The Google Maps Playbook for Plumbing, HVAC and Home Service Contractors

All right. Hello, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us on today’s session, we’re going to be talking all about how to get ranked on the Google map in your service area for your most important keywords. This is a really, really important topic, and something that I’m constantly studying something that our team is constantly studying. Because we know, if we get ranked better in the Google map, we can generate more leads, we generate more sales, we get more momentum in our business. So just real quick, in the comments, give me a one. If you’re hyper focused on getting ranked better organically in your service area, just I can kind of get a sense of where you guys are at. I know Larry gave me a one. Excellent. Charles, give me a one. Fantastic. Let me let me share my screen here and we will get this show on the road. All right, you should be seeing my screen now. It says the Google Maps playbook for plumbing HVAC home service contractors. I know you guys just give me one second, one more time, just give me a one. So I can make sure that this is displaying correctly. Player can see it. Okay. Awesome. So the digital dominance method, you know, this getting ranked on the Google Map is part of the overall strategy you want to put in place to really maximize your lead flow and profitability via the internet. So foundationally, we want to have a good website that’s built to convert, right, that’s kind of phase one. Phase two is we want to make sure we’re ranking organically, which means we’re looking up in the made in the non paid listings, and we’re ranking on the Google Map. And then we want to layer paid search on that and retargeting on that and everything else. But today, what we’re talking about is kind of here in the SEO area with a hyper focus on Google Maps, and how to get ranked in the Google map in your service area. So I’m going to ask for your attention, if you could, if you’re with me live, if you haven’t been watching this on Facebook, turn off your cell phone, close off your other tabs of let’s give this our undivided attention. I’m going to give you our latest and greatest ideas, strategies, techniques on Google Maps optimization, and what you need to do to get ranked up. So if you give us your undivided attention, I promise you’re gonna get more outcomes from the session.

So here’s what we’re going to cover. Here’s what I’ve got on the agenda, I kind of planned to unpack with you guys. I’m going to talk about the latest updates with the Google Map. This is constantly changing. It’s constantly evolving. And so I’ll kind of talk about some of those new changes, I’m going to talk about the five biggest issues that could be preventing you from ranking. What we found is some of the strategies that other agencies have used or other, you know, Google optimization people have taught, worked a couple of years ago, but now they’re actually preventing you from ranking as well as you could. So we’ll talk about those big five issues and how to get around them. And then we’ll kind of show you our proven model for getting ranked in the three fact which is those top three listings on the Google Map, we’ve now got about 172, plumbing HVAC, or home service companies ranked for their most important service and their most important city across the country. And we generate 10s of 1000s of phone calls directly from Google Maps every single month. So this this formula is based on real world experience working with companies just like yours. And we’re going to share some of our our top tools, the tools we like to use to systematize this and automated so that you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting. So if that sounds good, if this is kind of like what you came for today, just give me a one of the comments here just to kind of confirm yes, this is what you want to hear. This is what you want to learn. Excellent, fantastic. So who am I? Why should you listen? My name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of plumbing and HVAC SEO. We are one of the top digital marketing agencies in the plumbing and HVAC space. I’m the author of How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right for plumbing and HVAC contractors, very active in the industry. Active when PHCC que se next door service roundtable one of my content and articles have been published in the you know, the trade magazines, bytes and really more important than any of that stuff is that at this point, I’ve now had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing, HVAC, electrical home service contractors and some of the most competitive markets across the country. I’m seeing a lot of them go from where they weren’t ranking at all to now whether the dominant players in their market, many of them getting hundreds of leads from the internet every single month, several of them seeing over a million dollars in revenue growth over the last couple of years. And so you know, what I’m going to be sharing and what I teach on these webinars is based on real world experience working with contractors just like you and actually getting the results and outcomes and that this is what we do you know we were a digital marketing agency for plumbing HVAC Home Service comm company’s at war on a mission to help 1000 Plumbing HVAC companies triple their sales by getting their internet marketing. Right. And so you know, if as we’re going through this, you think there might be a need in your company. And you might think, you know, I’d like to just have Josh and his team do this for me to get me ranked on the map give me better results. We’d love to talk. You can at any point, if you’re too busy to sit through the whole session, you can go to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. And I’ll just drop that in the in the comments here, plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule. See if I spell that right Plu. What’s up Andrew glades, great to see you hear plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule, pick a time. And we will do a complete review audit of what you’ve kind of got currently in place, show you where there’s room for improvement, and we can have a chat about how we can help. So as we dive in, I think one of the first questions you should be asking yourself and probably something you should be considering is, do the maps even matter? Right? If the search engines are changing, and Google’s moving the organic results down?

