Google Maps SEO Playbook for Plumbing, HVAC & Electrical

All right, hello and welcome to today’s special workshop. We’re gonna be talking all about Google Maps, how to get ranked on the Google map in your service area for the most important keywords, so that you can generate more leads, so that you can generate more sales, so that you can generate, ultimately, more book jobs. And we all know Google is still where it’s at, but the game’s constantly changing, so I’m excited to share some new things and some new things we’re seeing on our end, as it relates to Google Maps optimization, generative search and engine optimization, and we’re just making sure we’re coming up where our customers are looking. I did put together a workbook for today’s session because I’m gonna talk big picture like, here’s what you need to do. Here’s how you need to do it, to optimize the listing, to get it ranked, and to make sure you’re plumbing, HVAC, electrical companies coming up. If you want to download the workbook, you can do that by going to plumber. Seo.net/maps-workbook, maps, dash workbook. Christian, if you could drop that link into the chat for those that are on with us. Live, there you go. Christian, just put it in the chat for you. This has a nice little checklist for you guys. I’ll just pull it up real quick and share my screen that way you guys can see it. Because ideally, I’m going to give you guys the details. And, you know, having a nice, tight checklist just helps everything, you know, be clear and kind of clear on what next steps are. So just type open if you were able to get that open for me, open into the chat some of you guys maybe. All right, Chelsea got it opened. Travis got it opened. All right, cool, yeah. So that’s gonna walk you through the main things so I can finally get back. I got a ton of slides here, so let me share my screen for just a sec for those of you that are going to track along this workshop, this workbook will definitely help

almost There. All right, yeah. So if you go to plummercio.net/maps, workbook, this obviously is around organic, but it’s really going to talk you through the main things you want to do on your listing. I know most of you guys already have your listings claimed at this point. Just type, I would imagine you have your Google Map profile, it’s been claimed, it’s been optimized, but at least it’s been claimed. So just type claimed if you’ve got it claimed. But this is going to walk you through, really how to optimize that list. Optimize that listing after the fact and after it’s all

set up. Sweet.

