The Home Service Expert Podcast - How SEO Done Right Can Get You 75-150 New Leads Every Month

Episode Date: May 29, 2020

Brian Hong has been an SEO and Digital Marketing Expert for over 15 years, and has worked on over a thousand websites to date. As the head of Infintech Designs, he supports small and large businesses alike in maximizing their online reach, improving their exposure, and increasing their sales. In this episode, we talked about design, marketing, advertising, SEO & digital marketing...

maybe even before launching SEO, figure out what your CRR means, your conversion rate optimization, figuring out what your offer incentive is. If we're getting one out of 100 people come to your website and take action, give you a call or fill out a form, how do we move the needle to two out of 100, three out of 100, four out of 100? And sometimes that misstep is saying, well, let's get more people and let's get more visibility, overstepping that, well, what about that funnel? Can we move the needle to the conversion rate? Do you have an offer? Do you have an incentive? Do you have a unique selling proposition? Do you have social proof? Do you have trust credentials? Do you have good content in place? Do you have a newsletter capture form? Do you have live chat?

Let's look at that landscape first before we say, hey, let's just spend more money and try to increase the volume of traffic onto your website. I think that's a large misstep I see. And really, the majority of new clients that come on, they're saying, hey, I want to spend X amount of money. It's almost like the spray and pray. Let's blast more. Let's blast more. I'm like, well, let's look at your user journey. Let's look at your user engagement. And let's look at your website looks like before we just blindly kind of spend more and more money hoping we move the lead volume in that method. 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 Brian Hong out of New Orleans. He's an expert in design, marketing, advertising, SEO, and digital marketing. He's the president of Infantech Designs, a digital marketing expert for over a decade supporting small businesses and maximizing their online reach and exposure.

Infantech is a digital marketing company focused on helping large to small companies increase their sales, leads, and exposure. With over 19 years in the SEO industry and 3,500 websites built to date. Brian is a good friend of mine. He takes care of my SEO. He builds all of our links and we rank really, really well. He's my secret weapon and I'm excited to have you on Brian. Thank you for having me. Those are flattering words. You know, a lot of people ask me who I use for SEO and I've done a lot of stuff. You know, we do a little bit internally. We've done some link building.

We've really maximized as much as we can. And you do this for a living. So it's going to be nice to have you on here. You do your link building and just the things that you notice when you get new people to start. If anybody's looking for someone that's really, really good at SEO, I will give you guys a link. Brian's giving some specials to anybody that listens to the podcast. But you've done this for a long time. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you got started in the SEO business and where you are today?

Sure. I got started in this business actually doing affiliate marketing in 2001. It was to pay my car note because I was a young college kid who bought a car that I couldn't afford. I remember my note was $400 a month. I bought a 2001 Wolfsburg Edition BW. It was a cool car to have back then, at least in my head it was, except I soon realized it was a hard card to afford as a broke college student waiting tables. And so I had a friend that said he made a couple hundred dollars on the Internet. I said, well, what does that even mean? So I went down the rabbit hole back then. There was a forum called Webmaster World.

I frequented that forum, and I've always kind of been a lurker of information. Started gathering information, trying to connect some dots, and heard about a conference coming up in New York called Search Engine Strategies, thrown by a company called Jupiter Events. Back then, they had RadioShack. I went to RadioShack, bought a tape recorder, broke college student, 60 grand in debt, figuring out there's got to be a better life than this. Bought a recorder and tried to go be a sponge, and that was kind of the beginning. Went, did that, came back home. First month, I think I made like 250, 260 bucks

doing affiliate marketing. I said, well, wait a second, what's going on here? How did I make money online? And so that was the spark. And this was the side hustle back then. I was doing insurance, actually. I was waiting tables on the weekends, going to school part-time.

And then the more time, really in between all that, late at night, I was trying to invest the weekends, going to school part-time. And then the more time, really in between all that, late at night, I was trying to invest time in this affiliate marketing world. And then that money slowly grew. And then I took the leap of faith, quit everything, and became a full-time digital marketer really around the end of 2001, 2002. And this agency I have wasn't born until 2008, but that was kind of how I got my start into this world of digital marketing. Awesome. So I personally tell people that Google is God when it comes to home service. You're involved in a landscaping company. You have a ton of clients when it comes to SEO. You've got a whole process. You guys are very, very good at project management, making sure stuff's getting done. Very good at communication, which I

find is hard to find in the digital world. Tell me a little bit about how important Google is to the home service business in space. You know, I'm in agreement with you of Google being the closest thing to being God without being God. You know, what do you usually do when you research something, when you want to know more about something, when you go on vacation, when you want to go eat, you're pretty much Googling it. So I think it's critically important if getting new business, getting exposure, Google is a place where you want to be because it's inbound marketing, right? Your business or your ads will appear based on search queries you type in. So it's pretty targeted. Not to knock radio, print, or TV, but I think it's a little bit

different that we can be targeted on a granular level. Where maybe a billboard on the highway is, I hope someone driving by likes what I have to say or I have a product or service they're interested in. Versus Google, we're a little bit more focused because it's all based on search intent. So I'd say every small business should be in the Google, at least consider it a bare minimum. If getting more leads exposure is part of your game plan. So talk to me a little bit about, we've got all these search engines now between Google local services, pay-per-click, Google my business page, and then you've got regular organic. Can you talk us through each one of those and talk about the pros and cons and

