How $18K in SEO Turned Into $1.7M for a Garage Door Company - Sarvesh Shrivastava

You posted a garage door company hired you for $18,000. This garage door company made $1.7 million back in 11 months and you are going to break down the exact SEO strategy that you used. Sarveshostrava, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much, Edward. And it it feels like home coming back here. And I am it's it's it's almost like I said a second home because I do listen to this podcast on a daily basis. So so much great stuff that you share on YouTube plus Instagram on a daily basis. So kudos to you for that. And yes, this is one of those case studies that's very dear to me. Uh the clients as well, the brand as well. Uh but yes, let's jump into the the the sauce right away. A thank you so much for I didn't even realize that you listen to the show every That's amazing. And and um yeah, we're we're always uh texting on WhatsApp outside of the show and you're awesome. So, so okay, your first your first part of this breakdown was Google. You said Google business profile first and the website comes later. Most business owners think their website is everything and that is wrong. So, you fixed the Google business profile first. What are some of the things that you did? Okay, so here there's a bit more context to there two types of business owners. A who would come to us who would just either ignore their website completely or who just focus on their Google on their website completely. So it's no in between. Uh this business was coming uh to us where they they were just focusing on their website and their Google business profile was lacking completely. They didn't even have the basics done right. So what we did was day one we did a full audit. We looked at where they were, what the other competitors were doing. We did a full audit, understood what were their primary category, what were the competitors were, what are the secondary subcategories that they the competitors had. Uh then we did a full audit including how many photos the competitors had versus what we had. Reviews, total number of reviews and equally important was review velocity. uh because this is something that does not get uh as credit as just the total number of reviews. uh generally you'll see okay uh my competitor has 500 reviews I only have 50 but yes do look at they have acquired the these 500 reviews over a course of maybe 5 years see how many monthly reviews they are acquiring and that is where you can compete because for a business uh for from Google's perspective they also see how active you are right now how many number of reviews or how many because for Google the number of reviews that's coming into you is an indication of how popular you are currently. They Google does not have access to your CRM, right? It cannot see how many jobs you did or how much revenue you made. So ultimately they are seeing how many people are calling you or how many people are driving to you. These are a few metrics that they are relying on and an equal important metric is how many new people are reviewing to you every month and how many good reviews you are getting, how many one-star reviews you are getting. So all of these information when we put together we have a crystal clear direction also in terms of okay we for example the competitors are getting 10 reviews a month now we are able to communicate to the business owner that okay we also need to be in the same ballpark range if we want to get in the top three. So as the business owner they also have a now a goal to chase otherwise till that point it was like okay whatever reviews we we will get we'll get it it was more just on on the basis of luck that yeah one of my guys would ask the customer and and maybe we'll get a review if the customer just want it so at that point a mental shift happened where they they have to come in and put in a system where after from through their CRM after each job immediately a message was going to the customers and they were leaving a review and the person on the job itself was asking for a review and if their name was mentioned on the review they were getting incentivized by the business owner for each review that they were collecting. That mental shift itself got them their review numbers increased massively and we gave them a task that in the first week itself we have to collect 10 reviews. How are you going to do it? look into it but 10 reviews first week that's the goal that itself just from review collection is a mental shift that completely changed the trajectory on the Google business profile side we came in we did all the audit immediately fixed all of the categories subcategories collected a lot of photos from them in a Google drive geotagged all of it uploaded it there uh then a lot of stuff like the products uh all and and the services that they offered they they had they haven't added most of it it didn't have any description descriptions added to it. Even the main description of the business had no wasn't properly optimized from a keywordri way. All of that we did uh and a few other things just citations and I I'll just come to it in a bit as well. But yes, we uh we came in with all guns blazing on the Google business profile. Week one a lot of it was fixed and then there were continuous improvements made week over week uh and and a lot of stuff like citations and all were added over the course and that itself gotten them great results uh as as the results came in. Let's go. Awesome man. You you wrote uh you wrote yet too uploaded real photos not those cheesy stock images with smiling actors. I love that line. So you were Yeah. So you were collecting the photos from them. Uh and then and so how how how did you say you you incentivized um the employees to collect reviews because you said you were incentivizing getting reviews. So how are you doing that? Right. What's a good way for other people to do So what what we suggest most of our client is uh the person who's working there on that project if the if the client is mentioning their name in the review like u like for example Edward was very helpful uh with us he is very patient with us some even something like that wherever if Edward's name is mentioned in the review we assume Edward collected that review and it is uh especially for a business where it's service related uh and especially in the home home uh home services related space because it's that one person who's actually helping you out there at your home at at what wherever you are. this uh system works really well and then uh um it's it's up to the business owner to decide what what is a good number to pay for that review but that incentivizes because that person is then and there with that homeowner right then and there and it's much easier for them to very quickly share oh can you please leave