The Home Service Expert Podcast - Boosting Your Sales By Thousands Of Dollars Through Effective Website Optimization

Episode Date: October 25, 2019

Matthew Woodward is a search engine optimization specialist and the director of Search Logistics, a company that helps its clients maximize the impact of their digital presence. A multi-awarded speaker and subject matter expert who has published over 240 tutorials to date, he has established multimillion-dollar brands, and has been invited to speak at numerous events and lectures across the world.   In this episode, we talked about search engine optimization, digital marketing, blogging...

Ultimately, what's going to separate the businesses that win and lose over the long term is the relationships that they're able to create with the customer or potential customer. Now, I touched on you got to be focused on connecting people's problems to solutions. That solution isn't always to buy your product or service. Sometimes it's just something they can do themselves. So my SEO blog, for example, exploded in popularity simply because I was looking on forums and groups at what problems people were facing in the niche. And then I published completely free content that helps people solve those problems. That has allowed me to grow the blog at a crazy rate.

And it's the reason we're having this conversation right now. Welcome to the Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the home service millionaire, Tommy Mello. Welcome back to the Home Service Expert. My name is Tommy Mello. And today I have Matthew Woodward visiting all the way from the UK. He's a search engine optimization specialist. He specializes in digital marketing, blogging. He's the director since 2014 at a company called

Search Logistics. And if you want to check more about him, it's matthewwoodward.co.uk. And he took sales from $3,000 per day to $60,000 per day with a zero budget. He's built multi-million dollar brands, and he speaks all over the world. Las Vegas, New York, London, Barcelona, Bangkok, Bali, Romania, Costa Rica, and many more. He's won eight awards and published 243 tutorials. And today, our goal is to explain to you how important it is to own a website and actually be found when people are searching for you, right? Yeah, yeah. And what a flattering introduction. I mean, when you have all of those things read out to you like that, I'm like, oh, I did all those things. So thank you for a very flattering introduction. And anyone listening, make sure you've got a pen and paper ready

because you're going to walk away with some action points today that's going to help you increase your visibility in the search engine. So make sure you're paying attention. And thanks for the great intro. So why don't you just share with us kind of how you got into search engine optimization, what it means to you and what it's done to your life and why it's why it's important. Well, I've been building websites and playing on the internet since before Google existed, before YouTube existed. I literally was delivering newspapers for like 80 cents a round every day to pay for a server. And it wasn't until a few years after building my first site,

I figured out, well, you could make money off this internet thing. Back then, people didn't really trust putting their credit card information. It was a hoax, buying things on the internet. You might remember how it was back then. And it slowly dawned over me. I was always that kid in school trying to sell you something, Pokemon cards or sweets or whatever it was. And my natural interest just converged at the point the internet exploded. And then Google came and search engines and everything else. And I was hooked. It was addictive.

And it still is today. It is my addiction completely. It's what I do all day every day. It's the first thing I think about when I wake up. It's the last thing I think about when I go to sleep. So over the time period, I've seen it all. I've seen things come. I've seen things go. I've helped big businesses grow. I've helped small businesses grow. I've helped individuals, people running hobby affiliate sites grow. And it's been a wild ride over the last 20 years or so. And it's probably going to get wilder from here on out, I guess. Yeah, it's crazy what you've done and built. It's just how many brands you've worked on and the things you've done. So as a home service guy, I tell people all the time, everybody's putting money into Yelp

and billboards and radio and TV. And I think it's a joke. I think it's a joke because they're not getting found on Google. All that stuff does is get you a higher click-through rate on Google. And I'm just a proponent of you get on Google, you maximize the crap out of Google first. You do PPC to get your quality score up. You get your long-tailed SEO. You spend the money building your brand online first. And that's what you specialize in. I mean, how important is that? Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely critical. And if

you're paying for Yelp listings, I guarantee you're wasting the money. Just go blow it having fun. At least you'll get some value from it. That's the old way of doing things. And all you need is a free listing. For the most part, what you need to be focused on as a small business owner right now is how quickly you can connect a customer's problem to a solution. And Yelp doesn't help you do that. Most people, when they have a problem, they're going into two different worlds. They're going to a search engine, which the vast majority of the time is Google. Sometimes it's YouTube, depending on what it is. Or they're going out to their network of friends who are then going to recommend the solution to the problem, which may or may not be

