Today I'm going to share with you what I did to get my PDR (paintless dent repair) company Aaron's Hail Repair on page 1 of google in multiple locations across Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska.

The methods I describe in this article will work for any type of service business. Roofing, Solar, HVAC, Plumbing, Auto Hail Repair, etc...

If you want me to do all this for you I'm availible for work.

This article is very long. If you want to skip to the SEO analysis and optimization methods section scroll down to PART 2.

Part 1: Context - Selling using internet technology is easier and more scalable than door knocking or cold calling

When I first started in Door to door sales back in 2018 I had just finished an undergraduate degree program in chemistry. College had left me in a bad financial situation. I thought getting a science degree was the path to wealth, but like many young people I had no clue about the "real world". So I was totally broke, my credit cards were all maxed out and I needed money bad.

Uncapped 100% commission based sales seemed like the most efficient way to get as much money as possible and take control of my financial future.

The first door to door sales company I worked with was run by some 30 year industry veteran guys who had an attitude that since they never got any customers from their website, selling using the internet was a waste of time, and furthermore you were being lazy if you wanted to get sales from the internet.

The old timers relied on strictly door to door sales. If a customer wanted to do research about our company there was essentially nothing to show them.

In the past, these business owners had tried a couple of marketing agencies and got burned, so they figured investing in marketing was a lost cause. The company eventually went out of business because they failed to stay competitive and couldn't retain salespeople, who felt it was easier and more lucrative to sell for competitor companies that had invested heavily in brand development, or paid them more.

Fast forward 5 years from 2018 to 2023 and I had worked for 11 different door to door sales companies selling auto hail repair, roofing, and solar. I disregarded peoples advice and jumped around chasing the redline, taking positions where I had autonomy to develop marketing as I wanted. I freed myself from massive overrides and TRIPLED my income through sales automation. A lot of people in the industry hated me for it. The people I used to work for that I thought were my friends became my enemies. In 2021 I made over $100,000 in commissions in less than 3 months, and I didn't knock a single door!

Problems came at that point when getting sales by leveraging automation became so easy that the business owners I was working for felt like the amount of work I was doing didn't justify what I was being paid. They felt since the automations were in place they could get rid of me and continue using them. I was burned for tens of thousands in commissions multiple times by unethical business owners. They kept using the systems I developed to continue making millions after I was gone. This led me in 2022 to make the transition from salesperson to full time entrepreneur and start my own company Aaron's Hail Repair.

When it comes to high ticket services where there are thousands of dollars in profit to be had for every job - leads are extremely valuable. If you're paying a salesperson $1000+ to generate a sale for you, and the internet has the potential to generate dozens or even hundreds of sales per year on autopilot with virtually no human interaction required, taking full advantage of it should be a big priority.

The biggest companies in this industry sometimes spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on paid ads in competitive markets.

I got Aaron's Hail Repair on Google Search page 1 for just a couple thousand dollars in software and web tools, and tweaking some technical SEO stuff. The FREE leads I get from my web pages ranking on the first page of google local search results sometimes net me tens of thousands of dollars per month! Sometimes I don't even have to speak to customers they just book appointments.

To me it's a no brainer to value website and brand development, but in the 6+ years now I've been in this industry I have seen less than a handful of companies investing in growth online.

Why isn't everyone doing this?

3 reasons.

First because SEO is so complicated that most people don't have the discipline or time to spend learning it.

What I share in this article is barely scratching the surface. It took hundreds of hours of concentrated work to learn, practice, and implement the methods I will show you later in this article. Unless you are extremely disciplined and posses some intelligence, you probably won't be able to do what I did.

Second because the nature of the web agency business model towards contractors. Agency owners make their money charging big fees and subcontracting all the work. But the subcontractors that create websites and manage the performance of accounts aren't business owners themselves, so they don't care.

Third because the attitude of dent repair techs and business owners towards paying someone to do marketing, or making poor business choices and forcing salespeople to work without investing in marketing to help them.

I get hit up by dozens of marketers every week so I understand - they're all basically scammers. That's exactly why I learned to do it all myself. Many web development and SEO agencies charge $5-10k upfront for a contractor website and then fail to deliver results. I will never waste money if I can help it, and from experience I've found that paying someone else to do something important isn't usually as good as doing it yourself.

My website Aaron's Hail Repair, and multiple other websites I've built for clients - have generated tens of thousands of dollars in net profit per month to the owners of those companies.

How much is a working sales automation mechanism like that worth to a business owner?

