How to WIN with Google Local Service Ads for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Services

All right, hello, and welcome. I’m super excited to have you with me today really excited about today’s topic, we’re gonna be talking all about how to win with local service ads. And if you’ve been marketing online for any period of time in your plumbing HVAC Home Service electrical company, you’ve seen the shift that’s happened over the last couple of years from, you know, it was just all about organic. And then it was all about organic and Google Maps. And you know, kind of figuring out the page strategy and the retargeting strategy. And then over the last couple of years, Google threw a monkey wrench at us and they launched local service ads. And for the early adopter that jumped on this and got into the Google guaranteed program and kind of got their profile set up got their their listing optimized, there was a lot of free money, a lot of easy money to be had just put $1 sign in the comments here. If you were able to get in early on local service ads, that kind of cash in on some of the low cost leads the volume of leads that was available before this became widely adopted by almost everybody in the market. But kind of as things have evolved, didn’t really well, as things have evolved. It’s become more of a challenge, right? It’s been harder to remain free pack, even if you’ve got a big budget thrown towards this, and sort of figure out like, how do you how do you really win? How do you make sure that you’re maximizing your lead flow and your book job flow from local service ads. And so that’s what we’re going to be talking about today. This isn’t like what local service ads is training. It’s how to win with local service ads, how to optimize your profile, how to do the work necessary to tell Google you’re the contractor that should be in the top three rotation and beginning the lion’s share of the leads. Just give me a one of the comments if that works, if this sounds like a good agenda, and a good plan for today’s session. Awesome. appreciate the comments. Appreciate the engagement, I do like to make these sessions as interactive as possible. So you talking about local service ads is really just a part of your overall digital marketing strategy like and really the accelerated growth model that we teach, and that we implement for plumbing and HVAC companies is we got to drive leads, we’ve got to maximize conversion. And then we’ve got to optimize results, we’re going to optimize the ROI, we’re going to optimize the campaigns and really double down on the things that are working best. Today’s session, we’re really going to be focusing over here on the drive leads side of the equation with a with a heavy emphasis on on like local service ads and the paid ads strategy. But if you look at your digital dominance method, row, there’s lots of things right, you gotta have a great website that’s built to convert, you got to make sure that you’re showing up organically, you got to make sure that you’re effectively leveraging paid search and you’re tapping into these pay per lead services. Gonna make sure that you’re you know, really retargeting and effectively converting the leads that you have. And so this is what we call the digital dominance method. And this is what we roll out for the plumbing HVAC home service contractors that we work with. So with that said, I just want to put the magnifying glass right now on local service ads LSA, Google guaranteed. And I’m going to ask, you know, ask you some kind of ground rules here, I’m going to ask for your attention if, if you’re really serious about getting the latest and greatest on what’s happening with local service ads, and really how you can win in this. In this marketing segment. I’m asking you turn off your cell phones, you turn off the Facebook, if you get another tab open, and let’s just give this our undivided attention. For the time being. Catherine says I refuse to go Google guaranteed, okay, well, this might be a tough session for you, because that’s the main thing that we’re gonna be talking about. Maybe I can convince you otherwise, throughout the course of today’s session. Make sure nobody applies for plumbing, HVAC Home Services. Really, it’s available in almost all the verticals. Right now. What I’m going to cover very briefly gonna talk about what local Google Local Services is talking about where it’s active. I’m going to talk about how it works. And I think that’s probably pretty important for you guys. But most importantly, I’m gonna talk about how you can jump on board if you haven’t, and what it takes to rank in the in the three right here, there’s three rotating listings at the top of the search results. And it’s not just about throwing money at it, there’s very specific things we can do to optimize the campaign that we can optimize our our uptime in the three pack, so that we can get the best results possible. And I’m really going to walk you guys through how you can maximize the output and the throughput with local service ads today. If you don’t know me, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of plumbing and each back SEO on the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. I’ve been active in marketing for plumbing HVAC home services for going on 12 years now. But I think more important than any of that staff grew. The reason you want to listen to me is at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVAC home service companies and some of the most competitive markets across the country and been able to take them from vertical obscurity to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their market, many of them seeing millions of dollars of increased revenue over the last decade as a result of really dialing in their internet marketing. strategies. And so what I share with you isn’t based on theory, it’s not based on like a blog post that I read somewhere, it’s based on real world experience, experience, excuse me with home service companies, just like yours. And so what I’m going to be sharing with you about LSA is based on, you know, optimizing, running, and really knowing the ins and the outs of these campaigns in the in the real world. And this is what we do plumbing, an extract, SEO, we’re a full service digital marketing agency working exclusively with plumbing HVAC, and electrical contractors across the country. If you’d like to talk with us about maybe how we can work together, if you’re a client on with us today, we appreciate your business. If your client is typing client that kind of scale up to see you guys and have you here with us. It’s what we do, right? And so if as you’re watching this, you’re like, hey, look, I’d like you guys to get more involved in our local service ads, or I’d like to have you guys run our marketing or our marketing strategy or run our local service ads, we’d love the opportunity to talk. So let’s get into it. What is Google Local Services. Again, this is relatively relatively basically, if we run a Google search right now, hopefully, you guys can see this. And I’ll kind of toggle between my screen and this board. In any market where we typed in San Francisco plumber, Dallas plumber, Dallas, AC repair, we’ve got the organic results. But at the very top, there’s the sponsored section, where there’s three companies and the opportunity to go and see more. And it’s it’s kind of tagged with this Google guaranteed checkbox. That’s what Google Local Services is what in a nutshell. You’ll see it in a variety of different places, it used to be called Google Home Service ads. Now, it’s Google Local Services. And really, the bottom line for the way that Google structures this is you’re not organically ranking in it, you’re not paying on a per click basis. It’s really about Google track numbers, right? It’s like Google puts a number in your great Google guaranteed listing, that number is tracked. And then every one of those calls is basically billed for on a per lead basis. And Google gives you this little guarantee check, which means they’re telling the consumer, if you work with one of these companies in our Google guaranteed program, you can feel confident you’re gonna get good service, and you’re gonna not get taken advantage of, you’re not going to get like your home destroyed. And if you do, we’ve got your back, right. So Google is really emphasizing this. And they’re putting their their, their energy behind really serving these listings above all else.

