How To Win With Local Service Ads for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Service Contractors

All right, hello and welcome. I’m so excited for today’s session, we’re gonna be talking all about how to win with local service ads commonly referred to as LS A. And it kind of really unpacking some of the new strategies on how to really tap into local service ads in your market, how to generate more leads, more calls, keep your trucks running. And I’d love to know just to kind of as you’re watching this, let me know what in comments if you’re already running LSA at some level, too, if you’re not, I know I asked this to the beginning before we started, but if you could just in the comments, one, if you’re running LSA two if not Dave’s not care, and Catherine is an excellent, there’s gonna be a little bit of something for all of you, if you’re not, I’m going to make the case for why you should be and why you should really get the ball rolling on this, if you are and really this, this session is optimized for you. Because you know, a lot of us turn on LSA, we kind of set it and forget it, but there’s a lot more to it. And there’s a lot of things you can do to give yourself a competitive edge in your market. So I’m going to be unpacking some of our latest insights now running LSA for several 100 of our clients across the country. And what we can do to keep you in the three pack more, keep your cost per lead, you know, manageable convert as many of the leads as possible, and really, really generate better results. So just I guess in the comments, if that sounds a good use of face time, and we can go deep on this topic. Alright, again, some yeses, so I appreciate that. So this is part of our accelerated growth model, right? If you really want to grow your plumbing, HVAC, electrical business, you want to accelerate the growth, there’s three things you have to do, you got to drive leads, you got to maximize conversion, and you’ve got to optimize results, right. And if you get those three, really humming, you can absolutely grow your grow your business, you can triple your sales, as I like to say, over the next 12 to 24 months. And it really comes down to optimizing around these three key pillars. And, you know, I unpacked this at the beginning of the year, it’s called your internet marketing plan. And it talks about the key things you need to do to drive leads, right, we’ve got to do organic, we got to do paid, we got to do database, to maximize conversion, we’re going to make sure the website is built to convert, we’ve got great online reviews, we’re leveraging automation to follow up with our leads as quickly, efficiently and effectively as possible. And then we’ve got to optimize the results, right, we gotta know what our total spend is, or average cost per lead our return on investment, we need to have a dial on those numbers. And a lot of cases, you know, if the goal is to go from a million to 2 million to 3 million to 6 million, we really have to sometimes increase the span, but we got to increase the span, logically. So that’s the accelerated growth model, I could talk about it for hours. But today we’re talking about paid search, and a subsection within paid search, which is local service ads, talking about what it is how it works, and really how to generate better results with local service ads that you may already be running. So a little bit of housekeeping as we kind of kick things off, if you could, like let’s be in the moment, turn off your cell phone, turn off Facebook, if you’ve got it running somewhere in the background, really, if you’re serious about generating better results for your plumbing, HVAC, electrical business, let’s just give this the focus. Because I truly believe when you understand how LSA works, when you understand how to optimize the way that you’re managing it, it can absolutely be a game changer in your in your business. So real quick, for those of you that don’t know who I am, and kind of what my what my background is. I’ll talk about that in a minute. But here’s what we’re going to cover. Today we’re going to talk about what local service ads is, we’re going to talk about where it’s active, we’re going to talk about how it works First, and for those of you that haven’t really started running local service ads yet how to jump on board. But more importantly, and really, this is what the meat and potatoes of today’s session is going to be around is what it takes to rank in the top three results because what I what I’ve seen working with hundreds of the top plumbing HVAC, electrical companies in the country, and really talking with 1000s of home service companies through our through our business development process on an on an annual basis is a lot of us have turned on local service ads, or we put a little bit of budget toward it. And there’s not very many leads coming in because there’s big competitors that are winning the day and the top three, and there’s very specific things you can do to optimize and make sure that you get your time in the rotation so that you can get as many deals and as many leads as possible. So to talk really about that I’m gonna move this forward so it’s a little bit easier for you guys to read.

And then of course, we’re really gonna talk about how to take advantage and really how to maximize your outcomes with local service ads. So real quick, who I am and why you should listen. My name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder and CEO of plumbing and HVAC SEO or digital marketing agency specializing in the plumbing HVAC home services for eight

Hi, I’m an author of the book How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing, right. If you’re on today’s session, you already have a copy of this book type book in the comments, and Christian will send you a link will was mailed this out to you completely free of charge. So you have it because it’s a it’s a great reference book on how to generate better results online. But I’d say more important than all the other stuff there is. At this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVAC and home service companies and some of the most competitive markets in the country and been able to help them dominate their local market, many of them seeing more than a million dollars in revenue growth, just by getting their internet marketing, right. So what I’m sharing with you and what I’m going to share on today’s session isn’t hypothetical, it’s not theory, it’s real world in the trenches experience working with companies, just like yours. And this is what we do day in and day out. We’re on a mission to help 1000 Plumbing HVAC and electrical companies triple their sales by getting their internet marketing, right, we’ve got a full team now like kind of all over the country and international, this is what we do all day, right? We help our clients set up their websites, get them ranked, make sure that the websites are built to convert put the marketing automation in place. And so if you’re interested in having us manage this for you, or copies, just look at your big picture, we’d love the opportunity to chat. If you if you would like to schedule a time, we’ll do a complimentary analysis, you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. And it will actually look at what you have in place, show you where there’s room for improvement, and walk you through how we can help. So let’s talk about local service. That’s the topic of the day. And so if you go to Google right now, and you type in whatever your service is, we’ve got some plumbing companies, we’ve got two HVAC companies, we’ve got some electrical contractors on here, if you type in your city, and plumber, or whatever your service is, what’s happening on the search engine results is local service ads comes up right at the top, whether you’re on mobile, whether you’re on desktop, this is what comes up first. This is not new information. But in a nutshell, that’s what local service ads is.