what you see the future looking like for those? Yep. So I think the home services is the kind of the growing part, right? That's only in select markets. I'm seeing it more and more often. That's kind of Google trying to, I don't know, maybe eventually enter the pay-per-lead space, right? They're going in that direction a little bit more, kind of like the home advisors of this world. So I can see that increasingly growing. Google Ads is something where I used to hate, because in my head, I feel like I figured out how to get free traffic. Why am I going to pay for it? Well, fast forward to today, I absolutely love Google Ads, because it has evolved and it can

do so many things that organic search can't do with granular targeting, with the ability to capture keyword data, which over 7% of search queries are generally search queries typed in one time per month, one time per year. It's kind of Google's evolution of becoming an answer engine and not only just a search engine. Also, that keyword data that we capture from Google Ads, we can look at that and say, okay, we're paying X amount of dollars per click, X amount of dollars per acquisition. It doesn't make sense to maybe take this keyword we didn't think of and move it to the organic search campaign. So I look at paid search as a great

supplement compliment to an overall digital marketing campaign, including SEO as part of that. SEO, I've always loved it. It's kind of like my origin story, right? It's how I got started in this industry. It's how I created this agency. It's how I learned about every other facet of digital marketing. I think it's going to even be bigger, especially with this outbreak situation we have going on. I'm already feeling it. My lead volume is going up. A lot of these businesses and brick and mortars are figuring out how can I digitize or how can I capture some of the online market from my brick and mortar? So that's for me. I've had many restaurants reach out to me saying, we need to build an online presence.

I've had brick and mortars that typically didn't sell in e-commerce say, hey, how can we convert my business and maybe start selling e-commerce? How can we automate? How can we start spending more advertising dollars, more targeted traffic? And plus, everybody's online. You're stuck at home. You're trying to burn time. A lot of these people, unemployment is at 26 million. A lot of people are engaged, kind of glued to their phones in front of their faces. So right now, ad cost is going down. Generally speaking, there are some markets where ads are going up. But for the most part, people are really, really engaged with just being online, whether it's video, social, search engines. People are trying to pass the time.

So really the digital space, in my opinion, is definitely where you want to be out of your small business or medium or large business, really any size business. One of the things that I've always believed is if you're going to do TV, radio, or billboards, you've got to have a really good presence online. What is your take on that? Yeah, I look at that always as a supplement. I work with a lot of law firms and a lot of them do do billboards, radio, print, and TV. And I look at that as being a great supplement to a digital marketing campaign, but I'm probably a little bit biased here, but I feel like digital marketing in terms of being granular with our targeting, our level of attribution and segmentation is way better than

radio print TV, unless you're doing digital TV ads, which is a thing, right? So running ads on Hulu, running ads on connected devices. I think that's going to be a growing segment. But overall, I do see radio print TV being a supplement to a digital marketing campaign, as opposed to being kind of the leader in that campaign. So you're talking about programmatic, right? Correct. Yep. Talk to me a little bit about programmatic. And I know you're able to do custom audiences, almost like Facebook, to where you can say certain age groups on Hulu and deliver messages. How do you feel like that's working?

So I don't use, for local businesses, you know, I've honestly tried it and I don't look at that as being the exclusive part of a campaign saying, hey, let's just only run programmatic video, digital TV ads. But again, it's a great supplement because we can set up remarketing, saying anybody that we've already come in contact with

and already engaged with our brand, let's create a reminder system. And so we can launch those types of digital TV ads based on a level of engagement. So maybe it's a conversion needle mover, but maybe it's not that the greatest first touch point. But again, it's one of those things that I think it's great at supplementing an overall campaign. And that's kind of generally speaking, because I've worked on some campaigns where it's worked really well. So like, my clients that have been political candidates that worked pretty well, clients actually ran some ads for HGTV, they approached me to run

a pilot for a reality TV show called Cabin Wanderlust. And that did pretty well. But generally speaking, I don't think the average small business, I don't see that being the first step they take with their digital marketing campaign. To me, for the average small business, that's a what else can we do kind of move. Got it. So what is the biggest mistake you see? And I'll give you an example. Like for Google My Business pages, I feel like they're not posting enough. I feel like they don't have enough citation sites.

I feel like they're not delivering enough great content testimonials on there. Talk to me about huge mistakes you see. I think load time for websites is a big one that like mobile get in type thing. But talk to me about some mistakes you commonly see. So I still see the clients I see, I still see keyword stuffing being a problem. You know, the average small business owner, I'm still seeing them keyword stuff because they still come from a world where they feel like they just need to repeat a keyword over and over. Another thing I see is thin content. A lot of these businesses saying, I don't want to be too wordy. My audience isn't reading it.

I'll see that a lot with photography businesses, media companies. So really thin content and just having a website with just videos and images, I feel like that's also a misstep. Not really having any content plan in place, not having a frequency of publishing, not implementing schema markup. You know, really, it's a pretty long list. I feel like the average business owner just doesn't realize either some baseline activities

and some of the baseline best practices they should be implementing with their website. So I've never had a better ROI than SEO. I think that it's the most under utilized platform Businesses say yeah google doesn't work for me, but they they try it for two months because business owners are Lazy and they get bored quick. They want that direct fast roi we're more seo's about long term it's about You might get a few leads today,

but in two months, if you build it right, you could get 20 leads a day. And they're free leads. They're not free because someone's gonna pay somebody like you, but for the most part, they're the way most affordable. Plus it's an asset that'll never go away if it's done correctly.

