Lead Gen Domination Blueprint 2019

So, I want to show you guys some pretty cut and dry strategies we are using to completely dominate the local SERPs and map pack in 2019. This is also the strategy we used in the aforementioned post so those who had the strategy specific questions should have those answered as well.

First thing we need to determine is the capital we can allocate to the project. My current strategy is extremely GMB heavy. We do our own verifications in house so our cost per GMB is low enough for us to create them at scale. If you use a GMB verification service then you can dial the strategy back as budget requires.

The authority site model has its pros and cons, but it is part 1:3 for my lead gen campaigns. One thing to consider, and this is important, is that when you start to connect a bunch of blackhat GMBs is that you increase the possibility of getting your entire linked network taken down. In this specific climate, it might not be the best idea unless you are dedicated to making everything look very real. A lot of people also find themselves in a precarious situation where they do not want to build the typical mass page site, and I do not either because they do not like the work involved with building out larger sites.

I can show you guys a way to remedy this. So, let’s start with that portion of things and we will get a bit deeper into optimization activities afterward. For the authority site build, I am targeting as much of the service area as humanly possible. I am not removing areas based on any specific demographics or population size.   I do not create GMBs for areas under 25,000 population though, and depending on your budget maybe you want to modify those parameters to better suit your campaign. My thought is that the areas smaller than that I can hit with the optimized page itself.   We have a system for deploying sites quickly from start to finish. I am going to dive much deeper into setting this up specifically for the authority site model, but here is a quick overview of me deploying a skeleton site, with lead tracking and management baked in, in less than 10 minutes. This includes registering the domain, setting up hosting, deploying a template, and setting up lead tracking.

This video is a bit dated, as the interface and some other things have changed, but still, pretty cool, right? Now, let me walk you through setting up an authority site in Jensen. One caveat before we get started, yes, Jensen is my product. This is not a sales motivated post but if you want to try it for free, you can sign up and try all of the account features without paying us a penny. No limitations.

So, the first thing I want to do is create a campaign.

We use the Campaign framework to encapsulate websites, tracking numbers, etc. that are tied to a specific client or campaign. We are naming it “Authority Site Example”. As we add GMBs to this site and different phone numbers to inner pages, all of those numbers and that data will be stored in here.

If you already have a monetization plan in place then you can configure the billing settings right now and have everything prepared to bill your client as soon as the leads start rolling through. If you are not quite at that stage then just use filler content for the time being and you can come back at a later date and revise the billing plan to suit whatever you deal flow you build.   To quickly run through this, the name of the billing, billing interval, and the day that the client is to be billed is pretty self-explanatory. The delay allows for clients to delay billing while they make any last minute quality checks or disputes. Setting this to 0 means they will get invoiced immediately.   Setting the way in which leads are approved is also pretty straightforward. You can set the price per leads as above, or you can also do fixed billing in rank and rent situations or flat rate lease agreements. The billing threshold just lets us know the max they will get charged for that billing interval.

When you are done we get this message and are prompted to start adding lead sources. Let’s take a moment to pause and jump over to the template section. It is good to either build or pre-select your template so when we go to the next section and actually build the site we can be prepared to get this authority setup live and rocking.

Some Jensen users have done a phenomenal job building their templates from scratch, but I am usually a most viable product type of person, so I am just going to select the template I want and edit it accordingly. Let’s run through building our template to use in the upcoming steps.

I am selecting to the windows and door template and will begin editing this template to suit the needs of my authority site.

This opens up our drag and drop builder where we can really start turning this site into something special. Jensen is definitely not the most intuitive drag and drop builder on the market so we use it more as a templating engine to quickly deploy lead generating assets.   The settings cog in the upper right hand corner of your sections opens up the actual code base of each content or media block. Some people may not like the lack of an interface but I love to be able to move into the backend of the HTML and make any little adjustments that need made.   Other than that everything can be edited from the front end of the tool. It’s point and click to make any changes to the content.

Hitting the pencil icon in the upper left-hand corner will bring up the detail editor. We have a built-in image engine that allows you to pull stock imagery in from our stock photo database and pipe them into your site. It was little amenities like this that we wanted to include to expedite the build of these sites.

As you can see a simple query for wood flooring brings up some options we can peruse through. The engine sometimes returns some interesting results so take your time and see what fits your site. We are going to take some time to rotate out the images and modify the content to fit our floor refinishing brand.

