There is a ton of potential money to be made with rank and rent SEO websites, and the local SEO lead generation business model!
Don’t worry about not being a local SEO expert, this Affiliate Traffic Lab Review will go over how to start your own pay per lead marketing business by picking the right niche, ranking a site, and selling leads or renting websites to local businesses.
The key here is to pick a niche that is both high ticket and high volume. One example of a good rank and rent niche is mold remediation, because mold damage is a common problem in many properties, and it is generally highly profitable for the business owner. Additionally, I recommend picking an industry where companies are used to the website rental business model or buying leads. You can get a good idea of these local affiliate marketing industries by checking out our tool, or looking in the pay per call section of OfferVault.
· Restoration of any sort, be it water (most popular), mold, fire, radon, crime scene cleanup, etc.
Get creative! Look for basically anything with a high CPC, then Google “average cost of X” to find what the ticket is. Ideally it will be at least $2,000 for an average job.
If you have any experience with local SEO you probably already know this, but If you are just starting out, here is something you should know. A good way to do local SEO niche research is by typing in your keyword + the geo modifier you are looking to target into Google.
For example, “flood damage repair San Diego”. When doing this, I personally like using Keywords Everywhere as a free chrome extension, which allows me to see data on search volume, CPC, and AdWords competition, as I view the search results. You can also use the Google Keyword Planner with a local search filter to find information on keywords in your area. If you would like to learn more about how to do this you can use this guide by Moz.
Important: I cannot stress how important this step is. Try not to pick an area that is super hard to rank for, especially if you are new to SEO. When I first started out, I lived and died by search volume and CPC, but this was a bad idea… Your focus should be keyword difficulty which is referred to as SEO difficulty in our keyword tool.
It is not that it’s impossible to rank for high competition terms, and they may be profitable upon reaching the first page, but I spent a ridiculous amount of time and money ranking these terms when I could have been snagging low competition, high ticket local terms and renting the websites out to local businesses. You don’t have to be the best SEO in the world to make money, you just need to know where to allocate your time and resources.
I like to start by putting some of the top ranked competitors into SEMrush or ahrefs and seeing which keywords they rank for, how much traffic each keyword brings them, and what the difficulty of each keyword is. Then, I proceed to utilize the good ones. After that, you will need to do your own manual checking, and this involves typing your main keyword into Google and seeing what shows up.
The main factors you want to look at when gaging your competition are backlinks, on-page factors, and I also recommend looking at who is in the map pack.
Map pack competition: If there are 3 companies with 10+ 5 star reviews, then you can bet that they are probably receiving the majority of clicks when people search that keyword. Think about who you would call if you did a search and the results like that appeared. So even if you manage to get into the top 4 organic results, you might still struggle with CTR (click-through-rate).
You can also use a free tool from SERPs to virtually change your location and get the most accurate view possible. The cool thing about this tool is that it will also show you the AdWords ads that are showing up, so you can get a better idea of all of the general marketing competition for that keyword.
· How many words does your competition have on the page that is ranking?
· Does the content look high quality, or is it just a list of keywords?
· What is that page’s PA (page authority)? You can use MozBar to determine this.
· Do they have the keywords in the heading tags, content, image alt tags, and title tag?
· Check how many links they have coming into their website using SEMRush, Moz Open Site Explorer, Ahrefs, and/or Majestic.
· Actually click on these links and see if they are coming from authoritative websites. If the links are all from directory websites, that’s good for you because those generally don’t hold much power, and can be matched or surpassed quite easily.
· Take a look at their anchor text profile and determine whether there is an exact match anchor text for the keywords you are trying to rank for. If there is, and the other factors seem kind of weak, you might be able to conclude that this is one of the major reasons for that website’s rankings, and match it with your links. If the links are all branded or there are very few of them, you can assume that that domain generally has a lot of trust with Google, and that is harder to recreate in a relatively short time span. On the flip side, no keyword anchor text could also mean that you can exploit the opportunity and take the top spot, while also using a diverse link profile of course.
· Do they have social media? If so, take a look and see how regularly they post, how many likes or followers they have, and most importantly, how much engagement they get for each post. You are basically doing a social signals audit here.
· Check their citations and NAP consistency with Moz Local.
Wow… That seems like an awful lot of work… If only there was an automated tool for finding low competition keywords.
Yes there is! We built a keyword research tool specifically for local SEO affiliate marketing, and it can be found here. It will provide you with terms with high search volume that are still relatively easy to rank. The best part is that it is completely free!
Just type your main keyword into the search bar and it will recommend you the best geo modifiers to rank that keyword in. I use it all the time for my own SEO, and even if I had no affiliation with it, I would highly recommend it for finding the best areas for your rank and rent SEO niche.
A key step to starting a successful local lead generation business is finding a domain that already has some authority due to its age and link profile. If you’d like to learn how to find these manually, you can follow this guide. If you are lazy like me or would like to save yourself some time, I would recommend hiring someone to find the domains for you.
You can find my personal resource for finding niche specific expired domains, here. Make sure to let them know that you are using this service for your money site and not to create a PBN with. This information will ensure that they find you a more brand-able domain to eventually rent to local businesses.