What are some of the biggest tips you could tell somebody when at least looking to do SEO? Because I know a lot of people that are paying $3,000 a month, and they don't even rank for their own keywords. I mean, I don't know what they're getting. They're getting somebody to outsource for $200 a month, and they're literally losing $2,800 of stuff. So what do you say to those type people? For those people, I'd say maybe even before launching SEO, figure out what your CRO is, your conversion rate optimization, figuring out what your offer

incentive is. If we're getting one out of 100 people come to your website and take action, give you a call or fill out a form, how do we move the needle to two out of 100, three out of 100, four out of 100? And sometimes that misstep is saying, well, let's get more people and let's get more visibility, overstepping that, well, what about that funnel? Can we move the needle in the conversion rate? Do you have an offer? Do you have an incentive? Do you have a unique selling proposition? Do you have social proof? Do you have trust credentials? Do you have good content in place? Do you have a newsletter capture form? Do you have live chat? Let's look at that landscape first before we say, hey, let's just spend more money and try to increase the volume of traffic onto your website.

I think that's a large misstep I see. And really the majority of new clients that come on, they're saying, hey, I want to spend X amount of money. It's almost like the spray and pray. Let's blast more. Let's blast more. I'm like, well, let's look at your user journey. Let's look at your user engagement. And let's look at your website looks like before we just blindly kind of spend more and more money hoping we move the lead volume in that method. a blog that people are looking for. For example, for me, organize your garage door would not bring me a ton of new garage door avatar or perfect clients. So that's a huge deal. Talk to me a

little bit about Google Local Services, because I think a lot of the people on this podcast that are listening have started hearing about it. How does that all work? Really, you have to be vetted. You have to go through their program. You have to kind of provide certain credentials on your legitimacy. And it's really, you enter a number on how much you want to spend and Google tells you how many leads they estimate you will get. It's just really another way for them to capture some of the digital space alongside with their display ads, video ads, with their search ads. That's just another revenue stream for them. I mean, I think it's mostly in the home service area too.

I only have a handful of clients where we've gone that direction, honestly. So I will not claim to be an expert at all in that space, but more often we're seeing a better cost per acquisition in paid search and organic SEO, local SEO more specifically. Okay. So you got a lot of algorithms with Google now. I've heard a stat, 70% of all services are found online. 70% of those are found on Google. So that means half of your marketing dollars should be going towards Google. Talk to me a little bit about link building so everybody kind of understands how important links are in your organic traffic. Yep, it's arguably the number one ranking factor

out of the 200 Google has. And you'll see different ranking systems saying it's number three factor, number two factor. But it's almost kind of how Google became Google. It's almost a voting system. By having a link point at your website, Google perceived that as almost another website vouching for you. And it's almost a voting system. By having a link point at your website, Google perceived that as almost another website vouching for you. And it's almost like a vote of confidence.

But that has changed tremendously. I think back in the day, it used to be a volume game on how many links I could get. And so we would build these, go get hosting on a cheap hosting platform, build million-page websites with something called the doorway page generator that would automate really, really bad content, but I would be able to generate a link on the fly. I would just point at any website I wanted so I could build a million links overnight. Well, Google evolved and got smarter and said, well, that's not exactly what we were looking for when you said point a link at you. Then link farms were born. Then PBN networks were born. Fast forward today, I think it's less of a volume game, although that is important. It's more of a quality game. So really the nature of that link on, is it contextual? Is it topically relevant? Is it on a website that has any existing authority? Are there less or more than 15 outbound links? Are there any links pointing to that link? Are there any links pointing to the link that are pointing to the link? Is there any traffic going through the website, et cetera, so on? And that's kind of the evolution of all these updates of how Google is perceiving these links. We feel the gold standard of a link these days is an outreach link.

So if not an outreach link, a link on an asset that has an existing amount of authority. And we measure authority usually through most of what everyone else does, which are these third-party sites like Majestic, SEMrush. We'll look at Moz, Domain Authority. We'll look at Ahrefs. They have a rating called Domain Rating VR. And so we'll look at that data to give us a snapshot analysis on what is the potential value of this website, and then getting a link from this website pointing to us. Then we look at the content. What is the content? Is it topically relevant to our client's website we're pointing to? So those things are important when trying to acquire a link where not all links are perceived to be the same. So because you can get a link on YouTube, right? You could do a naked URL in the description area, but that'd

be a nofollow link. And I think the largest misconception around the SEO world is nofollow links have no value. But there has been numerous amounts of testing where there is some value in creating nofollow links. I wouldn't advise building only nofollow links, but it does have an impact and does move the needle a little bit when it comes to getting a link, even on a nofollow level. I'd say the links you want to avoid when pointing directly to your main money site, that'd be your corporate site or the website you want to drive traffic to, is the forum profile links, right? That was really popular back in the day

or blog role links or links repeating across an entire website. And those aren't contextual links. And so we're trying to build almost a conversational link. Those types of links you'll see in news publications. You'll see on mostly news publications, right? It'll be

something within the context and it'll be conversational. It won't be an exact match anchor. An exact match anchor is where if I want to rank for a web design company, I'll have a paragraph of content and then I'll randomly have my anchor text, which is the link, say, website, New Orleans, where it's not really conversation or natural. I would rather have something conversation and natural that includes the word web design. So maybe something like, are you looking for web design services in New Orleans? Make that the entire anchor text versus web design New Orleans, which feels less natural. So just being aware on not all links are perceived to be the same and trying to go after links that are topically relevant, that are on sites that

have existing authority. Got it. What do you say to someone that says they get kind of a website built, you know, just a crappy five pager. And I know a lot of guys that have been in the industry 30 years and they get a lot of repeat business and they used to be the big fans of Yellow Book and they never really caught on this digital change. What are your thoughts? What would you tell them right now? So tell them in terms of how can I capture this? What can I do from an SEO perspective with a five page website? Well, try to convince them. I guess, first of all, I don't think they'll be around in another year or two if they don't start getting over to the digital age. Yeah. I guess if they don't get and see the value in Google, just look at their stock price. It's skyrocketed, right? I mean, look at their market share. Look at the trends.