So it shows up at the top, once you click into one of these listings, you can see some more details about the company, you can check out their reviews, you kind of got the bio section, but the main thing is the number. Right, Google has recognized that the main conversion factor for these types of services is a phone call, right? And so they’re really driving people to dial the local service ads number so that they can track that and they can really make sure they’re delivering a good experience for the end customer. Really, at the end of the day, that’s what Google cares most about is when the customer is looking, are they finding what they need? Are they having a good experience? And that’s, that’s what this is all about. So So why does this matter? The reason it matters is because 87% of consumers go to Google when looking for home services, right? They’re going to Google 87% of the time, they’re not looking at Angie’s List, they’re not looking on the yellow pages, that first, that’s for sure the lion’s share of your customers, when they’re in need of your service is going to Google and they’re running a search. And the number one place your customer looks, is Google when they need your services, right and local service ads is now at the very top, like this is the first thing that’s being prioritized on desktop, and mobile. So it’s super important. If this is the number one place your customers are looking, when they need your services at the very bottom of their buying process. You got to make sure you’re coming up. And so there’s no higher qualified lead no higher qualified prospect than the customer that just ran a search for a plumber for an AC company for AC installation than than if they just did a Google search. So you really got to have a plan in place to make sure that you win with local service ads. And Google did a slow roll of this over the last couple of years. And it started in San Francisco, and then it kind of rolled out. It’s now active everywhere across the country and in a number of international locations as well. And the way this has impacted the search results is we used to have our paid listings at the top and then we had organic listings and we had a map. Well now you’ve got SEO way down the page like this is your organic result. Now, I’m not saying nobody clicks organic, some people still go way down there, they kind of scroll down so we want to have a strategy for that. But then we’ve got a little bit above that we’ve got the map listings and then we’ve got our our pay per click listing Google ads. And then on the very top we’ve got Google Local Service ads. So this is the way it’s impacted. It’s moved to organic, your free, you know organic traffic down the page even further. And if we recognize that the line Sure if your customers aren’t seeing a Google result on their desktop, right, they’re pulling up on their phone. If you run a search on your phone, you’ll see it’s even further down that you have to really scroll to even get to the first organic listing. So it’s really, really important that you’re paying attention to this, you know, somebody said, I’ve refused to go Google guaranteed, it’s really important that you have a strategy, right? Because the number one place your customer looks is Google. And the first thing that comes up when they Google search is local service ads, it like, seems pretty important that we’re coming up in that result. Give me a one of the comments if that makes sense. Yeah, we have to make sure we’re doing everything we can to show up all the places our customers are looking, especially at the places that are that are prioritized in the results. So in order to get on, there’s an application process, Google does a background check on you and your employees. And this has changed what it was Pinkerton for a while now they’ve got different consulting companies that will go in and do the backgrounds, all of your technicians that are going to be in the home serving your local service add. jobs have to be in there, as well as the business owner. And then once approved, and activated, you’re gonna pay on a per lead basis, I asked at the beginning, how many of you guys were already playing local service ads, and most of you did. So I’m not spending a lot of time here. But for those of you that don’t know, there’s a little bit of a background process, right, there’s some hoops to hop through in order to even kind of get your name in the hopper. And to get that Google guaranteed, what we’re seeing is you’re paying on average, somewhere between 25 and $45 per lead. And in certain markets, it’s on a bid basis, kind of like what Google Ads has always been. And this is I think going to change over time, right? It went from you’re paying a flat dollar per lead that came in to, you know, different costs for the various types of services, because Google’s starting to get smarter about, you know, how valuable is an AC replacement for you versus an AC repair. But then ultimately, I think it’s going to probably move to a very aggressive bid based to like market driven cost per lead, right, who’s willing to pay the most is gonna kind of come up at the top. And that’s where that’s where it’s gonna go. So, higher charge for local service ads, basically, you set a weekly budget for the total that you’re willing to spend on a weekly basis. And then Google picks that divides it, and then gives you the amount of leaves that you get based on your budget. So for instance, if you had a $2,000 per month budget, and that was 500 hours per week, you’d have $71 per day that you can spend on calls, like coming through Google Local Service ads, assuming an average cost per lead of 35, which it’s different in different markets is different for whether your HVAC company plumbing company, or something in between. Basically, you’d have 57 leads per month, 14 per lead per week at two per day, once your weekly budget is spent, you go offline. So you know, really thinking about your budget and how much you get allocated to Google Local Service ads is a big part of this equation, right? You want to make sure that you’re allocating enough money to make sure that you can spend that those funds wisely, so that you can get as many of these low quality high costs, I mean, high quality, low cost leads through the Google guaranteed program. And you’re going to probably get different number of leads day to day, but you’re never going to spend more than your designated weekly budget, right? They’ve built it in that way. It’s like, okay, I got five grand a month, that gives me whatever that amount is per week, that weekly is going to get spent. And they do throttle it at some level. So I’ll talk a little bit about some strategies, we found to be effective for budget optimization, to keep yourself in the in the rotation as often and effectively as possible. You do have the ability to dispute non qualified leads. So Google is only going to charge you if it’s a service that you provide based on your profile in your service area. So if it was someone dialing in through their as a solicitation, or if there was somebody dialing in there for something completely off track, you can dispute that and you can get that wiped out. So what I mean in a nutshell, that’s that’s how it works. So solicitations you don’t pay for spam calls, like pre recorded, hey, this is someone so calling from XYZ doesn’t get locations that you don’t serve services that you don’t offer, Google will gladly discount those those costs for you. You just want to make sure you’ve got somebody in your team or a company like ours that can manage this process for you, listening to the calls, checking the outcomes and be able to dispute so you’re not wasting a lot of money, especially as this goes to like 3545 $75 per lead. You’re not wasting money on leads that were in any of these categories. You really want to pay attention to this. You want to you want to focus on it. The feedback we have for more active clients so we’ve got some of the top plumbing HVAC home service companies in the country that we work with in some of the most competitive markets across the country. And what we’re finding is your your average cost per lead right now, for local service ads is less than PPC, like less than you used to spend on Google ads, if you take what your budget was, and how many clicks you got, and how many calls actually generated from that your cost per lead is still lower on local service ads, the quality of the lead is significantly greater than HomeAdvisor. So, you know, typically, when you think pay per lead, you know, the stigma is home advisor know, and now, Angie, right. And it’s like, when these are garbage leads that went out to seven different contractors. And you know, they didn’t even answer it, it was just a big waste of time and energy. These leads are different, right? Because they’re on Google, right, they’re actually trying to make a buying decision, they’re not trying to shop out with 90 different people, they’re probably choosing you calling you. And if you answer any respond quickly, you’ve got a great opportunity. So lead quality is actually very high. And you’re always going to get price shocks, right with with any marketing that you do, there’s going to be some portion of the market, that’s price shop. And there’s some people that might say, well, the person that just clicks on the first listing, it didn’t do any, any due diligence research didn’t go to my website, didn’t look at my reviews, may not be the most qualified. So you’re gonna get a little bit of price shoppers, but I think the volume, and the cost per lead kind of more than makes up for that. And almost unilaterally, all of our clients, you know, if we look at what they spent on local service ads, how many leads they generate, how many jobs were booked, there’s a tangible, measurable return on investment from this avenue. So just like ROI, if that makes sense, like, you know, I’m talking about hundreds of plumbing HVAC, home service companies we’re working with, the ROI is there, like it’s just a tangible, measurable return on investment.

