The Google Maps Playbook: How Plumbing & HVAC Companies Can Dominate Local Search in 2025

All right. Hello and welcome welcome. So excited to have you guys here. Really looking forward to today’s session. We’re gonna be talking all about the Google Maps playbook and really what it takes to get ranked on the map in your service area when people are looking for your services and for what you do.

I’d love it if you could just in the chat, let me know what type of company you run. Is it a plumbing? Is it HVAC? Is it electrical? Is it a mix of plumbing, HVAC and electrical? Let me know that Ashley’s coming in from New Jersey. Jerry says they’re A-H-V-A-C company. Fantastic. I did put together a little workbook on this for you guys.

’cause the way the Google map works is constantly changing and we’re trying to keep, the latest SOPs and playbooks, how to get ranked on the map. And so if you wanna access this, you can go to plumber seo.net/maps dash. Workbook maps workbook, and it’s just a Google Doc with a checklist that you can track along with as we go.

And so when I think about Google Maps specifically and I zoom out into the big picture of, where does this fit into your digital marketing strategy in terms of, how do you accelerate the growth of your plumbing HVAC, electrical home service company? There’s a couple things we have to do, right?

We’ve gotta drive leads. We’ve gotta maximize conversion and then we’ve gotta optimize our results, gonna figure out what’s working and double down on the things that actually generate tangible, measurable return on investment. And really what it, when it comes to driving leads there’s only a couple plays.

There’s organic, there’s paid, and then there’s database marketing, which is marketing to that existing database, or those past customers or those past prospects. This really fits. Right here inside the organic strategy. And really the things we need to do to make sure we’re coming up where the customers are looking and we don’t have to pay every time somebody clicks.

And I always say that’s the foundation of your digital marketing strategy. And we think about driving leads. We’ve got organic, we’ve got paid, we’ve got database right here in organic. The most important organic listing really is the Google map and how you’re coming up in the Google map listings and dig Google Map.

Results. And so I’m just gonna ask for your attention. I know it’s Friday afternoon if you’re on with me live. And it’s probably been a busy week. You’ve probably had a lot of different things going on. I would just like to ask that you turn off your cell phones, close the other tabs. Just give this your undivided attention.

I will make it quick, I will make it productive. I’ll share real world examples and case studies and I’ll give you a very clear action plan that it followed. We’ll move you to a much better placement on the Google Maps, which will lead to more leads. And more sales. Hopefully we can stick to those rules of engagement.

And what I plan to cover on today’s workshop is the latest updates in the Google Maps listings is, it relates like, what does it really take to get ranked on the map listings? The five biggest issues or gotchas that we’re finding that, could be preventing you from ranking on the map.

And we’re seeing that some of the things you may have done two years, three years ago could actually be causing your listing not to come up the way that it should. So we’ll unpack those five things and there are proven model or proven three step model for getting ranked. On the map listings. And so that’s the main things I want to cover.

I’ll also be talking about some of the best tools and systems you can put in place to do some of the heavy lifting for you. If you’re trying to do this in-house, you’re trying to do it on your own, so just gimme a yes in the chat, if that sounds good, if that’s, if we can cover that stuff, that would feel like a good use of your time this afternoon.

Real quick, for those of you that don’t know, my name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder of Plumbing and Hvac, SEO. I’m the author of How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Internet Marketing we’re active in a lot of the industry association and groups, nexstar, service Roundtable, CEO Warrior and a lot of the different groups and organizations within the trade.

But I’d say more important than any of that stuff is that at this point I’ve had the opportunity to work with literally hundreds of plumbing HVAC, electrical home service companies in some of the most competitive markets across the country, and been able to get a lot of them. From, not having any placement online and getting very few leads to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their market.

Many of them generating hundreds and hundreds of leads every single month directly via the internet. Several of them seeing millions of dollars in revenue growth. And I was doing the math recently. At least 16 or 17 of our clients, we’ve helped grow to a place where they were acquired through public equity or through another company.

And so what I’m sharing with you isn’t based on theory, it’s not based on hype. This is based on real world. What we’ve seen working with home service companies just like you. And so is it okay with you guys if I share some of those examples and case studies? I guess it’s cool to see, hey, here’s the, here’s how it works, but is it okay with you if I share some examples?

Here’s the actual company, here’s where they’re coming up on the maps, here’s how many leads and sales they’re getting from that, so that you can connect the dots between the idea and how it actually plays out in the real world. Yes. Okay, fantastic. And just so you know, this is what we do right At the end of the day, plumbing, hvac, SEO isn’t just here to educate.

We’re not just here to train. We are a full service digital marketing agency, and we’ve got a team of 47 full-time employees that do this day in and day out exclusively for plumbing HVAC and electrical contractors. We build the websites, we do the SEO, we claim the listings, we build the citations, we implement all the strategies we’re sharing on these workshops and these sessions.

And if at some point you’re like, Hey, you know what, Josh, this sounds great. I just want you to do it for me. I wanna hire you guys to do this. We’d love the opportunity to chat. You can schedule a complimentary evaluation by going to plumber seo.net/schedule. Again, that’s just a free meeting.

We’ll look at your current online rankings. We’ll look at your current website and show you, Hey look, this is where there’s room for improvement and this is what it would look like if we were to do something together. Alright, Nick already dropped the link to that into the chat. Fantastic. As we get into the topic of the day, and we’re gonna be talking all about Google Maps, right?