And

it’s also oftentimes referred to as Google guaranteed, because Google’s got a process where they’re guaranteeing that you’re going to come out you’re not going to screw the customer. And it gives a better experience for the searcher. It gives a better experience for the contractor in a lot of cases. But it also then requires a little bit of legwork to make sure that you’ve got your background submitted, and that Google can feel confident that you’re going to provide great service for the companies, they send your way. The main mechanism of local service ads, the main mechanism that they’re tracking against is phone calls. It started out at the beginning, if people were were able to go on local service ads, and either submit a form or make a phone call. And they found that the tracking on that was was kind of squirrely and they moved it to it’s just a phone call, right? When somebody looks on Google in your area and they click on the Google guaranteed or the local service ads, they’re presented with a number that’s a tracking number that they’re going to track against and charge you on a per lead basis. And that’s kind of the way that it works today. So we’ll see the guaranteed symbol right underneath the number of reviews that the organization has.

And

it comes up right at the right at the top. If you if you drill into someone’s listing, like in this case, Tom Drexler, you would see a listing that looks like this, and we’ve got a phone number that’s tracked, right, that’s the main mechanism that Google puts in place in order to track this in order to charge you for it. So why does this matter? Like why is this important that we’re thinking about local service ads, and that we’re even spending time learning about how this works? Here’s what we know, 87% of your customers go to Google when they need your services, right? More than 87%. It’s like basically the number one channel by far that your customers look to when they’re looking to hire your services to solve that problem. It’s the number one place that people look. It’s also the first thing that comes up. So if we know 87% of your customers are either going to Google or they’re going to one of these sites to try and find you, then we want to come up first, right? We want to be at the top. Yes, we want to be in local service ads, we want to be in paid search, we want to be in the organic listings, we want to be on an app, we want to be everywhere. But the fact is if local service ads is what’s coming up first, we want to prioritize that impression. We want to make sure we’re coming up as often as possible in that rotation. Because if that’s the number one place people look and we’re up at the very top, we have a much higher probability of getting the lead getting the call and ultimately getting the the book job.

And the only thing I’m finding is that there’s no higher intent prospect than the customer that’s actually looking at that moment in time. So if you think about all the marketing initiatives, you can put in place right you can do

direct mail, you can do Facebook ads, you can run YouTube ads, you can do all kinds of things to market, your home service company. And I really think you want to have a diversified approach that markets and put your name in front of customers. But there’s, you know, interruption based marketing or like, let’s just use Facebook ads as an example, we’re running ads, and they’re seeing an offer, hey, if you’re, you know, you want to get $25 off your plumbing job, click here, most of the people have no need in that moment. And so it’s useful because they’re seeing you and then might remember you the next time they need you. But directional advertising is where we’re connecting with that customer, right? When they’ve got the problem, right, the AC is not working in the house, they’re hot, they’re frustrated, they’re going to Google on their mobile phone, they’re running a search HVAC contractor in your city, and that customer is going to be the highest intent that you can get. And this is what comes up first. That’s really why local service ads is so important. And so it’s really important that you have this plan, not just to be in the rotation, but to really optimize your outcomes and optimize your results with local service ads. At this point, it’s active everywhere, like if you like they’ve rolled this out over the last five years, basically, from a new thing to everywhere in the United States, and a lot of places internationally, local service ads is absolutely running. And what we’ve seen it has impacted the search results, right? If you think about, you know, years ago, there was no local service ads. And so it used to just be organic results for a long time. And then Google added the paid search results to the listing and move the organic results down. And then they added the Google Maps and it was like a lot of things moving. But the reality is, this is how it impacts your results. First thing you see is local service ads today, then you’ve got some Google Ads results that come up, then you’ve got the actual map itself, and then you’ve got the organic listings. And so you know, it does beg the question like as this becomes more and more prominent, you know, do we even need to focus on organic, like, do we even need to like really play that game, I’m going to tell you that you do if you go back and watch last month’s webinar, you want to have the organic opportunities as well, you definitely want to be playing on the Google Map. But you can’t sleep on paid search, and you absolutely can’t sleep on local service ads.

