The NEW SEO Formula for Plumbing, HVAC & Home Service Contractors

All right, hello and welcome. So excited to have you guys here today. Really excited for today’s session. We’re going to be talking about the new SEO formula. There’s one thing I can tell you for sure, it’s that search engine optimization, the Google algorithm, how these things work. It’s constantly shifting. And so kudos to you for investing your valuable time to be on this session, I’m going to unpack some of our latest insights and strategies on what’s working with SEO to move your plumbing, HVAC or electrical business up in the organic listings. And I really think that SEO is part of the bigger picture of your digital marketing strategy. And so really, I think everything comes back to this accelerated growth model. In order to have your plumbing, HVAC or electrical business in a constant state of Growth, there’s three things we have to solve for. Number one, we have to drive leads. Number two, we have to maximize conversion of those leads into sales. And then number three, we’ve got to optimize results. We’ve got to figure out what’s working and double down on the areas that are generating the best results. And so when it comes to driving leads, there’s three key strategies. There’s organic, there’s paid, and there’s database really remarketing to that existing customer base. Today we’re going to be focused right here on the organic side of the equation. How do we get the free clicks? How do we get the organic traffic? How do we make sure we’re coming up in the non played listings where our customers are looking? As it relates to conversion, we want to make sure our website converts. We’ve got a great reputation with reviews that people can validate. Hey, this is a solid company that knows what they’re doing, and we’ve got to leverage some automation. Automation exists. We can follow up with our leads quicker, so we can communicate with them via text, not just via the phone or not just via email. And then number three, we’ve got to know how much we’re spending. We’ve got to spend enough in marketing to hit the growth targets that we set. We’ve got to understand what our average cost per lead is to cross the different services that we provide. Make sure that that makes sense. Most importantly, we want to be dialing in our reporting so we can see how much do we spend, how many leads do we get, and what’s our actual return on investment? Right? And the technology now exists where we can sync up with service type, we can sync up with House called Pro and see, here’s what we spent, here’s how many leads were generated, here’s how much actual revenue was booked through the system. And when you get this entire formula dialed in, you can grow your business on demand. So that’s the big picture. I just wanted to zoom out for a second before we get into the specifics on SEO. You know, we want to be driving leads, maximizing conversion, optimizing results, and again, my favorite play in our company is plumbing and HVAC. SEO, search engine optimization. That’s where we started, one of my favorite places to make sure we have a great organic footprint that we’re showing up in the non paid listings, because ultimately, that’s usually going to be your lowest cost per lead, and in most cases, your highest quality lead that you can tap into. And this is part of the digital dominance method, right? So it looks at all of the different things we can and should be doing to really dominate our local marketplace and get as many of the the opportunities as we possibly can. So a couple things before we get into it today, I’m going to ask if you could close out the other tabs I know, in today’s world, on these zoom sessions, we get another tab open with email and Facebook and probably slack with people messaging us. Close those out. Let’s give this our undivided attention or undivided focus, and if you’re serious about generating better results with your SEO getting ranked better, getting more clicks, getting more leads, getting more sales, this is going to be a really valuable spend of your next 60 to 90 minutes. What we’re going to be covering specifically that we talking about the latest changes in the Google algorithm, the things you want to have that you might have put in place with your SEO strategy that could actually be hurting you today, and we’re going to really spend most of the time talking about how to optimize your website and your online presidents leveraging this new SEO formula. For those of you that don’t know, I’ll just do a quick introduction. My name is Josh Nelson. I’m the founder and CEO of plumbing and HVAC SEO. I’m the author of this book, How to triple your sales by getting your internet marketing right. One of the top selling books on internet marketing for plumbing, HVAC and electrical active in PHCC, QSC service roundtable next door, all of these groups and organizations might say, more important than any of that stuff is that at this point, I’ve had the opportunity to work with hundreds of plumbing, HVAC, electrical contractors in some of the most competitive markets across the country, and been able to see many of them go from obscurity online to the point where they’re now the dominant players in their market, many of them seeing millions of dollars in revenue growth over the years. So what I’m sharing with you isn’t based on theory. It’s not based on a blog that I read on Search Engine Land or something. It’s based on real world experience with plumbing, HVAC, home service contractors, just like you and our company, plumbing and HVAC SEO, we’re on a mission, and our mission is to triple the sales of 1000 plumbing eight. HBC and electrical contractors, and doing this education, doing this type of work, is a big part of accomplishing that mission. For some of you, it’s the insights and the information that you need, and you’re going to take it, you’re going to implement it, and we feel great about that. For those others of you, it might be you’d like to align with us and have us implement these strategies for you, and so if that’s what you’re looking for, we’d love the opportunity to meet with you, review your current website, review your current SEO strategy, and show you where there might be some room for improvement. I think Christian just dropped the link from seo.net/schedule if you’d like to schedule a complimentary evaluation of your current online marketing