a review we get incentivized for it if you just add that line mentioning to the to the homeowner they also feel like okay this person did a good job and if I can help them in any way just by leaving a quick you might as well do it because I have gotten a good good experience good uh work out of these guys and that is how uh it snowballs because until unless you you incentivize it for the team they're like okay we have done the work what is it for me yes they will do maybe 10 uh out of 10 one or two times but if you implement this they'll do it six or seven out of 10 times that is where that major shift happens of collecting those reviews this method of marketing is so effective I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average compact keywords page is only 415 words. Compact keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. The or the service people asks the homeowners, can you leave a re a review? And and what are the service and and and then the homeowners have the ser the service person's name in the review. And yeah, so so they say uh can you please leave a review on our Google business profile? Here's the link. And please mention uh how was your experience with me and they'll mention their name. How was your experience with me surve uh working with us please mention my name uh and it's up to them they can mention that I I'll get incentivized for it on on based on how your experience was with us. If you just add that as a human then you become kind of responsible for how you're leaving a review and then from there you you'll not leave it for tomorrow. like okay this person did a good job how can I repay him back just uh because you know as a company you paid the company for it right for the service uh but the work was done by this person for you for example so as a human you kind of you become uh incentivized okay I can repay him back just by leaving a review with his name and and what so what what's the bonus what is the bonus like uh for people who want to implement this themselves so it depends what you can but maybe uh something between 10 to it depends on what you can But between 10 to 30 bucks is something that you can pay per review to to your uh uh team members. So you don't you don't do it like on a percentage basis. No, just just a flat like okay per review we'll pay you 20 bucks or 30 bucks. Just like a small uh thing to show that we care and incentivize to to get a review. But and you said for the Google Oh, go on. Sorry. Go on. If a person is able to get maybe 10 or 10 reviews a month for you, that's an added $300 for them for that month. So, and that they they have to do everything of that process anyways. And that's just add another added $3 $400 as an additional revenue for them uh for that particular uh team member, right? So, that incentivizes them to actually do it. And you said uh you said you fixed the primary category and the description especially and people don't know what they're doing there with Google business profile like what are the common mistakes that you see and the and the common fixes that you make that your team makes right I mean uh people select primary categories on the hunch of what they feel like would be the closest one to what they do the best way to do it is search for and and there are so many free tools to actually do it as well. Uh just just Google on what are the best uh uh tools that you can install to analyze Google business profiles and ultimately and even these days you can just use cloud co-work and all of that to do all of this audit for you. Search for your primary keyword. So if it's garage door repair, garage door install in whatever location that it is on Google maps. Look at the top three four ranking uh map pack results. see what is their primary category that itself will just give you okay if I want to rank for this particular term this is what the primary category should be for me as well it cannot be that the that the top ranking results have a have x as primary category and you have y as primary it would be very difficult for you to rank as simple as that so that is where it has to come into picture then also on the secondary categories as well people and especially most business owners they just randomly select things that that feel like okay this would also be relevant to me this would also be relevant to me this would not be relevant to me so instead of just doing it randomly look again go by data back decision look at what all our competitors have selected and then feed it to claude co-work like I said and and it will just tell you go and just select these ones it's as simple as that uh today you do not even have to to like second guess it just feed it to claude it will tell you yes go pick this as your primary category pick this as as your secondary category And then that is true in any niche that you work in. So for for people listening if they haven't seen your Cloud Co-work episode, the last time you were on the show, you shared your screen and you showed how you use Claude Co-work and I believe it was to optimize Google Business Profile. And so if if you have if anybody hasn't seen that, just search on YouTube Claude Co-work the Edward Show and that episode with you should show up. It's that actually I think that episode might be my second my second highest performing guest podcast. That episode did so well and um people love it and so yeah, you could literally just search Claude Co-work the Edward show and you can see your prompts and and the the output and everything and uh yeah and actually we should now do an updated version of it because now I have a 20 prompt mega collection and I've done an article on X on it. It has done like 5 million views just on X. So maybe we can share the link to it in the description if you want. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure. Let's do a Let's do a a pod on it as well whenever you I'd love that. Yeah. I'd love that. I'd love that. So th this next uh this next post of yours was on was one of my favorite. Um, you said it I cuz I like niching down and going after high intent uh language and that's what you did with this next part. You said created pages that actually pull in cash. You killed their old generic services pages. Instead, you built super specific money pages like affordable garage door repair in Houston. Same day service, no hidden fees. People typing these are desperate for help now. These pages match exactly what people search when they're ready to swipe their card and get someone over ASAP. Right. So with most local businesses uh the way they structure their website and it is mostly because of how these websites are built by web designing agencies is they will have a a a silo of pages on for services. So they'll have five six pages on on the services that they offer and they'll they will