The 2022 SEO Formula for Plumbing, HVAC and Home Service Contractors

All right. Hello, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us on today’s special session, we’re going to be talking all about search engine optimization and how to get your plumbing HVAC, electrical home service company ranked on Google for the most important key terms in the organic, non paid listings. And I’m going to be talking a little bit about some of the changes in the search algorithm, I’m going to be talking about some new things you can do from a content strategy perspective, to move the needle in terms of how you rank and kind of sharing what’s working best for us and the clients that we work with across the country. So just to make sure my audio is working my videos working, give me a one in the comments, just to make sure you guys are hearing me you guys are seeing me. Alright, good. I had somebody had mentioned, maybe they could hear me just right. So this, this session around search engine optimization is is part of your overall online marketing strategy. And I’ve got a visual up. This is called our digital dominance method. And it’s kind of looks at the big picture of all the things you might want to do to truly maximize your lead flow online, right, you need a good website that’s built to convert, you need to make sure that you’re coming up, you know, in the organic, free listings is as strongly as possible, then we want to be doing pay per click and retargeting and make sure we’re tapping those paid online directories. And we find is, if you if you implement this entire digital dominance method, you can really be the known contractor in your market. And you can, you can get a lot of leads, and a great return on investment. But the fact is, each one of these requires a thought out approach. And today, we’re gonna be going deep on this this concept right here called Search Engine Optimization, which is really, how do we make sure we’re showing up in the non paid listings when our customers are looking the previous sessions, if you want to go back to the archives, last month, we did one on how to make sure your website was built to convert, right, because your website has to be set up in a specific way so that when a customer gets there, they feel like you’re the right contractor, they pick up the phone, and they call you if it’s not, then you can have all the traffic in the world and not get the results that you’re after. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Give me a yes, or type SEO in the comments, if you’re ready to get into search engine optimization, SEO strategies, ranking organically. Alright, Rick is always quick on the type of get SEO in there. Thank you guys. And if you could keep this as interactive as possible, right, this is a live session. And so I’ll be kind of throwing it out to you guys asking for your feedback asking for you guys to comment. And when you do that, it really, really helps. So a little bit housekeeping, if you don’t mind, closure, closure, other tabs that you might have opened, turn off Facebook, let’s just give this our undivided attention for the next 30 to 45 minutes, I promise it will be worth your time, I promise you’ll walk away with some great insights and strategies to not just rank better, or really to generate more leads and more sales via the internet.

So the the plan for today, um, as it relates to SEO, we’re gonna talk about the latest changes with the Google algorithm. I don’t know about you guys, but this stuff is constantly changing. And I spend a couple of hours a week reading the latest changes in the latest updates that are coming from Google the latest, you know, blog posts that are coming out, and the ball is constantly moving. And so it’s great that you’re investing this time to today to be on here too. I, I know that all of us don’t have the time or the energy to chase that down write, to kind of get get up to speed with what those latest changes are. I’m also going to talk about some of the things that you may have put in place that in the past were productive, write some things you might have done, because a year ago, five years ago, this was the thing to do. And you could get ranked and you could get leads and sales, but that probably are hurting you today, right? So I’m just going to bring those to your attention. So you’re aware, okay, that might be actually harming me instead of helping me like I had initially intended. And I’m going to unpack what I call the new SEO formula, right, just based on the very latest and greatest and what’s going on with the search algorithms. I’m going to unpack that formula. And I like to take these trainings from an 8020 principle perspective, just like 8020 In the comments, if you’ve heard of the 8020 principle, they say that 20% of your activity in any given area generates 80% of the results. That’s that’s a fact. And so what I like to do is just cover the 20% the things that are going to have the biggest impact that are going to move the needle the most the things that are most worth your time and attention so that you can give the 80% of the results just give me a one of the comments if that’s okay with you if I focus on the 8020 I’m not going to cover everything that you need to know about SEO and links and citations and all of the technical mumbo jumbo because that would be a seven day workshop, right? I want to give you guys as the owner of these home service companies, the 8020. Awesome, lots and lots of positive feedback. Lots of like, you guys are with me, let’s not go too deep. Let’s not get too crazy with the technical stuff. Let’s focus on things that are going to move the needle on. 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 each back SEO, we’re the leading provider of digital marketing services and SEO for plumbing HVAC and electrical contractors. We’re active in PHCC que se ACCA. My articles have been published in each VEC Insider. But I’d say really more important than any of that stuff is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing HVAC and electrical companies. And some of the most competitive markets in the United States literally have built over 500, plumbing HVAC Home Service websites have generated hundreds of 1000s of leads have ranked for hundreds of 1000s of keywords and competitive markets. And so what I’m going to be sharing with you on today’s session isn’t based on theory, it’s not just based on the fact that I read some new thing and Search Engine Land, like it’s based on our actual experience working with home service companies just like yours, and what actually works to get them ranked. I think that’s pretty important. I think that’s a lot more important than the fact that I published the book or any of that other stuff. And and this is what we do. Like we’ve got a team of 35 full time employees, building websites, doing SEO, writing content, moving the needle for our clients across the country. And so if you’re ever interested in possibly talking about how we can work with you how we can take over your website and your SEO strategy and help you generate better results, we would love that opportunity. This isn’t just going to be a sales pitch, obviously, I want to give you great information. But at the end of the day, if there’s an interest, that’s what this is about, right showing you guys some great strategies, seeing if there’s a potential fit and how we might be able to help you guys generate these results on your behalf. So if you’re interested in that you can reach out to Christian on here, you can reach out to me directly, we’d love to schedule a complimentary will look at your website, your SEO strategy to show you exactly where there’s room for improvement. And and see if there’s a good fit and help you guys get this rolled out. So let’s let’s dive into this. We’re on a session in 2022 talking about SEO search engine optimization. And the algorithm the whole search model has changed so much in the last 10 years, Google has moved the paid listings up and then they’ve moved the paid listings down. They’ve added local service ads, they’ve changed the way the search results appear.

