The 2020 Guide to Google Maps for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Service Contractors

Clients ranked in the three pack for the most competitive terms and some of the most competitive markets in the country. I’m also going to be making this very, very case study driven. So as opposed to just hitting a bunch of bullets, I’m going to pull up real clients ranked in very competitive markets. I’m going to show you their listings. I’m going to show you their websites, I’m going to talk about the specifics of what went into getting them ranked how we move them up the results from not ranking on the maps to ranking the first couple of results so that you get the ideas, right, okay, I need to do this, I need to do that. But you also get the strategies and the specific tactics that you could go back and try on your own if you wanted to. So that’s what we’re going to be covering on today’s session. Give me a Yep, give me a let’s do it. Give me a this sounds awesome. If you’re in comments, if you’re in for this, give me a thumbs up or a like if you’re watching this on Facebook. All right, let’s do it says Aaron Dominic says awesome, Charlie says yo Mike says Yep, okay, good. Let Let’s Let’s get this party started. So this session on Google Maps as part of our overall digital dominance method, right in the digital dominance method is everything you need to do to truly maximize your lead flow online. And there’s lots of different things right from your website to SEO to pay per click to social media, to you know, paying per lead per pay per lead services to all the way through to, you know, doing follow ups via email and nurturing your customer database. And this year, what we’re doing is one packing this digital dominance method step by step. And so if you go back to our website, plumber, SEO dotnet. And check out some of the previous content, you’ll kind of see we talked about how to set up your website to maximize conversion, and we talked about how to get ranked for the most important key terms we talked about, really how to leverage Google pay per click advertising demand. Maximize your lead flow. Today, we’re going to go deep on on Google Maps. So a couple ground rules before we get started. Just if you could, you know, you’re here, you’re alive, I’m live. Let’s give this your undivided attention. So let’s turn off the cell phones, let’s close the tab that we might have opened with Facebook on it. And if you’re a plumbing HVC, or home service business, and you’re serious about getting better results in 2020, you’re serious about getting ranked in the Google Maps this next 60 to 90 minutes is going to have a massive impact. I’m going to give you some information that most people don’t have that you can plug into to get significantly better results. And I’m going to prove it to you. Again and again. And again, how impactful this can be in your in your business.

So just

close everything out. Give this your undivided attention. And so we’re going to talk about on today’s session, we’re gonna talk about the latest changes in the Google Map logistics, right? It’s constantly changing. And I’m gonna I’m gonna share some of the latest things you need to know about, I’m going to unpack the five biggest issues that could be preventing you from ranking. Right there. You know, there were things that worked extremely well three years ago that at today’s day and age could potentially get you kicked off Google Maps altogether. So I’m going to talk about the big five gotchas that I’m seeing kind of how to get around them. And then I’m going to talk about our proven model for getting ranked in the three pack. So those are the first three listings on Google Maps, what you actually have to do, how you can move the needle and how you can win the day even in competitive markets, even when there’s a massive company, you know, or massive companies in your market competing for those same listings. I’m gonna I’m going to share some of our favorite tools to automate the heavy lifting, lifting, right, there’s there’s specific activities that really move the needle, and there’s a slow way and a fast way to do everything. So I’m going to share some of the tools To kind of shortcut the process to really amplify the results. Sounds good. I would love to hear like what what are you most interested in learning about on today’s session just in comments. Let me know what you’re most excited about learning how to do. Like, Mike had a question here looks like Christian already answered, answered. Asian Ramirez wants to know how to get ranked in the three pack. Um, let’s see. Awesome. Thanks for being interactive, guys. I appreciate it. Dominic says how to get ranked in the three pack barber says rankings Josh how to hit the top three. Beautiful. All right. So that’s what that’s what we’re going to cover. And that’s what you guys are excited about. So that’s a win. Just real quick. Who am I and why should you be listening to me? Obviously, you’re on this webinar so you have some context as to who I am and what we do. But I’m Josh Nelson. I’m the founder and CEO of plumbing and HVAC SEO. We are Google certified partners. I’m the author of The Complete Guide to internet marketing and had triple your sales. We’re getting your internet marketing right for plumbing and HVC contractors actively involved in PCC que se next our service roundtable spoken in a lot of the industry events and associations, a lot of my content and articles and things are published in the in the industry magazines. But I’d say more important than, than all of that stuff. Really the reason you should listen is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVDC and electrical business owners across the country and some of the most competitive markets. And I’ve been able to help them move the needle from, you know, not ranking, not getting lots of results online to being the dominant player in their market, getting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of calls. In the top of the of the Google organic and map listings, and so this is just some pictures of some of the clients we work with. But I say that because what I’m going to share with you isn’t based on theory, it’s not like I read a book On Google Maps, and I’m like, okay, here’s some cool things you can do with Google Maps, like this is time tested, and us working with countless plumbing hbic and other home service contractors. And figuring out what actually works and what actually gets them rank and what actually gets the phone ringing. What actually keeps the trucks running. So you can kind of affect what I’m gonna share with you is based on real world experience, and you’re going to see real world case studies and examples as we go. And this is what we do at plumbing, SEO, we’re on a mission to help 1000 plumbing HVDC companies, electrical companies, triple their sales over the next over the next 10 years. And so I’ve got a team of 30 full time employees at the office, some of them most of them working from home now with COVID-19. And this is what we do all day, day in and day out, setting up websites for planning HPC companies, making sure they’re built to convert, making sure that the strategies are in place to get ranked and truly matter. Maximize the lead flow. And so if at any point you’d be interested in talking with us about how we can help you do this, right, some of us want information. And that’s awesome. Otherwise, we’ll implementation, right? We want, okay, these guys know exactly how to do this. I just want to hire them and get the result. So if you ever get to that place where Oh, Kayla, why don’t I just hire Josh and his team to do this for me, we’d love the opportunity to talk right and Christian is on here and chat. If you happen to be watching this in Facebook, just give us a call, go to plumber, SEO dotnet and hit the schedule button. We’ll get on the call. And we’ll talk about how we can help. So that’s my mini plug before we dive into the content. If there’s any way we can help, we’d love the opportunity. This is what we do, right? We do this stuff for plumbing HBC home service companies. So

before we dive all the way in, the key question we have to answer before we even start is does Google Maps even matter right? The algorithms constantly Changing. Google has moved the organic listings down, right? You know, I think I’ve got a slide here. But at the end of the day, it used to be the maps dominated everything. And then it just kept getting shifted further and further down. And so if that’s the case, does it even matter? But maybe we should just focus on Google Local Service ads. Maybe we should just focus on Google Pay Per Click right? Is it even worth like I, Eleanor always said this, when we were working closely together, she always said is the is the juice worth the squeeze? Right? Is it even worth the squeeze here with with Google Maps? And I’m going to tell you that yes, the results have changed around Yes, the Google Maps have shifted down the page, but the reality is bowl lion’s share of searchers still click the organic non paid listings when looking for your services. So the statistics tells us that 44% of the calls come directly from people clicking on Google Maps, so they bypass local service ads, they bypass the paid search listings, and they go straight to the to the maps the organic listings 7070. Plus go to organic in general 44%. Click on Google Maps making it the number one place, people look and click and call when they need Home Services. I’d love to hear from you in the chat like you guys are all consumers of these services as well. Maybe not plumbing, maybe not HPC. But if you need to pull repair, if you need to have the carpet clean if you need to have someone fix the garage door, when you run a search, do you click on the local service ads? You click on maps? Or do you click on organic? I’d love to know where do you go to like Angie’s List or thumbtack or something like that? Put in comments here for me just so we can kind of do a little a little cross section because we are all users of these of these resources. What do you click on? Where do you go when you search? I know me personally. The first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to look at the Google Map listings. To look at who has the most reviews, I’m going to check those companies out, they’re going to be my first pass. And if I can’t find a qualified contractor there, I’m probably going to start to look at some of the aggregators, right? Some of the aggregators like Angie’s List, or thumbtack, and then my very last option is going to be something like home advisor, where I know I’m going to get a bunch of bids from non qualified folks.

