How To Build A Local SEO Site With SBPM

Although SBPM was originally designed to create websites that made money from displaying eBay or Amazon affiliate links underneath or in the middle of a block of spun content, it can be used to build different types of websites.

I know that a few users of SBPM have been using it to create sites that are designed to target a specific geographic area, mainly for advertising local services or companies. I call this creating a “Local SEO” site.

Creating local SEO sites based around offering a service such as plumbing or dry cleaning is also achievable with SBPM and using custom variables, you can create posts and pages that have generic but relevant content designed to target people looking for local services.

Site structure

I want to make the site look as good as possible, so apart from the SBPM generated content I will also be adding some articles too, especially to the home page.

The home page article must be 100% unique (not spun) and will help make the site look more credible to the visitor.

I will use a service such as iWriter.com to have an article of around 1000 words created about my chosen theme/topic. Adding images and videos to this long-form content to help it look more attractive and professional will help too.

If the site gets well received by the search engines, I may also return to add several shorter “how to” or “guide” articles later as this will help with the overall organic SEO of the site. These can be short 500 word articles that relate to the main topic.

Heck… I might even use LongTailPro to find some good keywords to target for these shorter posts.​

Thinking about visual design

It would be nice to be able to hide the main “thin posts” as much as possible and just keep the sidebar content to a minimum (or get rid of the sidebar totally).

I would configure a widget to show posts from the same category as the current one, so that the visitor does not get bombarded with too many choices or posts that are outside of the state they are looking at.

You can use the Ultimate Posts Widget plugin to achieve this.​

Monetization Strategies

There are several ways this type of website could be used to make money. If you are looking to use more specific towns and cities (within a smaller geographic area) instead of something that is countrywide, you can use a lead-magnet (PDF or email auto-responder series) via an opt-in form to capture the visitors email address and details.

The email address information can then be sold to a local company for a price-per-lead. Imagine how much money a local lawyer makes from each client in the long run – it’s got to be worth around $40 per lead if you can introduce customers to them direct. They just have to close the deal themselves and you get paid regardless.

How NOT to make money with a thin local SEO site…

In an ideal world, you could create an SBPM site with this sort of content and use Google Adsense to generate money, but this is the fastest way to get your Adsense account banned – so please, please, please – do not do this.

Instead I will be placing affiliate links to Amazon Home Services, a section of Amazon.com where you can book a local professional to attend your property to carry out any number of different services. Amazon pick the contractors and handle all of the payment process, which is great for the customer, the company that does the work and me, the affiliate.

The Amazon Home Services product is not available in all areas just yet, but there is a good chance that there will be something available for most major cities. If not, I still have the chance that the visitor to my website will buy something within the 24 hour cookie window.

Local SEO Data Sources

To start, you will need to have access to some data of cities or towns in the locality you are targeting. For this case study, I will be using the data from simplemaps.com, where you can download open source databases (CSV, Excel or SQL) of US or world cities. This data also includes ZIP, state and longitude and latitude data too, which we can use as SBPM custom variables.

Lets start by using the United States Cities And Zip Codes Database, which I have downloaded as CSV and imported into Excel. My idea is to create a WordPress site with different categories for each state and then posts for each city within that state. The service I will be targeting is Lawn, Garden and Yard maintenance.

Looking at the data

The CSV file comes with the following fields:

• zip
• state
• city
• lat
• lng

To prepare the data, I will use Excel to combine these fields together to create the SBPM keywords with the state as the category, the city as the keyword and then zip, latitude and longitude as 3 custom variables.

In column F, I have entered the following formula in each row:

=B2&”/“&C2&”(zip=“&A2&”,lat=“&D2&”,lng=“&E2&”)”

his converts the data into this format:

AL/Acmar(zip=35004,lat=33.584132,lng=-86.51557)

When I copy and paste all of this data into SBPM, it generates 29,470 possible posts (when I use all rows of the spreadsheet). We can then use the “After” option in the Pre and Post Title Options box in the SBPM settings to add the service information.​

I have entered this into the “After” field:

%%category%% Yard Lawn And Garden {Care|Services|Maintenance}

This will mean that the WordPress post title will be something along the lines of (remember that the %%category%% placeholder will be the state code):

• Acmar AL Yard Lawn And Garden Care
• Acmar AL Yard Lawn And Garden Services
• Acmar AL Yard Lawn And Garden Maintenance

Add the supporting spun content

So now I have the keywords sorted, I need to add some generic content that will bring visitors to the site and give them information about lawn care with a call to action to buy from Amazon Home Services.

I need to make this content relevant to the location but also generic enough so that it can be spun and not sound too rubbishy. I have used Spin Rewriter to generate some spun content about the topic of lawn and yard care and added a paragraph at the top that signposts the user that it is local to the area they are in.

Add a Google map

I also want to embed a Google Map of the local area too, which will add some good evidence for the visitor that the site is designed for them and their area.

To do this, we can embed an iframe that uses the longitude (%%lng%%) and latitude (%%lat%%) custom variables. I have also put this map inside a DIV and used CSS to float it to the right on the page to keep it all neat and tidy.

<div id="google-map" style=“float:right;”><iframe width=“350” height=“350” frameborder=“0” scrolling=“no” marginheight=“0” marginwidth=“0” src=“https://maps.google.com/maps?q=%%lat%%,%%lng%%&hl=es;z=14&output=embed”></iframe></div>

Add some images

I have written before about using random images in posts with SBPM, so I won’t go over the top here discussing it and how it can work.

