Summary
- To rank number one on Google, focus on keywords with lower difficulty and good search volume. For example, "gutter cleaning St Louis" has 590 searches per month, making it a good target.
- Begin by running a site crawl using tools like Screaming Frog to understand your website's current structure and issues.
- Remove generic posts or irrelevant content that adds no value. Start fresh with content that answers specific user intents.
- Ensure each service you offer has a dedicated page. This helps Google deliver the most relevant page for different queries.
- Include specific location names like "St Louis" in H1 tags and title tags of your pages for simple yet effective SEO enhancement.
- Use backlink analysis tools to find opportunities for quality links. Avoid spammy links as they can harm your website's reputation.
- Establish a strong site architecture by creating a sitemap with location-specific pages, like "Gutter Cleaning St Louis," to cover all relevant service areas.
- Develop certain content pieces to boost localized relevance; for instance, "How Much Does Gutter Cleaning Cost in St Louis?" These should include local context specific to your service area.
- Build citation links through reliable platforms like Lenic or Whitespark to increase your website's authority. Aim for around 50 to 100 citations to start.
- Consider sponsorship links from local organizations; ensure these links point to relevant internal pages to boost specific keyword rankings.
- Invest in high-quality backlinks to build long-term authority. Services like search intelligence can facilitate digital PR strategies for authoritative link-building.
- Focus on Google Local Pack ranking by acting as a service area business without displaying your address online. This aligns with Google's preferences for such business models.
- Target a high number of positive reviews to surpass competitors in local SEO rankings. Always aim to exceed the median review count by 10 to 25%.
- Regularly update and optimize both commercial and informational pages to maintain relevance and improve credibility in Google's eyes.
Video
How To Take Action
I would suggest starting by picking keywords with lower competition that have decent search numbers. For instance, if you're in the gutter cleaning business in St. Louis, use a keyword like "gutter cleaning St Louis." It has good monthly search volume and isn't too hard to target.
Next, I recommend using a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl your website. This will show you what's working and what's not. Once you've got the data, remove any generic or irrelevant content and focus on creating fresh content that meets user needs.
A good way to improve your website is to have a separate page for each service you offer. Include specific locations in your page titles and H1 tags for a simple SEO boost. For example, use "Gutter Cleaning St Louis" in your titles.
Doing a backlink analysis can show you where to get quality links. Always avoid spammy links and aim for quality ones instead. Build a solid site structure with a sitemap that includes location-specific pages to cover all service areas.
I also recommend creating content pieces focusing on local relevance. For example, write an article about "How Much Does Gutter Cleaning Cost in St Louis?" to give local context.
Building citation links on platforms like Lenic or Whitespark can enhance your website's authority. Try to get 50 to 100 citations. Sponsorship links from local organizations can also improve your ranking.
Focus on collecting positive reviews and aim to exceed your competitors by at least 10 to 25%. Regularly update your service and info pages to stay relevant and credible in Google's eyes.
These steps are cost-effective and don't require much time, but they can have a big positive impact on your business.