And getting ranked on the Google map, the first question we have to ask is. Do the Google Maps even matter anymore, right? We’ve all seen the algorithm has changed, right? And now you’ve got more paid results at the top. You’ve got local service ads, you’ve got chat, GPT, Claude, and all these other platforms that are competing for the attention of your customers.

And so with all of that happening, does it even matter? Like it’s even worth thinking about the Google map and how we come up on the Google map, and I can tell you the latest data, the latest statistics on this tell us. Yes, it still matters. It’s still important. So if you look at a Google search right now, we were to type in Denver plumber, just wherever your city is, plus plumber or AC repair or electrician.

The, the result page looks kinda like this, right? We’ve got the paid listings, we’ve got local service ads, and then we’ve got the map results and the organic results. Those results that are just based on organic search results. What the latest statistics tell us, 71% of the clicks go to those map and organic results.

71%. They bypass the paid listings. They bypass local service ads and more, I guess probably even more relevant is that 67% click on the first five results, which means, obviously the Google map being what comes up and is most prominent organically. That’s where the lion’s share of the clicks still go.

And as an example here, if we type in Evansville plumber or plumber in Evansville, we know that more than 44% of the clicks and the calls and the traffic and the eyeballs are going directly to the map listings. And so one of the companies we work with in, in Evansville is is Bud’s Plumbing, right?

And you can see if you zoom in on this, hopefully my screen is large enough, you’re able to see this. You can see up at the top you’ve got Buds Plumbing and Repair Service. They’re coming up in local service apps, so that’s a paid play, right? But they’re also coming up as the number one result in the Google map, right?

That map listing where we know the lion’s share of those clicks come from. And I just wanna drill down for you because who cares if you rank, if it doesn’t result in anything. If it doesn’t move the needle, if it doesn’t get the phones ringing and the trucks running. I wanna show you, this is our actual data for this client.

And let me know if you can see this type. Yes, if you can see my screen well enough that you can see these boxes and these visuals. But we can see here they make about a $16,000 investment. In online marketing, right? So that’s management fees with us. That’s their investment in local service ads.

That’s their investment in Google ads and retargeting. And we can track 905 leads every single month. Coming in via the internet. And that’s coming across various channels, right? 224 from pay per click, 251 from local service ads, 263 from Google Maps. So that’s specifically what we’re talking about today.

And 130 from the organic results. If we do the equation on this, we’ve divide that out. That’s about $18 and 33 cents per lead. Not too bad. And you could see a lot of that volume, almost one third, maybe a little bit more than one third is coming directly from the Google Map listing that Google Map ranking.

And if we drill down further and we wanna look at the actual ROI of all of this and how this all plays out, we can use some analytics. It’s like what percentage of those actually turn into book jobs? What was the value of the, those book jobs in the field? And so we can see that for this 16,000 investment, that’s $257,000 in projected revenue, which is a 15 time return on investment.

Now, if we took Google Maps out of that equation. The ROI wouldn’t be nearly as good because a lot of money has to go into LSA and into Google A and into the Google ads. And so yes, getting ranked on the Google maps still matters. Yes. If you come up for your main key words in your city for plumber plumbing services, drain cleaning, water heater, installation, water heater repair, that’s not just, that’s not just an ego ranking, it’s a ranking that actually gets you in front of your customer that has a problem that you can solve that generates revenue in your business. So then the other question is like, what about chat GPT and engines just type ai? If you’ve got some concerns in your mind what aren’t people now searching on chat, GT and claw and perplexity and these other tools, Alan says, ai.

Gimme one minute. Hopefully I’ll get my mic back on for you.

Can you hear me now? Gimme a yes, if you’re hearing me clearly. We’re just gimme a thumbs up towards the screen. Okay, cool. Alright, so you’ve got A-E-O-G-E-O-A-E-O Basically at the most basic level is answer engine optimization. So that’s Alexa, it’s Siri. If you’ve got one of those devices, and there’s a play for that.

More, I guess more relevant in today’s market though, really is GEO, which is generative engine optimization. And that is like coming up on chat t it’s coming up on Gemini, it’s coming on up on perplexity and there’s definitely a shift and people looking in those places for that type of stuff. What’s cool is if if we look at it and we’ve got over 176 plumbing HVC electrical contractors and we’re paying close attention to.

The Google results, the Bing results, and how they’re coming up in generative engines, and I still refer to it as SEO, which is Search Everywhere Optimization. We want to come up on Google, we wanna come up on chat, CPT, we wanna come up on all of these different places. But what’s interesting, if we go to chat ccp t right now and we run a search for, who are the best plumbers in my city?

So this is Laney’s, one of the companies we work with in Fargo, North Dakota. You can see here. They actually have a map that shows up in Fargo and it’s referencing Laney’s and a couple other companies. And so a lot of the same strategies and there’s nuance, but a lot of the same strategies we’re gonna share with you in this session.

And really the formula that we’re gonna roll out in terms of getting ranked on the map apply pretty nicely to getting ranked in these generative engine results as well. I do wanna, I got give you a little bit of confidence though that it’s Google Maps is still a significant advantage over any of these other platforms.

This basically says there’s almost 10 million searches per month and it’s still the dominant platform for services like Plumber near me, AC repair, et cetera. Chate on contrast for these types of terms, only has 500,000 searches per month. So it’s a fractional comparison. If you look at it seven, 13.7 billion searches per day on Google, specifically 1.1 billion searches per day on chate.