Let’s see.

Maps, organic maps, maps, maps, Dominic map listings, because I know they’re local. I click on Google Maps, I click on the organic cuz I’m feeling like the best of the best of the underdogs and get that. Excellent. So I don’t know if you guys can all see the chat because a lot of you guys chat into chat into the panelists. But most people are saying they click on maps, right. So the answer is, I’m pretty sure if that’s how we all cumulatively feel maps really do matter. I’m going to prove it to you here. One of the companies we work with is is Nick’s go plumbing. And so they’re based in Cincinnati, Ohio, told you I’m gonna share real examples here. So this is Nick scope plumbing. They’re full service plumbing contractor, primarily residential, but a little bit of commercial. And we’ve been able to get them really well placed in the three back so if we go Mason, Ohio plumber, which is where their offices you can see here number one spot in the top three listings, and I could I could rifle through about 20 terms that we monitor really closely plumbing, drain cleaning, Water Heater Repair, trenchless sewer replacement, and everything in between. But really, what I want you to see is they rank on maps, right. And if you look at their overall internet marketing strategy, because Google Maps fits in as part of your overall internet marketing strategy, this was about a year back, they were spending about $2,749 a month in online marketing. So that’s management fees for SEO management fees for Pay Per Click the actual paid spend, right? They generate 421 leads per month, but this is on a monthly scale. So if you divide that out to about $6 53 cents per lead, and then if you look at where the leads were coming from about 152, from organic, I mean, somebody clicked on the non paid listing, got to their website, dial the number 36. Budget a little bit lower in this particular case, but each and that’s what I have circled here directly from Google Maps. So if they weren’t ranking on Google Maps as well as they do, if they weren’t showing In that three pack, there’d be about 183 missed calls monthly. I’m not talking about quarter I’m not talking about a year. I’m talking about month in and month out. And so I update the slides as we go. So I did this webinar version of it last year around this time, these were the numbers. Fast forward to today. These numbers have increased pretty significantly. Now they’ve increased their budget a little bit 470 4744 572 leads to 16. from organic, little more from Google paid search, right? 128 and 196 from Google Maps, right. So I really just want to draw the correlation that if you didn’t, if you didn’t have a play for Google Maps optimization, if you were just focused on pay per click advertising, your cost per lead wouldn’t be significantly higher, and you’d be leaving a lion’s share of your highest quality, lowest cost per lead opportunities on the table. Does that make sense? Is it good to see like some real world examples like this? Give me a mixed answer yes or something plus one in your comments if it’s helpful to see some real world examples

I get some ones coming I got some yeses coming in. Excellent. Okay good thank thank you for the for the verification that it’s that simple. Okay, now I’m going to show you a company we work with in

Buffalo

Buffalo, New York. heating and cooling. I typed in Buffalo plumber,

plumbing

or Heater Repair.

So you can see they come up

he what the strategy is and how We optimized the website, how we optimize the content, how we optimize the listings to get these rankings. Well, now I just want you to see the impact, right? Because you need to know the impact if you’re going to invest the energy if you’re gonna invest the time. So they ran out of key terms outside of plumbing.

On a $10,000 expense with slightly larger company, slightly larger budget about $9,053 right here in the middle in total investment 684 leads divide that that’s about an average of $13 and 24 cents per lead, up to 123 from organic hundred and 69 from pay per click, and then 148 from Google Maps. So there again, these Google Map listings hundred and 48 leads pretty significant impact in terms of in terms of results. Now fast forward, we look forward now to this last month is July 23, you know, current COVID situation at all about a 6000 spend 1056 track calls average of $6 50 cents, talking about 409 Google Maps, organic calls 296, PPC, and 285 from Google Maps. So again, results are a function of really dominating the the three pack for a host of different key terms in the in the service area. So here’s ladies there plumbing HVC electrical, big brand in Fargo, North Dakota, I’m not going to pull up the website and do all that I don’t want to go you know, too too long with with the examples of case studies. But so here’s them, you know, they rank for a lot of different key terms last year 1177 leaves view the internet, no paid search organic, all brand based 850 through 835 directly from Google Maps. And if we jump to Again, 2020 right now, last month 1408 calls via Google Maps. So I mean, I think these numbers, if you look at how they’ve increased, part of it is if you get your internet marketing strategy, right, and you get an overall strategy that’s giving you ranked, that has a website that Converse, that’s tapping into all of the different channels, your lead volume is going to grow. Even if you’re large, you’re going to continue to see an increase, but also tells me that as we sit right now, in the middle of COVID-19, there’s there’s two ways of looking at it. There’s so contractors that are saying, you know, can we shut school shut, unsafe environment, and they let their mindset go to a place of fear. Oh, man, I’m gonna have to let guys go. I can’t be you know, continuing to advertise, you know, businesses down do three examples that just in the last 30 days have generated, you know, 500 plus leads directly to the internet. So if you can keep your mindset in the game right now, you’re your customer, the consumer still needs your services. Matter of fact, they need your services more than ever before. So stay in the game, the opportunity is there. And I hope that I’ve made a really strong case that when you optimize your Google Map listings, you get ranked in the top three results, it can have a massive impact on the number of leads the number of sales and really the growth within your within your business. So one last example I have to give an HPC example because I showed a couple of plumbing I showed a couple plumbing HPC and electrical on this one specifically HPC and it’s Cardinal heating and cooling out of Sun Prairie Wisconsin. So Sun Prairie AC repair, heating repair, AC contractor, indoor air quality, they Come up for almost all of this stuff. And if you look at the overall spectrum of their online marketing, about 12,000, spend 1077 leads about an $11 and 13 cent average cost per lead for HBC screamingly good 300 on Google organic 263 from pay per click, and 420 directly from the Google Maps. So I can see in fatica Lee without any question, yes. Google Maps, drives calls, and you can’t rely on Pay Per Click alone. Matter of fact, you can’t rely on local service ads on Google guaranteed listings alone, which a lot of people I’m having these conversations every day, want a plumbing HVC home service contractor, so Oh, Google, guaranteed, you know that I can show up in the three in that three area up on the top. And that’s all that matters. Well, as we’re seeing it, yes. It’s a great play. Right? Your average cost per lead. There’s very affordable. It’s wonderful, right? What if that’s all you did, you’d be missing out on a lot more of search, you’d be missing out a lot more opportunity that would be missing in your business. So, again, I