Does anybody have to click on the Google map anymore? Does it even doesn’t even matter should be focused on it. And what we’re finding our latest statistics tell us more than 44% of people that go to Google and search for home services, specifically, they’re looking for a plumber, they’re looking for AC repair, they’re looking for drain cleaning, more than 44% of the clicks and calls go to the Google map. So yes, we know that local service ads is at the top. Yes, we know there’s paid results. And the map has moved down a little bit. But still the lion’s share of the clicks and calls come directly through the Google map. So yes, absolutely. The Google Map matters. And I’m going to show you some exact examples with data to back that up. So you’d have to be like, okay, Josh says it’s important because you read some study somewhere, I’m going to show you based on other plumbing HVAC home service companies that if you didn’t rank on the Google Map, and you weren’t paying attention to this, how much you could be leaving on the table. So one of the companies we work with is based in Orlando, Florida, shamrock plumbing, we go to Google and we type in Orlando, plumber, aluminum, plumbing, Orlando plumbing services, you’ll see they kind of rotate somewhere in the top three results. For most of those key words, I just want you to show you their their their report. They’re very, they lean heavily towards the organic side of the equation. And don’t spend a lot on paid search. I’m not saying that’s what should do. But I want you to see the data here. So they spend with us about $3,000 per month for our management fees. That’s the website management. updating the website, doing the SEO doing the Google Maps optimization, putting the tools in place that we know have helped to move them to the top three and keep them in the top three. You can see we track over 890 leads a month for them. And so if you divide that out, it comes out to about $3.73 per lead in Plumbing and Drain Cleaning, which in a major market like Orlando is ridiculous. And it’s really good if you blend paid search without it. Obviously he’s going to bring that up to Carmelita, but what I want you to see is almost 819 leads fortune five of them came directly from the Google Map. Right? So that’s people that searched and either clicked from their mobile phone right on the Google map listing call shamrock plumbing, or they or they dialed that number because we do track this we can say how many came from organic, how many came from pay per click and how many came from Google Maps. So there’s one example right if you’re like, hey, I don’t know that nobody clicks on the map anymore. Nobody like is calling to the Google Map. There is an example in Orlando for over 405 leads just from the map itself without putting anything else into the equation. Now another company we work with is Mexico plumbing and their full service plumbing Drain Cleaning, Water Heater Installation repair company based in Mason, Ohio. If you type any of the Mason plumber, Mason Drain Cleaning Mason, Water Heater Installation repair LLC, they come up in the in the three pack on maps almost every single time. Usually in the number one spot, sometimes it’s the and I’ve been tracking this over the years. So I want to show you this was back a couple of years ago, this was back in 2019 that we had spent about $2,749 in marketing services generated 421 leads average cost per lead is like $6.53. And you can see here from Google maps directly 183 leads generated which is which is great. But you might wonder like is that number still valid? This is a couple of years ago. So fast forward to last year, that numbers up to 196 directly from the Google Map. Fast forward to just this last month. 352 leads directly from the Google map. So while still be aggressive with creating content, building reviews, optimizing for Google Map three pack rankings, and while I’ll talk about that exact strategy here in a minute, they’ve been able to see their calls directly from the map increased from 140 or so the 300 Plus on a monthly basis. So this is just answering that question is the Google Map important is anybody still click this, give me a warning, it’s helpful to see some of this data and kind of see the the realities, this isn’t, you know, pie in the sky, this is legitimately looking at these clients looking at the tracking and seeing the exact outcomes.

So I’ll do I’ll do a couple more, and then we’ll get into it. So one of the companies we work with is Lanius. They’re a plumbing, HVAC drain cleaning company, whole, actually some remodeling as well in Fargo, North Dakota. And you can see anything in Fargo, they’re going to type associate with plumbing, AC repair, etc, they come up in the in the maps extremely strong. So again, going back 2019, they had over 835 leads tracked on a monthly basis through the Google Map, which is pretty impressive. I you know what, that’s a lot of leads from the Google Map. Now let’s fast forward a year 1408 leads per month directly from the Google Map. Now our most recent report, just as of this last month, 1640 leads, it’s just like phone calls directly from the Google map. So there are people searching on Google, there are people skipping, right past local service ads, skipping right past the paid listings and going straight to the Google map. So if anything I want you to take away from this session. They’re all leads and calls to be had by making sure you’re coming up in the map listings in your service area. Give me a yes in the comments if that is clear, if I’ve kind of made my point here. So last last example, I’m going to show this is company we work with in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, it is Cardinal heating and air conditioning, they do heating, air conditioning, and plumbing. And I just want to show you here last year, bought $11,000 and spent an average of 1077 leads track per month an average of $11.13 per lead across their entire internet marketing strategy, which is which is really good and really scalable in a market like that. But what I want you to see is despite all of the SEO and despite all of the paid search, still the winner in their market is Google Maps with 420 track bleeds. And as we continue to expand their service area on Google Maps, and get ranked for more and more keywords, you’ll see that while keeping the budget about the same, we were able to increase that as of our most recent report that 13 175 tracked calls per month 300 from organic 181 from PPC and 762 from Google Maps for an average of $8.75 per lead. So the point here is yes, Google Maps drive calls, so you can’t rely on Pay Per Click alone. You shouldn’t do local service ads alone. So let’s get into the how let’s talk about how this actually works. And what you need to do from your Google Maps optimization strategy to get ranked for the most important keywords in your service area in the map listings. So there’s been some changes to the, to the search results, or the SERPs as as we call it a couple of the big changes over the years. It used to be when you ran a search on Google, you would see seven results on the map. I guess like four or five years ago, they switched that to just three on the map. And so that made getting ranked in the map more competitive. But it also meant that when you’re one of the three, you’re gonna get more percentage of the calls that kind of plays out. If you look at some of the examples I was showing you, right, they were ranked in the map. Now they expanded their ranking more keywords, and there’s less competition in the map listings. more leads more sales via the map, which is wonderful. Google is placing paid ads. In the map results. You might have noticed this like you know Google ads you can play not for all three but there you can place an ad at the top of the results in your market. Google Local Service ads are available across the country. They show up at the very top they’re referred to as Google guaranteed. There’s a whole process and a whole step behind that. Give me a one if you’re in local service ads, you kind of are playing that game. I think you should be