So if you were to stack this right now and you focus on the 80 20. You know the 20% of the activities that generate 80% of your results, Google and the Google Universe is still where it sits. So Google’s still king for these services, but GEO and generative engine platforms are coming on strong. So you wanna make sure that you don’t just focus on Google exclusively, right?

We wanna rank there, but we also wanna make sure we’re planting the seeds and we’re getting ourselves in position to rank on whatever generative engine may be coming down the pipe. Yes, Google Map listings are still super important and super relevant. And you wanna make sure you’re coming up not just in the exact city where you’re based, you wanna make sure that you set up your website, you set up your service profile so that you can rank, like if someone’s searching directly in your office, they’re searching outside your office, they’re searching outside your area, and there are tools that we can run and platforms that we can use to help you get a sense of.

What, like what does the grid look like when somebody searches for your service or searches in your market for the things that you do? And we’ve got some great tools if you’d like us to run those types of analysis. When you schedule a time, we actually will come up with those keywords for you. We’ll run those ranking reports and we’ll be able to show you like, here’s where you’re coming up.

Here’s where there’s room for improvement. Here’s probably the opportunity cost associated with that, and we can talk about if you want our help, how we would be able to help you get that. Done. And so I’m gonna show another example here of what it really means when we get ranked well on the map.

And so one of the companies we work with here in Danbury, i’m sorry, Salisbury Maryland is Hancock Plumbing, heating and Air Conditioning. That they’re coming up really strongly on the Google Map results for, for exactly that exact term. And you can see here, about a $2,687 investment, predominantly organic in this case.

And we’re tracking 172 leads directly from the Google Map results. And so again, I’m gonna share these examples as we go. ’cause I think it’s important to understand that. Yes, it matters. And it results in leads which result in sales, which result in revenue growth to keep the trucks running and the business booming.

I showed the example of Laney’s and if we were to run a search right now for Fargo, a CU Repair, Fargo, plumber Fargo, North Dakota, hVAC contractors, they’re dominant in that market. And we track the data very closely. And you can see here 938 leads tracked directly from their Google Map results.

And so I don’t wanna beat a dead horse, but I do wanna show you a preponder preponderance of evidence that when we do get ranked on the MAP results, it’s gonna lead to a noticeable increase in call volume. So again, yes. Google Maps drive leads. They drive sales, and they’re mission critical for your growth.

So what are the biggest challenge, the biggest issues that we’re seeing in plumbing HVAC Home services as it relates to getting ranked on the Google Map? Number one is that the way that the results are displayed has changed, right? There was a long time where you had a seven pack of results and then you had three, and then you had the local service ads, shift to the top and the maps shift down.

Google’s also started to serve ads in the Google Map results. And you might notice this, if you search your city plus whatever the service is, plumber, hc, repair, HVAC contractor, et cetera there’s gonna be typically three map results and a paid ad. And is Google gonna be shifting more towards making you pay to play in the map?

Potentially, right? That’s why you wanna pay attention to this stuff. You want to capitalize on the free organic traffic, but we also wanna have a paid component to what we’re doing. That way we don’t miss out on opportunities. Local service ads, as we’ve talked about is very, dominant in every market inside plumbing, HVAC and electrical local service has, is running.

And that’s taking some of the attention off the Google Map result, and so we wanna make sure, if you think about your overall strategy, you’re not sleeping on local service ads and getting the Google guaranteed badge and all of that fun stuff. There’s competition from chat t and other generative engines.

Certain, like taking some of that search volume, potentially taking some of that future opportunity as if people start looking on those platforms instead. And so I’ll just say, if you’re not on local service ads, I would highly recommend getting that set up. There’s A-A-U-R-L in your workbook that shows you how to go there.

It’s not as easy as. Setting up an account and then setting a budget, right? There’s some nuance to it. There’s a lot of thought that goes into it. Our next workshop’s gonna be on how to win with local service ads in your service area. And just know as a client, this is something that we can manage and really optimize for you.

So you you’re not sleeping on the local service ads play. So really what we want to do, right? The true objective when it comes to our, or. Online marketing strategy is to own the results where people are looking, right? We want to come up in local service ads, we want to come up on the map, we want to come up organically.

We want to come up in as many of those results as possible. So we have the highest probability of getting the click or getting the call. We’re getting that particular lead. And Google has really cracked down on. Fake listings. So there was a long time where we could get away with setting up a fake address or, using Aunt Bonnie’s address and putting that on Google Maps and claiming that listing and ranking maybe 5, 6, 7 different times in 5, 6, 7 different locations.

Google wants a real business at a real location, and that’s what they want to have coming up in the map listings. ’cause they found that creates a better experience for their end user, that person that’s searching for a plumber or an electrician or HVAC contractor. And so they’ve cracked down significantly.

Over the last couple of years, and that’s one of those gotchas that we’ve seen, if you created a bunch of spam listings in the past, or maybe a provider that you worked with thought that was a good idea, and so they did that for you. Not only probably did those listings start to come offline, but your main listing, like the actual listing that your, is your main location probably took a hit from that as well.

And so if you’re noticing that you’ve disappear off naps or you’re not coming up even for things you feel like you should be, this could be a big driver of that. And there’s a right way and a wrong way to approach how we optimize and how we get ourselves ranked. In the map listings in our service area.

And what could be hurting your rankings. On the map there, there’s a couple of things that we see again and again. And if you’re aware of it and you know how to address it, you can solve for it and you can get back where you need to be. And number one is you need an address in the city that you wanna rank.