just want to hear from you guys helpful to see a couple of examples to kind of restate the importance and the value of getting ranked in the top three, give me a yes. helpful. One, something just so I can make sure we’re on the same page or Josh says, great case studies. Albert says very helpful. Aaron says yes. Steve says one. Stats mobile to desktop, I can look that up for you. Most people are searching this stuff on their desktop now. Um, I mean, from their from their mobile phones. So yeah, and they’re clicking right on the Google Map, click the call, right. Um, as a matter of fact, that’s where that’s where these numbers track from. Somebody was asking. Somebody was asking I apologize and see it. Are you putting it tracking number on Google Maps in order to track this information, and we put, we put a tracking number on the website. So we can track source. Here’s what somebody clicked on our organic listing, they see a tracking number that tracks this organic. If they click and they came from pay per click, we can have it swapped to a different number, a different set of numbers. So we can track the number of calls from Google pay per click. And these these calls are literally from mobile device clicks. So within Google GMB or Google My Business and who was it, somebody on here and I’m glad to have you with us. Sherry is at Google My Business expert correcting my terminology on it I you know, the terminology is not that important to me. But the the click, you can run reports and see okay, how many people clicked the call, that’s 420 people that clicked right from Google Maps from their mobile phones. There’s probably more than dial directly off the Google My Business listing. So Good stuff. Okay. So now let’s get into it like what what has changed with Google My Business? What’s changed with these Google? Google listings and how to get ranked in the Google Maps in your in your service area. The first thing we all know, and this is now actually a relatively old news, it went from seven results to three, there was one time where the Google Map listings took up most of the page, right, and now it’s just three. So you have to be better, you have to be more competitive, you have to have more reviews, you have to have better optimization to be in the top three. But being in the top three now carries more weight than ever did, because now instead of competing and showing up and taking up real estate in that map area with 700 other people, there’s only three choose from, right. And if you get more reviews, if you’ve got a better optimized profile, the chances are they’re going to call you as opposed to competition. Google is now serving map, paid ads within the map results, I’ll show you what this looks like how you can tap into it. Google Local Home Services live in almost every major market across the country. I’ll talk a little bit about local service ads, we’ve got a whole deep dive session we’re going to be doing next month on how to win with Google Local Service ads, or Google local services or Google Home Services. We’re going to really unpack that. But this is how the how the results changed, right? It used to be over here on the left, we had all of these map listings, and now it’s, it’s down to the top three,

right.

We’ve got the guaranteed listings in play, which is what’s happening along the top those top three results. And there’s a very specific process for getting in there. And it’s impacting the search results right now, instead of all paid ads, and then a couple of Google organic and then organic listings now We got local service ads, the backpack and the organic results. So without like going into a long explanation on Google Local Service ads, this is something you can sign up for, I would recommend, go back, or actually send us a message and say, hey, I want to learn more about local service ads, how to get ranked and local service ads, how to compete, how to win, we’ve got some great information, great resources on that that route will walk you through how to claim it, how to optimize the listing, how to optimize the campaign, and then most importantly, how to optimize for ranking. Because if you can’t supply the leads, right, you have to be the most competitive provider to even be in the rotation for those top three results that come on local service ads. The other big change that’s happening with Google Map listings, is Google has massively crackdown on fake listings. So spam was a massive issue on the maps Especially in Home Services, plumbing, HVDC, electrical, locksmiths, etc. Basically what people were doing was, and I’m sure maybe you did this, maybe didn’t. People were claiming their aunt’s house, they were claiming their cousin’s house as as their business location. They were setting up peal boxes and claiming those as their location. So they can have little Google Map listings all over the area, right? And then they would claim those listings and then they would go in and they would optimize them. And then they would build citations back structured citations back to those fake listings. And it was a great game, watch what worked, right. But since 2015, they’ve knocked almost 70% of those listings out. And what what what Google really wants to see is businesses that have a real physical location where they’re claiming to be on google maps where somebody can come out and see them, and so there’s a massive competitive advantage to be A plummeting HVC home service company with a physical office in the city where you want to rank, like with the showroom, or or you know, with at least a warehouse that you parked trucks. Because when you have that authentic footprint, and you’ve got the citations around it, and you’ve got the reviews around it, like we’re going to be talking about, those are the listings that tend to win the day, right? So real physical location. So here’s what’s hurting you or maybe hurting you with how you rank on Google Maps right now. The first is you need a real or real office in the city that you’re targeting. And there’s lots of things you can do to kind of expand it a tad. But the reality is, if you’re in Miami and you want to rank for Miami plumber, Miami plumbing, Miami Drain Cleaning. You need a physical office in Miami to the extent where you know if you’re in Little Rock, and you want to rank in North little rock that can be challenging, right you need a real physical address. In the city that you want to rank, again, there’s lots of little things you can do to kind of move it. But for the most part, you know, the guys that are going to win long term have real physical address, we have trucks parked, potentially with a showroom where somebody could come in and see, you know, she’d see the shelf with the equipment, right or see a showroom, if, if that applies to your business. If you try to spam Google at some point with fake locations, that’s probably impacting your real location. And this was a big game, and there’s still people that are still behind that they’re still trying to do this. They’re still trying to claim those ups stores and the peel boxes and Aunt Linda’s house. And if you did that, you might have a real location, right? You might be one of the top dogs in your area. But if you did, that, those listings will be dragging you down across the board potentially. And so if that’s the case, you want to go in, you want to find those fake listings, you want to close them You want to eliminate the structured citations around them to have a much better probability of ranking over time. The other thing that could be hurting you would be inconsistency of your name, address phone number. So you get different variations of your company name. And what I’ve seen a lot of companies do on this front is their name will be Bob’s plumbing, or Bob’s heating, cooling, let’s just say.

And somebody read something somewhere on a on a blackhat. Seo site that said, Well, if you want to rank a map, what you should do is change your company name to Bob’s heating and cooling in Dallas, right, or Bob’s heating, cooling down so that we know you get the city plus the name of the company Yay. That could hurt you like because it’s inconsistent with the authentic name, address phone number of your company. Also you get a different permutations of your company name, different permutations of your phone number, right. And to the extent you’ll have a consistent name, address phone number on all of the main listings, like your Angie’s List, and your City search in your Yelp calm and the hundreds of other online directory listings and source sites that could potentially be dragging down your rankings on the Google Map listings. And again, you know, spamming your name into the, into the categories, right? Google has a handful of categories that you can pick on Google Maps. Stick with the basic categories. Don’t overdo it. Don’t spam it, right. If you get some issues like this, you want to make sure that you’ve you’ve got it nice and tight. So Mike’s asking a really important question. And it’s important, and he’s saying, Well, if you’re using tracking numbers on your website, doesn’t that hurt your ability to rank on maps, so I’m just going to type in Orlando and this is shamrock Plumbing and Drain Cleaning. Right number one on maps. Number one organically