And the first question we should ask ourselves as, as the owners of home service companies is does SEO even still matter? Like should I even care? Right? should I even be thinking about this? And I think it’s a fair question, right? If the search results had changed, and no one’s clicking on the organic listings, it really wouldn’t be worth any of your time. So I want to start there with today’s session. And this is the way a typical search result looks. If we look in any market right now we type in, let’s just call it Denver, plumber, Denver plumbing, it’s Manta plumber, whatever city you happen to be in, we’ve got the local service ads or Google guaranteed up along the top, we’ve got the map listings, and then we’ve got the organic listings. And oftentimes, you’ll see three paid results as well. And I might even run a Google search now to kind of show you sometimes there’s paid listings here. And so if the organic results, the free results are moving further and further down the page. And even further, if you have to be on a mobile device. What does the data tell us? Right? Are people still clicking on the organic? Are they still calling through the organic results? And what we found just in looking at the data again, I have access to about 500 Plumbing HVAC, home service company websites and analytics. And we’re tracking a lot of data and all this 71% of the clicks go to either the map listings or the organic listings. And so yes, those paid listings are prominent. Yes, the Google guaranteed is right at the top. Google wants you to click on that because that’s where they make money, right? They’re going to make money through the leader, they’re going to make money through the click. But that, notwithstanding, the lion’s share of visitors know that those are paid listings, and they click right on the organic results. To further that what we’re finding is 67%

of people are going straight to the first five listings. So the numbers tells right the numbers tell us that yes, SEO absolutely still matters. And it matters probably more than ever because we want to not just be on the first page we want to be in the first Five listings for the most important keywords, because that’s where we’re going to get the most bang for our buck. That’s where we’re going to get the best opportunity. I just want to give you a real world example of this and show you the metrics behind it. That way you can see, okay, um, you know, is the juice worth the squeeze as it relates to the SEO stuff. So one of the companies we work with is the meridian company. They’re a full service, plumbing, HVAC, electrical and remodeling contractor. They’re based in East Lansing, Michigan. We’ve been working with them for several years, and they’ve done a really nice job getting them ranked in and around East Lansing for their most important keywords. And I’ll be talking about what those keywords are how to analyze which ones are most important on how to obviously do the work to get your website ranked that you come up for those results. But for the purpose of this illustration, what I want you to see is they spend about $8,000 per month on average in their online marketing, that’s management fees to us that’s paid search ads, that’s that’s their their marketing budget. Not for that we track about 417 leads per month 95 from organic 127 from pay per click Google ads 191 73 directly from the Google map at 22. Via forms, I’m socially average this out 417 leads per month, an average of $19.32 per lead, which is which is great in a very, very affordable, very, very scalable in just about any home service market. But what I want to call your attention to is the fact that a lot of those leads came from organic, right, like 95 came directly from people scrolling down clicking the organic listing getting to the page and dialing the phone. And 173 came directly from Google Maps. And so I can show you example, after example, after example of this, but almost 65% of this lead flow is coming from the organic results. And so, yes, SEO still matters, you really can’t rely just on local service or pay per click alone. Now, I’m not saying just do SEO, like I think you want a full a complete strategy. So you’re showing up at all the places that your customers look. But I think a lot of people have overcorrected. They’ve been like, Okay, I’m going to go heavy on local service ads, I’m going to heavy and pay per click and not focus on pay on on the organic side not get my content strategy right now I get my on page SEO strategy, right. And because of that, their average cost per lead is much higher, their return on investment from their marketing strategy isn’t as good. So just give me a one or two comments if that’s clear, right. And I can show more examples. I’ll show more as we go. But the reality is your highest quality lead your lowest cost lead, when done correctly, is going to come from your organic search results, the fact that you’re coming up in the non paid listings. Okay, great, lots of lots of ones coming in. So I want to I’m going to hop straight to the chase here, I’m going to get straight into the formula, and then I’ll show you exactly what we’re doing on our client websites, and that you can do on your website to generate better organic ranking results. So the first thing we have to do when we think about SEO, is we have to figure out what the most important keywords are based on your services in your service area based on search volume. Right? So it all starts with figuring out like, what does your customer type? When they go to the Google search? I would love to see like what you guys think in the comments here. What do you think your customers typing? are they typing? Electrician? are they typing electrical services near me? Are they typing in a plumber? are they typing in plumbing companies? What What exactly are they? are they typing in? You’re just hypothetical, right? I’m going to give you some some data here with like, what the actual keywords are. But if you had to think just from the top of your head, what do you think those keywords would be? So how do we figure this out? You know, at this point, we work with several 100 plumbing and HVAC companies across the country. So we look at this on a market by market basis. We also look at it from the aggregate, like we’re gonna look nationally, what are those most search terms, but the tools we use, and the tools that you guys could use as well would be the Google keyword tool, right? This is if you have a Google Ads account, Google’s got some great access to data where you can type in, you know, plumbing, plumbing services, plumbing, you know, plumbing in my area, drain cleaning water heaters, and it spits out a lot of great data. And that’s free as long as you set up a Google Ads account. Word stream is a great tool SpyFu. These are all great tools that you can leverage. I’m sorry, I meant Google the Google Ads planner versus the keyword tool.