And so if you’re in Miami. You wanna come up in, in search for Miami plumber, Miami drain cleaning, Miami water heater repair. We actually need a physical address, ideally not a, like a, not a UPS door, not a. Virtual office, but a legitimate commercial address in that location. And to further that point, if you’re true office, let’s just say, and I’m gonna use an example that may not make sense, but think about your town.

There’s the city, but then there’s like the subsidies and the sub towns. If your location were in Palmetto Bay, the actual office is in Palmetto Bay, which is a little small town outside of Miami, but you want to come up in search for Miami. You’re gonna struggle, like if your address is in Palmetto Bay, but you wanna rank in Miami.

You, you probably are gonna need to get an actual address in the proper city that you’re trying to rank for. Otherwise, you’re gonna have a big challenge, right? And I think if there’s an agency you’re talking with or you’re trying to like, work your way up this battle and saying, Hey, I know I’m outside the city, but I wanna rank on the map anyways.

You’re fighting a losing battle. And so you’d be better served to get a proper address, get it properly optimized, get it properly claimed in order to give yourself a fighting chance to come up in those results. Number two, talked about this briefly, is did you spam locations? So in the past if you set up a bunch of fake addresses and got maybe like a pin code verification or a phone verification and you tried to, create some citations and you try to create some authority there, and Google caught it, right?

They’ve got all kinds of algorithms that’s seeking these situations out. If they caught that and it’s attached to your main profile or to, they attach that to your actual company that’s gonna bring all of your map listings down in the results. And there is a process we can take to say, Hey, let’s go find those fake locations.

Let’s close them out. Let’s report them as closed on Google. Let’s get the real location that we really wanna come up for in the real city where we have. Search volume, and we’ve got population and the right demographics, and let’s make sure that we’re doubling down on the authority of our true location that we wanna rank in.

Number three is inconsistencies of your name, address, and phone number. And if your company name is Bob’s Plumbing, and for some reason you set up your listing as Bob’s Plumbing and Drain Cleaning. That inconsistency of how it’s listed on Google versus how it’s listed on Yelp versus how it’s listed on Angie can be a detriment to how you’re gonna come up in results.

You want to have consistency of how your name is referenced, how your address is referenced, the phone number that’s being used. When you have that consistency, it passes authority signals back to Google. And spending some time to run some searches to see like my company name, how’s it coming up?

How’s Google seeing it? What are the algorithms seeing? And a lot of times, just recognizing that inconsistency exists and then going in and having concerted effort to clean it up, will make the difference if you’ve got all of the other factors working in your favor. That’s easier said than done, right?

If you don’t know how to do that correctly, if you haven’t got experience, you can easily chase your tail, like log into 19 different sites, change it in 19 different places, and still have that consistency re spawning again and again. Number four is if you spammed your company name or category. And so that’s where you you say, Hey, I’m gonna add the city to my company name just for the search results.

Or I’m gonna, add some things into the Google categories. Those are all things that seem good in theory, but could actually harm your Google Map results and how you come up. And then number five, and probably like the biggest driver is. Not having enough reviews, like all other things equal. The company that’s properly claimed with consistency of their name, address, phone number, and has the most reviews, is gonna be the most authoritative and.

Earn the right to come up at the top with the search results. And so having a proactive strategy to drive reviews is gonna be one of the key things we’re gonna talk about throughout the course of this. But, if you’re looking at your rankings and you’re saying, man, like, why don’t I come up?

And your three closest competitors have hundreds of reviews and you’ve only got dozens of reviews. That’s gonna be a big reason you’re not gonna rank in the map results the way you might feel that you should. And that’s the biggest things we’re seeing, that the top five things that could be like the gotchas preventing you from ranking in the search results.

The other thing I’m gonna say is there’s a lot of different ways that people search on Google for. Your services. And it’s not just as simple as thinking if they type in plumber or plumbing, or if they type in, plumber near me, there’s a lot of different things they could type, right?

They might type in drain cleaning or water heater, repair hydrogen, or some pump repair. If you’re a plumbing company and you really want to recognize that the Google results spawns for all of these different keyword permutations and. You want to think about how you’re coming up for those different keywords in order to truly maximize the amount of leads that you can generate from your map results.

And so we do have a list of these keywords. If you go to plumber seo.net/plumbing-keywords, and I think I’ve linked it in your workbooks as well. You can get that list and. What I would encourage you to do is really like figure out how you’re coming up on the map and in the organic results for all of the different keywords that are relevant to the services you provide in the cities that you operate in.

And so I’ve got that list for you for plumbing. We’ve also got a list like that for you for AC repair and electrical. And if you go to plumber seo.net/keyword-list, you can get it. What I can tell you though is most of the plumbing HVAC home service companies that I’ve worked with over the years that we give this list to, they’re like, Hey, cool, I’m glad I have the list.

What do I do next? And then maybe they try and figure out how to combine the keywords and then they try and run a couple searches and it’s just tedious. This is a tedious, obnoxious task. And so if you’d like. One thing we can do is run a complete ranking analysis for you completely free of charge.

And so what that includes is we will, like I identify what are your actual services? What are the keywords that have commercial intent? What are the top 10 cities that you operate in? And we’ve got tools that can help us quickly and easily and analyze and say, okay, here’s where your company’s coming up on Google on.

Being on these generative engines. And so if you’d like for us to run that analysis for you you can just go to plumber co.net/schedule and we’ll run that analysis. We’ll give you the keyword list, even if we don’t do business together, you’ll have a very clear list of the most important keywords and a very clear understanding of where you’re coming.

