Transcript
If you're a contractor sick and tired of wasting time on dead-end Facebook leads, underpriced jobs, or begging for referrals, listen up. In this video, I'm going to be breaking down how smart contractors are using local SEO or search engine optimization to dominate Google Maps and get free, highquality jobs from homeowners already searching while everyone else keeps chasing for scraps. So, what you're going to learn in this video is one, what local SEO really is and why it's the fastest way for you to get your phone ringing from people who are serious buyers. Two, why Google sends jobs to your competitors and how you're going to flip that in your favor. And then three, how to land your first five jobs from Google without spending a dollar on ads, Home Advisor, or any other lead broker. Let's get into it. So, let's start with the basics because most contractors are either have never heard of local SEO or they think of some type of buzzword that marketing companies use to steal their money, right? Local SEO is simply the process of getting your business to show up when somebody types in your service near me inside Google, right? So, they hop on Google, they do a search, I need this and somebody close by me. Okay? It's what determines who shows up in the three-pack of businesses in the Google maps and who essentially gets left behind. Right? Now, why does it matter and how does it pay? 46% of Google searches all have local intent. So, like you got half the people out there searching for something that you do trying to find businesses that are close by. So, local intent. 78% of local mobile searches lead to a purchase or job inquiry, right? People looking for your services within 24 hours of that service. So, these are people that are high intent, ready to buy. And here's the biggest kicker. contractors who rank in the top three spots on Google maps 60 they get 60 to 70% of those clicks right so if you're not there your competitors are well 70% of that 15% of those turns into actual calls and then that turns into more business more business more jobs more revenue for your business which leads us in the next section and the big question of why Google sending your jobs to your competitors now this is the part that stings but really is the truth contractors that are beating you on Google. They're not always necessarily better than you. They're usually sometimes not even cheaper than you and they probably don't even do better work. They just do these three things that Google actually cares about. So, one is a dialedin Google business profile. Okay, we're going to put GBP here. Optimized. You would think being a 15-year teacher I could write better than this. What does that mean to have the optimized Google business profile? Number one, that means having an accurate nap. What is anap? That's simply your name, address, and phone number. Making sure it matches your website. Um, and it's not outdated. So, address, everything's updated the same as your Google business profile is the same as on your website and your social media channels. All that's the same and it matches. Okay. Second are your categories. All right. Service areas, photos, and reviews, right? So they consistently update and have the correct categories. They make sure their service areas filled out complete or services are filled out completely. Their service areas are marked where they clearly service. They consistently upload photos to Google business profile and they actually get consistent reviews. Okay? And then they do these updates with photos and on Google business profile weekly as well as get reviews weekly and on every job. Okay, those are hugely important um when it comes to ranking, right? Because incomplete Google business profiles rarely show up in the top three when it comes to Google map packs because they haven't filled out everything completely. Second big thing is you have a website that is locally optimized. Okay, just going to put op there. Your website doesn't have to be fancy, right? It just needs to be very clear about what you're actually doing. Okay, so you want to use local keywords and titles. Okay, so the title of your website, we're just going to say use local keywords. So let's say like I'm a fence contractor in Pelum, Alabama. Super simple, right? Or most trusted roofing contractor in Nashville, Tennessee or Franklin, Tennessee. All right. You want to make sure that what you do, your service, plus the area you're in, is super simple and very clear on what you actually do. And of course, it works really well and looks good on a mobile device because remember, majority of your searches are coming from mobile devices. Okay. Second part of that too is your homepage. Okay. Clearly shows these things. who you are, what you do, where you're located, right? Where you do business, where you do service, and why, they should trust you. Okay? That's hugely important on your homepage because majority of people aren't going to make it past this page, right? They're going to get on that page and if you can't tell them who you are, what you do, where you are, and why they should trust you, they're going to bounce off. And of course, the last part of an optimized website is, is it fast? Okay? probably can't see that, but make sure you look down. Make sure you know that your website's fast because if people are having to wait longer than two seconds because we're impatient nowadays, um they're going to move on to a new website or new person, right? So, keep that in mind. Third part is reviews, okay? And why Google sending your competitors jobs versus you, okay? Now, Google when it comes to reviews, right? They weigh this based on quantity, frequency heavily, heavily. Okay? So, you want consistent reviews coming in, which means it needs to be built into your processes. You need to be not afraid to ask for a review. And when you do ask for this, you simply want to look at people and go, "All right, hey, I just, you know, hey, customer John, whatever your name is. Uh, I want to make sure that we provide you great experience, you know, and I felt like if we gave you a fivestar experience, would you be willing to share that with others on Google?" Yeah, absolutely. Whatever. You give them a link, you give them a quick text, a QR code, and have them do it right then and there before you leave the job site, and it will increase the amount of reviews you get. When you increase the amount of reviews you get, increases your rankings, which means you're going to get more phone calls for your business. Okay? So, the way to think about it is you want to aim for about 40 plus reviews if you're starting out. Obviously, 100 plus is is the goal, right? 