Sales automations can put tens of thousands a month in your pocket and continue working 24/7 forever

Are you willing to pay 20-30k upfront to have something like this installed in your business? 100k return on investment in one year from 30k is pretty darn good. Better than you can get in real estate or stocks, and that's just in the first year! Maintain a good reputation and it will get better every year.

If you're not willing to pay upfront - how much equity from the business is the entity that creates this for you at no upfront cost entitled to receive? 

More importantly how can the marketing partner ensure they will actually get paid on a back end commission plan, while minimizing risk from lack of competence or honesty of the contractor?

These are important questions that will determine if we can work together.

Why am I bringing this up?

In the hail repair industry at least, sadly its rare for companies to pay sales partners what they're owed. Many companies survive on a high turnover model by screwing sales reps over, or they just lack basic professionalism and accountability.

If you are in the insurance restoration business or chase storms you already know work isn't consistent and its not every month you get calls. But in one case I created a website for a dent repair startup that generated 37 auto hail repair customers in LESS THAN A MONTH, and every vehicle wrote up for over $10k!

This was in Round Rock & Pflugerville TX in 2021 after a 5 star hail event. The owner felt that they didn't need to pay me anything off the $200k+ net they made in less than a month, since "all I did was build them a website."

In 2023 there was another big hail event in Round Rock TX. My website Aaron's Hail repair was #2 on google the day after the storm and pulled in 39 vehicles in about 2 weeks! I sent the customers to a company that promised me they would pay me good, but then later decided they didn't want to and justified it by claiming "they were the ones doing all the actual work".

So I don't really trust anyone anymore with living up to their word and paying me on a back end commission plan. I've started requiring companies to pay upfront for customers I send them and it works better for me. If a company owner doesn't have 20-30k to throw down to get serious about the growth of their company, I'm not really interested in working with them. Since they're going to make at least 100k return on that, it should be a no-brainer. But lets get back to SEO.

Things you should understand about SEO

1) Creating a ranking SEO optimized website with custom digital media and dozens or hundreds of location based services pages is a 100+ hour project.

If I spend 100 hours knocking doors in the insurance restoration niche I'm going to make way more than $20k.

2) To generate sales online your company also needs to have a solid social media presence. That means make profiles on at least Google MyBusiness, Facebook, LinkedIN, BBB, and Yelp, which also requires many hours to create and post content.

Customers should be able to google search your company, and see lots of five star reviews on Facebook and Google, pictures of your satisfied customers, employees, and insights into your internal business operations.

Don't have all that built out already? You're looking at another 50+ hours of work.

3) Getting customers from SEO is a long term strategy (think 6 months or 1 year from now).

Once your website is online, it can sometimes take months before your location based service pages start appearing in local search results for specific keywords. There is no shortcut to success when it comes to this waiting period. In my case it only took about a month to see great results, but there are many factors that will affect SEO results like how saturated your market already is.

4) If you are interested in partnering with me build your website and get you sales from the internet book a call here.

I learned to do everything myself so I could have total control and not rely on "gurus" or agency subcontractors. You should do the same if you can spare the time. But unless you're someone with at least a month or two to spare to work on this, good luck.

Many business owners are too busy to spend months like I did combing through internet articles or videos, learning how to to build SEO optimized websites, paying for private SEO consulting, or learning how to use software like GSA SER, Money Robot, Scrapebox, Ahrefs, 301 redirect domains, Google search console & analytics, Semrush, etc...

Someone that knows how to use all of these tools isn't going to give away their time for cheap. But every agency you talk to will tell you whatever BS they can to take your money.

I invested thousands in software and private SEO consulting from several experts to arrive at this strategy, which I am sharing with you now for free. You're welcome.

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Below you can see some screen grabs of google searches for "auto hail repair" and "hail repair" in some cities in Texas.

It's important to note that my location based urls, not my home page, appear on the first page of search results.

On my home page I have internal and external links to all my location based service pages, and all the location based service pages also link to one another.

These pages also contain many outbound links to insurance company, automotive, and weather related websites.

I slowly built up to over 40 location based search pages. Even if theres not a hail storm there, I'll eventually have a location page for every major city in Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and every place that it would be a potential hail market if there is ever a storm! It takes days of work just sitting at a computer to create all these pages and link them manually.

The age of a web page is also a very important factor in ranking.

If my pages have been indexed in search console in all those locations for 6 months, mine will rank higher than a competitors new page that gets published right after a storm, but lower than competitors who have had their pages indexed for many years, provided their other SEO metrics are equally competitive.

When you have 50 or 100+ location pages interlinked to each other, this tells Google the website has more authority than a simple 1 page or even 10-20 page website.