strategy. So I want to get into this, but I’m going to switch screens, because I recognize this screen is cool, but it’s not always super practical to see. So I’m going to switch to my monitor. Here. You guys seeing my screen now. Kayla says, yes, okay, so let’s get into it. Does SEO really even matter when we think about the way the algorithm has shifted in the way Google’s search results are have changed. We’ve got local service ads, and we’ve got more paid ads, and the map listings become smaller. Doesn’t even matter, like do we even need to focus on this? And I guess what I would say is, when we run a search right now for Denver plumber, just as an example, we want to search for Denver plumber, we’ve got the LSAS at the top, then we’ve got the maps, then we’ve got the organic. Statistics are still telling us as we look at the search patterns of your customers, plumbing, HVAC related services, 71% of the clicks still go to the map and organic listings, and 67% of the clicks go to the top five results. This was a study by MozCast. That’s where I got that stat, and that’s where this information comes from. They’re looking at a lot of data to say, yeah, pretty important that we’re coming up in the organic listings despite all the changes with paid search. So yes, SEO still matters. Now I want to further that with some examples from the clients that we work with. So one of the companies we work with is the meridian advantage, based in East Lansing, Michigan. They’re full service plumbing, HVAC, electrical. They even added a remodeling over the last couple of years. We do all the things we know to get them ranked in the map in the organic listings, if you run a couple of searches for like, East Lansing, plumber, plumbing, Drain Cleaning, Water Heater Repair, HVAC, AC installation, AC repair, you’ll see they come up very, very well for those particular terms. But I want you to see the data, because we’re really about like, how much are we spending? How many leads are we getting? Is the return on investment there? And so if you look close, you can see they spend about $8,000 a month in online market. So that’s their management fee with us. That’s their Google ad spend. We track how many leads that actually generates. So from that, we’ve got 417, leads. So if you divide that, it’s about a $19.32 cent average cost per lead. Really, what I want to show you is the diversification of where those leads are coming from. So 127 from pay per click, but 95 from organic, 173 from Google Maps, 22 from forms. So you can see the organic and the Google Maps that’s specifically the SEO strategy. That’s the local map optimization strategy, 65% of their lead flow coming from organic. And so I say that because I want to make the point that yes, paid search is important. Yes, we want to be playing with social. Yes, we want to

have paid ads and tap into local service ads. But if you’re sleeping on SEO and you’re not coming up organically, you could be missing out on some some of the highest quality, lowest cost leads. So yes, SEO still matters, and you can’t rely on Pay Per Click alone. So a little bit about why SEO is important without getting super into the weeds. Today, 68% of all experiences start with a search engine. 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search. SEO drives 1,000% more traffic than organic social media, and 69% of social queries contain four words or more. So there’s like a long tail aspect to this as well that you wouldn’t necessarily be targeting those particular terms. And what we found kind of looking at spend traffic versus paid traffic. For whatever reason, SEO Leads convert at a higher level. The person that’s going through that path tends to be less of a Price Shopper and more selected your company, selected your organization, and so the algorithm, as I said, is constantly changing in recent news, Google’s laid off a ton of employees because they’re moving more to programmatic SEO and tapping more into AI. But there’s lots of formulas that go into ranking, and I’m not going to bore you with the the nuance and all of the details, but you know, just in recent days, there’s a core algorithmic update. Features, snippet, duplicate, deprecation, Bert for medic, core updates, Site Speed updates, thin content, spamming links. As proprietors of SEO, we study this stuff like we’re day in and day out, kind of trying to stay on the cutting edge of what’s happening, what’s changing. And what I want to do for you today is, take the 8020 of this. Figure out what’s the 20% of the things that you can do on and off your website that will have the 80% impact? So you can know the things that really matter that are going to move the needle and be able to kind of be on the cutting edge of what’s working. So the ranking factors, there’s tons of them. You know, there’s technical which is the things we do with the foundation index, crawling 301, redirects, structuring the data. Then there’s on page, which is what we actually do with the website. The pages we create, topical relevance, internal linking, image optimization, that’s what we usually think of when we think about SEO. And I’m going to get very specific for you guys, but I want to show you the big picture. Then there’s off page, which is really the factors that you don’t necessarily think about on your website, but that will actually move the needle in terms of how you come up, whether you’re in the fifth spot or the 100th spot, right? And that’s backlinks, mentions, social medias, likes, follows, reviews, citations, PR, syndication, things like that. And then kind of the new factor that’s been brand new over the last year or so is the experience. So Google’s looking at not just, does your website have the keywords in it? Does it have links and relevancy, but what’s happening when somebody gets to your website, what’s what’s happening when someone gets to that drain cleaning page on your website? What’s the experience like? Are they scrolling? Are they staying? Are they clicking, or are they just exiting? Right? And the tie breaker goes to the best experience, which is like your load speed, mobile responsiveness. Is it safe and secure? Is it? Does it have the security components all dialed in. And if I could summarize these changes, really, it comes down to eat expertise, authority and trust. So we don’t want to just build our website and create our content and our Off Page stuff for the sake