100 and keep going. But let's say your competitor has 50 reviews and you've got three from like five years ago. Google is going to assume that competitor um is more active, right? So most businesses with 40 plus Google reviews typically get like a on average like 50 plus increase in map visibility on average. So that's going to get you more calls. So don't forget uh make sure you're getting reviews. Now if you've been business for a long time and you have low in reviews, best thing to do to kind of get this up and going and we've done this for a client of ours before where they've been in business for like eight years and they had seven reviews. In eight years they should have had like a hundred. So what we did was just send out a simple text campaign asking their clients like hey if you've had a great experience with us over the past year or you know we whatever time frame it is do you mind leaving your experience on Google right and then we sent that out and allowed customers to go on Google and leave a review. We went from 7 to 53 uh in four weeks and that helped boost them and the map rankings and increase their call volume but I think like like 10 to 15 more calls a month just because we had people leaving reviews. So now, how does local SEO actually turn this into your first five jobs when doing all these strategies so you can get that free extra 25 to 50K revenue for your business, which is absolutely huge. So, we're going to break this down into four steps. So, step number one is fully optimized Google business profile, right? We talked about this in the beginning. All right, in your G Google BP, okay, that's fill out everything. You think after 15 years of teaching I could actually write. Fill out everything. Update photos often. Okay. Weekly posting photos and then add service descriptions in your city. Okay. All right. Bad handwriting. All right. Step two. Ask for reviews. I'm just going to put ask. Honestly, there's many ways you can do this. Ask after the job text review link, screenshot reviews from your site. Send them an email multiple times afterwards. Send them one six months from now. Ask them how their experience was and ask them to share that with others. Hugely important. So, step three, local keywords to your website. So, what you want to have is things like fence contractor in Pelum or roofing contractor in Woodstock, Georgia or um and I say Woodstock like you don't want to say Atlanta or you don't want to say coming Georgia like you want to be Woodstock or Yeah. or or um trying to think of another city around in that area. Um make sure that it's the area in which your business is located because you want to do one location, one service first and then as you rank out then you'll go. And I know most contractors be like, "Well, I'm in this area but that's not really who I service. I service this area. Doesn't matter. Start with one location and the more authority you build there, you can spread out to the area in which that you service the most. And then last two parts of this when you're adding this content, these keywords to your website is use natural language that your client would actually search for. Okay? Don't just keyword stuff it with big language and jargon that they're not going to understand. Make sure it's common to things that they're actually going to search. And then two, don't overdo it. People call this keyword stuffing where they just shove as many keywords as they can in the website and Google sees that as illrelevant or sees it as keyword stuffing or somebody just trying to rank and manipulate the algorithm so they'll actually negatively affect you. Make sure it's just natural and it's super helpful and pro provides a great experience for your potential homeowners. And step four, this is the one thing that nobody ever wants to hear. Stay consistent. Weekly updates from Google Business Profile. one new local blog post or project spotlight you have monthly. Put it on your Google business profile and then check your rankings with additional softwares that can help you like local falcon bright local hrefs all those can really help you with that. But honestly the best thing to do is just look at your Google business profile stats and look at your Google search console stats. Those are raw data straight from Google. And honestly, our SEO specialists use that to determine anything before they even go into other softwares like, you know, Local Falcon or Hrefs. So now you have the blueprint to outrank 99% of your contractors where you're getting the 50 plus reviews, the active Google business profile, local keywords, and consistency while your competitors are just stuck at like five or six reviews. They're outdated uh Google business profile. They got generic website. And of course, they just randomly post if they post at all on their Google business profile. All these local SEO strategies are going to equal free leads for your business. And then you can stop overpaying for junk leads with Home Advisor and your business will kind of stop feeling like an actual grind and start feeling like a business that you want. And of course, if you need help with any of these strategies at all or need a marketing company that you can rely on, click the link in the description of this YouTube video. You can actually book a call with me and we can talk about a strategy what it looks like for implementing this like over a 12-month period so you can actually beat out your competitors and start getting those free leads from Google. Till next time.