684: $500 Per Client Per Month: Why Local SEO Should Be Your Next Side Hustle

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1:17The idea is to help local businesses gain more visibility in Google so they can make more money and the market is huge. Think millions of potential small business customers here. Today's guest runs a six-figure digital agency while traveling the world with his family and says if he was starting over, he'd focus on selling a simple local SEO service. This might be the last bastion of SEO, local SEO. From ericdingler.com, Eric Dingler, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to unpack this with you for your audience. You bet. Stick around in this one. I'm excited as well.

1:53We're going to figure out, well, how do we find customers? how we're going to deliver this service quickly and effectively, and maybe how to remove yourself from being the hands-on technician in the business. But kick us off with what do you see as the opportunity here in local SEO? Well, for me, and especially as somebody that every three weeks to three months, I'm moving into a completely new city with my wife and our 14s, we're constantly going to Google Maps or Apple Maps, looking for restaurant barber, you know, grocery store, dentist, whatever it is we need. And I don't see people stopping that.

2:33People are still looking for that local service. I don't see it going away. And everybody in the entire world uses Google Maps, Google My Business, and Apple Maps. Yeah, where regular SEO, article SEO, website SEO is being eroded away by AI and maybe Reddit in the search results. Local SEO is maybe a less competitive game and it still works by the old rules, more or less. Whereas if I want a restaurant near me, it's not being eaten by AI just yet. Yeah. The thing about Google, they have invested millions and millions upon millions of dollars mapping every city, every country, every road in the world, adding all of the businesses that they can find to it, working to ensure that we have access to a business's hours, contact information, all these things.

3:25And they don't charge for this. They don't charge you and me as the end user trying to find a place. And they don't charge the businesses to be on it. But even with that, according to Google's most recent numbers in the USA, only about 20-25 % of businesses have claimed their Google business profile and have optimized it. So 75 % of the local businesses around you haven't done this yet. And they all already know about Google. They already know about SEO. And if you can learn a few key phrases and use those when you're talking to businesses, it's a very easy service to sell. In fact, Nick, today is our oldest son's 18th birthday.

4:12Oh, okay. And he is an outdoor kid through and through. Computer's not his thing. He wants to be outside all the time. He wants to play soccer and stuff like that. But if he was to come to me today and say, okay, dad, I want to start my own thing. What should I do? And my agency, we do web design development, app work. We focus a lot on helping businesses meet accessibility standards. We do paid ads, social media. We do all those things. Yes. And this is In Transit Studios. If anybody wants to go check that out. That's all right. Go ahead. Thanks. Yeah. But if my 18 year old came to me today and said, I want to start my own thing, I would give him a checklist to start a local SEO business.

4:53And I would say, this is what you need to go do. All right. Coach me through this. We'll worry about like the technical skills. Well, I don't know. I don't know the first thing about local. We'll worry about that in a second. But like, okay, let's say I'm your, I'm your son. You know, like you talk me through this. What do I do first? Great. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to go sell it. I do this a lot. I often sell services that I don't know how I'm going to deliver it. In fact, my very first local SEO client, I sold them local SEO. I collected the money and then I use that money to go pay for somebody to teach me how to do what I need to do.

5:29Because you can tell your customer, this is going to take me four weeks, six weeks, eight weeks. They don't know. Yeah, yeah. You set up expectations. Sure. Exactly. So you set those expectations. So what I like to do in this case, and this is so kind of take going step by step, really breaking this down. The first thing I would do is I would write a what we call beta test social media post. And later at the end of the episode, Nick, we can give people a link to I have this written out in an actual checklist with links and everything that people can follow. Perfect. But for the conversation, the thing I like to do is I like to create a beta social media post.

