Blake Denman 🙃

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org. A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

🚨 I am opening up a giant can of worms by posting this but here we go — what I’m about to explain is far and away the number 1 SEO strategy for local business owners that exists. Nothing else comes close 🚨 Everything I say here is meant to be informative, remember that there’s a risk to everything. 🤝 Proximity, proximity, proximity. The map pack in Google is ran completely off of proximity. Google wants to show businesses that are as close as humanly possible to the searcher. It just makes sense. If you want a locksmith, you want one close to you. If you want a restaurant, you want one close to you. If you want a cleaning company, you want one near by. The tricky part about this is that local service business owners serve locations far beyond what realistically could pop up in the map pack. Let’s say you’re a cleaning company in Fresno. Fresno is small enough that you’re willing to serve the entire metro area. The problem is that there’s more than 20 other active cleaning companies in the metro area, so ranking in the entire city proves to be incredibly difficult. If you only have one Google Business Profile live, you’re only going to be able to rank top 3 in 1/4 of the city. It is very very rare that you’re able to dominate more than 20-30% of the metro area. Google simply is going to rank different cleaning companies that are closer to the searchers in the other 3/4 of the city. It just makes sense for them. So here’s the hack — create as many Google Business Profiles as you reasonably can with a live address. I know this is difficult. I know working with Google to get these live is going to be an absolute headache. But you would not believe how much money you can make. If you somehow are able to get 4 GBPs live in each corner of the city, congratulations, one of your businesses will likely pop up for almost all residents in the metro area. The question to ask is, how the hell do I get 4 GBPs live with addresses? The answer is you need to get extremely creative. You could list them at homes, you could list them at coworking spaces, you could list them at offices. Expect to jump through a lot of hoops, but know it’s worth it. 95% of the time Google is going to want to a verification video, especially with permanent signage. Do whatever it takes to make it look like a real business is operating there. I acknowledge that this is more of a black hat technique, so you need to do it at your own risk. I highly, highly recommend that each of the GBPs you create are under separate Gmail accounts so you don’t put any of these at risk, especially your first one that you likely already have live. I also don’t think you should use the same exact phone number or name of business at all 4 either to make things really safe. If you need a phone number to put down, make a couple of Google voice numbers. They are cheap. If you want different businesses names use “of X” at the end of the brand name, with X being the name of the city being listed in. If your business name is “Sam’s Pest Control” and you are listing your 2nd GBP in Fort Worth (your first one is probably in Dallas), name the GBP “Sams Pest Control of Fort Worth”. If you need to get your FIRST Google Business Profile live and verified, shoot me a DM. I have a trusted partner I work with to push these live quicker than I can do on my own.

I was going to keep this SEO trick to myself, but no one sees my tweets anyway...