that point to it, have links actually to that website. We do not want this. Right. But we wanted something like this, which is like independent websites that do not point to each other, but they all, if somebody calls, point to the same location. Right. So the roads between the websites are calls and never links. Now before we go on, this has to be talked about. Right. So we're coming back to Topeka, which is in the middle of the United States and

5:05Kansas. Right. We could go to any city and that's the beautiful part. If I just zoom out here, do you see how much opportunity is here for everyone? It's humongous, a humongous country, humongous opportunity, tons of people. Topeka, if I come over here to our tool, right, will that niche actually make money? A lot of people who do rank and rent, they use this tool to see if it's a good idea to build a website more or less for this area. So I'm going to type in Rufin and I'm going to type in Lawrence, Kansas. Why? Well, we're going to come

5:32back to this. Lawrence was that little city in between Kansas City and Topeka right here. Seems like a logical thing to do. It's the sprawl, it's urbanized, could be good. Now this tool, right, our tool ranks at a 64 out of a hundred on like go or no go. The ticket price for Rufin is excellent. Local demand and competition are pretty darn rough and it has a map pack opportunity. So if I come over here to Rufin, Topeka, Kansas, right, scroll down, I see that one of the people in the map pack has 23 reviews. That means like you could potentially get in the map pack if you had a

6:05Google business profile but that is pretty good indicator of general competition. He has sponsored, sponsored, and then this map pack right here. So great ticket price but you have other issues in competition and local demand. Now what you should do and what you can do is take your time with it. You take your time, right, you come over here to the maps and you can find suburbs around any area that has opportunity where other business owners did not think of that area in that specific service. Now an easy way and most people do not think about this and I think it's worth talking

6:38about in this video. So an easy way to figure out what you could actually build one of these microsites is go into the services of your competition. So this is one of the top ranking and map packs of you know the search query Rufin, Topeka, Kansas and you'll see Google gives us a list of different services that are related to this business. Great! Any of these could be an exact match domain website as the microsite. In other words, we could have attic venting repairs Topeka.com. Is there enough money here? A local demand? Probably not. Chimney flashing Topeka Kansas.com? Probably not but maybe, maybe Rufe repair TopekaKansas.com. Then you could potentially

7:18be cooking with fire. And so what I did, I came over here, Rufe repair Lawrence, Kansas. Okay, ticket price an F so it brought us down and the demand was about the same. Map pack opportunity was the same, competition a little bit less. You can see it's kind of a dance. Rufe repair is still hyper competitive but you can go through these different services which Google has already dictated and you can find opportunities between the cracks. Now a few people commented on videos that I think are relevant for what we're talking about here. I really love when you comment please

7:48comment on the video questions, ideas, even if you don't like what I'm saying, that's fine too. Just blast it away and we'll all see it, right? Is this the same thing as rank and rent? Rank and rent. Jesse, I'm a bit confused. Is this the same thing as rank and rent and does your program cover everything needed as a complete beginner? All right, rank and rent. Let's zoom in. You build microsites and rent the calls to other businesses. You are the landlord. So it's for marketers and side hustlers, people who want to replace income. The star method, right, you build the

8:17microsites around your business and you keep every single call. So you're the landlord and the tenant. So you're working the leads that come in. So if you're an SEO, this is probably the best use case because I know a lot of people who watch this video are SEOs and they help other businesses. If you had a client who's a landscaper, a roofer, a lawyer, it doesn't matter. Instead of just working on their primary website, you can consider now the star method to start branching out and building websites, assets around their area, right? It just makes sense. Now another question, how many domains

8:50do you purchase, right? So I mean, for this instance, we're talking four to six domains. So you have your main website, which might already exist, plus the satellites, right? And all five satellites, about 90 bucks in domain cost. And one job for most local businesses pays for everything. So let's keep it rolling. Nothing built in two hours is worth 5K. Okay, this is, I like this one.

9:11This one's so fun. I've been building websites for 20 years and I've been using AI daily for four years, okay? There's nothing you can build in two hours that's worth 5K. So this is very interesting. This was on a previous video about using microsites at scale to sell to contractors as rank and rent or whatever you want to call it. So for the star method, this debate evaporates. You're not selling a satellite site to anyone for 5K. You're not selling it at all because it's yours, right? A lead site is judged by the phone and not by the pixels. This is where people, they freak out,

9:42they call it AI slop because we build these websites with AI. But listen, the value of something is not necessarily the work you put into it. The value of something is the value that it has monetarily, right? A lead site is judged by the phone, not the pixels, right? And then Roam is where the craft goes. So your main site deserves the full custom treatment and then the satellite sites deserve to be fast, clean and everywhere. And that's how we build them in the Rake Expand Academy. And this is what it looks like. It's a community of people that are

10:14all doing something similar. A lot of people are building these star method microsites and we have two modules here which are intense. If I click in one, you'll see, you know, how much is involved with that. And that's just one method. There's people who just focus on this module right here, the 90 days to freedom, which is a module to help you ramp up your revenue ASAP. There's a lot of stuff here. So I appreciate you watching this. And like I said, comment, because the comments are what fuels these videos. It helps me realize what questions you have, what you're

10:41thinking, even if it's negative, that's okay too. And I think we have a free trial on the Rake Expand Academy right now. So come check it out, see what you think about it and I'll see you in there.