Google's become a verb, right? Go Google it. Look at the assets they own. Google owns YouTube, second largest search engine in the world. They own Chrome, the browser. They own Android, Android payments. The list goes on. To ignore and think Google is not of any value to benefit your business, I find that hard for an individual to believe that as a small business owner living in times like now. I'd say most people I come in contact with, it's pretty rare I'll meet someone saying, hey, I don't believe in Google. I don't see the value. We can show simple things like, well, let's just look at keyword volume. Let's look at search data. Let's go to the Google keyword planner and let me give you a pulse and idea on how frequently the search term is typed in within your geographical area. Those

numbers aren't exact because they won't report those long tail search queries, but at least they'll see these search queries that have substantial search volume and say, hey, here's people actively searching for these search terms. Do you feel it's important that your business is in front of these people typing in these search terms? And almost all the time, they'll say, well, yes. If someone's typing in a service plus geomodifier, garage door repair plus Austin, would you want your business to be there? If someone is actually looking for garage door repair in the Austin market, why would you not want to be there? I feel like most people are kind of getting it more and more these days. And a lot of it feels like because some other big media companies, they say they do SEO, like our local newspaper here

does SEO. I just saw a news station in Seattle, Como News, start offering SEO. So I think they're bringing more awareness to it, but there are some smaller companies maybe giving SEO a bad name because you have the $99 SEO shops or the $200 SEO shops. I don't think push button SEO exists. And it feels like maybe that's what they're selling. And a lot of times, you know, just taking on other campaigns, I'll have these clients that have bad taste in their mouth saying, well, I've ran an SEO campaign. Like I'm thinking one right now for a retirement home. And they said, we ran SEO for two or three years. We do it because we feel like we have to, but we don't know if it's working.

I think some of SEO companies are taking advantage of companies because these companies don't know the questions to ask. They don't understand SEO. You can't really touch it, see it, feel it. I'll go into so many projects saying, well, wait a second, you've been paying for SEO for two or three years. And I'm looking at on the most basic level of best practices. I won't see any of the best practice being implemented, but that business owner won't know, Hey, let me question. They don't know the questions I ask. They don't know what the best practices are. So maybe working with an agency that can explain what their roadmap looks like, explain how they can help them. So really most important to me is work with an agency that does any level of testing. So what we do, what we've learned,

and we didn't come up with this, I'm just surrounded by a lot of other people that are way smarter than me, is working in environments with a single variant testing environment to figure out and get a pulse, what is Google doing? And we can identify that by coming up with fake keywords and entering that fake keyword into Google, and then really trying to find a blank canvas and executing a search of that fake keyword. So if you were to type a random search query into Google, a random string of letters, keep on doing that until Google says there's not a single search result here. And that's how we kind of run our single-variant test, which we've learned from other much smarter people

from us and other organizations. But working with an agency that implements that on some level, so you're not working with an agency that kind of does what they hear, does what they read, taking those things into consideration, but really implementing an execution plan based on what actually works, based on real-world data. So one of the things I find that I talk a lot about is call centers. And I've done a lot of work with Forrest and he came in and identified some weaknesses in the business that we've worked

on. SEO always makes sense. SEO takes time. It takes trust from Google. The best time to get started is today. The listeners out there, I'd say don't hesitate. And you know what, Brian? I'd appreciate it if some of the people listening, if they want to just reach out and you do a quick analysis for them and tell them what your thoughts are, would you charge to do something like that? No, I'd be happy to do that for you. I probably can't take on like 1,000 people,

but I don't know what that number is, but I'd be more than happy to schedule a time, give a little free consult. Another thing I'm offering to small businesses, and I'd be happy to offer your audience too, is a free press release. As long as they provide the content and I can give them kind of a template of how this content should be created. Some popular press release topics will be, you know, we're open or we're still in service, we're still doing business, or I'm seeing some press releases saying, hey, we're open and we're following proper CDC guidelines. All our employees are wearing masks. To make any broadcast or message, I can offer that for free for your audience

contingent on they provide the content they would like broadcast. So what is the perfect size content, like 500 words or what do you think? Yeah. Yeah. 500 words or so, not making an advertorial, not saying I, trying to make it look like something newsworthy. And so we can kind of play an angle. If you don't have anything newsworthy, things I'll do for my company, if we can't think of anything, but we want to get a press release approved, I'll say, hey, Infantech Designs now offering free consultations for law firms. But we've already, we've always done that. But I just need to spin at an angle that looks more newsworthy in order to get that piece accepted in the syndication networks. That'll also come with, you know, reporting. I'll show you a list of every website it's published on. And I can, I'll do it for the month of May. Okay. Well, hopefully this comes out right away.