So how it works. First of all, if you’re not in, I’m going to just briefly talk about this for those of you that aren’t, you have to complete the application process. So Google asks you for some background checks, they say you need to have a background check on every one that would go into the home. And so if you’ve got a large operation with 50, or 100 texts, that can be quite cumbersome. I know a lot of organizations just background check the owner, and they’re able to get that through. I’m not suggesting you do it. But I’m saying it’s going to be a lot easier to background, your check. So self, your CIT background check yourself than to try and background check your entire organization. They’re gonna background check your employees, they don’t want a license, check background check, it has changed, it’s been Pinkerton consulting, there’s some different companies involved in this process. Now,

by the book, again, all of your technicians as well as yourself have to be background check. If you’ve got a criminal record on any of the people that are going into the hall, you’re gonna, you’re gonna want to play carefully with that.

As long as you don’t send maybe somebody with a criminal record to your LSA leads, you can get away with that, obviously, it’s going to red flag your company, they’re not going to put you in Google guaranteed if you’ve got a lot of people that you submitted that wind up having criminal backgrounds and things like that. So just be aware, kind of hopefully, you’re doing this with your technicians when they come in, and you’re already aware, like where there may be some potential concerns

once you’re approved, so and I know this is kind of where most of us sit today, once you’re approved, you’re going to pay on a per lead basis. And I’m going to show you some of the screenshots and how it works. Because you can set a per fixed lead, where you can kind of play the auction game a little bit. And that’s kind of where some of the bigger organizations might have a competitive advantage. When you’re looking at the, you know, the 15 $20 million guy in your market, he may be willing to spend $75 per lead where the average automated cost per lead cubed is like $22. So just be aware, like there’s a little bit of an option play on this as well. But what we see is the average is somewhere between 25 and $45 per lead. This is a shifting target, like totally shifting because in bigger markets, I expect Google is going to change that potentially, I believe they’re gonna get more aggressive with rolling out the auction process and letting the bigger companies buy you know, basically buy all the leads because they’re able to pay more and I think eventually you know, if they’re looking at Uber eyes, the the home service trades, you know, I’m sure they’d love to get a person

centage of those books jobs. It’s not there yet. But hopefully it doesn’t go there. But that’s kind of what they’re thinking and kind of where it might go. And we do see the prices can vary by industry, because I think somebody said they’re a painting company, but it’s a little bit more for a electrical service contractor than it is for a plumbing company. Right? So it really varies. Top notch says in my ear at $60 Plus, so yeah, I mean, it’s gonna, it’s gonna get more and more competitive, and these cost per leads are gonna rise over time. But ultimately, when you get in, right, and I’ll talk a little bit of how to optimize the listing and how to manage the listing, Leon says is even higher in roofing, I have no doubt, you’ve got these choices, how do you want to bid, you can let Google set the right bid. And that’s what they recommend, or you can manually set a max bid. We’re playing with this in a lot of different ways. I kind of like I love the automation aspect of letting Google kind of set the right bid. But if if you’re really thinking, you know, I’ve got a big budget set on local service ads, and I’ve seen people set $100,000 budget, never intending to spend it, but just saying I want to set aside to get every single lead that I can. And they still aren’t getting lots of leads from the system. If that’s happening in your market, it what’s probably happened is the bigger companies have gone in and they said, I’m going to manually set my bid. And if everyone else is paying 50, I’m gonna pay 75. Right. And obviously, Google is going to prioritize the people willing to pay more, as long as they’ve got the background, they’ve got the good reviews, and they’re kind of having a high conversion rate on the leads they generate. So this is important to understand this is something that’s changed even the last, you know, 12 months or so that if you’re not getting any leads, you might want to go toggle this and be a little bit more aggressive with how you’re bidding. Give me a one of the comments if that makes sense. If you’re kind of tracking along, if that’s helpful to know that that new function can really impact, you know, whether you’re going to get the leads that you need the leads that you want, or not.

Excellent. So what I mean, the way you’re charged, is, you’re going to set a weekly budget that limits the total numbers of leads that you get. So if you say, you know, my weekly budget is 500 bucks, and your average cost per lead is 25, it’s going to quickly chip away, and once your budget is spent, you’ll come out of the rotation. So you can set that weekly limit, just be aware that’s going to that’s going to limit the number of leads that you get. So as as the example here 2000 leads per month, that comes up to 500 $500 per week,

that will be $71 per day. So if you’re if you’re at $35 per lead, you’re gonna cap yourself at 57 leads, 14 leads per week, two leads per day, once the once the budget spent, you go offline, and there’s a little bit of flex with that. But you know, just be just be cognizant of, that’s how it works. And if your average cost per lead on local service ads is less, let’s say than your average cost per lead through Google ads, which is like paper clicking text ads and things. You might want to say, look, let’s just increase them budget. And let’s go in and set a higher manual bid, so that we can get more of those local service and leads because what we’re seeing is the lead quality, is it drastically worse from local service ads than it is from organic or from even Google Google Google ads. So that I mean, that’s how it works, it’s you get your weekly budget, at the end of the week, it’s going to take you off, and then the next week, it’ll it’ll bump you back onto there.