Okay, so it looks like a bunch of you guys got to that if you want to make a copy of it, by all means, go ahead and make a make a copy. Now. Google Maps optimization fits into our accelerate growth model, right? It’s just one piece of the overall thing we want to do in order to accelerate our lead flow, grow our plumbing, HVAC, electrical business. And if you don’t mind, in the chat, let me know what type of home service company? Are you a plumbing? Are you HVAC? Are you electrical? Are you full service? Maybe? Are you something else? Just let me know that in the chat as well. Always cool to see. Michael pan here. Good to see a plumbing. I see plum plumbing and HVAC plumbing, all right. So, yeah, good, good mix of kind of, all of the all of the above. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that we can generate as many leads, as many sales, as many book jobs as possible to hit our goals and targets. And so this accelerated growth model is our philosophy on how to make that a reality. We got to do three things. We got to drive leads. We’ve got to maximize the conversion of those leads into book jobs and into repeat customers and referral customers. And then we’ve got to optimize our results. Right? We’re going to be spending money on marketing at some level, whether it’s the website, the SEO, the Google Maps, the local service, ads, whatever it is we’re going to be spending money, we got to figure out what’s actually generating the good return on investment, what’s actually generating results, and do more of that, right? And so really, when we drive leads, it falls into three main categories, organic, which is your website, your organic rankings, your free directories and things like that. We’ve got paid search, right? Local Service, ads, Google ads, Bing Ads, Facebook ads, Tiktok, YouTube, all of those, and retargeting. And then we’ve got database, which is those past customers that have done business with us, figuring out how to get them to use this again and again and again, right? And so we’re going to optimize for all of those three key strategies in order to maximize our lead flow. And then we’re going to maximize conversion. We’ve got to make sure our website is built to convert. It’s making it easy for someone to say, All right, I want to schedule with these guys, with reducing the friction as much as possible. We’ve got to make sure we’ve got our reputation dialed in. So when they when they’re trying to decide, like, is this a quality company? They see reviews. They see your quality organization. They see that you can be trusted. And we want to leverage automation. One of the coolest things you can do to improve your conversion rates is leverage automation into a text messaging to be quicker to follow up with your leads, to connect with your prospects the way they want to be connected with and to. Really automate the entire flow, and then ultimately, we want to optimize our results, which means we’ve got to track how much are we spending on marketing right now. And in some cases, we’ve got to spend more right in some cases, we’ve got to increase our spend to hit the goals and the targets that we’ve set for ourselves, but we want to do that with a clear metric on what’s our average cost per lead. So if we’re going to spend more, does that average cost really make financial sense? And then ultimately, we got to track the ROI, right? Is there a return on investment? Am I spending $1 and getting five to $10 out on the other side? If we don’t track that, this whole thing just becomes a, you know, something we’re just throwing money at. And so this is our accelerated growth model, with all the key things we want to think about, all the key things we want to put into play. Today, we’re going to be focused right here on organic. We’re going to just laser focus on how to get ranked in the most important place your customers are looking, the most important free result, which is the Google Map. But just type model, if it’s helpful sometimes, to zoom out and look at the big picture before we zoom into something as as granular as let’s make sure we’re coming up in the map listings, in our in our service area. And so this is our accelerated growth model in the workbook. I gave you guys a visual of this just so you can kind of connect the dots. Or here’s maybe, here’s something I need to focus on next. Here’s like, where I need to be putting my attention right now, in my in my business. But today we’re right up here in the organic column focused on getting those free clicks, those free rankings. So I’m just gonna ask a little bit of housekeeping. This is a live session. So if you could have your webcams enabled, have yourself ready to unmute so we can have a conversation. You know, we’re not going to engage live. Might as well just watch the recording after the fact. So have your webcams on. Close out the distractions, close the other tabs, whatever else you’ve got going on. Let’s give this our undivided attention over the next 45 minutes to an hour, and get you the latest information on how to get ranked on the map to generate more leads and more sales. So just type good if you’re good with those rules of engagement, always love to double confirm you guys are good with that. All right, good, good, good. I’m seeing some goods coming in. I appreciate it. Here’s what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to focus on, we’re going to focus on the latest updates to the Google Map listings and kind of how things have changed. And this is constantly iterating. It’s constantly updating. It’s constantly changing. We’re going to talk about the five biggest issues that could actually be harming your rankings in today’s market. There. There were things you might have put in play or your previous provider might have put in play a year ago, two years ago, that are actually harming your ability to rank today. So we’ll look at those to see if there’s any gotchas that are already happening. Our proven model for getting ranked in the three pack. And I, I’ll share some examples and case studies of like, here’s the company, here’s where they are ranking, here’s what’s happening with results. But it’s a it’s a nice, tight process that if you do it, you’ll get, you’ll get the results and the outcomes in terms of coming up on the map. And then the best tool is to systematize and automate the heavy lifting. Just give me a yes. If we can cover that today, you walk away with a clear plan, you’ll feel like this was a good use of your of your time. Just a yes in the chat. All right, cool, seeing a bunch of yeses. For those of you that don’t know, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder here at plumbing and HVAC SEO. I’m the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. We’re actively involved in the major groups and associations, next QSC service roundtable, CEO warrior, honored to participate and be active in all of those groups. But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is that at this point where we’ve actually worked with about 300 plumbing, HVAC, electrical contractors in some of the most competitive markets across the country. See many of our clients grow by millions and millions of dollars in revenue by getting their internet marketing dialed in. Probably at least 20 of our clients have been acquired by public equity. And so what I’m sharing is not based on theory. It’s not based on hype. I mean, this is based on real world working in the trenches with companies just like yours, getting the internet marketing dialed in, getting it, getting the websites ranked and getting consistent, measurable growth. And this is what we do as an organization. We got a team of about 60 employees. We do this day in and day out, build the websites, get them ranked, put the optimizations in place, put the automations in place, track everything, put a system in place to grow and so if any point you’re like, hey, you know what, Josh, this sounds great. I’d love to have you guys take this on for me. I’d love to partner with you to run your internet marketing. We’d love the opportunity to chat. If that’s you and you’re interested in that, you can go to Plummer seo.net/schedule, just a free place. We’ll schedule a time. See your situation, see if there’s an opportunity talk about how we can help Christian just put the link in for for that. So into the topic of the day, Google Maps. Do they still matter? Right? If the algorithm is constantly changing, and how many of you guys have seen change, just type change in the chat here if you feel like we. There was a time where that was just, it was the map was all there was. And now there’s these paid listings, and then there’s the LSA. And then, you know, it seems like the the the map results are moving further and further down and becoming less and less relevant. So does it even matter, like is it even worth putting any attention on this? I see a bunch of guys typing change. It’s changed. It’s constantly changing. No doubt, here’s what our statistics are telling us, even in today’s market. Yes, we know everything I just said. We know that the placement on the search results have changed. But here’s here’s the latest stats. 71% of the clicks, despite all of those other moving parts, 71% go to the organic listings, and 67% go to the first five results. So in today’s market, the number one place your customer looks is Google, right? And there’s not even a close second in this moment, they’re taking out their phone or they’re going to their desktop and they’re searching, searching for plumber in my area, HVAC, contractor near me, electrician, you know, near me on Google, right? And the lion’s share are clicking on the map results. So yes, we know this is super, super important. If we even drill down further, 44% of the clicks go to the top three results, right? So we want to make sure we’re ranking on the map in your service area for those most important keywords, because 44% are bypassing the paid result. They’re bypassing LSA, and they’re clicking directly on the Google map when they need your services. So yes, just from the data that will tell us that it matters. The other question that I think comes up often, and it’s going to come up more and more, is, what about chat GPT and other answer engines? Are you guys using these tools today? What like if you’re using any type of AI, whether it’s chat GPT or Claude or Gronk or perplexity, just type whatever it is, type which one you use. I know. I personally, I use them all. Literally. I use the one Gemini says and Fernandez, chat should be tea. Miles says, chat should be tea. I know. I personally, and my wife, probably in the context of home services, uses chat GPT all day, every day, from the mobile app speaks directly into it. And so one question we should all be asking ourselves is,

what about that? Like, are people going to start using chat, GPT and these other answer engines when they look for home service companies? And this is going to be hard to see. So I’m going to pull up my my screen and walk through this particular slide, because I think this is important, and I think it’s something we want to be paying attention to as we think about optimizing for the maps. And I know today’s really mainly around Google Maps, but what about chatgpt maps and other things like that? Give me a quick sec. All right.