of stacking links and citations and content and keywords, we want to make sure that we’re positioning ourselves as the expert in our industry, as the authority for what we do, and a trusted provider, and you know, all other things being equal. If we can do that, we will rank for the most important keywords. We will retain those rankings, and we’ll be in Google’s good graces. So again, I want to try and simplify this as much as possible. When it comes to local specifically when it comes to the Google Map listings, there’s a couple of big organizations that produce their local ranking factors reports, the latest information that we’re looking at and that we’re really believed to be. The truth is, your Google business profile listing, specifically how it’s claimed, how it’s optimized, how you’ve added the images, how you’re posting the Q and A type stuff. Next month, I’m going to be going deep just on Google My Business or Google Business Profile optimization, but that’s 30% of your local ranking. How well optimized that listing is? 26% would be your actual on page. Website. Do you have the right pages? Are they, you know, titled that, H ones and content specifically set up correctly? Do you have that, ee, at the expertise, authority and trust? Then we’ve got the reviews, big ranking factor, but not the only ranking factor. How many reviews do we have across the web, on Google, but then on all of those other profile sites as well, plays a big role in how well we rank. Oops. Links still a big play, right? I know a lot of changes have happened. It used to be back in the day, we could build the website, put our keywords in the title, drive a bunch of links, whether relevant or not, and we could win. In today’s environment, it’s really more about the quality and relevancy of the links that we have behavioral like what they’re doing on the website, how fast the website loads. Citations is web references of your company’s name, address and phone number on sites like Yext and next door and Angie and all of these different sites, we want their name, address, phone number, consistent. Interesting thinking about the new SEO formula. This has moved down in importance. This used to be like one of the top five factors got to get the citations, got to have this consistency of the name, address, phone number, still important, but not necessarily as important. So just kind of walking you through here the ranking factors and what we’re seeing, we can now pivot to the new SEO formula. And for those of you that are, you know, not deep into SEO, this is where you’re going to want to pay close attention, because I’m going to make this super simple. We’re going to put this into very basic terms that we can all wrap our minds around, and we’ll look at some live examples of how this works. So the first. Step with the new SEO formula is we gotta figure out what the most important keywords are based on your service and based on search volume. So what are your customers actually typing into the search engine when they need your services? Right? Plumber, plumbing, Drain Cleaning, Water Heater Repair, AC installation, indoor air quality services near me, right? We want to look at what those keywords are, and what’s great is now there’s tools that can show us how many people are actually searching for that in your local market. What’s the commercial intent behind that particular term, right? And we can be strategic with what pages do we create? How do we structure our content? So first thing we need to do is figure out what those keywords are. And lots of great tools. There’s the Google keyword tool, there’s word stream, there’s spy food, there’s Google ads, where you can type in keywords and get that information. So happy to walk through those tools with you, point you in the right direction if you need those also. Happy to run this report for you, like if you’re interested in saying, You know what, I don’t want to invest in these tools, but I’d like to have you kind of spit out a report for me that helps me figure out what the right keywords are in my service area based on my services. Let me know, and we can definitely put that together for you. So we figured out what the keywords are. The next thing is, we want to make sure we’ve set up our website with unique pages targeting those keywords. And I would say for most of us today, we already have a website or a pretty good website, so it’s not necessarily. Let’s build a new site on a new domain. The best thing we can do today is just look at the domain that we have and make sure that we’ve properly created the pages and the content to hit those most important keywords in the comments, just for a little bit of interaction. If you’ve already got a website and you feel like it’s pretty good, give me a one. Give me a one. If you don’t have a website and it’s not really optimized, well today, give me a two and give me a three. If you feel like you’re somewhere in between, like you got a website, it’s kind of there, but you don’t know whether it’s doing what it needs to do. All right, we got ones, but you guys are like, man, we got this dialed in. I’m looking for the 1% improvement. Michael says, three. Evan says, one. Okay, cool. So I’m going to gear this towards the more advanced side of the equation, but we already have the website. We just want to make sure that we’ve got pages for our main services and then pages for the main cities that we operate in, right? And I’m going to show you examples of this, but I want to walk you through it conceptually. Number three is we have to make sure that we’ve optimized for the user experience. So this is really important. We’re not just writing a drain cleaning page and filling it with the word Drain Cleaning 90 different ways. We want to think about that customer that gets to the drain cleaning page on your website. Are they having a good experience? Is it connecting with the problems they’re looking to solve. Does it have multimedia like video and imagery in addition to the text, and does does it load quickly enough that it creates a good experience? Lots of things we can do to not just think about this from an SEO perspective, but from a user experience perspective. Obviously, that’s going to impact your conversion from visitor to caller, from visitor to lead, but it also now is impacting how well you’re going to rank for those keywords, just thinking about that user’s experience.