6:12People that are listening, they probably have friends that are business owners or they use local businesses. They have a dentist. They probably have a barber or hair salon. They have a favorite restaurant. That's not a chain. You have your local mom and pop favorite places, landscape or whatever it might be. you have friends that have these businesses. So what I like to do is create a social media post that says, hey, fellow business owners or hey, business owners who are friends, I'm testing a new piece of software, or I'm testing a new system that lets me help local businesses be found more often when somebody searches for them.

7:00I'm looking for three businesses that I can use that would be willing to let me use their business as an experiment, you'll get an increased visibility on Google and I'll share all the results with you in exchange for helping me out. If you're interested, let me know. So that's kind of the gist, something like that. You put that out there and then you tell every business owner the next time you talk to them. You know, if you've got a neighbor that has a local business, you go knock on the door and you're going to tell them you're going to do this. And then you can say when they respond to the Facebook ad or when you go talk to them, you say it's$500.

7:42You know, the first time I did it, I sold it for$1 ,300, had never sold it before, sold it for$1 ,300. Okay. If you're as arrogant as I am, you can do that. But if you're a little more like, uh, I don't know, that makes me nervous, start lower. That's okay. But there is a guy, Sam Sarsten, and he has a coaching program. It's$49 without the community aspect,$99 if you want into the community, that's monthly. And he teaches exactly how to do all this. I don't have a course, but I know Sam's course is great. You can go sell this and then go sign up for Sam's course and he'll show you exactly how to do this.

8:27And what you're selling specifically is a one-time SEO boost. So that's what you're going to sell. It's your foot in the door offer. That's why I'd sell it for 500. One-time SEO boost. And you tell him, I'm going to improve your position in Google Maps and Apple Maps within three months. Okay. Within three months, you're going to be ranking higher, which means and here's that one of those key phrases nick i was telling you i like to use yeah we're going to increase your customer activity i'm not promising more leads because i can't promise i can't deliver on that i'm not promising specifically more website visitors or more phone calls i'm just promising more customer activity and every local business owner understands that and a restaurant is never going to use the term leads restaurants aren't looking for leads Yeah.

9:17A barber shop's not looking for leads. They're looking for appointments or walk-ins. A roofer is looking for leads. And so to me, the most universal phrase that I have found is customer activity. Okay. And this allows you to not worry, because that was kind of the next thing I was going to ask about, do you worry about niche select? Well, I'm only going to target roofers, but then it becomes maybe a potential conflict of interest if I sign up five roofers in the same town and now I'm like competing. Well, who do I, who's my favorite? Like, how do I figure out who I want to rank the highest? Yeah.

9:49So you're going to go, you go, you go kind of broad. It sounds like, because the same skill set or the same toolbox can apply across any number of different businesses. Yeah, absolutely. And the fastest way to a sale is the face-to-face conversation. For a side hustle, especially to just get started, you're just talking about finding three or four local businesses that are going to do this SEO boost,$500, because here's what happens. you're going to do the local SEO boost. And then within that three months, you're going to get results. And here's what you're going to do. When they say, yeah, I'll do this.

10:24This sounds great. I'd love to do it. Okay. It's$500. So, you know, here's, you know, set up a Stripe account, take PayPal, take check. You're starting out as a side hustle. Like cash is fine. Like however you can get them to pay you. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody can Venmo you. Sure. Don't, don't, don't let that be the bottleneck. Exactly. Exactly. Like there's lots of ways to get people's money from them. So receive the money and then say, Hey, listen, I need 24 pictures of your business, people in your business behind the scenes, the front of the place, I need 24 pictures. And that's what you need to send to me.

10:58And if they're like, Oh, I don't have them. Do you have a 17 year old and 18 year old a 25 year old on your team? Like, everybody on your team's got an iPhone. That's all I need. I need somebody take out their phone to get 24 pictures. Then they're going to send you those pictures. You're going to take those pictures. You're going to create 12 posts with those pictures about their business. This is a great place to leverage AI. AI is really fast, fantastic at this. And then every week, you're going to go in and you're just going to post to their Google business profile this. So they're going to, they're going to give you access.