have a category of location pages. So like 10 pages of location. These are the location that we cover. But the pages that actually rank the best is a combination of service and location like roofing services in uh in Oklahoma, roofing services in New York. That is in Austin. That is the page that actually ranks. And this is the page that uh business owners actually do not create on the website and they miss this and this is what we came in and we do for all of the businesses that we work with service plus location combination. So we call them as service area pages. Uh what service do you provide in it and which location do you provide it in as simple as that and create all variations of it. So if you are provide let's say for example if you're providing five services and 10 and you cover 10 locations that's 50 pages that you have to create and but you what another mistake that we do is we'll just uh you'll create a template and you'll replicate all 50 pages and just change the location names for it. Don't do that. Those pages do not rank. Yeah that people do not you do. You said that we do that people do not you do. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Correct. Yeah. Yes. So uh yeah those are Yeah. Those are doorway pages and and that is against Google's guidelines. You have to make them unique unique to the to the term that is being targeted. Yeah. Because from Google's perspective, they do not want you to be mass replicating pages. It's very easy to do that with AI. And let's assume me and Edward both run the same kind of business in the same location. we both can push a a button with AI right now and both of us can publish those 50 pages in a in a moment's uh time, right? Why would Google then prefer Edward or me over me or me over Edward? What what would be the decision-m point for Google then? So that is why it's it's common sense from Google's perspective that they cannot allow that. You have to make those pages unique. You have to add your own experience for there and ultimately you you belong to that location as a business owner, right? You know the ins and out of those location and that is what Google wants you to reflect in those pages that you belong there. You know the location better, you know the geography of there, you know the weather there, what are the actual problems of those locations. These are the nuances you want to add on those on those pages to make it unique rather than having templated pages across. So yeah, to summarize, create those service area pages. Don't just create service pages separately and location pages separately. The mix is where the magic happens with SEO and don't create templated pages. Each page must be unique. It must have unique elements across. I think part of the problem with doorway pages is that when they're like mass- created like that, you often find ones that are ranking for keywords that they shouldn't rank for. it it's and and that's that's very that's very common uh where it's like this thing the business doesn't actually do this thing but it's ranking for it because it was just easy to create a page and it was just in the it was one of the variables that showed up. Um, yeah, I'll add if you know between us if we were doing that, what would the differentiator be? It would still it would probably be like whoever has more authority and branded searches and things like that. But even then, like I was saying, historically, doorway pages give searchers a bad experience and and Google is against that. Now, I have a an interesting question for you. Between us, Between us, Google would just decide that you're much more handsome looking. So you would anyway. No, come on. No, it's so fresh. They were going to pick you. What are you talking about? I'm a I'm a gargoyle. Come on, man. Um, I lost my train of thought now. Yeah. No, so here's a here's a a question. How do you decide how many cuz like you you know if you put up too many pages, too many SEO pages too fast, Google's not going to like you. And so how like how many pages do you put up at the beginning? Do you look at authority and you look at traffic and branded branded searches or how do you decide like okay should we put up 10 at the beginning? Should we put up 30? Should we put up 50? Can we push it to 200? Like how do you Yeah. How do you decide? And then do you like do you look at velocity of the amount of service area pages that you are putting up? I mean I am more of a conservative and old school thought here still and especially with AI all around and what happens is if let's say a business has has come to us they have zero links coming in from high authority sites they're a DR zero domain rating zero site if you all of a sudden start publishing even 50 pages in that month one the indexing would become a real challenge so we know that for a fact that's why it's actually better to start with maybe 10 or 12 15 pages a month and then also supplement it with 10 12 blogs so that there's a decent amount of information content also being published and that also allows us to interlink properly between these pages which eventually helps in indexing a lot. In the meantime because we are also acquiring high quality links coming to the site that simultaneously starts uh in um increasing the overall authority of the domain. So the whole flywheel uh makes sure that these new pages start getting picked up and indexed in Google search and they start to rank as well. Uh so I am more of the conservative and old school where it's it's okay for me to go slow and steady and win the race rather than just go maybe 100 pages right at the beginning or two. A lot of of the clients that come to us, they want us to go okay, let's go just very hard right at the start and publish these 100 pages. And I go against it. I advise against it and we only work with the ones who understand why why we are doing this why we are going slow because for for us it's easy to publish 100 pages uh in month one that's not a problem uh so but ultimately depends on 6 months down the line 12 months down the line where do we want to be that is the end goal right I want to change the business we want to be 5x getting 5x more leads of what we are getting right now so to be there we want to start small It's it's same like uh doing workout right you you can go to the gym and the first day you can do uh squats with 200 kgs for that matter but then are you will you be able to go to the gym the next day that's that's the question and all of our content that we do all of our content that we do is is done by with by human writers taking help of AI so we are not mass generating pages anyways so or the bandwidth of work that we can take is also limited so that's also one thing that we keep in I'm I'm completely the same. I I like to play it safe because I do SEO for the long game and I'm