Are there businesses in cities? Of course there are. Do those businesses need customers? You bet they do. And will some of them (the smart ones, at least) be willing to pay someone else to send them those customers? Absa-frickin’-lutely. Why? Because, say they’re in the towing business, they’re busy driving the tow truck, right? Or managing a fleet of drivers if it’s a bigger operation. Plus bookkeeping and payroll and buying more tow trucks and dealing with insurance and putting out fires.
No matter what type of local business it is, be it pool cleaning or garage door repair or tree stump removal or anything in between, these folks generally don’t have the time or interest or know-how to get their own leads. Not on the internet anyway. Like, sure, maybe Hank, who’s got a chimney cleaning company in Naperville, Illinois, paid his neighbor’s nerdy daughter to make him a basic website a few years ago. And maybe he set up an Instagram account, uploaded a few pics, and forgot about it. But that’s about it.
And this is where most local businesses are at. They’ve done the bare minimum to establish an online presence, which, of course, isn’t doing ’em any good. ‘Cause nobody can find ’em when they need their service, right? They go to Google and do a search, and Hank’s horrible website and dusty IG account are nowhere to be seen. You’d have to go to like page eight in the search results to run into ol’ Hank. And ya know who’s doing that? Nobody. Not when page one has plenty of good options to choose from.
So that’s really the game for brick and mortars: showing up, front and center, on the first page of Google, for all the “buyer keywords” people in their city are searching for. I mean, yeah, there’s other ways to get leads. You can run paid ads, build out social media profiles, start a YouTube channel, try to get on the news, all that. And I’m not against any of it, if the business owner’s down to do it. But if we’re asking, “Okay, what’s the 80/20 Rule here? What’s gonna produce the most results?” It’s ranking in Google.
And if you’re willing to study that skill set (how to rank in Google Maps and Google Organic at the local level), and do the work, there’s still a ton of money to be made. Remember, there are hundreds if not thousands of different types of local businesses, with entire new industries emerging all the time as the world evolves. Case in point: “Tesla charger installation service near me.” Like that never used to be a niche. Now you could have a 6-figure lead gen biz just going after that in a handful of medium-sized cities.
And speaking of cities, here’s where local gets exciting. Say you’re going after “pool filter cleaning service,” right? But say I am too. And so are 12 other people in whatever local lead gen course you join. Big deal. As long as we all choose different cities (where there are plenty of pools), we can all have successful rank and rent sites without having to compete with one another. So not the case with Amazon FBA or Shopify dropshipping, where dozens of people can come in and copy your winning product verbatim and whittle your profits down to nothing.
In local lead gen, there’s just no reason to do that. Too many businesses times too many cities equals why compete with a buncha people who actually know what they’re doing? I mean, if you wanna heave half-court shots, be my guest; but we like shooting layups. And this is the only way I’ve found to make money from my laptop where that’s possible. Everything else is just such low odds of success. But still, that said, there’s a right and a wrong way to do this.