11:36It's, it's super easy to get access to their Google business profile. You're going to get access to the google business profile you're going to go in once a week you're going to post a picture for 12 weeks and maybe this is for these 75 of businesses that haven't even claimed theirs maybe that's step one like hey here here's an easy quick win for you mr and mrs business owner let's let's do that first and then we'll go do this one-time boost right well this is part of the one-time boost yeah this is this is it this is part of the one-time boost so for the one-time boost you're going to use ai to rewrite their description you're going to use ai to help you create those 12 posts and then you're going to go in and you're going to schedule those.

12:11Now, down the road, there are tools you can get to automate this. We now, when we do an SEO boost, we create all the content, takes us about two hours. We pre-schedule it for three months and we're done. We move on to the next one. But you're going to grow into this as a side hustle. I didn't start there. And so to keep it simple, you don't need a fancy automation tool. Why does the description need to be rewritten or what are what are some of like the checkboxes you want to see in that rewritten description yeah well they probably haven't done it if especially if they've never claimed their google business profile or if the business owner wrote wrote it the business owner talks about how they've been in business since 1985 and grandpa gave it to dad and dad gave it to me and we've got six employees and we're so proud of our community and we love serving and nobody cares.

13:06They want to know, are you the place for them? If you're a barbershop, you want to answer what we call their pre-qualifying questions. You can walk in, you can pay with cash, credit card, you can book an appointment. We do kids, we do fade-ins, we do beards. What are the common questions people ask you about your business? That's what has to go in the description. And so most business owners talk about themselves and not their customer and their customer's needs. So real easy fix. Plus you want to make sure that you mention the business type you are, you know, AJ's barber, proudly serving Columbus, Ohio, men, kids, short hair, you know, then you list the things, walk-ins, welcome, all that kind of stuff.

13:55So that's in the description. Got it, got it, okay. Then, and this is in that, the checklist I have. A lot of businesses, local businesses, they go to set up their Google business profile, Nick, and they're like, I want to serve everybody. So they put their service areas, the United States of America. Okay. Huge mistake. Huge mistake. Because when Google decides who to show to somebody on Google Maps and when Apple decides on Apple Maps, the first thing they look at is the geographic location of that phone. So i'm in budapest hungary right now if I get my phone and I search barber near me It's going to show me a couple the closest barbers right here to me and in budapest But if I turn my vpn on and I say i'm in miami And then I open google maps and I ask for a barber It's going to start showing me barbers in miami If you say you're in the united states that puts your business geographic location out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean because it goes clear up past Alaska, down around Hawaii.

15:03And the only people that's going to see your pizza shop, barbershop mechanic is somebody trolling for fish out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Not what you're going for. More with Eric in just a moment, including the exact type of posts you should be creating for local businesses. Plus how to scale this thing into a six-figure recurring revenue business with a remote team right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from what-if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100 % of our amazing guests have in common is they took their shot.

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16:15Sign up for your$1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle shopify.com slash side hustle are you still overpaying for wireless it's time to say yes to saying no at our partner mint mobile their favorite word is no no contracts no monthly bills no overages no hidden fees no bs and here's why i said yes to making the switch over five years ago and yes to getting premium wireless for 15 bucks a month i really liked being able to keep my existing phone and my existing phone number when I switched over. This year, we've taken advantage of their easy international add-ons, including free service in Canada and affordable packages when we were visiting Japan.

16:59But closer to home, all Mint Mobile plans come with high-speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. And the best part? Plans start at just$15 per month. Are you ready to say yes to saying no. Join me in making the switch at mintmobile.com slash side hustle. That's mintmobile.com slash side hustle. Upfront payment of$45 required equivalent to$15 per month. Limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. All right. So another quick win. Sounds like, okay, narrow down that service area location.