talking my

slightly different If you set the location to Orlando, but here’s the here’s the deal. He ranks number one on Google Maps, I’ve showed you a bunch of companies that are ranked number one, Google Maps. This is a rotating number, right? But what’s consistent is the way that his name address phone numbers referenced this number, this company name and the address associated with it. All Windermere garden suite eight is like that across the internet. So you can use tracking numbers on your website, as long as the main number is listed somewhere in the footer that way Google can match to it. What you want to do is each of your directories you want to have consistency of each of those across your online directory listings. What I don’t advocate for is using one number on Google a different number on Yelp, a different number on angie’s list that can create some lack of consistency in your name, address, phone number, you want to keep that as consistent as possible. And what we what we do will oftentimes In order to make sure that we can track because we don’t want to lose the track, we want to see how many how many calls came from these online directories directly versus once they get to the website. We’ll use a, a tracking number that’s uniform. It’s only used across the online directory listings. So we can really have consistency of the name, address phone number, and, you know, still be able to track the results. So Mike, did that help to that kind of answer that question for you a little bit? Yes, cool. Sweet. Okay. So then let’s talk about what we need to do. To get ranked, I’m gonna I’m going to share our very simple four step process. And like anything else in the world, there’s an 8020 principle that applies. How many of you are familiar with the 8020 principle? The Pareto principle as they call it, yes. In 20 something Tell me if you get it, okay. What the prayer principle or the 8020 principle tells us is 20% of the activities in anything, generate 80% of the results. And so there’s a million things you can do to rank on Google Maps from, you know, the basics. I’m gonna be teaching you to going deep with like geo tagging images, and doing all kinds of cool stuff like that. But the reality is, if you can get the fundamentals I’m going to show you dialed in, that will carry you most of the way. And in most of the cases, like I just showed you shamrock plumbing. He’s not the big dog in that area. He’s dominant in his rankings, but there are massive companies in Orlando that are exponentially bigger than him, but he’s won because we’ve really dialed in this three step strategy I’m gonna be sharing with you right now. So the first is we want to make sure that we’ve claimed and properly optimized for Google My Business listing, you know, there’s certain little things you can do consistency of the name, address, phone number, adding photos and pictures, getting the right category selected, having a quality description, posting into Google posts on a consistent basis. Yep, you can do that. And you want to optimize it to the fullest extent possible. The next thing you want to do is you want to make sure that you’ve got lots of structured citations, references of your company’s name, address, phone number we’re talking about before, like we’re you’re literally index knows, you’re in axiom, you’re in magic yellow, you’re in Angie’s List your local.com you’re on homeadvisor. You’re in all these places. So when Google looks to say, who’s the top plumbing company in Buffalo, New York, they can see that there’s 297 plumbing HVC companies in that market. They need to see like who should be in three pack. Right? their algorithm has to figure that out and what they’re doing Looking for is relevancy. They’re looking for proximity, and they’re looking for authority. And so if they can see that you’re not just on a website, but that you’re in a bunch of different places, and you’re listening

those places

in the exact same way so that they can match it as the same company that really helps to tell Google that you’re the most authoritative plumbing company in that particular market. And then really, the third key element thinking really well on Google Maps is online reviews, right, all other things being equal. You’ve got 279, plumbing and HVC companies that you’re competing with. And let’s just say 30 of you have a real location in the city. You have a solid website, you’ve got consistent references to your company’s name, address and phone number. You’ve got links, we’re gonna talk about off page strategies to build up your authority. But let’s say all things equal along with Those lines, it’s going to be the online reviews that have the biggest impact in terms of how you rank and in terms of how you convert, right? Because it’s not just about ranking, just ranking on Google Maps doesn’t really mean you’re going to get that many more calls. Because if you think about the psychology of your consumer, what are they doing, they’re searching to find somebody that can solve their need. Right? And then they want to find someone that’s going to be reliable. Somebody, they can trust somebody that’s not going to rip them off. And they can read some of that on your website. But for the most part, they’re going to they’re saying, Okay, I need a plumber in Orlando. This search right here, and they’re seeing shamrock. They’re seeing dream Genie. They’re seeing Emerald, they’re seeing Frank gay, right, they’re seeing all these companies. And at the end of the day, the ones that come up with top, obviously, we’re going to get more eyeballs, but it’s going to be the the ones that have where they can read, okay, let’s get 300 reviews. Well, people are saying great things. And these look like legitimate reviews, this drives conversions. This drives people clicking, calling you directly bypassing the paid search listing bypassing the Google guarantee and calling your company directly. So I’m saying that this has a big impact not just on, on your ranking, but also on how well your Google Map listing converts, costs, leads, book jobs, revenue for your business. So we’re gonna talk about some specific strategies for generating consistent reviews. Then you’ve got on an off page SEO, so search engine optimization, how you set up your website, where you put your title tags, how you set up the content, how you set up your name, address, phone number on the website itself, and then how you build the authority and structured citations out of just these online directory listings to really move the needle in terms of how Well, you rank.

So

I’ve talked for like 15 minutes here just on some some fundamentals on how to set up your website, how to set up your Google My Business listing from you like what’s been most helpful so far, we’re gonna go deeper, we’re getting quite a bit deeper. But from what we covered here, this simple four step process, what’s been most helpful? what resonates with you so far? Trying to change the primary. Okay, I don’t know what that means. tracking number or putting a tracking number in the Google Map listings? Yep. Depends, you know, if you’re ranking well, and you’ve got a track number in there, that’s that’s fine. Mike says how important the nap is the name, address and phone number and having lots of structured citations. Artists, you’ve helped me understand all of these four different types.

Good.

Let’s see Carolina. Learn how to optimize the GMB listing. Okay, cool. So as it relates to claiming and optimizing listings, I don’t want to go super super tech, but I want to give you some specific things you can kind of sink your teeth into, obviously, as the owner of plumbing at AC company’s home service companies, you’re not necessarily an internet marketer, right? You may not be doing the website, you may not be doing the content, you probably aren’t setting up and claiming directories. But I’m going to still recommend that you have access to your Google My Business account. So whether somebody else set up for you or not, you want to be able to log in to Google My Business and double check the settings to see the reviews to kind of make sure that everything’s structured correctly. So I’m going to give you a piece of homework. Whether you’re working with us or working with somebody else, working with a big company or working with the kid across the street. Ask them to a login or ask them to make you ads In that you can see your Google My Business listing, I think it’s really important. The next thing is make sure that your company name on Google, my business is just your company name. So again, if you’re building plumbing, make sure it just says bills plumbing, and nothing extra. And a lot of cases Google has already gone through and taking whatever spam you know, name you might have put in there and try to make it match to what your authentic name is. But it’s always good to check. Make sure that you’ve got a website address on your Google My Business listing, I’m always shocked at how often we look and it’s got the name, address, phone number, it’s got reviews, but they never set the link up to their to their website. That’s that’s a missed, um, use a local number, right? In Home Services. I don’t care if you cross three counties. I don’t care if you cross the entire state. When it comes to your local my business listing, you want to use a local area code number So in Miami, there’s two area codes, there’s 76. And there’s 305. If you’ve got an 800 number in there, I’m going to highly recommend you switch that to local for a couple reasons. First of all, for Google Maps, it seems more relevant that you’ve got a local number than an 800 number. But from your customers perspective, everybody wants to feel like they’re calling the guy down the street. That’s why they’re looking on Google Maps they’re really interested in in proximity, right, you may serve there, you may have a tech that’s right in their backyard. If there’s an 800 number, they’re going to feel like oh, this is a national conglomerate, and they’re not that local. So highly recommend if there’s an 800 number in there, switch it to a to a local number. The next is don’t use a peel box or a UPS Store.