so bottom line, it went from this over here but like where we had some paid listings in the set haven’t packed to now where we’ve got local service ads, usually one or two paid ads, and then the Google map with three listings on it. Real briefly, a couple of you guys have put in here a one in the comments that you are doing local service ads, which is great. So that’s this Google guaranteed local service ads area at the top is only three, you pay on a per lead basis, it rotates across, you want to know about this, you want to be participating in it, you want to be optimizing it for it. So we’ll be doing another session next month, all around local service ads and how to win with local service ads in your in your market. The way this impacts the search results, like the changes that Google has rolled out is we’ve got the local service ads at the top, then we’ve got our ads, then we’ve got our Google My Business or our Google profile listings, Google Maps, and then we’ve got the organic listings below that. And what I’m going to encourage you to think about and really what you want to do is you want to try to be taking real estate in each of these areas, right? This is the bottom of the funnel where your customer has a problem. And indeed, and there are Google either on their mobile phone or on their desktop searching, what we want to be showing up in local service, we want to be showing up in paid, we want to be showing up on the map. And we want to be showing up organically and possibly showing up as our website and in the various directories like Angie’s List and some of the other directories that are available. When you do that, you’re going to have more top of mind awareness, you’re going to improve your probability, not by 1x. But by 3x, that you’re actually the company that they click and ultimately call and book the job with. So on local service ads, again, I’ll do a separate session on this. But for local service ads, if you wanted to sign up for that, you can just go to AdWords google.com/local services, slash sign up, there’s a background check process there, you set a budget, you set a service area, and you know, you’ve got to play the game. And there’s very specific things that you can do to optimize your profile to optimize your budget, and really optimize your potential for showing up in the three. Tune in next month, or reach out to us for a one to one if you’d like to learn some of those, some of those strategies. So again, really what we want to do with art with our overall strategy is we want to make sure that we’re optimizing show up as often as possible. So here’s an example. So here we are in the map, here we are in the organic. And then here we are down here in the a couple of listings, or you can add, you’re gonna have your Yelp listing be the one that shows up, you can have your your website be the one shows up, we want to show up a number of times on the first page for the keywords your customers are typing in when they need your services. So things that have changed things that are hurting your ability to rank right now. Google has put an aggressive stance on eliminating fake listings. So listings that are to your aunt’s house to a you know, fabricated you know, office that doesn’t really exist inside of another person’s building. And in what used to be really effective was to set up a bunch of bogus locations, and all the little cities and towns claim that on Google, get the PIN code and play that game. I know some of you who have done this, I know that you know, there was a time where this was a common thing to do. But that may actually be one of the things that are hurting you in your rankings today. So top five things that could be actually preventing you from ranking that might have been working in the past month. Number one is you actually need an office in the city you’re trying to target. So if you’re going after Miami, and you want to show for Miami plumber, Miami plumbing, Miami Drain Cleaning in the three pack on the map.

You don’t want an office into Ral or Pine Crest or one of the surrounding towns that’s going to make it very hard to rank. Very rarely do you see a surrounding city actually ranking on the Google Map? You really what you need is a true location like a commercial office that you can validate and confirm with lots of citations, right, and you can do all of the best optimization in the world. But if you don’t have a location in the city that you’re trying to rank in, you’re going to be playing an uphill battle. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is did you at some point in your history or your company’s history, spam with fake locations. So if you had another provider or you personally went out and set up Atlin this house and set up your own house and got a UPS door, and you had one like fake location, all these cities and all these towns and they still exist on Google, your real location is trying to rank to fourth probably going to be penalized or brought back. So something to think about if you’re really struggling to rank in Google map, you want to check to see like, Are there fabricated listings and get those listings removed, get them consolidated, get them cleaned up. The other thing that could be hurting you would be inconsistency of your name, address phone number profile, I’m going to talk a little bit about this, this is called during nap. If you don’t have consistency with how your company’s name is listed, the address that you’re using, with little like little differences, like Southwest spelled out instead of SW, when you’re using different phone numbers in different places, this can cause inconsistency, which can hurt your ability to rank in the map. And then you know, if you’re spamming the like your keywords in your name on Google, there’s some there’s some data saying this can work. But it also is against Terms of Services, something you want to pay very close attention to. And then number five is not having enough reviews, right? If you don’t have reviews on Google, and more than the competition, you don’t have reviews, on Angie’s List and Yelp and all the different public profiles, you’re you’re gonna struggle, right. So you have to get real reviews from real customers in your in your real service area. So these are the five things you want to check out, make sure you get to a location, it couldn’t mean you could get away with a home office, but it has to be a real location in the real city that you’re trying to serve. Eliminate the spam listings that you might have, go up and find inconsistencies your your name, address phone number, consolidate your listing on Google profile, to be your actual company name, as it as it legally sets, right, and then make sure you get online review. So these are these are the key things that could negatively be impacting your rankings. But what I want to do now is unpack our formula for getting raked in the in the three pack. And it’s kind of simple, but there’s a lot of work and a lot of effort and a lot of diligence that goes into implementing this and making it happen in the real world. So the first thing you want to do is claim your your Google profile, right? You do that by going to google.com/business. And if you have, if you haven’t claimed it, most of you probably have or have had somebody that claimed it for you, you want to claim it and you want to optimize it. And I’ll talk about some specific things you can do to optimize your profile. But that’s the first thing right, you have to have a claimed and verified Google profile account. Second thing is you want lots of web references of your company’s name, address phone number across the internet. So there are 1000s of directory sites online. And you know, I mentioned a couple of them Angie’s List and City Search and best of the web and you local plumber, and home advisor etc.