So I really believe this is a no brainer, real. And I’m gonna say, if you’re not doing it, it’s a no brainer to do it. If you’re already on local service ads, I think it’s a no brainer to double down to expand the budget to get more aggressive with how you’re managing it. And to really put the energy necessary to dial it in, I’m going to share some of the things you can do. And some things we can help you with us as an agency to generate even better results with your local service Ads campaigns. So number one, is is going to put you at the top of the search results, right? I already talked about this a little bit. But let’s face it, it’s the first thing that comes up, it’s a no brainer, you want to come up in the number one place customers are looking at the number one listing, like you want to be on the top as often as you can, you’re only paying on a per lead basis, it’s actually a better business proposition for you, then what Google Pay Per Click was in the past, right? You’re only paying when there’s a qualified lead. And if it’s not qualified, it’s not legit. You don’t pay right, as long as you’re paying attention. And you get that in place. Lower cost per lead and PPC, higher quality than HomeAdvisor. And the ability to modify the budget based on your schedule, right? If you’re if you can kind of figure out like where are we deficient in our schedule right now, right? We’ve got our dispatch board, we’ve got guys that go into plumbing. We got guys that go into HVAC, we’ve got your technicians that go to repairs, we can do maintenance, if you can optimize and figure Okay, where do we have openings in our schedule? If you if you manage this correctly, you can kind of shift your budget and shift your campaign to prioritize the areas where you need to fill your dispatch board. So hopefully that makes sense, right? It’s just put in no brainer in the comments if you can see that you playing this game is really a no brainer. Amazing, Mason says no brainer. Alright, so how do you get set up on local service ads, if you’re already a client, which most of you are, we can absolutely help you with this. And let us support you let us support you kind of doing the background work, getting your profile set up getting it optimized. Also, I’m going to be sharing some new things we’re doing with local service ads, where we can help manage this for you even at a further level. If you’re already a client or somebody that’s interested in having us take this and run with for you. But at the most basic level, you can go to adwords.google.com/local services slash sign up. And it’s a very like self driven process, right? You can add your company name, add your employees, wait for them to do the background checks and get yourself added. And then you got to go in and optimize the profile. There is a self serve option for this as agencies, we have ways to streamline this make it quicker and more efficient and get you online faster, we can kind of have known what some of the potholes are that you’re gonna face and kind of get you around those a little bit more effectively. But it is something you can do on your own. It’s really like 123 step process, right? I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this because most of you were already in local service ads, but just wanted to show you what the what the back end looks like. All right. So let’s get to the reason we all came for this session, right? It’s not about what local service ads is or even how to get set up because most of us are already doing that. Let’s talk about how the ranking works. Let’s talk about how to optimize our results in the three pack. So just type ranking in the comments if you’re excited to get into this part of the presentation while I grab a cup of water and get my my throat cleared out

all right. Thanks for

the engagement guys.