So that’s the first thing we need to figure out what those keywords are. The second thing is we want to load up our website with unique pages and unique content targeting those words. So I’m going to bring this together. But I also want to paint the picture from a high level. So if we find out that our customers are typing, plumber, plumbing, Drain Cleaning trenchless sewer replacement like these are the words they’re they’re typing in plus your city, then we need to make sure that our website speaks to those who has good unique content and has specific pages that can target those particular keywords. Stick with me guys, I know this is bullet heavy, but I’m going to get into some very specific tactics here. So what that means is we want a page for each of our services. Each of the service that we provide based on the actual search volume, we want pages for each of those. And then we want pages for the cities that we operate in. What we find is most plumbing HVAC, electrical companies serve a 25 to 30 mile radius. And so if we use Miami is an example where I sit today, we’ve got Miami would be the main city, but in that 25 mile radius, there’s lots of little subsidies and sub towns, right. There’s Kendall Palmetto Bay, Miami Beach Key Biscayne, you and I want you what I want you to do is just think for a minute, outside of your 25 mile radius, what are the what’s the main city, and then what are those subsidies and sub towns that you operate in, because what we want to do is combine our services with the main city and those subsidies and sub towns so that we can create content for them so that we can get indexed in the search results for them. And then we can do SEO effort to move ourselves up in the organic search results for those key terms. Again, I don’t want to get too technical, but give me a one. If you’re following along with me like this is fundamental right? We want to figure out what they’re typing. And then we want to create content specifically for those keywords. From there, we want to make sure that we optimize the the website’s user experience. Um, I think one of the big shifts that happened with search engine optimization was at the beginning, it was just about keywords, right. And so you could take your keyword, let’s say it was Denver plumber, right? Let’s say your keyword was Denver plumber, you could take that and put in the title tag. And you could have all of the content in your website, just say Denver plumber, or some facsimile thereof, again, and again and again and again. And the search engines, all they were looking for was keyword density. How many times did that keyword come up? Did it match with the content on the page? And if so, that got preference. And then the search engines recognized that wasn’t creating a great experience for the person searching. And so they needed to figure out some other criteria other than just the keywords on the page. And so the next aspect was links. It was like, okay, which page that has those keywords on it has the most links from other websites, pointing back to it. And for a while, that was good, you know, it was creating good relevant results in the search engines for the for the searchers, SEO, SEO people like myself started to recognize that we started to get really aggressive with our link building and started building links just for the sake of giving more relevance to our pages. And then the algorithms had to evolve. And so now, what they’re looking at isn’t just the keywords on the page, it isn’t just the links and the number of links. It’s the user experience, they’re looking at the browser history of that person, they got to the page, they taking them for plumber, they clicked on the page, did they scroll down? Did they click on something that they stick around? Right? So what we have to do is we got to make sure that we’ve got our keywords on the website, we’ve got good links, you know, and 40 going back to the page, but we really have to think about that user experience, do we write the content in the way that a real human would want to interact with it? Do we write the content and structure the page in a way that somebody would do something other than just click the back button or click the call button and be done? Right? Google is looking at that user experience data, and it’s dictating whether you’re going to be on the first page are the fifth page. So really want to think that through and again, I’m going to get into some specific examples here.