conservative like you are. So, I I I really like that. How are you what um Yeah. How do you how do you find Do you have a method for finding high intent keywords, high purchase intent keywords, or do you just kind of like Yeah. Do you just kind of like think about it? Sorry. To to start with compact keywords. That's my first method. Oh, come on. Thank you so much. And and yes, I mean for local mostly uh it's generally what people search for is is service area plus near me and how near me is ultimately being pulled is the location name. So for us the keyword becomes service name plus location. So for the lead generation that is the main keyword uh structure for all of the pages in general. That's one. Second for blogs we go after what exactly people are searching for when uh what are the questions would be uh in the buyer journey. So if they are looking for a new roof what are the questions they may be asking for in the in the journey of buying of installing a new roof or roof repair and then we also add location modifier modifiers to it. That's one. We also ask AI about okay these are the questions we see uh people are asking about let's say roof repair or or new roof uh is there any specific angle to a certain location that we can add to these topics or uh the intent is are there any specific questions that people in only in these locations are asking and that helps us us put more uh more uh direct angle towards question for those locations. So, you said um you said you're creating pages like affordable garage door repair in Houston, same day service, no hidden fees. Would that be the page title and the H1? H1 or just the page title? So, the uh it depends. Uh mostly we try to keep the page title and H1 similar. But yes uh the H1 has to be uh both of them can uh can have different variations of the same keyword. So if if we if we find okay there is two variations of the same keyword like uh roof repair and roof repairs for example then we are able to to cater one variation in the page title and one variation in the H1 and that way we can cater both. If there are no two variations of it then it could be the same uh same thing in both. Yeah, 100%. All right, next next one is you are writing local blog content. He said, "Yes, it it even works for small businesses. Most business owners think blogs are just for big brands." Nope. We wrote stuff like how to protect your garage door before Houston storms destroy it. This type of content builds massive trust, shows you're a real expert, and pushes you up in Google at the same time. locals loved it and it got shared too. And so actually I think I I I'd like to ask how can you explain how how blog content can also make your other pages do well? Your your your person because blog content might not necess it it might not be high intent. it it's it's going to be targeting moreformational keywords. But how is your blog content going to improve the rankings for your purchase intent pages for your conversion based SEO landing pages? Right? Let's take roofing for example. when it's uh uh when it's a season where it's it's a lot it's very cold or uh very rainy for that matter and when they land on a roof repair article and there if if you're certainly linking out to a a blog post that talks about it that in Houston for example or in XY Z location when it rains this is when we see that uh these are the problems that roof uh we see happening in roofs when someone lands on it and just for a second they see that article and they open it. They see that you have the expertise. They may not read it thoroughly but they'll just skim through it and then they come back and book a call an appointment with you because they have had multiple touch points with you on on that. Uh they already now they are considering you more of an authority just because they have multiple touch points with you. This is a just a psych psychological thing that has already happened even before you know it. That's one. Second, there's always that SEO factor that is coming into play because you are because you're covering all of the questions that uh your customers may be asking. You are be getting established as a topical authority in that space and the internal linking helps in in passing around of the overall link juice along the site. Helps in better indexing of the website also helps in in overall AI searches as well. So there are multiple benefits of it. But I always say the end goal of blogs is not to get more traffic. It's just purely for SEO purposes. But there's one one part of it also where if you are covering uh very niche topics to your town to uh to your town, city and location, you may also sometimes get picked in local news sources. That is something that that people really ignore. But if you cover it timely enough, you may also get some really nice backlinks coming to your website from real local news sources. That is also something that could be a benefit. Not that you do it for it, but you do it for purely SEO focuses, but these are all of the added advantages to it, doing it the right way. Well, that's that's really cool. I could totally see a local business having just keeping an eye out for local news and being some of the first to report on it. How do how do other local news uh publishers who are finding this and linking to it, how do they find it in the first place? Right. So, uh I mean yes, this is a challenge because you're not in the news section of things. Uh so when when there's something like this, you'll also have to maybe actively share this with the the right people. That is something you'll have to do proactively because you're not uh in the Google news section of things. So yes, this is something that uh it's not and this is again uh it's not the thing that you do those blogs for and it is not something that's going to happen very uh actively for you and you'll have to take active actions to make that happen and but again you know the industry better than you. So if you're publishing some sort of maybe a stat where you know this could go viral just be a bit active and share it with the with the local news editor because you know the city and the town better than anyone else for that matter, right? So that is where you'll have to be a little bit bit more proactive to get them to to and local news always like to feature businesses and and local uh stats and local things right so for them it's always a win-win at the end of the day and now with AI around if your blog post is indexed these uh local news editors they are also researching on AI a lot so that is also a a chance from where it can get picked naturally that if they're looking for a stat around and you have put in a stat article on your website, they it may may get cited from there as well. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I think local news backlinks are some of the easiest backlinks to get because news that would be boring to anybody else is still new is still newsworthy for local publishers. It's like a like a new restaurant opened. That doesn't really sound like news, but it's going to be reported on. That's like if it's if it's hyper lo hyper local. And so I could it totally a situation like uh okay, a big storm is coming. You know, it's going to be a major issue for homeowners. Garages are going to get flooded. You write an article on your site. Here's how to prepare for this. You share it with local news publishers. You say, "I wrote this." Um maybe it would be useful for your audience or if you want I can even write a contributor article on your site about the same thing and Yeah. And you need to have the ends once. So if you have once you get published on it then you have direct editor details and all of that. So the next time you have something you can just directly email them and right good chances of you getting published the twice. So like now I have the like now I have in with the OG Edward and I and I've been on the show thrice. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. But yeah it's it's it's real. Uh and and that honestly that's something that a lot of SEOs miss is that maybe they get covered by like featured or or help a reporter out or source of sources. um they they get their first their first uh expert quote, but they never follow up with the journalist and is like, "Hey, you you featured me uh a month ago. Are you working on anything that I can comment on?" And a lot of journalists, they write for multiple publications. And so you can get links from multiple domains by the same journalist by just having a relationship with them. Right. Exactly. That that's so spot on. Yeah. All right. Number four is fixed their internal links. And this is actually something where we got a question on that episode about where I where I made an episode about this. Um, so I'll share that question in a minute, but you said, okay, fixed their internal links. The most ignored SEO move ever. Their site had zero links between pages. Basically, a maze with no doors. We connected all service pages, blogs, and the homepage in a smart, logical way. Google suddenly understood the whole site better and pages that were dead started climbing fast and it also helped real visitors find stuff easily. I I really like that. Right. I mean internal linking just in general is the most underrated SEO activity period. Uh and there's no site that we have come in and implemented this and we have not seen immediate results. the yes the the magnitude of results could vary but there's no site on the internet that you'll just go and not and do this that has just not implemented internal links before and they'll not see an uptake it's just true universally for that matter so this site for example they had just not done anything at all on the on the SEO front so we came in we we put together a proper internal silo structure and we went ahead we create we logically connected the right services with each other blogs with each the uh blogs linked out to the right to the relevant services the for which the the blogs were talking about. Uh then uh we also created um um uh massive location pages and those location pages linked out to all of the services within that location and all of that. So so proper internal linking silo was created and that really helped in indexing a lot of the pages that were not indexed before and as the back we created. So a lot of backlinks we created were to the homepage and then from the homepage that link juice very equally distributed across all of the pages. So all of the pages uh got got the benefit of that link coming into the site and the rankings because of that indexing happened and they started getting uh uh rankings started to happen for for most of them. Did you say you're link so you have hub pages you're linking to the hub pages in the top navigation and the footer or just the footer? How are you doing it? So, uh they actually uh hub pages are are primarily from from the navigation and footer has different pages uh depending on okay what are the things uh so so this is something that you do on a case by case basis. Yeah. So, so, so, so like sometimes map also like you might take maybe one of the most valuable purchase intent page that you have and you would link to that directly from the footer. Correct. Yeah. So, if you know that okay uh we also when we onboard a client we get them all of the services and locations in a priority order. So if we know these are the top three services that that will get them the most ROI and these are the three neighborhood or location or cities that will make them the most money that is like the priority that we want to give them. So a lot of our love for that matter goes to these pages first. So anything that that needs to go uh because we know this is going to make them the most money. So if they need to be inter from even from the navigation or from the footer to to get them the most juice or a bit more internal linking needs to happen to them or even direct backlinks need to go to these pages they go to to these pages. So ultimately oh go on because ultimately the goal of SEO is to make more revenue for the business and we make sure that whatever needs to be done for for that goal to happen happens and and maybe you Yeah. So you're linking to these super important pages from blogs as from blog content as well just like anywhere that's relevant to get it the most the most link juice especially blog content that's ranking. So um this is a that answered shout out to Ali Hamza for who's a listener of the podcast who asked a bunch of questions and what we just talked about answered question one. Ali's I think we we addressed question two which is like should service area should service pages be geo or non-Jeo for example plumber Manchester or just plumbing service and if I create geo service pages do I need to do do I need separate location pages but the answer is yes but and it and then for for three so what about multiple locations and so so Ali asked should I create a dedicated service page for each location or just my main location. So are you using are you using location hub folders for that? How how do you do how do you handle multiple locations? So yes uh so so I think we did uh an episode on the auto autogar client that we had uh they had four locations. So for example the structure is xyz.com/loation/service that is the the strategy you have to follow. location one, location two, location three, location four, service one, service 2, service 3, service 4, for location one. Similarly, if location all of the services uh so for example uh xyz.com/edmundmund is for for the first location then you have to create a unique service page