You may get a different number of leads day to day, but you’re never going to spend more than your weekly budget that’s designated. And you have the ability to immediately dispute leads. So we’ll I’ll show you a screen here in a minute. But Google only wants to charge you if they’re legitimate leads in your service area for the things that you said you did inside your profile. And so it’s important that you dispute the leads quickly. Because if you paid for three leads that weren’t really quality leads, and you don’t dispute them relatively quickly, that’s already taking you out of the rotation for the day. So you want somebody that’s really on top of this, this recognizing, you know, here’s our budget, here’s how we lose regenerating and really taking care of the ones that aren’t quality, so you don’t wind up burning up your uptime and your opportunity. So what what leads don’t count and local service ads, a solicitation, somebody’s trying to sell you something spam, like a pre recorded message. And this is really important, the service not offered. And so when when you optimize your Google local service profile, you’re able to tell Google, this is my service area. These are the services I want to like bid on and you really want to pay attention to that to expand your offering. But you also can use that to say hey, you know, that was outside the service area. I’m not going to pay for that. And that’s that’s an important thing to be monitoring and to be paying for. But this is one of the great benefits of local service ads.

Is that you’re not paying per click that could just, you know, wind up clicking away. And that absolute ending and nothing, you’re only paying per lead. That is a qualified lead that you defined as a qualified lead in your service area, which I think is a pretty great thing. Feedback from our active clients. And again, now we’ve got hundreds of plumbing HVAC, electrical clients that are using this, and we’re helping to optimize the results for it. What we’re hearing is lower costs, believe in PPC, right? In most markets, you still want to be in the in the Google Ads rotation, you still want to be playing that game. But as you do the math, or if you’re paying $16 per click to $25 per click, and you’re converting it 30%, your average cost per lead on local service ads, especially if you’re if you’ve got the fixed rate is usually less than the PPC, the quality of the leads are much better than what you might get from home advisor or a local plumber, or some of these other like services out there.

Not quite as good as an organically, like still your best leads somebody that clicks on your website browses around and physically chooses your organization because they liked what you were about, they liked your messaging.

Remember, on local service ads, they’re not probably even doing that much due diligence, right, they’re clicking the first listing, they’re calling your office, they’ve got a problem they want it solved, they didn’t necessarily choose you. And so while the quality is better than than home advisor, it’s not as good as the customer that physically decided they want to do business with you. So you’re gonna still have some price shoppers, you’re gonna have those people that you know how much you charging for this, okay, I’m gonna hang up, right. So that’s just kind of par for the course. But pretty much for all of our clients that track this that have good processes in place to answer the phones, to dispatch to make sure that they’re selling well in the home, and they’ve got a good conversion rate, there’s almost always a really nice return on investment from local service ads, I can’t even think of an example of a client that doesn’t have a tangible measurable ROI of this, from this on a on a pretty consistent basis. So in my, in my mind, I believe this is a no brainer. If you run a plumbing, HVAC, electrical company, really, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by really getting into this and optimizing it again, number one, you’re going to be at the top of the results, that’s where your customers are looking, we want to make sure we’re at the top, you only pay on a per lead basis for actually qualified leads, you’re still going to wind up with a lower cost per lead than pay per click, the quality of the leads are higher than home advisor. And you have the ability to modify your budget based on your schedule. So if your technicians are fully booked solid for the next two weeks, and it’s like you know what, I can’t even take any more calls, I can’t even deal with this right now, you can always go in and turn that budget down. You know, play with caution, just like with your your Google ads, like you don’t want to be turning on turning off turning on turning off, but you have that option. Because why pay per lead, if you can’t even get a technician to the home, right, if you’re not going to be able to convert because you can’t somebody out send somebody out there for two weeks. So I really think it’s it’s a no brainer, hopefully I’ve made a good case for why you want to be participating in this, I’m gonna really quickly talk about how to get set up. And then we’re gonna get into how to optimize and really how to how to maximize your results. Give me a one, if you’re tracking along with me, still, I know I’m kind of I’m trying to get through this part of it quick. So we get to the meat and potatoes. Okay, cool. Lots of lots of ones coming in. Appreciate that, guys.

If you’re a client, and I know we get a lot of clients potentially on today, now, if you’re a client, we absolutely will help you set this up. This is part of what we do as part of our paid search strategy. So we’ll help you with the background checks and all that stuff. If you’re not a client, and you’re trying to figure this out on your own, you can go to AdWords that google.com/local services dash sign up. And it will take you through an online form that you fill in. And then it will kind of trigger the process to do the background checks. And everything in between. This is what it looks like. I don’t know, Christian, if you can grab this link and drop it in, in case anybody needs access to it. But it takes this it’s three step form, right sign up, create your profile. And then really the the part that is slow is the background checks and waiting for all the background checks that need to be done.