17:41and you kind of draw a perimeter and okay the service area yeah all kinds of ways to do that it you know just the city or a couple towns but i just start with that that one central space and so you do that that's optimizing optimizing the description optimizing the service location you get those things optimized and a lot of people they haven't they business owners they haven't bothered filling in all the little boxes about parking accessibility is it you know veteran owned woman owned you know something like there's all these things and it's because google keeps adding these questions and and information every few months they add a new one and most businesses aren't updating that so you're just going to go through the google business profile and here's the thing, if you're like, oh, I don't know the answer, make a list and send an email to the, say, hey, just wanted to follow up with a couple more questions.

18:39Do you do this, this, and this, and this? They're gonna answer it. You're gonna put it on their Google business profile. Super simple. Yeah. So that's optimizing. You're just gonna do it one time. Then you're gonna create the 12 pieces of content and you're gonna go in once a week and add those. So one day added on Monday, one day added on Tuesday. You want it to seem kind of natural. And then once a week, you're going to add a picture. Those things right there, you're going to start to see their rankings improve. You're going to see increased customer activity. We like to use a tool called Local Falcon.

19:13I think I pay around$29 a month for Local Falcon. It's a super inexpensive tool. You go into Local Falcon, you go to reports, and you find the business. If they've got a Google business profile, Local Falcon is going to find them. And then you said a geographic region. We normally start with like two miles. And then you put in a search term or a couple search terms. Barber, men's haircut, pizza, pizza delivery, pizza pickup, depending on the business. And what Local Falcon does is it goes and it scans the entire area. because I can be a quarter mile to the east of a business and it's in 20th place on Google.

20:00I can go a quarter mile to the right or to the west and it's gonna be in first place. Your position on Google changes street by street. What this does is it creates a heat map and it shows you all of these dots and it puts the right position of where you are. So you're gonna have some areas that are green, some areas that are red, some that are in between in the yellow and orange. Now, some businesses may be all green. This whole, expand out, look for a different search term, expand the radius. Okay. Some businesses, it's all red, except for right where their business is, it's green. And those are the business owners that go, well, we thought we were in first place on Google.

20:42Yeah, you are, if you're searching from your front door, yeah. Yeah, indoor business. but you can either get in a car and drive around town and refresh your search every street, or we just create this geo grid for you. Now, down the road, you can offer this geo grid as a freebie. This is a good way. Once you start getting some clients, as you're getting established, and you start to promote some things, this is a great lead magnet because a lot of business owners see this map and they're like, oh, I want to see that for my business. You don't need to do that starting out. That's kind of a 2.0 kind of strategy.

21:20Right now, you're going to just talk to a couple of businesses, get a couple of people to hire you. You're going to go in and do these things. You're going to create one of those heat maps. Every month, you're going to run the scan again. A local Falcon has this whole list of suggestions after it runs the report, AI generated suggestions that'll tell you a wealth of information of things to do to improve your rank. Do you have an example or two of the type of post that you're posting on behalf of these different businesses to their Google profile? Sure. Give me an industry. Just any industry you want.

21:51We can go with the barbershop example again. Barbershop. Great. So they give you a picture of a kid getting a haircut. You're just going to take that and you're going to say, depending on the type of year, maybe it's another one of our customers in getting ready for the summer, getting a haircut before vacation, back to school seasons, coming up, getting ready to head back to school here in Pittsburgh, talk about, you know, vacation coming up, just whatever you can. Or maybe it's the barber that's cutting their hair, maybe in there five years, you know, hey, here's Tony, been with us for five years, cutting one of our favorite little customers hair again, helping them get ready for vacation.

22:32Okay. But you don't know, you don't always have that insight. So you got to like kind of probe the business owner for what's the occasion. You don't want to just make stuff up. Oh, Tony really just started last month. It's always a little weird. I wouldn't make up anything like that. I wouldn't make anything like that. But here's the thing that can be a little annoying with this. Very few people read these. That's what's annoying. Sure. No, I get it. It's like you need to feed the machine, even though nobody's realistically reading. It's like, but you got to give it some data. You got to give it some stuff to chew on.

