Local SEO Myths Debunked: What Really Works in 2025

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you wanna learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency. Hope you enjoy the episode.

All right. Welcome to the strategy session. Where do you guys want to start? SEO, pick the topic.

Let's do whatever Jason wants to do.

Ha!

He's the new man.

Jason's in charge.

I want to do everything. Um, I mean, this is, could be wrong, but first thing that comes to mind is we touched on like the use of AI for, talked about Topics in terms of leveraging it for service pages and location pages and local, for if it's an industry that's not as populated in the search engines as, for example, I don't know, like HVAC or something like that. Maybe just piggybacking off of that, it really opened my mind that maybe I'm paying too much and I'm moving too slow in my content production. For that type of work. And then I, of course, I'm sure we're all getting like slammed with that Instagram ad for, is it serps.com or something where they're basically just helping you launch like 1,000 service pages in, I don't know, it seems like they're telling you it's going to happen in 30 minutes. So that's interesting to me. I don't know. That's on local SEO though. I don't, not sure if that's where everyone wants to go.

Yeah. Jason, would you just Because you're relatively new to the group and welcome in again. So happy that you're here and decided to stay. Will you just recap a little bit about what you guys do as an agency and what you specialize in?

Yeah, I think we're still finding our way, but I don't necessarily have a heart for S corp or sorry, like major corporations or Fortune 500 brands. Like it's really, that's about as identified as I've gotten. So we're working with e-commerce brands and you know, local service industries, agencies, just not, you know, I've done some, I've done some corporate work and it's just so slow for me and, and I don't like to follow rules all the time. And so that's really where the agency seems to be going. I need to get more specific than that though, because it's, it's still too broad. But where most of my business is in California where I'm from, and I need to get business in Houston. where I'm at because one, people have a— businesses have a lot more budget out here than they do in California. As you can imagine, the California business climate is not great, so there's not a lot of extra money lying around. Yeah. And so I started in 2021. One of my clients who's an agency brought me in to run his marketing full-time, and I'd say we probably have a year left on that clock, not as an employee, but I just run all of his marketing. And then I hope at the end of this year to turn that into one of my clients again as well, so that I have my own internal team working on it versus their internal team. So cool.

And okay, so thanks for the recap there. You mentioned talking about AI and local SEO and the ad that you were getting SERPs about a bunch of, a bunch of service pages or something. I want to double-click on that, the service pages and like local SEO. Like what kind of challenges are you experiencing there?

You know, I started out as a writer many, many, many years ago. And so I still hold a soft spot in my heart for producing really great content, right? And so when it comes to like core pages on a website, it's definitely human AI with a lot of human. Um, but when you get into these pages that you've got to produce 30 of them and each one gets 30 clicks per month, you know, it's, it's, it's very time intensive for the ROI that most clients are going to get on it. And so, um, I need to be— I, I need to find a more automated process with less human requirements for those pages. Just, I feel like based on where the the industry is going. I, you know, work with a lot of international freelancers, some good, most bad, and they are the fingers on the pulse. And so a lot of times they're doing these things that are really smart moves in terms of website development and the way you build out your architecture, but the quality of what's being published is so bad that you don't want anybody to see it. And so trying to find that happy medium where you're able to produce say a city page, but then geo-targeted pages within a city like a downtown or a, you know, whatever else. But doing it with the quality that's necessary for the client to be satisfied and also the website visitor to be satisfied.

Hey, sorry I'm late. But Austin, I'm wondering, since this was very similar to my question the other day, I'm wondering if we also point Jason back to the recording because like Scott and Kevin literally did a beautiful brain dump of You know, how much AI to use on a page and sort of a strategy to work in both humans and AI that I think would be really super valuable. And in fact, I'm kind of wondering, Austin, if we just make that a clip that, you know, pull that piece out and just make that a clip as part of our— of the school platform, because it was really, really helpful. And Scott and Kevin, definitely appreciate both of you for that.

Absolutely.

So I think the only thing I would add to the question, I think the one part that wasn't talked about is that Jason, when— so I'm familiar with the practice of building out all those zip codes or downtown pages or—

Mm-hmm.

