Unlocking Local SEO Success for Your Franchise

SEO not working? This will inspire you! Lonnie Jones shares a JAW-DROPPING case study: a franchise went from 10 leads/month to 100+ after fixing their SEO! Learn what they did wrong & right. 

DISCLAIMER: The information on this podcast is for general information purposes only. Franchising involves risk and careful consideration should be given before making any decisions.

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Transcript

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you start getting addicted to the feeling of when you get somebody to the point where you start making them money and then you really substantially impact their business. There's no better feeling than that. Right. admittedly, I'm not gonna sit here like other marketers claim, they're AI experts at this point. It's all bs. It's moving too fast, but we're still smart enough people to move with it. It's just constantly chasing at this point. I can't express enough that you don't have to force yourself into a box like I. There's ways you can be influencing people everywhere. It's just gotta find what the way speaks to you and then just, right. But then you gotta commit to it like no matter what. Welcome to the Franchise Freedom Podcast, where you can escape the corporate trap through franchise ownership. Here's your host, Giuseppe gr, the franchise guide. Welcome to the Franchise Freedom Podcast. I'm your host, Giuseppe Grammatic, your franchise guide, the show where we help corporate executives experience time and financial freedom. Thanks for joining us today. We have a very special guest. We have Lonnie Jones from local SEO, help. Lonnie, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. We've been we've been talking a lot. I'm like, man, we should have recorded the previous call, the, you know, about 20 minutes ago as well. There's every time we speak, I learn something new, but wanted to bring you on. You know, we talk about business ownership and we've been bringing guests. We've had franchisors. On the show talking about different mile models, excuse me, franchise models. We've had accountants and attorneys, and one area we haven't talked a lot about was marketing. And we had a conversation a while back about SEO and I said, you know what? Lemme bring Lonnie on. Let's get a show. We can talk about SEO, maybe the future of marketing. I have. I have a lot of questions on my list that I still haven't asked, and I'm like, why not? Why not create a show. But before we dive in, if you can give the audience a little bit of background on who Lonnie is and how did you get into marketing and SEO? I mean, I don't really consider myself a marketer. I'm a numbers guy. I've a degree in finance. You know, I started my career as an accountant and started a little accounting firm that I ended up selling and then. Had was way more interested in the internet. I mean, I'm old, so the internet was a new thing at some point in my life, where now it's just part of life for most. Kids these days. And I wanted to pursue the internet because it was an interesting new I thing. And that's where I said let me start a website, right? I'm just some guy that wanted to start a website and started a business online. And part of that process I picked up a book about SEO one day because frankly I was a business owner, entrepreneur. A lot like people that are probably gonna listen to this podcast. So I don't consider myself a marketer. I learned SEO from my own business, you know, and so a lot of your questions were about SEO and you know why? Because you want to help your business. You know, luckily now there's a whole industry of SEO that you can turn to, you know, good, bad or otherwise, depending on who you work with. But I had the same mindset. The difference was there's no one for me to turn to. There was like maybe 10 people in the world that even add that title to their. Their name and so I was just on my own. So I started doing it and did very well. I mean, transparently, this was before it was as complicated as it was now, and you can get away with a little bit more. But hey, that's what started me down my path ended up selling that business and asking myself, what do I wanna do with my life? And in the process of thinking about what I wanna do next with my life a bunch of people in my industry approached me and said, Lonnie, can you help us with SEO? And I'm like, what are you talking about? You know, like I'm a. Business owner, I'm gonna start another business, you know? Right. Come on. Help me. And I said, all right, you're good friends of mine. I said, okay I'll do it for a few months. We'll just see what happens. You know, I never even thought it would turn into a thing, but I just got success after success. Maybe it was luck. I don't know. Back then I look back and think about all this stuff I did. I like to think I know things, but I didn't know anything then. And it, that's how it started. It just started having success and you know, you start getting addicted to the feeling of when you get somebody to the point where you start making them money and then you really substantially impact their business. There's no better feeling than that. Right. You know, and so that, that's kind of where it just led into. One day I blinked and I was like, I guess I'm an agency, right. You know, I never considered it that way. And then I started getting franchise stuff come my way and you know, here this is where we're talking today, so Awesome. That's a little bit about myself and my, how I got here. Sometimes you just fall into stuff, right? It's not the grand plan and you just, hey, get the interest is there, you start to build some traction in a certain area. So that's kinda been, I've been hearing that more and more often. So that's kinda, that's kind of cool. You never know what's gonna fall on your lap. Alright, I wanna maybe. From an educational standpoint, take a step back. Now, when you look at marketing, we'll use the word marketing in general. There's multiple pillars, right? There is. You know, I look at it, there's maybe some of these are kind of subcategories or sub pillars, but SEO to me is one of the most important search engine optimization for anyone listening in, because I didn't know what the heck SEO stood for when I first heard SEO. But, that to me is more of the organic pillar. It's you know, what you're doing on the website link building. There's a lot of aspects to that, you know, what are the other pillars? Because some people, you know, may only double down and do SEO, but ignore the rest. So what would you say are. Not to spend a lot of time, but what are the pillars in marketing, if you wouldn't mind sharing? I think the problem with calling it a pillar is it silos. All these different channels, pillars, whatever you wanna say. I think if you think about before the internet happened, how do people see you as a business? They would see a billboard you driving by, right? You see a truck out in the field, you'd hear your neighbors discussing you or talking about you referring you. You'd watch tv. I mean, back in the day when people actually watch commercials, you'd hear it on the radio, you know? And so you really want to be. Seen as very, as in a variety of places as possible, right? Primarily the places where your customers are gonna be more densely you know, engaging. And so when you translate that into the internet, it's just the same thing. They're just new versions of that, additional versions of that. Because a lot of those still exist and you know, this is where somebody. I spend one minute and you know, I'm in my day at work and I'm do a lot of Google searches'cause I'm doing research on things or looking potential clients up or existing clients up or competitor research or things like that. And I'm on Google a lot, whereas, and so then I want to make sure when I actually go to look for a service or product, I know I go to Google. It's just the way I am and a lot of other people do that. So that's where you want to have a presence for people who are. At a certain stage of their buying cycle. Right. Or thought process where they're gonna find you. Whereas when I get off of work I go and I, you know, I finally want to decompress and I sit down on my porch or in a chair or something, and guess where I go? I go to LinkedIn, I go to Facebook. You know, I just start checking things out. Instagram for some people, TikTok these days, right? And so that's where, but I'm still the same person that will be influenced by who, you know, the pro the brands that I potentially have are a good fit for. I by the way, yeah, I like, yeah, I like that point. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So I didn't answer your question, but there's social, which is organic and paid. Organic is where you just see. The businesses share content and things like that. And then paid is where they do an advertisement. There's Google search. Google has a Google display mechanism, which is similar to paid social. You know, I don't know there's. There's lots of white, you know, email coming in, SMS coming in. There's these scenes called voicemail drops where a voicemail just pops into your inbox, which is, people blow their minds when they get that. They think they missed a call. And it's that's the impression they give, but it's just a voicemail. But guess what? People listen to those'cause they're curious to who this is, and that gives you a chance to get, you know, somebody's. In front of somebody that you may not otherwise. So anyway I probably worked around that question, but essentially that's kind of how I perceive it actually. I actually I prefer the explanation, actually. Your explanation much better. Me, I'm, that's how my mind works. Maybe that's how my mind's structured, but that makes complete sense. And to your point, yeah, I'm LinkedIn during the day, but in the evenings I'm not on LinkedIn. You know, I'm on Instagram and. It's one way I bond with the kids. The kids would be sending me, you know, stupid videos and you know, it's like we can find the stupider video, so we're sharing them back and forth. Actually, text message doesn't work. If it's not a Instagram message, then they're not even responding. So that's my way. Oh yeah. There go, being able to communicate with two high school kids. So that's, oh, wow. That's a whole, I take skill. We'll do a show. We'll take skill right there. We'll do a show on that, that'll be next week's show. But you might need a couch for that one though. Yeah, that's a different conversation. Couch. And I'm, and I'll bring the kids in. We'll have a, it'll be a party. You know, SEO is, as you mentioned it's more organic. There's a lot of. Components to it and maybe we come back to SEO. But my thing and you know, the questions that I have, and I'm sure the listeners have is, you know, the game has changed back in the day. You know, you just did a blog post and that was more than enough because there was less people on, there was less technology, less ways. Right. So now with the with AI and everything that's being able to be produced, I'm noticing I do a Google search. It's like you're getting ai, now you're getting ai responses. Up top. Which I found interesting. So that. You know, correct me if I'm wrong, that is, that's, is that still technically SEO because the AI is pulling from somewhere. So if you can explain a little bit about, you know, what this, what the future looks like if you're doing traditional SEO what is gonna change in the future and how do you make it to that, you know, to where the AI is gonna be picking up your stuff. Yeah, I mean, over all the, I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years. I say 15 years because I haven't done the math to know exactly how many years. I probably should do that one day, but definitely over 15 years if I were to look back and. Search engines have changed. You know, when I first started this, there wasn't even Google, right? There wasn't even Google. I was, you know, and you know, there's Yahoo, there's a OL which people may not even heard of. You know, there's search engines have evolved over the time. Now Google ends up becoming the 800 pound and gorilla literally overnight. And so that's where all everybody ever talks about. But then even beyond Google, YouTube's a search engine. YouTube, yeah. Was bought by Google. They didn't invent YouTube, you know, and that was its own search engine. You know, duck goes a search engine. Obviously Microsoft and now Bing. So there, so over the years I've been doing this search engine have came and went and there's new search engines even going to. Instagram's a search engine. You're looking, usually when you're investigating and trying to find either a brand or somebody interesting you wanna listen to, or even like a podcast, people go to the search engine of podcast. Research franchise podcaster. Right. You know, and or franchise information. And they wanna find the podcasters talking about franchise stuff'cause they have interest in that. So all these things are search engines and they follow a very similar pattern. Guess what, when AI comes into the picture. It's the same thing, it's just a way more advanced competitor that, you know, good, bad, or otherwise. It just means that I need to put energy into figuring out what that new robot needs to see to, you know, for our, for my clients to then be seen and be found. And you know, for me it's been, I've been. Seeing this coming for three years now. A lot of people are just being introduced to this like this year or so. So this isn't new to me. I've already been doing the research and it's rapidly changing. So I don't wanna sit here and say that anybody's an expert. But once you understand the bones and the fundamentals of it you just keep evolving from that and to account for that. In the strategy that I take on for my clients now, it's affecting informational searches more than anything. When somebody's doing research, like I've been using it a lot. I hate, I don't know if I wanna admit it or not, but I like adding context. If you can't tell, I can talk and talk and talk. When I search for something, I'd rather give a paragraph search with tons of context and I want AI to give me the answers'cause I can get. Same context back and then my answer, that's more valuable to me than having me to go dig for that information. And so it's, so right now we're seeing it mostly affect those types of searches, right? You never go to Google and write a paragraph, right? And the quality of the bolt I'm getting is helpful, but if I'm looking for a roofing company at the franchisee level, at the local level, I mean, think about ai, they're full of information, but like how does AI differentiate between 10 roofing companies, you know? The information that's provided to them on the surface of a website is all equal. In AI's mind. They're gonna look for third party information, like reviews, right? They wanna see the sentiment of those reviews. They wanna see other websites recommending them, you know, forums, Reddit, things like that. So like they're evaluating it very similarly than how Google does, but probably a little more unique though. So I think if I were. You know, a betting man. I'd say there's inconsistency in local results at this point, and that's what I have to navigate is I could be following the same strategy for 20 franchisees and I might have 20 different results. Where right now I have a very similar result. So that's where I have to overcome. But it's because it's just such a new. Place to go into. There's no clarity on consistency that I can follow any patterns to then create a strategy to consistently win. Right. And that's where it's, it seems to be changing