Each location based service page also mentions the location and search keyword in the text on the page more than 50 times. The exact amount of times for each keyword is calculated using SEO software extension plugins for google chrome called SEO Pro and SEO quake. Using these tools you can examine competitor keyword density metrics, and use keywords enough times to be slightly higher than the average of the top 3 competitor pages, but not so high to be penalized by Google's search rank algorithm.

Performance in search console showing November 2022 through May 2023.

Aaron's Hail Repair went live in June 2022, and as you can see from the chart, I wasn't getting any web traffic.

In January 2023 was when I SEO optimized Aaronshailrepair.com using the methods I will show you later in this article.

The January spike in clicks is attributed to the sales team putting out flyers in a fresh storm market, where customers would google search the company and then click on the page.

The impressions from local search (purple lines) didn't start until about a month after I redesigned my website, at the end of January and into February, as location based service pages got indexed and more storms happened in those areas.

The purple line in the chart above rising up from 0 to 800 impressions per month from the beginning of January into February indicates the SEO changes I made caused my website to appear in more search results.

Although the average position of all of my location service pages remains lower than 1st page result, 41.2 at the time of this article, in several cities I am on the first page.

Those 340 clicks to my website over the last 6 months, some months, have made me tens of thousands of dollars. I'm getting calls all the time. Some people call, others book appointments directly from the web page and I never even have to speak to them. My system continues to generate multiple appointments every week across different markets.

Essential media components for sales automation

Before we get into the actual SEO optimization, check out what my visual content looks like.

If a customer wants to do research on your company, what are you showing them? Your website and social media websites are valuable tools to deliver information. Pictures and videos matter more way more than you might think they do.

The reason Aaronshailrepair.com works to generate sales is partly because of the SEO metrics we will cover in this article, but also because of the visual media I've created around my brand.

Other PDR companies I've worked for that didn't have pictures or videos, or that relied on web designers that didn't sell auto hail repair themselves, never got any sales from their website.

My brand is supported on Facebook, Google Business, LinkedIN, Yelp, etc with professional photography, videos, and lots of reviews. I invested heavily into photo and video so customers can really see into my business. My content is not generic at all, not one image taken is from the internet, they are all custom created for my business.

If you want me to create media like this for your business book a call with me.

SEO Metrics - what are they and how I optimized them to achieve a 1st page local search result.

SEO Metrics are what determines the rank of a web page in search results.

Later in the article you can see examples of each metric and how to optimize it.

There are both ON-page and OFF-page (back end) SEO metrics.

On page SEO metrics are determined by the HTML code on on web pages, aka your web design. I use Webflow to create all my websites. I find it way easier to use than Wordpress, Wix, Square-space, or any other web design tools I've tried.

Off page SEO metrics are determined by other websites linking to your website, as well as the age of your domain, and possibly what servers your domain is hosted on.

By analyzing the top ranking competitor SEO metrics and then changing the metrics on my own website to be within a slightly higher than average range of the top 3 ranking websites, my website eventually climbed the rankings to be in line with or above existing competitors.

Important ON PAGE metrics:

1) Keyword Count

2) Total Word Count

3) Internal Links

4) External Links

5) Headers

Important OFF PAGE metrics:

6) Backlink profile

7) Domain Rating

Part 2: Reverse engineering the top competitors SEO strategy

Lets begin by reverse engineering what the top ranking competitors for auto hail repair are doing.

The companies that rank #1 have invested heavily into SEO. Perhaps tens of thousands of dollars. We can use free internet software to look at the SEO metrics of their websites and figure out what they are doing that's making their web pages appear at the top of search.

This works the same for Auto Hail Repair companies as any other type of service based company or website.

Dallas Texas is the most competitive market in the United States for auto hail repair so that's a great place to start.

The top companies are Dent Mavericks, Ex Hail, Hail Medic, and Elite Hail Systems.

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1) Using AhRefs to examine the backlink profile and domain rating.

Ahrefs backlink checker is a free tool you can use measure some important SEO metrics like Domain Rating (DR) Backlinks, and Linking websites.

From the ahrefs data below you can see Dent Mavericks have very impressive off page SEO metrics. I would guess they have invested tens of thousands of dollars into building their domain rating and backlinks, paying for backlinks from high domain rating websites, and private SEO contractors.

Take a look at the Ahrefs data for the #1 search rank competitor, Dent Mavericks.

Dent Mavericks Domain Rating or DR is 71 which is very high.

If Dent Mavericks creates a new location based service page in a fresh hail market, their page will quickly rise to the top of search and be number 1.

New web pages will DR of 0 will have no chance ranking higher than this domain.

But as you will see in the next example, there isn't much SEO competition in this industry.