We actually, whenever we, like, we started off 5 years ago building lead gen sites for ourselves. So we were going to go into the whole rank and rent or lead gen model, eventually dropping the rank and rent part and just going straight lead gen. But Our pages, our websites rank in competitive cities in Canada. Like, we just go after Toronto, Calgary, and Vancouver without any neighborhood pages. Like, those pages— I know that a lot of SEOs kind of promote that, but I think it's a bit of an old— like, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago might have been working, but I don't think it's required anymore. And it just actually added a lot to cannibalization on the pages and a lot of duplicate content. So we just focus on key pages, like if it's city-specific. So the way we build architecture on a site is that we start off by saying this website, is it going to target a particular geography or does it target multiple geographies? And that's going to define really what your homepage does. But let's say if that particular website targets only one city, then your homepage is going to be all about that city. So let's say Toronto Tree Services. And then what we do is that we'll just build out the rest of the pages. That's going to be, let's say, tree trimming, tree pruning, stump grinding, stump removal, all about Toronto, but they're supporting pages for the homepage. We found that ranking really easily, especially if it's exact match domain, EMD. And so that kicks in really fast these days on local, and we don't even build out any neighborhoods. The second architecture was basically figuring out if it's multiple cities, then your homepage becomes like a brand page, and it just says that we service areas like Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver. And then you have subpages. So .com/toronto, .com/vancouver, and that page is going to be tree services Toronto, tree services Vancouver, tree services Ottawa. And then you have service pages within those pages. So /vancouver/treetrimming/treepruning/whatever. And that ranks really well on the first page. Like, we do not go down to zip codes. We might mention zip codes in a copy of the actual services or—

Yeah.

geo or a homepage, whatever, just to kind of, if there is a signal for that, but it mostly comes off because SEOs did it. And so Google ranks that stuff because SEOs did like chicken and egg. And so we'll add it in if we need to, but like we have, we are going into partnership with the tree guy and our website, the homepage ranks number 1, number 2. We've been working with him for 3 years, but we're doing actual partnership, equity partnership and it's like all we have is just 10 pages on a site and that thing just ranks fine without any neighborhood. So if you're spending money on that content, I don't think it's really necessary. Like, I think build out the core pages and build links.

I haven't done it yet. I guess I get stuck, like, just using my own agency as an example. Houston has 16, 17 cities that are technically considered Houston. And then you got email marketing, digital marketing, search engine optimization. Website design, website design, and then you multiply it by 15. I don't know if, hey, I don't know if obviously I don't want to try to target the world and that's not the best example, but it makes me think how much human is involved in that process for say 45 to 60 pages. You might've already covered it in that video.

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Well, just to add, like, I mean, I agree with everything Scott just said as far as it used to— what people used to do is do like every neighborhood, We've done that before. Like, for example, with pest control, we had a client that wanted to go out, like, in Southern California where you're from, where I'm from, Newport Beach. You know, you had all these neighborhoods in Newport Beach, and that's how people think in those neighborhoods. They don't think of— they're not like low. I don't want to go down to Newport to get my stuff. I want them to come up to me, you know, kind of thing, right? So, we first looked at the audience, the buyers, the, you know, where, how do they search, right? And then what we did is we created like cockroach control, ant control, you know, different things for those neighborhoods tied, and they all tied back to the Google Business Profile. So, on every page, we would have keywords that were tying back to those Um, to that Google Business Profile as well. And we tried to get people to give us reviews with those keywords in it because that helps a lot too. So that's one angle. The better approach— that I don't agree that that works as well today. I, I agree with Scott that you don't— Google's a lot smarter today than it used to be.

I think the caveat there, the caveat there would be if people's If Newport is large enough and when you search for that keyword, Google actually shows you Newport pages and you create— like, I'm not saying don't create it if it's not showing. Google every keyword and see what shows up. But if I search for downtown Toronto tree removal, it's just going to show me Toronto tree removal pages. So I don't need to create downtown page, right? So that's the idea. You still go off of—

But like Mississauga, Markham, you know?

Yeah, because those are larger areas. Like, there's a lot of population. So you just create those pages.

But a lot of people outside of Toronto think of those as Toronto, but in Toronto, I live in Mississauga, you know, kind of thing, right?

But it's a city.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It is a city, but a lot of people still call it Toronto, you know, like, uh, at least outside of Toronto, I guess, you know. But you're right, if you're surrounding downtown only— I just thought you were doing all of the Toronto area.

