How to TRIPLE Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing Right for Plumbing & HVAC Contractors

All right, well, Hello and welcome. I’m super excited. Today we’re going to be doing a deep dive session on how to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing. Right. And this session is is based, you know, a lot around what we cover in this book, How to triple your sales by getting your marketing right for plumbing and HBC contractors, give me a Yes, in the chat. If you’ve got this book, maybe you’ve you’ve either got it, or you’ve read through it, potentially, um,

but then when

it was published about a year and a half ago, and so today’s session is going to be based on the latest and greatest in what’s going on in digital marketing, and what we’re seeing work best for home service companies. And we’re going to keep it very interactive. So ideally, this won’t just be you listening to me talk, I’m going to tee up concepts, I’m going to show you examples, and then you’re going to do some work on it. So just give me a one in the comments here. If you’re okay with that, if you’re okay with keeping this interactive, making this something very, very actionable. Awesome, good stuff. Okay. Let me share my screen. And you guys should be seeing a screen now. It says how to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. Give me a yes. Real quick, just so I can make sure. Okay, awesome. So have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a dominant web presence that position you as the top plumbing HVDC electrical contractor in your area? Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to have a flood of prospects finding you online and coming into your business on a consistent basis? And really, have you ever wondered what it would be like to know that you’ve got the right strategy that’s optimized, she’d have to feel like you were constantly reinventing the wheel. That’s exactly what I want for you. That’s exactly what we’re going to be doing on this session. Today, we’re gonna be unpacking a blueprint of the most important online marketing mediums that you should be tapping into right now to really maximize your lead flow, right. And I said, I’ve updated this, this week spent a lot of time and energy updating the slides of beating the content updating checklist, so that it matches what’s going on right now in this current moment. So this is an outdated This is about as fresh as it’s going to get, we’re going to unpack our proven strategy for getting ranked well in the organic and the map listings, how to generate more peanut referral business with social media, how to maximize the conversion of the leads that you do get by tapping into some automation.

And most importantly, Hey,

sorry about that. And most importantly, how you can triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. And I know that’s kind of a bold, a bold claim, how you’re going to triple your sales, because some of you guys may be doing large numbers, some of you may or may not be. But what I’m going to show is examples of companies that haven’t been triple their traffic, tripled their leads tripled their sales by getting their internet marketing, right. So this is going to be based on on real world and not on hypothetical. who I am and who I am. In case you don’t already know me, I’m the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. I’m an active member of phcc que SCA CCA a lot of my articles have been published in magazines like plumbing and mechanical contractor magazine. But I’d say probably more important than any of that stuff is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVC companies and some of the most competitive markets across the country and see a lot of them go from, you know, obscurity online to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their area. Many of our clients have seen a seven figure revenue growth, like millions of dollars in increased revenue as a function of working together dialing in their internet marketing strategy. And so everything I’m going to share with you today, everything that I teach isn’t based on theory, it’s based on working with real home service companies just like you figuring out what’s working, and what’s not. So I think that’s why you can put some good stake in what we’re going to be doing here together today. And this is what we do. You know, we have plumbing h SEO is a digital marketing agency that specializes in working with home service companies. We’ve got a team of 3030 or so full time employees scattered across the United States, in our bright green shirts. And this is what we do day in and day out right build websites for plumbing HVC companies, get them ranked drive traffic track the results. And so if at any point is you’re watching this, you think hey, what I’d like to hire these guys like to have you guys work with us. We’d love the opportunity to chat with you about that. And I’ve got Christian Ortega, my director of business development on the session with us as well. You can always you know, schedule a time, no, no pressure, but just an opportunity to get to know you a little bit better where you’re at in your business and see if it might be a fit for us too. Work together. So, quick question as we as we get started here, before we dive in, what are you most excited about learning today? Like you’ve taken time out of your busy schedule? I know you’ve got other things going on. What are you most excited about? What do you really need to make sure you take what you can either enter it in chat? Or if you want, you can unmute yourself on whatever’s easier for you. But I’d like to hear from a couple of you guys. What are you most excited about getting from today? Let’s see. Brian says how to leverage Google My Business. Okay, cool. Excellent. We’ll be definitely talking about that

a little bit.

How about john? JOHN? Hi, Mark. What are you most excited about getting from today’s session? Put it in chatter. I’ll just unmute you real quick. I just basically any information we don’t have all right. Get some information you don’t have already just to make things more productive. Yeah. Awesome. Sounds Sounds great. So I like to start with why right? Why? Why is this even worth our time? Why is it worth our energy to be thinking about this to be working on this? There’s so many options. When we think about digital marketing, it can be unclear to where to spend our budget, right? If we think about the the sea of opportunities, right, good SEO, we got paper quick. We’ve got websites, we’ve got social media, we’ve got homeadvisor, and Angie’s and all these different resources, it can become really kind of frustrating to think about where we should actually spend the dollars. The other thing I know is home service companies plumbing, HVC, electrical, you’re going to spend a lot of money in marketing, right? This isn’t an industry where you guys shy away from spending the money As long as you get a great return on investment. But ultimately, times I see where you guys have very little to show for your investment. Like you’ve tried, reach local use, you’ve tried yodel, you’ve tried Scorpion, you’ve tried to kid down the you know, down the street, you’ve tried to do it yourself. You’ve tried to hire a full time person in house. And oftentimes you spend the money but there’s not a lot to show for it, which can be really, really frustrating. And why frankly, that the stakes are the stakes are high, right? If you don’t have the right plan, and you’re not consistently generating quality leads and quality return on investment on you can overspend which is really annoying. But you can also underperform, which is freshing is really the big challenge in this industry. As I’ve come to see, it isn’t necessarily generating leads and sales, it’s getting high quality technicians getting them trained up and having the manpower that you need to provide the service, give me a yes, if that’s kind of your situation, I think the biggest opportunity cost in not having your internet marketing dialed in is you spend so much energy recruiting, training and getting these guys in place, if you don’t have the lead flow and the ability to increase the lead flow to keep them busy. It’s really easy for them to hop ship and go somewhere else I’ve seen I’m seeing some nods and some with affirmations. Yeah, like so it’s really important. We need to have the internet marketing dialed in so that we can keep the technicians busy, and we can not have to worry about technicians going somewhere else. So here’s the opportunity. Here’s what we’re looking to solve for on today’s session. We want to have a clear plan, right? What like, where are we trying to go? What how many leads Do we need in order to get there. And we want to generate enough leads to keep the phone ringing to keep the trucks running to keep the technicians at full capacity and have a great return on investment. Right. I think just about every smart plumbing HBC home service business owner that I’ve met with and talked with is all for spending the dollar, right? If you can spend $1 and get three to $5. In return, you’ll spend that money and so that’s the opportunity want to make sure that we create a consistent resource to generate a solid ROI from our marketing. And if we get this right, really what I think success looks like is you maximize your lead flow. And you can more than triple your sales by getting this internet marketing stuff dialed in. And so that’s what we’re gonna do on today’s session. I want to start with an example because I think that I learned better based on examples than just hearing a bunch of slides and going through a lot of different things. So I want to talk to you about Mark Norman. Mark Norman runs shamrock plumbing. It’s a full service plumbing drain repiping company based in Orlando, Florida. And over the years, Mark built a really successful plumbing business but he built it predominantly through advertising the Yellow Pages, were talking, you know, 1015 years ago and At some point, the business started to dwindle, like the lead flow just started to drop off. He wasn’t generating as many leads and sales as he once had. And he quickly had to solve for like, Where did the customers go? like it used to be? You had that double truck ad in the Yellow Pages, that’s where everybody looked.

And

if you were there, and you got the leads, if you weren’t you missed out on. And so what he discovered, like all of you guys have, and this is not new at this point was that there was a transition from yellow pages for these types of services to the internet, like people going to Google going to Yahoo and going to being going to Angie’s going to homeadvisor going to thumbtack, right? We know for a fact, in today’s market, more than 97% of our customers and our prospects use the internet in some form or fashion before hiring our services. So knowing that what we want to solve for and what you want to solve for Mark was trying to solve for us how do we own the internet in our service area, and he’s in Orlando, Florida. And so we’re going back, I guess now, over the last seven years, he tried a couple of things. And it really the first thing he tried was was yellow page. So Yellow Pages at the time, had done pretty good for him with with the print ads, and they said, Hey, we’ll do your internet stuff. And so they put a website up for him. And they said, Hey, well, we’ll put a couple grand towards this and your phone’s gonna ring off the hook. So they put a website up for him, they got him on y p.com. He waited a couple of months, and it just didn’t work out. Like there just wasn’t much volume, there wasn’t much lead flow going on. So it was back to the drawing board for Mark. The second thing he tried was, there was a company that came out that said, hey, look, we can get you in the paid results on Google and on Yahoo, we’ve got call tracking in place, I think it was either yodel or reachlocal. At the time, they said, we’re gonna get your phone ringing off the hook, and it’s gonna be it’s gonna be awesome. And he tried that. And it actually did. It did work a little bit like he started generating leads and opportunities for his business, but it felt like, and I’m sure some of you guys have experienced this, it felt like for every $1,000, he would generate about $1,000 in revenue. So it was enough to break even. And but it really wasn’t enough to really exceed expectations, it wasn’t enough to create the volume to replace what he had built over the years. And so again, he was he was back to the drawing board. But there was like really two issues with the strategies that he tried initially in his business. First with yellow pages, they rolled out a website, but it was very generic, didn’t have any authenticity didn’t give any reason to choose him versus the competition. And it really didn’t show up anywhere where the customers were looking. It was basically on someone going directly to shamrock plumbing FL com, or finding him on wipey calm which nobody looked at back then. And they certainly don’t look at now. And so that was what happened there. When we went to the other paid search company that was just focused on paid search. The problem was he was still using his old Yellow Pages sites, it was still a very generic website that didn’t stand out that didn’t convert. And while it came up in the paid results, it didn’t show up organically. It didn’t show up in the other places where customers we’re looking so was like he had to spend and spend and spend just to break even.

