Google Maps + organic for local businesses. Digital Press Releases DM "PR" For information
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Joined May 2022
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Embed your GBP in the footer of your website
not a random map. use share, then embed a map, from your own profile.
buy a press release. Have those 300 backlinks and referring domains pointed at your site.
link to your Google profile from the press release. Embed your Google profile too.
your first release uses your brand name and your naked URL as the anchor. the second one mixes the brand with the keyword.
do another release every two quarters. your competitors are sitting on zero or one.
five referring domains and a thousand backlinks looks bought. keep the ratio healthy.
before you buy anything, run your competitors through a free backlink checker. that number is what you have to beat.
show your address on your GBP. not a service area.
link your GBP to its city page, not your home page
your primary category is the thing you sell. not the one that sounds closest.
three to five secondary categories. only things you actually sell.
list 15+ services on your GBP. then go back and write two to three sentences under every one.
fill in every attribute. scroll the whole list. yes or no on each.
use all 750 characters of your GBP description.
link all seven social profiles from your GBP. link them from your site. link your site from all seven.
your hours change where you rank. after you close, you rank lower. mark closed days closed. never lie about being open.
put a keyword in your business name. if your LLC won't allow it, file a DBA.
post real job photos. not stock. ask customers to leave photos in their reviews.
send the exact review link, not your profile. it opens the stars and the box. put it on a QR code and a tap card.
ask for the review within 24 hours of the job. follow up once.
put your keyword and a variation in your meta title
put your keyword and a variation in your title tag
your H1 should have your main keyword in it
your H2 should have your keyword and a variation
your H3 should have your keyword and a variation
your H4 should have your keyword and a variation
your H5 should have your keyword and a variation
your H6 should have your keyword and a variation
have more than one of each h tag. Look at your competitors pages. Do 5% more.
variations look like roof, roofing, roofer.
pick the keyword in Google Trends, past five years. stack every way people say it. house sitting and house sitter are different keywords.
then listen to how customers ask for it on the phone. then read your reviews and your competitors' reviews. those are the words.
your paragraphs need your keywords too. and the variations.
AND the entities in your niche. the things Google expects to see on a page like yours: materials, parts, brands, places.
every entity has a Wikipedia page, a Wikidata item and a Knowledge Graph ID. link all three in knowsAbout.
bold the keywords and the entities on the page.
name your image files after the service before you upload. not the camera's number.
two to three sentences of alt text on every image. keyword, variation, what's in the photo.
a visual service needs more photos on the page. count what the ranking pages have.
a video on the page gets video schema and the transcript behind it. two to three pages of content nobody has to scroll past.
your About page tells Google who the owner is. college, licenses, what they know about, photos on the job.
Person schema under every name. alumniOf, memberOf, sameAs to their profiles.
put your reviews on your site with the name, the photo and the date. bold the terms in them.
the text behind a closed accordion or a tab is still read by the crawler. the customer sees a clean page.
have a privacy policy and a terms page. Google requests them whether you link to them or not.
your name, address, and phone number should be identical on every listing
post on your GBP twice a week. every post links to a service page.
have a video on your GBP. always.
respond to every review within 24 to 48 hours. the bad ones too.
every page on your site should be two to three clicks from the homepage
a service hub, a locations hub, a blog hub. each one links to every page of its kind.
a page with no links pointing to it doesn't exist to Google
one service, one page. a services page listing everything ranks for nothing.
four to five blog posts about the service, each linking to its money page with the keyword as the anchor.
a blog post ranking for your service keyword is a red flag. it's competing with your money page. fix the links and the counts.
blog about where you are. things to do in your city, linked to your location page.
pick www or non-www. link to that one every time.
every external link uses that same version. your GBP, your YouTube, every directory. no URL shorteners.
check for 404s. even the big guys have them.
open Search Console, Settings, Crawl stats. if JavaScript is the top file type, Google is reading a blank page.
do not build two pages targeting the same keyword. they will fight each other.
have two sitemaps. xml for Google, html for people.
don't build 200 city pages. build the ones you have something real to say about.
build your site in plain HTML. if Google has to render it, it might see a blank page.
your first backlinks should use your brand name as the anchor text
the quote form pops out. every extra click costs you a lead.
if your business has a season, start three to four months before it.
anything talking about your business has the same Name. The same address. And phone number.
do all of this for six months and watch what happens.