Let’s talk about rankings. I know that this is probably the reason a lot of you guys came because you’re like Okay, again, I’m already on local service ads. I know the benefits of service ads, but how does it actually work? How can I make sure that I’m playing more in the rotation? Well, the way the ranking works is your proximity to the customers location comes into play. And so if you’re in, you know, Kendall, if I use Miami as an example, if you’re in Kendall and the person searching in Pembroke Pines, that’s going to have an impact and so making sure that you’ve got a location that’s as centralist

possible to where your customers live, helps raise data. So if you’ve got a commercial location, that’s way off the beaten track, that may potentially harm your effectiveness with Google Local Service ads, your review score and the number of reviews you receive through the platform is in That’s right, all other things being equal, yep, you can put your name and you can pay on a per lead basis, you can pay a little bit more per lead, and even give yourself preferential, but all other things being equal, if everyone’s trying to play this game. And they’re all putting money in the ones that have reviews. And not just reviews, like on Google maps, and other places, but reviews write inside local service ads, and I’ll kind of show you how that works are getting

preferential weighting in the algorithm. So be careful not to just be requesting reviews through like, you know, whatever you use pull Sam or review boss or nearby now, specifically for leads that come from local service ads, and that call the local service ads number in the dashboard, there’s a place to request a review from that customer, that’s what you want to use, because those reviews carry a lot of weight. Number three, and this is where I find most plumbing HVAC home service companies don’t realize is that your responsiveness to customer requests, and inquiries play a major major factor. So inside the dashboard, I’m gonna show you all this stuff in a minute, there’s a place where you can say, you know, dispatch job, you know, cancel job or disputed the lead, if you don’t have somebody that’s looking at all the leads that come in, and like rating the outcomes, eventually Google looks at you as a non responsive provider. And even if you’re not got a huge budget, even if you’ve got tons of reviews on if you’re not actively responding to the inquiries, and like closing the loop in the system, that’s going to negatively impact your ability to remain constantly in the three pack rotation. I’m going to show you that one in a minute. But this, in my mind is one of the top things you need to be aware of, and that you need to have somebody paying attention to inside your organization. The other thing on obviously, on this is your business hours, most of us, you know, say we can answer the phone 24/7. But really, we only have somebody that can get out of the home between, you know, whatever, like seven o’clock and five o’clock in the afternoon. And you want to be conscious that if you turn local service off, and you say your hours only between seven and four, then all of the people that are searching after those hours, like like six o’clock or seven o’clock at night, which most you know, a large percentage of your customers do, you won’t be in the rotation. And so you want to make sure that you think about when those hours are on and off, we find we can get lots of leads through local service ads in the in the off hours, as long as you can have somebody that can answer the phone live, have a professional conversation, you can book your next day just by being a little strategic with the office hours that you have listed.

The only thing that’s going to impact your ranking is whether or not you’ve received serious and repeated complaints about your business, I think it would be obvious that if people are claiming the guarantee and saying that you screwed them, or if they’re going in and giving you a one star review through the platform, eventually that’s going to chip away at your credibility in the system, it’s going to reduce your ability to remain in the three pack.

And then, you know, the other factor that’s that’s really going to drive it is your is your budget and how well you understand what the competition is doing. Are they just doing, you know, automated bidding? Or are they doing manual bidding? Are they getting super aggressive with their average cost per lead and saying I just want to buy all the leads. It’s different in different markets, right. And so you want to be paying attention to what’s going on in your local marketplace for your services. Because you can start to play the game of chess, and there is absolutely a game of chess going on in the background with your big competitors with your small competitors. And you know, you want to be the one that understands how this works better, you want to be the one thinking two or three steps ahead so that you can maximize your rotation in the three pack, you can optimize the number of leads that you get without overpaying, right? Because we don’t want you to go just I’m gonna try and throw $100 per lead price on this. And you get leads that don’t actually monetize to a 20 effective ROI. Um, so that’s kind of high level how that works. Now let’s get into how to win with local service ads type win in the comments if you’re still tracking with me excited to kind of unpack a little bit about some of the specifics here on what you can do to truly win with local service ads.

Fantastic, thanks, guys. I appreciate the engagement. So we’re gonna get into this I’m gonna show you screenshots we’re going to talk specifics. Number one is we want to dial in the service area, the profile and the budget. Like there’s very specific things it’s pretty simple dashboard that you get into

on local service ads, but there’s nuance to how you set this up to really put your best foot forward.

Second, we have to mark the jobs as booked, right? This is super important that every call that comes in is being rated. And then it’s being marked on the outcome, I’m going to show you exactly how to do that, and really how to optimize around that deal with disputes, that’s obvious, we’ve got to drive verified reviews from the real customers through the platform, I’m gonna show you how to do that as well. And then we want to target a a booking rate of 85% plus, so there’s actually an ability to see in the dashboard, how many leads, you got, how many of you you marked as booked, and you can see what your average booking rate is, I really believe that if you can get that average booking rate higher than the competition, and you’re also playing the big game correctly, you’re going to be the preferential company in the rotation. So this is something we focused on, this is something we optimize for is shooting for an 85% Plus booking rate in the dashboard, I’m going to show you kind of how you see this and how it works. But I just wanted to hit the big picture first.

So number one is we want to dial in the profile. And again, if you go into the mobile app, or if you go into local service ads, you get to a screen that looks a little bit like this, there’s some very specific things you want to pay attention to.

Number one is you’ve got to set your budget. And again, this is going to break down to a weekly average that you have available to buy the leads.