From there, we have to optimize for SEO on the site itself. So I’ll share what I mean by that. But like that’s getting your keywords and putting them in the title tags and the h1 tags and having them evenly distributed through the page itself, having a solid interlinking strategy from the homepage to the various service pages and from the various service pages to the City Pages. We optimize the actual website and all of those pages that we put together that we want to rank for. And then we’re most SEO strategies go off track is we also have to do off site optimization. Right. I think most of you guys here on today’s call You want to understand how SEO works enough to be dangerous enough to say, hey, I need these pages, and I need this content set up. And I know I need to do some some link building citation development, some authority building, but you’re not going to do that yourself. And you’re not going to hire a team in house to do it just because it wouldn’t be practical. I think a lot of home service companies, plumbing, HVAC, electrical, have this port pretty well dial there. But if you’ve got the website, you’ve got pages for each of your services, you got pages for each of your cities, we’re I’m seeing mistakes, as we look at, you know, 1015 20, potential home service companies that we’re going to take on any given month, where we see the biggest mistakes is you created these pages, but they’re, they’re riddled with bad content or duplicate content. So you just copy and pasted your your plumbing page 19 times for each of the 19 cities, right? That’s a big mistake that’s actually hurting you in terms of your rankings. But the other area, I see home service companies get this wrong, either because they did it themselves, or because they hired a company that just didn’t do the extra work is that they’re not doing the correct effort to build their authority. They’re not building citations, they’re not building structured links, they’re not building additional link flow back to their homepage, their service pages, their city pages. And, you know, this last bullet here on this list of the new SEO formula, um, seems like oh, what are we gonna do so Off Page Optimization, but if I were to, to balance it in terms of the 8020, right, 80% of your results come from this off page work. 20% comes from how well you structure the on page. And so I just want to make sure that you like talking high level here, we’re going to look at some real examples. I’m going to break this down for you guys. But like this is the approach that we found works best, give me a one of the comments if you’re if you’re tracking along with me. Hopefully, um, I like I said, I’m trying to keep this high enough level that’s like I get it right, I gotta create pages for my services that people are actually looking for that create unique content, I got to think about that user experience. And then I’ve got to build the authority through link citations and signals that are going to move my website up in the organic results. Now, the last thing here is we want to track our results, right? Don’t just have your SEO company, do this work in a vacuum, right? Have them figure out here are the keywords we’re shooting for? Here are the pages and the content that we’ve developed for it. Here’s the links that we’re building, and what is our results? Where are we ranking on Google and Yahoo, and Bing for these various key terms? Mainly, Google and Bing. All are we moving up? Or moving down? And then what’s happening with the traffic? Are we getting more visitors to the site as a function of this? Are we getting more localized traffic as a function of this? Is that number on the trend line up? And most importantly, most importantly, are we getting more leads and more sales that we can track back? Right? Don’t just think about your SEO strategy without getting really clear about what you’re tracking what those metrics are, and how you can see if you’re winning, or losing, and I’m going to unpack all of this stuff, kind of as we go. But this is the new new SEO formula from a high level. I’ve got a very simple one page checklist for you guys. If you want to download this Christian, you can drop this in the chat. It’s plumber, SEO dotnet slash SEO checklist. You This is something you can print out, you can work on it on your iPad, it just kind of see like, Okay, where are we missing? What can we put in place? What’s my, my current company potentially not doing

that could be hurting my results? So we started with keywords we started with like what are your customers actually typing in when they need your services. And for plumbing, what we found is, for the most part, it’s going to be your city, either on the front end or the back end, combined with plumbing, plumber, plumbers, water heaters, bathroom remodeling, tankless water heater repair and leak detection, Drain Cleaning, shower, repaired boiler repair, plumbing contractor, emergency plumber, repiping, commercial plumber hydrojetting, I’m not going to read this whole list because it would become extremely monotonous. But having a list like this, and then actually comparing it to your local market and say okay, let’s put these keywords and concatenate that’s what we call it when you take like Denver and you combine it with all these key words. And then you put it into a tool like the Google Ad planner or the keyword planner or you put it in a tool life workstream it will bounce back and tell you Okay, so based on those keywords, here’s how much search volume there is. Here’s how much competition there is in competition on Pay Per Click specifically like what would you have to pay or to have the number one page result for that? Give me a one in the comments if you think it would be helpful to have a keyword list like this custom developed for you in your market, that way you knew, like, what are the most important keywords? And how much search volume is there? And more importantly, like, how am I performing for those words, I got a couple of I got a number of ones, okay. So over the years, what I would tell people is like, let me show you how to do this, right. And I will show you how to, you know, merge tools together and come up with a keyword list, and then put it into various tools you have to pay for to get the results. And I found a lot of a lot of people on the webinar just weren’t well served by that. It just didn’t, it didn’t serve them well. So what I want to do is offer to do a completely complimentary analysis of this for you. I’m Christian, if you could drop the link in basically schedule in complimentary SEO analysis with us. And we will do this work on your behalf. We’ll put together the most important keywords, we’ll combine them with your city and your surrounding towns will show you stacked by a priority which the most important keywords are. And then we’ll also show you a ranking report that says, Where are you coming up? Are you on the first page? Are you in the first five results? Are you on the second page? Are you not ranking at all, and I find that that can be extremely powerful, right, just knowing these are my most important words, these are like how I’m performing. And this is where there’s room for improvement. So if that sounds good, again, no pressure, no, no obligation, we will run that report for you. And you can take and run with it, you can give it to your provider. Or we can talk about how we can help you get ranked better for those keywords. chances. Awesome, thank you. My pleasure, hopefully it’s a value. Again, I think this is where SEO starts. SEO starts with knowing what the keywords are, and then combining that for like how you’re doing and how you’re ranking. So armed with what those keywords are, the next step is we have to do the on site optimization, we have to optimize our actual website. And so I talked about this a little bit. Number one is we have to have a strong website with good content, like it needs to speak to a human so the human would read it and be like, okay, and it also has to create a good user experience, right? We’re focused on user experience, as opposed to adjust SEO. And this is a big transition over the last couple of years where it’s not just keyword stuffing, and just trying to get our keywords in there. For the sake of that we really want them to get to the page interact with the page, because those signals get passed back to the Google search algorithm. To do that, tactically speaking to do that, what we have to do is we have to leverage multimedia to improve on page optimization. So when they get to your page, and it’s only text, there’s not a lot of people like to read text, or they’re going to kind of read through it and move on with their day. If we’ve got pictures, visuals and videos, they might press the play button on that video. And just a quick video about who you are the problems you solve and why somebody chooses you guys versus the competition can go a long way for conversion. But it will also go a long way for this user experience, which is going to help drive your rankings and results from an on page perspective. We want pages for all the services that’s given, think about your most important services, your highest transaction value services, the services that you’d like to do most. Compare that to like the search trends and like what is their search volume for this. And let’s make sure we get page on the site. For each one of those. We want pages for each of the cities that we serve. Again, the key thing on both of