And this

isn’t Linda’s address, like use a real physical office. Ideally, your warehouse or your showroom. If you don’t have that I would recommend investing in a physical base, at least to park some trucks, at least to have some equipment in the city where you want to rank. going to take you some time, right? If you’ve got like a new location, it takes time, it’s just like setting up a new website, I set up a brand new domain, I’ve got to build authority for that day donating, I’ve got a given index, and it’s changing a dress or you add a brand new address on Google Apps, it’s going to take time for it to have enough authority to rank. But at least that’s better than having a peel box or a UPS Store. To me that’s like building your foundation on sand. It might rank and listen, I know that you can find examples in your market probably as someone ranking on Google Maps with a fake location. But it is built on a foundation of sand, which just means at any minute, Google’s manual review team could see it, recognize it as a fake location. And no matter what you’ve done to that point, you’re not ranking on maps and you’re never going to rank on maps again. So It’s much better to be in a real location with lots of real citations with lots of real Google online reviews where your bill is going to stand the test of time. The next thing you want to do is you want to upload photos. Google gives you the ability to upload a profile picture pictures of your staff, pictures of your trucks, pictures of your equipment. What I’ll say we’re finding works best on your Google GMB listing. You can you can put all kinds of stuff, Authenticity, just like on your website, real pictures of the team real pictures of yourself, rip like don’t even put a picture of your truck. Nobody cares about your truck. What they do care about is logo technicians, even if it’s just you, or if it’s a team of five versus a team of 50. Get the pictures of the team get the pictures of the tech at the home with a smiling customer. These are the kinds of things that show authenticity. If you’re involved in your local community. If you’re doing networking you events, you’re going to be an eye, you’re putting on some type of charity, you know, activity that you’re a part of. These are the kind of pictures that people want to see that they’d like to see that really resonate Well, in the real world, less implementing an HPC, less about the cool faucet issue installed. Well, that’s about the high end toilet that you installed, even though that’s relevant. It’s not that interesting from a conversion perspective. And then you want to make sure that your hours of operation and your service area is nice and tight, right hours of operation will tell you, let’s just say, and this is something you really want to think about. Let’s just say your office is only open from 7:30am to 4pm. And then it closes and that rolls over to a call center. Right? You have the choice to set within Google My Business or your Google Maps listing to say we’re only open from 730 to four or to show 24 seven. If you To show that you’re closed after four, then you’re not going to be showing up on Google Maps at that time, or you’ll show up, but Google will show you as closed and no one’s going to call you during that time. So I think as long as you’ve got someone available to answer the phone, those are your hours of operation, even if so it’s still called a 10. You’re not gonna dispatch a technician, but you’ll just be able to answer that call and potentially dispatch somebody for tomorrow, I would still mark that as 24 hour service because you get someone available to answer the phone. So just some things to think about in terms of how you set up your Google My Business listing. And I’ll share these slides with you. This is just a back end of Google My Business right here. You know, this is where you would upload photos. This is where you click info you add your photos. You want pictures of the authentic trucks, you want pictures of what’s going on. You can see this company 7000 plus views. You want to have posts that are getting posted on a you know, at least a week. weekly basis that way your your GMB listing is being updated on a consistent steady basis, you want to make sure that your your pin is verified, right. So there’s a process here, ideally, have somebody manage that for you don’t try and verify the listing yourself. But if you verified it, it’s going to have that little verified check on it put the pictures of pictures of the team over 5000 views of their team, right, and this was in a very short window of time, less views are going to come for your logo, less views are going to come for things like that. It’s just not really all that relevant.

And then pay attention to the insights most people don’t realize, once you log into Google My Business, you know, you can see home info, photos, reviews, where you can check all your reviews, and then insights, insights will tell you, you know, who see your listing who saw on maps versus directly in the organic listings. And then how many people actually called you from Google Maps. And so that’s what we that’s what we track on our end in order to pull that into our reporting. How many people call from the Google My business listing. So a couple other best practices here, update your photos and add them on a consistent basis. So don’t just set it and forget it. Like there’s something to be said for logging in and updating a new picture right on a consistent basis as you can rotating it. Right, keep it relevant. Don’t start loading just garbage pictures of you know, your the back of your truck or pictures of your guy underneath the sink, like keep the images relevant, but update them on a consistent basis. Take Team photos on a consistent basis. This gives you stuff to put out on social media as well. It gives you stuff to put out on email blasts, it gives you stuff to load up into your website, what updated right and keep it consistent. You want to be leveraging Google posts at least once every 90 days. I like to see it done every week. That way you’re getting stuff posted on a consistent basis. Something that I think gets missed often with Google Maps is responding to reviews. Right? Like people are posting reviews on your Google My Business listing. So here’s shamrock, right? Thousand, almost 1997. Most people have these reviews, and they just sit on addressed, right? Once you want to do is you want to log into these reviews and post responses to them. Hey, thanks for the review, hey, really appreciate your business, I really appreciate the opportunity to serve you. And you can come up with a 10 to 15 semi canned responses and and just have a rotation of responses to the reviews that are happening, I think shows you as a more proactive provider and it shows with someone that’s paying attention to what’s going on. And then there’s questions marks within Google My Business. You want to kind of seed some questions in there answer some questions. I think that has an impact on how your website or how your Google My Business listing links and comes up. So those are just some best practices on optimizing your Google My Business hopefully that was helpful. Any key insights in here? I know Sherry’s been adding stuff on a consistent basis. Um, yep. She’s chiming in. No virtual offices. No co working spaces. Yep. Hundred percent. I just want to make sure I don’t leave any questions behind it. We’ll keep going here in a second. So Mike’s asking if you’ve got an 800 number in your in your GMB, what should you do? I mean, you always want to check, there’s an outside chance they’re already ranking with that. And if that’s the case, you leave it right. But if they’re not ranking, it could be something that’s holding them back, right. So I would find their main company number and probably switch to that and have that be what’s listed across the web. That’s going to be the most authoritative phone number and get that checked out. Josh was asking, easy way to check. Um, yeah, it’s a good point here. Sure. And this might be technical, but You can add it as a secondary number. So use the 800 number as the secondary number in the main company number as the main number. That way, you still got that 800 number in there, it still matches to something that might be out there and citations. And that’s a good way to set up your tracking as well. Josh wants to know about a cool source to see how your your listings are showing up. I’m going to get to that right now. I’m actually going to give you a free tool where you’ll be able to type in your company name, address, phone number, and it’ll show you where there’s inconsistency where there’s duplicate listings, where there may be an issue, so hang with me, I’m going to share that right

now.

So step one claim optimize your Google My Business listing. Step two, you want to build the citations and the consistency right you want to have lots of listings, and you want to focus on the top 50 like online directory sites, the ones everyone knows like Yelp and Angie’s List and city search and homeadvisor and any local plumber, but then you also want to look for tier two type listings, like the local business directory, the niche specific directory, those people carry a lot of weight. And they can actually be the determining factor that give you a little bit more authority than than the competition. So get lots of citations on the spectrum of sites, make sure that you’re using the same name, address phone number across all of them. And then pay close attention to duplicate listings. This happens all the time, you’ll have two or three listings on Google My Business, now you’ve got duplicates, and you’re at risk of Google thinking any one of the three could be fraudulent, you’re at risk of one of them getting a bunch of reviews and the other ones getting shut down. But you also want to look for duplicated information on the secondary sites like yellow pages. I see sometimes companies have four or five listings on yellow pages, or they’ve got misinformation on some version of a Yelp listing. You want to find all of those in consistencies and consolidate them as much as possible. Make sure that that name, address phone or profile is extremely accurate and extremely tight. One of the key things to get to the root of bad listing information is the data aggregators, right? There are aggregators, there’s really four main ones factual axiom info city and info group and new star. And like these, these companies aggregate data, they sell it off to advertisers, but they also has what is known as like the main name, address, phone number, contact details for your company. And so oftentimes, if you haven’t set up these data aggregators, there could be one that has misinformation, because of, you know, because of how you incorporated back in 2007, you know, or because some SEO guy set you up with a fake listing, right, and it got picked up in a data aggregator. And then what those data aggregators do is they push out to hundreds of other sites that leech off of them for data that they can serve into the online world. rectory sphere. So what you want to do is you want to get to those data aggregators, all four of them, get them updated with the correct name, address phone number. That way you can

you can kind of

cut off the misinformation that might be spread across the internet and, and really get it all corrected, right? So pay attention to these data aggregators, if you’re not familiar, what they are some of my favorite citation tools to get online directory listings, and then to clean up directory listings, and to go out and like kind of simplify your whole process. There’s bright local, a great tool for your name, address, phone number, citation management, white spark advice, local has some great tools for directory listings, Moz, local, and then you know, really my favorite is is Yext, and they’re all kind of the big bad bear of the local directory listings industry. But the fact is they’ve got all of the API’s into the most important ones. Mind directories. So if you think about,

