Helping A Friend Expand Brands From The Same Location

I agreed to help my friend Chad expand his brand in a way which is a challenge in online marketing. He has a local driving school offering lessons, in-class sessions, and even is an approved 3rd party driving test examiner for people who can't wait several days (or weeks) to obtain a drivers license. These are all "local" intent searches according to Google & other search engines due to the high likelihood that over 95% of those seeking these kinds of services are willing to go only a short amount of distance. Google and other search engines pin the address of the business to these services in order to understand the nature of the business for its search results.

Chad & I had several deep discussions about his expansion plan. He became approved by the state to be one of the drivers license office accepted online driver education courses. Texas requires that teenagers (ages 15-17) take a 32 hour course (recently reduced to 24 hours); and adults ages 18 to 24 need to take a mandatory 6 hour course. Many local driving schools offer these courses in-person; but Texas allows approved educators the ability to offer driver education online as well.

This changed up our approach because he would be running a separate company, targeting statewide audiences (not local), from the same address. We talked for hours about this, and I had to consult mentors about this difficult marketing task due to the fact that search engine demand was so high at the time for his kind of new service. Ultimately we realized that a split strategy was needed:

• Building out county-specific and city-specific pages on his website, each with some kind of unique content relevant to that geographic area, to account for people across the state searching with their "initial" intent being to look for something locally
• Getting as much Texas-specific statewide mentions of his new company & services (courses) on authoritative websites

This included things like press releases, infographic content posted on high-trust infographic directories, a significant amount of YouTube videos optimized for the statewide searches -- yet building out city-specific playlists (on the same channel) to account for the local-intent searches whenever YouTube videos appeared in regular searches, and much more. Since that time we have branched out into topics about metaverse platforms, virtual worlds, Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and similar new tech in order to appeal to the shifting needs of the same demographic as the years progress.

Luckily there was a pizza restaurant three doors away as well as a Mexican food restaurant in the same shopping center as his driving school location. We had many meetings over lunch - and occasionally dinner (!) - to address these topics when we had to get out of the office to change the environment in case we reached tough points in mapping out our strategies. The other problem is that we laugh too much together, so sometimes we had to take the food back to the office as to not disturb the other restaurant patrons!!