So what this is like when it comes to the results that come up on chat, GPT, that’s called what’s really called two things today, answer engine optimization, which is really more Google, voice AI generated responses, voiced assistance, like Alexa and the geo generative engine optimization. Sorry, my Alexa just got activated, is going to be things like chat G P T, Gemini perplexity and so right now, if we go to chatgpt and we ask it like my wife would ask, or like I would ask if I was looking for various home service companies, best plumbers, Falls Church, Virginia, it’s spitting out like a, you know, a random list here, right company we work with in that area is the plumbing doctor. If we type in a search like best plumbers, Fargo, North Dakota. It actually introduces a map result, right? It’s giving us a map result here. And Laney is the company we work with in that market coming up in the like one of the top spots here. I’m not saying this has replaced Google today, right? I just want to plant the seed that generative optimization is important. More and more of your customers today, tomorrow, maybe six months from now, might be gravitating towards this versus going to Google directly. So we want to make sure we’re thinking about all map results, not just Google Map results in today’s marketplace, because they’re starting to serve pretty relevant results. And last month, I did a whole training on generative optimization. If you missed it, you can type geo in the chat. I’ll make sure to get you the link to it. But there’s a whole thought process, a whole strategy around it. But what I do want to make sure you’re aware of is Google is the dominant player. Right? This is it’s not even a close second, even, even today, when you think about how prolific these search engines are, 10 million searches a month for home services are going to Google, and there’s only about 500,000 going to chat, GPT and other generative engines. So don’t feel like, oh, I don’t need to focus on Google, because it’s not even a close second, but we do want to be thinking about the future with like, our left eye saying, like, where’s that headed? So Google’s kills still king. We do want to make sure we’re thinking about those generative, generative engines, and many users are bypassing those, those search results. So back to the question here, do the do the map listing still matter? Right? We kind of showed you the data. There’s a lot of people searching on Google still. Today, they’re still clicking the map listings directly. I wanted to show an example, and I’ll share a couple of these examples as we go. This is one of the clients we work with in in the in it in the spark Sparks, Nevada area, and you can see they come up really well on the on the map listings, right? So here’s coming up in the top result. They come up really well generative search results as well. But we track the data, so it’s like, where are the calls coming from? So they spend about $2,500 a month in online marketing. We track about 168 leads per month. That’s an average of $14.82 per lead. The lion’s share of the leads still come from from Google Maps, right? So if they weren’t coming up on the Google Map, they would definitely not have that average cost per lead. They would not have nearly as much organic opportunity in play. Another example of this company we work with in Fargo, North Dakota. You can see they come up here really strongly on the map listings. And we’ve been tracking over time, right? So we’ve been working with with this particular organization for several years now, and we kind of track back 2019 on a $2,500 spend. 830 leads a month directly from the Google Map, 300 from organic, 31 from web forms and other things. Fast forward. Now, our most recent reporting shows 1408 leads, and you can only go so much higher than like the first or second spot. Just goes to show you that coming up on the map is still relevant. There’s still a lot of calls coming through, if you can be the dominant ranking in that in that particular market. So without beating a dead force, here’s one of the clients we work with in Sun Prairie. We type in Sun Prairie AC repair. You can see Cardinal comes up in that second spot. They’re also dominant there on local service ads, we can look at the metrics. A little higher spend here, $12,000 in monthly investment. 1077 leads tracked an average of $11.13 per lead. 300 from organic 266, from paid search. 420, from Google Maps, right. Still, the the dominant result, the dominant lead generator. These results matter. So, yeah, absolutely. You want a blended result. And I’ll say again and again. We want to be doing paid search. We want to be doing retargeting. We want to be doing all of it, but we can’t rely on just paid search alone. We want to have a strong organic footprint, because that’s where a lot of the calls come from. That’s where a lot of the lead flow comes on. Just type yes in the chat here. If you follow you’re like, okay, yes, I get it. Thanks for showing me the data. Google Maps still relevant. Steve’s giving me a thumbs up. Thank you very much. So what are the biggest changes? Right? So some of the biggest changes we’re seeing are Google Maps recently dropped, and this is not so recent, but from seven results to three, right? We used to get us much more results. Now we’ve only got three results that are coming up. Google paid ads are now coming up in map results. So you can’t pay for the ranking in the three pack, but through your Google ads campaign, you can run ads that are actually showing up in the map results. And so that’s something you want to be thinking of as part of your paid search strategy as well Google, Google Home Services, Google Local Service ads, is running everywhere, right? And I would say, if you were prioritizing your paid search strategy, maxed out your local service ad spend second to that, set up retargeting, so we can retarget anybody that enters your world. Third to that, dial in your Google search campaign. After that, you’re probably looking at your Bing search campaign, because that’s becoming more and more relevant as well. But local service ads is a big driver. And then we talked about earlier the fact that there’s this new competition coming up from chatgpt and other general interventions that we want to be focused on. So those are just some, like, quick highlights on the big the big changes. If you’re not already claimed on Google Maps, I’m going to say, like, this slide says, Here’s where you set up your local service ads. If you’re not a local service ads, I would highly recommend it. Topic for another. Webinar another day, we’ll be doing one exclusively on paid search and local service ads over the next couple of months. But really what we want to focus on, and the goal that I would think you all should aspire to, is to own the search results in your market, like when someone types in your city, plus whatever like Plumbing, plumber, Drain Cleaning, Water Heater Repair, and Fernandez asking about Google Apple Maps? Yeah, absolutely, there’s, there’s not as many strategies that you can put in play. A lot of the things we do from Google Maps optimization, which I’ll be talking about, will impact your ability to rank well on Apple Maps. So we’ll talk briefly about that. But the the amount of search we’re seeing for plumbing, HVAC, electrical on Google Maps versus Apple Maps is it’s not it’s not close. It’s not nearly as many search if you were a hair salon or if you were a restaurant, there’d be a little bit more balance there, where people are using the Apple map. But for home services, it’s still like, majority of it’s happening on Google Maps. Okay, so our goal would be, when someone searches your services in your service area, we want to, yeah, we want to be playing in local service ads. We want to come up in the map. Ideally, we want to come up organically, and if we play our cards right, we want to come up in those second party directory listings as well. We have many clients I can point to that have like five or six results out of the top 15. And it’s a mix of, you know, obviously the paid ad, the local service AD, the map listing their website. And then, you know, maybe in a lot of markets, the up listing for that individual company can come up. The next door listing can come up. So we want to make sure we’re playing our cards to dominate for not everything. Right? Who cares about like keywords that don’t have any relevance to dominate for the keywords that have the most search volume or the highest commercial intent, right? The ones that you know somebody, if they typed that like, they type in transfer a player in your city, they’ve got a specific need, they’re trying to figure out, like, should they hire you or somebody else? And it’s going to be a high transaction value service. We want to dominate for those terms, right? And there’s a whole strategy around that. Google has been highly focused on spam results, spam listings, fake companies with fake locations that have just tried to game the system, and they say that they’ve reduced fake Google Map listings by 70% since 2015 and they’re they’re cracking down on this more and more