these is unique content, why we cannot just copy and paste someone else’s content and throw it on our site that’s going to look like duplicate content. We can’t use the same content for our Miami pages we use on our Kendall page and just change the city. Right? There’s lots of SEO guys that have done that clone 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of pages. And it harms it hurts the clients, it harms you guys as home service companies, you need unique content. The other thing we’d like to do is we leverage a tool called nearby now, which captures the the location of where your service tech does a job. So let’s say we’ve got pages on the site. 10 pages on the site certainly like talking about all the different cities. And we create unique content for each of those cities. And we optimize it so it’s got like Kendall plumbing company and the title and we got Kendall plumbing company, the h1 and this good unique content there. The other thing we want to do is have fresh data posting to that page that’s unique, and that’s hyper localized. And so that’s what nearby now does. It’s basically an app that the technicians put on their phones or that integrates with service Titan or house called Pro and as the job gets completed, it automatically through a shortcode pushes the location where that job was done onto a map and a brief description of the work that was provided, we find that when you do that, you can have a much more optimized city page, which is going to give you a much better probability of ranking and those surrounding cities and surrounding towns. Are you guys, give me one, if you’re still with me, let me know if I’m going too much, give me a two if I’m going too into the weeds here, because I don’t want to get too into the weeds either. One if you’re with me, too, if I’m going too into the weeds, so far, I’m getting one so that you give me permission to keep going down this track. We’re going to put the title tag and the h1 tag with our keyword in it, I’m going to show you what that means. We want a meta description that doesn’t have our keywords in it, but cells to click on. So when when we type a search like Dallas plumber. In your organic results, we’re going to see that the h1 is a rich snippet that kind of shows up at the top. And then there’s a meta description that comes below it. And old school strategy would say let’s put our keyword in there like 12 times in the meta description, what we found is more important is to write that like a text app like you would on a Google ad. That’s saying, you know, if you need same day service and a quality company to do your drain cleaning, click the link above, right and like really sell them on clicking you is the best use of your meta description, obviously want to name address phone number in the footer file, we want to have a blog. And so we don’t just want a website with all of our services and all of our cities. That stagnant, right, it used to be an actively updated site that’s putting out regular information that’s drawing links and signals that would tell Google that this is an authoritative site, which is ultimately something that should rank for our most important terms. And so one of the important things you want to do is have a blog on the site. You don’t have to post daily, you don’t even have to post weekly, but a really good curated piece of content at least once a month, that goes out. And actually polls ranking signals for you can make a big difference that one blog post or two blog posts can really pull a lot of authority back to your homepage to your service pages to your city pages. And I’ll talk a little bit about how that works and kind of why that works as well as it does. The other thing you want to do is you want to focus on PageSpeed, desktop and mobile. One of the big ranking factors right now is how fast is your website load. And there’s a bunch of tools like GT metrics, that will really quickly show you if you’re in A, B, C, or D in how fast your site your site loads. And if you’re not loading fast, that’s a ranking factor that will harm your ability to rank well in the search engines. So hosting used to be one of those throwaway like, okay, whatever, you can throw it on Hostgator, you can throw it on wherever the reality is, you need a website that loves that’s green on green GT metrics on that’s getting a ratings, because that will absolutely improve your speed. So great question here by Bill, how quickly should it be loading, I can give you an exact number, we’ll pull up an example or two here in a second.

Um, it’s not just about your host, right? There’s lots of great hosts. It’s also how you optimize the files on your site. Like you can use caching to make your images small, your videos smaller, you can use plugins that will compress. So you can still have a nice looking site, but it doesn’t have heavy files on it. That makes a big difference in how quickly the website loads. So let’s let’s pull up a real example of this. I know I went bullet heavy, and I apologize for that. I’m not a big fan of doing a lot of bullets, but I think it helps guide the conversation hopefully explained it in a high enough level that you’re like, Okay, again, I get what we’re talking about here, get what needs to be done. But now let’s shift to a real example so that you can see what I mean based on what I just said. So I’m going to pull up an example. This is a company we work with in Salt Lake City, Utah Valley plumbing, I’m just going to walk you through kind of what we’ve done with their website. That is a great illustration of this whole process. So give me one sec here. If I can get an empty tank