So I've gotten a ton of DMs about Press Releases.
One of the biggest questions is:
"What results can I expect"
"What should I see from this"
"Can I see a before and after"
"Show me examples of you applying this"
So today I'm going to rank a Brand new website with only Press Releases links.
I've already got someone that's okay with me using their brand / company information.
I needed a place to send the leads once the site ranks.
Now you might be asking, why not just answer their questions instead?
It's a great question, there's two main reasons.
1.) My respect for my clients Privacy
2.) Security reasons
With SEO it's very common for people to "Negative SEO" your site.
They will point bad backlinks at your site.
They will do a Denial of service, where your server crashes or it's resources are so full that Google cannot reach it.
So you're entire site drops out of the index.
They will point Adult links (Think XXX) at your site and get it taken down.
Then there's also snitch SEO, where someone will literally go tell Google you're breaking the rules.
When you look in reality, almost everything is breaking the rules.
So instead of exposing previous clients to all of this and having to worry.
I'm going to kill a few birds with one stone.
1.) Setting expectations of a Press Release
2.) Have a VSL or a resource I can show people without having to answer questions.
3.) Show I can rank a site
4.) Document the process showing off my product
I've already paid for the Domain. I've paid for the Press Release.
I will incur all costs. I'm not charging per lead or a monthly rate for the site to be up and generating leads.
This is entirely Pro Bono or Free.
I will not reveal the Domain until after I've shown what you can do with Press Releases.
ChatGPT has never ranked a site.
It has only been fed Google documentation. And Google is not going to tell us what it takes to rank.
There's no incentive.
The majority of their money comes from ads.
So you take advice that works, you plug it into your A.I., and your A.I. says Google's documentation and a random Reddit thread said this is spammy and bad.
Check it yourself.
Search DUI lawyer Los Angeles.
Click some of the top ranking sites.
View source. Control + F.
Look at how many times they use the keyword.
You'll see it a couple hundred times.
Thousands of times.
Then you scroll Instagram and hear keyword stuffing's bad.
What are we defining as keyword stuffing?
Look at what's already currently ranking.
That will tell you what's allowable and what you can get away with.
Then go look at other competitive environments.
Los Angeles.
Beverly Hills.
Fort Worth.
Dallas.
What are those companies doing?
And test.
I'm at 25 domains where I'm just throwing shit at a wall.
I just want to see what works.
Be careful with A.I. tools creating 100 page or 200 page websites.
I've done a lot of audits recently, and people are starting to make these insanely big websites. 50 pages. 100 pages. 200 pages. Because it's so easy with these A.I. tools.
This is normally how it goes. You create a whole bunch of pages at once on a brand new site. Google loves it at first. Traffic explodes. It goes good for the first month. Then the second month you are taken out of orbit.
A whole bunch of pages at once on a brand new site is a huge spam signal. It doesn't look organic or natural.
To rank a local business you may not need more than 15 pages. You can rank a one-page website. I have a client right now on just the homepage.
What I do instead:
1. Start with the homepage. Get the on-page optimization really well.
2. The privacy policy, the terms of service, an About page. The sitemap, robots.txt, ads.txt.
3. The Google Business Profile linking back to it.
4. Then three to five pages. Then blog content that links back to the service pages.
Already published them all? Slow down your content creation pace. Start interlinking them. Build links to the root domain, then to the individual pages.
I ran a study on 3,272 roofer profiles across ten big metros.
We measured the total amount of reviews on each profile, and how far from the profile it could rank.
As a profile got more reviews, it increased the distance from the profile in which it ranked. It also influenced the position it ranked in.
But nothing makes it past the 10 mile mark. Anything outside of a ten mile radius is going to fall below position twenty. You're not actually visible.
In the study, all we looked at was the total amount of reviews. There may be other factors.
So two moves.
As you get more reviews, your profile can rank further and further from the location.
And past ten miles, you need a second Google Business Profile.
The two radiuses overlap slightly, and someone in between those two profiles can see you take up two of the top three.
Can you open a second Google Business Profile? Yes. A third, a fourth, a fifth.