I will choose some open source images that are generic, but relevant to the topic and upload them to my WordPress site, making a note of their file names first.

I want the image to show lower down the page as part of the content, floated to the left too.

<div id="%%category%%-lawn-care-image" style="float:left;"><img src="/{lawn-care|yard-care|garden-care|yard-services|yard-garden-care|patio-cleaning}.jpg" alt="{lawn|garden|yard} {care|maintenance|services} providers %%keyword%% %%category%%" title="{picture|image|visual} of {lawn|garden|yard} {care|maintenance|services} in %%keyword%% %%category%%"></img></div>

To make this code work, I will need to have several images placed in the root of the domain with the following filenames:

• lawn-care.jpg
• yard-care.jpg
• garden-care.jpg
• yard-services.jpg
• yard-garden-care.jpg
• patio-cleaning.jpg

As you might be able to see from the example above, I have added some additional ID, ALT and TITLE tags to this code using spintax and the SBPM custom variables to ensure that not all images have the same properties. This helps make the site more unique in the eyes of a passing GoogleBot, but helps keep some real SEO value too.

Add a call to action

The next step will be to add a call to action, where the person visting my local SEO site will see the map, read a little of the content and then click the link to take them to the Amazon Services page.

There are several ways I could do this, by using a general text link at the bottom of the page, or by adding a link to the image I will be inserting (not a bad idea). However, I would like to add a button that they can click.

Many WordPress themes have their own shortcodes built in to allow you to create a nice clickable button. If you don’t have such a theme, there are a number of websites you can use to create a CSS button and then copy and paste the code into the SBPM content area. We can also add some spintax and SBPM custom variables too so that the “Click Me!” text is more relevant to the visitor.

For this example, I will be using the website Best CSS Button Generator as they have a good range of pretty looking buttons 

The generator spits out a chunk of CSS code that you will either need to add to your theme’s custom CSS area or add as part of the SBPM post content.

The HTML that the generator creates is quite generic and references the CSS with an additional class name, which will make it look pretty.

<a href="#" class="myButton">green</a>​

​However, I need to add 2 things to this code to make it work for me.

• An affiliate link to the Amazon Home Services page.
• The spintax to change the text on the button from “green” to something else.

<a href="http://amzn.to/1MjCbvR" target="_blank" class="myButton">{Click To |Go And||Click Here To} {See More On|Read More About|Review|View} %%keyword%% {Maintenance|Contractors|Services} On Amazon{|.com}</a>

Putting it all together

Now that we have the main components of the page, we will need to paste it all together in the SBPM content area.

Add the main spintax content and insert the button HTML in the middle somewhere. You will also need to add the code to add the image and map too.

If your visitors decide to read the whole page, you will need to add a call to action towards the bottom too – so it might be worth adding a simple text link or copying the button code there too. This will give them one last chance to click through on your affiliate link.

Add some SEO data

An important part of getting visitors to the site will be having a good page titles and META descriptions. To set this up, we can use the SEO options within SBPM that will automatically work with either the All In One SEO Pack or Yoast WordPress SEO plugin.

The key is to generate a short META description that contains our target terms (yard, lawn or garden care) and the location the page is created for. We also want to keep this under 160 characters if possible.

This is then added to the SEO Description field inside the SBPM settings. If we don’t do this, the description will just be a truncated version of the start of the post – not ideal for on-page SEO.

I like to phrase my META descriptions as questions to entice the reader to click through for more information.

{Do You Need|Want|Need To Hire|Looking For} {Lawn, Garden Or Yard|Yard|Lawn|Garden|Garden And Lawn|Lawn And Yard|Yard And Garden} {Services|Work|Maintenance} {Near|Around|In} %%keyword%% %%category%%? {See|Find|Get|View} {Our Recommended|Top Local|The Best|Top|Local|Expert} {Workmen|Companies|Contractors} Here.

The final touches

First, make a few test posts to make sure everything is working as you expected. There is nothing worse than generating thousands of posts and then noticing that you missed something off and having to start over – not that it is hard to change with SBPM.

Now that SBPM allows you to have 3 different content blocks, I would copy and paste the content from the main area into the 2nd and 3rd tabs and make some slight changes.

Perhaps the images or map will float to a different side, or be bigger or smaller. You could even use totally different content or a different layout to make the posts more unique.

Make Posts!

This is the part where you make the coffee, push the “Make Posts!” button and let SBPM create the posts for you. If you are making 26k posts, it might take some time, time out a few times, or you might have to do the posts in batches of 5000 at a time – it all depends on your hosting.

Read more about how to make hundreds of thousands of posts with SBPM.​

As we have used some spintax in the “After” field in the “Pre And Post Title” section, each post title will not be preset – you could run the process over and over, until you have created every combination possible. This could take your site to near 100k posts if you really wanted to.

​What to do next

I usually finish up by installing and configuring a caching plugin such as W3 Total Cache.

It’s best to do this after creating all of the posts as having it enabled when publishing a post will add overhead to the process and could make it run very slowly.

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This concludes my tutorial on creating a Local SEO site using SBPM.

What do you think of my method?  What would you add or leave out?

Or have you created one of these sites before and have a few tips for others?

Let me know below :)​