In the search results today. So hopefully that is a useful thing for you if you’re serious about getting dialed in on your rankings. And hopefully that’s helpful. So let’s get into the formula, right? And, we’ve tested this, we’ve looked at it a million different ways, and we’ve really drilled down to a couple key things that you can do from an.

Optimization perspective to come up well in the search results. And so it really boils down to number one, claiming and optimizing your Google profile. And you do that at Google in a business profile. And there you can claim your listing, you can add pictures, you can add descriptions. I’ll talk about some of the details there.

But we wanna properly claim and optimize that listing. From there, we want to build up our citations. And so all other things being equal, Google wants to serve the company that is the most legit for their results. And so one of the things we can do to tell Google that we’re legit is be referenced in a lot of different places online, and there’s literally hundreds of online directory sites that reference company’s name, address, phone numbers.

And so if we can get ourselves added in those. Those directories with consistency of our name, address, and phone number. That’s a vote of confidence. That’s a vote that this is a legitimate company that potentially should come up with search results. And then number three is we’ve gotta build up our online reviews, right?

All of the things be being equal. The companies that have the most reviews, that are legit, that are real reviews from real customers in your true service area is gonna win the day in terms of how you come up in the search results. And those are the things. Claim and optimize the listing.

Build up your online citations, and then drive a lot of verified reviews to your Google profile. And then in addition to that, we want to make sure that we’ve got proper on-page optimization. So the website is set up in a very specific way that tells Google the services you provide, the area that you service, that you’re a quality contractor.

And when you get all of those four components dialed in, that’s how you’re able to dominate the Google Map results for a lot of different keywords and get literally hundreds and hundreds of inbound phone calls and inquiries per month. And I, again I’ll show more examples of that in the real world, but this is really the formula, this is the shortcut.

And so a couple things you can do to build up that. That trust profile in Google’s eyes. Number one is brand authority, right? Like actually having your name, your logo, your company brand recognized as the go-to provider in your service area. And there’s lots of things you can do to build up that brand authority.

Verification. The way you verify your listing oftentimes is a, is an authority driver. And so if you verified way back in the day with a pin code, and this is how you used to do it, you would go on to Google and you’d say, this is my company. And they would mail a postcard to your address, and then a couple days later, somebody at the office would get the postcard and they, you’d log back into Google and you type that PIN code.

That is a low level of. Authority in terms of your verification method. And so now you can verify via phone, you can verify via video. You can verify in a variety of different ways. If you’re not ranking and, maybe you were in the past, it might be a good idea to reverify and use video verification where you’ve got a video of yourself.

Walking through the office, a video of yourself showing that there’s a locked key on the front door and some signage proving that you literally have a location where you say you do. And there are some things you can do, even if it’s not a dedicated office, maybe it’s a virtual office or it’s shared with other companies.

There’s some things you can do to get your video verification, to pass muster, to get verified and to come up. In the map results. So double verification is good. Video verification live with the rep is powerful. Live recorded video also a solid option postcard is the lowest level of verification.

Not even available if you know currently, but if you did this two years, three years, five years ago, and that was the method used for verification and you’re not ranking it, it’s worth it to reverify the listing in a lot of cases. Just for the sake of passing that authority. Phone view. Okay. The other thing that really drives authority in Google’s eyes is your reviews, right?

And when it comes to reviews, it’s not just the total number of reviews that you have. ’cause in any moment in time, I could pull up your city and your service. Your city plumber, your city ac, repair your city, whatever the term is. And there’s gonna be a top three result that comes up, the top three companies, and we’re looking at, are they properly optimized?

Do they have q and as on their profile? Do they have lots of citations with consistency and who has the most reviews? And that snapshot of time will show, this company’s got 200 reviews, this one’s got 176, this one’s got 512. And in a snapshot, that makes sense. Okay, we got some details here, but the other really important component is review velocity.

How recent are those reviews? Are they getting, did they just get a massive drop of reviews or is there a consistent, set of reviews coming in? What’s the overall review sentiment like? If you’re getting all one star reviews and two star reviews, that’s not gonna bode well for you in terms of the authority, which is gonna drive your rankings on the Google Maps.

Recently Unsuspended. So if you were suspended or filtered, there’s like terminology for this. Oftentimes when you come unsuspended ’cause you reverify or because you like validate the address that was incorrect in some way that can really be a good thing to move you back up in the search results.

And a lot of times just thinking, I’m gonna set it and forget and kind sit on my hands hoping I, my ranking comes back is not a great play. If you’re not coming up, there’s, you wanna do something to re-trigger. The algorithm to get yourself back up. Now, you wanna be careful with that. If you are ranking right now in the top three, that’s not the time to go change an address or to go reverify a listing.

Only do these things if you’re not coming up in the search results. And because it’s, you don’t want to displace a solid ranking, ranking, listing on the Google Maps. Believe it or not, your backend engagement on the search engines. A key driver. So are you logging into the Google Business profile, you or somebody on the team?

Are you answering questions? Are you responding to reviews? Are you uploading images? Are you loading offers that backend engagement? Is important. So whether that’s a service like ours, like our company, we can do that for you, right? We can claim the listing correctly, we can be logging in and showing that activity.

But if you’re doing it in-house, then you want somebody that you know, knows, like we didn’t just set the profile up and. Never look at it again. Like we have to be looking at, we have to be engaging on the backend completeness of your profile. So you can load a lot of details into your Google Business listing.