a service that you offer or a product that you sell. And if you're starting off as a small business, you really need to understand that because that's where your focus and investment needs to be. Not just on ad spend, but your overall strategy in how you win clients just needs to be focused on connecting people's problems to solutions, either through Google or people's social channels. And lots of people aren't doing that. And they're paying an SEO company X amount of money per month, not really seeing any results. And if you just focus your entire ethos on how can I reach the people who are facing the problem that I can solve, it's going to save you a lot of wasted time and money and everything else. And not only that, but your customers will love you for it because you've made it easy for them to solve whatever problem it is they're facing. money and everything else. And not only that, but your customers will love you for it because you've made it easy for them to solve whatever problem it is they're facing. Whether that's a

leaky roof or they've been locked out of their house or whatever it is, put yourself in the shoes of the customer. What would you do in that moment? Would you ask a friend? Would you Google it? What would you do? And if you don't appear where you would look for a solution, then you're never going to grow your business successfully. So it's critically important that you're doing these activities, but it's more important that you do these activities in line with the behavior you expect your customers to take when looking for your product or service. And I think there's a lot to be said about that because no two generations are alike. I go to my cell phone and hit the button and talk into it and tell it what I want.

And then I get a bunch of things that pop up. I hit a button and it calls. Sometimes I do the online. I'm all about mobile-friendly websites that are simple. They're done in WordPress. There's a really good offering. There's good pictures. And it's got a call to action. And tell me, in your mind, what do you see the biggest mistakes are? I mean, listen, there's people listening right now, Matt, that don't have a website. I mean, what do you say to those people?

I think you're going to get left behind where you've already been left behind. About 10 years ago, you missed the bus. It's honestly. And oftentimes, businesses do have a website. And I asked them, why have you got a website? And they look at me like I'm stupid. I'm like, but why do you have a website and I ask them, why have you got a website? And they look at me like, like I'm stupid. I'm like, but why do you have a website? Well, that's because everyone has a website. No, you have a website because it will become your number one sales channel in your business. It will generate more leads for you than any sales guy will. And if you're not treating your website in the same level of

seriousness as you would when you're about to hire a sales manager, then you're leaving money on the table every single day. Because let me tell you, in a lot of the businesses I've worked in that weren't taking the internet seriously, once they started taking it seriously, the website generated more sales and leads their entire sales team put together could. So if you're not doing something right now, you're losing out. And just because you have a website right now, don't be sitting smug thinking you're ahead of the game. If that website doesn't directly align to generating more leads and sales for your business, and you just have a website for the sake of having a website, you are also 10 years behind the game.

Likewise, even if you have a website that does focus on that, but it looks like crap on a mobile phone, you're five years behind the game still. So it's critically important, especially now that you have a website that loads well on mobile. It's fast. It's responsive. And remember, loading fast on mobile doesn't mean loading fast while connected on Wi-Fi. It means driving somewhere where the signal on your phone sucks and where a customer is likely to try and find you from and do the search and see how it loads there. Because that's what will make the big, big difference, depending on your industry. And if it's, you know, I got a flat tire, I need emergency assistance. Well, that could be in somewhere where they've got no signal.

They're not always going to have access to Wi-Fi. So you've really got to consider things from the customer point. And you've got to have a website. In order for you to control how you connect a person's problems to a solution, you've got to have a website to control that experience. I agree. And I'll tell you about a little over a third of my revenue is generated solely from organic search. Some of that's local, some of that's old school, just regular organic. But the point is, I like to get that up to 60, 70%.

And that has to do with reputation management. You know, there's all these options. There's Yelp, Angelus, there's Nextdoor, there's HomeAdvisor, there's Kudzu, MerchantCirc. I can keep going, going, going, right? What do we do? We've got Twitter, we've got Snapchat, we've Cirque. I can keep going, going, going, right? What do we do? We've got Twitter. We've got Snapchat.

We've got Instagram. We've got Facebook. We've got all these social medias, all these different citation sites. How do you tackle this? I mean, what's the best way? People are confused just at their website and then you tell them they've got to be everywhere.

How do you even go around tackling that problem, Matt? They haven't got to be everywhere. They've got to be where the customers are. And where the customers are, that's why you need to step back through the experience. How do I want a customer to find me? Or how do my existing customers find me? And then double down on that.

There's no point being on Instagram if you're selling power tools. Yeah. You've got to be where the audience are. And again, it depends on the business. If I'm hiring a painter or decorator, it's likely that I'm going to do a Google search and find a few, read some reviews and some contacts.