Next is we want to optimize the on page optimization, and that’s the things like the title tags, h1 tags, meta descriptions, getting our keywords and metadata into the into the images and things like that. Then we’ve got to build our authority, which is building our links, building our citations, building our relevancy, so that we can be the E at the expert, the trusted website for those particular terms. And then finally, we’ve got to track the results. Let’s put a mechanism in place to say, what are the keywords we’re going for, what are the activities we’re doing with links and citations and authority to try and move our results for those keywords? And let’s track how do we actually rank on Google, on Bing, on Yahoo? Not so much these days, but mainly those two websites. Let’s track that activity. So that’s the big picture. I’ve got a great checklist for you guys. If you guys. If you want to get into this, it’s at Plummer seo.net/seo-checklist, and it just helps you look at those big things. So whether you work with us, or whether you decide to go back to your current provider or your internal team, you’ll have a great checklist to kind of prompt your memory in terms of what we’re talking about today. That’s SEO dash checklist. Christian, I don’t know if you can drop that into the into the chat. Okay, so I want to give you guys the shortcut on some of these keywords, because we, again, we work with about 200 plumbing, HVC electrical contractors at this point, and we’ve done a lot of research trying to figure out what are the actual keywords somebody types in when they need your services? So within plumbing, kind of by priority, we’ve got plumbing, plumber, plumbers, water heater, bathroom remodeling, tankless water heaters, leak detection. I’m not going to read you the entire list, but you can grab that by going to plumber seo.net/keyword, plumbing, Dash. Keywords can drop. That into the chat. And then on the HVAC side, we’ve got air conditioning, air conditioner, AC repair, furnace, HVAC train. And what I want you to see is I’m pulling up these keyword lists. It’s not just plumber, plumbing, plumbers. Plumber near me. Yes, that’s probably where the lion’s share of the search happens, but there are people very specifically searching for the other things that you do and some of the higher transaction value things that you do, like sewer line replacement, like backflow testing, like hydro jetting, right? And so we want to make sure we’ve thought about those different keyword combinations as well. We want to make sure we’ve created the pages and the content for that, and then on the on the HVAC side of the equation as well. There’s lots of different keywords and variations. The other thing we find is some people will type the specific brand that they have in their home. So they’ve got a train system, they’ll type in like train repair specialist near me. So you want to think about what are the different brands that your customers have in the home and integrate that into your content strategy as well. And so there’s a keyword list for you where I’m going to give it to you in a Google sheet that you can download and access. What I find, in a lot of cases, though, is it’s great to have that list, but the next thing that we need to do is figure out, well, those keywords combined with my service area. So I’m in Miami. Yeah, Miami plumber, Miami plumbing, Miami, Drain Cleaning, Miami water, heat repair, and then beyond that, in Miami, we serve like, let’s say, a 25 mile radius. We’ve got Kendall, Palmetto Bay, Doral, Miami Beach, we want all of those main services with the main city and the surrounding cities and towns, and it gets a little bit cumbersome to combine that if you don’t do this every day. And so what I want to offer to do for you guys is a complete keyword research report. For you, we do this every day, so it’s pretty quick for us. We’ve already got the tools, things like merge words, that helps us quickly combine the keywords, and then we’ve got the paid tools where we can drop that in and see where the search volume is. And so complimentary, because you’re on today’s webinar, we will run that report for you. Send it off. Hey, here’s the keywords, here’s the search volume. And then we can even run a report that shows you where you’re currently coming up on Google, on Google Maps, on Bing and see, hey, you know what? I’m dominant for all this stuff. Or, Hey, I’m ranking really well for these five terms, but there’s these other 72 that are High search volume in my area that I’m not ranking for today. So if that sounds cool, plumber seo.net/schedule, enter your details there. It sets you up with a time. But they also gives us the ability to run the due diligence, get you that keyword report, send it off. This is a low pressure opportunity, so if it’s not a fit and you’re like, hey, you know, I just want the keyword just let us know, and we’ll send you that report completely free of charge. So that’s the first thing right. Step one was to figure out, what are people typing in when they need our services. The second thing is, we want to set up the website so that we can rank for those keywords, right? And we said, on page, off page, technical. There’s lots of different things, but the easiest thing to wrap our head around is like, what do we do with the website itself? And so we want a great website with a great user experience, right? Gone are the days of just writing for Google or writing for the search engines, right? Needs to be written for the human being. We want to leverage multimedia. Text does one thing, and it’s good for search engines, but having images with metadata behind it that also connects with what they’re typing is another thing. Having video on the page like where you’re talking to the customer about that particular thing. You’ve got it embedded on a loader on YouTube, and it’s embedded on the page. That’s going to create a more rich user experience. It’s also going to work in your favor in terms of how you rank for the most important keywords in your market. The next thing, I think most of us have done this in today’s market, but we want to make sure that we’ve figured out all the services we provide, and we’ve got a page for that. So we’re not just saying, you know, we’re a plumbing company, and there’s a page that lists out all of our services. We want separate pages for each of the services that we provide. So that drain cleaning page specifically talking about Drain Cleaning with imagery for drain cleaning, with videos for Drain Cleaning with any case studies and examples of clients that we’ve done grain drain cleaning work. We can give lots of context to each of those different service pages on the site. Additionally, we want to create city pages for each of the cities that we serve. So again, back to that example. If I’m In Miami, we might want to anchor the main site around Miami. But we also want to figure out what are the top 10 surrounding cities in our main market that we serve, and have pages for each of those. The important piece, though, on this is the content needs to be unique on each one of those City Pages and each one of. The Service pages. So what you don’t want to do is just copy and paste and change the city on all the pages we’ve seen. Unfortunately, the plumbing, HVAC, home service companies do that. We’ve also seen where they hired someone and that’s what they did. They created 100 page website, but it’s practically the same page just with like, one change, can’t do that, right? We want unique content. I would also caution to be careful with AI. Like, I love the new AI content generation opportunities that are out there. I think there’s lots of ways we can be creative with it. I think AI is great for ideation, but don’t lean on Hey, chat. GPT write me a drain cleaning page, have it spit out 500 words and just paste that onto the site. Right? You want to be careful if your your provider is exclusively leaning on AI to create content, it’s too early to tell like it’s really too early to say, hey, that doesn’t matter. It’s not going to hurt your rankings. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next six, 912, months, so I think, be cautious, right? Create great, unique content. Use your personal experience and expertise and be like, super relevant with what you write. But the critical factor here, and kind of the myths I see a lot of home service companies have, is

they’ve just regurgitated the same page 17 times on their site and then wondering why it doesn’t rank right. Each one of these pages use needs to be unique, so unique content on every single page. Oops, I hit the back button and then we’ve got the basics. I’m going to show you guys examples of this, but I just want you to understand where I’m going. So if we got a page for each service and a page for each city, well, then we want the keywords in the right place, right? The keywords in the title tag, the h1 tag written in the content throughout the site, our meta description that we’re writing. Don’t think about that for Google or for the search engine. Think about the meta description to sell the click, right? Because in the search result, when I type in Miami plumber and I see what comes up, the title tag typically comes up in the snippet, and we want our keywords there, obviously the meta description that comes up, the little text underneath it. Yeah, you could put keywords in it, but really what you want to do is almost like a text ad, write it so that somebody wants to click your result versus all the others, because your click through rate, even on the organic results for the various keywords that you’re targeting, impacts how well you’re going to rank for that keyword, name, address, phone number in the footer. And then I’m going to suggest that if you’re doing blogging on your site, leverage some type of syndication so that those blogs get picked up and start to pull links back to your website. A lot of times, we’re blogging in a vacuum. So we’ve got a website and we’ve got this blog section. We’re updating the blog once a week, once a month, whatever the frequency is, but it just sits on the site and it doesn’t get any exposure outside of your particular domain. I’ll talk about some strategies you can use to turn those blogs into syndicated posts that pick up links and citations to the keywords that we’re trying to pick up authority for. And then finally, we want to optimize on Page Speed, both desktop and mobile. This is a critical user experience factor. It’s a critical ranking factor. And so sometimes we get so focused on how the website looks, we get so focused on the content on the site and all the multimedia that we want to infuse into it, we forget if that takes a while to load, it’s going to have low ratings on GT metrics. It’s going to have low ratings on Page Speed Insights, and that’s going to harm our ability to rank Excellent. So, so GT metrics is a great source. You just go to gtmetrix.com you put in your domain, it spits out a report that shows you performance wise, like, are we doing good a, are we doing BC, D, I would say, if you’re less than a B on GT metrics, you’ve probably got an image compression issue or something going on where the site’s taking too long to load. And so does anybody want to, like be the brave person to drop their website? It will pull them up in GT metrics. Again, I was, I’m going to show you an example here in a minute of buds plumbing. But this is Bud’s plumbing in Evanston, and you can see here a 93% all right, top notch plumbing. LLC. Adrian, getting bold, let’s see what we got. First, I’m going to pull up the website and kind of give you some feedback, and then we’re going to, I forgot DM Hold on, top notch. Oh yeah, top notch plumbing. Nice. I like the authenticity here, Adrian, I’m seeing you in the top right hand corner. We’ve got the call button. So we got here operated glissy, California, plumber. We’ve got see keyword of the title tag, solid. We’ve got a nice image, which helps with conversion. It’s got your, you can see, if I roll over it, I can see you’ve got your your city and H like kind of your title tag, data there, phone number. Let’s see. See multimedia. Well done. We’re showcasing our reviews. I would say, like, this is a really solid website. Let’s see what we’ve got in terms of services. So we heating and furnace, commercial new alright. So an opportunity I see would be to, you know, go a little bit deeper unless, yeah, you got the service. So we got Drain Cleaning, we got plumbing. Let’s see here why top choice plumbing wrinkling up here in northern Colorado. Salutes with a question. Good content looks, I’d say this looks pretty solid from an on page perspective. Rich content. Let’s see northern Colorado. I wonder if northern Colorado is the target that you’re going after here. Okay, all in all, it checks those boxes, right? We got the pages for the services. We’ve got pages for the cities that you operate in, and plumbing services. Eaton, excellent. Cool. It checks most of the box. Let’s see how it loads from a site speed perspective. And I encourage you guys all to do this, go to gtmetrix.com, I think it requires you to set up a free account, but within just a couple of seconds, it’ll tell you how fast the site is loading. Let’s give this a minute to populate you. I’m

gonna go back to the homepage Greenly. So I just typed in green. So this is really the test we want to see. Does it come up in the organic listings? Top Notch, number one. Spot. Number one, yeah, man, this is, this is checking all the boxes. Let’s see. So it’s gotta, it’s gotta be on site speed 77% so there may be an opportunity here. You’re already ranking number one for the most important keyword that you’re targeting, but I’d like to see that be a BNA, if possible, and that they might be some of the plugins that are running in the background. It might be the the size of the images that you have on the site. This is something just to focus on, because it is a user experience process and a user experience factor. Give me a yes in the comments if you were able to pull your website up and run it on GT metrics or on Yeah, GT metrics the other one is the one directly from Google called Page Speed Insights, which I highly recommend you guys run your websites through as well. Alright, so I want to, I want to show you guys a real example. So this is buds plumbing. They’re a plumbing company based in Evanston, so I’m going to pull up their website and kind of walk you through this. So let’s pull up oop.