So really what he needed to solve for in order to really get things headed back in the right direction and his business. He had to make sure he was showing up for the keywords people were typing and it really the organic and the paid listings. The other thing is software was having a website that was was built to convert it wasn’t just a generic cookie cutter site. But it was something that people got to and said I want Mark looks different. He looks professional. This is the kind of company I want to call so that when someone got to his site, they picked up the phone, and they converted into into sales. And so I said we wanted to show up where people were looking, you know, we just have to spend a minute to understand how the search engines work, right? If we type in Orlando plumber, right now at the top, we’ve got the local service ads, right, we want to show up there, we’ve got the map listing, which comes up right below that. We’ve got a couple of paid results. And then we’ve got the organic listings. And so we want to make sure Mark showing up in all of those places so he can really maximize his lead flow. And so when we started working with him, we started with the website, right, we wanted to make sure the website was built to convert right and nothing less not super fancy, but the fundamentals right personality, you get to know Mark a little bit on the website, clear calls to action, reasons to choose him versus the competition. And of course, we had to make sure the website was optimized to show up in the search engines where people were were looking. And so if you run a couple searches now and it only took us I don’t know a couple months to get this off the ground for him. He started to show up for almost all of the keywords in Orlando. Relatively of deployments Orlando plumber, Linda plumbing landed in Franklin in Orlando repiping Orlando Water Heater Installation, and repair. And over time, we rolled out what we call our online dominance method, which you know is about the website. It’s about SEO, it’s about pay per click. It’s about retargeting. It’s about lead, nurture, and maximizing the conversion rate of the leads that come in. But really, what I want you to see is the is the outcome, right? Because he went from stagnated in his business, if we look at our tracking on a month by month basis, so this is monthly, what I’m going to show you here, not not for the year, but I’m just showing you timestamp back over the last couple of years. So 2017, you got up to about 230 leads per month via the internet on a 16 $100 spend at the time 2018 increase to spend a little bit got up to 497 leads tracked, maybe some of its coming from organic, some of its coming from pay per click, some of its coming directly from Google Maps. And some of its like web forms that are submitted. So we track all of this stuff very, very closely. 2019 586 track leads and this is per month, guys, it’s just an average monthly result. Now fast forward to 2021. This is his most recent report, I was just looking at it today. 818 leads tracked via the internet average cost believe about $3.82 286 from organic. So we definitely like to organic by 48. From from paper collect 408 directly from Google Maps. GMB, somebody mentioned that something they’re interested in learning more about today. And 66 via web web forms and chat via via their site for a total of 818 leads. And so, you know, the promise, here’s we’re gonna show you how to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right, this is an example of more than tripling their lead flow over that span of time. So does it happen overnight? No, what if you really follow what we’re going to do on today’s session, you can really increase your lead flow and maximize your opportunity in your in your service area.

So what did it mean for Mark? Well, it really meant was he was able to go from a one man operation doing about 250,000 per year to over $1.5 million. And growing, it’s been from one guy to seven guys, and he’s got confidence, because he’s the dominant player in that confidence to really continue to grow and continue to scale the business operation, I want you to think about what it would mean what it would mean for you, right? If you could generate 800 500 300, we’re just significantly increased the amount of leads that you’re generating on a on a monthly basis. So I want to do now is I want to apply what worked for Mark, and what has worked for hundreds of other clients to you and your business. And so I put together this little handout, it’s actually a checklist that you can follow along with me. And what I want you to do is what and download this now Christian, if you could drop the link in chat, download this, have it open in another tab, if at all possible, we’ll open it up on an iPad, or if not just printed out and go back to it after the session. And because I’ve walked you through it, you’ll be very clear on where you’re at on certain topics. But the format I’m going to follow is we’re going to look at a concept. And we’re going to I’ve kind of ordered this in Priority with what we need to focus on first, second, third, fourth, to really maximize your lead flow. I’ll talk about the concept. I’ll show an example. That way you can like really understand what I’m talking about. And then we’ll we’ll have you look at the checklist and see like is that something that needs to be a priority for you in your business? So give me a one in chat. If you’re following along, you’re clear on what we’re going to do here next with the format of the presentation and the checklist process. Okay, Yana jerell. Brian, john. Thank you, Annie. Great, awesome. So we’re we’re talking the same language, we’re clear on what we’re trying to do.

So like I talked about with Mark,

the first thing you want to think about is your website, right? You really want to like look, is the website built to convert visitors to leads? Right? Because if it’s not, you’re going to wind up spending money in a lot of different areas. And you could get lots of traffic but maybe not the outcomes that you’re after. So in my mind, your website is the hub right? before somebody does business with you either was because they saw your your van and they were like, hey, that’s the company in my area. They ran a search on Google. Maybe they came up they found you want to thumbtack usually what they do before they wind up calling you or submitting the request. They’re gonna pull up your website and see like, what’s this company all about? What reviews do they have? Is this a quality organization? And so all of your marketing effectiveness kind of hinges on your website, what’s the experience on a desktop, what’s an experience on a mobile phone? And is it built to convert those visitors those opportunities those potential customers into leads for your company. And a good a good example of like why this is, is so important and kind of the, the baseline on optimizing your website for conversion, I’ve got two scenarios up here, I’m not going to spend a bunch of time on this. But let’s say you’ve got 1500 visitors per month, and your average conversion rate is 5%. That’s, that’s about what I see somewhere between five and 10%, and Home Services, plumbing HVDC, electrical companies. And so if you got a 5% conversion rate on 1500 visitors, you’d have about 75 leads, and let’s say all those leads, you convert 30%, like so they called in or they submitted a form 30% of those end up working out to be booked jobs, you’d wind up with 20 to book jobs, assuming of 450 average transaction, I guess this isn’t a low number for most of you, you’d have about 10,000 revenue on that on that traffic. Now, if we can get the conversion just to 15%. And we’re targeting typically for 25 to 30% for our clients. But if we can get this to 15%, then for that same traffic write for that same SEO effort for that same paid search effort, we’d wind up with 225 leads, let’s keep the conversion rate the same, we’d wind up with 67 book jobs, let’s keep our average ticket the same we wind up with $30,000 in revenue. So we can have a tripling of the results without doing anything else while optimizing the conversion rate on our on our site. So this is really important to spend some time and some energy to get the the optimization of the website down. A great example of this is a company we work with in in Fargo, North Dakota, and that’s lanius, their full service plumbing, hv AC, electrical, Bathroom Remodeling company, and they’re relatively well known Lego, they’re a big player in that market. But when we started working with them, they just hadn’t spent a lot of time on the website, it just wasn’t a priority for them. And so you can see over here is an image of the website as it was when we started working with them. And it was just phone number, some basic content, no authenticity, no personality, we rolled out a new version of the site that was built to convert. And again, I’m going to walk you through the key elements that we put in place to make sure that they convert at the highest level possible. Actually, I’ll pull up the site for you here. This is how it looks today. All right. Nice website, phone number, a picture of the owner key bullets and why somebody wants to choose them versus the competition, easy way to book in an appointment. Oops, I closed the site when I did that.