rapidly is, but the bones are there still not quite. Seeing the patterns that I would want to, I need to know exactly what to do. I mean, admittedly, I'm not gonna sit here like other marketers claim, they're AI experts at this point. It's all bs. It's moving too fast, but we're still smart enough people to move with it. It's just constantly chasing at this point. Gotcha. At least how It's how I feel. Yeah. It's it's an evolving thing and I feel you know, it's just you're constantly learning things. If I find once you figure it out, it's changing, but. I guess if you learn anything, it is just to evolve with it. It's not it's not stagnant, it's not you know, you're constantly having to improve. You know, you're on page one day, you know, this week and that you may be at page 20 if you're not keeping up. So that's why you have to love what you do because then what I do, I love it. I love the challenge of learning. I've been doing it for 15 years for a reason. This isn't new, it's just different version of what I experienced. And if you don't love this, if you're doing this as a job, you're not gonna cons always be. Interested in this type of stuff to continue to learn. So I think that's maybe where I might have an advantage over other people is I just, I can't help it. I need to constantly be in front of it, not even for the sake of my business, because I'm just generally curious, you know? Right. And I think that helps me a lot. Loving, chasing this type of stuff. So I'm not mad about it. I'm actually happy that I like the evolvement. If it's too stale, I get bored, or that means other people can get into my space and I now I have more competitors because if it's easy, everybody will do it. Right, exactly. And they'll do it themselves, right? If it was easy. There there's so many elements as you know, as a solopreneur that it's hard to keep on top of things. Two parts. Number one. You have an SEO masterclass that you had shared with me, if you can talk about that and who that's for. And then the second part would be if you are working with that startup franchisee or even the solopreneur, just say they're not even a franchisee and they have only, we'll say five hours a week to really spend time on SEO, you know, what would be where should I start and what would be your top recommendations. Yeah, those are good questions. I mean, I created the franchise SEO masterclass that's being hosted on franchisors.com. If anybody wants to go check it out, it's free. The reason why I created that is because I've talked to pro hundreds of franchise brands over the years of doing this. Thousands of franchisees and I get the same questions over and over again. Okay? So I put those questions in a video like this and I put'em into a list where you can, you did, you or your marketing teams can go find, get questions answered without having to like book a call with me and ask me the question. You know, people are sometimes uncomfortable just getting one answer. They think I'm gonna try to sell them something. I'm not that way, but I made it easy for them and put'em out there and said, Hey, go get your answers. And the second reason why is because. These franchise brands, I'll inherit them. I'll, you know, I'll sign'em as a client and there's so many mistakes and I go, I know where those mistakes come from. They're either coming from their lack of education or their agency's lack of education and, you know, they mean but they don't know what they don't know. You know, they don't know the intricacies of, and the depth of what SEO can be and all the lessons learned from that depth. So then I have to fix it, and then a lot of times I have to fix it. That takes resources and time and money. It also slows down. The results that I could get somebody if they didn't make those mistakes. So I'm hoping brands and their marketing teams will go and get questions answered, and at the very least use it to challenge their existing agencies or their existing marketing teams and get them to at least address it before they take a step. In a different direction or maybe learn something and go, Hey, let's do what Lonnie says on here. And then, you know, maybe one day if I end up working with them it'll make my life easier. And ultimately that brain's gonna have a better experience and get a better result. And that's ultimately what matters to me. And what, and the site was again. It's on franchisors.com franchisors. It's, and you know, they hosted it. You know, I'm starting to do, you know, probably do some videos and stuff on YouTube at some point. Just not quite developed there yet. But right now franchisors.com is hosting it for me. So happy that they did that. And you know, it's a resource for everybody that's free. I can give you the link and you can add it to this description or whatever, wherever you wanna put it. People can get to it easily. But then, you know, the second question you asked was about if somebody has limited time you know, let's say they have one hour a week or two hours a week, or five hours a month to put into SEO. I mean, it's a good question. A couple things. One, you gotta have content out there. I know that's something that you hear over and over again. You're doing it right now. You're creating content, you know, you're having me on here and you're talking about things that are related to the industry you're in, and the direction you're, you know, the businesses you're pursuing would get value outta the conversations like this. So doing something like this is well worth your time and energy. It's just, what's your version of this? At whatever business is watching this. Right? Right. I mean, I'm not a comfortable person interviewing people. I won't ever do a podcast. I can talk, you can tell that I can answer questions. I mean, I guess that's easy when you know stuff, you just answer things top of your head. So it's not like a challenge. But I wouldn't be good at interviewing people, so it's not a good fit for me. So you gotta find what's a good fit for you, what channel that's on. You obviously want to be in the channels that. That your customers will be or whatever, but there's some influence there. But ultimately, find what you're comfortable with and just start with what's easy for you. Don't force yourself into generating content or doing things that you're not comfortable with. I'm not good on social media. Like I'll sit here and answer these. Questions, but then now I, LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever, and I need to post selfies. And I'm at, I mean, I was at a conference yesterday, I didn't even take one picture. That's stupid. I'm a marketing guy. I didn't take one picture. And so now I'm like, I probably should have taken some pictures and put'em on LinkedIn, but I just, it's not my instincts, but you gotta go steal'em. Gotta go steal'em from others doing the masterclass. Correct. You know, doing a masterclass was my thing I could lean into and I now I have this huge asset that hopefully will lead me and get me in front of people that I wouldn't. And get in front of. So content is over sold in the sense of everybody says get content. But what is Find the, just find works for you and just start there and just stay focused on that and build it out. And then you can figure out once you have that, like how do you get people in front of that? That's. That's how, what I recommend, I guess if I was a franchisee. The other element, and you asked a question about AI already is AI is actually evaluating a franchisee or a local business or you know, solopreneur that has their own local business. It's not so much. As much about what Leilani can do on a website, it's about the whole picture is actually becoming crystallized in AI's mind. They can see the big picture where Google has tried many years to see the big picture, but they still compartmentalize all the elements. Of what a real