so this is Valley plumbing

dot drakeley I’m going to pull up their website here. So a couple of the key things I’m not going to spend a ton of TON TON of ton of time on this, but I just want to draw some coral to what I just talked about, we want pages for each of the search, obviously, the homepage, we want unique content, we want to optimize for user experience, right, which means we’ve got real pictures, we speak to the human being, we give them call to actions. That makes sense, right? There’s a whole strategy behind how to set the website up to convert, we get real personality and authenticity. But you can see this also draws a scroll, right? Yes, you can, you can convert based on just what you see here. But it kind of draws you to scroll down the page, which is what we’re talking about. From a user experience perspective. We want that scroll, and we want at least one click once they get in. So whether that’s to click to book the appointment to click to start the chat, or to click the play a video of Robbie welcoming you to the website. This creates the on page stickiness that helps the website rank really, really well. The other thing I talked about was like making sure that we have pages for each of our services, right. So what do they do they do, they do drain services, we get Drain Cleaning, pans, sinks hydrojetting, kitchen sinks, video sewer inspection, trenchless sewer repair, right, this is just within drains. And so this is reliable Salt Lake City trenchless sewer line repair replacement services. The title tag clearly reinstates that up in the title, we’ve got unique contents. But speaking to that specific service, right, this is unique to this page is the only page on the internet that’s talking about Salt Lake City Drain Cleaning, or trenchless. Sewer replacement in this particular way. And then within planning, where we got lots of plumbing services, garbage disposal repair, we got water heaters, we got water softeners. So there’s the water softener page. So pages for each of the services with unique content, title tag, which you can see up here in the tabs, h1 tag with our keyword and the city. Give me a one if that if that checks. Like that makes sense. So you can now see a visual of what I’m talking about paste for each of the services. Keyword unique content. Okay, the next thing is we’ve got the service areas, and that’s what it is. So surrounding cities and surrounding towns that they work in. So in they they they’re serving a pretty wide area, right. So in their market in Salt Lake, you get outta and Herman and Sandy, and West Jordan, and all of these different cities and towns. Each one of these has a unique page, right with our keyword in the title specifically now we’re talking about West Jordan plumbing, water heaters and train service, we pick the main ones they want, they’re focused on based on volume, we get great, unique content that speaks about them, why choose them, it’s not just written for the search engines, it’s also written for the human being, because who cares if it ranks, we want also someone to get to this page and actually take action. And then remember, I talked about nearby now the platform that we use to kind of push heatmap data to the pages. This is a live example of this, right? So 20 hours ago, Randy s was in West Jordan. And there’s a brief description of what they did there. And you can see this, this heat map is just all lit up with where their technicians were in this particular city, and what they’ve been doing. So that’s that’s, that’s this process used to be that their technicians checked in on a phone. And that’s how it passed to this. Nowadays, this is automatically synced with service Titan for them. So we set up an automation, where when they close out a job in service Titan, it captures the job description and the address of that job. And the technician who did the work. It closes the job pushes the content to the City Pages, and we obviously get tons of City Pages, these pages are constantly being updated. And then it pushes a request for review, which helps them drive more and more online reviews, which also drives their online rankings. So just Is that clear what I’m talking about with having those City Pages and you can I don’t want to get crazy with it. Mostly, I would say target like 10 subsidies and surrounding towns and create unique content for it and then leverage a tool like like that. Bill Epstein. This is a city page. Right? This is a page specifically targeting West Jordan planning, right? That’s what this page is all about. Give me a one if you’re following with me, because Bill your question makes me feel like maybe not.

Okay, good. All right. So I’m not going to run 100 searches here but you know, if we were to go to Google and type in as an example last Jordan Clark. You can see up here, right at the top is valid Drain Cleaning with a 1.6 1000 reviews, and they come up number one organically. And I could pull up on, you know, a long list of keywords. But really the idea here is if we structure the website correctly with pages, feature services, pages reach the cities and towns, and we do some of the arcade stuff I’m going to talk about here in a second. That’s what drives these types of results. So we’re gonna see they rank for a lot of different stuff, what I want you to see is his impact in terms of how this impacts the revenue, how this impacts their growth. They spend about $10,000 a month in their online marketing, that’s management fees to OS, Google ads, that’s to combine monthly ad spend, or digital marketing investment. You can see the track 460 leads per month, this is, you know, you might have been a couple months ago, an average of $23 per lead, if we divide that out 329 of those come from organic rain. So we’re able to like we’re able to put tracking in place to say where do they come from, if they clicked on a non paid listing, and they got to the site, it shows a different number. So we can say 329 people picked up the phone and dialed in via that channel 36 on Google Maps, this number is much, much higher. The only distinction is we’ve got multiple Google Maps, and this particular report didn’t pull in that particular location. But that notwithstanding their organic cost per lead is less than $9 per lead. So just give me a one if that’s helpful to see a real example on page optimization. Jeff Lee says one Okay, good, good, good. I don’t want to do a dozen examples here. This is another company we work with in Reno, Nevada, they serve Reno and Sparks Nevada area. You can see here they’ve got the number one spot. company we work with in Orlando shamrock plumbing very dominant for a long time, I want you to see in his case, he’s just got about a $3,000 Spend 410 leads track about an average of $7.53. A lot of those obviously coming from organic right, coming directly from the organic non paid listings. So as it relates to the on page, we’re gonna shift gears here in a second the Off Page. What were your takeaways? Like, what were some things that you saw that you noticed that you recognize, I need to do this on my website, I need to maybe create those pages, or maybe I need to create those, you know, the service pages, or maybe I need to structure the content. So it’s more unique. Hopefully, some things are standing out. For excess content, City Pages, Jeppeson, City Pages, Nicky, Nick says content is king 100%. So that’s the on page stuff. That’s what you do on the website itself. But like I said, most home service companies today have this right, most home service companies have pages for their services and pages for their CDs. A lot of you guys have updated it. So it’s unique content, and you’re doing something on a consistent basis to make the content on the website itself unique. But you’re still wondering, I’ve got that why am I not ranking? Why am I still on the fifth page? Why am I still at the bottom of the first page? What’s the difference between the guy in the number one spot and me like, what’s the difference? Just give me a quick question mark. If that’s ever been a question, Mark, in your mind, if you’re like, Man, I you know, our team has done this, like what this is here, I can look at my site, and I can see that it’s there. Why are we not coming up? Right, a lot of question marks. So here’s, here’s the thing. It’s really about what happens off the site, all other things being equal, if there’s 100 Plumbing Companies in your market, and 20 of them have taken the time to do proper on page optimization.