So what we

found like the number one thing really that’s going to it’s going to drive your ability to show up in the ranking in the three pack budget not being the issue is going to be your proximity to your customers location, right? Google is looking at where that customer searched on their IP address or on their mobile phone. And if your location is way outside that area, you’re probably not going to come up for it. Even if you’ve got your your your listing set up to cover a wide slice. So this is something you only have so much control of, but it is a big factor in how you rank in the in the local service ads. Really, really huge as a as a ranking factor, right? Assuming budgets, not an issue, right? Assuming in your market, you know, you and the next guy are putting $20,000 A month towards local service ads, you’re telling Google spend it right? If you can get me enough of these leads, spend my 20k. And all of you guys were at that level, the next factor is going to be the review score and the number of reviews that you received. And we’re seeing that Google prioritizes, your reviews for local services, right? So yes, we’re gonna look at your Google reviews, your standard Google reviews in this equation. But the reviews you get after a service call that was booked through local service ads, with the review requests through that dashboard are being prioritized, right. So you know, if you’re behind the ball on this, you need somebody that’s listening to the call, recognizing that a job was booked, and then pushing that review request through the system, somebody needs to be paying attention to that and following up on it. Because all other things being equal. Google wants to serve the best result, right, which company actually showed up, did the job and provided a great service through our Google guarantee program. Good. The reviews is a big part of that. The other thing that’s really important is your responsiveness to customer inquiries and requests. So Google’s AI is running in the background, right? When someone types in Dallas plumber, and your listing comes up, and they click that listing and then they dial your tracking number, the AI is listening to see was the call answered or not answered. And they’re waiting for you to close the loop and say, did the job get booked? Or did it not get booked? Most home service companies don’t recognize how important this is that you provide the feedback loop back to Google to let them know like how are these calls are turning out. But your responsiveness if you’re not answering 95 to 100% of the calls that come in on your local service ads, that’s going to impact your ability to remain ranked in the three pack. So the AI sees was an answered by a real person and that a conversation ensue or not, right? And if it’s too often showing that you didn’t answer the call, even if you’ve got the 20 Grand allocated, you’re going to start to come out. So it’s super important that you’re actually answering the calls. Obviously, your ranking is impacted by what you said as your your office hours. So in the dashboard variable, say we work from 7am to 7pm, Monday through Friday, and we’re closed on Saturday and Sunday. If that’s how you have it structured, then on Saturday and Sunday, you’re not in that result at all right? It’s only going to be the companies that show that they’re open. And you know that I’ll leave to your judgment, whether, you know, it makes financial sense for you to answer those calls after hours and dispatch or trying to serve those customers. I think what I found is the customer searching after hours is usually the highest qualified, like they’ve got an emergency situation, they’re just trying to get the situation solved. So if you can show office hours as open, and you can have someone take those calls live, you’re going to get even more booked jobs. With that said, like, obviously your office hours impact whether you’re on or not. The other thing that’s gonna impact is if you’re getting complaints, right, we say that this is the Google Guarantee Program, which means Google is guaranteeing that you’re going to do a good job, if they’re getting a lot of complaints from your customers saying oh, they you know, they didn’t show up at all, they were bad company. Well, they’re requesting a refund through the guarantee, you know, don’t have whatever you do, like make sure that the customers that you get through Google guaranteed are happy, right? So I’m really focused on this because this will absolutely impact your your ability to rank.

So that I mean, that’s, that’s the main thing, I want to kind of walk you through this now. There’s really, there’s really five steps that you want to focus on to dial in and win with local service ads. The first thing is we want to dial in the service area, the profile and the budget, right, I’m going to show you what this looks like. But there’s certain things you can do to really optimize the listing. It’s not the super complex, but if you know what you’re looking at, and you know how to tweak the settings, you can really set this up to the nth degree, like there’s a good, better, best way to do it. And you might as well put your best foot forward, you might as well fill in all of the sale sells, you might as well you know really, really get this set up as well as possible. Number two is we have to mark the jobs as booked like this is one of the most important pieces of that feedback. loop, got a call, answered it, and then did you book that job, somebody on your team needs to be listening to all these calls, needs to be reading the outcomes and needs to be disputing the non qualified leads. And whether that’s somebody on your team or a service that we can provide for you, this is super important that we’re dialing in the profile correctly, and then we’re marking the jobs as booked, that do get booked, we got to deal with our disputes, right, when when that’s a lead in the non in the wrong area, it’s not the right kind of lead, we get to dispute those, we don’t wind up wasting a lot of money, we need to drive verified reviews, right. And so if you’re using some of the automatic automatic tools that already exists, like nearby now, or review boss or one of these other platforms, that’s great. But usually those are going to send an email or text message to their Google listing. And so it’s really important when it comes to your local service ads in the Google Dashboard, you can mark okay, this call came in through local service ads, and get a verified review. This is different like, like, you need to actually send this through the platform, right. And so it’s important that you focus on getting these these verified reviews. And then we want to be targeting an 85% booking rate. And I found it somewhat consistent, super aggressive. But it’s just a benchmark to shoot for. We want to answer, you know, like, almost 95%, right? We want to answer the call, there’s no excuse not to answer your leads, right? We need to these calls are coming in, we got to answer it. And then we want to, we want to book as many of them as possible, right? We want to have a great answering service or a great CSR that knows how to book those calls. But we can go back into the back end and say that it was booked. Because the higher your your booking rate, the more reviews you get the you know, the better you’ve optimized your profile, this is how you’re going to win with local service ads. So just give me a one in the comments. If you’re tracking along with me, and you’re still with me, kind of this is making sense. Amazing. Thank you appreciate it. Okay. So when we dial in our profile, right, there’s a a dashboard, you can log into for local service ads, that’s got lots of different fields, lots of different sales like, and usually what we think about is, alright, here’s my company name, here’s my phone number, here’s my website, address, budget, whatever, I’m going to put some budget towards it, and my job types, and we’ve just kind of leave it at that. But there’s lots of very specific settings that we can get into within the profile. You want to set the budget, the budget that you set in local service ads, could make or break the outcomes that you have. And what I’m gonna say is, if if local service ads is your lowest cost per lead, it’s the top result that’s coming up in the search results. I want to suggest that you really open up the budget as widely as you can, right? What the the local service ads budget first put a lot of money towards this, a lot of our clients wind up putting more money than they ever spend in the kitty so that they can make sure that the budget isn’t an issue, right? As long as you get capacity, put the money towards it, right. If you put a $20,000 budget, Google might only spend $10,000 of it. But if those leads are converting, and they’re selling, and you’re closing those jobs, you’re gonna get more and more, right, assuming you’ve got the capacity to handle those types of jobs. You want to update the ad schedule, this is really important. It’s kind of a strategic thing. Think about when you’re open when you’re available to answer. A big mistake would be to say, I’m available 24/7 When you don’t have someone to answer live on Saturday at 9am in the morning, right like so just think about when you’re sure you can answer knowing that the after hours calls, the after hours leaves, usually there’s less competitors, right, because a lot of your clients don’t work those after hours. And so they close their profile down, less competition and highest urgency, right, somebody’s calling in the middle of the night has a high urgent need somebody’s calling on Sunday, at three o’clock in the afternoon, it’s probably a higher urgent need. And because you’re one of the few that will answer and be available, you have a higher probability of getting the job. So really think about updating your ad schedule. Update your business bio, you get the ability to Describe your services. Really, this is an opportunity for a sales letter about who you are, why people choose you what your unique selling proposition is, the services that you provide, really think through that business bio, optimize it, select the job types, and really look at all of the job pipes available. Look at the ones that you do and the ones that are pretty congruent to what you do MakerBot like spend the time to really dial that in, set up your service areas like you can you can show up in a wider area as long as you select the right service areas within the system. Now proximity to the location is still a factor. But you know, it’s you can go that 25 miles outside of where your office is, and you can kind of mix in that service area, as long as it makes sense that you can dispatch a guy you can still be profitable with it makes a lot of sense to really dial that part of what you do in. You can also like kind of laser target the areas that are higher affluence, right, the kind of client that has more money that’s willing to spend more that is worth your energy, spend some time thinking about how can we widen our service area, and what are we want to focus some of our attention, think about those office hours, which is similar to the to the ad schedule. And then add photos where you have the ability to add a lot of different photos to your Google local service business profile. It’s funny how often I look and I pull up a local service ads listing, and it’s just a blank slate, right, it’s just like the company’s name, their phone number, and what they do, you want to add photos, and what I’m gonna suggest is add the personality based photo. So this shouldn’t just be like the smiling family Stock Photo, be authentic here, just like you would on your website, have a picture of the the owner have a picture of the technicians have a picture of your trucks have a picture of a happy technician at home, have a cup a picture of your technician at home with the client, you know, looking at the great job they just did, like us some authenticity, authenticity sells, right personality sells so infuse that into your profile.