for each service that you do in edund then if it is for New York then all of the services in New York. So that is how you have to go. So this is the the root parent structure. So wait, let me just So it's So it's like uh yeah, yoursite.com slbrooklyn and then slash the name of the service and then you have another subfolder which is forward slward slashname of the service and that and and all of these all of these service pages because it's like roofing repair in Queens are they are unique to you are making them as unique as you can to Queens or to Brooklyn. Correct. So just answer this question from Google's perspective by looking at the URL. Is it making it clear for the for Google that where are we located or where do we provide this service and what service do we provide? Does the URL completely tell Google the story? If it does, that's the correct structure. Yeah. Right. That makes a lot of sense. All right. We're going to talk about link building. We're moving out of link building. You said focused on real solid and but again this is how you turned $18,000 into was it was it $18,000 just a total of a lump sum of $18,000 that you turned. Yeah. So they're still a client with us but they still a client with us. It was a they're on a monthly uh recurring uh uh subscription with us but I just took a number for the for the 10 11 months they were with us by that point and by that point only we had grown them by $1.7 million in revenue already. So that I took a period of 10 11 months of them working with us. So over the 11 months you got $18 grand and they made and they made 1.7 million. Amazing. Yeah. So this is how Yeah. So like this is this is how you're doing it. So, all right. You you focused on real solid backlinks, not not cheap directory junk. You said you didn't touch spammy directory submissions or fake press releases. Instead, you got guest posts on real legit local blogs and industry sites. You built relationships with other local businesses for link swaps and mentions. You added strategic links on authority websites that actually moved rankings. And you said these links separated them from every other local business stuck on page three forever. How how what what do people uh get wrong with guest posting? What's the thing that that everybody gets wrong when when doing guest posting? They'll just do buy guest post link and the first platform that shows up, they'll just go and and look up, okay, uh I'm I'm getting a link for $10 versus I'm getting a link for 50. I'll just get the link for $10. That's the first thing they'll do. That is where they get it wrong. Uh you you need to understand what are guest post links and how to actually figure out what's a link farm because until unless you figure out what's a link link farm is, you won't be able to actually get the real links. And one important thing is if a link is available on link mostly on link uh farm marketplaces, you have to assume it it won't be the highest quality link in general, right? it if if it's so easy to to just buy off of a marketplace, it it won't be the best quality uh link in general. So, for business owners, my advice would be don't buy links yourself. you you there's there's good chances of you actually not uh actually doing more harm than good because if you if you buy links from PBNs or link farms it can it can actually get you penalized more than uh getting you right because there's there's only some things on the on page front you can do so wrong that will get you penalized but there's so much you can do wrong on the off page or backlink side of front that will get you severely penalized in the by Google right because they see it they're very strict with that because they see it as you're trying to artificially manipulate their algorithm which is and they are much stricter on that front versus you doing anything on your website. So that is one thing that I see uh a lot. Second, I see they uh they'll mostly just buy maybe a better business bureau subscription and and they think they are done with buying back links. But you have to understand all of your competitors have also bought that link, right? So how are you different? How when Google has to compare you and your competitors and both of them has better business bureau link, how what is putting you above them then? So anyone can just go and get a subscription of of better business bureau and and get a backlink from them. Right? So how how is it differentiating you from them? So when when I say local links that is what people think oh uh local I'll just get a link from my better business bureau. I'm a member there. So is all of your other competitors. So you have to differentiate and uh for that differentiation these guest post links these local news links this is not something that anyone can just just wake up tomorrow and and get very instantly they there has to be rhyme and reason and strategy to acquire those right this is what will differentiate you from all the other competitors and that is what I see the most obvious mistakes happening in by by business owners. So to then to what extent are you using do do you see do you use marketplaces? Do you pay for links? To what extent are you just doing organic outreach and not paying and just doing pitches and getting your pitches accepted and creating uh relationships. I mean at this point all the all the websites that are actually good and high quality they know the value of their link. So it's very very difficult to to create a relationship and actually get a link to to the pages that you want to get linked to using the anchor text that you want to get linked to. So essentially you have to pay for those links. We do pay for these links but that also gives us the flexibility to select the best quality of sites cuz when you're paying for it you're not the you're basically not begging any for one for the mercy of okay please link out to me. You are just purchasing it. So then you have you you look at the best available options and select the perfect or the best highquality site from that list and you are able to to purchase the best quality site and that is why uh in our retainer we also include the backlinks within the retainer so that it's on us to select the best links because if you just leave it up to the clients they want the cheapest one at at some point or so we don't want to phone that. So uh so we want that decision to be with us uh so that we even if you have to go just above and beyond certain limit we can very openly do that and get that best link because we know that uh in local businesses you don't need 10 links a month you need one or two links a month to just create that magic and and get that kind of ROI that we are talking about uh for this garage business but that one or two links should be the best possible quality. So, when you pitch like a local