But if I'm locked out in my house, I'm going to do a Google search, find the first one call them and whoever gets there first but it all starts through a digital experience I'm certainly not picking up a phone directory and trying to find anyone I'm certainly not looking at offline ads I'm certainly not waiting for a radio advertisement to come in the moment that I need a solution I'm picking up whatever digital device is close to me. And in some cases, I'm not even doing that. I'm just asking Alexa.

And then that's where I'm going. So that experience is different for every business vertical. And you need to, if you've literally got no idea right now of how your customers find you, go find out. Just ask them. And then double down on that. Forget everything else. Just ask them. And then double down on that. Forget everything else. Forget being everywhere. It's a waste of time and resources. Just find how your current customers

found you and throw as much gasoline on that fire as you can. Well, I'll go ahead and save everybody a lot of time, energy, and effort. Everybody brags about, I do Facebook ads and I post. There's a lot of stuff you can get on social media. I get a lot of time, energy, and effort. Everybody brags about, I do Facebook ads and I post. There's a lot of stuff you can get on social media. I get a lot of referrals from Facebook. But I'll tell you this, people go to Google and they do voice search. And 70% of all services are found online, especially those ones that need to be done quickly.

You don't have time to go ask a neighbor. You don't have time to post on social media when you can't get out of your garage or your air conditioning's broke. You don't go to Facebook to find a good company. You go to Google. So I'm going to save everybody some time, effort, and energy. Go and dominate on Google. Get good at your click-through rate. Spend time on the page. Find out what the user experience is like. Put time, money, and energy into it, and you will watch the benefits happen overnight. And I think the reason why, and I'm going to be a little bit cocky right now, the reason

I'm going to be the largest Chrysler company in the world is because we understand this firmly, and we're going to press that every day, build multiple websites, buy out companies, throw gasoline on their website, and make it rank because they're old websites. They're good websites. We're going to make them better. And where do your customers go? They go to Google. Let's face it. When you search on Alexa, it's going to Google. When you search on everything, we get a lot of stuff from Bing, but Bing happens accidentally. We do well on Google and then Bing automatically ranks. So what do you think about that? I kind of just... I mean, no, no.

I don't disagree with anything that you say. You need to treat your website and the way that you market that website as a serious, serious sales channel. That requires time, effort, care, investment. It's something that you have to feel proud about. It's the kind of thing that you have to build and feel the kind of pride that you want to print it off and stick it on the fridge to show your mom kind of thing. You got to feel proud about how you're represented digitally online because for the most part,

that is the only representation of you that counts. Less and less and less are we relying on word of mouth recommendation from friends. More and more and more do we just jump to a search engine to get that instant answer. We've become a society that wants instant fixes, instant answers. And for the most part, when you're facing a problem, that solution comes from Google, as you say. And I don't think many businesses realize that because they're just focused on doing what they do great in their business. But it's something that you've really, really, really got to pay attention to. And like you say, you can grow and scale your business.

It's just a numbers game. The more leads you generate, the more money you make. So how do I generate more leads? Well, where are the customers going? Okay, the more money you make. So how do I generate more leads? Well, where are the customers going? Okay, I need to be there. It's as simple as that. It doesn't need to be any more complicated than that. The scalability that's offered, I think, is scary for people because you have so many choices. But ultimately, you've just got to be where your customers are. And it's not any more complicated than that.

I agree. So there's a lot of things going on right now. Google spent $100 million growing their home service division. Facebook's entering it. I'm part of Amazon's rollout for Amazon Home Services. Amazon's the largest company in the world at this point. Apple's huge. Everybody's trying to go after this niche. It's huge. So I kind of love being part of it, but I still go back to Google and still think Google's God. But things are changing with voice, Alexa, Hey Google, all this stuff. And some of my things in this room are probably going to start talking to me here, but they go, they run off of an algorithm and they tell you

what the best choice is, just like Uber finds the best person that's the closest to you. What's going to be happening in these next 10 years with all these things happening? Where do you see this all going? Ultimately, what's going to separate the businesses that win and lose over the long term is the relationships that they're able to create with the customer

or potential customer. Now, I touched on you got to be focused on connecting people's problems to solutions. That solution isn't always to buy your product or service. Sometimes it's just something they can do themselves. So my SEO blog, for example, exploded in popularity simply because I was looking on forums and groups at what problems people were facing in the niche. And then I published completely free content that helps people solve those problems. That has allowed me to grow the blog a crazy rate. And it's a reason we're having this conversation right now. It's a reason I'm giving the advice on the show. Without it,

you never have seen me as an authority and you would have never have invited me for the podcast. All of that is based on the fact that I was connecting people's problems to solutions. Now, the consequence of that is that I've established a teacher-student kind of relationship almost immediately with people. And then people are looking to me for what services can I then offer them? Can I do X or Y for them? And then they become a customer. But all of it is based on just helping people first. So what's going to separate the businesses that succeed and fail are the businesses that care about their customers. They care about helping people solve their problems. They care about, how can I take this person from where they are now to where they want to be.