Um, alright, so that’s,

that’s optimizing the profile. And that’s something you want to do right out of the gates, you want to do it as well as you can, and you want to revisit on an ongoing basis, add new photos, adjust the adjust the hours as it makes sense, add new services, if you’re expanding and adding additional things. From there, we have to make sure that we mark the outcome of every job right in the platform, the calls are there, you can run a report, you can see okay, here’s all the calls that we got,

you need to mark, as booked. This is the hidden metric that most companies

don’t realize is that Google’s AI is looking to see whether you answered the call, and the system is willing to find out what happened. The companies that feed Google the data that they want, which is we answered these calls, these are the ones that got booked these the customers that wrote us reviews are going to win the debt, they’re going to be the prioritize listings over time. And so make sure that you or somebody on your team or an organization like ours is listening to every call figuring out what happened and pushing that data back to Google, give me a one because this is like one of the most important things, give me a one in the comments if that makes sense. And something that you’ll commit to do something more with going forward, we’re going to, we’re going to be in the dashboard, we’re going to optimize it correctly, we’re gonna mark the outcome of all of these calls. Fantastic. So Google is going to rate your responsiveness, you have the ability to look at a report and see right within the dashboard, what your responsiveness is, and what your booking ratio is. So you want to mark them as booked or scheduled, you want to add the customer details, because you can add additional information, the value of the job and things like that include their email address, and then you want to archive the non converted opportunities. So let’s just say you had 10 leads to come through local service ads, and two of them get booked, you mark those as booked within the system. Now there’s eight, maybe that didn’t respond, or they just went radio silent on you, you don’t want to let that sit in a dashboard is like just adding up, you can mark those as non converted opportunities, you want to archive those that will you keep your data clean, I I don’t know that that’s a ranking factor. But I think that if you do that work, the more you give date data to Google and you give them what they want, the cleaner your dashboard is, the better off you’re going to you’re going to be. So we’ve talked about optimizing the profile, we talked about marking the outcomes of our opportunities. Number three is we want to dispute the unlike the unqualified leads, right, it would be very easy to spend five grand and see two or 3000 of that potentially, hopefully not, let’s say $1,000 worth of that be, you know, outside your service area, spam calls, bot calls, and that can really harm your return on investment. So you want to make sure that somebody on your team, again, is listening to the calls, saying okay, that’s outside the area. That’s not what we do, and disputing those so that you don’t wind up with that bleed, of budget that bleed of spent. So somebody needs to be really like disputing those unconverted opportunities. You’re not going to be charged for disqualified leads anything outside your area, not in the service you provide. Number four is we got to drive verify reviews. Right? So you know, like I said, having reviews is important, but verified reviews right within the local service ads dashboard is super important. So your calls come in and you can run a report with the numbers of the people. And then you can click ask for review. And so you want to make sure that within the platform within the native platform, somebody is pushing that review request and getting those reviews going through the system. I really believe the companies that answering the phones through the track system, marked the outcomes and then requested, get reviews from the customers and provide a complete feedback loop and are getting happy reviews on the other side are going to be positioned to win. Give me a win in the comments if that makes sense. Like, this is the formula to win, optimize the profile, mark the outcomes, and then get reviews on the back end, not just Google reviews, but like verified reviews through the platform. Amazing. Lots of comments you’re saying with I love that. So the number of you reviews is a major factor, you’ve got to provide great service, right? This is this is a, you know, the experience that you generate makes the difference right answer the phone on time, send the guy out with with a pre call in advance, show up with the booties, maybe even put down the the mat, you guys know what to do to create a world class experience. But if you if you provide a great experience, and you request the review, you’re going to get reviews. And it’s going to it’s going to create the experience. And you gotta leverage the dashboard. Again, I’m hammering this again and again. But I know we’ve all got tools that we love that are kind of maybe even automated into our system through service Titan, where we close the job review request text message goes out, that is a little bit different than what I’m talking about here. Right? If it came through the local service ads dashboard, we want to push into the native platform so we can get those real reviews baked into the system. And so again, like within the dashboard, it looks like this, hopefully you guys can see this, you know, you can see like kind of What’s your average reviews are, you can see how many phone calls you received, and how many you actually asked for the review, like go in and on a daily basis. The approximate recency is important with this type of thing, right? If you wait a week and only once a week or requesting the review from that customer. Now they’re like Man, that was last week, I’m not even thinking about that anymore. Like it used to be the job was done. And the review review request hits their hits their inbox, right. So you want to be on top of this, you want to be something you’re doing on a consistent basis to really generate the best results, you have to collect the data. Because if you can get the customer’s email address, it’s not like Google’s gonna magically send them a text message, right, you have to type in their customer email address, what the job was, what area you what the service location was, bam and push that request through the system. It is surprising to me how many home service companies are spending a lot of money on local service ads. They’re they’re answering the calls. And maybe in some cases, they’re they’re booking them through but they’re not pushing the review crest through the system. And really, this is one of the the secret components to make sure you win long term with local service ads. Now from a KPI perspective, Key Performance Indicator, I think all other things being equal, we got a great profile, it’s optimized, we got a great budget, we’re putting, you know, lots of money, we’re putting $25,000 A month towards this, we get everything set up, we’re booking the jobs, we’re requesting the reviews, your your booking percentage rate is going to really drive home your outcomes. And you might think Google doesn’t know But reality is right within your dashboard, you can see how many leads you got charged for how much was spent, and then how many jobs were booked. And Google has a booking rate that they’re tracking, right. And if Google’s main objective is to provide a great experience for the customer, knowing that when they searched, they found what they needed, and they got the problem solved. And they know there’s hundreds of plumbing HVAC, home service companies, vying for these leads, right putting big money towards showing up for these leads. Don’t try and tell me that this booking rate isn’t going to be important to Google that they’re not going to prioritize the companies that are higher in the completion of their jobs, and then the completion of these opportunities. So just per percentage in the comments, if this makes sense. Like this is something you want to be monitoring, this is something you want to be managing towards. Because if that booking percentage rate is zero, which a lot, a lot of cases when I look at these campaigns that are zero, because nobody’s even going in and marking the outcomes, you have to mark the outcomes. And then you got to really make sure that your mark and your outcome is as as high as possible, right. If your dispatcher isn’t good at selling the book job right on the phone, that’s going to harm your ability to move forward. So this is super important, really focusing on this metric, this booking rate. So we want to target an 85% booking rate. In order to do that you need to understand the reporting rate, you need to understand how to get into the dashboard, how to look at that report, how to look at that report based on timeframes. how effectively you convert calls will impact your overall ranking over time, and you’re shooting for 85%. I see clients that are well below that. Some that are kind of in that territory. This is just a benchmark that we like to shoot for because it helps gives us something to measure. And I’m a big believer that what you measure improves, right so make sure that this is something you are measuring and that you or somebody on your team or a company like ours is paying close attention to this for you on an ongoing basis. That’s your your booking percentage, right and So this is this is the outcome that we want to focus on. We got our budget, we’re getting as many leads as we can. We’re answering the calls, we’re not missing any of the answer rates. We’re booking as many as we can, we’re going into marking those as booked in the system. And then we’re requesting the verified reviews through the platform. So how do we increase the lead flow? Right, let’s just say we’ve got, you know, 1010 grand a month going to local service ads, we’ve got everything set up, like it’s all ready to roll and we cleaned our profile, we’ve got the right listings, we got everything dialed in. But we’re not getting a lot of leads, right? Sometimes that happens, right? Because there’s there’s other players are already pretty well entrenched, that already have a great booking rate that are already kind of the go to on local service ads in the major markets. So what can we do to increase the flow when we feel like we’ve tapped out and we feel like we’ve gone as far as we can. Some things we want to do. Number one is open the budget, right? There’s, if you’re a $2,000 a month, go to 5000, right? Whether it spends or not increase the budget.