And just

the key things that are going to make somebody want to choose them versus the versus the competition. And so that’s that’s what we did, we kind of went from the old site to the new site. And what happened was within a very, very quick period of time, we saw the the call track go from 50 to 317, which meant traffic was getting to their website, people were getting there, and they were looking for their services. But it wasn’t converting because it didn’t look right on mobile, or it didn’t let compel somebody to want to choose them versus the competition. I just wanted to like track forward as we started to do some of the other things like drive traffic through SEO traffic through Google Maps traffic through paid search, you can see here that the number went to 930 track the leads, they real heavily heavily invested on the organic side of the equation. And so we’re going to talk about conversion a little bit. But that’s just an example of what’s possible when you get conversion optimization for your website down. I’ve got a workbook for you do not need it for today’s session. But if you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash convert dash workbook and you want to really go deep on how to optimize your website to get more visitors to to callers and into leads, that workbook will help kind of map that out for you. So how do we optimize for conversion, right? How do we make sure that we get as many leads and phone calls out of the traffic that’s already getting to the site? I’m going to talk about 12 elements very, very quickly, then we’re going to look at real examples similar to the one we just looked at. First of all, we want to make sure we’re speaking to our target avatar, right. We want to make sure we’re not just talking about the technical aspect of what we do, but We’re talking about that customers fears, frustrations, concerns, are you going to be on time? Are you gonna leave my house a mess? Am I gonna waste time booking an appointment? And then have you not show up? Are you going to rip me off, right? If we can speak to that in the messaging on the website and put it above the fold, that’s absolutely going to improve conversion rate. Number two is to be real and authentic. So many plumbing HVC home service company websites I look at, they might look nice, but they’re using stock photography, a picture of a smiling family picture of just a cheesy plumber with a wrench. The one thing I’ve found that has a bigger impact on conversion than just about anything else is authenticity. So that means using real pictures of the owner real pictures of the team, real pictures of the operation real pictures of who’s gonna show up at the home. To the extent that you can get some pictures taken and you can infuse that into your website, it will have a big impact on how well your website converts. We want to use multimedia and video right? If a picture’s worth 1000 words in a video is worth 10,000, right? So why not with the technology being available today, take out your phone, Hey, my name is Mark from shamrock plumbing. I do plumbing, I do Plumbing and Drain Cleaning here in the Orlando area. If you’ve got a slump, stop clock, the brain, we can get out there today and get it solved. Right shoot some videos. That way you can be authentic and you can meet them in a couple different modalities has a big impact on your on your conversions. videos I recommend you would have is a welcome to the website. Here’s who we are, here’s why people choose us and then a video for each of your main services. So if you do indoor air quality, and you do heating repair, and you specialize in some other type of geothermal, let’s just say, and we’re going to drive traffic via paid search and organic to those pages. Why not create a video for those services it will help with conversion will also help with your SEO, and then a video explaining why somebody should contact you and do business with you versus the competition. Want to leverage social proof as heavily as possible. So that means all other things being equal. Your potential customer wants to do business with someone that’s got reviews that other people have used that have you know lots of people saying good things about them. So on your website, you want to be featuring the reviews, the testimonials that you have from various sites like Yelp and Angie’s and Google and all of these different sources. And we want to make sure we’ve got the basics in order, right. So some of the basics, phone number in the top right hand corner. Amazing how often that that gets missed. But when somebody gets to your website, there is a natural Glavine gravitates to the top right hand corner, that’s where you want to have your phone number, you want to make a form well, either a button or form where they can quickly enter their name and contact details to submit a request or potentially schedule an appointment. We want to add credibility with authority symbols that they recognize, like BBB and Angie’s List, super Service Award, things like that the local newspaper,

you want to have clear call to actions at the bottom of each page. So if we talk about having pages for the different services and pages for the different cities, make sure for each block of text, it tells them to schedule your service call now give us a call at this number, click here to schedule a time tell them exactly what to do next, leverage special offers and coupons. I know we don’t none of us want coupon buyers. But we you know, we want to give them an incentive and a reason to call you now, as opposed to clicking back and going to the next potential customer. We have to absolutely make sure that the website is optimized for for mobile. You know, I think something like 60 to 70% of traffic for your services are coming via mobile phone. So make sure it fits nicely in the mobile phone, make sure that they can tap the call make sure they’re not having to copy and paste the phone number. That’s a recipe for disaster as relates to conversion. Really think about the mobile experience. It’s much more important than the desktop experience for your plumbing hpac or home Service website. The other thing you want to do is want to make sure we leverage chat. Like especially a two way text message chat people get to your site, they have a fill out a form they can pick up the phone to call we want to give them the opportunity to also to do a quick chat on SMS to answer some questions to find out when you’re available and to potentially book in. There is a major shift that’s happened from people wanting to pick up the phone and call to starting a two way message process right says what if we can’t staff the live chat lots of options right you could you could hire a third party company that that could man the chat for you. There’s there’s a number of services like home service chat now Ruby, Apex chat lots of good options for that. My preferred option would be to put a two way text message that is going through SMS. That way, they can chat with you and have to be chatting on their cell phone instead of the website itself. That way you don’t lose them. And we’ve got a tool we use that we built called conversion amp, which would give you the ability to put this on your phone. And when somebody starts to chat with you, you get a little pop up and you can engage right back. And you can actually automate some of the communication, some of the initial things we know they’re going to ask right out of the gates. So we want to make sure we leverage chat on the site, I’ll be talking a little bit more about conversion app, as we go. We want to give them the opportunity to book online. And we want to make sure that the website loads extremely quickly, right, this is more important than ever, like if your website has any type of load speed issues, that’s going to bring you down significantly. And then number 12, was we want to make sure we’re engaging via SMS phone and marketing automation. Don’t Don’t sleep on those, those three items. So I’m sorry to show so many bullets, but I wanted to kind of paint the picture and I will pull up some some real examples. So let’s look at Valley plumbing. This is a company we work with in Salt Lake City, Utah, they they’re like the West Jordan Salt Lake area. And you’ll see a theme in these websites, I’m going to show you not just the site, but like how well it converts. And what the conversion metrics are, is some of the reasons these websites convert so well is, a lot of times we’re using real authentic images, pictures of their real trucks, pictures of their team, you can see they’re professionally branded, you can see you know, it’s very vibrant and professional and lively, simple thing like it, but it really has an impact, we get the phone number in the top right hand corner, we got the opportunity to schedule the request a quote, we’ve got the ability to book right in to pick the time, we can start a chat right down here if we want to. So without even having to scroll up or down, we’re giving them a lot of different mechanisms to move to the next step, right, if they may not need to read paragraphs of text to decide that they want to do business without phone just based on the above the fold experienced now, for the more technical customer, you know, that maybe likes to be more logical and inclined, then yes, we need to have content, right, that’s, you know, we’re going to educate you, we’re not going to leave a mess, we’ve got experienced team that’s going to make sure they do it right. And then it kind of goes into showing the reviews and the social proof. And they can read all kinds of reviews about this company, like literally 1000s of reviews, video of the you know, one of the key stakeholders in the business explaining why people choose them versus the competition, what you can expect if you do business, a special offer, right? I talked about all of these components. So if we there, they’re standing out as I walk through this with you

the credibility symbols that that kind of show that they’re legitimate solid company, the recency of new content being rolled out, you know, visuals of the area that they serve kind of answering that question, you know, can you serve me to serve my service area, I don’t want to go too deep, but you kind of get the concept here. And then you can’t see the exact mobile experience in this way. But you’ll see the website fits really nicely, there’s a button that they can click to call right in. We don’t try to create the content because we want to make sure we give that mobile browser everything they need to make a buying decision. But we make sure that all of the key buttons that they probably want to get to you maybe see the coupons, read the reviews, or just call their office is right there within the mobile experience. And you’ll see if we run this through a site speed test, it loads extremely, extremely quickly. So the metrics here, right 510 leads on a $9,500 investment for an average of like $18.81 on 330 from organic 115 via paper quick 61 from Google Maps, 510 leads, this is a month like on a monthly basis. loi, what I want you to see is the conversion rate. So we talked about like the average being somewhere between 10 and five and 10% visitor to call her in their case, because we’re tracking all the traffic from analytics, and then we’re tracking the calls through a call tracking platform, we can see on 3300 3017 3317 sessions, they converted about 35% excuse me 35% of visitors to collars. So that’s the kind of consistent conversion rate you can get you when you optimize your website in this way. I’m not going to spend as much time on this example. But I do want you to see meridian. Another example. This is not a drain plumbing company because a lot of you guys do plumbing hva remodeling, up. So this is a, you know, full service plumbing HVDC remodeling kind of electrical company, based in East Lansing, Michigan. And you can see again, kind of this this, this theme of authenticity, they can see the the owner of the company greet them. Welcome to the website, you know the professionalism of the trucks and kind of what they’ve got going on within the operation. Like the key bullets on why somebody should choose them, they’re always ready trusted tax professional service, phone number in the top right hand corner, right, you get the you get the picture, really nice, easy mobile experience, very fast loading site. And if we look at the metrics on this, so $6,866 investment 677 leads, average cost per lead about $11 across the the spectrum of services 32%, visitor to color ratio, show one more example. So this is Nick’s go plumbing. They’re a full service company based in Mason, Ohio, can see 38%. So when I throw these numbers out, I’m not throwing you hypotheticals, it’s like you can absolutely optimize your website to the 30% or greater level. By doing this, the fundamental things that we’re talking about here, I think what a lot of people miss, where they don’t want to do the extra work, they want to, like, get a template and throw some content up. But the extra work of having pictures of your trucks, pictures of your team, video of you talking to the camera and explaining why somebody should choose you versus the competition, really thinking about the user experience can have a huge impact on conversion rate. So this is a Nick’s go rig the pictures of Jeff himself, right? We’ve got a video of him walking into the site, we’ve got prominence of the online reviews, we get the service form. And really all of the key elements that we talked about, and of course, being mobile optimized.

So in our workbook, in our checklist here, and hopefully you guys have this open, I just want you to expend a minute, I’m gonna give you guys two minutes right now, pull up your website and another tab and look at it right, are these fundamentals in place? Or do we have the folder in the right hand corner? Are we leveraging pictures, videos authenticity of the real team? Is there a compelling call to action after each block of text? Are we giving the customers the ability to engage via chat or to a text? Is the website mobile optimized with an easy click to call? And is it fast loading. So as I’m talking, I’m giving you the opportunity to pull up your website and kind of look at this. Again, just hearing me talk about it for the next hour isn’t going to do much. But if you spend some time looking at your current setup, it should send some light on opportunities. Anybody want to volunteer their website and have me pull it up? And kind of use it through the checklist process?