Look at A1 Garage Door Service. KKR is buying it for about $2 billion.
In the Phoenix metro alone, A1 runs 13 Google Business Profiles. 4 in Phoenix. 2 in Scottsdale.
One each in Gilbert, Mesa, Tempe, Peoria, Surprise, Queen Creek and Fountain Hills.
They run 111 Google Business Profiles across 17 states.
I like to think about each profile being its own billboard.
Within a four to five mile radius of your profile, when someone types garage door repair near me, you get a billboard placement in that three pack.
After that four to five mile radius, you start to severely drop out of the rankings.
It's steep. A vertical line, straight down to 15th, 20th and 20th plus.
One profile only reaches the people near it.
You want as many billboards as you can get.
So you stack them.
In Phoenix theirs are relatively close to each other, so don't be worried about placing your second or third profile too close.
The 60 character title tag limit was set by everyone but Google.
I tested it.
I placed a million keywords in one title tag.
Random combinations of letters and numbers.
Then I searched site: and a keyword in quotes, and kept going down the list. The first keyword. The 5,000th. The 150,000th. The page kept appearing.
It wasn't until the 160,000th keyword that my site stopped appearing.
Am I telling you to do this? No. But it does go to show the 60 character rule is not a hard set rule that you have to abide by. Keeping it to 60 is an easy guideline. You can absolutely do 120. You can go 180. You can go 240.
The same people will tell you your meta description has to be 160. I've seen a page ranking number one with 225 characters in its description.
These artificial rules were set by people. Search your keyword and see what is currently ranking.
Be careful moving towards these A.I. website builders.
They build with JavaScript frameworks like React. Your browser is doing all the work to render the content, so to you the site looks great. Google doesn't see what we see. It reads all the code line by line, and a majority of the time it does not have rendering enabled.
So Google comes by, and at first it sees that there's nothing there. It sends your page to a secondary queue. That queue can take days. It can take weeks. It can take months.
Rendering costs Google money. It's not going to come by and try to figure your site out.
Check your own site.
Right-click, view source. If you can scroll through your content, you're good. If it's mostly script, you know what to fix.
Search Console, settings, crawl stats, by file type. If you see JavaScript high there, that is a big issue.
The fix is pure HTML, or server-side rendering. With static HTML, every crawler, every AI, every LLM sees all your content. Every single time.
That's why I build static HTML.
Your domain should be a .com.
You do not want a .net. You don't want a .law, a .io or a .co. A .com top-level domain is going to rank higher in search, and it is a big distinction as you get into more and more competitive environments.
Search your keyword and look at the URLs on page one.
Nine times out of 10 those are the top-level domains that are ranking in Google.
When I do see a .net in the fourth position, it might be an indicator that this is a lower competition keyword.
Say you don't currently have a .com.
You have one of these other top-level domains.
Keep that website up and build a brand new site on the .com, with a clear distinction so it is not considered duplicate content.
Both can rank, but it is more likely the .com will. As you rank the .com, you slowly get rid of the other.
One podcast turns into hundreds of social posts, all pointing back to the site. Repurposing on steroids.
Go on a podcast, or record one. Before recording, Google the main keyword and open People Also Ask. Take every question. Record once, answer them rapid fire, one segment per question.
Feed the podcast video to Claude. Have it transcribe and cut 10 short form videos.
Each short goes out on 6 platforms. That's 60 posts. Each description has a keyword I'm targeting and a link to my money page for that keyword.
Each short becomes a still carousel: key moments with the captions across them. 60 more.
Recut each short to 4:3. Trial reels on Instagram so we don't lose our audience, scheduled weeks out everywhere else. 60 more.
Turn the transcripts into tweets, LinkedIn posts, YouTube community posts and Facebook posts. 40 more.
Screenshot the X posts and post those on X, LinkedIn, YouTube community, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. 60 more.
That's 280 posts from 10 videos. Every one is a page on a site with far more authority than yours, pointing at you. Do it four more times and you're past a thousand.
The editing used to be a month of work. Now it's one run of an agent.
How I would figure out what services / what to apply to a Burger store's Google Business Profile.
I would download the Chrome Extension Pleper.
Then I would look at my local competition.
Then, I would go across the entire U.S looking at all of the BIGGEST citites.