Again, you’re not going to find a lower cost per lead with more highly, highly qualified leads. So you want to you want to maximize this part of the equation. The next thing would be to expand your service area, your job types, your ad schedule, your business hours, right, if you’re not getting as many leads as you want, and you’re not booking as many jobs as you want. The next thing would be to look at each of these and see, could we expand the area? Would that make sense? Do we have, you know, some dispatch in that particular market to go a little bit wider? You know, are there job types that we’re not bidding on, like maybe symptomatic job type. So sometimes we just want the installation, I don’t want to deal with repair, because we just want the install. So let’s really go heavy on install for those customers who are looking to replace the system. But we all know that the repair is usually the thing that leads to the install, right More times than not they want to fix it. And then when you go on look at and say, Hey, this thing is, you know, this thing is beyond repair, we need to replace it. So maybe if we’re not if we’re not prioritizing the job types that are systematic, we’re symptomatic, to the types of jobs we want, we would expand that job type, the ad schedule, right if our ad schedule set Monday through Friday, from nine o’clock until 4pm, because that’s when we get the lady at the office or the guy at the office. Maybe we should expand that right knowing that most of the other home service companies are in that similar ad schedule, right, they’re turning it off at night, they’re turning it off on the weekends. You know, if you can cover that, you could probably get more of these leads, you could book more jobs generate more revenue. And then you know, the ad schedule in the business hours really, really important. Give me a one if this is helpful if this if this is making sense, some different ways to expand the lead flow. Risa says yes, excellent. Okay. Close out every job, right? I’ve said this, I’ve harped on this, we want to close out every lead, right? We want to either market as booked market as scheduled or marketed as archived, right, we have to close up a loop on all of these jobs. And we have to request the review on every job, which means somebody on your team needs to be paying attention, hey, what’s your name, hey, what’s your email address, once the job is booked, went back into the system, putting in that name, that email address the job that was done, and then pushing out that review request through the platform. This is how we can really expand the the lead flow this how we can generate more results. So we’ve talked about how to win with local service ads, we’ve talked about how it works. We’ve also talked about kind of how to expand your lead flow over time as you hit those thresholds. If this is something you’d like some help with, you can just type help in the comments. I’m excited to announce we do have a new service called local service ads management, which is the higher level part of this like in the past, we were just kind of will set up a local service ads help you kind of get the background checks done. But now we actually have a service dedicated to management, where we’ll manage this entire process for you. So just give me a one of the comments if you’re okay with me kind of walking through what that looks like what we charge for it, how that works and how you can get involved. If that’s something you’re interested in one in the comments here, let me know. All right, cool. I got at least a couple of ones I feel all right diving into this. Or give me one of the comments. If you got value from this session. If there’s at least one or two things that you could take away, you’re like, Okay, that was useful. That was something I can I can go back and implement in my in my business. Okay, I want to make sure I share the right screen Hold on one second. I get the screen up. So if you’re if you’re interested, you can go to plumber, Seo dots.net/lsa. And that takes you to a document where you get all the details and where you can even sign up for this. But I want to walk you through this real quick and show you exactly what we can do. Why it’s a no brainer because we understand how to set the profile up we understand how to optimize the campaign we understand how to really drive the outcomes that are that are really most important being that this is the number one place your customers are looking. Okay, so I should be sharing my dashboard now. So this is our local service ads management service. Again, this is something we’ve been doing for a long time but something gets a new structure program, because what we found working with hundreds of plumbing HVAC home service companies was most of them, you know, were good at getting the leads. And they were good at like dispatching it kind of taking care of it. But they didn’t have someone that understood the importance on the back end of modifying and updating the profile in order to have somebody that understood the importance of closing the jobs and listening to every one of those calls and marking the outcomes. And so we’re like, hey, what if we did this, we beta tested this concept, what if we put our team on the task where every day they were looking at all of the leads that came in, they were listening to those calls, they were marking the outcomes, they were pushing the review requests, they were disputing the reviews, would that generate a better result would that help them get higher ranked in the three pack would then generate a better ROI. And we found that it was a significant increase in the number of leads, they were able to get through local service ads, the number of book jobs, so just give me a yes, in the comments, if you feel like that would be helpful to have somebody that understands it, that could just take the ball and run, run with it for you, on the back end. Excellent, Mark. Appreciate that. Excellent. So I’ll just walk you through. So what we’re doing with the local service ads management, if you don’t have the profile setup, we’ll help you get the background checks. And we’ll help you push this true. If you do, we’re going to get into the campaign and we’re going to help structure it right, we’re going to look at all of the fields, we’re going to look at all of the job types, we’re going to look at every last thing we can do to optimize the profile to put the best foot forward for you. So we’re really going to dial in the campaign and the account itself. And then we’re going to do the ongoing management for you. Right, this is something that, you know, isn’t just set and forget, which unfortunately, most most of you guys don’t have the time you don’t have the energy, you don’t have the staff to really focus on this and work in an ongoing basis. So we’re going to make budget recommendations and budget bidding adjustments, we’re going to put the call tracking in place. And more importantly, we’re going to do the call analysis. So our team is gonna be listening to those calls and marking the outcomes, they’re gonna be listening to the calls and marking the things that need to be disputed. We’re going to manually rate each of the calls. And then we’re going to keep the profile up to date, putting new photos, keeping the licensing up to date, making sure you don’t fall out of the three pack at all whatsoever, we’ve got a great dashboard that we’re going to provide you with in addition to the to the native local service ads dashboard in, in Google, which really makes it easy to see what’s happening, right, it’s able to see how much we spent, how many leads, we were charged for how many of those calls came in what the outcomes were, and really gives you that insight that you don’t have right within the dashboard itself. So you kind of have that extra layer of reporting. And then we’re gonna do the review management, right, which is not the automatic tools that you use, but actually say, Okay, this job was booked. Let’s push the review requests to the platform, let’s try and get as many booked jobs as possible, let’s try and get as a high of a conversion rate as possible on our on our job management. So here’s the way we’re pricing this, we wanted to try and make this as as no brainer cost as possible. Literally, this is our team and our expertise coming in properly setting up and optimizing the profile, managing their ongoing basis. And then doing the grunt work right doing the work day in and day out to listen those calls to rate the outcomes to look at the dashboard and kind of give you feedback on where things are being missed. The base price is 549 per month for up to 75 leads tracked through local service ads, because this is a very labor intensive process. For somebody who’s listening to these calls, there’s time there’s cost, and there’s there’s communication that has to be done. And then it kind of tears up from there as your volume goes up, right, because the time that is required to listen to the call and rate the outcomes. So again, if this can help you book one additional job per month, your local service ads, it practically pays for itself. And we’re seeing hundreds of additional jobs booked because we’re showing up more local service ads, we’re getting better results really optimizing for the things that Google cares about, which is the profile itself, which is those those reviews and that that closing the loop on each of the jobs. So that’s the opportunity. On today’s webinar, what we’re doing is we’re waiving the setup fee. So clients non clients, if you want to have us do this for you, all you have to do is click on the link where it says click here to sign up. It takes you to a simple registration page. Again, it’s 597 per month, and then we’ll look and monitor like if it turns out you’re more like 300 leads per month and the cost is higher right because we got to have that extra horsepower that extra manpower to get this done. So there’s there’s your call to action right? Go ahead. Go to plumber SEO dotnet slash LSA get signed up for this right? This to me this is a no brainer opportunity. We do this well. Like this is what we know we do this day in and day out. All you have to do is click the button get yourself registered the next First thing that you’re going to get on the back end, you’re going to get to a page where you schedule your kickoff call. And we’ve got Daniella, our local service ads coordinator that will meet with you one to one that will kind of get all the details, get the login information, be clear on what you do, what you don’t do what your service hours are, and go in and update the profile, get it dialed in, and then get your dedicated manager that’s that’s going to be listening to all those calls and writing them for you in the back end. So, again, if you if you take action while we’re on today’s webinar, we’re going to waive the $500 setup fee. And it’s just for 549 per month. And you can just go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash LSA, click the Get started now button. And it will take you to this page where you can enter your credit card details, and we will hit the ground running.