A preview shows that the homepage is coming together, at least from a template standpoint. It is ready for some additional content.   If you guys want a pro tip for free logos for your lead gen sites I can throw that your way before we move on as well. Nate showed me this little trick and it’s cool to get unlimited quick logos without signing up for anything or getting spammed for being on lists to get free downloads. Head over to FreeLogoDesign.org

Follow the steps by adding your company name and selecting an industry. Then, when you are done you will get to a screen asking for your information to download a free low res PNG of your logo.  

Select that option and put in a fake name and address. After it says it is sending your logo to your email inbox, refresh the screen and hit download. It will then download the file to your machine and you will not ever have to use real information. Boom.     There are two more things I want to familiarize you guys with before setting you off on your own. One is setting up the pages for our authority site structure. The other is getting comfortable with substitution variables.

Under pages make sure you add a “service-location-index” page and the service-location-show” page. The show page will be the one that lists all of the areas that you serve and you can modify that to look however you feel fit.   The location-index page is what your actual location pages will look like. So, before you move on you might as well edit those to look however you feel fit. Once complete, you can move on and get ready to deploy your site.   Substitution variables are {{variable}} tokens you see all over the templates. We have a library you can access, or you can create custom variables by simply adding them into the site. Jensen will detect them and then offer you a place in the dashboard to add your unique data into those spaces. Here is a video on its application:

We did not collect site content yet but we made some good progress. The total time invested should be no more than 15-20 minutes, max. We did not do anything SEO related at the moment, nor did we add advanced elements to the page, but I want to actually get the site and its pages deployed before we start that process. It keeps it set up like an assembly line for my team. Machine baby, machine.

Without further ado, let’s select “build first site” and get started on this masterpiece. This next section looks beastly but it is not too terribly difficult to get through. We can walk through it together…

In this case, we are going to buy a new domain through the system to showcase the ease of use. Just enter the domain you want to purchase and build the site on and we will make sure the domain name is available. When you find one you like, go ahead and move on and you can purchase directly through the dash. For this specific strategy, I want to obviously include the keyword in the title but I also want this to be somewhat of a brandable name. I am a big fan of using a commercial keyword in URLs and then adding modifiers to try and make it look like a real business.

After choosing your domain name, simply click purchase and it will grab the domain for you. No need to leave the dashboard. Remember that template we just built? It is time to get that bad mamma jamma onto this domain and get everything hosted

I am going to use Namecheap DNS for this site.

I want to stop for a moment and talk about our hosting and deployment infrastructure so you guys use this system with confidence should you decide to take it for a test run. Jensen’s hosting infrastructure was built from the ground up to be flexible and Hosting Provider agnostic. Powered by infrastructure automation tooling, we are able to instantly deploy Virtual Private Servers from dozens of hosting companies. Our current deployment servers are spread across Google Cloud, Amazon AWS. Digitalocean, Rackspace, and more. Each Jensen site in a given user account gets deployed to a unique IP, on a server with lightning-fast load times. The Jensen hosting backbone is providing redundancy through automated backups and robust monitoring and alerts, all transparently integrated with the website builder and Jensen dashboard.

You can quickly configure your contact email in the next section. Nothing complex here. Create an email and move on.

Next, it is time to configure an initial phone number for the site. I like to have different numbers for each location page, but some may argue that an 800 number will suffice. I like the conversion aspect of local numbers a bit more and I also like the granularity involved in tracking calls on a per page level using unique numbers.

Under the buy a new number section I am going to follow the easy to use sequence and grab a number from Philadelphia. This is going to be the home base of the faux company that I am putting together for this lead generation exercise. Clicking next will purchase the number and we can move on to the next step.

Under the site forms tab, we can connect emails that get notified when leads come in, set up the Jensen autoresponder, integrate with MailChimp, activate your form to call lead dialer tech and more. Fill this out and we can move on to assigning values to our substitution variables.

Remember earlier when I dropped a video for you guys and asked that you familiarize yourself with how the substitution variables work? Well, it is time to tell Jensen what names, numbers, cities, or other values it should insert into your site when it comes across a certain variable. This allows you to remove the redundancy of adding phone numbers, keywords, NAP, socials, etc. to every page of the site.

Connecting Recaptcha will reduce the amount of form spam that you receive. This might seem like no big deal, and our lead management system will make it easy to sort through and delete those junk leads, it is not a bad idea to wire this up as the amount of spam you get will be insane in some cases.

The advanced SEO section allows you to update your metadata for each page and connect your Google Analytics so Jensen can pull in site visitor data and graph it. We can also set default SEO parameters that will populate on pages in which we do not provide custom inputs.   Adding custom parameters allows you to optimize each page the best. You can even add custom scripts to each page. This is great for multi-location schema. At the very bottom of the page, you can add scripts that will essentially end up in the head of the site.

