The Home Service Expert Podcast - Optimizing Your GMB Page to Generate A Flood Of Customers

Episode Date: May 21, 2021

Joy Hawkins is the owner and president of Sterling Sky, Inc. and a Search Engine Land Columnist. She has examined thousands of Google local listings for SMBs in the US and Canada since 2006. Certified in both Google Search & Display, she enjoys spending time managing Google Ads accounts. She has been a speaker at various search engine marketing conferences such as SMX & LocalU, Pubcon, and Mozcon. In this episode, we talked about SEO, online marketing, online advertising, social media, blogging...

The website is not dead. There are definitely transactions that happen on Google where people don't make it to your site. So that is true. But your site is the main thing that contributes to where you rank. So if you try to rank without a website, like just set up a free GMB website, for example, you are going to have a really hard time controlling where you show up, ranking for more terms. There's nothing you can do SEO-wise on a GMB website. So you 1000% need a website if you want more traffic. And then just on the organic side, I feel like organic, people might think it's going away, but we're not seeing that at all. Especially in home services, we see a lot of traffic,

more traffic coming in from organic than GMB for some industries. Now, like Locksmiths, for example, we don't necessarily see that. We see more from Google My Business. But I'd say that industry is a great one where we had a Locksmith client hire us. And you can just tell that none of their competitors were investing in SEO. They're either getting it overseas really cheap or just not doing anything. And the amount that we were able to make a dent in their organic presence was massive. Their Like their traffic just like skyrocketed because nobody else was investing in any of it. So there's a lot of opportunity there. 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 got an awesome guest visiting us from Uxbridge, Ontario. She's an expert at SEO, online marketing, online advertising, social media marketing, and blogging. Joy Hawkins is part of Sterling Sky Incorporated. She's the owner-president from 2017 until now. She also used to be part of Impressio Marketing, local SEO product consultant from 2004 to 2016. Done a lot in the SEO world.

Joy Hawkins is the owner and president of Sterling Sky Incorporated and Search Engine Land Columnist. Since she started working in the local SEO industry in 2006, she has looked at and worked on thousands of local listings for SMB or GMBs in the United States and Canada.

She loves spending time managing Google Ads accounts and certified in both Google Search and Display. She has been time managing Google Ads accounts and certified in both Google Search and Display. She has been a speaker on various search engine marketing conferences such as SMX and LocalU, PubCon, and MozCon. I had Matthew Woodward

on a couple times and I talk to him pretty much every week. Are you familiar with Matthew? Yep. You are like, I am so excited for this. So I appreciate you coming on, Joy. How's your day going? What's the weather like?

What's going on? It's kind of rainy here, so not great. Well, I am going to drill you through this on the best way to do this. Right now, we're at about 40,000 downloads a month, and everybody wants to know more about what they could do to make their their stuff better so why don't you just start out by telling us how you got into seo world how you're you've moved so close to google and everything that's happened over the last few years well it started kind of accidentally i was going to school for marketing advertising and then wanted to get a job, something related to my field. So I applied

for this job doing telemarketing, selling Google Ads. I didn't even know what Google Ads were. This was back in 2006. And then kind of got interested more in SEO because I found that was the thing that business owners were always asking me about. They were obsessed with... When it first came out, it was called Google Places, but those used to be seven listings. Now it's three beside the map. So I started getting obsessed with them because I kept getting questions from my clients about them and self-taught myself how to get set up, how to rank, started messing around with things, trying to figure out which things actually influence ranking and which things didn't. And fast forward over a decade later, I'm here.

That's the summary. I don't know how old you are, but I was in school when search engines were coming out and we used to use this thing called Pro Fusion. There was all these different things going on. AOL was really big. And Google kind of just got it started and it kept coming. And then it was like nothing else existed for a long time. And then Bing, I honestly don't understand how they're not a monopoly.

They pretty much are. I mean, there's nothing that comes close to the amount of traffic that Google drives, right? We spend a little, really little bit of effort even looking at Bing, just because the volume is nothing compared to Google. So they don't really have any real competition at the moment, which is why we kind of focus on them so much. Right. So yeah, I don't see that changing. I think like DuckDuckGo and Bing, they kind of, you know, maybe together are like 5% of the traffic that we see coming in. Whereas, you know, Google's 90, 80 or more percent.

All right. So I've got all these questions, but I'm just going to just come off the top of my head here for a while, if you don't mind. So we've got four different algorithms that I know about that I run on. We've got pay-per-click. We all know pay-per-click, three ads usually. They're placing them differently now. We've got the GMB. You can do a paid GMB above it. Certain times it shows up. You've got the LSA Google Guarantee local service ads. And then you've got your strictly organic. And then you've got some pop-up stuff with the display stuff. But I guess there's five.

