So if you're taking this course, because you want to develop a local marketing agency, what I wanted to do in this section was give you some, some ideas and tips on how to get that consultancy up and running because local SEO, as a business model can be very, very profitable. But you have to start in the right way. And there's some things you're going to need to do to make sure that you're getting the success you really want. So let's look at marketing proof is in the pudding. You have to make sure that your website is optimized so that you can actually deliver what you're saying. As an example in your own website.

If they search for local SEO and you're number one in search, why are they going to buy from you. Now one of the things you can do to build up your portfolio so you have something to market his take on a free product. Now, don't pick your cousin's business, you know, your cousin's coffee shop, just because he's your cousin, and you want to do a free week for someone take on a free project, that's actually going to have a little bit of credibility in the marketplace, not saying your cousin's coffee shop isn't credible. What I mean by that is, try and pick a popular business, you know, it's going to get traffic. And then when you do local SEO work for them, explain to them, you just want to do some free work. Most people will bite your hand off, help them get the rankings.

That is a great portfolio piece. And then you just ask them to put a backlink to you on their website have something all local SEO done by so and so. And you'd be surprised at the people out there. If you go to a network meeting, which we'll talk about in a moment and say, I'm looking for a new company. I'm looking into some local SEO to improve Local SEO For Businesses, local businesses. I'm just looking for someone who actually wants to come on as a sample client so I can create my first project.

Get in touch, let me know You'd be surprised how many people bite your hand off. Now one of the things you want to do is educational marketing. So this is going to be the meat and the heart of what you're doing. So what you do is you start holding some simple workshops on local SEO. And you give them some of the basics. Now the secret to creating educational marketing in a local workshop, and a very easy to set up, find some local network groups, they'll have you along speak to the council, or the education or anyone involved in promoting local business and then share the what and the why, but not the how.

So when you go in there and educate them on the what and the why, what you're going to find is they're going to understand what they need to do, why they need to do it, because they don't understand the how you don't take it that deep. They will then consider your services. So educational marketing is where you sit and educate them. They learn who you are They learn about the subject matter. Now they think they go and a lot of time for the subject matter. But because you're sitting there and you're the expert, you only have to go through this course as a couple of times, three times a couple of projects, you'd be surprised what expertise you will have.

If you're willing to go into a presentation, if you're willing to do some free education on local SEO, give them some simple tips in this course, what you will find is they will come and buy your services. So that's gonna be really, really powerful for you. Now, when you first start out, you want to pick up local business, so you need to connect locally. So what that means is you're going to have to connect to local businesses if you're going to be doing this as a consultancy, so Connect locally. Don't go looking for work outside of your location to begin with, build up your portfolio locally. So if you concentrate on local SEO work in your local area, you're going to find your reputation quickly spreads around if you do good work.

Now to do that, you need to take Every network you can. Now when it comes to attending one to one networks, business networks in your area, find all the free ones, you'll soon get to know a lot of people by attending the free ones. And at the beginning, you will have to attend a lot of networks, but figure out where they are a great way to find out what networks are actually available. It's just find a local business community and ask them to attend every network. Now, when it comes to paid networks, a lot of these paid networks are not really worth the money. Unless there's a lot of your target audience in that so is there a lot of local businesses are willing to spend money on their website or willing to spend money on their marketing.

If there are then it might be worth your attending but they get expensive, very, very quick, so be careful of that. So a great way to sell is actually offer packages and the best way to do that is usually offer a gateway product. So you want to create a gateway product. What is a gateway product? a gateway product is a low cost service that they can use and get to know you. Really important that you spend the time building your client up to higher sales.

But what happens is they might be willing to spend 150 pound because you're going to sort out their Google My Business Page four, and you're going to optimize it and clean up any old listings. Then when you come to selling a much more advanced service, then they already know you. So you can scan your services and lead people through now a top tip is teamed up with a web developer, most web developers actually really bad SEO. So that's To be fair, there's different types of web developers. There's people that develop websites that are very technical and do amazing things that web designers are very good at creating beautiful websites. And very rarely you'll get a web design Who actually understands local SEO.

But if you can find a web designer who creates beautiful websites, you can team up with them. And then you can cross sell each other services, you don't have to create a new company. You just team up with them. So make sure you've got someone on board so that if someone comes to you and says, okay, that's great, but what about my website and you look at it, and you go, well, we're going to need to rewrite that That's terrible. You need to make sure that you can offer that. And the other thing you got to understand is what are they trying to buy?

When you're selling this? They are trying to buy better results in local search. So sell that to them don't sell local SEO, Google My Business optimization, sell them very simple packages that are very clear about what they're going to get at the end. So improve your local search rankings and get new clients. That's what they're trying to buy. They want that who doesn't want more clients.

So sell them that. Now the other thing is don't over promise a lot of accompanies do this and Google, if actually Google index you doing this, they'll penalize you, you cannot promise that you'll get someone on the first page of Google, that is a promise you cannot make. And people get drawn into that I'm going to get you on the first page of Google. And people will buy it. But Google are really funny about this lately. And if they find content that's over promises, then they're going to penalize it.

And when it comes to selling, you need to make sure that they understand a lot of time, it's a long term project or something. And this is where we would maybe introduce retainers, and we say to them, that we can't promise the first page of Google what we need to do is optimize it to the absolute best that we can, so that you can compete for your key term. And then over time, we should be able to build into that position. So it this sort of feeds back into the last slide where we talk about offering a package, but where the real value in this type of businesses is not the setting up the value is The retainer, where you're charging them maybe 70 8090 100 200 pounds a month, because you're managing a local SEO, and every month, you are improving their rankings. So you figure out how much you're going to dedicate a month, you might say, I'm going to do two hours a month on this particular business.

And that retainer package is 100 pounds. But I'm not going to over promise, in fact, is under promising, and over delivering, that's going to build your credibility. And eventually, you probably will get to the first page of Google. But then again, you might be competing against an SEO, local SEO wizard in your area. And he's got the top three companies and he's been doing it for 12 years. How are you going to get above him when he knows more than you, so you can't over promise, but what you can say to them is I can improve, and I can help new clients find you by creating backdoor landing pages by, you know, using some of the techniques we've shared in this course.

So to sum up this section, what we need to focus on is creating a standard price. So we might want to charge for cleanup services, or I'd call a setup cost where we set them up, we remove old listings, and we have a standard charge for that. But then over time, we probably want to get them into a retainer type business so that you can start guarantee in your income, what with a service based business, the worst thing you can do is just charge for set at work all the time, the real money is in the retainer work. And then once you've got that going and you've got enough work, then you can actually with this type of business, you can actually then start and use freelancer.com. And you can actually employ people at a much lower rate than you're actually charging, happy to work because they're in the Philippines and they do good work and they're happy to earn what would be considered a low wage where you might be if you're in the US or the UK, and then you can draw a profit from that.

So all the time now we have to be focused back on what they're trying to buy. I mentioned it earlier, but I just want you to really, really close with this for you have to sell what they're trying to buy, don't sell them first page of Google, but do sell them, I'm going to increase the number of clients and traffic that comes to your site. Because that is really, really what you're selling. And then if you've got your spreadsheets in place, or we set up at the beginning, as they go through. And as you build that over a period, it's 12 to 18 months, you probably want to try and get a contract for when you do a retainer service. As that goes on over time, you can show them that data, record that data and give them that back.

So they are trying to buy traffic. If you're managing the website also trying to buy conversion, but you have to understand what they're trying to buy. And that's what you sell to them.