Outstanding. Hopefully you guys are taking action here, you’re pulling up that page, you’re getting yourself registered. Again, you know, tiered pricing 549 Is your is your management fee. As the volume increases, you charge we charge more, because we have more time, obviously, you’re also generating a lot more revenue and a lot more results. So the ROI for this is literally a no brainer. Like you’re gonna make a lot more than what you’re spending on this on an ongoing basis. If you still have questions, and you’re like, you know what this sounds great, but I have some questions, I’d like to talk more about how this works, how this integrates into our overall strategy. Maybe I’ve got another company that’s that’s doing my internet right now. And I need to make sure this isn’t going to be a conflict. If you’ve got other questions about this before you feel comfortable getting started. You can call us at 866-610-4647 where you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Mike, great question, what’s the fee for two locations. So if you’ve got two local service ads, it’s the same fee plus an additional $150 per month, because we have to set up another dashboard, we got to set up the other tracking mechanism, there’s more cost for us that just helps us cover that cost. So great question. Hopefully that answers it, you can start with one location, just sign up for the one location and we can modify to to or modify whatever we need based on volume. And again, if you have if you’re a client already, and you have questions you want talk with your account manager about it, you can just get on a meeting with your account manager, hey, I’d like to turn on local service ads management, and then we can set up that order on the back end for you as well. So that’s the scoop, go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. If you have more questions about this, you want to get some more details about how it works, what’s involved, or just go to plumber SEO dotnet slash LSA where you can where you can sign up, and we can just say, Hey, I’m ready to get started. Let’s hit the ground running. Let’s go ahead and run with this. And we are Team will roll up our sleeves, get to work and kind of be your advocate, be your local service ads management team on the back end helping you really generate great results. So that’s all I have for today. Right? This is part of the accelerated growth model. We went up you drive leads, we want to help you maximize conversion, we want to help you optimize your results. Right. So when it comes to driving leads, we’ve got setting up the website, making sure it’s ranking organically making sure it’s coming up in all the places that your customers look, we have paid search, which is Google, Google Ads management, your local service, ads, optimization and dialing that in really generating as many leads as we can. We’ve also got your database, which a lot of people don’t think about is your existing database of past customers and past prospects is an amazing opportunity to drive leads, right all most of us focus on the new opportunities, we don’t focus on our existing customer base, one of the things we like to focus on is let’s get your customer list, let’s make them an offer. Let’s get in front of them. Let’s get back out in the home. And let’s generate revenue through that channel. So lots of different opportunities for driving leads, we want to maximize conversion, right, we want to make sure that as many of those people that get to the website, there’s many of those people that call in convert into a book job. And so you know, that’s really making sure your website is built to convert, making sure your reputation is best in class where somebody looks you up, they see lots of great reviews about you. And they’re seeing on Google the scene on Yelp, they’re seeing it on Angie, they’re seeing it all over the place. And so we’ve got some strategies in place to help really boost your reviews and your online reputation, because that really impacts your your conversions. And then we want to dial in automation. Like there’s so much automation available now where after somebody inquires, we can send them a call, we can send them an SMS, we can follow up with them automatically, and give them the opportunity to engage via two way text messaging. You know, we can absolutely help you maximize your conversion. And then we want to optimize the results. Right as we’re spending money in marketing, as we’re thinking about the goals that we’re driving for. First thing we want to think about is how much are we spending, right how much we spend. Usually, we got a fixed budget Let’s call it five grand 10 grand a month. We’re like I want to keep growing. And this is my budget. But the reality is, as your company grows, you need to carve out more money to invest in local service ads, and Google ads in marketing automation and other things that are going to help you get more leads, get more sales. And so we start with what’s the goal, and then how much revenue do we have to play with, and then how much is the spend, usually, we can spend more, as long as there’s an ROI, let’s keep spending more from there, we want to optimize around the average cost per lead, right, we want to make sure we’ve got an average cost per lead that makes financial sense for the different types of jobs that we generate, we could spend a little bit more for replacement job that may be for a repair job, right. And so really optimizing that average cost per lead across the spectrum. And then the biggest thing is return on investment. Right? As long as you spend $1, and get $5 in return after expenses. You know, that’s what we’re optimized for. So we want to make the ROI better. But really, a truly accelerated growth model comes down to these three key pillars, right, we got to drive leads, we got to make sure those leads convert into book jobs and revenue. And then we got to optimize the results and double down on the things that are having the biggest impact. And so today was really all around local service ads. But if you’re interested in that accelerated growth model, and you’d like to talk with us about how we can help and how we can help you dial in your overall online marketing strategy. You go to plumber, SEO, dotnet slash schedule, if you’re an account, if you’re a client, and you want to get with our team to really dial in the strategy and kind of take it to the nth degree. Feel free to let’s let’s schedule that in. Let’s get it going. And if you’re interested in moving forward with local service ads management, you can go to plumber, SEO dotnet, slash LSA, that’s plumber, SEO dotnet, slash LSA, you’ll get to the page with all the details, click the button, get yourself registered, we’ll schedule the kickoff call. And we will get to work on this ASAP dial on the profile dial in the management and ongoing basis, and really amplify your results with local service ads. So that’s it for now. Guys, thank you so much for your time. Christian, are there any questions that I missed?