Over time, and so could your company listing on Google be getting flagged as a potential fake listing. Could could something that you did in the past because an issue, and this, if you’re established organization that’s been in business for, you know, at least three to five years, and you’re not coming up on the map results. Sometimes it’s, it’s the things that you set up in the past that are haunting you, versus the things that haven’t been done yet. So what like, what are those things that we’re seeing that are pretty prevalent in terms of, you know, actually harming rankings? Number one is you actually need an office in the city you’re targeting to rank well on maps, like if you’re in, and we had this, this case, you know, not that long ago, if you’re in North Little Rock, but you want to rank for Little Rock. And a lot of times, proximity to the search result makes a massive difference. And you know, there was a time where you could just set up a BS listing, or you could, you know, put your aunt’s house in there, and you could get away with it. Not so much in today’s market. So we want to actually have a location, an actual, real map address, that we can claim, verify, you know, optimize around. So that’s one thing, making sure you actually got a location that’s legit. Number two is, did you try and spam in the past, right? Either you or maybe a marketing person on your team or a company you hired? Did you set up a bunch of UPS, offices, PO boxes, and try and put in fake locations? If you did that, you know that’s probably bringing down your overall authority on Google Maps, and you’d be better served to go back and mark the fake listings as deleted or no longer active, and really just optimize the main location andor locations where you have true office space, commercial office or not. The third is where there’s inconsistencies of the name, address and phone number, and what we see often is maybe you moved or maybe you know your address has a suite number that’s a little bit different on one versus the other, consistency of your name, address, phone number, not just on Google, but how it’s shown on Google and Yelp and Angie and next door and thumbtack and all of these different sites you. Of Google’s looking for consistency of the name, address profile, to match the authority of your of your organization, spamming, spamming your city, in your company, name and or categories. There’s, there’s a couple of cases that actually show that this, for a while, was actually impacting in a positive way, your rankings, but obviously it’s against Google’s, terms and services for you to like. If your name is Steve Cleveland plumbing, and you try and put your city inside your company name, just for the sake of giving more relevance to the Google map, you might get away with it for a little bit, but it could actually be harming your rankings over time and then reviews right? Obviously, all other things being equal, the companies have the most reviews win. And so there’s actually things we can do in each of these categories to say, hey, let’s spot check. Let’s find the issue with why the listing is not coming up in the top three. Sometimes it’s this stuff, right? It’s like, oh, we just screwed something up and we got to go clean it up. Other times, it’s your competition has just done more of the right things than you have right we’ve got to catch up. We’ve got to be a little bit more aggressive in each of these categories, which I’ll be talking about in more depth. So this, this starts with figuring out what are the keywords your customers are typing when they need your services. And it’s not just plumber, and it’s not just plumber near me, it’s a variety of thing, things like, think about all the services you provide, and I’ve got examples of this for electrical and HVAC, but you know, they’re typing in plumber, plumbers, water heaters, bathroom remodeling, tankless water heater repair, leak detection, shower repair, boiler repair, plumbing contractor, right? There’s a lot of different variations, and then you’ve got your Higher, higher value, things like re piping, trench, sewer replacement, gas line repair. We want to see how we’re coming up in the map and organically in our service area for all of these keywords, with and without the city modifier at the beginning, at the end and or just like the raw term itself, because Google Now, based on where the search is happening, can match the searcher to the result, and there’s a couple ways to figure out where you’re coming up. Today, you could run a bunch of searches, right? And, like, literally, hand search one at a time. This comes out to about 125 different keyword combinations. If you put the city in the front, the city at the back, and then you take it without the city, and that’s time consuming. There’s tools that we use, well, a variety of tools that can automatically combine the most important keywords with like commercial intent, figure out what the search volume is, and then automatically run a ranking report and say, Hey, here’s exactly where the company ranks in national search for these terms, and here’s exactly where it ranks based on a geogrid. And so you could do it on your own, probably take you about a day and a half, or this is something we’d be glad to run for you, completely free of charge. If you’re on today’s session, we will literally like go to Plum rescue.net/schedule, we’ll give you a list based on your service area and the service that you provide. This is all the keywords with the cities, the modifiers, and then we’ll run a report that shows exactly where you’re coming up right now on Google, Google Maps and Bing. We don’t have it available yet. For generative engines, we’re looking for resources for that. But this has, this has value, just the time and energy that would go into running this report and getting this data. So if you want us to do that for you, you can just go to plumber, seo.net/schedule, of course, you know, we’ll run the report, we’ll walk you through, like, how good it is if you’re ranking, or where there’s room for improvement. And you know, if you’re interested in us helping you, like, actually improve the rankings, we can talk about that as well, but this is not, not a hard sell thing, like we’ll just, we’ll run that analysis for you at plumber seo.net/schedule, okay, so let’s talk about the proven approach to get ranked on the Google Map. There’s really three key things. Number one is we want to claim and optimize the Google map listing, right? And that’s your Google business profile. Number two is, we’ve got to build citations, those web references of your company’s name, address, phone number, with consistency, right? So we’re showing up in like, literally hundreds of places with consistent name, address, phone number and mapped out profile. You know, the more citations, the better in terms of your authority as a as a home service company. Number three is online reviews, like all other things being equal. If there’s 190 contractors, plumbing, HVAC, Home Service, contractors in your market competing for these terms, and you’ve all got a good on page optimization, you’ve you’ve all got a good map with a real location, all of the things being equal, reviews is the great equalizer, right? Usually, the company with the most reviews tends to win the day all other things being equal. So we need a strategy to capture previous client reviews and get them posted on Google and other places, and then a strategy to on a consistent basis, get new reviews and shoot for a high service call to review. Ratio, and then your website right? Actually, there’s very specific things we can do on the website itself. Title, tags, h1, tags, meta descriptions, H, card formatting, where you place your address that can dictate to go, okay. This is an authoritative company serving this service area with a reputable profile that deserves to come up in the top three results. And we’ll talk more about that and kind of, how do you how you do that in each of these but really it comes down to your your trust profile. Right at the end of the day, Google wants to serve the right company in their search results. They want to serve the company that the consumer, whoever that homeowner is is going to get the best result with right? And so they’re looking for trust. And there’s a couple things they look at in order to determine trust. Number one is your brand authority. And I know I’m talking about SEO and branding. It seems like, you know, it seems like an abstract concept, but how authoritative your actual company is? The logo, the company, the history that all encompasses your your brand, and it’s more important than ever in order to really come up well in search results and on the map, specifically your verification method, right? There’s now a lot of different ways you can verify your map listing, and sometimes you get suspended for a period. Sometimes your account gets dropped away because you changed an address or somebody like, submitted a, you know, a false claim about you. You can re verify. And there’s authority levels to how you actually did your verification. You can be double verified through like a pin as well as a video. You could, you know, be very double verified is great. Then you’ve got video verification with the live rep, and that’s where, like, you’re literally on your the the app, and you’re at the location, and you’re showing them. This is the office. This is the like, the actual signage of the organization, recorded video and and postcard. Double verified is best. Video verification with the Google rep on with you is second best. And sometimes if, let’s say, you feel like everything else stacks up, website is good. You’ve claimed your listing. It’s been fully optimized. Everything seems like you should be winning.