You can load pictures, you can answer questions, you can have a detailed description. There’s lots of categories you can select and, not just. Verifying and leaving it with your name, address, phone number, and that’s it. Like we want to, we wanna give Google as many details, as many assets, as much context about your company, about your services, about your service area, to improve our probability to coming up in the map results.

And the other really critical factor in terms of authority outside of your reviews. Outside of your citations is your links and the links back to your website and the links back to your map listing. And a lot of times when I say links, it feels like this abstract, complicated concept. And so I just wanna share some very tactical examples of what you could do to build links, from other properties to your website or to your map listing that will improve your rankings.

And one really cool thing that you can do that we found that works well is to do local sports sponsorships. And so your local high school or your local non-for-profit that has a baseball team, a softball team they have typically opportunities where you can sponsor that and the past. That was like, maybe you paid for the t-shirt and you had a logo on the T-shirt, or maybe they had a big banner on the fence and you got a little logo on there.

What you wanna look for when you’re saying, Hey, look, I’m willing to sponsor this local community event is, if they’ve got a local website that has any level of indexation, that has any level of authority, and you ask for them to link to you from that website, that’s A low cost. High quality, high relevant link that you can get.

And you couldn’t just reach out to the organization, Hey, can I send you, 50 bucks and you put a link on the website. It’s not as simple as that. This, doing this type of sponsorship. Is a backdoor play that tends to work pretty well, especially when, you’re not coming up, you’ve already got your profile listed, you’ve got it verified.

You’ve flushed it out as far as you can. You’ve got lots of good online reviews. You feel like your website is dialed in, but you’re still not coming up. These are some things you can do to give yourself a little bit of additional juice to come up in those results. Host local community events.

So this is doing like meetups and then making a little bit of stink about it on those sites. Create local resources page so that you could say, Hey, here’s the companies that we do business with that we recommend on your website. So you could say, and if you’re a plumbing company and you refer out to an HVC company, or you revere out to a damage restoration company, or you’ve got a kitchen remodeling company or a a renovation, provider that you recommend.

You can have a section on your website that links out to those local companies, and then of course you would ask them to do the same where they’re linking back to you. Simple thing you can do. That’s a win-win. It’s a win for them. It’s a win for you. It’s a win for your customer, and it builds that authority profile for your rankings.

School sponsorships, especially, if you’re doing trade school type things and maybe giving people’s apprenticeships, that’s a great place to get those trade schools to, to link to you and creating content for those trade schools. So if you’re actively involved in your local chamber of commerce, your local trade school, trade organization.

Offer to create content may like maybe a case study of a student that came in and got trained in how much money they’re making in the trade content about how much opportunity there is to make good money in the trades. You create that content, you have it published on those sites, and that builds authority back to you.

Even if they’re not massively high domain rank sites. Because it’s local, because it’s relevant, that’s gonna pass really good authority back to your organization. And, the lots of other different plays, but I think those are the most specific and the most tactical things that you can do that can really move the needle.

Going to the fundamentals, right? The top three, three things that you wanna make sure that you do. Number one is optimize your listing. And I think get a company that knows what they’re doing, that knows the ins and the outs, and the little secret tricks that you can put in place to really optimize your listing, to give yourself that competitive advantage.

But I also think as the owner, your Google Map listing is an asset. It’s a very valuable asset, an important asset to your company, and so you wanna make sure that you’ve got access to that profile. So either have them set you up as the owner or give you the username and password so that you can also log in and you can check.

The basic settings, check the basic details, and I’m not gonna bore you to death. This is all listed in your workbook with a little step-by-step instructional, you wanna claim that listing. You wanna make sure that your company name is listed correctly, that you’ve really thought intelligently about what the address is and how it’s gonna be referenced on Google and those other online sites, and make sure that it’s listed in that way.

Be intentional about the categories that you select. And there’s a handful of categories relevant to plumbing, a handful relevant to HVAC, a handful relevant to electrical. You wanna make sure that you’ve selected those categories that you’ve got a local area code number on the website. Don’t put an 800 number here, you want the local number ’cause this is a local business and we’re trying to come up on the local map, upload photos.

Don’t just have your logo, just like when you’re building out your website, we know that people want to do business with people they know and trust. And so use the opportunity to have a picture of yourself, have a picture of your technicians, have a picture of the team, authentic, real images, ideally taken from a phone.

Tend to carry more authority. They tend to carry more weight. List your hours of operation and the services that you provide. You’ve got room for a detailed description, leverage that, get your key words. But write it in a way that’s persuasive to the, to the customer that’s gonna click on your listing.

Make sure that you add photos. Make sure that you’ve verified your listing correctly, and you might wanna do phone verification, upload those photos, the ones that you’ve got on your website. Ideally, the personality based photos. You get access to click into the insights and see how many people are clicking on your listing, how many people are asking for address how many people are getting driving directions back to the location.

This gives you some really interesting insights on how it works. But outside of that. You wanna be leveraging the profile, don’t just set it and forget it. A couple things that you want to be doing on an ongoing basis with your MAP listing. Upload new photos on a consistent basis. Upload to that new job that you did upload.

Upload the picture of that award that you won, upload that picture of you guys, doing something good in the community. Upload photos leverage Google posts to still have the opportunity to load up posts about what’s going on in special offers. Then there’s two things that you definitely wanna do in your Google map that I see so many home service companies ignore.

Number one is answer reviews, right? If we’re focused on creating a world class experience, we’re focused on generating positive reviews from our customers. Then when someone does write a review, we should acknowledge that. And we should follow up and say, Hey, thanks so much. Really appreciate your business.

