Jesse Cunningham Reviews Results from 50 Local SEO Sites

0:00The people making the most money that I see right now are doing local SEO. And the coolest part is you do not have to be a local business owner. We're going to talk about this, right? So I was watching this video between Edward and Caleb and they're two professional SEOs. And they're talking about the 30 page local SEO hack. I love it. This is cool. We're going to incorporate what they're talking about in this video combined with some things from my book, some things that we talk about over here at the Rank Expand Academy, which if you're already in here, right? We just got off

0:28of a community call talking about a lot of things, but we do microsites here for local businesses. I've built over 50 of them. Imagine building a website that is so structured that Google can't help but to rank it. Now we're going to move fast in this video. I'm pretty caffeinated. Let's roll with it. Google AI overviews and ChatGPT is where we need to get found if we want to have a successful business online, a local business. Think of a plumber, electrician, a roof, or whatever. There's a kabillion different things that you can rank for on a local business, but this is the trifecta.

0:58Google AI overviews and ChatGPT, which is the basis of this video. Customers do not just Google things anymore. They're going to ask AI, right? They're going to have conversations with AI. Conversational queries is the future, which is what we need to figure out. So your next customer, and most people don't want to hear this, but you have to. You may never ever see your website.

1:19Your next customer may never see your beautiful website that you paid $10,000, $30,000 for, right? There's a lot of local businesses that pay that sort of money. Every time I say that in the comments, people freak out, right? Local businesses that are super successful will pay 20 grand for a website, but nowadays your customer might not even see the darn thing. Why is that, right? So Google's own CEO says search has become an agentic. You type what you need and AI agents go out and read the web and bring back an answer. That's why. Have you seen this, right? Google AI overviews

1:51and GBT is obviously its own ecosystem, right? So there's two readers we need to appease. Like always, we have the human, which is going to skim your page and get a vibe in 20 or 30 seconds. They're going to see, is it trustworthy? Do I feel good? Am I going to call them? Get them to call you on the phone. And the AI agent reads absolutely everything on the website. It's going to check it against your Google profile. We'll talk more about this. Your reviews and the rest of the internet.

2:18And I mean, this right here, if we just zoom in on this portion right here is so much the basis of SEO right now as a whole is kind of summed up in this sentence. It reads everything. The AI agent reads everything and cross references it against everything. Now there's invisible things humans can't see on your website, such as schema. We can talk about that. But this right here, it just, if we pause and just stayed here for 20 minutes, we could probably do that. But let's keep it rolling. One business, one signal everywhere. We need to be everywhere. This is where a lot of

2:50people are lacking nowadays. They're reluctant to do it. But listen, you got to do it, right? Google, Gemini and chat, GBT all face the same problem. They must decide if you're trustworthy, how do you do that? If you can do that, you're going to make a fortune. So number one, Google business profile. Hello, you have a local business. Google has its own system to rank you high. It's called Google business profile. So that is your real money page. So you have categories and services and that sets the menu for everything. So Google already has like pre-baked for your industry, certain categories and services. Let's use those. And then on your website, we're going

3:23to mirror the profile page for page. Same services, same city, same warden. And then we have reviews and mentions, customers and local news repeating this stuff back. This is like a flywheel effect. Everything we used back in the day and we still call it NAP. We have name, address, phone number, right? Needs to be consistent across the web. Nowadays, this stuff needs to be consistent too.

3:46Now this is a really good representation of visualization of what they were talking about in the podcast, the Core 30. I like it. A website that mirrors your Google profile. So whatever category and services are on your GBP, do it on the website. Now, listen to me before I kind of blow this up and show you what it's all about. If you pick a structure style for your website, your local business, it needs to be uniform across your entire website. Don't pick this style and then pick the different style that I use because I do a little bit different than this.

4:12But this is what, at least what I think they're talking about. So home page, Plumber Houston, right? So we're going to focus on Plumber Houston. And then on the category page, we're thinking of something like bathroom remodel in Houston. So that could be a category on Google Business Profile. And then the service page, faucet replacement Houston, and then core service pages. Now, this is one way to do it. But if you're going to do something, make it uniform. And at the Rank Expand Academy, we do it a little bit different. So if you come over to classroom, you scroll down to, well, two things. The Microsite Playbook and the Microsite Empire,

4:42you will see the exact structure that we use. It is very similar but we use, and I'm sure these guys do too, but there's a very specific way we use data to figure out which service pages, which service location pages we should do because our theory is this. Our theory is when we build these out, and we've built over 50 of these, right? And the Microsite is like a rank and rent website where you can get leads and resell them to businesses. That's why I said in the beginning, you don't need to be a business owner of like a plumbing business to make money this way.