I clicked on their paid ad. I’m gonna have to send them some money for that. I’m

there it is, all right. So this is buds plumbing, right? We like we talked about a lot of different things in bullets, but now I want to show you this in real world. So, trusted Evansville plumber, buds plumbing. So that’s those keywords are up in the title tag. You’ll notice that this isn’t just written for the search engines, like it’s got a very human component to it, because we don’t just want visitors, we want visitors that convert into sales. And so, you know, we got pictures. We’ve got, you know, all of the conversion factors up here. We’ve got the way for them to convert Evansville plumbers. And then we got pages for all the plumbing keywords. We’ve got pages for the cities that they operate in, Newbury, et cetera. So if we go into let’s just say gas line services. You can see this is optimized for Evansville gas line repair and installation, right? And having the pages in that way, we’ve got a page for each of the services, and it’s properly optimized with that keyword in the title, in the h1 and infused throughout the content on the site, gives us the opportunity to rank for those terms. So if we type in like, Evansville plumber, there’s buds, plumbing, plumbing, it’s right here, Drain Cleaning. That’s so there’s your drain cleaning page, right, and we could go on and on, right. So the first phase to this is having the website set up like I talked about, with pages for each of the services pages for each of the cities, and optimizing the on page factors. Anybody want to volunteer their website to kind of look at it for again from an on page perspective, let’s see, I see Eric’s energy.com Rachel, if you want to drop your site, I can come I can come back to it in a minute. Let’s pull up, Eric.

Yes, all right, Eric’s serving Kansas City since 1972 request a quote. Let’s see what the title tech says, best HVAC contractor in KC. Is this targeting the entire KC market? Do we need to get a little bit more brain over that? I’m not 100% sure. I gotta look why choose Eric energy heating and cooling. I would put some authentic imagery up here instead of just an AC, but that’s not an SEO thing. We’ve got unique content. I like the Q A down here. You blogging on a consistent basis, heating, cooling, energy audits. I just want to see heating. All right. So we got furnace, we got heat pumps, hydraulic water heaters. All right, good. So you got pages for the services and Lee’s Summit. So this is actually speaking to a town where the other content didn’t Where are you based? Greenwood, Missouri, okay, air conditioning, geothermal energy audits, maintenance plans, geothermal lease Summit. So if I type in, I

Eric kelsh, energy,

it I mean, unless I’m looking at it wrong, I’m not seeing the site come up. So it’s probably going to be a lot of the Off Page factors that are going to drive the the rankings here, unless let me just type in, make sure that it’s pulling off of that, I’d be curious. So without getting super technical, I’d be curious to look at the links, to look at the citations, to look at the authoritativeness of the site, but the website itself, from an optimization perspective, looks pretty good. Like we’ve got the title tags, h1 tags. We’ve got pages for each of the servers. We got pages for each of the cities and towns. We should also run it into GT metrics, if you don’t mind, drop your site into GT metrics, and let’s get a sense for how it ranks. So going back to buds plumbing, which was the website I was showing you as an example, you can see the site does come up in maps in the top two to three for most of the keywords in their city and most of the organic listings as well. But I want you to see the results in terms of how many leads and how many sales come from this for them. So they spend about $13,000 monthly in online so that’s our management fee, plus their Google ad spend and any retargeting spend, you can see it’s about 832 leads cracked on a monthly basis for an average of $16.36 455 of those come directly from Google Maps. 285 from pay per click. You would not think this is a massive market with a huge population, but when we rank well and we optimize correctly, the call volume can be pretty significant. Give me a one of the comments if it helps to look at some real world examples of this as we go and kind of as I explain it. So we can see I ran the GT metrics report in advance for this, you can see they’ve got an A 93% 97% on structure, excellent. Another example I’ll just pull up real quick is Ira Hansen plumbing. So they’re in Reno. Hopefully I typed, you know, so you can see here, Reno, Nevada, plumber, number one, number three on maps, number one, organically, again, personality, authenticity, phone number on the top, conversion factors. But main thing is, we got pages for each of the services that they offer, pages for each of the cities. And there’s not a ton of cities in and around Reno, right? But if we hit sparks Nevada, you can see here, there’s a page for that. So if we go in like, you

can see they come up right there for that. So just a couple of examples, like, when we do this, right? It can, it can work. It can work very consistently. I could spend 45 minutes showing you guys a lot of different keyword examples, but the main thing I want you to take away is that the key things you want to do on your website is get your keyword, you know, whatever the city is, plus the main thing, plumbing, plumbers, plumbing, AC, repair, HVAC contractor, whatever it is for you, in the title, in the h1 and then have great content to kind of fill in the gaps, written for the human, not just for the search engine. Make sure that we’ve got pages for each of those services that you offer, because people are typing in Water Heater Repair, leak detection in your city and in your town. On and then pages for those surrounding cities, so that you can rank, not just in Reno but in Sparks, and in all of the surrounding cities and towns. Again, with the importance being we’ve got unique content on each of those pages so that we can come up organically, so that we can be in the game for that stuff. So that’s organic as it relates to what you do on the website. Getting ranked on the map specifically is a little bit different. Your website plays a role in it, but it’s, it’s really comes down to three key things for ranking on the map. Number one is claiming your Google, my business profile. That’s, that’s kind of step one. Number two is, we do want to have consistency of your name, address, phone number, so that whatever address we put in on Google business profile, that’s what we’ve got in all of those different citations with consistency so Google’s seeing a match to that name, address and phone number. We need reviews, right? One of the key ranking factors for getting ranked is having real reviews from your real customers in your true service area. And then, of course, we need that on page, stuff like I just showed you, having the name, address, phone number in the footer on the pages of the site, having the pages for the cities and the surrounding towns, making sure