Any questions? Go ahead and

type a question in the comments. If you have any specific questions. Let’s see Matt saying if there are physical locations with dedicated GBP profiles, their own distinct service areas, you can definitely get approved for two profiles. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And so again, our charge for two profiles separate is your same management fee plus an additional 150 per month for that additional location. Stephanie, do you guys what CRM do you find works for your system. So in my mind, there’s two types of CRM, there’s like your dispatch system, which would be service Titan housecall, pro fuel, the edge those types of platforms. And then usually, you’re going to want to have some type of marketing platform on the front end of that. So we have a system called Conversion amp, which is is built to manage your lead flow, right, the leads that come inbound, the leads that come from your outbound the leads that you can nurture through email marketing, automation, and SMS marketing automation. And then you want to integrate that into service Titan or house called Pro or field edge. So once they became a customer, that’s where you would dispatch the job, collect the revenue, manage that type of thing. I’m a fan of all three of those. Obviously, certain service Titan is the 100 pound gorilla, that that seems to be just getting better every single day.

Let’s see. Okay. What’s up you? Thanks for being here.

Excellent. I’m not seeing any other questions. So I will just say thank you so much for your time today. I hope you got value. I hope you got some new insights on how you can win with local service ads. If you have any questions. Feel free to schedule in with us by going to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. And if you’re ready to get started with local service ads management, go to plumber SEO dotnet slash LSA. That’s it for now. Thanks, everybody. Have an amazing afternoon and we’ll talk again soon

Transcribed by https://otter.ai