What you want is to be listed on Google My Business or Google profile. And you want to have a lot of web references, a lot of citations that reference your exact company name, address, phone number with consistency. So the second thing is we want to make sure we get lots of consistent citations for your business. Number three, or number two is we will need to make sure that we have lots of reviews. And we want to do that there’s two things I’m going to recommend. Number one is have a process where you’re requesting reviews, after every service call sending an email, giving them the direct link to write a review for you on Google, if you do this, right, you can make it very simple for your customers to post a review, you can get lots and lots of reviews, all things equal the company with the right address in the right city with the best citations, and the most reviews is going to have the advantage right, you’re gonna usually see the company with the most reviews in three pack showing up at the top. So this is a major ranking factor on maps. And then the third is we want to optimize the website itself. So the content on the homepage is service pages, the the City Pages, the use of, of microformat data, the embedding of your Google map correctly into the into the site, lots of things you can do on the site itself, to put yourself in a prominent place to rank in the map listings. So I’m going to unpack this as we go. But at the most basic level, we want to claim our profile, we want to get lots of references to a company’s name, address and phone number, we want to get lots of reviews. So I say there’s two ways to get reviews. The first is to have a system where request reviews after every service call. The second would be to do a a database requests like take all of your past customers, all of your past friends, your you know your sphere of influence, and send a message hey, you know what, we’re looking to build up our online authority. We’d love to get your feedback. And you take a couple minutes to write us a review on Google. Right? Oftentimes, that’s that gets overlooked, but it’s a simple thing you could do to push an extra 10 or 15 reviews, rather than the games to give yourself a little bit of a a jump in terms of how you’re going to rank on Google Maps and then we will Want to make sure we optimize the website itself? Give me one of the comments if you’re tracking along, right, I want to keep this actionable, I want to keep it, you know, manageable, but without getting too technical. Alright, so we’ve got a couple of ones. Thank you guys. So as it relates to optimizing your Google profile, and it’s I always say Google My Business, because it was Google My Business for a long, long, long, long time. And then about a year ago, they changed it from Google My Business to Google profile Business Profile Manager. So what I’m going to do, first of all, I want to make sure that you get the log into your Google account, whether you’ve hired us, you’ve hired a third party, or you’ve done this on your own, you want to know what the Google profile is, you want to make sure that you’re the admin on that account, so that you can get in, you can look at the settings, you can make sure there’s no shenanigans, if you ever have to switch directions, that’s the most powerful thing maybe other than your domain that you want to have access to. So as the business owner, I’m gonna encourage you to get access to your Google Business Profile Manager. So that’s the first thing in there, I’m going to suggest, update your company name to reflect your real company name. So if you’re Bob’s Plumbing, you want that to read Bob’s Plumbing, not Bob’s Plumbing, dash Dallas, or whatever extra things you might want to add. There are some gray hat strategies around this gray hat, meaning, you know, it works. But it might not be associated with Google’s best recommendations or their terms of service, where, statistically speaking, if you look at it across the board, if you go into your company name, and you add the city, or you add the service, the keywords you want to come up for, you give yourself a little bit of a bump in how you rank. So as an example, if your company is Bob’s Plumbing, and you want to type, you want to rank for Bob’s Plumbing and Drain Cleaning in Dallas, Texas, if you added that to your name, theoretically, that’s gonna give you a little bit of an advantage, because you’re very keyword matched to what the cost prospects are typing in. I don’t recommend doing it unless you go out and like literally, literally change your company name to match that. Right. So Brian, good to have you on here. He says, What if you haven’t legally updated as a DBA? From what I understand, you can get away with that. I mean, it’s a lot of hoops to jump through. If you’re in a very competitive city, and you’re not getting where you need to go. Maybe it’s worth doing that.