JOHN says Sure, okay, drop the drop the link.

Okay, so while we’re doing this, you can choose to watch me. Or you can choose to say, I’m going to work on my stuff, which is either one is a great option. So don’t feel like you need to stick with this port. But I’m going to pull up my mark here. Let’s take a look. And just think about that checklist of items that I just said, first thing that stands out, phone number in the top right hand corner isn’t there. So if I’m a customer, I find myself scrolling through, I got to go down here to find the number to dial right as opposed to just finding it up here in the top right hand corner. It does appear that it’s Yep, on mobile, it’s there. And I’m sure there’s an easy click to call. So looks like this is pretty well mobile optimized. Um, I like the fact that there’s trucks but it doesn’t feel like authentic right, I would like to see a picture, you know, of the owners of the team of what’s going on in the operation here instead. Look, I like the rotating reviews. Let’s see. We’ve talking to some sizzle buttons right up front pricing, professional technicians 24 hour service, we do have the ability to engage via two way text message which is great. Hopefully we’re leveraging some automation on that front. I think this is good. I think there’s definitely some room for improvement as we look at it from a checklist perspective. Um, definitely, you know, some some room for improvement, but not not terrible. I probably give it a b a c plus or a B, right. And if We’re looking at it from the checklists perspective, you know, following on the top right hand corner now, let’s probably suddenly want to do authentic images. No, there’s like a picture of some structs. But people resonate with real people’s faces smiling teams. Right? So that’s probably something to improve on compelling call to action after each block of text. Let’s see. If you have any questions. I mean, I think your call to action here could be a little bit stronger.

Um,

yes, we have the option to call with text check. website is mobile friendly? Yes, it does appear to be loading fast that you want to double check. It didn’t seem like I had any load speed issues on it. But definitely something to run through gt metrics are one of these sites. So if we go to, I’m not going to do this now, guys. And hopefully you’re looking at your slides as we do this. gt metrics. com. This is a free tool. I just kind of run this in the background. It’s just something that is important from an SEO perspective, as well. So you’re you’re you’re working independently time is up. Any takeaways just in chat? What did you take away in terms of like what you can do or what you might need to do within your within your website to improve conversion? Love to hear for either hear from a couple you guys muted or if you want, just put it in the put into the chat there? What was the question again, Josh, what were the takeaways? And what were some of the things you recognize that you might need to do on your site?

For me phone number in the top right hand corner, phone number

in the top right hand corner. All right,

leveraging videos. Fantastic advice. I love that, like on each of the service pages, that’s a great idea.

Yeah.

Awesome. Fresh tech says graphics. Okay, cool. Awesome. So let’s say you’re only going to get as much out of this as you put in, right. So ideally, you’re looking at this and you’re finding opportunities for improvement. Um, if not, you definitely won’t get the full outcome of what we’re trying to do here. So that’s the first, right, we want to make sure the website is built to convert that it stands out and it’s distinctive in the marketplace. The next thing is, we want to make sure that it’s coming up in in search, right. And my priority, if I look at it from a priority, you’ve got show up in church, yeah, local service ads, you’ve got pay per click, and you’ve got organic. For me, when I say does it come up with search site? Is it coming up in the non paid listings is just showing up on Google Maps? And the question a lot of people ask when we get to this doesn’t even matter, right? That local service ads is the top now there’s more pain than ever, we’re getting listings of moves so far down the page, does anybody even click the organic listings anymore. And I can tell you based on our metrics, and we track this very closely for our clients, 71% of your potential customers on desktop and mobile 71%, go to the Google Map and new organic listings, and 67% of the clicks and leads go to the ones in the top five results. So yeah, it absolutely still matters. I showed you guys, the meridian company, on their website, if you run any number of keywords in around that East Lansing market, plumber, plumbing, drain cleaning, Water Heater Repair, ac repair, etc, they have a very strong position in that in that market. And we can see here like 417 leads on an $8,000 spend an average of $90.32 per lead, which is great for the different services that they offer. Really, what I want you to see is 95% of those leads came from organic like that’s where people that clicked on a non paid listing, landed on the page and call and we split test our tracking so that we can track how much came from paid how much came from organic, and 173 came directly from Google Maps. So that’s almost 65% of their leads that came in via the internet directly from SEO. So I say that to really hammer this this illustration that yes, that’s your still matters showing up in the non paid Google Map listing the non paid organic listing for a lot of different keywords can have a huge impact on the number of leads that you get and the average cost that you’re going to need to invest on a per lead basis. So SEO really boils down to like what are the different keywords your customers are typing when they need your services?

And

are you showing up and how can we get you to show up at the top for those different keywords and it’s not just you know, your city plumber and your city plumbing it’s not just your city AC repair your city air conditioning, you know there’s there’s a lot of different keyword permutations that somebody You might type in. And so I’ve got this for you guys, it’s a list of the most commonly searched plumbing keywords and a list of the most commonly searched hpac keywords. Christian, if you could drop this in as a point of reference, really, what you want to do is we use a geo concatenation tool that would put, you know, let’s say Orlando, and then plumber, Orlando, plumbing Orlando plumbers, Orlando water heater, repair Orlando bathroom waddling around oak center, etc, etc. And then you typically want to choose your top 10 cities that you work in. So in the case of shamrock, they’ve got Orlando, and then they’ve got kissing me and they’d get, you know, all of those surrounding cities, you’d want to combine probably your top services, not all of them, but like plumber, plumbing plumbers with each of those cities. So you’re usually going to have a pool of 150 to 200 keywords that are really important and relevant, that you want to optimize your website for the Christian is dropped those links in for you. Something will do for you guys, as a complimentary service. If you’re interested, what we’ll do, because I found that doing this webinar now, for the last 10 years, it can get a little bit complicated. So what we’re willing to do for you is, if you schedule in a time and Chris, you got to put your link to schedule in your schedule at a time, what we’ll do is, we’ll take this list, we’ll take the cities that you’re in, and the main, you know, the main market that you’re in, we’ll use our tool to combine it will give you that list of 100 most important keywords in your service area. And then we’ll run it through a ranking analyzer that shows where you rank right now, on Google and on Bing for those keywords. Very valuable resource to know, are we ranking for everything? Are we not ranking for everything? Are there certain keywords that we could do much better for? So that’s complimentary. I’m sure that you know, there’s value on our end in terms of time and in the investment in the tools that we use to do it. But I think it’s a good resource you’ve invested the time to be here on this webinar. So if you go to plumber SEO, dotnet slash schedule, that’ll be something we do free completely free of charge as part of this, this process. Give me a yes. If that sounds like a good, a good option and a good offer that would be beneficial. Dennis has given me a thumbs up sweet. Fantastic, okay. So that would give you a good sense of where you’re at and where there’s room for improvement.

So what do we have to do to make sure we actually rank for all of those different keywords, there’s two elements, there’s what we do on the website itself. And then it’s what we do off the website. So there’s on page optimization and off page optimization on the site, we want to make sure we’ve got a good user experience, right? It’s not written for the search engines, but it’s written for a human being your customer to read through and be like, Okay, this is a cool company, I want to hire them. We want to leverage multimedia talked about this for conversion, like having videos and pictures, because it’s going to help with conversion, what we find is it also helps with SEO, because if there’s good imagery, and there’s good video, they stay on the page longer. And that passes signals back to Google, hey, based search, they got to this page and they stuck around, it must be a good must be a good site. We want pages for each of our services. We want to think strategically, what do we do and have pages on our website for each because they give us a placeholder to show up in the search engine for all of our different services. pages for the main cities that we work in, I find most plumbing hpac home service companies serve between a 20 and 50 mile radius, usually there’s at least 10 to 30 sub cities outside of the main city. And so we want to have pages for each of those cities combined with the services that we offer. So we can show up in those surrounding towns has to be unique content, right, don’t just copy and paste the same page every single time and just change the city, you’ll have to write something different and unique. Ideally, something talked a little bit about that part of town, something talking a little bit about your services combined so that it’s unique content that can be really relevant. And then we use a tool called nearby now, which basically, every time you do a service call, it captures the geolocation of that service call, you know, it passes some of the details about the job that you just did in that area, and through a shortcode will pass that information to that page on the site. So it helps to like create dynamic content that’s automatically being published to those city pages, which can really help them get ranked over the long run. Again, unique content on every page. We want our keyword that we’re optimizing that page for in the title tag in the h1 tag, I’m going to show you guys what I mean here but like these are the fundamentals we want to meta description that’s not keyword stuffing, because Google doesn’t even really look at the meta description for ranking but that sells Click almost like like you would with a pay per click ad like sell the one why they’re going to click on you in that meta description. We want the name, address phone number of our company in the footer, we want to be blogging on an ongoing basis, but also blogging and syndicating the content. So we can get lots of links, and ranking factors and ranking signals pointed back to our site. And again, it’s super important for conversion, it’s also super important for SEO, because we want to focus on Page Speed, it has to be super fast on on desktop, and mobile. So let’s look at a live example of this. Oops, we looked at at Valley plumbing from a formal conversion perspective, what I want to do now is just kind of look at it from a, an SEO perspective. So let’s go to Google real quick, I’m going to type in, oh, by the way, Hi Mark, a very fast loading speed. So that’s not a concern. on your end. Let’s type in West Jordan, plumber, Valley kind of air in West Jordan, they’re in Sandy, they serve the greater Salt Lake City area. You can see there, they’re active with both locations on local service ads. They’ve got the number one organic listing and the number one Google Map listing with 1207 Google reviews. So I said, making sure we’ve got our keywords in the title tag, the h1 tag, the meta description. So we’ve got Salt Lake City plumber, we’ve got Salt Lake City up here in the title tag pages for all the services, right? They do drain stuff, right. So we’ve got pages for all of these, like main sewer drain trenchless sewer repair, right, we want pages for each of the different services that we provide, and unique content on there that talks about that service that makes it really, really relevant. And we’ve been plummeting, we’ve got faucet repaired, garbage disposals water heater, so like this is going to be Water Heater Installation and service, Salt Lake City, right Salt Lake City Water Heater Installation repair videos, we’ll find out we we did a lot of videos for each of their different services. And then special offers, and then unique content for those services. So pages for each of the services. But then we also want pages for each of the cities. And they serve a really, really wide area. But you know, just at random, let’s say don’t even know what like let’s go to the West Jordan Page. So West Jordan plumber, water heater and drink links, we’re talking about all three of the main services.