Um, so Greater Toronto— so This would be tied back to what Jason was saying, is that Houston will have Greater Houston Area, right? That's what you guys call it, right? So you have one website in Houston.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Those are, I consider to be cities. Like, you can call them towns, whatever, but they're like individual, like, municipalities. You have to create pages for those. But if you take core Houston and you have, I don't know, Upper Houston or Downtown Houston, like, we don't create those pages. Like, it's not necessary because Google will just show Houston. It's not going to show you downtown. When Toronto, yes, you call it Toronto, but it's Greater Toronto Area. And Markham people will say we're from Markham. I am in Markham. Mississauga people will say they're from Mississauga, right? It's still a city or a town within a Greater Toronto Area, but it's not Toronto. Toronto, Toronto is like, or even Etobicoke that's considered to be Toronto is actually Etobicoke or Scarborough. So Houston will be similar. It's like you have an area, yes, but there's towns within Houston that would not be part of core Houston, you create pages for those. Just don't— I don't think you need neighborhoods. Like, neighborhood is different.

Yeah, neighborhood's different than like Sugar— what is that? Sugar Land, I think.

Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Yep.

You have The Woodlands, you have Katy, you know, like what I would do like strategically is really look how people search, you know, because some towns, people call everything Houston, you know, kind of thing, right?

Yeah.

Um, but if I live in, um, Galveston, you know, that's not Houston, you know, but somebody from out of town might think that's part of Greater Houston area, right? I mean, that's a little farther away, but more like, uh, Pasadena, you know, um, Baytown, you get into those surrounding areas, you know, and, um, if you own I would go for a smaller hill than a whole city, or you know, so not a neighborhood. Like definitely neighborhoods work well for people who are proud of their neighborhoods and they do a lot of searches on it, right? Like that Newport example, I wouldn't do that in Westminster, you know, kind of thing. But but Houston, I'll give you a better example actually because you're from Southern California. I had a B. What do they call it? Bee removal service, right? He was new. He was really good, but he's new to Orange County. So Orange County is a huge-ass area, right? And there's a lot of big cities within Orange County, right? But everybody calls it Orange County. If you're in Irvine, it's Orange County. If you're in Huntington Beach, Orange County, right? So he was struggling to get any traction because he was— all his keywording, everything was OC this, Orange County. He's too big an area to try to go from zero to hero. So what we did is we created, um, Orange County— is it— it was in his name, uh, bee removal, call it. But we would have Orange County bee removal in Costa Mesa. So we had a Costa Mesa page, we had a what to do in Costa Mesa Like it was kind of more of a helpful content approach. Like Costa Mesa is a city of 300,000 people that live near da da da da, and they have some parks and sit. You know, like we would kind of do this, and bees are live in Costa Mesa. And then we talk about bees in Costa Mesa because it's a lot of homes in Costa Mesa. People live there. A lot of people don't like bees in Costa Mesa. So there wasn't a lot of duplicate content because. Next door to Costa Mesa is Newport Beach, you know, kind of thing. So totally different vibe. You gotta write for each one. So we— this is pre-AI. I wish I had AI, uh, back then, but we literally wrote all those pages within 3 months.

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He was getting so much business, he had— he didn't know what to do with himself, right? He said, shut it off. I go, bro, I'm not shutting any— it's like, you can't just shut it off, you know? But, um, he start— so what we did is we turned it into a lead gen business. So he would sell the leads to his competitors because he couldn't handle them all, right? And so, um, that was a— now that was a— I did him a deal. That was like a $3,000 effort I charged him. I'd normally charge a lot more to go after that many cities. I was testing it in some ways how effective it would be because I had a lot of theories. I hadn't done it yet for like OC, you know. So that's a unique case that you could understand because you're from, from California, right? And so, um, Houston might be a little bit different, you know, kind of thing. Or, uh, Tucson, you know, Tucson's not as big, um, so Tucson might be what you have to go after, and it's just going to take you longer to get there, you know, kind of thing. But neighborhoods, I agree with Scott. I don't think it's, you know, for programmatic SEO, Google sees it for what it is, and it's you're trying, you're trying too hard. You know, in my opinion, Kevinology, right? In my opinion. But always have a plan, plan your work and work your plan, and always be helpful to Google, you know, to the people Google serve, I should say. If you're helping Google out by providing value, Google's going to eventually see that it's legit, authentic, and move you up the ranks.