You know, choose your battles, right. But you know that that’s something you could do, I recommend just having a beer company name. We don’t have any problem with companies like next go and lay knees, which clearly don’t have the keywords in there still ranking extremely, extremely well. Yes, Chris says looks tacky. doing that. I agree, right, because you also want to think about your brand, you want to think about your perception. So while you might get a little bit of a hit in terms of how you rank, I would suggest just keep your company name in there. Obviously, add your website address in there, use a local number in Google Maps, on your Google Map listings. Don’t use an 800 number, you want it to be local to the city that you’re in. So use the 305 numbers, use the 786 Number, use the 954 use the actual local area code number in there. shy away from a peel box or a UPS Store, there was a time where you could get away with mailbox etc. Or a UPS store virtual office, you definitely aren’t getting away with a peel box in a UPS store right now, if you want to be on the fringe, and again, I’m very much on the white hat side of the equation. So I don’t like to be on the fringe. But if you wanted to be on the fringe, you might find a virtual office that has a unique suite number that isn’t Regis but so Regis is the biggest one that everybody knows Google has all of that index that can easily see, yeah, you set up a Regis office, that’s not legit. If you find like a virtual office, that’s why somebody just rented an entire building and subdivided it. And they can get you a unique suite number where you can receive the mail, you can get a PIN code and you can build your citations, you could do that best practice would be get a real commercial office in the city that you want to rank, make it as small as it needs to be invest a couple 100 A couple $1,000 There, that’s going to be your your best foundation to build from while you might get away with a fake address, well, you might get away with a virtual office, eventually, that’s probably going to get caught and it’s gonna get filtered out of the results. And so you would have spent a lot of time and energy for nothing at some point down the road. So the real commercial office and the real place where you want to rank and do it the right way. Once you’ve got those fundamentals in place, we want to upload as many photos as possible. And I like to think about the photos that you put on your Google profile. To be similar to what you would want to put on your website, so you can put your logo but really people want to do business with other people. So use real imagery, use pictures of your team pictures of you as the owner pictures of your trucks, pictures of like your technician at the home pictures of the authentic experience that your customer is going to have not stock images or real nice imagery. I was reading a report that actually using cell phone based images as strangers that is curious a little bit more weight than highly processed and highly edited images. So get your logo on there, get to pictures, you know the main pictures that you use, and then get some some pictures of your technicians out in the field on a phone, get some pictures of your guys, for a little bit of a bonus in the way that you upload your images geotag them to your city and include the the metadata that has your your keywords in it. So instead of calling that like image, one dot jpg, call it Bob’s Plumbing, full service plumbing, Dallas, right or like get your keywords in the naming the metadata. So as you upload it, you can put some metadata behind it that passes more context to that image, which is in your Google My Business Profile, which ultimately can help with the proximity where you rank. And then we want to list our hours of operation and our services offered. I’m just going to show you like once you log in, right, you’ve got an area right here where you can upload your photos, upload it, look at your profile, and make sure that it lists itself, as verified. as many photos as you can, right just you can you can, I don’t really think you can go wrong. Adding too many photos in there, you got some great data that you can look at in terms of history and how many people have clicked on you, and how many people have used it to get, you know, driving instructions to get to your office.

The other thing you want to do like and I want to call your attention to a couple of things. Don’t just set and forget it with your Google profile. Yes, upload photos in the first batch. But add new ones on a consistent basis. You know, things happening in the business, new jobs, updates to the showroom, that type of stuff, update it. The other thing you want to do is you want to be doing Google posts, there’s an opportunity to post right from Google My Business or Google profile updates, special offers incentives. Once you post on Google posts that last 90 days, I recommend trying to get a Google post up at least once a month, if not on a weekly basis. So post to that and then be strategic, right? Get your keywords in the posts, get image in there with geo modify data in it. That’s all going to pass for relevancy and context to your listing. In addition to getting reviews, we’ll talk more about how to get reviews respond to reviews, right? So as people post a review about you, hey, you know, Larry was amazing, his technician was super friendly came out on time. As a courtesy, it’s gonna help from a conversion perspective to say, hey, thanks so much for taking the time to post the review. We appreciate your business from a ranking perspective, and I can’t validate 100%. But if you can include some key words in your response, hey, it was it was a pleasure to install that new water heater for you. Down in the Dallas area, right? include that in your response without sounding sounding robotic, you can get more context going something I would suggest and then answer questions that get posted a little ninja hack here in addition to answering questions, because how often is someone actually going to your Google My Business Profile and asking a question, not for your plumbing, HVAC, electrical company. Not that often. But we’d be to seed some questions, seed some questions that have the keywords that you want answered and answer those questions directly on your own Google profile. Obviously, you’re gonna get more context doing it that way. So just some best practices on Google profile, what to do, how to optimize it. So that’s that’s the first thing. Second thing is we want to build up citations, right references to a company’s name, address and phone number across the web. Key things are anchored in what your address is, how you’re going to list your company name, and what phone number you’re going to use. And then go out and get yourself added to as many profiles and as many online listings as possible. I think I’m gonna be sharing some great citation resources with you guys. But think national like Angie’s