business does. It's not just the content on the website, it's how many reviews they have. It's, I already said it earlier, the sentiment on in, you know, in forums, the sentiment in social, things like that. And they're evaluating all that together and deciding who should be number one. AI is gonna be, do something similar, but I think they're gonna be better at the other things that aren't on a website, that aren't in a Google business profile. The things that I know how to manipulate the best are still gonna have value, but I think there's gonna be more value in. AI being able to evaluate a real business that's highly sought after in a market, and that's where you, as the business owner needs to be out there and doing all those glue things that it's hard for an agency to do and that's. Collaborating with other local businesses, you know, joining Chamber of Commerce. I know this sounds like stuff you've already heard before, but this is the stuff that then ends up online and ends up in different areas and referrals and you build brand ambassadors at the local level. All those types of things generate activity and conversations and things that AI is now gonna see at a better debt. And that's gonna be influencing WW how much you show up in a. In the AI search engine or the AI version of the search engine. Gotcha. Those are the types of things. So just do real business, real local marketing. I know it sounds like it's seems like a cop out answer, but I'm telling you the act, you know, I always see franchise brands say, I want my franchisees to be the mayor of town. I hear that everywhere. It's true. And this is even doubling down on that because you need to be out there creating relationships, creating, you know, with the intent potentially to create referrals. Yes. Things like that, that is gonna drive activity, that is gonna be picked up by AI and that's gonna get influencing SEO, which is this. People aren't gonna really put this together, but that's ultimately what I'd recommend with my time is don't make a to-do list of things you're gonna do for SEO and I'm gonna optimize this or whatever. Either generate content or if you're in a local market, you can still generate content, but lean into fostering relationships locally because that will circle back around and generate the activity online that these AI search engines are gonna be seeing and using to influence where you show up. Right? There's a long answer. Like always for me. No, it's good. You, I mean, a big part of it, as you mentioned the stuff that you enjoy doing. Like you said, you don't, you not necessarily a podcaster, but you enjoyed the masterclass, which was that, you know, with those, the series of videos. So it's gotta be sustainable, right? If you're gonna get sick of it the first time, obviously. Oh, podcasts. Don't work. What was the intent of the podcast? And you gave up after 10 episodes, so what? What the hell did you do? It was kind of a, I'm not, you didn't even, you didn't give a shot. I've heard from expert podcast marketers that you're not, it doesn't make sense to you do a hundred, you know, yeah. Oh man. I don't even know how to inter, I mean, that's where I like, get realistic for myself. Say, I'm not gonna interview a hundred people. I mean, I might. I don't know. It's just not that I don't want to commit to that energy. I just know I won't be happy about it, so it won't be something I enjoy. So that means it's gonna be like a job. It's gonna be painful, and so I can't express enough that you don't have to force yourself into a box like I. There's ways you can be influencing people everywhere. It's just gotta find what the way speaks to you and then just, right. But then you gotta commit to it like no matter what. That's the other thing is people give up way too soon and they just say, this isn't working. I don't know. And then they don't do it because they don't, but I don't know, I don't know how to explain it, but I have tons of examples of clients of mine and even myself where I just commit to something heavily and just let it. You know, see it through to the end and it does work. I mean, I can't tell you enough that masterclass has brought me leads that I never would've got if I didn't have it. And I spent a lot of time on that thing. But it was easy time for me. It was just time. The time is what I struggled with that because I have work to do. But but doing it, I enjoy it. I could do that all day. You know, I have a lot to say clearly. I keep over-explaining things, but, so that's why it was easy for me, and I have other things I want to do. It's gonna be easy to do. It's just gotta find the time, and then I'm gonna do it right. And then eventually, over the future after that'll produce activities that, again, if I didn't do that right one, it came my way. Yeah, no, I, yeah I, it makes complete sense. I wish I had learned some of this stuff sooner, but speaking of shows, this is, I don't know the exact number, but we're at, we're approaching 250. This is our. Our fifth year, we're doing about 50 a year. This is, yeah, fifth year basically. So we started just before COVID I think it was March February, March of 2020. So I. Oh, you're a natural. I mean, you just, it's in your bones, right? It doesn't this isn't work for you is it just feels now it's during COVID, you know, at first we, we built a show to educate, but then it became education, but it also became networking. That was my networking thing. And a lot of people don't have, you know, you may take you two hours or take a flight to see someone. And I'm not saying. This takes the place of that, but I'm able to meet someone new just about every single week, talk with them, learn a new topic, share that with the world. You know, we create a blog for every single one, so it's helpful. Now, my, I guess my website is a search engine. You can just search a word and it'll pull up any single topic that was brought up. We have the transcripts on there, people find that useful but what I hear all the time is, you know, they go back to the site. They don't look past the last 10 shows. So we're bringing a lot of topics back up, you know, not that there's any change, but it's let's revisit marketing, let's revisit you know, your your FDD review or your accounting best practices and stuff like that. Not many changes. There, there's some updates as you just got back from the conference, maybe some new things you learned, which will. Which we'll add, but not a lot changes at least when you're doing due diligence or looking at brands and stuff like that. So yeah, it's fun. And for me it's natural. It's just part of what my weekly routine, it's just new show every week. Sometimes we batch record'em, but it's fun. I truly enjoy it. I know some people don't, and they first told me I had a face radio and we just did audio, and then we added video. And I was like, I'm screwed now. And now I gotta figure, I gotta be, I gotta become a writer and I am definitely not. A good writer. So this is something that's easy for me. It's fun and yeah, it's but for some people, I have friends of mine that I, that were on the same kind of group, and they're writers, they're afraid, you know, afraid of the camera. So they write, and that's equally as good. I think if that's how you can connect with people. You said it a minute ago that like the networking that came from this, that wasn't your primary focus on doing this. I guarantee when you started doing this, you're thinking that you're gonna get lots of subscribers and followers and lots of people finding you that way, and that's how you're gonna make this make sense. But I bet you the networking is what produced more value out of it. So that's where people give up on things too soon because they focus, they don't realize big. They stick a step back and think about all the things that come from that. And then, you know, they don't really put that together. It's understandably.'cause you really may not if you're not experienced with it, but I guarantee the networking you brought to the table. Was the differentiator here. I mean, when I was at this conference the other day, I mean, people walked up to me and said, LA, you haven't been posting on LinkedIn? I just told you earlier, I don't like social media. So like when I got too busy over the last few months, I, believe me, I have tons of content to get out there. I just been. Too overwhelmed to actually get to it, but I realized, geez, you actually paid attention. People are paying attention to this stuff, you know, so now I gotta oh, I gotta get back to getting some stuff out there. But you know, you don't realize how many people actually see this stuff and put a face to a name and recognize it. You know? I, it's weird. It's so anyway I really, yeah, that s cel the celebrity status, I call it. What? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, it was surprising for sure, for me. What was if you could share the name of the conference and if you had any, if you can share any takeaways. It was the Young conference in, in Scottsdale this year. You know, the Fisherman's and Ryan Hicks put it on. And the, and I. You know, they also do Springboard, which is one of their other popular conferences that I also go to, and I think they have a third one called Unconference as well, which is more of a small group. And you know, they have lots of emerging and mid franchise brands there. And you know, it's good for someone like me to go there and shake hands and kiss babies, but then it's an educational platform, so they have people speaking and talking and educating things that I think brings a lot of value. But the most value comes out of just talking to people. I mean, I got, again, the same questions on my masterclass. Got asked to me 35 times is the last few days, you know, and I like, and I feel I can, you know, I feel bad'cause I'm like this is my masterclass. It's not self-promotion, but I want them to know that I know they have more questions and their marketing team, they're not gonna remember my answer. Even when I told them at the, you know, in person, they're gonna go back and try to tell their marketing person, you know, Lonnie said, go do this, you know, and then they're gonna, they're gonna butcher it. So I say, go to my masterclass. Get your marketing teams there. They can just get questions answered about website structure about. Content about GBP stuff. You know, you name it I covered the whole basis. Even if it's just loosely related. SEO, it's on there.'cause they're the questions I get asked. So I, you know, love sharing my knowledge and I love helping people. You know, especially merging brands that don't have the big budgets, they still need. To know this stuff, they still need to head in the right direction and make the right decisions that will get them results or save them a lot of money and time in doing the wrong things, right. So that's where I'm happy to have it out there and I hope people like it and utilize it for that, for those reasons. I I went through the class and it was very helpful, so I greatly appreciate it. So for anyone, we'll you know, anyone listening and that's interested, we'll put the the link in the show notes switch, switching gears a little bit because you know, you work with. Franchisors as well as franchisees and in every organization is different. You know, depending if the franchisor offers what they call turnkey marketing. Some are gonna be a little bit less, and not because they don't wanna assist their franchisees, but maybe it's more B2B and they have you going out and doing more of the networking in the chamber. But we see a lot of, in the home services space, which you have a lot of experience in, you know, helping those brands. So the question that comes up is that there's a different strategy at the franchisor level. There's typically a brand fund. You know, you're getting kind of that national presence across the country. And then you have the franchisees located in their specific markets, maybe a couple zip codes or a handful of zip codes in their in their state. So the question is, you know. The strategies are different, but at the same time how do they work? How do you kind of work together so that you're not replicating posts and content and potentially I would assume maybe get penalized for that. So what, how does that strategy kind of differ when you're putting money into the brand fund, but you're also doing kind of, marketing at the local level where, I mean, the information for the most part is similar because you're all dealing with the same brand. Yeah, I mean, I run this a lot. I mean, every brand I work with has a different version of what you just said. I mean, it's amazing. Everybody has opinions, you know, other agencies have opinions from, some, from experience, some from lack of experience will recommend things. So there's all this noise of information and recommendations out there. So I understand why there's this big variety of what I inherit when I work with the brand or even. I just analyze brands a lot. I have, Hey Lonnie, can you look at my website and tell me what you think? And I'll get on calls with them. I'll give them my advice, you know, and get off that call. But it's amazing the differences in what I see. And again, a lot of my. Recommendations or in my masterclass I know that sounds like I'm promoting it, but it's this is all, these are all the kind of questions I get is generally what you just asked. And so I can't stress enough that I've covered all this stuff in, in there and for people who are listening to this and that have their own concerns and questions to go get'em asked. But anyway so what I see commonly is. The brand will take money outta the brand fund, use it for lots of things, but if they end up doing SEO or using some of it for SEO, there is a national. SEO strategy, right? And so when Google is looking at a franchise brand's website, they don't sit there and go, oh, that's a franchise. They, it's not how they analyze things. They analyze things that it's just another website. And so when they see that website, they have the same expectations as they would see on your website or a franchisees website if they have a different website, is they wanna see content about the subject matter that they're in. So it doesn't matter what industry you're in, there's an expectation that you're gonna be. Talking about, you know, med spa information or roofing information or medical information about whatever you do or whatever you sell or whatever you offer. And and you want to, you kind of want to be informative. You want to display the fact that you are an expert, so you have all this wealth of information that. Anybody in the general public can turn to learn something like it's a resource. So that's one thing at the national level your brand should be doing. Some of'em do some of them don't. Some of'em do it well, some of them don't. Right? So there's just lots of variety of what that is, and I could talk about that for an hour by itself. But when you're a franchisee. If your brain is doing it right, then you don't need to establish yourself as the expert in roofing, you don't establish yourself as the expert in, in, you know, facials or waxing or, you know, men's health, whatever it may be. You just need to establish the fact that you are operating in your city. Okay? So when you're, you know, your franchise brand gives you a micro side of some sort, which is hopefully tied to the brand itself. So now you're being evaluated'cause you're connected to that brand. You don't need to write, rewrite a blog about roofing. You don't need to rewrite a blog about medical stuff. You know, you don't need to establish yourself as an expert in the niche or the industry you're in because that's already been done at the website brand level. If the brand's doing it right, so you really just trying to establish yourself with local relevance that you are in that geographic market. So that's where there's really not a lot you can do above and beyond. What's usually recommended is if you have any ability to optimize your website yourself, or you can. You know, your franchise brand works with an agency that can do it for you. What you're really doing is most brands, every website is exactly the same one for the franchisees, the microsite. So you have a very similar structure, right? Now, the only difference would be. This one's gonna talk about Scottsdale. This one's gonna talk about Los Angeles. This one's gonna talk about Denver. This one's talk about Miami. But usually the rest of the content about the industry they're in is the same. Now when like I take on a franchisee and we do local SEO for them, one of the first things we do is, you know, in theory we're getting. You know the brands we work with, I only work with them if I can actually optimize that page. Some brands don't allow that. They're like, no, this is a template. We're not touching it. Oh, really? You're severely limiting my ability to improve that franchisees market. But they're like, in their mind it's scale and it's the management of. Hundreds of locations that have, will have different content, whatever it may reasons why they'd make that decision, I don't think they understand the impact it has by being able to optimize locally. So we'll go to that page and we'll really hone in and be hyperlocal and add a bunch more words about the points of interest in Scottsdale. You know, you know, talk about the things that only people in Scottsdale would recognize, and it's not even related to the industry you're in, but what I'm trying to establish in Google's mind is that. We are operating there and I know that sounds like it's an obvious thing. You said Scottsdale and your pager. What else do you need to do, Lonnie? You know, there's 30 Springfields in the US right? You know, there's 80 some odd Washingtons, right? I mean, or WA related to Washington. So Google is a robot again, and yeah, you might give enough information that makes it obvious to you that you're operating that city. But Google's robot wants to see more debt. I mean, there's Pasadena, Texas, there's Pasadena, California. And so if you don't really highlight. More specific hyper-local information that differentiates the two pasadenas. And yeah, you can put California and Texas and that seems like an obvious thing, but I'm telling you from experience, it takes more, right? And the more depth we go with localizing that content, the more Google trusts. Which city you're in, and then we will rank you higher because of that. So that's one of the things that we do for our clients. But if you're a franchisee and you can edit your own content, find a way to crowbar that in there, add your own influence. And so that's what you can do to the website. And then when it comes to your Google business profile, which is. You know, more important in my opinion, than the website itself. That my next question? Yeah. Oh, okay. That's where you wanna do the same thing. You wanna make it hyperlocal, you want to add photos and your, I mean, I was just at a a franchisees grand opening when I was in Scottsdale actually. And this is another thing I didn't even put on LinkedIn, so I'm actually gonna do that today. But, which was cool to go see franchisees in person, right? You can boots on the ground, you can meet the people, you can, you know, really put that perspective out there. So I really enjoyed myself out there, but I sat there and I told the owner, I said, okay, drive all around Scottsdale taking pictures. I. Of points of entry, the Scottsdale sign, the things that are recognizable. Put your, yeah, your wrapped vehicle out in front of it and, you know, make a, you know, make a comment about it. But what you're effectively doing in Google's eyes is you're confirming to them that you are operating there. That's your territory, that's your service area. It's not enough just to say Scottsdale on your website, Scottsdale inside your Google business profile. They wanna see that depth and that depth is often very hard for a brand or an agency to produce. So if I'm a franchisee, and I'm trying to do the things that are gonna bring the most value to me as a franchisee. Again, hoping the brand is doing the right things. Then when you come in and do the things I just mentioned, that's gonna be a game changer for you. So that's what I would recommend. That's going to keep things, you know, keep the conflicts down. When it comes to, again, if you write about roofing and your franchise, a lot of brands will give their franchise these local blogs. And I see them write about roofing, about med spa. All you do is hurt the brand because the brand already has content about that stuff. Right. So when you write about it. Google looks at the two. They just, they're just two pages on the same website. And if they're the exact, they're talking about both about roofing or both about, you know, I dunno, skincare, whatever it may be. Then Google doesn't know which page should be the premier page. So it actually brings down the national page, which reduces the effectiveness of it.'cause there's lack of traffic. Your page goes up a little bit, but your page will never go to number one locally. Right? So you have to be very selective with the content you generate at a franchisee level on the website. To things that are just hyperlocal that are unique to that location. If it can be answered Nash to on a national post that's generic, it doesn't mean you need a local version of that.'cause people aren't going to Google and searching for how do I fix a roof leak? And then in Houston, right? What's the difference between Houston or whatever, right? So like people, I see those blogs everywhere and I'm like, you just kill, you just wasted your money and energy, right? And you actually hurt the brand probably. Anyway, I can have a lot, I can give you 10 examples of this where I've seen, I went to the brand and go, look, I'm gonna go delete all this stuff. I don't care how much your franchisees spent on this, you're act, they're actually hurting us, the system as a whole. And you know, that's a whole battle by itself. But anyway, I can't even imagine. You got all these other business owners and Yeah, it's and they may not real, they're not doing it intentionally, right? They're doing No, they have good intentions. They're good. It's a good thought process, but no one's. Telling them otherwise, you know, everybody's moving a hundred miles an hour and the agency, it's just but you gotta put these in the brand policy. So I'll work with brands and say, Hey, here are the rules that you need to put out there. I need to tell you why. And then they put'em out there within the franchisees are like, oh, my nephew, who's an SEO guy says, I need a blog and do all these things. Like the intention's, right? But that. Person doesn't have the experience to know what they're actually asking for and what the impact is negatively when you're working in a franchise system. So that's where it ends up becoming a battle. And it, it shouldn't, but it just does. And so brands want to be helpful. They want to be collaborative. So a lot of times they say yes and then because they don't know either, and. Backfires. Yeah. I come in and go, we're gonna go delete all this. And they just look at me in horror and I go or we don't, then I'm gonna go work with somebody else because it's not, I'm not gonna be able to do my job, you know? Right. So anyway. Yeah, I can only imagine. I've heard horror stories and yes, it's it's difficult, but you're the expert in that area. Right. And now we know what to do, kind of going forward. You know, the plan is create content, but this is how you go about it. We kind of handle the rest, needs be strategic for sure. It's gotta be very strategic. I absolutely agree. And I didn't really understand all the moving parts as well. So yes, you, it's not like you're selling it, the course is free, you know, worth a watch, even if you watch a couple modules there. Completely helpful. Can you share maybe kind of putting it all together and to kind of round out the show maybe a recent success story where you were able to, and we'll keep it in the franchise space. Where you were able to help the franchisor, franchisee or even both really turn things around specifically with SEO. There's a lot of success stories. I mean, I think about the, there's the biggest one that pops in my head immediately. It's not the most recent. There's some recent ones, but it's all the same story. Right. A lot of times you know, a brand usually engages with me because they're not feeling like they're getting the results from whoever they're working with, right? That's usually the case. And then somebody says, oh, you need to talk to Lonnie, or whatever, and they go, okay, Lonnie, you know, let's. Get on a call and the first thing I do is I go look at their website and I have tools that evaluate it and gimme a sense of what they've done. I can see all the history. I mean, it's not a hundred percent of it, but 80% I can see with these tools and I go, okay. Piece together. I already know what they did, I know or what they didn't do, and I can look at their website. I mean, that's the beauty of being an SEO is everything's right in front of you. There's no guessing game. And so I can see the depth of the quality of the content, how well it was optimized, all of that. And I. Get on the call and I show them what their competitors are doing. I show them what, why the competitors are doing better. I show, I mean, I give them lots of real world examples. I show them where their deficiencies are and then they, you know, again, a lot of other agencies do the same thing, and it's easy to poke holes and stuff and say things and whatever. So I, I take that the grain of salt if I was a brand, but I take it very seriously and think I give a lot of great advice and give a lot of direction. So I do that and then. They say, okay, Lonnie, I trust you for whatever reason like what you're hearing or recommendation, you're referred by the right people, or you have a track record, whatever it may be, and they go give it a shot. And then I would inherit the site and get all my access to it. And a lot of times I'm inheriting websites from very well-known marketing agencies. I mean, you name them. I know them and I hate poking holes in their stuff because, you know, it's, we're still all marketers and we're all on the same team at some capacity. But I also see what they've done and the reason why there's no lack of results. So I have to poke holes so the brand knows that there's deficiencies here, right? So I take'em over and. I work on the franchisees location page. I do things like I mentioned earlier, I delete blogs, you know, I do lots of things. I optimize the Google business profile and everything starts moving. And so I remember one brand specifically, which popped in my head. I went through the history of the research on them, and they worked with the, probably the biggest marketing agency in the franchise space, which I'm not gonna name names, but I'm sure you can. You can. And they worked with them for seven years, paying them. I can only imagine how much, and there was 50 plus franchisees in the system and they probably grew like 1% a year. Right? 2% a year. And this is just on the SEO O side. Right. And I look at it and they, K and I and the brand I was talking to said, oh, they just kept saying, SEO takes time. SEO takes time. And I'm like, oh. I hate saying that myself. The Yeah, the famous, yeah, it does take time, but there's just never ending the seven years. Yeah, seven years of it taking time. But I know it, they went to, they every month they're like, look at, there's a little bit of improvement, but it's just minuscule. And then I go look at the leads. So not only can see the rankings and the traffic and the clicks, but then what matters here is are they making sales? Generating leads. So I dive into that data and I was like, okay, you guys are generating about 500 leads a month, which is great in a round number. When you divide that by 50 Zs, that's 10 leads a month, which is still not bad, right? But seven years, and I can only imagine how much money's being spent. You know, there's a, there's what's the ROI on that? So long story short, we did a pilot with five Zs and just those five shot. To, they were generating 50, 60 leads a month. They didn't, not right away. They generate 20 or 30 and then it turns into 40, 50 and then, and at some point after around a year, they were generating about a hundred. Somewhere around the range of 80 to 120 leads a month, depending on the territory and the, you know, the Z and things like that, what they were getting in a year. Wow. That's impressive. Yeah. That was the end result. So when it was all said and done, those three, as those five pilots, you know, we started telling all the other Z and all there, I wanna do this too. And you know, we did this big announcement, you know, and I explained to everybody what we do and how we're doing and those early results, and every single franchisee came to the table and so we just applied it to everybody and. 18 months into the campaign, you know, I did a town hall with the brand and went over the results just so everybody can see it. And I think we were generating seven to 8,000 leads a month. Wow. You know, and so like it sounds, it's not, you know, that's doesn't mean that's normal. Depends the difference. This brand was around for a while. They had a lot of good stuff going for them. When I told you earlier about franchisees doing good things in business and being talked about, like they checked all the other boxes, they just didn't have SEO dialed in, right? Like I just went in there and turned some knobs, did some stuff that wasn't done and it can really move that fast. So again, not at exact, that kind of trajectory is very aggressive. So I don't wanna set myself up for failure and say I can do that for everybody. But just telling you that. Existing brands do things with full intent thinking they're doing well, but there's, depending on the industry you're in, how competitive it is. You, there's a whole nother tier, a whole nother level of what you can do to be competitive and make this stuff move. And that's where I like to feel that I take that level of depth and determination when I develop a strategy that. I guess a lot of other agencies just don't do, or they think they're doing it, but they don't know that there's a whole nother level you can go to. And that's unfortunate. But that's a big success story that I like to, that's, no, that's, think about, that's huge because Right. If they're not, maybe they're not up to speed on SEO or they're. They're not going about it the right way. And then, you know, it's always, I hear let's just dump money and paid ads. Let's just dump money here. And it's just I call it almost like the black hole you want, you know, once you stop those ads, the leads start, stop coming in. So the SEO is something organic? Yes. Oh, that's, let me speak to that. I mean, you just hit on a perfect thing and it's hard to explain. And you know, and first of all, I can't even make a case study about this because I signed an NDA and the brand has a policy where they don't want to, you know, anybody, any, so it's ah, it kills me. You know?'cause I wish I could just put this out there, but it did happen. But what's worse is then they sell to private equity and then private equity goes, oh, we have our own agency. So that own agency takes everything over. And so I just keep watching it and everything just keeps moving. And I see them add new franchisees, and guess what? Those new franchisees aren't moving. Right. You know, and it's it's all the existing all, you know, the 50 I worked with turned into 80 over those, the 18 months, they all have enjoyed all this and are just killing it. And then I can just imagine the conversations they're having in there going, why aren't the new ones moving at that rate? You know, but, you know, so it's just kills me when that type of scenario happens. But it's you know, still feels good when. When you Yeah, it's, it does happen for sure. No, that, that was that's really helpful. And that's that's one thing my, where my focus has been just really putting good content. I'm national, so there's a lot there. It's hard to really focus on one area, but yeah, no learning, learning every day and trying to apply as much as we can. I know we went a little bit over last question I like to ask everyone that comes on the show. Fun fact. I don't know if you remember what you put down. I don't, Steve. It's different. I sometimes I lost a, I lost my spot over here. I'll ask a fun fact and it's wait a second. We're going in a different direction. Something about Mexico. I. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's what popped in my head. I was like I, you know, I lived in Mexico for 10 years. I still have a house down there. And you know, you look at me and I don't look like the stereotypical guy that would've lived in Mexico. But for a long time there I was in Southern California and you know, got sick of just the grind of. You know, making a living just to survive in a high dollar area like Orange County, you know, it's pretty expensive to live there. And I was like, you know what? I just need to take a vacation for a weekend. Went to Mexico and rented like a condo there and was like. What am I doing? I mean, contrary to you know, not many people would do that. And there's all these fears of Mexico, which I can, you know, talk about another day. But you know, I was one of the best decisions to make in my life and happy to do it. And then I liked it so much I. Moved there permanently, or at least for 10 years and built an agency and hired a bunch of people there and trained them in SEO and everything. And a lot of'em are still with me. I'm currently in Idaho, but definitely have a big love for Mexico. I like my tacos if you can't tell by looking at me. That's always a big thing that pulls me that direction constantly. Part and part two of the fun fact, in 10 years you didn't learn the language. Not even once. That's the worst part. I mean, so I was surrounded by enablers. I mean, one on one hand, my entire neighborhood is full of Americans, so everybody's there and the local bars around there, everybody speaks English. So that's the one thing. The second thing is when I hired the team, of course I had to hire people that spoke English, so who just speak English to me. And then my, you know, my wife, speak Spanish and English. So we'd go out if it came down to it, she would just interpret it. She was so alive and make my life easier. You know, my brain doesn't work that way though. I mean, I think that's the problem too is I'm a, I'm an analytical person, numbers guy, statistics guy. My brain's not for language like. I can, even now, I barely pick up words, you know, it's just it's not my nature. So it made it easier for me when I had these enablers surrounding me. So that's go Google Translate. My, my wife is from the Czech Republic, and when I visit her family, I don't know, I mean, I know maybe five words of C and I mean, you just talk in this thing and it just, it talks the other, I mean, it completely translates everything. And it's it's so convenient. I don't know how the hell we did it prior to that, but yeah, it's, technology. Oh, I technology's great. As long as it's working. Technology is great. Or you have internet. That's where I'm hopeful AI's gonna come in and they're gonna have a solution where, like in real time. Yeah. You know, I know Google translates. Okay. You know, like it can get you through things, but I know AI would make it a whole nother level. Especially when they, you know, Facebook has those glasses that they're putting out there. I know other people are gonna do the same thing. Can you imagine it just, he listening to. What someone's saying and then write on your glasses, would tell you what, you know, what they're saying in English so you can have a conversation. It's gonna be that amazing. Yeah. I mean, it's priority in that direction if I had to guess. But yeah, I'm excited for that. I'm excited as well. Yeah it will help. I mean, English is spoken in many countries. We've traveled and but it's, yeah, it would be pretty, pretty amazing just to have that convenience. But Lonnie, this was fun, man. I'm sure we've could have probably talked and we've, we started talking before, we've spoken again for hours. Oh yeah. I think this was this was fun and we'll put all your contact information if anyone wants to reach out. But I'll put that link for that masterclass. I think that's huge. It's definitely helped me. I learned the I learned a lot, applied it all. And, you know, you gotta be consistent. You almost need like this checklist and you need gonna eventually have a, an assistant or someone to really assist me with some of these tasks because there is quite a bit that you can be doing so, but ultimately. It's gotta be sustainable and to your point, yeah. If you just absolutely hate it, either it's gotta be outsourced somehow, or you gotta I always say pick your platform if it's. Audio writing as I was mentioning or video. Pick what you enjoy doing and it won't feel like work or else it becomes a grind. So completely. But Awesome. I appreciate it and yeah, if we, anything that we didn't talk about that you found helpful, or if you see another resource, if you shoot me an email, we'll include that on the show notes on the blog as well. I will definitely do that, and I really appreciate you having me again. We can talk, we can do another two hours. Absolutely. We'd probably put people to sleep as entertaining as we think we are. I mean, yeah, right. We'll do we'll we'll do a masterclass in a different area, but now it's yeah, there you go. There you go. It's it's a lot. And everyone's got their, I got the secret sauce and it's is there really that, that secret sauce? It's, there's really, you know, there, there's a. Yeah, there's a guide, you know, kind of, that's basically what you created in that masterclass. You don't need the the next what's the word I'm missing? The, not the strategy, but like the hack, I guess. Right? It's what's the new hack of the day that's not gonna work. So I. But no, this was helpful and I think it's good to talk, explain a little bit more, not just you need SEO, but what the hell is SEO to begin with. How do I actually implement it to start, and that's why we asked that question. If I have an hour a week or five hours a week, whatever that number is, I. How do I get started? So stuff like that. And then you slowly build. So just build some consistency and build it kind of like you brush your teeth every day. You're doing a video every day, you're doing some type of article or blog every week. It takes a little bit of time. It becomes a habit at the end of the day. Yeah. But yeah, no, this is fun. We'll definitely have you back on and appreciate it and we'll we'll definitely talk soon. All right. Happy to be here and happy to do it again if you choose. Sounds great. All right. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in if you want to learn how to make the transition from corporate to owning your franchise. Join Giuseppe on the next episode. You can also follow on all social media platforms and achieve financial and time freedom today.