Unique contents, this is different from one city page to the next. And then this is the nearby now that I was talking about. What we do in their case and really has made an impact is the way nearby now was initially engineered was you would have your technicians install the app, they would go into the field and every time they get to a house, they would check in and they would type the description. Can anybody guess? What the bottleneck was there? Yeah, the technicians didn’t want to check in and they wouldn’t type their description and it didn’t happen very often. I’m sure a lot of you guys would face the same challenge in your in your businesses. So they they’re they’re really heavy users of service Titan, which is a great platform, we can do the same thing with service Titan field edge or house call Pro. And so now what happens is when they close out the job in service Titan, it automatically captures the location where the job happened, and the job and the job notes because they’re already doing that inside service Titan. And so now every time a job gets done, because we’ve got the shortcode set up and we’ve got nearby now piping in you can see 16 hours ago here in West Jordan, they cleaned out and an old rod right and in 17 hours ago, they removed the water heater installed the new one and so this new content is flowing into these pages on the site and it’s constantly being updated which makes this page more relevant than the other pages on the internet that are trying to rank for these surrounding cities and surrounding towns. I don’t want to go to detail but I mean ideally This is connecting some dots give me a one if this is making sense like if you’re still with me and and this is making sense Alright, getting some ones good good good. So there’s an example again you know lots of quality leads via via their site. Very affordable cost per lead. I’m not going to go into the details because we only have so much time but another client we work with just dominates in their market sparks Nevada. We type in sparks a lot of plumber they you know they weren’t for plumber plumbing Drain Cleaning Water Heater Repair Water Heater Installation and get and they get great results. So the question is Is your A website properly optimized. And I’m going to show a very basic visual for this because I showed you the live. But really what we want is our keyword up in the title tag, which is what’s up here. We want our keywords here in the h1, we want great, unique content throughout the site. We want pages for each of the services. So the Emergency Plumbing, drain cleaning, burst pipe repair hydrogenic pages for that stuff. We want pages for each of the different cities that we operate in. So Alexandria Falls Church, McLean, right, think about the cities you operate in. And then we want to make sure each of those have that same on page optimization with that city in the title, that city in the h1, unique content across the board. So I want to give you guys a second, I’m looking at your checklist, look at your at your website. And you know, just while this is fresh in your mind, do we have pages for each of the cities? Do we have pages for each of the services? Do we have our keyword in the title in the h1? Are we using the city that we’re targeting on our home page? Or is it just kind of generic? So I’m going to give you guys two minutes right now pull up your website kind of run through this lens. And if anybody wants to volunteer there’s um while you know while you guys are doing your homework, so to speak, I’d be glad to pull that up and walk through it with you. If you want to volunteer yours put the link in the chat otherwise I’ll just let you guys work independently erst absolutely all right put the link to your site please.

Earnest earnest Craig okay. AKA service hv AC. Let’s let’s see what we got here.

I didn’t do the right one. Hold on.

Okay, and K, service heating and cooling.

To see where we’re based. We’re in Alpharetta, Georgia. So let’s do

first bold Alpharetta Raven. Okay, so when we look in Alpharetta, we’ve got good good old boys, roto rooter and how come coming up in maps? I don’t see nk there. And I don’t see a K. On the homepage, right. I’ll be glad to run this through a ranking like tool for any of you guys. So you can really see where where you’re ranking and where you’re not. So that being the case, let’s look at why right. We didn’t come up in Alpharetta, which is I guess outside of think outside of the I typed in plumber, you’re not a plumber. That’s why let’s do AC repair. Alright, so we’ve got standard heating and air standard Heating and Air we’ve got temperature Pro, and we’ve got North Point heating and cooling. Reliable cool re home advisor Alright, so you’re not coming up there and I apologize it first I used I used the plumbing keyword which obviously you wouldn’t come up for. I don’t see you coming up. Right so and Kate I think you’re like what you’re doing you’re leading here and your title tag with aim key service heating and cooling, which is your company name and not your service and then Alpharetta, Georgia at the end definitely rethink the title tag on the site itself. Um, I hv AC expert enough, right. Okay, so you’ve got that. There. They were on the eighth. They were eighth on the first page. Okay, Frank, thanks for catching that. Um, let’s see encase problem member Ed content. I mean, there’s some work to do on this site from a conversion perspective. Um, let’s see. Most well, so you got some of the different surrounding cities and surrounding towns, got some reviews. Let’s see how we’re doing with services. We have pages for each of the services. So let’s look at heating, heating and cooling service Alpharetta, very similar to what’s on the homepage. Do you want to kind of make it a little bit more varied. Looks like we did have a video of some sort made Ernest. He repairs, furnace repairs, service areas, it looks like you do have pages for each of the different cities that you operate in. Services, Middleton, Georgia. See. So I mean, a lot of the basic fundamentals here I would need to look and see whether this is unique on each of these cities or whether it’s the same, you might want to consider using a tool like nearby now to pass geo modified content.

Excellent.

Yeah. The other thing Chris, you just brought up, you’re using hva see a lot, which is more of an industry specific term like, as an HB AC contractor, you know what that is, but your customer looks at you as a heating contractor or an AC company. And we find very rarely does someone actually look for hv AC, in search as a as a homeowner looking for your services. So that’s something to think about in terms of how you’re being optimized. First, hopefully, that’s helpful. Hopefully, that’s helpful for the rest of you guys, as you’re looking at your website. These are the things right, we want pages for each of the same services pages for each of the cities, we do want to run this through some type of site speed optimization process, like is it loading quickly. But that’s only like half the battle is actually less than half the battle, like 20% of it is let’s get the on page factors, right? Let’s make sure we get pages for all that stuff, which we get unique content. And then we’re passing Google the information about what we do. The off page factors really are the biggest driver, which is making sure we’ve got the claimed and optimized my Google My Business listing, making sure we’ve got lots of like citations for our company, where we’re listed in a lot of different places where their name, address phone number, making sure we’ve got lots of reviews from our real customers and real service area using tools like nearby now and birdeye, review, bus, whatever you want to use pulse em on building links, and this is where a lot of people miss building the links from other websites back to our homepage, back to our service page back to our city pages, not tons of volume, but relevant quality links. And then strategic content syndication is something we’re big on not just putting out a blog, but putting out a blog and then getting it picked up as a as a news release, that then brings lots of links and lots of signals back to the various pages on the site, which really move it up in search, as you’ve seen in the results. So the real question here is, who on your team is proactively thinking about new content that’s being rolled out new links that are being brought in to the website, which is ultimately going to be the determining factor and whether you rank well organically, or you just wind up somewhere on the third fourth page. And I like I said, the top six result, get the lion’s share of the clicks and the leads. And so we want to make sure that we have somebody that’s proactively building the authority, building the links, and building the the the authority back to your company. So I kind of created this little checklist for you, I do have an SEO checklist that you guys can access to kind of run your website through. But like, these are the fundamentals that we’ve covered here on today’s on today’s session as it relates to the SEO strategy. So I want I want you guys now like on your checklist, looking at this whole SEO side of the equation, you know, what can you check mark? Yep, I’ve got that. And where’s the opportunity, right, don’t miss finding the opportunity, because the opportunity is what’s going to make the difference between where you’re at and where you could be like really solving problems, putting the things in place, building the authority, building the pages, building the content, as needed. So I’m going to give you guys a little blank space here to kind of update this portion of the checklist. And while you’re doing that, I’d love to hear like what were some of your takeaways on this little section here about SEO? And like how you can get yourself ranked better in the search engines. One or two takeaways either in chat or unmute, it would be awesome. Me for me is Brian, Brian, thank you for interacting with me it makes it makes it so I’m not like staring in a dead screen with the other 30 or so of us on here. Rather than, for me,

I’m developing a system for driving online reviews. I think he’s important. And I really love that whole heat map idea automation, like it’s his workers go around to different locations, and integrating into the city pages that that’s brilliant. I think I mean, that’s a really kind of puts content development on autopilot and leverages your staff, just normal activities to build content on your website.