List and E local plumber and things like that think industry specific like the the the plumbing directory, the HVAC directory, the trade association directories, things like that specific to your industry, and then also think local. So in your market, there’s going to be like in Miami there’s like the Miami business directory and the Miami home On service directory, right, find the national find the industry specific and find the local specific listings that you can get yourself added to the more the merrier in terms of getting yourself in there. Because every reference to your name, address phone number is going to pass a little bit of a have a vote for the legitimacy of your business. And some of those paths links back to your website, some of those embed your Google map listing and then and so if you get you get more and more citations, that’s going to help with your your Google Map listings. You’ll also want to look for like duplicate listings and incorrect business information. I find most companies once they add themselves to a couple of the data aggregators, and like one of the top tier directories like citation management systems, they have plenty of citations. But what often happens is incorrect and duplicate listings start to spawn a duplicate Google map listing, which means you’re coming up two or three times instead of just once a duplicate yp.com listing, right where you’re coming up in a couple different places under a couple different names. That’s not good, right? Especially your Google map, you need to consolidate those. But a lot of times you’ll get these duplicate listings with incorrect name, address phone number, which is harming your ability to rank in the map listing. So limit the number one eliminate the duplicates, and we want to go and clean that up. I’m gonna suggest look at the data aggregators, there’s four main data aggregators, factual axiom info USA and Newstar. Basically, those four services push data to hundreds, if not 1000s of independent sites. So those sites leach information from info USA to populate their directory. And so

if you’re not in all four, you’re probably not going to be in as many places as you could. What if you don’t go in and control your data aggregator data? Easily, you might, you might have factual axiom and info group, right, right. And so those sites that they feed to all have right information for you, when new store let’s just say you’ve ever claimed you’ve ever set that one up, and it’s pushing invalid data, like some wrong name, or some wrong address that’s showing up in a lot of different places. So what we did for a long time is when we try and manually reverse engineer, okay, let’s find all the directories and let’s go claim and add yourself to them. Let’s update them and consolidate. But it was it was still like bad information in the dagger aggregator level. So I’m gonna suggest you know, either you and your provider that you work with make sure that they’re getting you on those data aggregators with the right information. There’s some great citation tools on the market. Bright local being one of them white spark being a great service. So citation providers would be tools that you can type in your company name, your company address, and it will look at okay, where are you? What are the valid the relevant directories that you might want to be in and help you find opportunities to fill in gaps and vice local Moz Local and Yext UX being the most famous and the most popular? Some people love Yext, some people hate Yext. The reality is Yext is the dominant provider, they’ve got the most API’s, they’ve got the best access. And the beautiful thing about Yext is you can go in and update in one place and have a lot of these directories, the most important ones, the tier one listings updated quickly and concisely across the web. And so I’m a big fan of Yext and bright, local to create secondary listings. And of course, you have to do manual citation research as well. None of these tools capture all of the national, local and industry specific sources. So if you’re ever curious, like I think if you’re ever curious about how your citations look and kind of how you’re being referenced across the internet, we have set up this link for you guys, you can come in here is a free report that you can run to analyze how your company looks with consistency. Anybody Anybody want to volunteer their site to have a look at it and do a quick a quick check. Sometimes they get a guinea pig, Andrew, okay, give me give me the address and the and the phone number that you use. Sure, if you want to put that actually, we’ll come we’ll come back to that Andrew. Sorry. I mean, let’s see. Here’s what I want to ask you guys to do. This is this is free for everybody to hop in and do go to that page, put in the report, this will help you get a sense like where you’re might have some inconsistent data in your data that’s being pushed across the web. So just something to look at. And that’s plumber SEO dotnet slash scan. And it will give you a report that looks very similar to this, how many inconsistencies there are, which ones you need to fix. And of course, we’d be glad to fix it. I know you’re one of our clients, this is something that we’re working on for you diligently. And this report is for you, right, it’s for you guys to go in and do that stuff. So that’s the first thing, run the scan, right? Have yourself on all of these online directories have the consistency of your name, address, phone number, and a couple of best practices as it relates to your citations. Number one, Google your Google profile, you want to claim that manually, right, don’t use your extra BrightLocal or some third party app claim that manually have a login, have admin access that you can update it directly on there. Use a tool like Yext to push it out to the other top 50 or 100 directory listings, make sure that you’re listed in the major data aggregators. And then leverage a tool like bright local white spark Logan X to find some of those tier two, tier three niche directories and do some manual searching on Google as well. If you do this on a consistent basis, you’re going to have consistency, you’re gonna have more citations, and you’re going to have better authority, which is absolutely going to help you in terms of how you rank in your market. And we do have