As long as the new website metrics are slightly higher than the average of the top competitors, a new website can still rank in the top 5 within a several weeks to a few months.

One thing that you might notice from Dent Mavericks SEO data above is some of their referring pages are non-english. This indicates someone is using automated link building tools.

If you do SEO research you might read a lot of articles about how GSA SER doens't work anymore, or that Google will penalize you for using link building software. This is simply not the case.

Only about 3-5% of spam links get indexed, so these guys would have had to build over 250,000 backlinks with GSA SER to get their almost 9k backlinks indexed. This takes awhile -my guess is they did this over several years, which is why their domain rating is so high and they rank number 1 basically everywhere they set up. The only way to rank higher than them in those markets is to utilize PPC or pay per click.

Learning how to build backlinks

The most common link building tools that SEO people commonly use are Money Robot and GSA SER. To use these tools you also need Private proxies and to build your own list of websites to post on using scrapebox, or buy a list from GSA verified lists. After creating all those links, you can get them indexed using googles Bulk indexing API in Python.

Check out this Ultimate Guide to GSA SER

Another great resource is Black Hat World, an SEO forum where a lot of experts share valuble advice.

Or here is a video by an SEO expert that I have learned from.

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Lets take a look at the next competitor in the number 2 spot: Ex Hail Auto Hail Repair

Their ahrefs SEO data looks much less competitive in the figure below.

A domain rating of 6 indicates that this domain doesn't have much authority.

It looks like they might have paid for some backlinks, but the number of indexed backlinks is less than 100.

Since these off page metrics are not competitive, it should be possible to rank a website higher than this page provided all the other metrics we will discuss later are optimized.

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Below is the ahrefs off-page SEO metric data for Hail Medic, the #3 competitor.

They have more backlinks and a higher Domain Rating than Ex Hail Repair, but rank lower in search.

This indicates that the google search algorithm takes into consideration more than just the DR, Backlink, and Linking website variables (Off-page metrics)

It looks like Hail Medic also at some point paid for link building services. If you don't use the right list with GSA SER, it will create links to bad websites like the 143.204.101.56 link you see below.

These types of spammy backlinks means google might penalize the domains search rank. Exactly how anyone can quantify this is unclear.

I've been advised by SEO experts like Chris Palmer that it's better to buy expired domains, publish a clone of your existing website to them, and then 301 redirect those domains in search console to the main domain. Use GSA SER to build links to the secondary domains which link to your domain, and every few months keep adding fresh expired domains.

Google takes into consideration the quality of the backlinks you have, as well as a combination of the other ON PAGE metrics, which is probably why even though Hail Medic has a higher domain rating than Ex Hail Repair, it still ranks lower in the search.

Calculating where a website needs to be to achieve a high rank in search console

Taking the average of the top 3 competitors Domain Rating we have 71+6+14=91/3=30

This means if you want your local service page URL to be displayed on the first page of search results in Dallas, you would need a domain rating of around 30.

Similarly you can figure the average amount of backlinks and linking websites needed.

Taking the average backlink number 8900+50+425=9375/3=3125

Linking websites 2300+210+30=2540/3=847

To acquire 3125 google indexed backlinks you would need somewhere in the area of 90,000-100,000 GSA SER verified links built to your website (or tier 2 domains).

If you want to start building links I would suggest watching these videos and learning how to use Scrapebox, GSA SER, and Money Robot. This software will run you around $500, plus you will need to pay around $100 a month for a VPS, private proxies, and GSA SER lists.

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2) SEO Quake and SEO Pro (Google chrome plugins) to measure on-page SEO metrics like headers, word count, keyword density, links, etc...

SEO quake and SEO PRO are free google chrome extensions that you can use to look at the on page SEO metrics of websites.

Lets take a look at the on-page metrics of Dent Mavericks below.

A common mistake web developers make is overusing headings to make big text when they're building a web page, or not assigning the headings properly. The purpose of headings is to contain the most important search keywords, not to make text more prominent for readers.

Dent Mavericks has 29 Headings with 66 links and 30 images on their home page.

Ex Hail Repair has 4 headings with 62 links and 49 images

Hail Medic has 7 headings with 30 links and 18 images

So taking the average of these metrics you would need around 14 headings, 53 links, and 33 images on a web page to be a top competitor in search results.

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Next comes the most important part: keywords.

How many times does a keyword appear on a page, in the headings, and what is the relative amount that word appears versus the total word count of the page?

Keywords in headings are super important.

Customers are searching for auto hail repair, hail dent repair, auto hail damage repair, plus the city name needs to appear lots of times in both the headings and on the page.