The thing that’s going to stack those 20 versus the others is what has happened off of the website. And I’m going to talk about what those offsite factors are. So first of all, we need to claim and optimize our Google profile, right that used to be called Google My Business is called Google profile. Second, we need to get citations web references to our company’s name, address and phone number in the the organic directories that exist on the internet. We want to have consistency of those. But we need to build up our reviews. This is one of the big Off Page factors that makes a big difference, especially on the map. We need lots of reviews on Google, on Yelp, on Angie’s List, or on Angie’s excuse me, on the public places that Google can see like, here’s your company. Here’s the name, address, phone number. Here’s the number of reviews. Here’s the average sentiment that drives your rankings. You need to have lots of good Reviews, legitimate reviews from real customers. You need to build authoritative links back to your website from other websites. And I know this is not in fashion right now when we think about SEO, like, oh, Link building is dead? Well, the reality is you do need to, you do need to build up links. So you need links, not just your homepage need links to your service pages, and to those subsidy pages, if you want them to rank up Cooper’s plumbing and Houston say I don’t see broadly. That’s why I can’t list all the tools, there’s tons of tools on Bradley is a great solid tool for getting reviews as well. And you want to be doing content syndication, I think this is a big shift in off page optimization strategy that we’ve implemented, that makes a big difference in the results we get for our clients. And that’s that a simple blog post to your website isn’t cutting it anymore. And this was out of the old playbook of SEOs, which was a sample website, create pages, drive a bunch of links, and do like a couple of blog posts a month and call it a day. And what we found is a blog post posted on your plumbing site or your HVAC site or your electrical site, if it’s a, a blog post that just sits there stagnant, it’s basically serves no purpose. It doesn’t draw any links. It doesn’t draw any citations. It doesn’t build any authority. And so it was a checkbox activity that either you or somebody on your team or your agency was doing just for the sake of saying, we’re updating the website, what we found that works really well is to take your typical blog post, and syndicated we call this a signal generation approach, which means what you want to do is yes, come up with a great unique piece of content that’s either specific to your local area specific to a service that you provide or specific to something that you and your company is doing that’s unique and interesting. And syndicated out getting picked up on local news sites get picked up in the local community so that that piece of content appears in a lot of different places, and has links pointing back from it to your homepage to that subsidy page that you set up to that Google My Business or the Google profile that you have set up. And when you get the on page, right, and you do this kind of aggressive syndication of content, you can create consistent momentum because you’re going to have more authority, then your competition. And so really, what what Google is looking for, and we’ve studied this ad nauseum, I’ve got a bunch of slides, I’m not going to spend a ton of time on because I don’t think it’s going to be super useful, relevant. But it basically boils down to Google wants to give top results to expertise, write a good quality page with good, unique content that’s actually relevant to the user that has authority, right. And authority means that it’s it’s published and being referenced on sites like ABC, CBS News, etc. And it’s trustworthy, right, there’s signals thrown flowing through to that page. It’s not just a rogue page on the internet. It’s a page that’s being referenced from high quality, relevant places. And so