And some of the time, that's going to result in you generating new clients and leads and profits. But some of the time, it's not. But what will happen is, because you've helped people solve their problems, they'll tell other people. And when they hear other people with similar problems, they'll say, hey, check this guy out. He'll help you. And it becomes almost anti-social media in a way because we're just taking advantage of the human element of just helping people, which is often forgotten in the modern day age of social media. So that, I believe, is what's going to separate the winners from the losers. First of all, caring about people's problems and then helping them solve them. I agree.

I will say this from a devil's advocate point of view is a lot of people go into business because they're a good technician and they're good at solving that immediate problem that a technician solves. But there's also the manager and the entrepreneur. And that involves running a business, hiring, firing, coming up with pay schedules, taking care of people. And I tell people all the time, I only work half time, 12 hours a day, seven days a

week. So it's not for the faint at heart. And the thing is, I'm a better marketer. So the best marketer wins every day. And then I'm really good at sales. Yes. Yes. However, the difference between creating content that solves people's problems, which could literally just be you stood there with an iPhone recording the technician fixing something. Literally as simple as that. And actually what you tend to find is the more real, genuine videos like that get more traction than the professionally filmed ones. So that actually plays into the advantage of businesses that actually have knowledge and experience. Because for the most part, when people are Googling solutions to problems, that solution's been written by just someone in a content writing mill that's literally just Googled it and looked what everyone else wrote and rewritten it so it's unique. They

haven't actually added any expert insight or knowledge. And in many times, the advice might be just plain wrong. So just recording what one of your more experienced technicians does to you is something that you see every day. It's like, boring. But to people that are facing problems or to people that are choosing which company to work with, creating content like that demonstrates a level of expertise. Now, yeah, you can just go and buy traffic and all the rest of it. And you can just become part of these marketplaces and willingly give up a large percentage of your profits in which to appear. And then Amazon's going to increase your rates just like they did to everyone else. And eventually you're going to be working for somebody else. It's no longer going to be

your business. But if you take control of that customer-client relationship and remember that at the end of every computer, there is a human that will allow you to stand out against companies that are purely focused on big data, numbers, analytics, and growth, and they all forget about the human. And it can literally be as simple as recording what your technician is doing. That's it.

And then putting it on a YouTube video, publish it on your site, publish it on whatever social channels your customers live on. When I first started the blog, the big realization I had, I was seeing all these problems come up in forums. I'm like, well, I'm doing this every day. I'm just going to press record. And that's what I did, and it blew up. Zero ad spend, zero anything.

It made $6,000 in its second month with absolutely zero ad spend just recording what I was doing and then sharing that with people. There was, in my opinion, nothing really special about the tactic. I was just helping people, and I think that's often missed,

especially by small companies because they're so focused on doing what they do great, which is whatever the service is that they're offering. But often, the opportunity is so easy for them to take advantage of, they just don't know that they can take advantage of it. And within a day of following a technician around or whoever it is, you can usually come up with some pretty decent video tutorials solving common problems faced by your customers, which adds to your overall expertise. It's going to grow your social net worth and will eventually lead to more clients and leads. Now, if you take that approach and throw gasoline on it with paid traffic and you start ranking for all of those long tail search terms

because of that content. At that point, lead generation becomes almost automatic and not something you have to worry about anymore. But there's huge room for companies to go straight down the middle and focus on helping their customers because not many people are doing that. So tell me about this video because we do a lot of testimonials and how-to and I've got 2 million views for how to change a garage door spring. Tell me a little bit about what makes a good video. Obviously, authentic, real. Do you have a call to action at the end? Do you put the website? Do you put a phone number? Do you just not have any links on it? If I was to post a video right now on YouTube,

what would our listeners have to do to start this process? If I was a small business with not much to invest, I'd keep it very, very simple. I'd just shoot it with whatever the best phone is available. And then you can put a call to action at the end if you want. It's not necessary. And a call to action could just be as simple as, hey, if you have any plumbing problems,

please feel free to reach out to us on blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever the phone number is, or call them into the website, depending on what your business is, depends on what call to action you're going to put there. But as a bare minimum, I would just put your logo as a watermark in the corner. Beyond that, the most important thing is that the video actually helps people solve whatever problem it is.