Quotes by Author
"This is a game of relevance"
"Google always wants to serve up the most relevant Pages possible"
"A simple change with big impact"
"You want to build the most relevant page"
"Google doesn't like when you show an address"
Full Transcript
I'm going to show you how to rank number one in Google for gutter cleaning St Louis let's get right into it all right so I just went into semrush and searched the keyword and it gets about 590 searches a month and it has pretty low difficulty according to semrush and I went and picked a random business so I picked gutter STL which is ranking number 45 for this important keyword for their business okay so this is the website that we're going to be looking at uh and I intentionally picked this one because a lot of the websites that I tend to analyze uh in these videos usually have like a ton of issues but I wanted to really focus on a website where they have a really solid foundation and they just need to make some tweaks to ultimately drive better rankings in Google so the first thing you're going to want to do is run a crawl with screaming frog you always want to start here because you just want to be able to see everything that we're working with on the website okay so in the context of this situation because this is you know not a client of mine I don't have access to Google analytics and Google search console you can get around this and by the way you know if you want to analyze your competitors you can also run them through screaming fraud so if you go to the atref section and go to metrics you can actually click on this and then you can clear all these out and then just click referring domains and then go down here and click on keywords and traffic so what this is going to do it's going to show you the quantity of keywords and the quantity of traffic that each individual page on the website has so this is a really good reverse engineer tactic to kind of see what pages are doing best on your competitor's websites but you can also obviously do this for your own website as well okay so once the crawls complete just go ahead and paste it into a Google sheet and I just label it crawl okay so what you want to look at are just the pages that are indexed and so we're looking at a very small website here and there's a few things that I noticed right away number one is we've got a bunch of kind of generic posts here or pages and clearly you know this is this is kind of boiler plate type of content so I would just get rid of these completely because what you're going to see here in a second is the right way to build out this content but all this stuff is just it's not adding any value and it's not going to Drive traffic either so I would actually just delete this because you would want to start from scratch okay and the second thing is this page is actually a 404 so this it looks like now uh there is some sort of calendly being used here but I would still 301 redirect this page to the calendly just in case there is some referral traffic that we can flow to this booking page okay now going through here once again this is a small website so we're not going to be dealing with the whole lot but I want to bring your attention to one thing right here so when we look at the homepage you're going to see that they're trying to op they're trying to rank for a lot of different things on one page and this is a very common issue and you'll see it quite a bit and the reason why this doesn't work is because Google always wants to serve up the most relevant Pages possible so when you're dealing with new gutters gutter repair and gutter guards that's a lot of different intent for each of those keywords so when we go over here and we look at the homepage you can see you can use the uh detailed Chrome extension here and you'll see that they're trying to hit on many different topics that each requires their own dedicated page so more than likely the best thing they could do is on the homage maybe Target something like St Louis gutter company right go a little bit broader to capture more ground in that regard and then what they need to do and I'll be showing you this in a second is really get hyperfocused on these internal commercial pages and optimize those the right way and when you do study the results that are doing the best we'll go we'll go ahead and look at the top ranking results it it's no secret that they're doing well right every single result here has a dedicated page or the entire website is built around gutter cleaning so like these guys they just do gutter cleaning okay their whole website is built around it so that is the type of relevance that we want to build and so this is a game of relevance so you want to build the most relevant page and if you're offering more than just gutter cleaning then you're going to need to have a dedicated page specifically for that gutter cleaning service okay and then I'll bring your attention here to the H1 tags and once again what you're going to see here is we have St Louis popping up on the homepage but these critical service Pages aren't even mentioning St Louis so this is like the easiest win imaginable is we just need to literally add the location that we're targeting in the title tag and the H1 and that should dramatically improve performance just doing that alone which is you know we're talking about a minute of work just to see a significant increase in performance okay so very very simple change with big impact and then the final column I want you to take a look at is the referring domains so this is very common for a relatively new website or a local site there's a lot of pages that don't have any backlinks so if you view backlinks from the perspective of votes then this website is not getting very many votes from the internet okay so to make a website perform better in Google we need to drive high quality votes to the actual domain so I'll be showing you how to do that in a second all right so the next step in this process is to build the site architecture so what we want to do is go to the main keyword that we're trying to rank for and what I like to do is I like to actually take the top competitor based on who has the most like the quantity of keywords that they're ranking for so when we