this is what we call a content syndication strategy. Basically, what we do is we set up on our clients website, and I’ll kind of pull up valley as an example here. And we’ll push out a post, repairing the water heater, what to do and what not to do, right. And if all that did was sit on their site, it wouldn’t serve much purpose. But we’re able to push that through a content syndication network, and get it picked up by a lot of the local news sites. And when it gets picked up on those new sites, like Fox News 21. Now, it’s the content that’s sitting there. But we’ve got links pointed back to let’s say, that brain page or head pointing back to that subsidy page, or pointing back to the Google My Business listing. And when you do this on a consistent basis, I combination to citation development, and building reviews and building other like highly qualified links, you can really move the needle up over time. This is a tool that we’ve developed and that we use, you know, in our in our company, right, like we’ve made massive investments in this technology. And so it’s something we use on behalf of our clients. So over the last two and a half years, we’ve been leveraging this this platform and getting these types of results. This is one of the clients we work with Fox and sons, plumbing and HVAC Out of Vernon, British Columbia, you can see they have 352 key words over a span of time that went from not ranking on the first page to being on the first page, and they moved up in 151 different instances, flow plumbing in Brentwood, California 117 keywords ranked for from one period to the next. Oliver’s plumbing in Sun Prairie 102 keywords 135 moved up. And so this this approach works, right, I just want to hit the key things here because I don’t want to like get super super into the technical nitty gritty. But on page, we got pages for each of our services and cities. We optimize those pages with our keyword in the title, the H ones, the URLs, the images and unique content throughout the page. on Google, on the Google map listing the Google profile, we plan it, we optimize it, we add it to yes or some other third party citation aggregator so we can get our listing picked up and being referenced in a lot of different ways. We add it to the major data aggregators, which I’ll do a session next month on specifically Google My Business and how to get ranked in the Google Map listings. But this is a key idea, right? There are aggregators and four of them that if you’re not in will be spawning incorrect information potentially about your name, your address, or your phone number. And if you changed it in one place, all of a sudden, you’ve got inconsistent data, which is harming your ability to rank on the Google

Maps. So you want to get to a concrete listing management platform. And then you want to get yourself added to the main data aggregators. And then you need a system in place to drive online reviews, where after every service call, the customer gets an email, Hey, thanks so much for your business, we’d love it if you’d like us to review and give them a direct link, whether it’s to their Google Map, or whether it’s to Yelp or whether it’s to whatever profile you’re trying to build up at that moment. In time. I think you also want to do quarterly look backs. A lot of people don’t do this. But there’s no reason you can’t grab your customers over the last couple of months, the last couple years, hey, it was an honor serving you, you know, we went out there and get a drain cleaning job for you. I was hoping you could post a quick review with your experience. Not everybody in the moment does your review. But if you get a wave where you’re hitting your customers on a consistent basis to check in and also to ask them to give you some feedback, you can get quick hits in online reviews, which will absolutely build up your your rankings. And you need to be building citations on an ongoing basis for Google Maps specifically, you know, there’s the top 50 that we all think of and you know, that are kind of connected with Yext, but then there’s local specific directories. There’s service specific directory, so local, if you’re in Denver, right, there might be the Denver plumbing director, there might be the Denver business directory, right? There’s local ones. And then there’s industry specific, like plumbers nearby and things like that, that you can add yourself to. And if you’re adding yourself to new citation sources, over time, you’re going to build more authority, you’re going to build more credibility, your site’s going to have more signals pointing to it as ultimately with the reviews and the proper on page optimization, going to be able to move way up in the organic results. Now, we do need to be doing ongoing content as well. So we want to push out at least a new blog post a month and have that syndicated. So it’s not just a blog post on our site, but it’s a blog post, it’s going out, building inbound signals back to your My Business page, back to your website back to those subsidy pages on the website. We’re gonna leverage expertise, authority and trust. And we want to mix our links. So we’re not just doing all links back to the homepage, we’re not doing all do follow links. This is more of a technical thing than anything else. But there’s do follow, you’re telling the search engine, this is a legitimate link, I want you to pass authority through this. And there’s no follow which is a link, but it’s on the search engines. Don’t give me any credit for this, you want a little bit of a mix in that in your syndication strategy. You want to have map embeds on your website, like with nearby now on your posts, so that that’s passing juice, not just back to your site, but also to your listings on and you have to have fresh content on a consistent basis. Um, so that’s the checklist. You can go to plumber SEO dotnet slash SEO dash checklist. Hopefully this was useful. I talked about making sure that I covered the 8020 Right, the 20% of things you can do to drive 80% of the results. There’s lots of little nuance between all this stuff, right in terms of how you structure the content, how you interlink and what you do with the map embeds. But if you got the main takeaway Ways and the main things from this checklist, you know enough to be dangerous. I’d love to hear like, what your takeaways were, what you learned. And if you’d like some help, right? If you’re thinking like, you know, this was good, I think these guys might be able to help me get my on page optimization tire, they might be able to help me get ranked better, they might be able to help me generate more leads and more sales, I would encourage you, let’s schedule a complimentary session, complimentary, we’ll run the analysis, we’ll be able to look at exactly where there’s missing components with your online directories. We’ll run that keyword list for you and show you exactly what those most important keywords are and how you’re ranking on Google and Yahoo, and Bing. And we’ll walk you through either the good, bad or indifferent. It might be luck, your website looks great. Or it might be Look, here’s what’s wrong, here’s where there’s room for improvement. And here’s what it would look like if you’d like us to take this and run with it on your behalf. Michael says biggest takeaways, user experience and content syndication awesome, very important strategy is very important, very important pieces of the of the puzzle. So thank you guys for being on here today.

It’s been my pleasure to share hopefully you got value. Give me some feedback here in the comments on a scale from one to 10 one being wasted time. 10 being this was great. I got some great insights very useful. Okay, good. That makes me feel good. I’m you know, I’m getting a weak ego. So it helps me to get positive affirmations feedback, guys, thanks so much for taking the time. I’m glad you got value. Take me up on our offer for free strategy session by going to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule, and we’ll talk to you again real soon. Thanks, everybody.

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