So from your Garage Spring tutorial video, do you know what uplift that's brought your business? Well, I've got an online site called Garage Door Nation, and that gets so much traffic. It's our number one source. We get over 600 unique visitors a day, and it's monster what it does, but it also makes me authority. People are like, why would you teach people how to change their own garage door spring when you've got a garage door company? And my answer to that is, well, my customers asked me for years when I was in the field, I looked online how to do this and it looked dangerous and there was no good videos. Well, I listened to my customers. They said, I want to do this myself. But if I didn't put a

video out how to do it safe, then more people would have got hurt. So I said, this is the way to do it properly. Here's how you get on the ladder. Here's how you make sure you don't get hurt. And I wasn't the first guy to do it. I just did it better. Yeah. I think one of the things you're kind of preaching is listen to your customers. What are they asking for? Yeah. And some people, they're saying, why would you teach a customer how to do that? Because they're just thinking about the money. But the way you thought about it actually elevated your position and depth of expertise

and the benefits of that i had the same thing when i recorded my first set of tutorials people like oh you're an idiot like you could have charged 300 for those and you're just giving them away for free i'm like yeah would i be sat on all these awards and everything else if i just hit them all behind a paid product thing? It would have never blown up. So it's the same thing. You can very easily create content that establishes your expertise in a world where everyone else is just focused on closing the deal.

People think we're dumb. That's what's so funny, Matt, is they go, these idiots and so many people are sitting down right now, probably opposing... The people that listen to the podcast are really... They're trying to better themselves. But people that don't educate themselves, they don't read, they don't listen, they don't understand. They're always hypocrites. They're always negative. And we're going to run all over them. And the one thing I will say is posting a video is good, but imagine this. I'm working on a product that posts to every single employee's social media, and it posts videos at every single

job. And it's got testimonials with the dog and the puppy and the before and after. One video is cool, but what if I posted 200 a day, and it got on my Google Local, and it posted to my GMB, and it posted on the Facebook, and it posted to my GMB and it posted on the Facebook and it sent pictures on Instagram. And it was automated and it was a simple tool that just talked to our CRM and posted it online. And you know what's so funny is as people leave reviews, let's just use my guy Steve. And he posts on Facebook and he posts when he washes his van. And you know how many people call my company and ask for Steve because he's live on social media, because he's on the Yelp reviews, because they call up and they

say, I want Steve. So if you could create a process, an operational index for how this is performed, you'll win every day. And it's hard to go up against me because I'm innovative. I'm asking questions from you all the time and people that know things better than me. And posting one video will just, it'll put you on the map, but it's not going to do much until you create an operational index of how you're going to do this every single day. And I'm just excited to get a guy like you on. I mean, when we were talking before the podcast, where do you start if you don't really have a good website? And you said, I got something that's going to blow the socks off of these guys that they could do in a single day.

You've got to start with a website. I mean, you could just upload it to YouTube or upload it to Facebook or your social, wherever it is that your customers live. It's where you should upload it. That doesn't necessarily mean everywhere, just where they live. But you're not going to be able to fully leverage the position if you can't send people to a website

where they can become a qualified lead, where they can make a booking, where they can make a reservation, where they can make a phone call. So first of all, if you haven't got a website, the most important thing to realize is why you need a website. You do not need a website just because everyone else has got a website. You need a website because you need to generate leads and sales for your business.

You must treat it like that. Your website must be clean, simple, not look like a tie-dye t-shirt. It's got to be easy to understand, provide all of the information that people need to make relevant decisions. It should have an FAQ section on it. You should ask your customers what their most common questions or thoughts were. You should ask your current salespeople or whoever it is what the most common questions they get asked are. And that should all become part of your content and your website, which the number one goal of is to turn visitors into leads. How you do that is going to depend wildly on your business, but that must be aligned to that goal.

And it must look good on mobile and it must load quickly on mobile data, not Wi-Fi. Once you have all that in place, then what I would suggest you do is if you wanted to go to the content creation route, I would speak to your guys that are in the field and again, ask them what are some common problems that we could easily solve for our customers. What could our customers do themselves with little to no risk? And then spend a day just filming those. It's likely if you plan it in a day,

you can probably get six to eight of those filmed. Without any budget, you can download a free video editing tool, add your watermark to the video, and then upload it where your customers live with a call to action back to your website to make a booking and or reservation. All of those things you can do on your own. There's no reason to hire an expensive web design company or anything like that. You just need to learn the basics of WordPress. You can learn that in a morning with YouTube and just actually doing it. You can build a WordPress-based site that's got a nice theme that's responsive. That means it

looks good on mobile. And you can put together a very nice site, even if you've got zero experience, you know, within a couple of days, you don't need to go and hire an expensive editor. Again, recording the videos is eight hours work, recording them. Then the next day, a few hours, adding your watermark and exporting them and then just uploading where people live and continue that cycle. Seek out customers that are having questions, seek out people that are having questions and answer them with your content. You know, there's absolutely no reason to spend a lot of money doing this. And it can be done on next to zero budget.