I want to see what other Burger Stores are doing.
I would create a road map or strategy.
That's what they're all doing. I can see X, y and z.
Let me apply it to my own store and see what happens.
Some key tips:
Click around on every possible button on the Google Business profile.
Look at everything that they're doing.
Posts on the GBP. Reviews. Products.
Do they have all seven social profiles linked out to from the Google Business Profile.
Google lets you link to seven social profiles from your Business Profile.
Link to your site from all seven and that is seven free backlinks.
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok and X.
Even if you don't post on them, you still want a profile on each.
In each one, a very verbose about or bio.
Your name, your address, your phone number and your website link stay the same across all of them.
Every one links back to your site, with the same URL structure the site serves.
YouTube is another Google entity.
In the YouTube about section, link to all of your other social profiles too.
Multiple references to all of them.
Then, anytime you launch a new service page, a new location page or a new blog, post it on those platforms with a link going back to it.
When Google crawls those platforms it finds the URL and follows it.
Every time it crawls those pages, even months or years later, it follows the URL again.
More chances to be crawled, and it keeps your pages indexed longer.
Your posts on those platforms can rank in search too. They can get clicks.
From this one video I will get 60 clips.
These will be repurposed across the 5 Major social Platforms for short form content.
Instagram
Facebook
Youtube Shorts
TikTok
Linkedin
That 60 then turns into 300 pieces of content.
Helping an 8 Figure Exit Founder Fix His Google Indexing
A founder with an 8 figure exit shared his Search Console with me. 5,500 URLs, most of them not indexed. A national brand, three months live, state and city pages.
I went through it live. Timestamps below, and under them what happens at each one and what to do about it on your own site.
Timestamps:
0:00 The short version: why the pages are not indexed
0:23 How many URLs do you think there should be?
3:28 A ton of pages at once is a spam signal
4:41 The authority: referring domains and backlinks
5:10 A URL being generated by the CMS
6:24 How Google will view it: crawl budget
7:10 Crawl stats: the app subdomain is exposed
8:18 URLs being created that shouldn't exist
9:14 site: search, a paintbrush of confidence
10:21 Performance and Google Analytics
12:50 Is there any secret sauce to getting city pages indexed?
14:03 If Google does not have it indexed, it is not served
14:56 Internal linking: a hub that links to the city pages
16:37 Build links: 10 to 25 referring domains per city page
17:28 Referring domains vs backlinks, trunk and leaves
18:30 How does one get backlinks? Press releases
20:13 Niche edits, social content and PBNs
23:00 AI gets you 80% of the way: on-page
23:52 Build the page, see where it sits, then expand
24:14 Never delete, never change a URL structure
25:03 Keep checking in: three to five months
26:46 Organic's king
What happens at each one
00:00 The short version. The cold open is five lines from the call. I would never delete. You think you have five and a half thousand? These are just URLs being created that shouldn't exist. If Google does not have it indexed, it is not served. The worst thing you can ever do is change a URL structure. The rest of the video is how I got to each one.
00:23 How many URLs should there be? That is my first question on any site, before I look at a single error. He said 5,500. Know your real page count before you read Search Console, because the indexed number means nothing until you know what it is a percentage of.
03:28 A ton of pages at once. Launch thousands of pages in one go and Google sees a spam signal, because it is watching everyone else do the same thing. Google also discovers your URLs by crawling links. It crawls, queues, crawls, queues, and if the pages are not linked from the hubs it reaches, it never works through the list. Every page needs a link from a hub Google already reaches.
04:41 The authority. Referring domains and backlinks decide whether Google says yes or no to spending more resources on your domain, following your links and treating the pages as worth indexing. Not enough of either and Google does not spend the crawl.
05:10 A URL being generated by the CMS. Scrolling the not-indexed list, I found URLs no one made. A misconfigured CMS can multiply your URL count overnight. His AI agent called them harmless. Check your own list for URLs you did not write.
06:24 How Google will view it. I can only tell you how Google sees it. It thinks you have more URLs than you do, which can trip the spam signal and lower quality signals. You get a set crawl budget, and every fetch spent on a junk URL is a fetch your real pages never get. Where there is smoke there is fire, so it is probably happening somewhere else too.