Sometimes it makes sense to trigger re verification and do it with video verification. Travis, how do we get live rep with Google reps? Actually, in the Google business profile, you just it’s gonna say you need to verify and it’ll give you, usually, one or two options on how you want to verify your listing. You do like video there, and you’ll get on a video call with somebody at Google and like, they’re gonna wanna see your location. They’re gonna wanna see the main thing they’re looking for is your address and some type of signage to prove that you’re like not at a bogus at a bogus listing in the document I shared with you guys the Google Maps playbook, there’s a whole thing on here with verification processes and what to do if you know your listing is suspended. These are the actual like internal SOPs we use for our clients, you know, like, ideally, and so just know that, like that is there for you as a as a resource. The other big thing for trust, obviously, is is Google reviews, number of reviews, review sentiment, very important. Review velocity, however, is often overlooked. So number of reviews, you might have 150 200 500 reviews. That’s one thing that’s useful, right? That’s going to help you. If the rest of your competition only has 200 or 100 reviews, and you’ve got 500 but the other thing is, are you getting new reviews based on recency? And is there new reviews happening on a consistent basis? So that review velocity is important. We don’t want to set it and forget it. We should be actively serving your clients, actively creating a world class experience, actively getting those clients back to the Google profile where they can post a review. And you have consistent volume growth if you’ve been suspended and you get re triggered a lot of times, that can actually be good, and that’s something you can play with if you’re all other things being equaled. You’re, you know, you feel like you should be ranking in the map, but you’re not going back and requesting a re verification. Sometimes can bump you to the spot you should be in the map results. So there’s lots of ways to play with that. And then there’s also back end engagement in the in the actual portal. So business.google.com is where you access your Google map listing. You or the company that’s managing the profile for you should be doing things in the actual platform, right? Whether it’s responding to reviews, uploading images, doing Google posts like actually seeing that there’s a real IP address, logging in and doing something on the back end is is really important. Let’s see anyone, anyone have any information about reviews that Google said they removed for violating policies that are. Good Christian, if you can, I know we’ve had some recent updates on that Christian. If you could post that in the comments for that would be, that would be great. And then actually completing your profile, your profile, we’ll talk about here in a minute. I’ll pull up some screenshots, logo cover image, images of your work, frequently asked, questions and answers, lots of things we can play with in the listing itself. But you know, really, if we can optimize for these trust signals, we’re telling Google we’re a real company that’s really in this area, that’s really cares about our map listing, it’s going to act in our favor to get ranked better in the in the maps. And there’s more advanced things we can do from a local link building perspective. How many of you have heard Link building is bad, just like bad if you’ve heard, you know, sometimes, you know, yes, links are important. But you know, if you get bad links, and you get irrelevant links, links are bad. Like there was, like, there was a time, if we kind of look at the history over the last 1213, years, where you set up your website, you put all your keywords into it, and as long as you had more links than the competition, you could win. Whether those links were from India and or anywhere else you could you could win. Google caught on to that, and there was a there was an algorithmic update that said, hey, fake fake links. Bad links drops your and it tanks your results. That being said, even in today’s market, your link profile is one of the key things that’s going to drive your rankings, and so we want to make sure we do is we build links that are relevant. So what is that like? Relevant links for your plumbing, HVAC, home service company would be like local organizations that are linking back to you because you supported them in some way or because you do business with them and they do business with you. And so there’s some things we can do to pass highly authoritative links that will improve your profile, that will improve your probability of coming up in the search results. And so one of the best things you can do is local sponsorships, super easy and super high impact. So think about your local sports teams, like the local school, the local clubs. Most of them, they want somebody to sponsor their T shirt or to sponsor the launch or to sponsor the team so that they can pay for the busses and things if you sponsor, and you were going to sponsor anyway. So I’m not saying just to do this, just for this, case, you could say, hey, look, I just want to make sure, if I sponsor the team, that you’re also going to link back to me on your organizational website, and because that’s a real organization in your local market that carries a lot of weight, and you can ask them to possibly even do a blog post about you guys and why you sponsored and why they chose you as their sponsor for their thing. Can be a great strategy to build local authority, host local community meetups. This is just bringing together homeowners, especially higher end homeowners you want to do business with, and contractors you refer business to anyway. So if you’re referring to, you know, if you’re a plumbing company, you refer to an HVAC company. Or if you’re a plumbing company, HVAC company, you refer to a damage restoration company, electricians. A lot of us have these referral networks. Bring those people together and a local meet up through any of those online meetup sites and create content around it. This can create great link building local resources page, which, like those same people that you refer business to, and they refer business to you, you can link to them, they can link to you. That passes authority both ways, without being a spammy way to do it. You know, lots of different things we can do to build your authority outside of the obvious. You know, buying links or doing other things that may actually harm your rankings over time. Okay, so tactically speaking, here’s what we want to do to rank on the Google map numbers we had to claim and optimize your Google business profile, I would imagine like you’ve either done this through a somebody on your team or through a third party provider. In most cases, I would still suggest, regardless of who you’ve hired, you should have access to your your Google account, right? Your Google map listing. This is super important because even even though you’ve delegated it, you don’t want to abdicate it, right? This is a asset. This is a piece of property that you need to control within your organization, so make sure you get access to that Google My Business login, make sure you’ve updated the company to read your actual company name, if you want to play shenanigans, right, which, you know, there’s some, there’s some, something to be said for adding cities and or keywords to your company name for the sake of ranking. You should create a DBA for that, just to make sure you’re not, you know, messing messing around with things. Obviously, you should link out from your map listing to your website. Use a local number, not a 100 number, one, not an 800 number. You do want to use a tracking number so you can track the number of calls coming through your Google map listing. Just add your main company number as a secondary number, so you’ve got that consistency of your name, address and phone number. So usually real address, not a UPS store or a PO box. Now those just aren’t going to perform. Well, there’s something to be said for virtual offices in secondary towns you might want to rank in, but they need to be under the radar, and you need to be able to do map verification, and you need to be the only one at the address if you’re really going to be able to play that strategy. Well, upload your photos so and the photos you put into your Google map listing should be your logo should be picture of you as the owner, should be pictures of your technicians. Try and build the authenticity and personality around who you are as an organization, lift your hours of operation and services offered a lot of calls come in the after hours in plumbing, HVAC, Home Services, and so if you only have an answer, let’s say between nine and seven o’clock Eastern, or whatever your time zone is, And you turn it off like unavailable after after the evening, you’ll come out of the map results during that period of time. And so it’s worth figuring out a 24 hour live answer. Whether that’s you’re ringing out to a third party or you’re using AI. There’s some amazing things happening with AI voice answering today. I think it would be a shame not to have somebody answer answer questions, capture the contact details, and even soft schedule the person if they’re calling after hours. I did a whole training on this, on how to optimize for conversion and some of the new AI tools that you can leverage, whether it’s aI chat or AI voice, regardless, make sure your office hours would kind of match when you can actually answer the calls, but don’t shoot yourself in the foot by saying, Hey, we don’t have live answers, so we’re going to mark ourselves closed after 7pm