It's just mostly knowing that you can do it. That's the biggest barrier. But once you realize that you can leverage your company's expertise in order to generate sales, well, you really unlock the next level of promoting your business. And it's accessible for anyone. If you want it, it's there for the take. It's just time and effort to put it together. Well, I think you said it the best is I just hit record one day and I kind of just did the same thing. You just hit record and do what you normally do. I started doing more Facebook lives and started doing some YouTube

stuff. You know, there's people that make a million dollars a month just by living their normal lives and recording it on YouTube. I mean, it's crazy. It's nuts to me. Yeah. Like unboxing products. It's one of the most popular product categories on YouTube. Just buy a product and make a video of you taking it out of the box. It's crazy to me. I don't even understand that.

But I guess I'm on the tail end of the millennial, and I don't get it. I don't know. I'm confused at a lot of stuff. I just think people like real. They love reality. Yeah. I mean, the difference is before, if you wanted an answer to a question,

you had to go to a library and find a relevant book and look it up to get a qualified answer. Now, if you want a qualified answer from any expert in the world about any topic, it's in your hand. And if you're not that qualified expert in your niche, then someone else is. And that someone else is making a lot more money than you are. So you've got to put yourself in a position where you become that qualified

expert. And when people are looking for solutions to something, it's you that they see. It's you that they see helping people. It's you that they see as the teacher. It's you that they see as the authority. And that will naturally lead to more business and sales. I think one of the biggest mistakes that I've made is not finding a small enough niche because the tiniest niche in the world has still got a huge audience. So sometimes people go way too broad. So when I think of, let's say, Russell Brunson, I think he's the funnel guy.

When I think of Gary Vaynerchuk, I think of his social media, he's a lot of Snapchat, Instagram. When I think about Frank Kern, I think about the huge following he has as far as getting big, high-paying clients. And they've each got a separate niche. And when you're trying to build a niche within a home service company, what's the best way to get started with that? It depends what the home service company is. If you offer roofing, well, how can you niche down in that?

You need to ask your customers why they're your customers. And literally, I am just guessing. I know nothing about roofing. If you know about roofing, this might sound stupid, but I'm literally just guessing that there's probably two types of roofing clients. Those with emergency leaks that need things fixed right now, and those that just want to upgrade their existing roof. It's deteriorated. It needs maintenance, that kind of thing.

How you niche down into those different things, well, maybe you need to create two distinct brands. One that's focused on emergency. We're the emergency roofing people. We fix your roofing emergencies now. And then you need another brand that's a little bit more constructed than that and isn't appealing to the alert of the desperation of the situation. In every type of business, you can niche down in one way or another. If you're a mechanic, well, is it someone that's coming for an oil change,

or is it someone who's broken down and are stuck on the freeway? You might want to create sub-brands that target those specific types of customer. Speaking to your existing customers will probably tell you if you do need to do that or not. But your customers know it better than you do. So that's where you should start. Okay, so I think we've got something. So content is key. Giving valuable information out there. You mentioned a watermark in the video, having a good website. So if I was to get started today and I wanted to make the deepest impact over the next quarter, which is October, November, December, or any quarter, whoever's listening to this, if I wanted to make an impact today,

where do I get started? What is my order of operations? Well, you need a website built to the specifications that we discuss. You need to find out what the problems are your customers facing or were facing. And you need to see if there are any easy solutions that you can create content for. That would give you the foundation of expertise and knowledge. Once you have all of that in place, you can go and blow it up with ad spend while you're waiting for organic traffic to come in from Google. That is the way I would approach it. Not necessarily the quickest way,

but it is the way where you set up a foundation that the more people see your foundation, the more it cements you as the authority. And I don't think you should be throwing gasoline on any fire that doesn't do that. And if somebody wants to learn more and get some of your tutorials, first of all, which ones do you recommend them starting with and where do they find them? You can find me on matthewwoodward.co.uk. You can literally type whatever problem you're facing into the search box there or scroll down, all of the problems are categorized.