I like to say open it up, right, even if you’re a small contractor, you know, and again, assuming you’ve been doing this for a little bit of time, like don’t just throw in 50 grand as your budget if you’ve never done it, but if you’ve been doing this for a little bit, I would say probably even double or triple your current budget. Because sometimes you have to have a bigger budget in order to be in the rotation. I’ve never seen like a large budget just obliterated through the system, right? Google is going to rotate it with other contractors, it’s going to get averaged over a weekly. But if we know that this is our lowest cost per lead, and it’s our highest probability closely, because they’re directional at the moment, we want to optimize and spend as much as we can here. So just want to open up the budget, I’m gonna encourage you be a little bit more aggressive probably than you are right now. Because as long as you’ve got a technicians that are available to go out in the field, you know, you’re gonna get a good ROI from these leads. Number two, is we want to make sure that we update the ad schedule. Really think about that, again, you know, when when is your customer typically looking right. And I know we get calls all throughout the day, we track this very closely for our for our clients, hundreds of clients, we get calls all throughout the day, but there’s a little bit of a concentration before 8am. And after 5:30pm, because the homeowner gets home, or they’re just about to start their day The thing is broken. And that’s when they have time to make that call to do that research to generate that opportunity. And so I think a big mistake most of us make is we’re just going to work in to set the schedule from nine o’clock until 4pm. And you’re leaving a lot of opportunity on the table. So we want to update that ad schedule.

You want to set the business bio, right. And you know, you don’t want to just type in there, you know, I’m top notch planning, right, like, use this opportunity to take some of the text from your website to really optimize it. I don’t think that there’s an algorithmic search function there. But the reality is, when your customer gets or that prospect gets to your profile, we want to have our best foot forward, we want strong messaging about who we are and what we do. And you know why we’re unique in the marketplace and why they should choose us against the competition. Don’t you know, don’t just fold this in, spend a little bit of time make sure that that bio makes sense. Select your job types. There’s not an infinite number of job titles, but really make sure that the things you do are the things that maybe are the things that lead into the higher transaction value, things that you want more of are being selected. So be strategic with the job type selections, set up the service areas. So that’s where you’re telling Google here’s the area that I want to take opportunities from, I often find

there’s a balance, right? If you go too wide, you’re going to be too far away from where the customers are searching. But you also don’t want to be too narrow, right? So just try and spend some time you can tell Google exactly what that service area is. Update the business hours we talked about with the with the budget, and then add photos. I think this is one of the really basic things that as I look at other local service ads, accounts that are set up, they’ve got like a logo, and then they’ve got maybe one or two stock images. This is your opportunity to stand out and local service ads. They let you upload

Old Photos. And so this is where I really believe you want to use personality based photos, picture the owner, picture the team picture of the trucks, like people want to do business with real people just like me to recommend on your websites, personality on offense is on authenticity sells. And so make sure you’ve you’ve maxed out that photo bucket like offload really, really high quality, relevant photos to who you are and what you do, so that you can stand out. So that’s what we’re going to do one dialing in the profile. Again, that’s right within the local service ads dashboard. Next thing we want to do is we got to mark the jobs is booked. Right. And I said before, I really think this is one of the key drivers that’s going to separate you from the competition is recognizing that when a lead comes in, you can click in. And there’s this little button here that you can say mark as booked, a lot of contractors are getting a lot of leads for local service ads. And nobody themselves or anyone on their team has ever logged into the platform, like they might look at it once a month and just say, hey, like what’s going on, you want to make sure that you’re marking your job booked. On a daily basis, you’re closing these loops. So the Google sees your contractor, you’re actually answering those phones, and the people that they’re sending your way are being served, right, because if they’re, if they’re booking with you, they’re being served, that’s a win for Google, it’s a win for the client, and it’s a win for you as the contractor. And so Google wants this data, right. And since most contractors aren’t doing it, this is a big opportunity for you to tap into that and, and just give them the data that they need. And that that and that they want.

Again, Google is going to rate responsiveness by how well you complete your jobs, we want to mark them as booked or scheduled, right, you’ve got that option within the system, you want to add the customers details. So that gives you the opportunity to tell you a little bit more about that customer and details about the job, you want to include the email address, this is where you’re going to be able to push out the review request.

And then you want to archive you know, keep it clean inside the system like you know, there’s going to be a an aggregate of leads, booked leads, you know, non responded leads, you want to make sure that you archive the non converted opportunities, just close them out, moving them out of the system.

So these are simple things, but they go a long ways in terms of the results that you’re going to do. Obviously, we want to deal with disputes. And so this is the leads that come in, that are outside the area that you know weren’t qualified that solicitation, we want to dispute them ASAP for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you can dispute it, that’s going to reduce your spend and give you more money to remain in the rotation for the weak. The other thing is it’s going to impact your booking ratio, right? If If three out of your 10 leads, were not legit, and you didn’t dispute them, your booking ratio is going to look 30% worse. So there’s a lot of reasons you want to you know, outside of just saving the money, you want to deal with your disputes, and you want to deal with them quickly to keep this to keep this nice and tight.