a report for you guys that we put together some of the top citations that you can tap into, if you go to plumber, SEO dotnet, slash citations, that’s plumber, SEO dotnet slash citations, you’ll get our list of the latest, you know, manual citations you want to claim based on authority. Okay, so number one, we claim to optimize your profile. Number two, we bought we brought up we got a lot of consistency of our name, address phone number with citation management. Number three is we want to drive lots of real reviews from a real customers and our true service here, all other things being equal, it’s going to be the companies with the most reviews that win the day in their local market. So I’m gonna encourage you to leverage leverage tools to request a review after every service call. I’m a big fan of nearby now, in a basically technician checks in in the field, they type in the customer’s name, cell phone number and email address. And a review request goes out. In the perfect world, you’d have a review requests going out after every service call thanking them, the customer. Hey, thanks so much for your business. We’d love it if you take a minute to post us a review, right and take them to the profile that’s going to be most powerful, right? If you’ve got lots of Google reviews, and you need more, keep driving them to Google right. One of the nice things about nearby now is a will recognize if that person’s logged in on Google. So if they’re on Google already on their mobile phone or their desktop, it’s going to automatically send them to Google. So all they have to do is hit the review stars and type it in. If they’re not, then you can choose I want this to go to Yes, or I want this to go somewhere else. I recommend having a review card printed like a physical card that you can tell them hey, thanks so much for your business. Hey, if you take a quick minute, you can write me a review by going to this page that helps to plant the seed and train your technicians to do that train your technicians to say hey, by the way, it’s been an honor serving you, I hope you had a great experience. You know, my job is you know, is rated based on the experience that I generate for our customers and so you’re gonna get an email and a review or request to run a review. If you do that for me. It would It would really help me out kind of like the car dealers always do. I know every time I buy a car that that that sales guys like man, you’re gonna get this survey. I need you to write the survey my kids, you know, we’re gonna go hungry if you don’t do the survey, like don’t be that aggressive with it, but train your technicians to plant that seed. One of our clients, Mark Norman from shamrock plumbing Orlando, actually calls the customer after the service call they happy calls, right? And says hey, by the way, would you be willing to write a review? And then they say yes. And that’s where most of us leave it. Okay, great. Hopefully they do it. We kind of sit there twiddling our thumbs help that customer writes a review. You know, when he did to really blow up his reviews as he would get those customers on the file and say, Hey, are you worried? Okay, great. Let me send you the link while you’re on the phone. And okay, click here, click there and like really hold your hand through that process. If you do that you’re gonna get more reviews doesn’t have to be you could be somebody in the office, but those reviews will make humanI people look at reviews before they buy reviews drive your rankings rankings drive your lead flow, it’s worth the investment that you make within the within the business. And then you want to build reviews and recognition into your company culture. The Brian just mentioned here, can we incentivize gamify, the review process for protects? Absolutely, you want to be tracking this, you want to be like bringing it up in your team meetings, you want to be like giving them a spot for their reviews, or some type of hey, whoever gets the most reviews this month gets a prize. Like there’s some really cool things you can do to incentivize your guys and your team to think about creating an experience, generate reviews, and then give them you know, to like, get them excited about what they’re gonna get as a reward, I find the companies to do all of these things, get the best results. And he’s working on some stuff to get some some reviews. Amazing. So my favorite tools for review automation, and there’s there’s a million we’ve got nearby now review baz BirdEye, customer lobby, pull Sam, and the list goes on and on.

What I would suggest from an automation perspective, what can really amplify this is to have it be automatic. So whether you’ve got service Titan, or maybe housecall Pro, or if you’re doing your books in QuickBooks, you can set up an automation so that once the job is complete, and service Titan are in QuickBooks, it triggers the review request through your system. And usually we can set this up through a zap or through some type of API. But that way, it’s not you thinking, Okay, I’m gonna copy and paste this email out. It’s not somebody in your team knowing they had to go in and push a button. It’s like when the job closes, which happens every time you close a job, it triggers a review request, our clients that put that automation in place, are the ones that usually see the most acceleration in reviews. So there is a great integration for service Titan, where we can push the review request through there nearby. Now we can actually push the check in and the review request with a text message in the email and a couple of message follow ups, that works extremely, extremely well. So leverage automation. Give me more if you’re still if you’re following along with me. So we talked about claiming and optimizing the profile, we talked about building up our citations. And we’ve talked about reviews and some great strategies to amplify the amount of reviews that we have. The other thing I would suggest from a review management perspective, is to once a quarter, get a list of the customers because not everybody writes a review and send an email out, send the text message out, hey, really appreciate your business, we’d love it. If you’d take a quick sector review. That way, you can get a nice little bump of reviews on a consistent basis. So just something to think about there. Now, the fourth pillar, the fourth red key thing to the strategy is your on site optimization, right, there’s certain things we want to do on the website itself, to make sure that it’s optimized and has the highest chance possible to rank in Google Maps. So obviously, you want a good website with great content that’s focused around user experience. So when somebody gets to the site, they’re not just reading garbage text, but they’re reading in a way a human would they’re interacting, they’re scrolling, they’re clicking things. We want to leverage media, social media, multimedia, wherever possible. So a video of you welcoming the person on the website, letting them know why somebody should choose you guys versus the competition. That doesn’t have to be fancy, it could just be you on a webcam, or you on your phone. Hey, my name is Andrew, I’m the owner of platinum plumbing. So excited to see you. You know, we’re a full service plumbing drink company serving this area. Video like that gives them the chance to know like and trust you before they have to do business with you. It’s going to improve time on site, it’s going to improve your your rankings. You want pages for each of your services. So if we get dry cleaning and water heaters and indoor air quality, we want a page for each of