Or in 30 days, you know, i'm flexible on that 30 days when it comes out okay so you know home service you're involved in home service you're a part owner sometimes leads aren't always the answer i just want to be very clear since you're familiar with it a lot of times i see other problems i'm like you're not booking calls you're not open the right hours you don't have technicians with good conversion rate and average tickets. What have you found when you're like, like I said, you never want to skimp down on SEO because if you can run a whole business off of free SEO leads and just fix the other stuff, but when do you find that they got other issues and it's hard to be successful? I think the follow-up process. I experienced that myself with my business partner. He's kind

of the operations guy doing most of the follow-up process. And I give him a little nudge. I was brought on to implement maybe a better standard operating procedure of what happens when a lead comes in, trying to automate as much as possible with intake forms, using a CRM to identify should we follow up with them, when to follow up with them? Adding a layer of a newsletter to create another touch point. I'd say follow-ups because I see it firsthand just with my own business where they may follow up once, but when we started being more aggressive, just our follow-up process, not really annoying them. If they say, leave me alone, obviously we're going to leave them alone. But a lot of people are busy. They're preoccupied. We've connected with some really large projects that may have come 30, 40, even 60 days later just by following up with them. And I feel like that's maybe a misstep a lot of business owners may be taking. So one of the things I'm working on with Service Titan is we're building an API into a system

called Scipio. And it's a text messaging tool that actually pulls the data. So I connected it with Zoho. So it pulls the data out of ServiceTitan and it recognized we didn't close that job and it sends follow-up reports. It also sends the one-year anniversary time for your tune-up. It also sends upgrades. So you got to be really careful when doing text messaging because you can get in a lot of trouble. But if it's compliant, you're fine. So if you're discussing an opportunity that you've already been out on, it's fine. And I'll tell you what, most people can add 20%, 30% to their bottom line.

I wouldn't say to the bottom line, the top line, I would say, just by a really, really good follow-up sequence. It's just good to know what's going on. You got to inspect what you expect. You got to measure the results and go from there. So a lot of times people tell me, this is the worst answer in the world, Brian. They tell me I booked 90% of the calls. I said, 90%, not 88.2, not 91.6. Yeah, it's around 90. So you have no clue, do you? You have no idea what you're booking. Well, no, I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure, so you have no idea. So they're not measuring anything. They're not measuring their conversion rate. They're not measuring their follow-up process. You see, if you knew the data that we look at, and I'm a big business, I wouldn't consider

myself huge, but I had to start in layers. You got to start out with some just basic keys. What's our booking rate? Use Call Cap. Susie Boyder, she had a podcast on here. We don't use them anymore. We've been able to make service tight and work for that. But it's like these people, they just assume this is going on and they have no idea where to spend their time and their energy on a daily basis. They have no focus. So the first thing I'd recommend to the listeners out there is before you, or simultaneously, if you hire a guy like Brian, who's the best at what he does, and he'll make your website, deliver you a lot of leads. Hopefully if you're a garage door guy, you don't listen to this because

I want those leads because I'm probably coming to your city soon. But the main thing is get good at SEO, but make sure you're converting the calls. Make sure your guys are showing up on time. Make sure they're converting them and make sure you've got a good average ticket. But you got to look at your acquisition costs. The only thing you want to decrease is your acquisition costs.

But you want to measure the acquisitions too. So this is where it gets a little bit more complicated, but I don't care if I pay $200 for a lead if I'm getting $2,500 versus if I'm paying $50 for a lead and getting $500, I'm better off paying the $200 because I'm getting a better ROI. And people don't understand that. So I found that SEO leads are some of the best in the industry. They're not quite as good as the newspaper, but they're way better than a HomeAdvisor or Angie's List or Yelp or a Deal of the Day or a ValPak coupon. What is your take on that? I agree with that. I think that the puck doesn't

stop with SEO. It's that follow-up process you mentioned. At a bare minimum, implement some type of paid remarketing system in place. That's a great reminder system that comes at a fraction of the cost of any top-of-the-funnel marketing like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Contingent on them having existing engagement, I feel like every business looking for more business should, at a bare bare minimum run a remarketing campaign, assuming that they're getting some level of traffic and some level of engagement coming to their website already. If you are, then that remarketing is almost like an automated follow-up system. It's keeping your brand forefront of mind every time they come online.

It's just another layer of that kind of follow-up. Every day they wake up, they see your brand. When they are ready to pull the trigger for a garage door repair or any respective service, they think of you first. So trying to keep your brand forefront of mind is important. What's your take on social media? Because I get this question a lot. Hey, Tommy, how do you feel about Facebook ads versus pay-per-click and SEO?

What is your take on that? And tell me, I guess it's industry specific. So if you got something really cool, Facebook works good, but tell me your take on that. Yeah. You know, I like SEO more than social ads, although on a remarketing level, I like to remarket across all networks, across Google's network, YouTube's network, Facebook, Instagram. Those are the primary networks I'll run remark. As far as top of the funnel marketing, which means the introduction of your brand, product, or service, the first touch point, in my opinion, Facebook ads,

it's not the first step we take for service-based businesses. And I'm sure there's a lot of people that argue differently over that, but that's just the way we do things with my shop is there are some businesses that I think can benefit from social ads if there's maybe not an existing amount of search demand, right? If people aren't searching for certain search queries related to your brand, product, or service, then maybe social ads are better because maybe we can create that demand or maybe that demand isn't as established. And that's more of your digital billboard targeting people based on your interests, what you like, et cetera, so on. So maybe that's a better fit. It just really depends on the product. Gotcha. So other than marketing, what are some good tips you would give to some of these home service business owners?

I think the incentive and offer. It's the thing I see most common in my world is they're saying, hey, my phone's not ringing. And well, if they have five different service-based businesses to choose from, why are they going to choose yours? So making sure we have some level of an incentive and offer. The next thing is some level of trust. So with the low-hanging fruit, that would be a testimonial video. Ideally, a video because it's the hardest to fake. It's also the hardest to get. But if we can get a testimonial video, then we have trust.

