Getting Qualified Leads for Local Service Business (Car Rental) without spending a dime on Ads? Yes, it’s possible with SEO!
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization” is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.
In simplier terms, one of the goals of SEO is to rank for particular keywords/categories in Search results of Search engines, in our case we use Google as our search engine (or probably 90% of the world does)
The Business Owner wants to have qualified leads without spending a dime on ads, as well as creating an online presence for his small business. He owns a small Car / Van Rental service and wants customers outside of the Philippines (which is a major part of his market) to be aware of his services. He also wants his business to be visible in google search results and have an automated system to generate leads without taking too much time of his time.
STRATEGY
We decided to create a new website (https://maxwellcarscebu.com/) (since he has none) for his Local Business on a self hosted WordPress platform. The website is fairly simple, focusing more on conversion (with our CTA [Call To Action] buttons in multiple areas in home page) and having a key emphasis of our unique proposition – being one of the lowest cost providers in the area.
We also included A Testimonials Section showing some sort of social proof of our successful trips.
Our CTA Buttons (Contact Us Now and Book Now) all link to a Contact form in the website. Based on owner’s experience, most of the users submit a detailed itinerary which could vary and ask for pricing first before booking.
Here’s what our contact form looks like – (We use a Free service from ZOHO Forms)
Once Users submit all their info – they will be taken to a Thank You Page – Assuring them that the next step is someone from the office will call them to answer their inquiry / confirm booking.
CREATING A LEAD DATABASE FOR THE OWNER
Using Zoho Form’s Free service, once information is submitted in the contact form, the data fields are automatically exported to a google sheet accessible by me and the owner. Here is a live look of the Sheet. (you can click image to open high resolution image)
We don’t want to wait all day looking at this sheet to see if fields are exported and a lead is generated, so we use a service named Zapier which notifies us via email every time new data is exported to the sheet. Here’s what a zapier email looks like every time we get a notification email with a link to our google sheet.
RANKING THE WEBSITE – HOW WE GOT QUALITY ORGANIC LEADS
Discussing detailed SEO Strategy is reserved for another article so i’ll try not to put too much space here. Our main strategy was identifying what keywords we wanted to rank and checking on competitors based on Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). Using AHREFS (one of the best, if not the best for SEO), we identified that we can outrank the competition using keywords “Cebu Rent a car with driver”. The keyword we plan to optimize next but much more competitive is “Cebu Rent a Car”- that is the next course of action.
After Doing some On Page SEO, adding a few blog articles and getting free organic traffic from local business listing websites / youtube, we got that much needed SEO juice and our page started to rank eventually. Here are the Keyword positions as of the moment, surely lots of room for improvement, but we see massive potential!
We are now in page 1 of Google search results for some very relevant keywords for our business.
THE GOOGLE SANDBOX THEORY
As per AHREFS –
The Google Sandbox refers to an alleged filter that prevents new websites from ranking in Google’s top results. Think of it like a probation period—even if you do everything right, your site won’t get decent rankings until it comes to an end. The Google Sandbox has never been officially confirmed by Google. But many SEOs are confident in its existence, as they see sandbox-like effects when trying to rank new websites.
Since this is a new website/domain , We are not sure if we were really affected by the “sandbox” but our data seems to show a trend. Most of our site contents/blogs were created during October 2019 and we did not do anything to the site until now (Feb 2020). Looking at the data, clicks and impressions started to rise by around December 2019 or about 2 months after site creation even without much site updating going on.
AUDIENCE
No surprise most of our visitors came are local from the Philippines, but we were pleasantly surprised that we got some traction globally. Here’s the audience sources form the last 30 days,
What is interesting however is despite having probably 94% of visitors local – 80% of the inquiries/bookings from the website have come from international visitors. Talk about the 80/20 rule in action – roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
CONCLUSION and NEXT STEPS
We were able to prove that we can outrank competition locally in SERP and get quality leads with a sound Lead generation system in place without spending a dime on ads. We cannot validate the existence of the “sandbox” effect but we were getting significant traction after 2 months – we believe the site has a lot of potential.
Next Steps:
- Improve / Optimize On Page SEO
- Add more Quality content/blogs
- Add backlinks pointing to the site (off page SEO), outreach strategy
- Utilizing Google My Business (GMB) – Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool that helps local people find your business on Google Search and Google Maps. You can provide potential customers with key information, such as your address, phone number and even your latest offer, allowing for an instant interaction. With majority of searches now
performed on mobile devices, you want to ensure that your information is readily available.
Here’s an example of GMB listing of our competitor –
This is called the google local 3 pack, as it shows the top 3 GMB listings for a particular local business. Local 3 pack always appears on page 1 and on top of the search results – making it a free yet very powerful tool to help your local business.
Unfortunately, our local business is having a problem receiving the Authentication code Postcard needed to create a GMB account. As of the moment, we are re-sending the post card so we can start using GMB and outrank the competition once and for all.
What do you think of this strategy? We’d love to hear from you! You can go ahead implement this method for your business, or if you need help or got any further questions, leave a comment below or contact us via email.
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Amazing! Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and knowledge with us.