so you know, I’ve just got a couple screenshots in here on how you would get in to your Google business profile. Again, make sure you have access to this in the info section is where. Here’s where you can go in and add photos, add posts you want to flesh it out, right? Like, kind of, really add, add stuff to it, make sure that your listing is verified, right with the little check badge at the top of your head. Or use a a team photo tends to work best. People want to do business with people they know, like and trust, and your team is going to be the key people that come out to the to the site, add photos, logos, things like that. It’s like within the photo section on the Google business profile, on insights within the dashboard, you can really see some things. You can see data around visits to the website, address requests, how many people calling directly off the map, results, couple of other best practices you want to update, update your photos and add to them on a consistent basis. Don’t just set up your Google business profile once and call it a day. This would be something that you’re you, or a company like ours, which we can do all of this stuff for you, or whoever it is, make sure that they’re consistently updating it post to Google. Posts. Might as well make it keyword rich content, add photos, add stuff about the main services you provide at least once every 90 days, we try and post multiple times per week. Respond to reviews. This is big. We know we need more reviews, but I’m shocked and amazed by how many plumbing, HPC, home service companies are getting reviews, good, bad and indifferent, and they just leave it, you know, okay, we got a review you or somebody on your team should be thanking that person for taking the time to share their feedback and for giving you their business. This is a good signal to pass to Google, but it’s also a good signal to pass to somebody that’s thinking about doing business with you to see that you care. There are FAQ sections frequently asked questions that can really help with your rankings. And so seed yourself questions. Are you available? 24/7, do you have a trip charge? Do you do indoor air quality? What are the best you know, the best AC systems that you recommend. Seed those questions and answer them that gives more context to your Google profile. And also, you know can come up in separate searches because of the the actual Google posts that you’ve put in place. So that’s what you want to do in the Google map listing itself in order to optimize it. Secondarily, is we want to build the consistency of our name, address and phone number, right? Lots of references of your company, name, address, phone number, with consistency. And we want to limit duplicate information, limit incorrect business information, like an old address somehow still being shown, or a different phone or a different website being linked. Consistency is what really, really matters in terms of your citations across the web, there are these things called aggregators that basically take all of the listings and put them onto these directories and then feed that information out to the third party, online sites and directories. The top four are factual axiom, info group and new start. And each of them have their own database, and each of them can really, actually syndicate out to hundreds of different sites and so. What I see as an issue with a lot of companies is they’ll go to Google and they’ll update their name, address, phone number, and they’ll think, Okay, I’ve updated my stuff, when there’s actually hundreds of other directories that have a name, address and phone number. And so sometimes you look at a scan and you say, well, there’s lots of inconsistency. I’m going to go to each one of those sites, and I’m going to update it. And you go in, or you, or somebody on your team, or a VA or something, goes in and updates it on a couple dozen sites, and you know, okay, now I should be good. I should have that consistency there. But then you check back a couple weeks later and it’s showing the wrong information again. That’s because these data aggregators feed those hundreds of sites. And so if you don’t go back to the source and update those data aggregators, you’re going to continually respond incorrect information about your company, which is going to pass a negative signal to Google in terms of how you rank. And so this is one of those simple things. You invest a little bit of money, you actually claim and update those four listings, and you can, you can get back to the root, get back to the source. My favorite tools for this are Yext, which is like kind of direct API to the top 50 online directory listings. Moz, local, white spark advice, local, bright, local. These are all tools we use in local SEO. Again, if you choose to work with us, or a company like ours, most of us can set these up for you properly. In addition to the data aggregators, make sure that you’ve got that consistent profile, which is one of the keys to getting ranked on the Google map. If you’re curious to see what your citation profile looks like today. You can pull up plumber seo.net/scan enter your name, your address and your phone number, and this will show you where there’s inconsistency today, right? This is a good place to start at plumber seo.net/scan and again, that’s a free a free resource. We’ll give you to just to kind of see this was an example, one of the one of the companies, Southern Plumbing and Mechanical, they had 88% inaccuracy. In other words, they were showing one thing on Google, something completely different on four squared, and these, all of these directories that have different phone numbers and things. All of that’s important, right? All of that’s going to impact your ability to rank. And if you’ve got consistency, that’s one of the key factors in coming up. So again, if you want to just audit yourself on that particular front plumber, seo.net/scan, okay, best practices here with citations, manually claim and optimize Google. Don’t use a third party to manage your Google listing. You can use a tool like Yext to push out to the top 50. You know, there’s a love hate relationship in in local SEO with with Yext. What I like about Yext is it’s immediate, right? And sometimes you can manually claim those 50 directories, and you can manually change them one by one. It’s very time consuming, and they’re still going to pull from other sources to update, where Yext gives you a direct update to all 50 of those. And if you think about the 8020 principle, it’s those 50 sites that generate 80% of the traffic, 80% of the authority. And so we want to get those ones right, get yourself updated and claimed on the four major data aggregators, and then leverage tools like Like, like, bright local citation finder, white spark loganxt to find niche opportunities. So there’s, there’s, like, the big sites you think of, like Angie and next door. But then there’s little local directories, local business directories to your area. And then there’s Home Service specific directories that are very niche, that you can add yourself to, that in a lot of cases, carry a lot of authority. They might not get a lot of traffic. They might not, you know, like, blow up your phone, but they’re passing authority back to your company and to your main listing. So hopefully that’s clear type citations. If you feel a little bit clearer on you know what citations are, why they matter, and how to like, focus on updating your your consistency. Awesome. We’ve got a list of the top citation sources, and you can access that at plumber seo.net/citations,