07:10 Crawl stats. Settings, then Crawl stats, right below robots.txt. It shows when Google comes and what it fetches. His app subdomain was exposed and eating crawl budget. Open yours, click By response, 200, and read what Google is actually spending its time on.
08:18 URLs that should not exist. The 200s were CSS and JavaScript files with a deployment ID stuck on the end. Google treats each one as a page. So his real pages were more indexed, as a percentage, than the top line said. Separate your pages from your files before you panic.
09:14 The site: search. Open Google, type site: and your domain, then click Tools under the search bar. It showed 598. I trust that number more than Search Console, but any Google number is a paintbrush of confidence, never one to one. Page through the results, skip to page 10, and see how far it lets you go.
10:21 Performance and Analytics. Performance in Search Console showed the launch, a drop when he pulled pages for a certification review, and a climb since. Everything looked fine for three months in. In Analytics, go to Reports, Business objectives, Generate leads, and read traffic by channel and by city. Give a new site more time before you judge it.
12:50 Any secret sauce? He asked if indexing is a waiting game. My first question back was what the goal is. For him, city pages ranking in their cities. Name the goal before the tactic.
14:03 Not indexed, not served. He thought a page that is not indexed is still out on the internet. If Google does not have it indexed, it is not served. He put it himself: a national brand needs every one of those pages indexed.
14:56 Internal linking. A local business has a locations page that links to every location. Same shape here: a state hub linking to each city page, each city page linking to its treatment pages. Build the hub, then make sure every leaf hangs off it.
16:37 Build links. I build backlinks from an assortment of referring domains to the hubs first, the pages that link out to everything. Then each city page needs 10 to 15 to 25 referring domains of its own, eventually.
17:28 Referring domains vs backlinks. A link from Yelp and a link from Facebook is two referring domains. Two links from Facebook is three backlinks but still two domains. The homepage is the trunk, the city pages are the leaves. And SEO is a competition, so for every page check what the ranking competitor has in links, referring domains and internal structure. Beating a national player and beating a local one are very different jobs.
18:30 Press releases. His question was where backlinks even start. For me, press releases. An article about your page goes out on a provider's network, Yahoo Finance, AP News, Business Insider, with up to five links in it. Depending on the provider you get 100, 500 or 1,000 referring domains from one release.
20:13 Niche edits, social, PBNs. Niche edits are asking other sites for a link, sometimes paid. I have never done them. Social content on the big six or seven, LinkedIn, X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, carries links back to your site. Private networks of your own sites exist, white hat or black hat depending on how you run them, and in his regulated industry they are off the table. Pick the routes your industry can live with.
23:00 AI gets you 80%. AI gets you 80% of the way, the last 20 it cannot, because it is trained on general scraped information. On-page still has to be done by hand against what is ranking: keyword density as a percentage of the words on the page, LSI terms, entities, schema, heading tags, listicles, bolded and italicized keywords and variations.
23:52 Build, sit, expand. If you want to jump start indexing, backlinks are the route. The other route is a cadence. Enter one market, build the page, see where it sits, fix the on-page if it needs it, build backlinks, and once it ranks, go to the next market. Not everything at once.
24:14 Never delete. His AI agent told him to delete the unindexed pages and re-roll them. He said no. The worst thing you can ever do to a site is change its URL structure. Leave the URLs alone and fix what feeds them.
25:03 Three to five months. His agent's real count was 4,478 city pages, 1,025 state pages, 404 blog posts and 54 pages, and the sitemap was carrying things that are not pages. Internally link everything, especially the blog, and with that many pages send a press release every month. I will check back in three to five months.
26:46 Organic's king. He built two service businesses on doing a good job, and barely ran ads for the first. Paid got the second one moving, but it all stemmed from the work. Organic is king.
Your site loads with www and without it. To Google, that's two identical sites.
The way I think about it: a file on your desktop. Copy and paste the same document. Now you have two files, named slightly different, same content, same everything. That is how Google remembers a URL. Every service page, every location page, twice.
Half your crawl budget goes to each version. Google is crawling basically the same pages twice, and it starts to see duplicate pages.
Type your domain with www in front of it. Then type it without the www. If both of them load, you have a problem.
Pick one version. One is not better than the other. 301 redirect the other. Same for http to https.