it’s a good user experience. All of this plays into ranking well on the map. But I would say, all other things being equal, it comes down to the number of reviews that you have. And so one thing we found that just has had a quantum leap in terms of the effectiveness for the clients we work with is leveraging automation. So there’s lots of ways to get reviews. One way is to just do good work and hope that people write reviews. And I would say, like one in 1000 customers will do that, even if you provide a great experience. Way number two would be to, you know, send an email afterwards. Hey, thanks for your business. Please take a minute to write us a review. The problem there is, you got to remember sending email. It’s very manual. Way number three is, you have have it where the technicians check in in the field, or they request a review right in the home, and they ask for those reviews. The problem there is technicians get busy, or they get lazy, and it’s very rare that they do it. The best way is to automate after the job is closed. If you use service Titan or house call Pro, or whatever platform you use, the technology now exists where once the job is closed, that pushes to the review request system. And the key is you want to review request after every job that goes out via email and SMS, we find most of the action happens on the SMS, right? Because you get so many emails, you don’t really click it. But if you get a quick email that says, hey, it’s Bob, I was just at the house you really appreciate your business. Would mean a ton to me. If you take a quick sec to post a review for me, and then the link, they’re going to click that. And we’re seeing a very high uptick when it automatically happens after every service call, and when it happens via text message. And then, if you can plus one that with a couple of reminders, if they don’t click it, Hey, just wanted to follow back up on this. You’re going to catch that person that wanted to write a review but got busy and forgot just to, you know, Don’t get crazy with it. But like, two automations and make it worth if they click the link that takes them out, but if they didn’t click it, Hey, just wanted to circle back. Would really love it if you’d write us a review, those little modifications, those 1% improvements, and how you follow up make a big difference on the number of reviews that you get, which drive your Google Map listings. Any questions on this? Any any takeaways? Somebody says, Should I create a blog or have fresh content for Google? Matthew, I’m going to talk about that here in the next second, right when we talk about how we build our authority and how we build the links and citations and relevancy. But so far, we’ve talked about what we do with the website itself. We’ve talked about what we do with Google Maps optimization and kind of some of the basic technical aspects that we want to focus on on the website. Give me a one. If this helpful, if you like, you’ve got at least a couple of things that stood out to you were relevant, just so I know that I’m not just talking into my screen. Megan gave me a one. Thomas, okay, cool. Thanks, guys. I appreciate the feedback. All right, so we talked about what we do with the website, and it’s important, right? Because what you do with the website is what gives you the opportunity to come up for the keywords people are typing in. But really what’s going to make the difference in how you rank is what’s happening off the site. It’s about the authority that you develop and that Google perceives of your website, of that drain cleaning page, of that indoor air quality page on your site. So how do we build, how do we build off page factors? Well, number one, we want to claim and optimize our Google business profile. Number two, we’ve got to get lots of citations. Number three, we’ve got to build up reviews, and I recommend using a platform like conversion amp, which is our tool, or pulsam or podium, that have the text message that goes out after each service call. Number four is we have to build up authoritative links, which are other websites. It’s on the internet linking back to our website, and either that’s our home page, our service pages, Our City Pages, because if you just have those pages on your website and they aren’t pointed to, then Google doesn’t perceive them as relevant. And if they’re not relevant, they’re not going to come up the rankings for the most important keywords. And the number four, one, I suggest, is syndicated content, which means we don’t just blog on our website in a vacuum, but we actually create blogs that point links, citations and relevance back to our site. I kind of show you how that works. We made this shift about a year and a half ago where we stopped just doing a blog post or blog posts every week to our client sites, and we started syndicating our blog content, and what we saw was, doing it that way drove more links, it drove more relevancy, and ultimately drove better rankings and long term, more leads, more sales, more revenue. And so again, there’s lots of factors that go into this, but at the end of the day, it comes down to expertise, authority and trust. And so if we look at buds, plumbing, and I’ll actually just pull up their website here, instead of having a traditional blog, we’ve got a news and media section on the site, and same technology that you would use to post a blog, but what we do is, instead of just blogging onto their site, we push it out through a new syndication process. So is it time to repair or replace your sewer line? This is one of the most recent posts here, and you can see it’s a good site. It has some in links back to the certain pages. Their site also has outlinks to build relevancy outside of the actual site itself. But this one’s actually going to another blog, and then this one is coming back to their plumbing page, right? So internal linking back to the page that’s probably one of the most important pages on their site, which is their plumbing page. Now this is useful, right? The fact that this is on their website has some relevance. It gives us some interlinking. It gives us some more content to potentially rank for. We also embed their map so it gives us the geolocation aspect to it. This is just a simple embed of their map with their name, address, phone number, passing that map consistency, but really this in the news piece is what makes the syndication process possible, and why it has so much value. So instead of this just sitting in an isolated incident on their website, that exact post sits on these news sites as well. And so I’m just trying to find like, let’s, let’s look at and then Augusta, so this is an authoritative website, Augusta news media, and there’s their content. It’s no follow, it’s, it’s, it’s not going to get picked up on this particular site. But this site has authority right? And now this site, and all of those other sites that are news relevant, are now linking back some of them to the other sections, some of them back to the other areas, but mainly to that plumbing page in this particular case. And then the relevancy the citation outside of your top 50 citations. So there’s like 50 relevant citation sources on the web, Yelp, Angie, thumbtack next door, right? There’s like 50 to 75