Again, you don’t get qualify, you don’t get charged for disqualified leads outside the area services not provided. Number four is we want to drive verified reviews. And I think a lot of people have a misconception in their mind about this particular aspect. Let me know in the comments here like a one, if you use some type of review automation platform, whether it’s pulse, Sam, review buzz, nearby now BirdEye. There’s, there’s so many tools, give me a one if you use one of these tools, and I’m a big fan of these tools, like you want to make sure a review request is going out after every service call you say hey, thanks so much for your business. Click here to write us a review. I’m not seeing any engagement. So like you told me like give me a two if you don’t use any review automation. Be surprised that that’s the case.

Okay, so what is done? You should like gobbling saying yeah, like, you want more reviews, it drives conversion, it drives

your rankings in the Google Map. But what I find is most contractors have their review automation dialed in to the place where they think Hey, podium says Rob Yeah, they think like, okay, that’s already taken care of I’m we’re doing review requests. Most of those review request platforms are going to drive reviews to Google or to Yelp or to Angie, which is good, you want that. But the reviews that are verified, are different, right. This means somebody came through the platform. They dialed in, they showed up on your on your queue here, and you can click ask for review. Those reviews are listed as verified reviews on local service ads. And so you want to make sure that you’re using that as the mechanism for the leads that come from local service ads, because more verified reviews is going to drive better rankings is going to drive better outcomes. Catherine says so it’s better to use the review link. For LSA than GMB. Yeah, in this particular

case because we want to feed Google the data that we booked the job. And we want verified reviews, the way to do that is through this process right here within the within the platform. And I can kind of show you guys a little bit further on how to do that. But again, number of reviews is a driver of your rankings in the LSAS. Right, if, if you’re got an open budget, you’ve got the right service area, you got the right time schedule, maybe you’re even manual bidding a little bit more than the rest of the competition. All other things being equal, the organizations that have high booking conversion rate, and that have lots of verified reviews are going to be the contractors that win the day, in the long term. Obviously, you’re going to provide great services always leverage the dashboard to drive your verified reviews by entering the name and the email address and hit that review request button. Again, that is a it’s a, it’s a little thing, but it’s a big part of it. So when you log into the into the platform, you see a dashboard like this, you see how many received and how many of you have requested the reviews for you’re gonna get that list of customers, as you as you kind of go through it. That’s where you want somebody on your team on a daily basis, marking the outcome and requesting the review.

And then it just pops up a little bubble like this would you put you need to ask them like what their email address is, what the name of the customer is, what the job was, what the location was sin, I can’t validate this. But I believe just the act of following this process gives Google more data as well, which is going to tell them that you’re actively really working the process, you’re trying to deliver good results for the for the leads that they’re sending your way. And it’s going to it’s going to act in your favor. And of course, customers will then write those reviews. And as you get more verified reviews, it’s going to drive better and better results. So again, Google verify job Google verify job. That’s what you want, you want like lots of those types of reviews, and not just the normal reviews that you would get from somebody going to your Google map listing and posting review. Okay, so on to number 5/5. And really important is your booking rate. So as you booked the jobs, if you come into the dashboard, and this is on the home screen, you see the leaves that you’ve been charged for, you see your budgeted spend. And over here, as you’re closing your jobs out, you’ll see number of books, number of appointments booked and your average booking rate, you want to look at that, I would say if you’re looking for KPIs key performance indicators, this would be one of the KPIs you want to keep an eye on. And what’s interesting is probably, you know, a high percentage of home service contractors don’t even look at this. And so if you look at their booking thing, it shows zero, because they’re not showing that the jobs were booked. And they’re not like closing the loop. And they’re not asking for verified reviews. So like right within the dashboard, I’ll see if I, if I have another screenshot here. This is just right on the overview screen, you see it right there. Within the reporting, it’s a little dashboard underneath that shows

the outcome. So you want to understand the reporting, you want to, you know, effectively how effectively you convert calls into service clients will impact your rankings over time, we’re shooting for 85% Plus conversion rates. Leon saying could be while we had him to give me leads, it might be part of the equation, right? Maybe you’re not spending enough, maybe you’re not converting and marking your jobs as complete, maybe your booking rate is 0%. Right. And that’s obviously a bad thing over time, and what you measure improves. So if you’re measuring this on a consistent basis, and you’re watching this on an ongoing basis,

it’s going to improve, right? And so measure it, manage it, you’re going to get more leads, you’re gonna get more sales, you’re gonna get better outcomes on Christian says on the Report tab, you’ll be able to toggle to a date range, and then look at the date range. So yeah, so once you click Reports, this is where you would set your date range, that’ll show you exactly what’s happening in the in the number of of book jobs and what that booking conversion ratio is.

Is this helpful? Give me one of the comments if it’s helpful. Hopefully, if I’ve covered at least one or two things that you can kind of, you know, sink your teeth into and say I see some additional ideas, we can leverage that. And I says very John says one, Rob says, Yep, okay, great.