Many businesses, now we review client sites all the time, one of the most common issues we find, even if the site is looking good on mobile, we often find that the page load time leaves a lot to be desired. If your website's not loading in less than two seconds, you are losing money every single day. And if you look on my homepage, you'll find a link to an article about increasing website speed. And within that, you'll find a link to a tool from Google and you can put in some data and they will tell you how much money you're losing every year because of the speed of your website. And for me, increasing the speed of my website by one second resulted in an extra $28,000 in revenue.

That's no joke. So how would you increase your website speed? Well, it's something, again, you can do in a couple of hours with no knowledge next to no budget. And if you follow that tutorial on my blog, there's a six-step tutorial. Each step costs nothing for you to integrate. You will see significant increase in your website speed, which is not only a ranking factor for Google,

it's also a ranking factor for your customers when they're making a buying decision. So I encourage anyone that's listening that has an existing website to go and visit that post, plug your numbers into the Google tool, that's listening that has an existing website to go and visit that post, plug your numbers into the Google tool, and then test your current website speed. The first step is to test your current website speed.

If any of those tests come back larger than two seconds, you're leaving money on the table every single day. And you should follow the remaining five steps to plug that hole in your business. It will take less than a couple of hours for you to do and you can do it without spending anything. So you've literally got no excuse to not do it. It's one of the things that we do for all of our new clients that come in. It's a very, very, very common problem. It's very, very likely you have this problem. Even if you've looked at your website speed a year ago, I guarantee you've got the problem again now. It's something that you should

be checking every six months because it's amazing what creeps in. So that's something if you've got a couple of hours free and you were looking at a way to really make a difference to your business, that's where I'd spend it this weekend. So I'm on the on page, of course, I'm the type of guy that most listeners probably right now are on your website looking. So I'm on on page forward slash SEO dash audit. Where's the link to this? No, no. You want to go on the homepage of the blog, matthewwoodwood.co.uk and scroll down and you'll see the pink section and on the right there is SightSpeed.

Okay, so I'm going to do this. So I'm going to SightSpeed and I see you did 28,400. Yeah, that's the one. And then where do I put it? So I'm on there. Where is the link? So it says according to Google and there's a link there.

According to Google. Oh, so the link on Google. So I'm just going to run through this and show how much of a loser I am. And then you put your domain in. Yeah, I'm doing it right now. And let's just see how much money I'm losing. This is going to piss me off.

So it's 57% and growing here. So this is cool. So it's actually, I think with google.com forward slash feature forward slash test my site, which it's a lot easier to go to your site and just click the link because you share a lot of information on there.

Yeah, but I want to hear the results of your test. How much money are you losing? While you figure that out, look, everyone listening, site speed is a serious, serious issue. It's something that many people gloss over, but Amazon actually did an experiment where they purposely introduced 100 milliseconds. That's 0.1 seconds of delay into their page load time introduced on purpose reduced their sales by 1%. And that is no joke of any money, like amount of money, 1% of their entire sales just because of a 0.1 second difference in load time. So if you run in that test and you're at three seconds,

when you should be at two seconds, think about how much money you're losing. You got me 6.4 seconds, meaning I'm losing $10 million a day. No, I'm just kidding. But this is cool. I think that I got a lot out of this. Just this one tip alone could be the difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for me. So I'm on it and I'm going to continue talking to you about this stuff. I've got a few questions as we kind of close out here. If you had to recommend three books, I always ask the same question to all of the hosts that I have on here. What would be the three books? And they don't have to be about SEO.

They don't have to be about business. I don't really care. Just three books that have impacted you that you'd advise reading to the listeners. Yeah. For me, the classic Think and Grow Rich Napoleon Hill. And the reason for that is I've read it quite a few times over my life. And each time I've read it, it's allowed me to reflect on the lessons I've learned the last time I read it, which has then opened up new lessons and allowed me to continue learning all from the same book. So my top three books are Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, and Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich. Because it's the only book I keep going back to

and keep getting value from. Typically, when I read a book, it's like, nah, and it doesn't really impact much things. But that not only had a great impact when I was younger, continues to have an impact each time I read it. So yeah, I haven't got a top three books. No, no, no. Now I'm in my A making sure that that's downloaded

because I have the book. So if somebody wants to get more of you, is the best thing to just go to your website? Where else do they find you? I know it looks like here you've got a pretty big audience on Facebook and Twitter. Yeah, I mean, I don't hang out on social media too much. The best way to reach me is on my blog, matthewwoodward.co.uk.

