What Jesse Cunningham Learned from Building Over 1,000 Websites

0:00Everyone has an opinion, but what actually works? So, I want to talk about a few things, this, that, and this, right? So, we're going to talk about I'm going to come over here. Thousands of websites later, here's what works. So, I'm somebody who creates websites every single day. And then, if you combine that experience with everyone in the community like Brandon here, he had 310 leads Friday through Tuesday, crazy.

0:20Marcus showing up on page one and the AI overview six times. Why? Because he created microsites. So, we know what ranks on Google. Now, what I did, and I'm very interested in this, we compared it what what with what WhiteSpark is saying. Last year, they put out this report. I really like it. WhiteSpark is a good company, by the way. They are good company that provides a good service, especially if you want high-level citations, like very excellent, expensive, but good. And what I'm interested is right here, local organic ranking factors. And they go over like a million different ranking factors, sorted by most relevant to

0:54least relevant. And what they do is they source all these expert SEOs here throughout the industry to get their opinion. So, is it database? It's database in a way that they are kind of gathering all these experts to get their opinions. So, rolling with it, let's come here. Thousands of websites later, here's what works. So, you're going to forget the map pack. Everyone freaks out. The old school way of ranking rent and ranking a website was the map pack.

1:15Now, it's hard to do that, right? You need a Google business profile, a lot of questions around that. Forget about it, right? Because if I'm going to build 100 websites and you're going to build two, who do you think is going to win regardless of the map pack? Now, let's talk about the top 25 things sorted. So, if we come back over here, we come to WhiteSpark. Let's come right here. So, we're only going to focus, and I'm focusing on local organic factors in the top like 25. Which one really matters, right? And if we wanted to, we could talk about a lot more here, but it all

1:45falls in the three buckets. So, we have content and focus, we have links, and we have structure and tech. Now, the content and focus, what matters the most to rank a website based upon these, I guess, 40 plus different experts, right? This is interesting. Dedicated page per service, geo keyword relevance, topical relevance, focus on a specific niche, and volume of quality content. Very, very interesting. The links, I'm going to come back to in a second. And then the structure and tech, internal linking, site architecture, mobile-friendly, HTTPS by default, organic click-through rate. Now, we skipped over the backlinks for a reason.

2:21I want to talk about this right here. So, if you come over to the classroom in the Rank X Academy, scroll down to the bottom right. My head's in the way, but click this backlink Rolodex. I have personally made hundreds of thousands of dollars with this list that I'm giving you right here. What is this? This is my personal Rolodex of backlinks that I have used, right? My team reached out to grab these different websites and vet them. Now, things have changed over time, but you can see here, DR30, DR40, DR50, 70-plus. Now, what does this matter? What does it mean? So, if you

2:51build a website right now, and you want to rank on Google, there's three primary buckets that you need to check off. It's that simple, right? You have content and focus, which we went over. You have structure and tech, right? And then the links. Now, I don't think you need links if you do this right. If you build a website right, a microsite, especially if you go after the right niche, which is why we built this right here. You can use this right now. Will that niche actually make money? So, type in niche in a city or a neighborhood and get a

3:20straight answer live from Google data. So, we built this tool, and I think if you're going to come, join the community, and you want to build microsites, you want to make money with websites, you have to get your niche right. Going a bit deeper, here is why the microsite works. And a microsite is simply this, a website that you build that ranks on Google, and you can get leads into the website, and you can resell those or run them yourself and make money. Why does it work? And this is why it works. So, one of the biggest ranking factors was a dedicated page per

3:45service. This is exactly how we build them. Focus on a specific niche, that's obvious. Geo-relevance is why you build location pages. so 190 was the score for a geo keyword relevance of content and then a page for each area. That's how we build these out, right? Your exact match domain feeds the on-page factor. So, people often in comments are like, "Exact match domain are the things I talk about. This is SEO of 2011." Maybe it is, but I don't care because it works, right? Let's just do what works.

4:14Who cares if this worked 10 years ago? It works right now. So, keywords in the domain name does it work? Absolutely. I can tell you one of the most frustrating things for me was a campaign is a campaign that I'm still on helping a client rank their website, and this is a national or global, rather, website against their competitor. It's basically two players, and their competitor, right, uses an EMD, an exact match domain. Very hard to beat them. Like, very difficult, very annoying. So, if you can use an exact match domain, do it. And then keywords in title tags matters, right? Keywords and headings

4:48matter, too. And if you come to the Rank Expander Academy, right? If you come here and you come, well, you can talk to everyone and have a community, that's great. But, if you come to the microsite playbook, you will have the breakdown of how all of this works, right? It's not rocket science when you see it. So, internal linking is the star method, so internal linking across the site, site architecture by topic. I like it. Real content wins, then loses, so you know, in the beginning when we started using the term microsite, I I get why people were confused cuz micro denotes, like,

5:16small. But, to us, it's a micro amount of work. On that computer right now, I have a website being created, it's going to take 20 to 30 minutes. It's going to be 50 pages, though, right? So, it's going to be real content that's not thin. It's going to be thick. So, volume of quality content. Uh we don't And by the way, I should say we don't have blog posts. Some people like blog posts, depends upon the niche. If you're doing YMYL, cool. For our stuff, typically not. Doesn't You don't need it. So, links are everywhere in the top 25, and

5:45this is what they're talking about. So, we come over here, this list right here talks about links, links, links, links, links. But, like I was saying, I don't think you need that many links if you have a proper niche. Now, if you want to go after a big dog niche and compete head-to-head with like hundreds of leads for one website per month, you're going to need backlinks, no doubt, right? So, links are everywhere in the top 25.