look at this there's a few options but I'm going to take these guys in particular because they have the highest amount of traffic going to their page and they have about 60 total keywords so if we go and look at this you're going to see that they're ranking for a lot of things that we're also going to want to rank for okay so obviously everything related to St Louis is all very important but a few things that I noticed right away is some secondary cities like Oakville and Arnold uh I believe there's Chesterfield in here so there's a bunch of other secondary locations that will help us build support around St Louis and when it comes to gutter cleaning most of these companies do service broader areas so what you're going to see here is I've actually already gone through and started to build out this site site map in the right in the right way so what you can see here is we have in one column we have the keyword Target okay so gutter cleaning plus City okay so we have St Louis Oakville Arnold Fenton Chesterville Ballin and St Charles okay there might be more locations but these are the locations that actually have search volume so these are definitely going to be the the ones that we we want to focus in on okay the intent here is commercial so there's a lot of different types of search intent but most of them can be bucketed into either commercial or informational and in the context of local there's really no point of getting super granular just stick with commercial and informational it'll be a lot easier okay now what you're going to see here is we can see if we look at the St Louis URL here okay this is their current URL structure okay and I'm not a big fan of this URL structure the reason is because when we look at this if we just if we eliminated the root domain and we just saw this we wouldn't really know what what they did and where they're from right so gutters gutter cleaning are they where are they located right we just we're not entirely sure so you know in a situation like this I would I personally would probably change the url structure because they're not performing well right they're ranking number 45 in this case so I would probably change the UR the URL structure to mimic something like this so it' be gutter cleaning St Louis Missouri and you can see I've done this with all of these and the reason is once again because we want to see if the root domain did not exist would Google be able to understand what this page is about that's just my opinion I think building really highly relevant pages is a really good option so that's what I would do as far as building out the commercial pages okay and remember we're not talking about the other gutter type of services that they offer we're just hyperfocused right now on building topic Authority for gutter cleaning specifically okay that's the focus here and this is really important just to mention because a lot of people underestimate how much you can do just to build kind of this localized topic Authority okay so that's the first part we want to be able to build this out and then we want to have a really good title so gutter cleaning St Louis I actually just pulled this specifically from the top ranking competitor all right so we're just going to replicate their format which I think is sufficient for the title tag okay and then the H1 is slightly different right it's a little more natural a little bit cleaner uh but remember this is what's showing up in the search results this is what's showing up on the page when they actually go there right this is what they're seeing right here okay so with that in mind once you have built out your commercial page which should always be your priority always build at your commercial Pages first then what you're going to do is you're going to think about how do we build topic Authority around this concept of gutter cleaning but specifically making it specific to St Louis okay and so what I did is I found these ideas and what I actually did is I went into sem rush and I searched searched Gutter and gutter cleaning in semrush broadly and then I exported that and I put it through chat GPT okay so I ran all these through chat gbt as you can tell and then I told it I told it to add St Louis to the queries when it makes sense okay now the key here is it it needs to have variability for St Louis so when you look at the the results that I ended up with how much does gutter cleaning cost in St Louis okay this is a variable idea meaning that in St Louis there's a different a different answer than there's going to be in Los Angeles or Chicago or uh Minneapolis right there's always there's going to be a different answer so those are the types of pieces of content that you want to create another one here is how often should uh you get your how often should you do gutter cleaning okay or uh what does gutter cleaning include uh why is gutter cleaning important in St Louis and what's the best time for gutter cleaning in St Louis so notice that we're combining that core topic which is gutter cleaning right this is really really important but we're also combining the specific location that we're going after so you could theoretically just do how much is gutter cleaning cost but you'd be missing out on a massive opportunity to build localized relevance and when it comes to local SEO we need to build localized relevance it makes a huge difference okay so those that that right away we already have about you know 12 pages that we need to build or rebuild okay but then from there we also want to be thinking about how do we create content marketing assets and linkbait so once again we can just go right into chat GPT and we can have chat GPT help us with this okay so I'll show you an example so what we can do here is use a a a prompt like give me 10 link bait ideas for a gutter cleaning company in St Louis Missouri and it once again very important make sure you mention the type of company that it is and the location that they're serving because we want these to be hyperfocused on this one location okay and so what I went ahead and did is just picked the best ones and what you can tell here is these are these are really good topics that are specific to St Louis now remember these are more for Content marketing