Thanks so much for choosing our company. We know you have other options. And, that is just a good way of doing business, right? It shows that you care and it communicates to that customer that was happy. But it also passes signals to Google that you’re active, that you’re paying attention, that you care about your customers, which is really important.

And also if it’s a negative review, which happens from time to time, regardless of how good you are. You wanna respond to those reviews as well, and not in a confrontational way, but just acknowledge the review. Apologize if they had a bad experience, and do whatever you can to try and work that out, but po publicly acknowledge it and use that as an opportunity to show that you’re the kind of company that steps up when something bad happens within your organization.

So that’s one of those extra things you wanna be doing on an ongoing basis, really important. The other is to answer questions, and this is one of those ninja things that you can do within your Google listing that will pass more context about what you do as an organization. And the easy thing to do would be to think about the most frequently asked questions that people are asking and actually see those questions yourself, and then answer those questions on your own profile.

That’s a great thing to do, but also be looking to see are there questions coming up that you can answer? You don’t wanna leave questions on your Google profile. Unaddressed. And so those are some very specific things we can do. Number one, to properly claim and optimize your listing more details in your workbook on that.

And again, if this isn’t what you do every day, and this isn’t your area of expertise, get with a company like ours, like this is, we literally have a team that exclusively claims and optimize these listings so that they’re set up to the highest level. Possible. Number two is we want consistency of the name mattress and phone number, and so that’s literally having yourself listed on sites like Yelp and Angie’s List and City Search and, all of those little websites.

The key though, as you do that is to make sure that you’ve got the same name, the same phone number, and a consistent address listed the exact same way. This passes a lot of authority back to the search engines. Really important is to recognize there’s these individual listings and these individual sites across the internet, but then there’s also data aggregators, and the smaller sites pull their data from four key sources.

They pull from. Factual from Axiom, from Infogroup and from New Store. And those sites, those four data aggregators literally feed thousands and thousands of online directories. And so where I see a lot of people get stuck is they’re like, okay, I’m gonna update my listings. And they look and they’re saying there’s lots of inconsistency.

What do I do? And so they start to go to these individual sites and do password resets and change the address and hit save, and they circle back a month, two months later. And it’s showing the wrong information again, and they’ve got now two listings and it’s drives them nuts and. What they don’t understand is that it’s not just those independent sites that you have to go to.

You have to go to the source, which are these data aggregators, and make sure that you’ve invested in owning those profiles with the right name, address, and phone number, and when you’ve got those data aggregators. Combined with a properly claimed and optimized Google business, Google Map listing. That’s how you can really control the consistency of your name, address, phone number, and be willing to invest a little bit or make sure you’re working with a company that’s willing to invest a little bit to properly control that online profile for your organization.

Off of Google as well, and there’s some great platforms and some great tools that you can use to, to scan your consistency and to update those listings. Probably the most common, the most known would be Yext, right? Yext is the main online profile that has direct feeds into most of the the citation sources and citation listings.

But there’s other tools that are very good that are also a little bit more manual. Like Bright, local and whites, spark and Moz and advice local. My suggestion is claim your Google business profile. Add yourself to the data aggregators, and then use one of the site syndication tools like Yext to get the top tier listings and then do manual research to find local under the radar directory sites like.

Local, business directory, like if you’re in Dallas, you type in Dallas Business Directory and there’s gonna be like random sites that don’t even hit these engines. And then also industry specific. So if you’re plumbing, you type in like plumbing, business directory, plumbing listings.

And we’ve done a lot of research, obviously now working with hundreds of plumbing HVAC companies where we’ve already identified those really niche directories. That we can add ourselves to, in addition to Yext, in addition to the data aggregators, which gives us a little bit of a competitive advantage in terms of the number of citations and the amount of authority and juice we can pass back to your listing.

And so if you’re curious about if there’s inconsistency or if there’s citations that haven’t been claimed we do have a free resource@plumberseo.net slash scan that you can type in your company name and your address and it will show you like. Here’s where you get inconsistencies of the name, address, and phone number, or you can always just go to plum co.net/schedule and we’ll manually run all of those analysis for you before we meet and be able to show you how.

Here’s the key words. Here’s how you’re coming up. Here’s why you’re not coming up. Here’s the inconsistency of the citations or the disparity between you and your next competitor in terms of citations or reviews. And so either of those two options will give you more clarity on next actions and how to really action this going forward.

And so that’s plumber seo.net/scan. If you wanna run that, that free analysis.

Okay. Key strategy number three. I’m just gonna kind of hop to this if I can get to it. Key strategy number three is online reviews, right? Assuming you’ve got a properly claimed listing, you’ve got all your citations, you’ve got everything in a really humming, in the right direction, all other things being equal.

The companies that have the most reviews. Are the ones that tend to rank best. And so you wanna have a proactive review acquisition strategy where you’ve gone to the past customers. And this is something we do right outta the gates if you become a client, is we’re gonna get your database of past customers.

And we’re gonna send them a a review request, and we’re gonna do what we call a review blitz, where we get a, a set of brand new reviews on your Google profile and some of your other online directories. But then we wanna put a process in place where after every service call. A message goes out via email and SMS, Hey, thanks for your business.

Would love it if you take a second to write us a review and make it really easy for them to take the next step. And the goal, obviously is to create a great experience and to plant the seed with the customer. Hey, we really appreciate your business. We need your feedback. We’d love it if you’d write us a review and then incentivize.