I’ve also got all this stuff linked in your in your workbook, all right. Factor numbers three super important is real reviews, real reviews from your real customers in a real service area, like I said, before all other things being equal, the company with the most reviews tends to win. And so we want to leverage tools to request a review after every service call. We want to train our team to create a world class experience. Train our team, the technicians in the home, to plant that seed. Right? They come in, they do their thing, they create a great experience. And then they say, hey, we’d love it if you take time to share a review, and if you can get them to have on their tablet, hey, here’s a QR code I want you to scan that will take you straight to the page where you can request a review, in addition to the email or text message going out right after the service call, that can work really. Be well to build that review, but when I look at the companies that have the best online rankings and have the best online reviews, they’ve built it into their culture, right? Which means their team is focused on creating world class when they have their weekly or monthly huddles, they’re recognizing this as an organization, they’ve got all the text there, and they’re saying, Hey, we got 17 new reviews this last week. You know, Johnny over here generated 12 of those reviews. And so we’re taking Johnny out to a steak dinner. Right? When you celebrate that online review, and you celebrate that and you create a culture around it, you know, that’s when you start to really see momentum with online, online reviews, the other big thing is going to be leveraging automation. And the way we request reviews over the years has has changed, right? It used to be, you know, how do we get a review? We asked the customer, right? And, like, a very small percentage do it. Then there was a while where we started to use, like, tools like nearby now, and things like that. We’re like, that, where it’s like, Okay, I’m going to type in the customer’s name and email address, and then it’s going to press a button, and then it’s going to like, request a review. In today’s market, we want to set it up where let me know what platform you use. Are using Service Titan, or using house call Pro, or using field edge or using something else. Just let me know in the chat, most of our clients, probably, if I had to name two, would be service Titan and field edge and house call Pro, right? So looks like Jody’s using Service Titan and Fernandez is using house call Pro, GHL and field edge. Okay, cool. So decent mix. Most of these are web based today, which means there’s APIs and there’s automations that can fire the clients, we see the best results with the second the job is closed in whatever platform, let’s just say service Titan, it triggers the automation to say, hey, thanks so much for your business. It was a pleasure to serve you. We’d love it if you’d let it light us with you, right? And it’s it’s sending that via email and text message, and the customer clicks the link and their Google profile comes up, and they just have to click the button and write their review. When you do that, and you don’t gate the reviews, and you don’t make it a manual process, those are the clients that we see with exponential increase in online reviews. And if you’ve got an exponential increase in online reviews, you’re going to tend to win the day. I’m going to skip past this, all right, and then so that’s that’s online reviews. The next is your is your website, right? And last week, I did a whole hour and a half long session on how to set up your website, how to optimize the pages, how to optimize the links, and everything else. I’ll do the 8020 part of this. If you want that, just type SEO or geo in the comments, and Christian will grab that link for you. And you can dive into that if you want. But it’s really about having pages for each of your services, pages for each of the cities that you operate in, optimizing those pages with the title tag, the h1 tag, the actual content being unique and quality, making sure the website loads quickly, lots of little things you can do on your website itself to improve the probability of ranking. And so a great example of this kind of all encapsulated is this company. We work with, the meridian company in East Lansing, Michigan. And if we go to Google and we type in East Lansing plumber, you can see they’re come up here, number one on maps. They come up number one organically. Let’s actually, let’s just, since I got this open, let’s just type in, let’s say we were on chat GPT here, and we were going to ask chat GPT,