So now that we’ve optimized the profile, and we’re doing the things Google wants us to do, the next thing is like how do we increase the lead flow, maybe you’re done all that maybe you’re like right on top of the ball, and you’re saying I want more leads, right? And I want to expand this whole process, a couple of things you can do.

Again, I don’t want to beat a dead horse but want to open up the budget, whatever you’ve got, spend more, right there’s always more that can be spent within reach

doesn’t increase the budget up number two is to expand the service area. Like if you’re capped out,

there’s going to be, you know, certain things you can’t get past but you can absolutely expand the service area and maybe show up in cities and towns that you’re not showing up for right now. Expand the job types really look closely, maybe at first, you just chose plumbing and drains if you’re a plumbing company, but there’s other job types that you can bid on. And so expand that to make sure you’re hitting all of the things that are relevant and useful for you. Number three, is really pay attention to the ads ad schedule. Again, you know, if you’re, if your ad schedule is limited to seven to four, there’s a lot of opportunity, just by expanding the ad schedule, as long as you have somebody that can answer the phones, close out every lead, right? I mean, I don’t want to beat a dead horse. But this is really important, this is going to help you increase the lead flow request reviews on every single job. And those are really the key things that are going to drive your results that are going to drive your outcomes. You know, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Right, you’ll look at it inside Google Local Service ads. And the dashboard looks like there’s four, four little screens that you can play with. And there’s only this much room. But the reality is, if you understand the nuance, and you start to really manage this on a consistent basis, there are things you can do to put a better foot forward to generate better results. And to really expand the lead volume that you get.

Hopefully, hopefully, this was helpful. You know, for a lot of you guys, maybe today was just I want to learn, I want to kind of get ideas on how this works. Hopefully some great takeaways. Some of you might be saying I want I’d like some help. It sounds like Josh and his team have a good process for this. I’d like some help. If that’s you, I’d love the opportunity to talk. We have a full service digital marketing program, right that we will manage your website, your SEO, your pay per click and everything. But obviously there’s a large cost to that, right. And there’s a lot a great return on investment. And if you’re interested in having us take over your entire strategy, we’d love to have that conversation because that’s what we’re all about. But we also recognize that some of you just want help with local service ads, like you’re just want someone that can manage this process for you. And so we do have a done for you local service ads management service that you can sign up for by going to plumber, SEO dotnet slash LS A looks like Christian already dropped it into the chat. I’ve got a QR code here in case anybody feels fancy, but it probably be hard to get to on my screen. But the bottom line is for this service, what we’ll do is everything I talked about here will manage for you. So the setup part is easy, like that’s that, you know, there’s just some follow through to be done. But we’re most contractors don’t have somebody that can diligently rate the calls beyond their every day, marking the outcomes of the jobs beyond their every day pushing the review request process. And then being strategically thinking about how do we optimize this budget? How do we increase the the outcomes. And so we try to price this very, very cost effectively, it starts at 549 per month for up to 75 leads through local service ads. There’s a setup fee. But for those of you that are interested in taking us up on this, now we waive the setup fee, so you just be 549 monthly as the volume increases, the price increases. And I think it’s just important to note that because the time that needs to go in to listen to recall, and some marking the outcome, and to doing that follow through obviously increases as the amount of work needs to be done. And so for those of you that are interested, again, it’s plumber, SEO dotnet slash LSA. We’d love to talk with you about that if that’s something you’re interested in.

Also, you know, if if kind of as you’re thinking about this, you know what I’d like to have Josh and his team evaluate what we’ve got look at our website and our SEO strategy, your paid search strategy. We do that complimentary. And it’s not just like a sales call, literally, our team will review your website will run a ranking report, we’ll look at the entire accelerated growth model and be able to tell you, hey, look, here’s where you’re not ranking. Here’s why your website’s not converting. Here’s what we could do differently with how you’re running your paid search. And if their opportunity to help you get to the target. We could talk about how we can work together, right but if not, you’re gonna get great value from that meeting. And so if you’d like to take us up on that you can go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule to get it’s complimentary meeting we’ll do a complete review of your online marketing. And we’ll we’ll talk with you about how we can help. Top notch says we already had a client in that market, that market may actually be available. And so if you’re open to having the conversation, we’d love the opportunity to chat. You’re right there was a little change in that in that particular organ.

integration.

So this is one piece of the accelerated growth model, right? If you think about it, we’re going to drive leads, we’re going to maximize conversion, we’re going to optimize results. Today, we went deep on one portion of paid search, which is local service ads.

If you really want to accelerate your growth, and really our model is built to help you triple your sales, regardless of if you’re a million or $10 million per year by dialing in these metrics.

Love to have that conversation with you about how we can help you take things to the next level. Again, plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule or you can call us 866-610-4647. It’s been amazing chatting with you guys today. Thank you so much for hearing me out letting me share some of our new insights on how local service ads works. Again, if you’d like some help with local service ads, specifically, you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash LS A.

That’s it for now. Thank you guys so much for your time today. Have an amazing afternoon, and I will see one on a future version of this. I look forward to talking with some of you guys real soon.

Thanks, everybody.