Even though they are really good at finding expired domains, you should still know how to double check their work.
1. Use Moz Open Site Explorer and double check the metrics and spam score. The Moz spam score should be zero or at least low with a justified reason. While you’re at it, take a look at the linking domains and their spam score as well, the lower the better. Then actually click on the links and see how these websites look. Do they look legitimate? What are their metrics? Plug them into SEMrush and see if they have some sort of traffic coming to them. If they do, that is a good sign.
Also, you can understand how much link juice is actually being passed to the expired domain by seeing how many outbound links the page and the general domain has. If they are all directory links, they are not of much value because anybody can build them, and there are so many outbound links that all of the juice gets split between them, not to mention that many directory links are no-follow.
2. Plug the website into SEMrush and Majestic to check out the anchor text profile. If it is somewhat related to your rank and rent niche, that is good. Make sure that there are not too many keyword anchors though. There should mostly be branded and generic anchor text as well as naked URLs.
1. Branded anchor text: Just your brand. So if I was linking to Moz, the anchor text would just be “Moz”.
4. Naked URLs: If I was to link to Moz it would be “https://moz.com”;.
Google recognizes these 4 types of anchor text as natural because they are generally how people link to web properties, rather than with anchor text like“Water Damage Restoration Las Vegas NV”, which is considered an exact match anchor text, and should only be used about 1–3% of the time.
Keep in mind that in 2017 Google looks at your entire anchor text profile when considering whether or not to slap you with a penalty or to rank your website higher. Link and anchor text diversity is crucial to a successful link building campaign. That is why I recommend purchasing link building packages for weaker links like PDF and video submissions because they create diversity in your link and anchor text profiles.
It does two major things. One, it make your site look way more natural than if you were to just build 15 PBN links, all with keyword anchor text. The second thing it does, is it allows you to use keyword anchors for a couple of the more powerful links.
Note: Keep in mind that you can be more aggressive with your link building, anchor text, and rank a little faster with parasite SEO.
1. Check to see if the domain is indexed by putting “site:example.com” in the Google search bar. If it is, that’s a good sign, but if it isn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the domain was de-indexed due to a penalty. It might just have been out of commission for awhile, so Google felt it was not necessary to keep the site in its index.
2. Check archive.org (Wayback Machine) or Screenshots.com to make sure the website has a clean history, particularly its most recent history. This has happened to me a couple times, so I look out for it now. If at any point it looks like the domain was home to a PBN site (private blog network), avoid it at all costs. It may have a pure spam penalty!
You will need to set up hosting for this domain and create some web pages. To generate your web pages, I recommend installing a CMS (content management system) of your choice (I recommend WordPress).
With the assumption that you are using Wordpress, the first thing you need to do is pick your theme. I have found that there are some solid free options out there, but if you really want to streamline your website creation process and make your site look professional, check out Divi.
Important: You should decide how you are going to monetize the website before moving forward. There are two main ways to do this when setting up a local affiliate marketing website.
1. One commonly used model is pay per lead marketing. You will set the website up to look like a legitimate business in your lead generation niche, and sell leads to companies.
You will need to use a call tracking service like CallRail. You can configure it to record every phone call and agree on a price that you will charge the business owner you are sending the calls to. I also recommend you configure CallRail to play a message when the business owner receives a call from your forwarding number. This will add one more layer of assurance in their mind.
One way you can go about this is by using a pay per call affiliate service off of OfferVault. This will give you a set amount per call, but keep in mind that they may not have every local lead generation niche. Another downside is that you probably will get less per lead than if you were to rent your websites to local businesses, or sell leads.
What Are The Benefits Of Selling Leads Online through A Pay Per Lead Affiliate Marketing Network?
You are assured payouts from the large affiliate company, and you don’t have to have your sales hat on as much as when you sell leads to companies.
The second way to do this is to make an agreement with a business owner. As I mentioned before, this will give you a chance at getting a higher payout per lead.
Put yourself in the their shoes for a second. Basically, they need to make sure they are profitable on whatever you charge them per lead.
There is no absolute right or wrong way to go about coming up with a valuation for your leads, but here are a couple ways to get a good estimate.
1. Do a little bit of research to find out how much profit business owners in your niche make. Charging about 8-10% of the average profit made on a job in that industry is a good rule of thumb. Just keep in mind that they need to be somewhat qualified calls, demanding a water damage company pay you $250 per call for an automated sales call is going to make them not want to pay you or do business with you again. You will need to decide on what defines a qualified call with the business owner. If they insist on putting really strict guidelines for what a qualified call is, then you should charge them more per call, and vise versa.
2. Find the average CPC for your main keywords. For example: If “Water Damage Repair” has a CPC of $62.55 and “Water Damage Restoration” has a CPC of $77.44, the average of the two would be about $70. Now I can estimate that this is what local businesses are willing to pay for a click in this industry, but what about a call? In general it takes about 4–5 local search website visits to get a call, so we can calculate that they are paying Google about $70 X 4 clicks, or $280 for a call. Now, because we want to undercut Google by a little bit to offer a good deal for the business owner, let’s say about $250 per call.
At the end of the day, these methods are a good way to get an estimate of what you should be charging, but it all comes down to your particular agreement with the business owner.