That behavior in your technicians. So your technicians know that they’re being greater on this, they know that they’re gonna be recognized on this, and it’s just part of how you operate as an organization. One great strategy that we found, that really move the needle in terms of the number of reviews that our average client gets after every service call.

Is the leverage automation. If you think about our evolution of how we’ve rolled this out over the years at first it was like, Hey, let’s set up a little dashboard where the customer could type in their name and the name of the customer and their cell phone number and email and it sends an email and or text message.

And that only worked to a certain level. And then we started implementing nearby now, which is a platform where they check in the field and that gives geo modified data, which is great for our SEO. But then it also sends an email and a text message after the job. But it required a technician to be paying attention, right?

And a technician to check in and to key all the buttons. And we found that there was a low adaption, right? It was like the technicians didn’t wanna do it, and some of them did and some of them didn’t. And. What we do today is we make sure that there’s an automation that’s happening, where after every service call, once the job is closed in ServiceTitan or Field Edge or House Call Pro, that automates check-in, it automates a review request and it’s happening after every service call.

When we started getting those automations installed, that’s where we started to see massive increase in the number of reviews, which made a big difference in the rankings online. And so there’s tons of platforms for this, like whether you’re using SEM or BirdEye or Customer Lobby or our platform Conversion amp let’s just make sure we’re using automation so that after every service call, we’re improving the probability of getting those online reviews.

And so that is the key thing there. Now, those are really the key drivers. Claim the listing, get your citation profile in order, generate online reviews on a consistent basis, and then make sure that your website is properly optimized. We’re you’re clearly telling Google, this is what we do. This is the service area that we serve, and there’s a lot of nuance to that in terms of on-page optimization, off-page optimization.

I have a full hour and a half long session on that we did last month. And so feel free to go in and drill down on that if you’d like, or just type SEO wherever you happen to be watching this. And that’ll be a prompt for us to find the recording of that and send it to you. But the way you set up your website and the way you structure the content on the website will really drive how well.

You come up in the maps as well, right? It really goes hand in hand. And so I wanted to show an example of this. So this is the Meridian Company, the company we work with in East Lansing, Michigan. And if we go on Google and we type in like East Lansing, plumber, east Lansing, drain Clinic, east Lansing, hp, AC Repair, they come up really strong.

I just wanted to show you some of the data here. $23,000 investment in online marketing. That’s management fees, local service ads. Google Ads. You can see here 753 leads tracked, which if you divide that out, comes out to an average of about $31 and 66 cents per lead. I do want you to see though that the Google Maps here is a key driver of that outcome.

You could see they’re 307 inbound leads, and if we do the math, that’s over $183,000 in revenue and, over a seven time return on investment that they get. By having this dialed in, by having this fully implemented and really structured well in their company. I can show a lot of other examples.

I don’t want to beat a dead horse. This is a Ira Hansen company, which is based in Sparks, Nevada, and Reno, Nevada. And if we go to Google and we search like Sparks, Nevada Plumber, dry and Cleaning Water heater repair, or Reno I just want th this one is a, an outlier here. You can see, I’m not gonna tell you what they spend with us, but 640.

Google Map listing calls every single month and over 120 time return on their investment. I’ll let you do the math on kinda what that means, I could tell you there’s an approach that works. You have to do it right and there’s very specific things, even though it’s not complicated.

Doing it the right way will make the difference in terms of how you come up. On the Google map in your search area. And i’m happy to answer any questions that you guys have. That’s the formula, that’s the key approach. I’ve showed you examples of companies that we’ve put this in place for.

I’ve showed you the step-by-step instructions on how to do it. I’ve given you the workbook, so hopefully this gives you enough details and enough information to say, okay, I’m ready to hit the ground running. I know how to go out and get my Google Map rankings better. I’ve got this checklist for you guys, and again I would encourage you.

Just run yourself through the paces, make sure that you haven’t missed anything in terms of on page Google, my Google business profile, ongoing content, passing the right signals through schema, through on-page optimization, through content structuring, title tags, H one tags, meta descriptions. But the.

Easiest, most practical next step would be to, let’s do an analysis, right? We do this day in and day out. Let us pull up your website, pull up your Google Map listing, show you like where you’re coming up, where there’s room for improvement, and. Give you all the data so that you decide, Hey, look, I need some help with this.

Or maybe we’ll just tell you, Hey, look you’re in good hands, which happens from time to time. So if you’d like to take us up on that and you’d some additional help, implementing these strategies, improving your Google Map listings. Improving the amount of leads and sales that you generate online.

You can do that by going to plumber seo.net/schedule. And again, like this isn’t gonna be a sales page, it’s literally we’re gonna run those keywords. We’re gonna show you where you’re coming up. We’re gonna do an analysis of your map listing. We’re gonna do an analysis of your citations. We’re gonna do analysis of your on-page optimization for your website.

And we can have a conversation based on the data, whether there’s room for improvement and whether we can help you take things to the next level. So that’s the scoop. Go to plum seo.net/schedule the schedule a time. If you have any questions, whether you’re on live, whenever you’re a on after the fact, feel free to drop those.

Into the comments or you can reach out to us if you happen to be listening to this at 8 6 6 6 1 0 4 6 4 7. Or feel free to send me a message anytime, josh@plumberseo.net. Alright, I’m not seeing any questions, so I will just say thanks for participating today. Thanks for logging in on a Friday.

Excited to see you guys implement this and generate better results with your Google Maps and we’re gonna wrap it up there. Thanks everybody.