It'll also explain really the pain point you solve for that customer. So it's kind of multifaceted. You can put it on your landing page. You can use it as an actual ad. It'll help clarify the pain point you solve and what you do for a living. So I think those things of just having an offer incentive and trust will be a big needle mover just doing that by itself. Also responding to reviews is one thing I don't see is responding to all your Google reviews, even the bad ones, even the negative ones, not attacking back either, because I've had some clients that will respond and attack back, but showing the professionalism of your company, but also just being aware that Google scrapes

and collects this information. And there's a lot of arguments on whether or not how impactful that is on your rankings. Well, I come from a world where I feel like it is impactful. So when I respond to reviews, I'm pretty much keyword stuffing, right? So if someone says, thank you for working on X and X campaign, web design SEO, then I'll reply. And everyone's unique, never copy and paste. Every single response is unique. And I'll say, thank you, Mr. Smith, for letting me work on your web design campaign. I'm plugging web design. I really look forward to working with your New Orleans-based business and maybe launching an SEO campaign to help improve your link building. It's all pretty much keyword stuff in a conversational manner and all my review

responses. Love it. So I'm on like, you know the going get tough the tough get going and i get on things like deal of the day stuff like that a dill chicken groupon living social and there's always an offer and i explain to people this is not to make money this is to get you in their home it's your job to go in there and do a needs analysis and find out what else is available to sell. What are your ideas on that? Yeah, I think it is the salesmanship of you, right? The SEO is just kind of getting your foot in the door. More often, an SEO company, the primary job is to set you up with the opportunities, and your primary job is to close those opportunities and upsell and do a needs analysis

and figure out what is a lifetime value of this customer. Are just buying a product now is there any maintenance maybe down the road they buy another house so not just looking at how much can i make now but playing the long game is how much is this client worth over the course of their lifetime versus just how much can i make just that one-time business got it and what about service agreements you know landscaping is a great business because you go there all the time. But how important are service agreements for home service businesses? what about this? What about that? And we have to look at that service agreement. This is a scope of work we're contracted for. And we still get it even with our service agreement, but it puts us in a better position to have a more professional conversation and say, well, this is what we agreed upon. This is the agreement versus something ambiguous saying, well, you're supposed to do this, you're supposed to do that. And sometimes we'll just do it just to keep our reputation healthy.

But when it's something unreasonable, like I think we had a project kind of recently where they wanted us to rerun all of their electrical for this outdoor deck that we built and i was like that has nothing to do we just built the deck has nothing to do the electrical which i guess i didn't think we would have to we didn't say we would run it but we didn't say we wouldn't run it so just because it was a big project and it's a really nice house and they were referring other clients to us, we just went ahead and we ran the electrical. That was a little bit of a hit. And that was a lesson for us to now start including what's not included.

Not only what is included, but we actually have a section on what is not included as well. Okay. This is a loose question because it depends on the industry. But if your SEO is set up, your Google My Business is set up, your GLS, let's not even talk about PPC, pay-per-click on Google. But you're doing stuff on Bing. You're still set up on Bing.

Your Yelp account's good. If you set up your online resources, you're getting reviews, you're getting good Google reviews, you got the Google My Business, you got the GLS, and you've got a good, good, good website. And you rank it well. And you invest a year into this, and they pick up your company. I know it depends on the industry, like cleaning lady versus a garage door guy versus air conditioning. And it depends on the time of year. But what could I expect to get up lead-wise? I mean, if I had a shooter number, I might say you could easily per city get 20 leads a day through those sources. What would be your take on that? Yeah, I think it really is industry specific and maybe sometimes even seasonal. What time of the year is it? Like for landscaping,

we are slammed really springtime and we have to make our money now to survive the winter months. And on a good month, we'll generate 130 to 150 unique leads per month during that springtime. And as we enter the winter months, and so when I say landscaping, we're not mowing lawn. We only do landscape construction. So it's everything except the mowing lawn. In the winter months, we're doing probably about 30, 40 leads. So it's hard to put that number of leads per day because it also is contingent on are you crawl, walk, running with your campaign? How aggressive are you?

How many channels are you focusing? But with just SEO alone, I'd say in a decent sized city, greater than 100,000 people in it, I think it'd be a fair expectation to get around that 75 to 150 leads per month. Okay, let's talk a little bit about Bing because Bing works.

I don't love Bing, but it really seems like to me the 50-year-old plus people, it comes loaded on Microsoft. Any computer that you buy with Microsoft on it, Windows, is going to come with Bing as the go-to search engine. It's definitely not volume.

What is your take on Bing? It's pretty much everything we do on Google, we automatically or eventually just do well on Bing. So it's not like something we pay super close attention to. It's something we check and something we want to be aware of how much real estate we're taking up in the search results of Bing. But generally speaking, almost every single campaign, whatever we're doing right in Google, it just eventually makes its way over to Bing. Yeah, I agree with that. And if you wanted to get good reviews, I use something called BirdEye. There's a million of them out there. How important is it to have something that works with the CRM,

that works when we're not thinking about it and it actually does it for you? Yeah, I'd say that's critically important. You know, that's almost low-hanging fruit. If you're in business and closing a new job and you're already doing that, then let's try to ideally get a video testimonial, but at a bare minimum,

have them leave a Google review. And if you can kind of help, like persuade them to use certain keywords in the review, just like I encourage using certain keywords in your responses, I also encourage certain keywords to be used in the actual review. Because if you look at the review, you ever notice they categorize it by words that are used in the review? Is there scraping that data. Not only that, you ever look at the Google listings where some listings will actually have a snippet saying, this website mentions garage door repair. This website mentions garage door installation. So it'll actually pull that from the actual review being left.