100%. Thank you perfect takeaways that was that was awesome. Hopefully, the rest of you guys had good takeaways that you’re going to go back and implement. The next item on our on our list here is is getting ranked on the Google Map. So most of what we looked at in that last section was around organically. How do we rank in that area below the map for the most important keywords and SEO and Google Map optimization kind of go hand in hand, but there’s a very separate strategy that goes into making sure you’re ranking in the map listings. And, you know, you might wonder that doesn’t even matter. Yes, almost 40% of all the clicks and calls goes directly through the Google Maps. So yes, it matters. On the example of this. We talked about shamrock plumbing at the beginning here. Their latest report 819 leads generated via the internet fork and five of those came from Google Maps. Right? That’s for people typing in Orlando plumber Orlando, drain cleaning, Atlanta Water Heater Repair, seeing him at the top of the results and clicking right in from their mobile phone. That’s mobile quick, the calls straight from Google Maps 405. It’s a big part of the results that they generate. Another example here Next go plumbing dominant in their market. In Mason, Ohio. This this I actually did back in 2019, this screenshot 183 via Google Maps. And I showed the old one because some people have said, Well, I’m sure that the numbers have changed, right with local service ads at the top. And you know, the the way the search engine has changed, I’m sure the volume of leads you can get from the map is down. Well, this was last year, when I did it 196 leads on click to call through Google Maps. As we were sitting here, before this webinar ran an updated report, you can see 591 leads on a 2014 $66 spend 352 via Google Maps, they’re their lead, like volume on maps has done nothing but increase right. So don’t think that Google Maps is no longer relevant or less relevant than it was at some point in the past. So what we found three, three, a three step process for getting ranked on the Google Maps. First, we want to make sure we claim an optimizer Google My Business listing. Second, we want to get lots of citations and references of our company’s name, address phone number across the web. Third, we need to get real reviews from real customers in the true service area. And we’ve got a dial in on page SEO. So using the things we talked about in the previous section, getting our name, address phone number in the footer on all of the pages of the site, and having pages read to the cities, we operate in getting our city you know, in the title tag, all of that plays into getting ranked Well, on Google Maps. I don’t want to spend hours on this. I’ve got an hour and a half long session just on Google Maps. But if we were to look at this from a checklist perspective, this is what I want you to look at. This is what I want you to think about. What have you claimed to verify your Google My Business? Do you have a login, I’d like you to have a login even if you use another company. Even if you subcontract this, you should be able to log into Google My Business either as an admin or the owner and look at like whether they’ve properly optimized it. Do you have yourself listed in all the main online directories through data aggregators like axiom and info USA, locally? Like there’s these aggregators that will push you out to hundreds of online sites? With consistency of your name, address, phone number? How many reviews do you have? Like one of the things you can do to see like, Where’s the gap? How am I doing in Google Maps is to search yourself or search Orlando plumber, and look how many reviews you have? And then look how many reviews? The people above you have? Right? It’s Do you have enough reviews? If you’ve got five reviews, and the person in the number one spots got 1912? You’ve got a long ways to go write reviews plays a big part in this. So proactively, like do you have a strategy for getting reviews on a on a daily, weekly basis, are you I’d like to see you be getting at least 10 to 20% of your service calls. result in a in an online review. And we’re actually leveraging automation here is also a very good idea just like nearby Now, if you’re using housecall Pro, if you’re using

service Titan or field edge, you can set it up where every time you close a job, a review requests automatically goes out to the customer, email, text message. Hey, it was so great. You know, certainly you today, would you take a minute to write a review, they can click right there, pull up Google Maps and write a review for you. Or to that? Well, you definitely would want to think about that. Um, and then the other thing is on Google My Business, outside of claiming it, optimizing it being in the city that you’re trying to rank. You want to be posting to Google posts, and you want to be like responding to questions you want to be responding to reviews, those things can play a pretty strong factor in your in your ranking on Google Maps. JOHN says this nearby now work for frozen for, for us frozen people in Canada. Um, yeah, I don’t see why not. Yeah. Christian. I think we have clients using it in Canada, right. I’m pretty sure yes. Okay. So take a second. Look at that checklist. What do you need to do on Google Maps? Maybe it’s just get access to your listing. Maybe it’s be more active with your online reviews. Maybe it’s figuring out who the top three in your city are and figuring out how many reviews they have versus how many you have. Maybe it’s building up more citations and references of your company name, address and phone number, there should be something you can absolutely take away to optimize better for Google Maps. The next question, as we kind of go down this list, now, we’ve optimized your website for conversion, we’ve optimized your website for search to make sure showing up on maps or showing up organically, we thought about what we needed to do on that front. The next is we want to think about putting some extra lead generation through paid search. And I like to think of it as you know, your foundation is your website is your organic is your Google Maps. And once that’s strong, then it’s time to look at adding paid components to your strategy. Now if we think about it as a as a hierarchy, right, organic SEO is the base, that’s your website. And yesterday, we talked about this point, with tapping into social media and building up your your relationship with your customers, then it’s being sure that you’re in the paid online directories with like at least a free listing, like on an Angie, maybe on, you know, buying some homeadvisor leads, and then at the top of the triangle is pay per click and getting aggressive with Google ads and Google Local Service ads, I find a lot of plumbing HVC, home service companies have this triangle inverted, they’re spending a ton of money on pay per click, and very little effort on SEO on organic. And then he’s like, man, I don’t understand, like where I’m like, I can hardly break even here. Because your highest quality, lowest cost leads are always going to be organic leads. So you know, you want to optimize for both. But if you’re putting the cart before the horse, you might spend a ton of money and get very little return. Versus once you’re very well optimized, organically, you got lots of reviews, you’ve got a great website, when someone looks you up, they’re like, wow, this is a great company will improve the conversion of your pay per click Make it more cost effective, and be a better blended result for you. So some of the paid advertising opportunities, right, it will be Google ads, local service ads, and G Now, why p.com yelp.com looking at paying to be in some of those, some of those sites, tapping into like services like thumbtack, homeadvisor, let’s look at the lower threshold of quality. But if you need leads, like all of that stuff can can play to generate lead flow and volume for your company. So the question I always get when it comes to like, especially Google Ads is Can it really drive an ROI because so many of you guys have spent money on this and see very, very little return on your investment. I just want to show an example here. This is a company we’re work with called cardanol. And they’re a full service hpac company.

And I just want to show you, overall internet marketing 12k. So that’s management fee to us. That’s SEO that’s paid search right? on that they generate 936 leads a month. So $12.82 a month for HVDC is really very good. But what you can see is 224 leads directly from from Google Maps, right? And if we break that down their average cost per lead from organic I mean from paid, which is 9000 bucks a month is about $40 per lead, again, very, very affordable and very scalable. The great thing about paid search is we can we can ratchet it up and say okay, this average cost per lead will make sense, let’s increase the budget. Let’s keep increasing the budget. Because we know that we can convert that into profitable revenue on the on the back end. So if we just look at the metrics here, 224 leads from Pay Per Click about a 40% conversion rate from lead to book job, I’m just using that as an average metric would be 59 book jobs, average ticket 750 in their market on HVC stuff. So that’s 89 jobs at 750 would be 67,200. projected ROI is an eight time return on investment.

Here’s a plumbing example. Falcon plumbing is a company we’re working with here in Miami, Florida. For 40 leads on a $6,282 spend average of $14 per lead. You can see though the lion’s share is coming in this case from from PPC 237 from paid search. So on it’s on a $3,842 spend. So about $16 per lead. So if you do the math 237 leads at a 40% conversion rate is 94 book jobs, average ticket 550 94 jobs at 550 51,000. That’s a 13 time return on investment. So I can share lots and lots of examples, but I just want to show enough that you’re like, Okay, yes, I believe pay per click, you know should be part of my strategy can absolutely have an impact. The key with real why most Pay Per Click campaigns fail is because whoever it is that’s running, it doesn’t understand the complexity of plumbing hpac Home Services, they tend to kind of lump everything. And they just think of plumbers, a plumber, and AC company as an AC company, when in reality, there’s lots of nuance to the services that you guys provide. And so it fails, because they set up one ad group for all the services, they don’t write specific text ads differential for Drain Cleaning, versus plumbing versus sump pump repair, it’s all just lumped together. And so of course, the relevancy of the keyword to the text ad to the landing page doesn’t really work. And usually the landing page has no compelling call to action. And so this is kind of the recipe for failure with pay per click campaigns, which is just driving all of your keywords all in different things, people type into your homepage, with a very generic text ad, very easy to spend 1000s 10s of $1,000 a month without really getting a great conversion rate. Bobby’s asking for an example of a landing page. Yes, I have it on hang with me till the end, because we’re already getting to like a three, three hours 15 minute mark, and an hour and 15 minutes in at the end. I’ll come back to that. If you remind me, okay. So if you run your paperclip campaigns correctly, you can absolutely get a solid, tangible return on investment, you have a much skeller more scalable model. The other question you really want to think about when it relates to paid is are you tapping into local service acts, right, this is big across the United States Armed Services now sits right at the top, it’s also referred to as Google guaranteed. There’s a process to it. But you absolutely should be trying your best to be in local service ads in your market, the way it works, is you’ve got to complete the local service ads application, they’re going to run background checks on you and your technicians. If you’re approved, you’ll be able to pay on a per lead basis between 20 and $30 per lead in most markets, 20 and 25 and $45, depending upon the market and the service. What we’re hearing from our clients is we match this very closely for our clients. Seo Pay Per Click social media, the whole nine yards is at this moment, the average cost per lead on local service ads is less than what you would spend through traditional Google ads, the quality of the lead is much higher than homeadvisor. This isn’t your average pay per lead situation like they’re literally calling your company directly. They’re not going to like a blind form and going out to six different contractors, you’re still going to get some trash offers, and you need to make sure you’re on top of the ball answering the phone following up. But every single client we have that runs a decent operation is getting a very good return on investment from local service ads. So you should absolutely jump in. I think it’s you know, international now, but it’s definitely all over the United States. And you should absolutely be in on local service ads.