if you think about the 8020 principle, right, there’s 20% of these online directories that are the most authoritative. yelps, and the Angie’s List and the city searches and the map quests. And so the beauty of of Yext is that you can beat yourself in the accident. If you work with us, we know we can manage react profile, if you don’t know, it’s a great tool to use, because you can opt in in one place, have duplicate suppression across a lot of the most important sites. And then you’ve also got quick updates, like if you’re doing this manually, like we did for a long time, there’s benefits to that. But there’s also cons, right? It’s very time consuming. Sometimes you’ll update a listing that doesn’t go live because there’s a verification validation review process, a lot of times with the extra updated all the main sites are updating immediately. Now with that said, you cannot stop with Yext, right Yext is a 20 principle. Yes, it’s very powerful. But the reality is Yext only tapped into, you know, the top 75 or so sites in the aura adding sites as they go. What you need to have a much broader citation footprint than just what Yext provides. And that’s we’re using some of the citation resources I’m going to share with you here in a second can really help you get more citations, which separate you from the competition. Right? So is this helpful to kind of some tools that you guys can plug into to kind of shortcut this process and the automation tools that we like, let me know if this is helpful. Yes. helpful. Yes. Okay, great. Awesome. Thanks, guys. So Josh was asking for a resource to get a sense of,

you know,

what does your citation profile look like today? Right, is it clean? Is there an accuracy or the duplicates this site if you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash scan Oops, Christian, can you pop this into chat? Um If you go here, you type in us your name, address phone number, like it sits on Google, my business sits on Google right now. It will scan the internet and it will show you, here’s where you’re getting consistency. Here’s where there’s issues, and you could use that to manually go in and fix it. Or you could hire a company like ours to go in and adjust those for you. Or you could you know, you could you know, hire Yext directly for instance and and get that little piece of the puzzle squared away. So that’s a great resource plumber, SEO dotnet slash scan completely free, no obligation, just a great resource to help you get a sense of where there’s inconsistency. So you type in your name, address phone number, and then it will come back with a report like this. How much is inaccurate so in the case here, Southern plumbing and mechanical had 88% inaccuracy rate Oh, stale. You’re not on four squared and You’ve got the wrong number on white pages. And the number that you’ve got listed on Facebook doesn’t match what you’ve got listed over on on Google. Right? So these I mean, I know it’s it’s tedious. I know it seems like detail orientation stuff. But the reality is this is what makes the difference between you having consistent name, address phone number potentially ranking in the top three results and not ranking at all. So hopefully, this tool helps you kind of identify where there may be that that inconsistency and again, that can be found at plumber SEO dotnet slash scam. So best practices on on citations, I really think manually clean and optimize the Google My Business listing, right, sure your Google profile, you want to have a direct login, where you go to google.com my business where you’ve got access to see what’s at what’s there. What pictures are on there. What’s the reviews Look like, you know, all of that where you have access to insights you want to do that manually verified directly on Google, then I suggest using a tool like Yext for the for the API integration, so that you can hit the top 50 citations, I think you pay to claim and optimize the top four data aggregators. That way you can really make sure you’re controlling the content or the, the listing data downstream. And then you want to use a tool like like bright, local, or white spark to find those nice directories, right. This is really what moves the needle. And it’s one thing to claim these directories, right and to have yourself updated on Google to add yourself updated on Yext and to be in the data aggregators. What really, what what we do that a lot of the bigger companies are the people that are just doing the basic stuff here don’t do is go to the next level right there. Lots of smaller sites, there’s lots of bigger sites that are very niche focused and you want to have listings on those. The problem is it takes work you can’t just click a button and have it updated like you had to manually go to you know, random directory, you know, Dallas comm fill out the details, upload the pictures, typed the URL, put the phone number, clean up the citation, and those extra 1015 3070 new citations per month can really move the needle in terms of how authoritative your Google My Business listing is, versus the competition. I hope that makes sense. Let me know if this is clear on you know, this, you know, what I don’t want you to get is okay. I’m just gonna throw myself on the X on the claim my Google My Business and call it a day, right? There’s more to it. Like you have to be building this up consistently and over time. So I’ve got a list of some of the top citations sources that you can tap into. These are the ones that we tend to add our clients to. If we look specifically for for plumbing, he sees things like networks and contractors calm and fixer calm and build zoom in the best plumbers and home blue, calm plumbing, web calm. That’s like little, you know tier two and tier three citation sources that you can add yourself to in addition to Yext in addition to the data aggregators. And so I’ve got that list for you if it’s helpful if you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash citations. Richard wants to know for the dentist niche so this

webinar is specifically for plumbing hpsa home service contractors, you would want to like develop your own list if you’re looking for dentists. But you know, there’s there’s specific citations, there’s specific sources that you could definitely look into for that. Hey, Kristin, can you pop this link of the top citation sources in here in the chat for me? How many you guys would like to have access to that list of citations? Just putting comments citations.

Okay, cool.

Okay, and I’m going to send these slides off if it’s helpful as well. So you have it there. So that’s step one claim optimized Google My Business. Step two, get lots of citations consistency of your name, address, phone number. Step three is going to be online reviews, right? talked about this, right? The online reviews, all other things being equal. Christian, can you post that for me? Yeah, put the HTTPS in there. Make sure that it lands on the right place. all other things being equal. Google sees you is more authoritative. If you have more views. Your customers see you as more authoritative if you have more views. So I’m going to suggest on this front, all of you should be leveraging automation. All of you without question, a service call is done. Project is installed an email and a text message absolutely needs to go out automatically without anybody in your team having to click a button without anybody on your team having to follow up on it manually, like to the extent that you can do a job, have a very simple thanks so much for your business love it, if you run this review, click here to write a review have a hard logged into Google where they can post that review. That is the very best way to do it. And without question, the companies that have this automated into their process are doing the best or getting the most reviews on a consistent basis. And are you know dominating? It’s in search. Because if you’ve got lots of reviews, you must be credible. If people are saying You’re great, there must be something about it. And that’s what people want, right? They want to deal with the quality provider. And Google knows that. And so Google definitely gives preference to the companies that have the most online reviews. So leverage automation. I’m going to share some of my favorite tools for automating this with you here to start. But don’t leave it at that, right? You can’t just use automation and call it a day, I think you want to have, you want to have the automatic email, text message go out, you want to have something physical that’s handed to the customer after the service call. So we use review cards for this custom cards with the text photo on it and kind of would love it if you’d write us review and tells them where to go to do it. And that’s, you know, nobody’s taking that card I’ve been in but it’s training the technician to plant the seed that they need a review. Right? So I mean, I just recently bought a new car, my wife and I bought a new car. And you guys have all experienced this right? You’re buying the car, you’re signing the documents, that guy gives you an extra trinket at the end, hey, don’t forget, you know, you know, we take our reviews very seriously. And you know, you’re gonna get a survey I really need you to post us a good review. It has a lot to do with my compensation and has a lot more Dealing with, you know how we’re rated as a company, we take that very seriously. I don’t want you to become car salesman’s with with how you do this, but I am gonna suggest, like train your technicians to plant that seed. Hey, listen, after the service call here, you’re going to get an email and a text message from a place to write us to write us a review. You know, do you feel like you had a great experience today? and get them to say yes, great, you know, my compensation, kind of how I’m how I’m rated our performance as a company because we take world class service extremely seriously. It’s going to be based on the reviews that I get. Would you be willing to take a couple minutes and write a review for us if I send that to you? Yes. All great. And in some cases, some companies will even be so bold as to you know, write their house, hey, you know, can you pull up this website for me real quick, and they pull it up and they write the review all the technicians there. You can’t do that on your technicians iPad. You can’t because Google looks at the IP address. And it’s just it’s not authentic. You could tell the customer Hey, I noticed you get your cell phone there, can you just real quick pull this up? that’s uncomfortable for some companies, it’s uncomfortable for some texts, but it tends to work really well. But at a minimum, you want to create a world class experience. So your company needs to do great work, right? You need to answer the phones you need to show up on time, you need to roll out the carpet and put on the booties and have great you know, service. But you also want to bake into the into the process, you know that your technician is going to ask that they’re going to expect the review and to really bake it into what you do on a very consistent basis. Um, the other thing, you know, that I found to work really well on some of our clients like like shamrock plumbing saw there was 900 plus online reviews. What he does is they finish the job, they provide great service, they send a review request out via email, they do a happy call. How many of you guys do happy calls, happy calls. If you’re doing happy calls, you’re just checking in after the call. So they do happy calls and say, Hey, Miss Jones just wanted to check in. I know, you know, Bob was out there earlier wanted to make sure everything went well. Were you satisfied with the service? Yes.