5:10But the idea is this, service location pages are what drive everything. But the only reason and the only way they're going to work for you, right, is right here. Internal links beat URLs. So you're going to build hubs, not piles. So Google and AI agents, they're going to map your website by how each page links to each other. How you link your website shows Google exactly what is important.

5:33The structure of the website dictates what Google should see. It's kind of force feeding Google what it should see. So we're going to hub and spoke everything. We're going to have broad pillar pages linked down to specific pages. Specific pages link back up. It's reciprocation of links. This is old school SEO. Every article should link to at least two related pages on your website. Now, I mean, sometimes it blows my mind to see some of my friends websites who are using these strategies. I have a friend who has a 700 page local business website and I'm like, dude, how are you doing this? It's humongous. You don't need a website that huge, but he does and it works

6:07and he dominates. It's because his internal links are on point. Now, if we're going to do this, descriptive anchor texts, right, we're going to do linking with water heater replacement in XYZ, in this case Houston, and never a click here, right? Very basic, but very important. So your anchor text matters. It shows Google what the related page is all about. Very, very important.

6:28We're going to have short slugs. We're going to have supporting content hubs. Now, this one, I can argue both ways. For a primary website, I used to think blog posts on a local business website mattered so much. Blogs. Let's blog about this. Let's blog about that. But with our microsites, we have never had a blog once. We don't do blogs on our microsites. Now, mind you, our microsites are usually about 50 pages and they cost us like five to ten dollars to build and our carrying cost per month is like a dollar. A different beast. They're ranking websites, right, that are just there to funnel leads to our business owners. We don't do blogs. Now,

7:07I'm curious in the comments, what do you think? For local business, do you do blogs nowadays? Now, this probably deserves its own video, but let's say you're starting out and you want to build rank and rent websites, microsites. You want to build small, well, they're not small necessarily, but you want to build websites for cheap that are going to produce leads and produce revenue for you.

7:24Okay, will that niche actually make money? So what we can do is we can come down here. Let's do, I don't know, it says dog grooming. That kind of stinks. Let's do roofing and, no, let's not do roofing. Let's do something a bit different. Let's do, I don't know, water heater replacement in this place in Texas. So what's going to happen? We're going to use real live Google data to help you, right, figure out if this is a wise idea to build this website in this particular area for this particular service, right? So here we have water heater replacement in this area and it grades a 43 out of 100 and there's different reasons and we can

8:02get into it in a different video, but if you're going to start this out, the biggest land mine of creating a rank and rent website, which we call microsites, is doing the wrong service in the wrong area. In the description of this video, I have a link to that tool. You can use it for free, but step three, the 20 minute fixes most businesses never make what they should consider.

8:22So on Google business profile, you have secondary categories. So Google allows up to 10 and most businesses, they only set a couple of them. Listen to me. If Google ever gives you an opportunity to fill in more data, right, do it if you can. Don't spam, but if it allows you to put all the services and you're only doing two out of your five services, why not? You should do it. Google's giving you a free handout. All right. List services as things, not keyword spam. So Google understands that car accident lawyer and car wreck attorney are the same thing. So stop spamming. Fill in

8:57every box. Back to the point if Google gives you an opportunity, fill in your hours, your attributes, your description, your products. Listen, everything we go down, we go so far as to make sure our photos that we upload have the right data in baked in the metadata of the photo. Do everything possible. Update holiday hours every few months. Otherwise you go stale and then real photos over AI images, for sure. Now here's a fun one. Most people don't think about the hierarchy that matters when you're going to be doing all this keyword stuff. So the title tag is the most important spot. So you're

9:29going to have your keyword in city and make it under 60 characters. Listen, if you're a business owner and you're watching this video, you don't know what a title tag is, that's okay. Type into GBT and just say, what's my title tag and how do I change it? Easy. So on the H1, which you should only have one H1 in your article, you're going to have the same idea. Water, heater replacement, location. Do you feel me? It's always a pairing of the service plus the location. Always, always, the first paragraph, keyword early, straight talk to the searcher, right? Subheadings as real

9:59questions. How much does a water heater cost in Houston, et cetera? The mistake of most local sites is this opening with a history lesson founded in blah, blah, blah and blah, blah, blah. Listen, it's a dance between a piece and two parties. Like we're saying the user and Google, or in this case, AI. Now specificity matters here. So attribute match and give the AI exact details to match. I love this slide because this is typically how we crush on our microsites.