purposes these are more for potentially acting as link bait okay so we're going to try to add data to these we're going to try to make them super high quality these are not necessarily going to drive a lot of organic surge traffic but they're going to help Drive they can actually be used in ads right so if you're running ads specifically on Facebook uh that's targeting St Louis we could use this marketing collateral this content in our ads to drive awareness for the brand right so there's a lot of value in doing this uh and it's not just for that uh purpose but it's also for SEO purposes as well and there is evidence by creating more content around your core offer like this you're likely going to inform Google that this is your core competency okay so you just don't want to go overboard right and notice that each of these have different intent I'm not like creating the same content over and over like one is you know reasons why you should do it this one's an ultimate guide for maintenance this one's uh are about mistakes this one's about uh the impact on rain uh this one's about the cost of ignoring your gutters right so they're all different okay so with that in mind we have multiple pages that we need to rebuild we're talking about just like in a very short amount of work we've already got 20 pages that we can build to build a lot of topic Authority all right so once you've established your sit map what you want to do is you want to optimize each individual page so based on this scenario we're really just looking at one existing page and then a bunch of new pages that need to be created so in this context let's go ahead and take a look at the existing page and how well this content is actually optimized so as I mentioned before even at the most basic level the keyword is not really in the title tag it does have technically STL but it doesn't have St Louis and I would prefer to have St Louis in there there isn't a meta description and with the headings we don't even have St Louis in any of the headings at all okay so really just basic onpage SEO can can work wonders here but we want to take it to the next level okay so what I did is I I ran this page specifically through rankability the content Optimizer and this is what we're looking at okay so you as you can tell this content is not very optimized meaning when I talk about about optimization I just really mean relevance this page is not that relevant and so this score here is really based on relevance all right now the one thing we can do here is we can actually sort this by unused so we can see all of the things that they're not mentioning so just by adding something like this in the H1 tag this is immediately going to improve the relevance of that page just like that okay and we could even just add Mo just to take it to the next level okay and right away we already have improved the relevance of this page with just uh you know a couple seconds of work now we want to do is go through and and identify all these different topics here that we need to create additional sections about uh or find Opportunities to talk about these topics in the content now keep in mind we are not just looking at these ideas and just finding areas to inject them we're looking at these ideas as opportunities to build out more content on this page because even when we look at the word count here it's about 900 is the ideal they're even below that so this page just needs more content in general okay so and we've got plenty of opportunities now what I would do though is I'd probably rebuild this from scratch right I would probably rebuild this from scratch I would copy all of these NLP keywords and I would do something more like this okay so I'd say create an SEO content outline for gutter cleaning Chesterfield Missouri using these NLP keywords so you can tell here I went ahead I copied these and then I ran it through chat gbt but here's one little trick okay what you want to do is go to the about page okay and this is one way that you can really personalize your AI content so what I like to do is I will go ahead and pretend like I'm going to print this okay and I'll save it as a PDF all right and then from there I can actually upload that to the prompt and so what it will do is it will personalize this content specifically to this one company and this makes it a massive massive difference when you're trying to you know go against other people who might have just generic content this can help you have that differentiation okay now you'll see here it created a nice little outline and then I actually had it create the content for me from scratch okay so you can tell here just from the first draft alone it's already at a 76 okay and this is just the beginning right this is just the beginning so what I would do from here is I would send this to an editor but this is the same process that we would go through for all of these Pages the commercial Pages the informational Pages this the same exact process right so we're going to we're going to go into rankability we're going to copy the NLP keywords we're going to create that first draft uh with chat gbt and then we're going to have a human editor go through and clean it up okay so you can get all of this right you can build out a great sit map you can build out great content but if you do not have enough Authority you're really going to struggle okay and so when I'm speaking of authority I'm speaking in the context of backlink authority your overall backlink profile and so when we look at this particular website you can tell there's not a whole lot of authority going on at all and if we approach this from the perspective that backlinks are votes then this website needs more votes okay now the good news is there's a lot that can be done here because you're basically starting at Ground Zero now the first thing I would recommend doing is always start with The backlink Gap analysis so you can actually go look at the top competitor for the keyword and then just go ahead and look at go into the backlink Gap tool and run them through so you'll see here this is the competitor and this is us okay and we want to see what's the see see what opportunities exist all right now what we're going to find here though