6:07Quality and authority of links to the domain, so these are like the specific things they think that matters. Links from industry-relevant domains. Keywords in the anchor text of your links, I mean, these are basics, right? Diversity of your inbound links and links from locally-relevant domains. There's a lot of cool things and I've talked about it on this channel before, but you can go to Google, maybe I'll show you here.

6:27Yeah, let me just show you. So, we're going on a tangent a little bit, but look here. So, you can do in parentheses sponsorship or sponsorships plural and then your area. So, that's a little hack, right? If you want backlinks to your website and you want locally-relevant backlinks, that's all you have to do. You can have a VA do it, you can have Claude do it, whatever. You can click in this one and say, "Okay, here's some corporate sponsorships." And guess what? If you do a corporate sponsorship, you're probably going to get a backlink, right? But, it all comes down to, at this point, is it indexable?

6:55What is the DR, the domain rating, and basically, how powerful is that website pointing into our website? And how much does it cost? Now, the cool part about this right here, the Rolodex that I have personally that I decided to give to everyone in the community, is that we've already used these links and we've already vetted them and we've already negotiated price, which we list right there. So, what it's going to look like is if you come here, is this going to show you? Yeah. So, you have DR 30+, 40, 50, 70, and it's the negotiated price.

7:23Is it worth it to do this for a microsite? Maybe not. Quite frankly, of the 50-plus that we have, we haven't bought any like true guest blog posts like this. These are guest blogs and we teach you how to do that. But, you you might need them for your regular website or if you're going after a really competitive term. Now, a secret might be this and I'll I'll I'll show it to you. Directories are the cheap way. So, with our microsites, we haven't bought any guest blogs because we don't go after competitive terms that warrant buying a $50 or $100 or $200

7:53guest blog, right? And by the way, how do people make money with backlinks? Well, they source them their self, and if you're part of the community, you have access to it, and then they resell them, right? And then there's margin on the resell. But, directories are your cheap link engine. So, if you build a microsite, it can cost you what? Like 11 bucks, 12 bucks for the like that's it to build a website that can compete in Google. And what you're going to do, at least what we do, is we get cheap links through directories, name, address, phone number. It's very, very easy. It's

8:23cheap. It gives you diversity. What more can you want, right? Very easy. I'm going to skip these two. We're going to keep it fresh over time as well. So, if you have a website that you want to rank, freshness across the site matters. If you want to stay at a high level of ranking, well, you can do backlinks over time, but you can also, just as easily and more affordably, keep the darn thing fresh, right? So, if you're building in quad code, and even if you're doing WordPress, there's ways to have agents just go in maybe quarterly, maybe every 6 months, depending upon your niche. If

8:51you look at, and this is a tangent, I'm going on tangents here, but if you look at like law firm websites, type in like mesothelioma lawsuit, whatever. Go look at their websites. See how often that they update. So, your niche will kind of determine how often you need to update. And the microsite hits the whole top 25 by design. If I zoom in here, you will see all these different things that by design a microsite just does. Now, I want to go over three different myths that I hear a lot and I think are important to address, but before I do, I

9:20want to show you this. If you do decide to join, this is the microsite empire. You're going to get this after some time. This right here is the microsite blueprint for Claude. So, what you can do is download this zip, give it to your LLM of choice, and basically you get the structure of our microsites, how we build them, and you can use any LLM, any AI builder, right? But let's talk about the myths.

9:40So, reviews and posts barely move organic. So, that's that's true. Review and posts really don't matter. So, if you want to rank on the map pack, cool, right on. But if you want to rank organically, which is where we focus, the quality of Google reviews and the frequency of Google posts really doesn't move the needle, and that's good for us for so many reasons because the old school way of rank and rent was to build your GBP, have your friends and family give you reviews, do whatever you can to build a Google Business Profile. That's really, really effective, but quite a

10:10pain in the butt and not very scalable, right? So, myth number two, okay, the tweaks people obsess over ranked low. Some meta descriptions, I mean, I have websites that don't even have meta descriptions at times, and Google fills in the blanks, right? Keywords in the Google Business Description and quantity of photos on Google Business Profile. And then, the best one that I like, you need age and authority first, right? The age of a website and the main authority, especially with the way we do it, really doesn't matter that much. Now, maybe I should have shown this slide first, but a rank is just a phone call waiting to

10:42happen. How we make money, right? One way is to hit the top ranking factors, you rank organically, the phone rings, and you rent out the phone call. That's rank and rent, right? So, if we distill it a bit more, your organic playbook is this: one niche, one exact match domain, a dedicated page for every service and area, internally link it into a hub, feed it links with directories, and ignore the myths, and keep it fresh.