Next, let’s go ahead and set up the billing settings. One of the biggest headaches for me when I was scaling my lead generation business was managing the management and sale of a ton of leads. Everyone that talked about how passive of a business model this was probably never scaled the operation to thousands or even hundreds of leads per month.

Just for demonstration purposes, we are going to create a new billing template. This is fairly straightforward and simple, but powerful as it allows us to essentially automate the sale of leads from the site.   Name – This is simply so you can assign a name to this specific billing configuration. Billing Interval – Simple enough, what is the billing cycle in which we want to charge the client? Day – This is the day the client will be billed Delay – Enabling this option will allow a delay in invoicing and billing to give the client time to look over the leads that were generated. Auto Approve Leads – This will dictate how lead approval is handled Pear Lead/Fixed – Selecting Per lead will charge them for each lead that comes in. If we select fixed it will charge them flat rate at whatever intervals you determine. This is great for rank and rent. Per for form lead price – You can set up specific rates for leads generated through the site forms Per call lead price – Here, we can set a price we will charge per call Per Facebook lead price – Leads generated through FB can also have their own price tag and you can set that here. Billing threshold – This will set the total budget they are willing to be charged within the billing interval. So, if they agree to 10k per month but you are billing weekly, you would set the billing interval to weekly and the threshold to $2500. Simple enough, right?

Okay, so this post is already getting big but we still need to attach the GMBs to each of the locations for which we decide they are getting them built. There are a few ways to approach this. If you want to make a national authority site selling an expensive product or service to affluent individuals then you could add pages for each high median income area in the country and optimize for low volume – high reward web traffic.   If you want to blanket a service area on a local level then for me it’s more of a lead volume play and I want to make sure we have a presence in the most populous areas. This data can be grabbed from Wikipedia or other municipal sites by using basic Google queries.

As you can see we are identifying the cities and neighborhoods that are the most populous and affluent and creating a workflow for the team to grab verifications in those areas. Verifications are not retail priced for us as we create them in house, but if you are buying them retail then you might need to modify the strategy to fit your allotted budget for the overall campaign.   You will find that my campaigns are heavy with GMBs. It is a good time to be ranking in Google Maps and we are taking full advantage of that. I, unfortunately, cannot disclose my verification method publicly.   We do sell them at GMB Swarm and you can also find them around with other retailers. Be careful, as we found some of the cheaper and more popular vendors have a footprint built in with every GMB they verify that leads back to their iPhone.

Optimizing your GMBs   Because my current lead generation strategies rely heavily on GMBs and the calls that they generate, I need a way to manage, track, schedule posts, view insights without having to log into thousands (literally, thousands) of Google accounts and dig around.   We built a tool that helps us with this so after I go over some of the main foundational points of optimization, I will show you guys how to take your game to the next level.   Optimizing the GMB is important just as is placing the GMB in a ranking cluster should your query have one for the local maps pack. In this section we will run through how we optimize the GMBs that are attached to our “authority site” and i will also include some links to other GMB optimization resources from our blog.

Title/Name of the Business     We optimize the GMBs for our authority site just as we would for a real business. I wrote about the naming system for multi-location brands in this post pertaining to getting a GMB unfiltered. I am ripping this verbatim from that post for you guys,   Here is a Google Patent that describes some of the protocol that is or could be used in different local queries. The line I want to direct everyone’s attention to is the one that reads, “If multiple listings having a same business name are identified, a total number of listings having the same business name may be identified (block 530). Next, a webscore for each listing may be determined the manner set forth above in FIG. 4 (block 540). An adjusted webscore may then be determined based on the number of listings having the same business name (block 540). In one implementation consistent with principles of the invention, the webscore for each business listing may be 1/x of the raw webscore determined in block 540, where x is the number of business listings having the same business name. For example, for a given local search, McDonald’s may have 10 listings within the broad geographic area associated with the search. Each McDonald’s listing may have a webscore of 2,200,000. In accordance with the present embodiment, this raw webscore for each listing may be reduced to 2,200,000/10=220,000.” This alludes to the fact that if you have multiple locations with the identical brand name then you could be diluting your webscore.   This means that for this specific setup I am going to name each GMB “Floor Refinishing Pros – York” This is not against Google TOS. Each location that has a GMB made for it will be named accordingly.     Again, you can see that I am adding the keyword into the title just as I did with the actual brand name of the site, and I am creating the opportunity to add the city in the name as well by using a popular method for expressing which division or location someone is looking at when our listing appears in the SERPs.