is this is why you got to be really really careful okay because you know although this competitor is doing really well uh what we don't want to see uh is is the types of links that they're getting okay so when we go ahead and look at this particular link here this is just your classic spam link all right this is a a profile link these are just not good yeah these are not what you want at all okay and so we don't want to model them is the point we don't want to model these links and we're going to go ahead and look through and see are there any that we should try to model once again you know same type of profile link building here with kind of keyword Rich uh anchor texts so this might work short term but this is a path to penalization with this in mind you're going to have to kind of build this from scratch because you don't have a competitor that's already done all the good work for you so what we'll do instead is the first thing I would want to do is build what I would call foundational links so you want to just build straight citation links so you can use a service like lenic you can use bright local you can use whitespark uh you know those are the three they're they they're all kind of different but lenex just manually goes out there and builds them for you the other ones are kind of a little more automated um but I just I prefer using lenic uh just my personal opinion so uh but basically what you want to do is build out uh at least you know 50 to 100 citations and these citations are not going to you know massively move the needle but they're going to give you a nice base layer of you know high quality links from good websites that are trusted and it's going to really give you a nice diverse anchor Tex profile okay so start here get that nice base layer then from there I would immediately start looking for sponsorship opportunities so just search something like sponsors Plus St Louis want to get really specific spefic to the local level and ideally we want to find a page like this okay so the way to kind of uh qualify these prospects is go in here we want to see that they're actually linking out to the companies okay sometimes they don't sometimes it's just kind of like a logo and they don't link out we want to see that they're actually linking out okay because then we're going to reach out to them say hey uh we saw your sponsorship page we' love to sponsor you uh what's the investment to to get on this page okay simple as that don't don't overthink this okay so try to get as many of these links as possible and start with the the broader City first so like St Louis but then don't be afraid to look at some of these smaller cities you'd be surprised how many sponsorship opportunities you can find just in you know a small City like Oakville or Chesterfield there's tons of opportunities so don't underestimate that uh but the kind of nuance here is like let's say you get a sponsorship link uh for uh let's say some sort of organization that's based in Chesterfield you would want that link to go to your tester field gutter cleaning page okay that's that's ideal now that's not always going to be possible but if you can try to drive it to that internal page okay uh and then next thing I would do is once you've kind of built up a nice base of citations you've built up uh a nice base of sponsorship related links then you may want to start to invest in some very strong back links links that you're really focused on quality over quantity and that's where a service like search intelligence can come in this is a digital PR strategy and so what they'll do is they'll basically act on your behalf and they can do what's called like expert commentary so they'll act as the expert they'll respond to journalist queries uh and then you'll get a really strong backlink from a very authoritative website back usually typically back to your homepage but don't worry about that because driving links to the homepage is still incredibly effective as long as you have built proper internal linking so if we look at this you'll see you know they've already got this set up up really well so any link that goes to the homepage is just going to flow to these commercial Pages as well so it will be extremely beneficial so definitely recommend them if you know if if the budget is is there for this it's not definitely not a small investment but this these are the types of links that you want you do not want to focus on quantity of back links kind of similar to what you're seeing here this is not the path to go uh you want to go this path if you want to really focus on building long-term results okay and then the final piece of this is on the local Pack level so when it comes to gutter cleaning you know this is definitely a service area type of business model so you know you're not going to need to have to show your address which is a good thing uh and in fact Google doesn't like when you show an address when it is a service area type of business and as you can tell the number one result is acting as a service area business and they're absolutely crushing it but keep in mind they also have a ton of reviews so what you want to do is kind of get that median review count and then just make that your target but you do want to add at least 10 to 25% on top of that median review count and try to hit that because you don't want to just get the same amount of reviews you want to exceed your competitors in reviews so if you really want to take it seriously maybe don't even get the median just look at your top competitor so you know 232 reviews make that your target make 250 your target right because you're just not going to beat them unless you get you you know a similar amount of reviews okay so when we go down to look here we'll look at uh the the website that we've been studying here and you'll see they are acting as a service area business and they've got 13 reviews but you know a lot of room to grow here so if they want to be able to go to the next level they're going to have to take review generation very very seriously so that is how I would go about ranking for gutter cleaning St Louis I hope that was helpful and as always uh please like the video and subscribe for more free SEO training videos thanks for watching