who are the best Plumbing Companies in East MI. I it,

am I spelled Lansing right? It’s funny, because these this result. Sometimes it it shows a map, sometimes it doesn’t. I think I spelled Lansing wrong. But I mean, you know, typically we’re going to see

there’s some meridian, and they come up well in generative search as well. So hold on, where was I? Okay, so there you can see they come up really well organically. We’re looking at the traffic here, right? $8,000 in spent tracked across here. 417 leads per month. So that’s $19.32 average cost per lead. That’s 95 from organic. 127 from paid. 173 from Google Maps. So the Google Map, obviously you’re here, if we’re looking, is driving a lot of the results. And it’s not just for that one keyword, but that, you know, is driving some great traction there. And that’s the power, right, of getting getting the organic dialed in, getting ranked on the Google Map. You know, we can, we can have a really effective cost per lead to grow and. To and to scale, another good example of this in Sparks, Nevada, Reno, Nevada area, is Ira Hanson plumbing and so let’s just type in like

there’s Ira Hanson right there. They come up really well, right? They coming up well in the maps and the organic results. And this, this exactly is what I’ve been talking about this whole time, right? Properly. Claim Google Map, lots of online reviews. Set up the website correctly. Build the citations, build the online reviews, build the the authority. You can see here on a $2,400 investment, 642 leads tracked average of $3.84

per lead, 214 of those

from Google Maps. So I just like I wanted to show some examples of what’s possible when you get that dialed in. And there’s other things we do with off page, like syndication, building up authority that that can drive those, those organic results as well. And so I don’t want to bore you to tears, right? I wanted to give you enough detail here on the 8020 if you want to get into more specifics, the the workbook I shared at Plummer seo.net/maps-workbook, which Christian just typed in, really gives you the checklist. It gives you. Like, here’s what we’re going to do with business information, with categories, with the description, with other like add on things we can put in place. How we can leverage video verification. And if you’d like some help with this, whether it’s you know, you want us to do a review of your website. Want us to run a rank and report. Give you a list of the most important keywords. We’re actually talking about how we can help you get ranked, and, more importantly, how we can help you drive better results online. You can go right there to plumber seo.net/schedule, give us some information about your company. We’ll do the due diligence, and and we’ll schedule a time to connect and to go deeper with this. So that’s the scoop. If you have any questions, feel free to post it into the chat, and Fernanda says, great webinar. Thank you very much. I have the drop. Okay, thanks for being on here. Jody, great to see you. If you want help, you can call us anytime, 866-610-4647, or go to plumber. Seo.net/schedule, no pressure. We’ll do an analysis, we’ll do our due diligence, and we’ll have a good value add conversation. So that’s it for today. Thank you guys for being here. Thanks so much time for for investing the time with me today. Tune in. Next month, we’re going to be talking all about how to accelerate your lead flow with paid ads. So we’re talking about Google ads, local service ads and retargeting, getting that dialed in as part of the accelerated growth model. Awesome. All right, guys, we’ll talk to you again real soon.