So I would encourage them, if you can, say, oh, just make sure you possibly use these words and maybe add the city you're in, if that's an option and if that makes sense to do so. Got it. So what's a quick way to get, well, I'll tell you guys a quick way to get a lot of reviews. Go to every person, friend, family, neighbors that you've done and ask them to write an honest review if they used your service. Nobody really thinks that there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing illegal about that. They use your service. Nobody really thinks that there's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing illegal about that. They use your service. It's a great way to get a head start. And sometimes I'll write the review for them, send it to them and say, modify it as you see fit, just to make

it easy. Hey, Tommy showed up at my house and I have the date because I have a CRM. He fixed this, this, this, and this. He did a great job. But that way I could put the keywords in there. And if they say he showed up a little later, left a grease spot on my porch, oh, well. But ultimately, friends, neighbors, family typically have a good feeling about us. And I wouldn't send it to someone that I didn't think knew me and trusted me. And I've got a bigger obligation than friends, neighbors, and family to do your job right the first time anyway. Because if you ever do a job for a family member and it doesn't work out well, you're in big trouble. So talk to me a little bit about a quick way to do that or just any tips that you would give us here to really accelerate the Google growth.

And I want to know the open and close hours because I see a lot of people screw up on that. Yeah. So we advise clients looking for some automated system, exact same system you're using as well, which is BirdEye. Another side note in the reviews, if you can get that person to include an image that they take on their phone, then they'll have certain metadata to show the location of that photo that was actually taped.

So that can potentially expand your service area. So for you, it may be Garage Door Repair Austin. Well, what about all the other cities surrounding Austin that are within five miles of it? Well, if you get any clients in that area and they take a picture, then it automatically geotags on their phone and they include that in a review. That's an opportunity to potentially expand your rankings in that area because where you search from, what you see is based on your location. So maybe someone in a suburb searching may search for that same search query and Google may take that into consideration saying, well, maybe we should expand your rankings. You're ranked number one, two or three here.

Maybe we should also rank you in this adjacent city rank one, two or three. That's not Austin, but pretty close to whatever respective city. But I would also use BirdEye too. You know, we kind of advise the same people is use a system in place. And really everything you said is the exact same thing we advise is go after friends and family

and try to get the snowball and the process started with getting them to leave a review as well. Okay. I mean, there's so much stuff we talked about. I agree. Being active on Google, getting back to complaints, being active on Yelp, citation sites. Let's just dive into a couple more questions here. Tell me a little bit about citation sites. Tell me about what tools to use. I forget that one that everybody uses in the world for citation sites to check.

Yext. Yext is one that people use. I think they have an audit tool. I think Moz has one now. Everybody's kind of entering the citation game. SEMrush has their own location management tool. A lot of them are out there. I'd say before or concurrently, you do a citation blast, which just means you're trying to acquire new directories and new citations,

is do an audit to figure out what's out there that's inaccurate. Figure that out. And I guess there are services that do it. Yext offers it. We are a fan of Yext, but there are other competing services that work just as well. So not skipping over that audit process to see, well, should we be fixing it? I think White Spark is another one. They offer a citation service. I believe they also offer a citation cleanup. Bright Local is another one. They offer a citation scrape and audit. They also offer a cleanup. So don't skip over that step of actually fixing what you have and only focusing on creating new citations. Make sure you implement an audit as well and making sure you have a consistent name address value.

So if your street address is ST period or S-T-R-E-E-T, pick one and stick with it. What I'd also recommend is when you make your citation sites like Judy's Book or YP.com or Yellowbot or I could keep going. there's a million of them there's city pages first of all like brian said make sure you're putting if you put street as st make sure all of them say st make sure they all have the exact same address if it's west in front of it put west in front of it but more importantly add really good descriptions if there's characters, fill that whole thing out. They'll allow you to add pictures,

geotag them and add them. Put the best pictures first. Put a friendly picture of a nice wrapped truck. Professional, professional, professional. Make sure you're smiling. Make sure your eyes aren't closed. Make sure you have before and after pictures. What other stuff can we do with citation sites? You can build links to them. Making sure they're indexed is, I think, another problem that I see is when we build these citations, that's kind of step one, but really to start moving the needle, making sure Google acknowledges that citation exists. And so for those people who are like, what is indexing? How do I do it? There's a tool out there. It's a paid tool, BulkAdURL. We have different methods, but that's one where people can go take that list of actual citations that they have created. I think it's, I don't know,

two cents, three cents. I can't remember the price, but it's BulkAdURL.com. You can sign up for an account, acquire the URL addresses of all your citations, copy and paste it into there, and that will help get your citations actually indexed, meaning Google kind of acknowledges its existence. Yeah. So basically that just pings it and then Google crawls it. And then it says, so certain websites get crawled a hundred times a minute, certain websites get crawled once a month. How does that work? So that's the crawl budget. And so part of moving that needle is having a frequency of publishing. Google wants to come to websites that are helped feeding their to month? How does that work? So that's the crawl budget. And so part of moving that needle is having a frequency of publishing. Google wants to come to websites that are helped feeding their

business model. And part of that is creating content. That's why you see Wikipedia, this massive website rank for pretty much everything and anything is they probably have been assigned a very high crawl budget because they have a very high frequency of publishing. They're always creating new content. And if Google comes to a website and they see a pattern of this website always creating content, the next time they come, they may say, you know what, I should come back sooner

and I should spend more time because there's so much content being generated on this site. And so having a blog and a content plan will help potentially massage that. Okay, a few more things here in closing. Number one is, if you had to give us three books you really like, what are the three books?

I do Audible books. And I read these days. I don't read for pleasure very much. I just read a lot. I read SEO by the C.com. I'm not much of a book reader, to be honest with you. I read a lot of publications. I read a lot of newsletters. I read a lot of case studies. That's kind of my world. And when I don't,

I do a ton of podcasting and audibles. As for fun, the podcast, I really like the Ben Greenfield podcast. I'm a huge fan of that. I really like making my first million podcasts. I'm a big podcaster because I can multitask, right? I can work out while I listen to it. I can do a little bit of work that doesn't take really high intensive thinking. I can do more than one thing at a time. So I'm not much of a reader for fun is I'll do audibles and podcasts instead.

Okay, and if someone wants to get ahold of you, I know you set up something that you're gonna do some of the free stuff for and give them a special deal. Where is that website they go to to get a hold of you? Yep. So it's infantechdesigns.com. You know, I've never been a fan of my own company name. It was a side hustle that turned into a career. If I knew what I do today, I would choose a different name because it's how do you spell it?

I and those are all difficult letters. But it's in FinTech Design, in like opposite of out, fin like shark fin, tech like technology, and then designs being plural, Infantechdesigns.com. Okay. And then you got one, the home service special or whatever? Yep. It's Infantechdesigns.com forward slash home dash service dash special. Okay, perfect. So just mentioned you, you heard about us. You'll get the free, free press release contingent on the client provides the press release they would like syndicated. And if not, you know, it'd be a small additional charge if you want us to write it. Okay. Tell them what you think of the site and

how much they might be doing great or how much they might be getting off. I know a lot of people that are getting ripped off right now. They have no clue. They're paying 500 or 2000 or 5,000 or 200 and they're not getting shit and they have no idea how bad they're getting screwed by doing that. Yeah. Yeah. General rule. if it's too good to be true, it's probably not true. If you're doing a push button SEO doesn't exist. If you're paying $299 per month, chances are that company is hoping you never dispute it. It's such a low number. The expectations aren't super high versus if you're spending a thousand dollars a month, you better see that needle move. I just see a lot of companies being taken advantage of.

I've even seen $99 SEO. I'm like, who's doing SEO for $99 per month? And how much could you possibly do? Yeah, there's nothing getting done for $100 a month. I see that all the time. Basically, you get 1,000 people that don't have a clue at $100 a month and you're spending $30 with VAs. That's $70,000 a month. And a lot of people, they're

like, yeah, I'll spend a hundred bucks a month. They're like, I don't, I just want to have something getting done, you know, but I look at companies when I go to buy them and I'm like, you haven't done anything. There's no new link building. There's no new content. There's nothing like you've literally wasted this money and it's not a lot of money, but I'd rather have it from ground zero than have this. It's like, this is nothing. So when I look at a company to buy, I look at have they done SEO? And if it's pretty good, we could inject some steroids on it. It's a lot quicker to take a company that's been doing something in the past and then just really add on to it than somebody that's done nothing.

So I'm telling you, if you want to grow your business, if you ever want to sell your business, you need to have a good foundation. You need to have an online reputation. You need to have a good website. I love WordPress. What do you seem to like the most? Yeah, WordPress, I don't think it's a coincidence.

They power 51% of pretty much all the websites in the world. There's a long list of why I hate it, but my list of why I love it is still longer. It's open source. It's the most user-friendly out the box. It's the most scalable, the most modular. It's easy to customize. It's a great fit from a small, you know, the dog trainer next door to a enterprise level business, even like Sony Pictures uses them. I believe Mashable uses them. So it's a very scalable product, but keeping in mind, it's not a perfect product. It's not a set it and forget it, which I see a lot of companies do. They don't update simple things. They don't update WordPress. They don't update plugins. Just realize it does require

a certain level of maintenance and a certain level of upkeep. But yes, I agree. It is still the best solution out there for most businesses. Cool. And then I'll just give you the floor here to kind of finish this out. If there's anything we didn't talk about or one last kind of thought for the people that are thinking about getting some help online. I know right now it seems like they don't have money. It seems like things are tough. Why would I invest in this when I'm having to lay people off? But in my opinion, this is my final thought. The last thing you cut is advertising. The first thing you put your money into is growth.

You get rid of the low-hanging fruit and the low-hanging fruit is never marketing. And the last thing I'd get rid of is SEO. So if you're thinking about doing it, do not hesitate. At least give Brian a quick call, get on his website, take advantage of what he's offering. The one thing I like, Brian, is you're not high pressure. You just tell it like it is. You don't bother people a ton. You check back in here and there, but you get done with what you say you will. And that goes a long way. And I've dealt with hundreds of SEO companies. I know a lot of people on here probably go to Scorpion And Scorpion is the most expensive SEO company out there. They get their stuff done, but I can't say anything bad about them because they actually get stuff done, but they're not cheap. I'd say you get more done and you're more affordable. But

one last thought, what would you say? I'd say even before reaching out to me for those people, figure out what your customer avatar is. Who are they? Who do you feel? Where do you think they live? And then things you can do yourself, and maybe the budget isn't there, is start writing your own content and start doing research and start creating a frequency of publishing. Start videoing yourself on project jobs. Start maybe recording process maps. Start taking pictures of before and after. maybe video the process. Those are things customers can all do themselves is creating that customer avatar, writing content themselves, capturing images and video for successful jobs and testimonials. So I would say those are things

that I see a lot of people that say, I don't have a budget. Well, I'm like, well, why don't you engage and do the things that you can? And those are some low hanging fruit things that I feel like the average business owner should be able to do. All right. Well, you hear it here from Brian. I'm telling you guys, this is a big deal. There's never been a better time to get online and invest in the future of your business. Brian, as always, I appreciate you coming on and I always get a lot out of these talks. So really appreciate you. No problem. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it as well. All right, brother. Thank you. Hey, I just wanted to take a quick minute and thank you for listening to the podcast.

You know, most people don't understand this, but the way that the podcast has grown is when people subscribe and they 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.