a local news site, local blogs are different. If it's an independent blog, that could be different, but what about if it's like if it's a local news site? Um, yeah, like a ABC affiliate or something like are you are are you also directly offering to pay right away? Do you do your pitch and then say, you know, if any financial compensation is necessary, let us know. Like, how how do you structure those pitches? What do they look like? Yes. So in that case you have to talk to the the contributor and editors in a more uh indirect way first and see okay is there a possibility here? Are they open to it? Uh not all uh local news sites are are open to it as well but some are. Uh that is why I mean yes acquiring those links cannot be done on a scale. So they are just one part of the equation that we do. Guest post just in general are more acquirable and more uh scalable. And when when we are operating at the scale that we are, we cannot just rely on one type of links. But yeah, they are part of our equation. And at the end of the day, yes, this is how we approach them to see how can we sponsor this or how how can we sponsor an article on on on the news site without being labeled as an sponsored article. So that's that's the angle that we take. And and so um what I mean what is a like what does a pitch look like? I guess the pitch it it will differ. It will different differ for the type of uh publisher that it is. But okay, what would a pitch look like for for local news versus a local blog? Oh, a local blog, you just go and say, I want to get an article published on your site. How much is it? As simple as that. And they'll give you a quote directly that this is uh this is what you charge. Then you negotiate with it. You' basically start at half of what they ask or something like that. And you you you'd meet in the middle. And when when you're when you're doing that, when you're selecting local blogs, are you also you're looking at like how much of their content is ranking? Yeah. What are their rankings like and are you're looking at their blog to see okay is are all of these guest posts like how are you how do you avoid how do you avoid wasting money? Yeah. W Yeah. Wasting money on the wrong blogs. We have we have uh a few different criterias that each each site must uh qualify like the DR score must be 40 and above. The site must be getting as per HFS at least 2 to 3,000 monthly organic search traffic and they must not be ranking for like link farm me type keywords. Uh like keywords that are just there to artificially inflate HF's traffic and all of that. We have a link building team in house and they can just in within seconds open a site and tell you that this is a link farm. Now just by doing this over and over again they can just look at a side and tell you that. So all of we have a few different metrics that we that we very religiously check and then only it goes uh to a point where we reach out to them and and then the negotiations happen. Yeah. And then and then yeah the local the local news sites with local news sites we are much more lenient because if it's a genuine news site we are okay with uh with the metrics. No no but I mean I mean how is the pitch how is a pitch different because for the local blog you're just like all right how how much is it and and yeah but for local for local news are you what does a language look like? That's something that a lot of people struggle with. It's like, okay, I want to pitch this local news site. How do I write it? What do I say? So, it's more like we start with, oh, uh, we represent XYZ business. We'd like to get our client or or this client's business featured on XY Z, uh, platform or this news portal. How the commercials Oh, but but but you don't want a commercial because you don't want it to say sponsored. Yes. So first we wait because we want them to want them to respond. When they respond they'll say okay uh they'll either say oh we don't look do look do look do look do look do look do look do look do look do look do look do sponsored at all. That could be one response or they say we charge XY Z amount. We say okay that's fine with us but we don't want this to be labeled as sponsored. Then either they'll say okay that's fine but that would charge XY Z amount extra. Or you have to understand these local news they are not getting that many sponsorship deals on a month or on a weekly or monthly basis. Right? So if they do it they will accept it in some way or form. So so then we negotiate and say okay not this much we can do this much and all of that and that is how we so the first step is we want them to respond to us because if they're not responding there's no conversation happening. If you get them into a conversation then it's a different ballgame altogether. Dude, I heard about I heard about some businesses who they will find a journalist that they like and then um literally pay that journalist to be a contributor for their for their blogs for their like let's say like it's a it's a garage door repair company and they will literally pay uh the journalists to to write like a guest article. you're like, "Hey, you write some awesome stuff. Like, I'll pay you to write an article for my for my business's blog." And and now they have a relationship with the journalist. And then and then they're like in a week it's like, "Hey, uh, is there any possibility for you to use me as as like as a a an expert in Yeah. as a source. And and and there's such like a high acceptance rate when you do that. And it's like an a very indirect way of paying local journalists like real journalists for for links and coverage and creating and and over time it's like this journalist kind of becomes a contractor. Yes. Yes. This is good for people who are just operating into maybe one market and if you have like all clients in one market and then you can just crack that one one big source and you can get a lot of links for that one market. just uh for us because of because our clients in so many different markets it becomes really challenging to crack the like relationships in each market it becomes really challenging then well so then so actually that was my next question because you wrote build businesses for link swaps and mentions so how are you building those relationships so two things and this is where it it really helps if the if the business owner already has established relationship which a lot of businesses already have because if you're a business owner you do know a lot of other business owners in the local community. So, a three-way swap works really well there. Uh where the businesses we support we can create, other businesses we support or other businesses we subscribe to, things like that. Uh particularly for this business, they had a really strong local community and and some of the other sites had good SEO