Category/Description/Other     Chaz put together a guide on selecting categories for your GMB so I do not want to expound on that. It is a simple process. The idea is to pick the best categories that describe the services your business provides without stuffing too many categories into your profile. Adding too many will lead to you GMB getting filtered.   Creating a description optimized with some of your commercial keywords is also a good foundational step. Completely filling out your hours, categories, description, etc. is imperative for optimal performance, not just from a ranking perspective, but to make your GMBs look like real businesses as well.

Location of the GMB   We have been noticing that top ranking GMBs in an area are becoming more clustered together. It used to be the centroid that everyone was after, getting their listings verified as close to the center of the city as possible, but that has drastically shifted. You will find queries where this is untrue and in that case, we have a bit of a different strategy for placement.   If there is a cluster we try and triangulate the top three rankings and then verify our listing in the center of that space.

This is not scientific by any means, I just wanted to show you guys the general idea behind the strategy when there is a cluster. If a cluster doesn’t exist then we verify the listing within close proximity to the number one listing. We just make sure to stay at least 1000m away to avoid potential possum issues that stem from the address placement.

GMB Posting     Let me dispel some rumors that have been planted by people that have something to gain from you relentlessly using their posting tool or posting services. GMB posts are not the alpha and omega solution to ranking GMBs. There will always be exceptions to this rule, and in the business of ranking sites or maps it is not wise to speak in absolutes, but I assure you, more times than not posts will not be a standalone ranking solution.

Here is a new posting schedule we are currently working with for our GMBs. We are posting around 250 posts per month and in some single variable tests that we are running, they do provide what we found to be a consistent increase in visibility.

That increase at the end of January was when we started posting and the spike was when we increased post velocity. Since then we have had increased visibility. Yes, This was a single variable test. This listing does not even have a description nor is it attached to a real website.   Managing bulk posting and/or editing your GMBs from a consolidated hub is super easy with Local Viking. We built it for ease of use and scale and we are the most competitively priced solution on the market as well as being the best engineered. Hands down.   Advanced GMB Optimization   We have been releasing GMB ranking strategies for quite some time on the blog. Chaz has a new, free, video course dropping on Local Client Takeover very soon and I have some pretty intense experiments to release that have lead to us developing some insane systems for scaling rankings. Until then run through the following articles to swipe our GMB optimization strategies.   GMB Ranking Guide – Oldie but a goodie. It is on our list to update, but a lot of the concepts are the same now as they were then.   GMB Ranking Case Study – I literally break down every aspect of this campaign. We hold NOTHING back and show you the exact strategy that we used to rank in one of the biggest cities in the country and for an extremely competitive niche.   Unfiltering GMBs & Multi-Location GMB – This post case studies a pretty specific problem that we solved but there are still some really helpful pieces in there that can be applied to a lot of GMB campaigns.   Stay tuned for additional GMB optimization content that we are working on.

This concept is simple enough. We are simply building a site that is optimized for a faux brand in a specific city. Suburbs are optional but I love to include them because they are a great way to generate some easier leads, especially for mid-size and larger suburbs. Simple. You can create a template in Jensen and deploy tons of sites quickly, or you can focus a bit more on quality, and even more hands-off, and order a site from The Digital Swarm. Whatever strategy you choose, layering this strategy with the other two can help you diversify your assets and create additional ranking properties that look less spammy than sniper GMBs and has less of a footprint than the Faux Authority Site model. My last trick for the evening is blanketing areas with GMBs. These do not have a typical website, instead, we are using the free GMB sites. We build them out enough to try and avoid suspensions, but other than that, they are quick listings thrown down to snipe leads out of 3 packs.

Remember this? We are looking at these neighborhoods again, and this is the direction we will head with verifications. Another really cool way to deploy GMBs is to identify holes in the top ranking competitors. It will allow you to penetrate those areas a lot faster and with less optimization. Using Local Viking’s Geogrid GMB rank tracker we can quickly and easily determine holes in the competitor’s visibility.

All of those red and grey areas are potentially open for us to dominate. We can also move around the city and check out other competitors to essentially “layer” these results and further define areas in the city that are susceptible to easy rankings. So, that is the gist of a typical lead gen campaign we run. You can definitely start off much smaller and focus on better optimization with fewer sites and GMBs. I like to get a bit more aggressive and attempt to generate as many leads as quickly as possible.     If you have any questions or comments please drop them here or in Local Client Takeover.