Welcome to my FREE Local SEO Course – Local SEO Unlocked – Module 1 – Lesson 1
– [Neil] Hey, everyone, it's Neil Patel, and today I have a new course for you called Local SEO Unlocked, where I teach you how to
dominate the local SERPs. Now, before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel or if you're on YouTube,
click the alert notification. That way, when I release
more of the modules in this training course,
you'll get notified. I want to welcome you to this course because it's going to
transform your local business, and I love SEO because
it works for anyone, especially if you're starting
off with little to no money. See, my first job was at an amusement park and I launched my first business
when I was 16 years old, although it didn't work well, but I decided to learn marketing to get my first business traction, and eventually it got traffic.
I still don't make much
money, but it got me traffic, and eventually I use those skills to help a company called
Elpac Electronics, which was my first client,
and I helped them generate another $25 million a year in sales. From there, I ended up launching
a few software companies like Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics,
my first blog, Quick Sprout, and now fast forward today,
I have neilpatel.com, which is my main blog, Neil
Patel Digital, my ad agency, and of course my SEO tool. If you haven't checked
that out, make sure you do. There's a free version of it. It's called Ubersuggest. In essence, I'm living
proof that SEO still works and it delivers results.
That's why I've worked with
so many large corporations and I have tons and tons of testimonials, but before we begin, I want
to break down a few things. First, you need to give this
course your full attention. Don't skip ahead. Go through every module
that's intended, take notes, and make sure you download all
the worksheets, cheat sheets, and PDFs that help you perform
all the tasks in each module, and you can find those at
neilpatel.com/training, then just click on Local SEO Unlocked. So if you approach this
program with a positive mindset and you implement everything you learn, you take your time, use
the PDF, the cheat sheets, the assignment vault,
all that kind of stuff, you'll be able to see results, and if you feel that you're a bit lost, you can always ask us questions, leave a comment below any of
the videos, including this one, or you can also rewatch the videos, because they'll be pretty
much available forever, technically, as long as
they're still relevant.
So let's get started. What is SEO? SEO is a process of optimizing
any given search word or term for a search engine on your site. I also have a marketing glossary 'cause I know there's a lot
of different terminology that we're going to end up
breaking down during this course, and you can find that at
neilpatel.com/training, and then click on Local SEO Unlocked and that'll break down all
the cheat sheets and modules, and even give you the
marketing acronym glossary, which you'll find when you go there, and it's underneath the first video, as well as a local SEO packed.
So what is local SEO? Well, you can download the pack. That'll help give you a preview of the page and what
local SEO is all about, but in essence, what it
is is whenever you search for something, you typically
see a map listing at the top then some local business listings
and they'll have ratings. Ratings are very important. The moment people have four
and a half stars or more, they tend to do well. Anything less than that,
they don't do as well, and then beneath that is you
see organic results as well. So let's go over local by the numbers.
46% of all searches on Google are local. Google 3-pack appears in the top spot 93% of searches with local intent. 18% of mobile local searches
lead to a sale within one day. 78% of local mobile searches
result in offline purchases, and 71% of the people surveyed say they look up and confirm
the location of a business before going to it for
the very first time. Local SEO is very important. About 89% of people search for a local business on their smartphone at least once a week, with 58% of people searching daily. It's very powerful, and it can drastically
change your local business if you rank at the top, but the key is you have to rank at the top because positioning is everything.
Over 35% of the clicks go to position one, and if you're not in the top 10, it really doesn't make
that big of a difference. The benefits of local SEO is it helps build positive reviews, great business reputation,
gets you more foot traffic. It gives your location more
visibility, again, more traffic. It can help reduce your advertising costs 'cause you don't have to keep
paying to get to the top, and it draws you more customers, which is the most important thing. So how do you win when
it comes to local search? Well, if you're looking to win, there's a few things you
need to keep in mind. You need to keep your name, address, and phone
number consistent, right? Wherever you talk about your business, by keeping that consistent,
it won't confuse people and it'll help you rank better. You want to optimize for quality reviews, and then, of course, go for quantity.
So you need both high
quality and tons of reviews. The more detailed the reviews, the better off you're going to do. You want to create local
content for press mentions, and use Google Maps on your site. So the signals that
matter with local search are things like categories, locations, keywords in the business
title, even location as well. Then there's review signals, like how many reviews do you have? How quickly are you getting
the reviews on a regular basis? The quality of the reviews,
are they really short? Are they in-depth? Are
they five-star, four-star? All that really matters. Off-page signals like
aggregators, or your name, address, phone number consistency, citations, people linking to you. On-page signals would be,
again, like your name, address, phone number,
keywords in the title, the authority of different pages, or even your old domain. Link signals, as I mentioned briefly, similar to off-page signals. The more sites linking to you and the higher their authority, the better off you're going to do. The more social shares you
have, the better off as well, and behavior signals are very important, like click-through rate. If people search and they
click on your result, it tells them that your copy's appealing.
If they go click the back button too fast, it tells Google, "Hey,
we don't like the site. Don't rank it as high." And there's also a lot
of tools that you can use that Google gives you for free, such as the Google local search, Google Maps, Search Console,
and even Google My Business. So the Google My Business listings, as you can see right underneath the map, and if you are in Google My Business, it really does help in the long run, but just don't expect to submit to Google My Business
and show up to the top. You need to do quite a bit more than that, and I'll break that down
throughout this course. This is the first video lesson. There's going to be five more, but I'll teach you how to get to the top as long as you follow every little thing.
Now, Google gives you guidelines on representing your business, and they even tell you the dos and don'ts, but they don't provide
too much information. They give you some good feedback,
like don't deceive people, or don't cloak, or don't use hidden pages, but that doesn't really tell you a ton. So what do the top-performing
local landing pages have in common? Well, there's a few things. They have great copy, strong headlines, product benefits, things
like social proof, teams, contact information, call-to-actions, location, and map.
There's a lot of little
things that go into it. I know I went over them quite fast, but that's because I'm
going to dive into them way more in-depth in the upcoming modules, and this program, in
essence, contains six videos. This is the first video, and I break down everything
from getting started to the signals, to
setting up your listings, to optimizing on- and off-page SEO. I really will go in-depth in
everything you need to do, and what you'll learn in this course is pretty much how to set up your site so you can not just rank at
the top, but stay at the top, which is more important, and continually get the traffic over time. As Jimmy Wales once said, "If it isn't on Google, it doesn't exist." So some action items for you. Go to neilpatel.com/training,
click on Local SEO Unlocked, and underneath the first video you'll find the Google search packs as well as the course itinerary, as well as marketing acronyms. So in future lessons, I'm going to be going over local keywords, how to find them, how to rank for them, how to use Google Search Console as well as Bing Webmaster Tools, how to create content, and, of course, how to track and improve your rankings.
So that's it. We're off and to the races. If you have any questions,
just leave a comment below and I'll do my best to
answer it and help you out. If you enjoyed this video, like it, share it, tell other people about it. Of course, subscribe to the
channel. Thank you very much..