And if they did good, okay, great. Well, hey, I really appreciate your feedback. We take things very seriously. You might have just gotten an email with a link to write us a review. Did you get that? And they say, Oh, yeah, I got it. You know, I didn’t get it. Okay, great. Let me send it to you again, real quick. Would you mind taking a minute while I’m on the phone and writing the review, I promise you if you if you get your technicians to plant that expectation while they’re in the home, and then you do a happy call that follows up make sure that they have a good experience and then you kind of hold their feet to the fire so to speak while they’re on the line. Everybody but a high percentage will do it. And that that will help. Well I think the biggest thing you can do to bake online reviews and consistent reviews into your into your your business is to make it part of your company culture. So what I mean by that is people your team is more motivated by being recognized in front of their peers than they are by the money that you pay them. Like statistics will tell us that 100% and so if you can just most of us are doing weekly huddles with our team, maybe even daily huddle for the team. Make it part of your weekly team, or at least your monthly team meeting where you track all right, which technicians got the most reviews. let’s acknowledge that. Let’s call them up in front of their peers. Hey, look, Homeowner Bill just said Johnny did an amazing job. He showed up one time you saw the problem. He was super professional. And we’re gonna give, we’re gonna give that technician a bonus because he provided world class service. So I’m telling you just a couple things that I found outside of automation that can really make a massive difference in the amount of reviews. I’ll tell you the companies that crush it with online reviews are doing all of this, right? They’ve got the automation, they’re calling in on happy calls. And they’re recognizing the technicians and making it part of the culture that they want to provide the best experience. They want to get that review. And they want to get recognized and compensated for providing that level of experience to the customers. And having those reviews is what drives the rankings that drives the conversion that makes everything work extremely well. So George was asking about tools. So these are some of the tools we recommend that we find work really well in this space. Nearby now review buzz, bird eye, customer lobby, there’s poll, Sam now, there’s lots of platforms that can kind of help with the automation of this review request process. I’m not nearly as hung up on the tool as I am on making sure that you’ve got automation, where the email goes out after every service call the text message, especially goes out after every service call make it super easy for the customer to Click the button and request a review. But there’s something you can do to really even supercharge this to the next level because a lot of these tools rely on their automatic automatic what manual automatic but manual because if you think about review buzz, the service call gets done in a lot of cases then you got to go in and somebody Our team has to type in the customer’s name and cell phone number and email and the email goes out same with nearby now same with customer lobby you know they’re automatic but somebody has to key the information in the companies that we’re having the best results with that are getting the most online reviews have this directly fed from their their dispatch platform and now service Titan has it I know that home house call Pro has it i’m sure feel that has some different integrations, where the job is completed, and once the job is completed automatically triggers the review request. I tell you, if you can take your technicians out of the process, if you can take your dispatchers out of the process and just make it once the job is closed, the email, text message and maybe a drip campaign requesting feedback happens, that’s when there’s explosive growth in the number of online reviews that you can get. So that’s, that’s the third piece really making sure you’ve got a system to get online reviews on a consistent basis from your real customers in your real service area. Let me know if that’s been helpful for you, if it kind of it kind of gave you some ideas on how to do that. Okay, so I got some good, some good nods. Some good nods there. So here’s what I want to do. Next, we’re going to talk about, um, SEO. I’m not going to talk too long about SEO because the fact is, I’ve got an hour and a half foot long webinar we did last month to talk about how to set up your website, where to put your name where to put your phone number To optimize for for conversion. But I want to make sure you know that on

your website from a Google My Business and Google Maps optimization perspective, you want to have your name, address phone number matched on the site, you want your city in the title tag, you want your city in the h1 tag, you want unique content, you want pages for your services, you want pages for each of your cities. And that’s what you want to do on page off page. Outside of the website itself, you want to claim the my business listing and get those lots of citations. We want to build up online reviews. And then we want to also build authority. Because if you look at it, and we look at that, like Orlando plumber here, shamrock plumbing, he’s number one. But he doesn’t have the most reviews. Frank gay actually has a little bit more reviews. So it’s not just about the reviews. It’s not just about the citations. It’s also about the website. It’s about On the website, it’s about the links and the, like the citation profile pointing back to the website. So you’ll see there’s there’s pages on this website for all of the different services. There’s pages for each of the cities, right. And that gives more context to Google about what this site is all about. But what it should be ranking for and about why it should rank well in the in the map listings. So there’s something we’re doing now that really has an impact on those off page factors that really help to build authority. And so it used to be okay, we’ll grab some links or blog on a monthly basis. But what we’re doing now is what I call strategic content syndication. I’m going to talk about this real quick. I make sure we wrap up here in the next 10 or 15 minutes so everybody can get back to work. But if you want me to keep going, by posting comments, keep going. I know I’ve got a lot of you still here on with me. So hopefully I’m not going too deep, but it seems like this is resonating, and it’s value added information for you guys. So all right, keep going says bill keep going, says Josh. Albert key great info. Okay, good. A simple blog posts on your website just isn’t going to cut anymore, right? The fact is, if you’re doing blogging every week, are you doing blogging every single month? that carries very little weight for you. Because those blog posts don’t get picked up in the in the in the index for the most part, they don’t build any links. They don’t build any authority from from what you’re doing. And so, really what what we found works well is a 46 signal generation. So I’m going to skip this stuff. Because it’s it gets pretty technical. But really, when you get down to the nitty gritty of what Google wants to rank versus what Google does on Google Maps, it really comes down to expertise, authority and trust, right, if they feel that your company is the Most expertise because you’ve got quality content, structured snippets, you’ve got media rich content with pictures and videos on the site. That’s that’s gonna build your expertise authority, if your website is only referenced from directories, but it’s actually got links from authoritative news sites like ABC, CBS, Fox News, you know, Fox and things like that, that’s gonna pass authority for your company for the for the business. And then trust, right, because the website is PageRank because it’s got links because people are staying on the website. They’re not bouncing off at a super high level, all kinds of things, right. This is the local ranking factors report that that is put out by by a couple of different companies. Lots of lots of things. And for you guys as home service contractors, this is super complicated, super technical, so I’m not going to get into it. Um, but the bottom line is if we can get more attention Then our competition, if we get more links, more citations. And if we look at like these are the like the most important factors. It’s really about who’s putting out the content. And if we can have authoritative attribution to the blog content that’s picked up outside of just the website itself, I’m telling you, it has a huge impact on rankings, because it’s about proximity, how close is your business and local business listing to the area where the person is searching zip codes, geo coordinates and things like that? how relevant relevant is it to what they typed because of the H ones and the citations and the review velocity and everything else. And then the prominence we talked about their expertise, authority and trust, which is brand mentions, which is local ranking factors that most SEO companies don’t pay any attention to at all, like we combined all of that stuff. This is how these great rankings happen over time.