one of the key factors that’s going to make you more relevant than the competition is if your name, address, phone number is listed in more places. And so each time we do one of these releases, we can get that content with a do follow link from an authoritative site, plus a citation that comes back to the site. And so that syndication process really starts to build up some momentum in terms of the authority, and that’s one of the reasons bloods plumbing is so dominant in Evanston and around yes, we’ve got a good website. Yes, we’ve got pages for the cities. Yes, we got pages for all the services. Yes, we’ve got 1000 plus reviews, but we’ve also got this link velocity and this authority that’s coming from all of these new sites and sources on a consistent basis, hopefully that visual paints the picture. Just give me a yes or an emoji here in the comments. If you follow along with what I’m talking about here, we just want to syndicate so we can create more more relevancy and more authority. Adrian says, Yes, cool. So the SEO checklist, right? And I’ve provided this to you guys. Have it there. We want pages for each of the services. We want each of those pages on the site to be properly optimized with title tags, h1 tags, URL, like we’ve thought about the keywords in the URL, we thought about how we’ve named the image, how we’ve alt text, texted the image, and we’ve got unique content throughout the site, right? All other things being here, that’s what we’re really talking about. On page itself. For most of the clients we work with, plumbing and HVAC and electrical, it’s going to be somewhere between 50 and 100 pages, right, depending upon how many surrounding cities and towns that we’re targeting. After that we want to claim and optimize the OP, the the listing we’re. We want to get all the main citation sources and data aggregators. I’ll be doing another session next month, just on Google Maps, and I’ll talk more about what these data aggregators are and how they work. We want to put the automations in place to drive online reviews on a consistent basis, and then we want to be adding new citations through syndication and manual process on an ongoing basis, we need to be putting out new content. So if we got a 75 page website, we want to be putting out new blog content that’s going to build more authority and more relevancy over time. And then we want to really use signals to push out our authority, expertise and trust. Get through, follow links, get more citations, work the Google Business Profile listing right? We can we can see Q and A’s, we can respond to reviews, we can post images. So we want to leverage all of those opportunities from the map perspective directly. And so again, there’s a million things we can do for SEO, and I could do a whole day workshop on this. For most of you, I wanted to cover the 8020 right, the 20% of the things that you can wrap your head around and say, Okay, these are very specific things we could do on the website, off the website, with our Google Maps in order to pull our authority up, to pull our rankings up, which is ultimately going to drive more leads, more sales and more revenue growth. So ideally, now you’ve got enough context that this checklist gives you all the details on page Google Maps ongoing content and signals being generated on a consistent basis. Would love to answer any questions that you have. Michael wants to know how those articles are syndicated. So that is one of our proprietary things that we’ve, we’ve engineered here at plumbing, HVAC, SEO, and so that’s one of those things that we use for our clients, right? So if you were interested in working with us, we’d love to show you exactly how that works and do it for you. I can’t say, like here, here’s a tool that you can use to go do that, but there are tools out there like that, PR release tools and things like that that you could research that could potentially do something similar. Excellent. So hopefully you walked away with some good ideas and insights. If you’d like some help with this, this is what we do. We’re passionate about working with plumbing, HVAC, electrical contractors, getting your on page, off page, and all the other factors dialed in so that you can rank better. Again, it is only one part of your overall marketing strategy, right? Our goal is to help you triple your sales through the the accelerated growth model. So that’s organic, paid database marketing, and then helping to make sure you’ve got all the factors in place to convert your leads at the highest level, follow up with them, leveraging automation, and then have all the tracking so that you can know how much I spend, how many leads that I get, what’s my return on investment, and to double down on the things that are working best. So if that’s of interest to you, or you’d like to have us do a review of your website specifically for SEO. Give you that keyword list to show you where you rank and where you don’t. And the keyword list is valuable because you can use that list, whether you do business with us or not, to say, Hey, I’m going to go create these pages, because these are the ones we don’t have that people are actually searching on in our area. And we do that completely free of charge. If you’d like to schedule that, you can call us at 866-610-4647, or just go to Plummer seo.net/schedule, takes you to a page, asks you a couple of questions. You’ll be able to pick a time on the calendar that works for you. No pressure, right? We’re going to give you the keyword list. We’ll show you where there’s room for improvement. If you’re interested in hearing how we can work together, how we can implement these strategies, how we can help you implement the accelerated growth model, we’ll definitely use the time to show you how we can help what it would cost, and how we can take it from there. But either way, we appreciate your time. We appreciate the opportunity to share this knowledge. Our mission is to help 1000 plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors triple their sales by getting their internet marketing right. And I really hope that this has been part of that for you as you look to take your company to the next level. So that’s it for now. If you have any questions, feel free to post them in the comments. Otherwise, please use this time to go to Plummer seo.net/schedule, pick a time that works for you, and we look forward to connecting with you personally and taking a deeper dive into your current SEO and online marketing strategy. All right, I’m not seeing any questions, so thank you for being here. Thanks for the engagement. I really appreciate you guys chatting with me back and forth. We’ll be live again next month on Google Maps and how to get ranked for the most important keywords on the Google Maps. Specifically, we’ll be able to go a little bit deeper on that topic with you guys. Alright. Desiree, alright. Michael, alright. Everybody, thanks for being here, and we’ll talk to everybody like. In real soon. Thank you, Michael, you.