23:03Yes. people read reviews and people look at the pictures, but very few people read the post, but Google does. And Google wants to make sure that if it's going to recommend you, somebody's there turning the lights on. Because if Google sends somebody to a closed business, they're going to lose their trust in Google. They may switch to another tool. If Google starts losing eyeballs, Google starts losing advertising. Google will not lose advertising. I mean, that's how they make their money is advertising. So they want to keep the eyeballs. They want to make sure that they're giving you and me, when we look for a business, a business that's open, a business that other people use, a business that keeps their hours up to date, Google will reward you by what these are called signals.

24:04Yeah, yeah, giving positive signals, make it look active, right? It's active and engaged. They're using our tools and helping people in that way. Yes, and right now, again, for those that are listening that are just trying to get started, you're just doing a one-time local SEO boost. So you're doing a minimal viable product here to get results. When you run that first local Falcon scan, you're gonna take a screenshot. Each time you run it, you're gonna take another screenshot and suddenly you're going to get before and afters. You know, had very little green, two months later, all of this green.

24:37They're showing up all over the top of Google, okay? Because then what you can do, you've got these first few seed clients, they've given you the money that's given you the money to invest and hire, you know, into a training and to getting some tools. But now you can go back to them and say, here's the results we got. This is great. here's what it's going to take to keep you at the top of this. You're going to need to keep posting once a week and you can do this. And we got to get into eventually what there's these things called directories. There's some great tools that help with this. Mods local is one.

25:16Yext is another. These are tools a business owner can go and pay for themselves to do it. And the business starts getting added to directories. Directories are websites that link to businesses. So this is how you get those backlinks. They're still gold, even in local SEO. This is still a big thing. This was NAP listing, name, address, phone number listings, like all across the internet, all pointing back to your home base, your website. Exactly. And some of these directories now power voice search. So it's important to have these directories up to date, because Google looks for consistency of NAP, name, address, phone number.

25:59If you're listed on 20 websites, but sometimes the name is spelled out one thing, sometimes it's this, sometimes that the address is a little bit, sometimes the phone number is different, because you got a new phone number, something like that. That's a signal to Google, like, do they have their act together? Can they really be trusted? but this is an advanced and this is we don't we don't touch directories for a local seo boost i don't have to okay but for our monthly recurring where we go and we say hey listen we can manage this for you and we can write content we need to have a strategy session once a quarter where i come in and i interview you about your bar how long have they been here how long have they been like this is where you get into the nitty gritty and we do a quarterly strategy session and we have you got any specials coming up next three months anything you want to put like you have a seasonality to your business in the next three months is where somebody like oh back to school is big for us valentine's day is big okay great so then you create that content calendar and at this point you'll get a tool where like now you're going to create the content and post it so it's automated and done for three months, things like that.

27:08Or better yet, how I do it is I now have a team that does this. I've got an amazing person on my team from El Salvador. She's a rock star. And this is all she does for us. She only does local SEO content. She creates it. She meets with the clients once a quarter, does a strategy session, maps out their content. She can do two of these a day. And we typically charge around$750 a month for the ongoing monthly recurring revenue. But again, I grew into that. So this is local SEO. It's not going away. But that's no, that's like really, really cool to see what is potentially possible down the road with a trained up team member who is taking half a day to service this customer that you're charging$750 a month for, you imagine the margins on that are quite healthy.

28:05Yes. Even if you hired somebody in the States, I have one person on my team in the States, but the rest of my team are remote. We're an entire remote. I'm remote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So my team is remote. Yeah. And we just, that's how we operate because we are able to keep in very high margins. We're able to keep our costs very competitive that way. And it's fun to be able to travel around the world and meet your staff. Do you worry, you know, this is the Bezos line of, you know, your margin is my opportunity. Do you see clients getting poached from under you from other competing services? It was just like the number of small businesses is so vast, so massive.