understanding as well. So, it does not really help when all of the other businesses, they their SEO is also zero. So, then it's not really if you're getting a few links from the other DR site. Yes, it's it's a local link, but it's like it's it's just going to add some relevance to it, but it's not going to do any magic for your SEO, right? Uh but the these guys were part of a few franchisey uh franchisee groups as well. So, yeah, so he had they have had some really good links there as well. So, that also helped us. But yes, that and then you can also reach out to other businesses in in parallel niches. But for that, your SEO also needs to be somewhat decent. You cannot reach out with a DR0 site. You'll have to show them some value that okay our site gets either some traffic or whatever it is that you do. One way that we lead to is um and this is something that we are just uh start we have started to do now is we'll do a guest post on a high domain rating site and we'll see we'll say that okay we are doing a guest post on XY Z site where there this is their metrics they get like 200,000 monthly visitor to their site we link out to you as top five businesses in XY Z area or some sort of angle uh in return uh we would want you to be linking out to this business from one of your pages. So that is uh also one angle. We we are testing this out. Let's see how this works out. But uh if you are uh basically in return we are giving them a link swap from a much better site uh on an article and and we are expecting a return a link swap from them from their business page to our our uh our client's uh business site. That's amazing. I I I uh I'm looking forward to hearing how that works. Right. Yes, we give this a shot. And so you wrote Okay, so you wrote, "We stopped trying to be famous and focused on local only." And yeah, you so I I really like this part because you're niche. You're really niching down. You say they wanted to rank for best garage door or top garage doors nationwide. Pointless. We ditched all that noise and doubled down on keywords like garage door repair Austin. These are the searches that actually make the phone ring and bring in paying customers ready to book today, not just look around. I still remember the conversation with the uh with the owner. He I asked him, "Okay, uh you tell me one of the one of uh keywords that you'd want to rank for uh and that could bring you a lot of revenue." So he said, "I would like to rank for garage door repair company." So I said, "Okay." Uh but garage repair company is a nationwide keyword, right? You need to add a a location modifier to it then only it becomes a a local uh keyword and that would bring you leads. So we we had to make him understand the the complexity of it that why garage door repair company and garage door repair company New York are so vastly different terms from an SEO perspective and why the amount of investment and all of that time required to rank for these is so different from because someone who's not into SEO they may look like okay garage door repair company and garage door repair company in New York how different would it would it be for for it to rank for them but in reality who knows SEO does SEO. This is two different ballgames altogether. Right? So, and this is a mistake that everyone make, not everyone, but a lot of business owners make that they want to rank for the category itself nationwide. Like if you have an u uh if if you're a roofer, I would like to rank for best roofing companies. I would like to rank for. But yes, that's a very different ballgame. And even if you rank for it, how if you're based in Austin, how are you going to solve leads for New York or how are you going to uh to solve leads for any other different state? So, and that is the conversation they have never never thought about. It's just about I just want to be ranking for best roofing company. That's it's a it's such a common like like people who are just getting into into SEO like who are just learning about SEO it's such a common mistake that they make is that they want to they want to rank for these broad keywords that aren't going to do them anything. Exactly like what you're saying. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And and honestly it's Google knows where the searcher is too. So if the searcher is in Austin and you have a page garage door repair Austin, that's going to sat that's going to be relevant. That's going to satisfy the relevance there. But whereas if you just have a page garage door repair, it Google's not necessarily going to know where you are. Google is going to choose the page that is titled garage door repair Austin over the page that is just titled garage door repair. And just an extension to this is another thing that we see a lot is people and business owners are still spamming their pages with near me terms like everywhere garage or repair near me uh all headings and subheadings have near me near me. You don't need to do that anymore. Google's algorithm are so sophisticated and so advanced right now that they understand when someone is searching near me what are they near to. They know from their IP address where they exactly are to I mean to the grid location even for that matter. They know exactly where where they are. So if they're searching near me, they know what is near to them. You don't need to mention you just need to mention your location where the business is and they'll automatically match that. Dude, thank you for sharing. Thank you for sharing that part because that is something that people need to know is that don't don't you don't need to to use these terms. Uh, last part last part of this conclusion wrapping up. They were a small company struggling to get calls, living off word of mouth and random referrals. The owner was almost ready to shut it all down. Now they're booked out weeks in advance and turning away low ticket jobs. All thanks to local SEO done right. All thanks to Sarveesh and his amazing team. Sarveshostra, thank you so much again for coming on the podcast. It's always great having you. Likewise, everyone. Thank you so much. And this is almost like a family to me uh everyone. And I do read all of the comments here whenever I come. And uh thank you so much for the love and support here guys. And uh hopefully we'll we'll keep bringing uh a lot of uh SEO knowledge and SEO jargon here. I'll keep throwing everything you guys way. Thank you so much for having me. And we're going to keep bringing the heat. All of your links will be in the description for this show, including you said your Claude, your new Claude co-work prompts. That's going to be in as well. This is episode 1 of the Edward Show. 1,09 days in a row doing this amazing podcast with my amazing guests. If you watch this on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow.