Ranking Third-Party Websites for Local Service Keywords | James Dooley Interviews Dan M. Jones

James Dooley (0:00)

Ranking Third-Party Sources for Local Service Terms.

Today, I'm joined with Dan M. Jones, and while I was away in Sofia, he was talking a lot about ranking. It could be branded Web 2.0s, it could be social media posts. He was talking about business listings, generating inquiries. I wanted to get him on to discuss this a little bit more, because more and more third-party sources around your website, echoing who you are, what you do and why you are brilliant, is actually one of the main reasons of getting better AI visibility. So not only do I want to talk about the rankings within Google Search, I also want to talk about how this could help ChatGPT citations or Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, all these third-party sources are working better than ever. So Dan, I want to jump straight in and I want you to say, what 5 platforms, what 5 third-party sources are you seeing is working great when you go and post on those platforms and let's say force index with index exceptional, so Googlebot is coming to crawl it and index it. What 5 platforms are you seeing working the best at present?

Dan M. Jones (1:15)

For us, it's WordPress, Blogspot, Facebook, LinkedIn and I'd probably say Twitter as well. I'd probably say those are the 5 best, but you're not limited to those 5 and in my opinion, I think just hammer all of them. Build out your social profile, your branded web twos, everything.

I said to you before, for me, I like to do variations. I don't really want to put the same content on all of them because if I'm trying to blanket the first page, which is something I've put a case study up on, if you go on my YouTube channel about this where we've basically got one of our clients ranking for eight of the top 10 positions in Google, and a lot of that was with Web 2.0s. For us, it was variations of the same thing, and they was all ranking for that exact same keyword, even though they were branded. Google don't care at all. Yeah.

James Dooley (2:08)

For us, with regards to local websites, what we normally say is when people say, when you start in a new website, this is what we call it internally. I'd just be interested to hear what you call these. I think, I don't know if it's just this is the way we explain it and you might explain it different. So we normally say go out and get the highest quality business listings. So that could be like Silex, it could be Thompson Local, it could be Yelp, Yelp, Hot Frog and getting these type of business listings being put on there. After we've got the business listings, they're like foundational links, repeating the NAP, defining who you are and what you do. We then say go and get a social fortress. This is what we call it internally, which is meaning that to go and get the LinkedIn, the Twitter, the Facebook, the Pinterest, the Instagram, the YouTube channel, literally every possible social branded platform of what we can get. Then after that, then we say go and get the branded Web 2.0. We call it a link wheel. Now, it mainly call it a link wheel because we used to do an IFTTT ring, and it used to distribute out to all the different channels. So we still call it a branded Web 2 link wheel.

What do you call them? So you've got business listings, you've got the social fortress, and you've got a branded Web 2 link wheel.

Just out of interest, what do you call them free strategies?

Dan M. Jones (3:34)

I would call anything like WordPress blogs, but I call them Web 2.0s.

I don't call it a social fortress anymore because we don't use it like that, because I can see that we can use these in a much more powerful way than just trying to get trust to the domain. Because the subdomains on the Web 2s, like WordPress and all that, they can rank for the service keywords, like local service keywords. So I would say that's a Web 2.0, we don't really build it as a social fortress. We have that as another asset to bring leads in. Anything like we're talking about with like Yale and all those Thompson Local, I'd call them citations. To me, that's a high quality citation right there. And then the others, I'll just call them social medias. But I mean, all of them things can be used. When you look at the SERP, and this was how I actually figured out that Web 2.0s were working when it comes to ranking for local service keywords, is because when I was looking at the SERP, I was looking at a keyword before and I noticed that there was this Jim Doe site ranking. You know Jim Doe, like the really low quality Web 2 And it was on the first page of Google. When you go down to the footer and it had in there, the address was Example Street, Example Town, Example County. And it had the phone number, 070... There was nothing at all on there that was showing it was real business. But it was ranking on the first page of Google. And when I saw that, I thought to myself, you know, it's black and white. You see right here, this is the opportunity. Google is giving these trust now for some reason. It blows my mind why, but they are. So we might as well be utilizing them to rank for all these keywords. We started doing it. Now, there is a missing piece here because I've spoke to a lot of people about this and they say, it doesn't work. And that was my stance on it a while back as well. Because if you just build out a Web 2 profile and even if you do everything right, your on-page is good and everything else, your internal link and all that, with that Web 2, that doesn't mean it's going to get indexed. And we tried a lot of things, like I mentioned to you before about, we were trying to use different indexes and it wasn't working for us.