From the SEO Quake data below you can see that Dent Mavericks has a total word count of 2459 words

Ex Hail Repair Repair has a total word count of 893

Hail Medics word count is only 272

Aaron's Hail Repair word count 3787, higher because to get the right keyword density requires a larger amount of words on the page.

Some people argue that simple web pages are better but I disagree. I like giving people as much information as possible on my website. My customers appreciate it and so will yours.

In the data below you can see the most common keywords and how many times they repeat on the page.

I put keywords in headings, in the page title, the description, and the URL itself.

The last secret is that in my local search result pages I use the city as a keyword at least 30 times on each page.

3) Location Based Service Pages

Below you can see how I created a new web page and subsequent URL for each city I want to rank in.

Creating these web pages is a tedious process. After I build a page, I have to go through and replace the city and state manually one word at a time on the page, in the title and description, all the headings, etc... so over 30 times it will say "Sherman" or "Sherman Texas" or whatever the city name is.

I put the city name in the page description, the headings, and the url itself.

4) Google My Business Optimization

Here is a great video on how to optimize your Google My business profile using the location based service page link.

The main point of this video is you want to make a Google My Business page for each location based service page, create products, and then link to the location based service page in the product.

5) Schema Markup

Schema is another important tool for SEO that makes your links stand out in search.

This will tell google to display an image next to your search result, or display other important links on your page in search results under your mail link.

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6) Buying high DR expired domains and 301 Redirecting them

Using a 301 redirect technique - you buy old domains with high DR or Domain Rating, and set up a redirect in google search console from the old domain to your new domain. So if someone visits olddomain.com they will automatically get forwarded to yourwebsite.com

This process has 3 steps

1) First you buy a domain, host it in your web development software, and verify ownership with google search console.

2) Then you use Semrush find the urls of all the old published web pages, then publish a copy of your home page HTML code to each of those old url slugs.

3) Then you set up a simple 301 redirect from high DR domain to your company domain from within search console or your domain provider like Go Daddy.

Some people argue that it "doesn't work" but other SEO experts like Chis Palmer (in the videos on this page) will tell you it absolutely does. The trick is to not only 301 redirect the main page, but re-publish a bunch of the old URLs in the expired domain with your own content, and then use software like Money Robot to build links to all of those old urls that are subsequently linking to your main domain.

Doing this will pass all the "link juice" or "SEO Power" of the older higher DR domain to your company website and theoretically give you a boost in rankings over competitors that have lower domain rating and weaker backlink profiles.

There are a few websites you can buy expired DR 50+ domains but most of them cost over $1000. Worth it but if you are on a budget you can do it for a lot less. Most expired domains only cost $10-$15. There are tens of thousands of domains that expire every day on the internet, and you can use this free website called Expired Domains to search for them.

You will need to create an account, then go to the expired .com domains. Open up the filter and you can see lots of options to filter so the results you can see only the ".com" domains that will be good. In this example I chose to search for domains that are all letters, have a business related "trust flow" and at least 1000 backlinks.

Here you can see the results from the search, sorted by the amount of backlinks or "BL" column in the image below.

Remember that you don't need millions of backlinks, this would put your domain way over the average.

This example in the screenshot below is just a general example of how to use expireddomains.net

It took me many hours of searching to find a suitable expired domain; searching filtering then checking metrics on ahrefs and semrush.

You will want to search for domains with backlinks in the range that was calculated earlier.

You can use Ahrefs for free to evaluate the number of indexed backlinks and the domain rating.

Below you can see what the SEO data from ahrefs looks like for these two domains circled in the picture above.

In one of the domains the DR of 38 is good, but there are too many backlinks, and linking web pages are not in english. Since the backlinks are not in english it wouldn't be a suitable candidate to 301 redirect to your company website which is in english.

The process of searching for the right domain to 301 redirect can take hours or even days, which is why there are other websites where you can just skip that and pay $1000+ for a good domain. But if you are on a budget or want to save money, expireddomains.net is a good option.

Besides just 301 redirecting the main domain in search console, you also need to use software called Semrush to look at the historical data from the domain and figure out what the old published urls were.

You can host the expired domain in your web development software, and then publish new pages with the exact same urls as the old unpublished pages.

Once you publish them with your content, request re-indexing in google search console for each page.

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Thanks for reading

If you made this far congratulations.

You should have a pretty good idea what goes into ranking a website on google search.

Hopefully you also realize the tremendous amount of knowledge and time required, and it makes sense why very few marketing freelancers are capable of delivering working results.

If you want me to build you a website and take your company to the next level online, book a call with me.