We can help you get set up if this is something you’re looking forward, you can go straight to Google Local Service ads, sign up, complete your background checks, put the tracking in place, so you can gauge make sure that it’s got a tangible return on investment for you. And then be be sure that you’re leveraging the platform to the fullest. Which means if for those of you using local service ads, and you’re wondering why you maybe you’re not in a three rotation anymore, or you were in and you kind of pop in and out a couple of factors go into your ranking on local service ads outside of just your you’re spending your budget, obviously optimizing it for the service areas for the services that you provide. But the most important thing is your responsiveness. So when you answer the phone, going back into the platform, marking the outcomes of your of your opportunities that were tracked through local services, the companies that are marking the outcomes and saying which one got booked, which didn’t get booked, and are getting reviews on the back end of that are the ones who are going to win long term local services. So play the game while it’s making return on investment. Be sure to play the game well, right. be responsive be on top of the ball, and you can really really do well with local services. So here I mean, as it relates to to paid marketing. I’d like your run through this this list, right? Are you tapping into local service ads? Do you have the budget matched right? To me if I can get a lower cost per click and a lower cost per lead from local services than pay per click, I would want to open my local service budget to the max right 100 grand if I had to write there’s not 100 grand worth of leads in most markets, but open it up as wide as you can possibly afford. Because you’re not going to spend the full amount and then You cycle the rest of it towards, let’s say, Google pay per click and things like that. Are you retargeting, right? We know that I didn’t talk about this on this session, but we know that people get to get to your site and don’t convert. We want to make sure we’re putting banner ads in front of those people following them around the internet, getting them back into the fold getting them converted. Are you running Google ads? Are you just strategically breaking down the ads, the text ads, the landing pages? Do you have conversion tracking in place? You know which keyword and which campaign drove the conversion? Are you running Facebook ads, the prospects in your in your area? Do you have paid listings on anti Yelp wipey City search? And are you tapped into pay per lead services like homeadvisor, a local plumber thumbtack right now thumbtack seems to be you know, I’m not a big fan of pay per lead services, but that of all of them. thumbtack seems to be a quality source on the hpac. Side expecially. So what are the opportunities for you here on paid ads? And we’d love to hear some of your key insights, any key insights and takeaways as relates to the paid ad side of things?

If not, be sure that you’re marking down your notes in the

question. Are the local service ads managed through the Google Ads platform?

Yes, yeah. Okay. Yep. So there’s a link there in the presentation. If you need the link to register, let me know. But I sign yourself up, go through the background process. And it’s, um, it’s not, it’s relatively easy, but you want to make sure you do it right. I’ve got an hour and a half long training that walks you through how to optimize your local service ads campaigns.

Also in your list of them. The slide just talks about are you taking advantage of paid online marketing are those are those items kind of an order of importance, like starting off with Google local searches and Google ads and then working down to thumbtack is that kind of like

yeah, that’s why thumbtack is way down at the bottom. And things like that. However, you know, if, if you’re an established company doing millions of dollars per year, this is the order if your startup plumbing company with virtually no leads and nothing going on, you start with homeadvisor and thumbtack just to start to get some leads. And to build your authority you make sure you Johnny on the spot on every single one of your leads, you get reviews from almost every customer, you build up your authority you invest in your organic, so depending upon your size, this is more stacked for an established company down. If you’re if you’re less established, you might start down there and work your way up.

Okay, so

active on social media, right? We know that more and more people are going to Facebook and Twitter and and these different social platforms. I’m not going to go long on this because we’re starting to run short on time. But to me, the power of social media is the ability to write to generate more peanut referral business, right? If you can get your real customers in your real service area to like you on Facebook to engage with your content, and you’re posting updates on the consistent basis, they’re going to remember you, they’re going to be more likely to refer you and they’re going to you’re going to build your brand in that way. Email Marketing, to me, I think, is one of the most overlooked marketing strategies for home service contractors. Most plumbing HVC, companies aren’t getting the the phone numbers and email addresses of their customers. They’re not building a database of prospects and clients. And the fact is, the cost to drop an email to your entire prospect list is very, very low. And you can use that as a reactivation strategy. You can use that as a brand strategy. And all of you guys should be should be doing this. One of the best examples of leveraging email marketing is Daniel Cordova plumbing. He grew his company from zero to over 3 million in about a 12 month span of time. And when I was asking, like what were the strategies that really had the biggest impact, so of course, the website and the SEO and all that stuff, but the big carrier was email marketing, he got very consistent with getting the names, email addresses of his customers and prospects got very consistent with pushing out a newsletter every single month, had a kind of a proactive strategy to reengage people after six months and 12 months to get them back into the fold to get back into the home. And it worked extremely well for him. And that’s one of the big proponents of his growth. This has nothing to do with that this are just his numbers here. 7000 spend $282 282 leads average of $25 per lead. Um, so the thought to drop on this point in the checklist is are you leveraging email marketing like and if not, why not like it’s just a matter of asking for the emails and dropping an email at least once a Once the customer base with useful check in type information, there’s great tools for this constant contact MailChimp AWeber, we have a tool that we’ve developed called conversion app, which does a lot of things. But the one that like a very basic thing it will do is help you develop that database of customers and prospects, so that you can send out an email blast, or you can send a text blast, so you can do database reactivation. So on your checklist here, you know, are we are we set up with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram? Are you posting to your social profiles on a consistent basis? And then are you leveraging email marketing? Are we emailing out to that customer base, that’s that’s the opportunity to think about there.

I think one of the biggest challenges facing you guys in fixing this home service industry is unconverted leads. We talked about a lot of different lead sources. Today, we talked about SEO, we talked about Google Local Service ads, we talked about Google ads, but then you’ve also got like access to thumbtack, homeadvisor. Other advertising that you might do a lot of cases getting leads, isn’t that hard, right, we can put things in place to generate more leads. The challenge is if you don’t convert the leads that you’re getting into book jobs and into revenue, and you don’t turn that one time customer into a repeat customer, your cost to acquire becomes extremely high. And so the problem is, as I’ve seen it, like 50 to 60% of inbound leads don’t convert, we listen to you guys, as calls, we’ve got hundreds of clients. Like they’re calling in to get that water heater or to replace that air conditioning system. And for whatever reason, like 50 to 60% of them say, Okay, I’ll come back later, or Okay, I’ll let you know. And they, you know, there’s no follow up after that. And something like 90% of webform. So almost all of you guys have forms on your site where someone can enter their name, their email, address the details of what they needed their phone number, to me, a webform is where the leads in a lot of cases go to die, right, they just they filled it in, and it was crickets on the other end. And when you combine these two, you’re looking at something like 70% of your leads are a complete waste of time, if not 80, or 90%. And the reason for that is we know statistically leads that don’t get followed up within 15 minutes or less, go cold, right? That homeowner is calling you, if you don’t answer, if you don’t follow up quickly, they’re going to the next guy. And if that guy answers, they’re booking in with them, and the search is over the customer is gone, right? You’ve lost that opportunity. The other thing we find is that customer needs to be followed up with five to seven times before booking, right, if you don’t have a mechanism to follow up, you’re going to be leaving money on the table. And the biggest lead conversion challenge or opportunity is the transition from phone to SMS. Your customer today, it’s completely different than your customer five years ago, your customer five years ago didn’t want to have to email you they wanted to call in and just get it taken care of your customer today in our mobile world that we’re in, if they believe they could message you get their job booked and not have to talk with you ever would absolutely take that option nine times out of 10. And what most of the home service companies we’re talking with, aren’t even they’re not even tapping into two way text messaging. And so these are the three big reasons, you’re not going to convert the way that you could the way that you should. And we’ve developed the solution right in its it’s called conversion app. It’s a marketing automation platform. And really, the solution is this. We want to leverage automation to follow up with every webform within two minutes or less. And we want to follow up automatically with a phone call. Right that connects to your office press one this lead is waiting for you. We want to follow up with an email. Hey, I saw you submitted the form, what can I help you with? And we want to follow up with a text message that says hey, this is this is Brian from Brian’s plumbing. You just submitted a form on our site. How can I help you question mark, right and start that two way conversation. clients that are leveraging automation are getting a significantly better conversion rate significantly better return on investment from all their marketing. So that’s the first part of it. We want quick via all the different channels to follow up on our leads. But we also want to automate the follow up so that we touch them at least five times and engage with them in a number of different ways. I’m not everybody’s ready to book right now. So if we can automate Email, automate automatic call automate a text message that follows up a number of times and a number of different modalities, we can catch that customer that was a little bit further down in their booking process. You know, this, we’re seeing increased conversion rates from like 30% to over 70%. Just because we were leveraging automation, and we’re leveraging the ability to follow up really, really quickly. I don’t want to go into tons of detail on this particular session, because we’re already three, you know, an hour and a half in. But I’ve got a link here where you can do a demo of conversion app. And I’m just going to drop it in here. Oops,