There's a contact form. But for the most part, whatever problems you're facing, I've usually got a tutorial to solve it. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments. I'll respond. I'll help you. I will connect your problem to a solution. If you want to hire my team to rank your site for you, we can do that. My agency is called searchlogistics.com. We start at $2,500 per month and up. Why do we start from that kind of a price?

Because so much goes into search engine optimization, content creation, development, design. Like, you know, to do SEO effectively, it isn't cheap. That's the price point where we really have the ability to blow up a client's search traffic. Anything below that really shackles us and we can't deliver the results that we like to deliver. Other than that, on YouTube, I just built, like, literally built an extension on my house for a video studio. I've got a full-time video team, and we're cranking out quite a lot of video content. So if you like video content, check out my YouTube channel. Ironically, I hate watching videos, even though I'm known for making video tutorials. Personally, I hate them.

So there's always a text and image version of any tutorial available on the blog as well. So it doesn't matter which way you cut it. You can learn however you want to learn. Well, I've got a lot out of this. The last thing I do, Matt, and very impressed of everything you're doing, and I'm definitely going to stay connected and share theories and work with you in the future. What is one last thing that we could share with the audience? I'll give you the floor. Just one connecting to your target customer and audience. If you operate a traditionally retail business, you get traffic just by putting your shop in the high street, right? Like where the foot traffic is, it's easy. But when you're a service, you don't have that option. The only option that you do have is the digital real estate,

and that is somewhere you can really stand out and shine. So if you're a service-based business, you really must treat your website in the same way that a retail business would treat their shop. Their shop is well lit. It's easy to browse around. It has all of the products organized neatly on the shelves. It has prices. There's usually sales assistants that assist you with your buying decision. There's some level of service. There's help there if you need it. People don't open their retail stores looking a mess. They don't open it with half of the shelving installed. They don't open it with half the products missing. They don't open it with wires hanging out the ceiling and the electrics not finished and everything else.

But too many service business owners open their website like that. So it's very important that you understand as a service-based owner that your digital presence is your retail location. And you must treat it with that level of respect and pride. You must look at your website. And like I said, if you don't feel like printing that off and sticking it on the fridge because you're proud of it, you're doing something wrong. So that's my closing advice. As a service-based business, you must treat your digital presence in the same way a retail-based business would treat their physical shop. I love it. Well, I've got all your information. I tried calling you earlier, but I don't think my phone dials out to the UK very easily.

But I'm going to be in connection with you. I think that the audience has a lot to take away from this. And super appreciative of you coming on today. I've got 20 million things I take notes on here and just a lot of work to do. I told you to get a pen and paper at the start. I told you. I'll get you back on here. I'd love to just get you back on every six months just to talk about what's happening, what's going on in the digital age. And I think the one big takeaway for me is I've got a lot of great employees, great sales guys, great guys at operations, but sometimes we kind of neglect our online assets and we don't treat them with the same respect. And right now, like I told

you, it's over a third of my business comes from that. It's the best referral partner you could ever have. And I think we need to get down and dirty and pay more attention to things like this because at the end of the day, someone else is doing the stuff that we're not. So there's no better time than today to get started. Yeah. You know, sharing your expertise is a lead generator and it establishes your brand as well. It's a brand builder as well. And often it's literally just point your phone at something and press record.

Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong. I've got a lot to go do today. So I really appreciate it. And thank you so much for coming on today. No, no problem. Thanks for having me. And if you get any questions and anything you want to cover in a follow-up,

then let me know. We're quite happy to answer people's questions live in a follow-up or however you want to do it. Just let me know. Like I say, my entire business efforts is connecting people's problems to solutions. So any way we can do that, I'm on board. leave a review. So if you would please, please, please, Wyatt's top of mind, take a quick minute to subscribe and leave a quick review. It'll help me out so much. If you just took a little bit of time right now, I can't tell you enough how much I appreciate the listeners and the feedback.

And also when you subscribe, what I'm going to do is let you know the next guest coming on the podcast. And I'll let you email me anything you want me to ask that next person coming on. All the pros I have on here, I want your feedback. I want you to subscribe so you can start giving me the questions you want me to ask and help us grow together. Also, I'm giving away my book for free now. All you got to do is go to homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast. You got to cover the shipping and handling, but I'm giving the material out for free. It's 200 pages. It's a hardcover book, homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash podcast.

I appreciate each and every one of the listeners. And thank you for making this Home Service Expert podcast a success. I hope you're having a great day. And thanks again.