10:26It's the specificity of what the user needs. Listen to me. This is so important. So nobody types Plumber Houston into GBT. They say, my garbage disposal died. Who can fix it tonight, right? Tonight, right now. I need help now. And the AI then hunts for a whole a business whose details match these things. Garbage disposals, evening service and fast response. If your site says drain repair, but the searcher's problem is a lead main drain line, and you never said the word lead, you do not get recommended. And this is this right here, just stop right there. That's how we make money on our microsites. We are so specific about very

11:05particular services in very particular areas. Now this looks like a simple one, but it's not, this is what separates the professionals from everyone else. So pay attention. This is huge. So prove that you are local with pages no AI could fake. And that's kind of funny because AI can fake basically anything. So number one, you're going to rank, you're going to run a rank map, you're going to figure out where your business ranks, you're going to find the near misses, and then you're going to write hyper local pages for them. Service, location, pages. We're going to pause there. Service. I've been saying this the whole video. Service, location. So you're going to,

11:36what is your service? Where do you do it? In the page. Like make a page, one particular page on your website about it, right? So here's the cool part. And I have like very poignant data from my own experience on this. Google now removes mass generic AI written filler. Location pages survive only when they say something true and specific. So in this instance, River Oak means estate homes and long walks back to the truck, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You've seen this. You probably have seen this. Maybe you haven't, but nowadays people have a very defined templated website for local business through the structure of the URLs, the slugs, and the internal linking.

12:12And now AI is so good, what you can use is whatever. You can use whatever. Census data, Reddit, your own job history. And what you do is for these specific service location pages, you inject specificity into those pages that are unique to that area and how that service relates to that unique area. Now don't sleep on this. I'm going to breeze over it, but reviews are now AI food. If you're not asking for reviews, you can pause this page. You can figure out how to do it. Moving on. Cheap born, devastatingly effective authority. So I love this, right? I just love this. I've had other videos. We talk about this. People often hire my firm, or at least

12:50they did. We take on few clients now because we have our clientele and we're happy with it. But you can always reach out and see if we're open. Here's the point. People reach out for backlinks, right? Backlinks. Do you know what a backlink is? It's a different website pointed to your website. But instead of paying $300 to my firm for a link on a guest blog, why don't you get the local Chamber of Commerce for $100 to $300? Why don't you sponsor locally, right? Why don't you do that local sponsorship so you can give back to the community? If you're a business owner, you can

13:19go and shake hands and meet people and make connections, right? It's probably the same if not less money to do this, right? You can look on my channel on how to do this specifically, type in backlinks or something on the channel. And then we have Google press releases. Press releases crushed right now. You can do YouTube channels. Listen, backlinks still work but you have to do them in a very particular way. Now, I'm a big fan of this one. Google is listening so you better answer the phone. Half of US smartphones are Android so Google sees it all.

13:49Have you ever wondered why Google has like a whole ecosystem of Chrome and Gmail and da-da-da-da? It's because they know everything and they have the power, right? So you better answer your phone. Now, what we do on our microsites is a bit different. We use an AI agent to answer and I love it. It's crazy. So every day we wake up and we get emailed the leads that were pre-qualified through an AI receptionist and it's super cost effective, right? Why ever be out in the field if you're a business owner and it's a small business and like you're struggling to do the work and

14:19you're struggling to answer the phone, that's ridiculous. Nowadays, this right here, it's definitely where it's at. An AI receptionist beats a missed call. Now, I want to show you one more thing but before we do, this is the Rank Expand Academy. This is my focus right now. So if you want to become one of our clients, it's probably not possible anymore because we're already tapped out on clientele for SEO work but right here, you can join and learn how to do this. Microsites is one aspect. There's tons of ways to make money with AI right now. Everything hinges on AI in

14:50this community and it's this. This is what makes it unique. It's the intersection of AI and money. Like it's not let's build a cool, pretty website, it's let's build a website that actually makes money effectively and that's the whole goal, right? Let's make some money. So your first 90 days, month one is foundational work. You can pause this. Months two and three is momentum. Bottom line is there's a very, very structured way to do all this. A lot of it's old school SEO and a lot of it's new but if you combine both of them, then you really do have a fighting chance.