I think all of you guys should check this out. It’s it’s marketing automation I’ve been using for plumbing and HVAC SEO for years, and it probably a lot of you guys have experienced where I’m emailing you a lot, sending you a bunch of reminders. And this automation exists, it just hasn’t been brought to Home Services. And so we built this platform that does email that does text and doesn’t in a smart way to engage with your leads to send the reminders before the job to send the follow up review request after the job, and to kind of nurture that database of prospects. So they remember you and they go from a one time customer to a repeat buyer. So you could Yeah, you can either look at the demo on that page, or Christian gave you a play a place if you want to, like do a one to one where we walk you through exactly how it works and how it applies to your current situation. You can schedule a demo for that there. So checklist time, are you leveraging email and automation? Are you really taking advantage of this, maybe this is an opportunity, maybe you’ve got a great website, maybe you’re already ranking, maybe, you know, you’ve tapped into all the paid search opportunities. And it’s now just a matter of optimizing the the lead conversion conversation, which is where like this email marketing and marketing automation comes into play. So so when we follow up five minutes are left via phone, SMS and email Do we have to conversion campaigns that touch them five to seven times we have different modalities? Do you have a database of your customers email addresses? Are you sending a monthly email newsletter? And are you leveraging email to get online reviews and to draw customers back to your social profiles? Right, this is like fundamental stuff that can have a really big impact. Any takeaways on this before we go to the last section, which is tracking and ROI? questions or thoughts? I’m going I’m going deep here I told you this was gonna be more of an interactive style, you know, deep dive into this. Give me some feedback. Give me a one if this is useful if you feel like you’re getting value, and there’s takeaways here that you’re like, Okay, this is this is something I can I can do something with. Got 100 from Brian, thank you very much. Appreciate that. First, give me a one. Awesome, fantastic.

Okay. Hopefully, there

was some takeaways for you guys there. Um, the next one is, is tracking ROI, right? Don’t go do all of this stuff. If you can’t tangibly See, here’s what I spent, here’s how many leads are generated. Here’s what my average cost per lead is. Because if you don’t know that, it’s very easy to spend money and just, I don’t know, maybe it works. Maybe it didn’t, I can’t really tell. But if you if you know your numbers, you really can, you know, just like I showed you that example, after example, you could see, here’s what we spent, or somebody leaves we’ve got, here’s our return on investment. And you can easily say, Okay, ready to go get that extra truck, let’s increase the budget, let’s increase the spend. So things I like to see you put in place would be Google Analytics, right? So you can see visitors to the site on a keyword tracking report, like what I offered you guys earlier that updates monthly that shows you where you’re ranking for the most important keywords. Obviously, we want to have call tracking in place where we can see how many calls came from which source and hear recordings of those conversations. Ideally, you drop it onto a CRM, where you can track how many of those leads actually got booked, what was the value of those leads. And you can do that with service Titan, you can do that with conversion and lots of different tools and resources to really track the true return on your investment. So checklist of items to look at from a ROI tracking perspective. And that takes us through our entire checklist. I promised I was going to show you a model that, if followed will help you triple your sales, right? If you dial all of these things in, do you believe you could triple the sales that you generate, and that might be in the way of more organic traffic, it might be in the way of more paid traffic. It might be in the way of just converting more of the traffic you already have through converting visitors to a site where it might be in a way of converting more of the leads you get into book jobs. Just give me a yes in the chat. If you feel like if you go through this process I’ve just outlined and you implement it the way that I’ve described, you could absolutely triple the sales. A lot of work, but yes, yes, yeah, I got a couple a couple of nods here. If you’d like help with this, we’d love the opportunity to talk with you. Um, you know, we’ve covered a lot of ground, right, we looked at the big picture of the online marketing strategies, you can tap into review the key key lead generation strategies, and we develop the plan, really, which is what that checklist is, is the plan on, like, out of all of these things, what can we do next? What do we need to implement? on if you’re interested in talking with us about possibly helping you do this and actually get this implemented? Like, Brian, you said this, there’s a lot of work? Absolutely right. If you tried to do it yourself, if you tried to work with an internal team that hasn’t done it that doesn’t have any experience on a work, the easy button is, this is what we do. Right? Everything I just described to you on that checklist we’ve done, we do it an expert level, and we could potentially do it for you, I say potentially, because we only work with one company in each market. And unfortunately, or fortunately for us, we’ve got clients and most of the markets across the country. So if your markets available, we can we can potentially do this for you. Next steps. If you’d like to talk with us about potentially working together, how we can help would be to schedule we call lead flow acceleration session, during that we would run that keyword report for you. To show you where you’re ranking, we would develop the custom keyword list, we would analyze kind of the consistency of your name, address, phone number, your online reviews, your social presence, your effectiveness from a conversion perspective. And it’s complimentary, right, you will invest the time and the energy to run the reports. We’ll walk you through it. And then if it makes sense, we’ll talk to you about what we charge what our program looks like. show you some more examples. And you can decide whether it’s a fit or not. If it is a fit. Awesome, we’ll get started and we’ll hit the ground running for you. If it’s not, well thank you for the opportunity. And you can take the information and go with it wherever you see fit. So you could call us at 866-610-4647 or you can go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Christian has dropped this kindly into the chat. We would love the opportunity to talk with you either by having to call us again at 866-610-4647. We’re going to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Awesome. Well, I

hope you guys got a you know, some useful insights and some useful things that you can take away. If there’s any questions, I’d love to stick around for a couple minutes to answer them. I know there was a question about landing pages examples of landing pages Bobby, so I didn’t forget about you. If you have questions, also feel free to drop those in. What I’m going to do now, Bobby, I’ll just pull up a couple examples from Pay Per Click landing pages for you. So let’s pull up and find my paperclip presentation. I know I had an open so it should be right here. Yep. Christian, thank you. So I mean landing page wise, we tend to use a different style landing page than we do. Like the website itself, right? The website, we want to have an organic play, we want to have a branding, play paid search, we want to give a single point of decision, right, we want to drive them to a page that gives them the information they need and prompts them to, to convert. And Christy if you could throw a couple others if you could grab them for me so I don’t have to look them up. That would be awesome. Victor says Thank you, Josh. God bless you and your family. reading your book now. Awesome, man. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. This is a glad to see that you’ve got a missionary family and a solid foundation of Jesus. Yeah, absolutely. I’m very blessed. Brian says, How about this? Does having a city after the keyword make a difference to refer? Good question. Um, let me let me pull that up here after we could talk about that a little bit. So this is Point Loma, they’re a an electrical and plumbing company. This is the like an example of landing page that we use for them font on the top right hand corner in a very, very text base because it loads extremely fast ability to schedule service. And then it scrolls down. You can see it’s much simpler. It’s much cleaner. We split test all of our landing pages across hundreds and hundreds of clients. And this this page converts really, really well. Here’s an hva see company we work with champion. So we did try and brand it to the company based on their based on your color scheme based on your logo, right and we have a special incentive. Based on the service, so this was Drain Cleaning, local Drain Cleaning expert plumbing HVC, electrical $99 Drain Cleaning, special schedule service, trustworthy upfront satisfaction guaranteed, right? And nice and clean. And then one more. So this is Cardinal hpac company we work with, again, just superclean special incentive. Why choose us? So there you go. Right. There’s a couple examples of PPC landing pages that convert really well. Brian, your question was around keywords like the way you do the way that keyword lists, the city should be first or last, right? Is

it make a difference in like volume of search? Or do you just is that just a convention you guys use?

Yeah, I mean, it really depends. So if I’m going to type in Orlando plumber here, you can see shamrock comes up. I think what you’re talking about is the order of the title tag,

no, like the order of the keywords. So it’s like plumber Orlando instead.

Alright, so in the title, it’s going Orlando plumber instead of plumber, Orlando. I’ve looked at it, we’ve tested it both ways, I find that it makes very little difference. Um, but usually what we do is we’ll run will run the keyword analysis and see what like which has more search volume in a city. Most of the times it’s too low to really differentiate. But if there’s enough data to say, Los Angeles plumber has more search than plumber Los Angeles, then we would we would invert it based on that. But I find that it makes very little difference. It’s more about the off page factors at that level than the nuance of what you put first or last thought Yep.

This was a I’m gonna jump up I just have to say this was fantastic. You’re You’re like truly the expert in the field when it comes to like SEO for each page back to plumbing. I refer my clients to you know, ran an eight vacuum plumbing business myself, but I can like without question like, you know, the stuff you do in the shops you share just is is right on. You’re muted, you’re muted.

You’re muted.

Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the referrals. I appreciate the feedback. Thanks for being on here with us today. And thank you everyone for your rapt attention. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. We are here to serve and support. Go through your checklist, find your opportunities for improvement. If you’d like to chat with us go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule we’d love to love to meet. And that’s it for now. We’ll talk to you guys later.