The canonical tag on every page is the version you kept. If your canonical points to a URL that redirects, you're teaching Google not to trust your canonical tags.
Any link pointing back to the site has the same URL structure. The links on the Google Business Profile, the social profiles, the citations, the press releases, the internal links. A link to the other version loses a little of its link equity.
Go audit your social profiles right now. What URL are they linking to?
My rule for Google Business Profile services: fifteen or more, and a description on every one.
I looked at 14,140 profiles. 39.7% have 15 services. 14.7% have written a description on even a single service.
Services with descriptions on them are the two rarest. Do those two alone and you beat 87.4%.
Each service is a keyword people search, not what you call it in the trade.
Go to Performance, scroll down, and you will see the search terms your profile is already appearing for.
Anything on that list that is a service you offer goes in. Include the variations. Nobody searches the same way.
First list the service and save it. Then go back and put a description on each one.
Two to three sentences. You cannot do both in the same pass. Do not overthink it.
Do not build the whole list in one sitting. Five, then after two weeks another five, matching the primary category, then five more.
Someone is going to say you can only put twenty-five services on a profile. I have watched one with seventy-five rank number one.
Do it before you touch the website.
Google already knows what Christmas lights are.
It has a Knowledge Graph ID for it, /m/03cg49.
It has one for your service, and one for every city, county and state you serve.
Find the Knowledge Graph ID, the Wikidata ID and the Wikipedia link for every entity on your page.
In your schema, link to these pages.
When I build a client's schema, knowsAbout is where I tell Google what they are an expert at.
Every service they offer, linked to its Knowledge Graph ID, its Wikidata page and its Wikipedia page.
The areas they serve go in areaServed, each with its ID.
When Google comes to crawl the page and sees that URL in sameAs or areaServed, it knows: this thing I already know about.
From the Wikipedia article and the Wikidata page, Google then has other information, other things it knows about in relation to this.
It gets a better understanding of what you do and where you serve, without you having to put more content on the page.
Anything that has a Wikipedia article is more than likely going to have a Knowledge Graph ID and a Wikidata page.
Smartest person I know for A.I / LLMs
I’ve been working on two related projects: fine-tuning a small classifier with reproducible runs, and merging a LoRA adapter into a base model to export sharded BF16 weights. I have experiment records, checkpoints, manifests and evaluation artifacts. Are training, adapter-merge and weight-export traces useful for what you’re looking for?”
This is the service page structure you want:
The whole page, top to bottom, as I build it. /🧵
1. The top. One page per service and per location, a clean keyword URL, one idea each.
The keyword and a variation in the title tag and the meta description.
H1: main keyword + city, almost an exact match of the service you target.
The top of the page stays short and sells.
The free quote is not its own page: when they click it, it pops out and they fill out the form there.
Each click you add reduces the rate at which it converts.
Name, address and phone identical to the profile and every listing.
One URL version, www or not, 301 the other, and the canonical and every internal link match it.
The links and the bottom.
Service pages link sideways to each other and down to their location pages.
Location pages link back up to the service.
Nothing is a dead end.
Four to five blog posts on the service, every one linked to the service page, the clickable words the exact service you want to rank for.
On the pages ranking across the ten biggest cities in Texas, the average was around 157 internal links.
One study, not a law.
Count where the links go.
The money page should get the most.
LocalBusiness schema with areaServed for the city, and inside it the city's Wikipedia link, its Wikidata link and its Knowledge Graph ID.
Person schema for the owner: name, job title, who they work for, the image, sameAs to the profiles.
In the footer: your own profile map, share then embed a map, not a random map.
The privacy policy and the terms of service, because Google checks for both whether you link to them or not.
The sitemap.xml and the sitemap.html.
The hubs in the header and the footer.
Schema.
Code you add to the page that tells Google, in its own language, what your page is about.
Different types of schema on your page is a ranking factor. The types I use: local business, area served, review data, FAQ, and same as.
Then Person for the owner and VideoObject with the transcript behind it.
Most local businesses only use a handful of on page ranking factors.
I've made a list of 50.
You can have my Grok bot compare your page with 3 competitor pages on all 50: x.ai/bot/P1ijZO3rOe1VeNBcQfE…