those. We want a page for each of the cities, especially the top 10 in our service area with unique content. We want to use nearby now so that those City Pages are getting unique content added to them on a consistent basis as jobs are completed as jobs are closed out. We found that works really well. You get content on every page, every page targeting a specific keyword in the title tag and the h1 tag, meta description that sells the click. So we’re not just writing our keywords again, and again, we’re trying to write it in a way that somebody says, Okay, that’s the company I want to collect rents and specific things you can do on that front. Make sure that we have our name, address phone number in the footer with the microformat data. We want to be blogging on a consistent basis and doing syndication, which means we’re not just putting a blog up on our site, we’re putting a blog All got that gets syndicated out, which builds links, which builds ranking factors, which builds authority over time, we want to make sure that our site speed is on point that our website loads quickly, both on desktop and mobile, which,

which really can help you win the day. I’m trying to do real quick here on the on site stuff, because last month, I did a session on the new SEO formula that goes depth on this. So if you want more details on the specifics on page and what you do with the content and what you do with the microformat data, go back and watch that training, because I spelled this out in in depth. So a good example of this, like in the real world from an onsite optimization perspective is Valley plumbing. They’re a plumbing company serving the greater Salt Lake City, Utah market. You can see here, if we type in West Jordan plumber, you know, they’re coming up here in local service ads are coming up on the map, they’re coming up organically with a couple of listings, and then their, their directory listings also rank. So we’re really in a dominant place in all things, search. And so I just want you guys to see here 10,000 in monthly spend 460. Tracked calls are 329 from Google Maps 93 from I mean, 329 from organic 93 from PPC 36 from Google Maps, on average cost per lead of just $9.02. On the organic side of the equation, the company we work with in Reno and Sparks, Nevada, Ira Hanson plumbing. And you can see here, we’ve typed in sparks that out of flour, really strong in the map listings. total spending about $2,463 To earn 14 leads directly from the Google Maps. So that’s $3.84. I meant here to go. Let’s just go to Google. And I’ve got some for a plumber up, which Cardinal AC, let’s pull up their website. And so just looking at the on page factors here, phone number in the top right hand corner, cargo heating and air Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, we get our keywords there in the title, you know, good unique reason, from a user perspective for someone to scroll down and engage, we get video and multimedia. And so like this is what we want to do with our site right pages for each of the services, pages for each of the cities inside the service area section. This tells Google what you are where you serve, gives you all of the like kind of the foot forward stuff that you would want. Let’s type in Sparks. Plumber. There’s Ira Hanson right there at the top. Same thing right phone number, the top right hand corner, Reno plumbers sparks, you know, is kind of the city that they’re based in trusted renal plumber. And then we’ve got pages for each of the services, service area pages for the main cities that they serve. We’ve got her name, address phone number here in the footer. So this is a multi location strategy right coming up in Reno. And sparks in the in the map and organic listings. And so looking at them as the example here 2400 Spend 214 leads directly from the Google Maps at an average of $3.84. So bottom line, right, our formula here is we’re going to claim and optimize the Google profile. We’re going to get lots of citations, references over companies name, address, phone number across the internet. So we’re consistent, we’re going to have a strategy, get online reviews from real customers and our true service area we’re going to do looking back or past customers. And we’re going to try and use automation so that after every service call review, request, text message and email goes out. And we’re going to make sure we optimize the on page factors, right. We want to optimize by getting your name address phone number by creating those City Pages, creating the service pages and making sure that the content is unique, without or throughout should I say. And so that is our formula for getting ranked on the Google Map. I have a checklist for you guys. Anybody that wants to checklist, go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash maps. Christian if you want to drop that in. That is the Google Maps checklist. And then we’ve got one specifically for the SEO, which is the SEO dash checklist. Both of those will get you to great resources. So I try to keep this quick. I try and keep it actionable and try and focus on the 8020 the 20% of activities that drive 80% of the results. I hope you had some takeaways. What I want you to do kind of as we’re wrapping up is just thinking your own mind. What are your takeaways like what do you need to do differently? Maybe with your citations? Maybe with your or on page optimization, maybe with how you’re getting reviews and getting reviews on a consistent basis, maybe with how you claimed and invalidated your Google My Business listing? What are your takeaways? What are your action items? What are your next steps?

And if you’d like help, if you’d like to talk with us about how we can help you do this, in your business, get you on page optimization, right, get your Google Maps optimization, right. We will run a keyword ranking report for you and show you exactly where you’re coming up right now, on Google and Yahoo and Bing, we will run a citation report to show you where there might be inconsistencies of your name, address, phone number where you’re missing, missing listings where you need to be in and completely complimentary. So if that sounds good, if you’d like to have us look at your current strategy, run a report for you show you where there’s room for improvement. You can either call us at 866-610-4647. Or you can go to plumber, SEO dotnet slash schedule. That’s plumber, SEO dotnet slash schedule, pick a time that works for you. We’ll run the analysis, we’ll jump on a call and show you where there’s room for improvement. And if it makes sense. We’ll talk about how we can work together and kind of what we would charge. If it doesn’t, that’s fine, too. So that’s a wrap. Thank you guys so much for being on here. Hopefully this has been helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out and schedule your strategy session by going to plumber SEO dotnet slash schedule and we will talk to you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.