Right. And so what we’re doing is

content syndication basically for for your clients, the clients we serve as opposed to just creating a blog post that sits on our site. We’re creating a blog post that then gets syndicated out and brings in lots of citations, lots of snippets back to your website, which gets that website ranked well in organic search. So I’m just gonna I’m just gonna pull up Alli plumbing. It’s one of our top clients in Salt Lake City, Utah. And so this is their website, run a couple searches. You see they do really well in and around West Jordan, Lehigh Valley everywhere in between. But if we look at news and news and media, we we’ve shifted from just putting out blog content to putting out really media releases. And so every time we do a blog post, let’s say I’m going to pick what put an end To waterborne viruses, this is relevant with what’s going on with with COVID-19. This is newsworthy, it’s specific to their company. And it doesn’t just sit on their website. This is really it’s almost like blogging on steroids because now we’re taking it, we’re syndicating it out. And so you can see this has been picked up by like news sites in their area. So I’ll just click click, click a couple of these. But what you’re going to see is each one of those sends a 40 back to their site. Like some of these links like this is going back to water filtration. This is a quality link from a lot of different sources back to their website, and we use strategic anchor text throughout. Some of it passes back to the site. Some of the passes back to other sections. I don’t want to get too technical here. But here’s when it comes to Google Maps, where the rubber meets the road. We need more structured citations name, address, phone consistently across the web than our competition, right? And so now we’ve got an authoritative site, actually hundreds of authoritative websites, linking back with anchor text, which, which actually helps with our SEO efforts. But then we’ve also got that structured citation with a company’s name, address, phone number, we’ve got a GMB embed, which is a Google My Business embed, right and each of these different posts. So without question, now, this company, and we’re doing this on a consistent basis, you know, two, three times a month or even just once a month, we’re creating more authority in amplifying the impact of the content that we push out. This is called content syndication, and it’s having a huge impact on how well we can rank our clients in competitive markets. So you know, I’m not going to go into these case studies I’ve covered it before, but as we squish shifted from just doing, you know, bread and butter blog content to really syndicating, building up this profile immediately says to create more inbound links, more structured citations has had a huge impact on our clients rank in the in the organic listings I showed you, I showed you case studies, it feels like I showed a lot. But I literally only showed you like six or seven clients, I could show you hundreds of plumbing HVC companies in very competitive markets that are ranking dominant positions, and generating hundreds of leads every single month via the internet as a function of this strategy that we’ve just unpacked over the last hour and 20 minutes. So I’d love to hear from you. Like what were some of the key insights? What were some of the things that you picked up that were helpful? Um, what can you go back and implement from what we’ve covered today? Because I don’t want to just close up with Okay, now you’ve got some cool ideas like what will you put in place what stuck inside your brain? What changes do you need to make in order to move the needle to build more To build more reviews to move the rankings up, so you get more leads, more calls and better profitability in your plumbing HVC home service company.

This was great.

Are your citations nofollow or default, so with the releases we’re doing, we can actually set certain links to be do follow certain links to be nofollow and a structured citations or structured citation. So that’s another place where it’s getting picked up across the across the web. Great information, Scott says he’s going to start syndicating more of his content to you know, immediate releases. Excellent. So I’d love to hear from you guys. If this was helpful. Great. I’m going to send the slides if you’d like more information, let me know if you’d like to talk with us about having our team implement this for you. We’d love the opportunity to chat. So if you like to have a look at your Google My Business listing. If you’d like to have us look at your online rankings and show you exactly where there’s room for improvement and rankings, we will do a custom analysis completely free of charge. We’ll review your website we’ll review your rankings we’ll run a ranking report for you. And we’ll talk about how much it cost to have us do this for you and help you take your plumbing HVDC home service business to the next level like seriously to the next level as quickly as possible. So if you’re interested in that post in the comments Christian is watching. I’m just post schedule. Just let us know you want to schedule and we’ll be sure to reach out to you or what you can do is go straight to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. So if you could Christian pop that into chat, plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule and that will take you to a page where you can pick a time on our on our calendar and we will we’ll get to work right we give us a couple days what we do is we run an analysis of Your website, we do all of the work to see exactly where there’s room for improvement and talk Turkey, right? Here’s how much it will cost. Here’s the results you can expect. Here’s the process that we’ll put in place. And either makes sense to do something or it doesn’t. It’s completely no obligation and no cost to do that as well. Excellent soon as any questions in here. Thank you guys for sticking with me. I hope this was valuable. So we had a good a good group with us the whole time. So that’s awesome. Christy says great information. Thank you. Or the other webinars available? Yep. If you go to our website and kind of look at the blog, you’ll see usually we’re adding that stuff to the blog as we go. Our says great, as always appreciate that, um, Yellow Pages, do you do that? I’m not sure what you mean. They’re like so you can claim a free listing on yellow pages, we would definitely do that. Or you can advertise in the Yellow Pages. don’t really recommend it. I’m not seeing return from the printed Yellow Pages and or the you know, the the white p comm or the online Yellow Pages? Not anymore. They used to be good. And we’re an online company I used to say, hey, look, you should still be in print, but it’s just not generating a ton of calls for most of the contractors we work with. Wanna make sure I don’t leave anybody out in terms of questions. Praying could take two whole days. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Good deal. All right, guys. Well, thanks for joining us. I really appreciate your time and your attention. I will send an email out Timothy with the replay and with the slides. JOHN Gordon, where did you post a question posted again, because I might have I might have missed it.

I you know what, Gord I really apologize. I’m not seeing it here. There’s tons of comments coming in. If anything, send me an email or send me a post. And I’ll make sure that I get an address for you.

So Gordon saying,

What if I have a listing that’s showing us closed? That I mean, that’s one of those one off situations, we need to pull it up and we need to look at it right. I can’t answer that, you know, without looking at the situation. could be as simple as just marking as open. Could be, you know, there’s a some kind of penalty on a listing. So shoot, yeah, go and shoot, shoot Christian a message. We’ll jump on a call. We’ll look at it for you. All right. Good deal. I appreciate you guys’s time. I appreciate the rapt attention here. I appreciate the engagement. Thank you for chatting back and forth with me asking questions chiming in when I asked you to chime in. You know, if you’re interested in having us do this for you go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. Let’s schedule time to chat. And Sandra says thanks for the webinar. Since the computer problems I missed the first part. Can I send the slides yesterday? Actually, it looks like the recording worked. So, you know, by tomorrow, this whole thing will be up and available for replay. So you can watch the whole thing. And I will send the slides

as well.

Outstanding. Well, thank you guys have an amazing afternoon. Be sure to tune in for one of our sessions to follow I believe the next webinars going to be around Google Local Service ads, how to make sure that you’re capitalizing on that how to make sure you’re winning with Google Local Service ads. So stay tuned for that and have an amazing day. We’ll talk to you guys soon.

Trying to find my end.

Alright guys, talk to you later.