But, you know, these days, SEO, the generic organic SEO, it's hard to get found. I look at my GMB. We do UTM perimeters around everything to see what's going on with our Google page and the traffic. And it's changed drastically to where it's almost you got to pay to play. Right? So talk to me a little bit about the different algorithms and your take on what's happening with Google. Yeah. Well, it's kind of interesting because local service ads expanded to lawyers this year. So we have lots of clients that do home services, but we also have quite a few in the legal space. So we got to see firsthand the introduction of these ads, what it did to their performance

in other areas. So what we found was that when local service ads started appearing, it didn't actually cut into traffic from Google My Business or the local section too much. On average, the average law firm in our study that we did lost 5 clicks a month. So nothing substantial or massive. Where we saw a huge dent was in their paid traffic. So when local service ads come out, your traditional Google Ads account is going to change drastically, like the performance. We saw a lot of negative changes. But as long as you're refining and making sure that you're targeting keywords that are not serving local services ads, I would say you might want to still keep your regular Google Ads account running as well. But it had

a really huge impact more on the ad side than stealing traffic from organic. So it's kind of a good thing. So one of the things that I do is I work with Matt, Matthew, we look a lot at the H refs and I'm a 62 now, which is pretty good. I'd like to bump to get that to 70. And if I could get it to 75, I think I'll rank my manufacturers actually. But the thing that I'm wondering is that's good and gravy. And it's really cool that I could come up in this search for a lot of stuff and the blogs does really well. But it seems like to me, the only things I could really do well on is when you're comparing products like a manufacturer versus another manufacturer or certain things like what's best of my house is facing West for garage doors and i'm a garage door company or what do you think

still is the best play and i want to go through each one of these because i want to go through all four and like i said as i'm just going to drill you this is going to be super fun because i think it's going to be if you guys don't know that are listening, usually there's about 40,000 downloads a month. Joy is the best there is. People study her. They watch. There's only a few people like Joy in the world and she's on here. So I really, really appreciate it once again.

So, well, I'm going to just take the time I have with you and selfishly just continue to ask tough questions. But where do we win on SEO these days on organic? Yeah. So I have a lawn care client. I'll probably mention them a bit because I work really closely with them. So I know like everything about their account. They were our first client. So they kill it when it comes to organic. They actually have more leads for organic than they do from Google My Business because frankly, they just have more reach. Google My Business, unfortunately, you are limited. There's only so far away that you can rank with a specific location. And where they really kill it

on the organic end is a combination, I guess. They have some articles, they don't convert super well. Usually articles are not lead magnets, but their service area pages perform amazing. So they have really well done pages for all the different cities. They service about 15 or 20 of them. And those are usually the ones that the leads just pour in on. So those still work really, really well if they're done right. Yeah. And then do you recommend having a video on those pages as well?

Yeah. The only thing with a video I would say is make sure it's not super high on the page. We've actually done some testing where we had a client who had their video as the first thing on their page. And if the first thing that Google sees when they scan your site is a whole bunch of code, that can actually have a negative impact on your ranking. We found the same thing with widgets. So we had a client that had a Yelp widget on the top of their page and moving it down, we saw an increase in the ranking. So videos are good, but just make sure there's a bunch of content before it. Okay. So I'm just going to jump right into a bunch of other stuff. So organic rankings.

Now what happens is, and I'm going to explain this to the audience too, is normally if it's a paid term that Google knows they're going to make money, they're going to have the LSA at the top sometimes, the top three. Then they're going to have, as you go down, a couple PPC ads, then the GMB, then the organic listings. My question for you is, how are potential clients, customers of ours in the landscaping industry, we're expecting them to go on their cell phone or go on Google and just take know take the mouse pen and just scroll you said we get a lot of action from it for the landscape company i don't know if you want to tell us who that is it's probably personal information but no okay um i will i mean they've told me it's okay but yeah no i'll leave them in on us for now just in case you know their competitors are listening sure and we'll get into this, Charles. So what I mean by that is if you look up how whales poop, you're going to come up with an organic listing.

There's not going to be anybody paying for that term. So you're going to find a lot of stuff on exactly what's going on with how whales poop. And then what happens is the Google My Business page is your location. And then the local service ads is Google guarantees that service that they've done a background check, usually through Pinkerton. And people are asking questions here. So I'm just kind of clarifying. And there's no way for me to make them visible to you, but I'll share some of them in a minute. And then the deal is, is the pay-per-click is just simply pay-per-play. But if you got a high quality score you'll pay a lot cheaper coca-cola can pay

a penny when when pepsi might pay a dollar for a coke term and they'll let them they want they want the users to be happy with the search results and pay-per-click too so still going back i don't know if there's any shortcuts or any just not shortcuts, but any good advice? Because a lot of people are saying websites are dying. It's really your Google My Business page. It's really, they literally have said that. They said, no one's visiting your website unless you've got a good gallery on there or something. So what do you say as far as the organic side?

So that's definitely not true. I've heard that a lot myself, though. It's kind of like a trendy thing that people say. The website is not dead. There are definitely transactions that happen on Google where people don't make it to your site. So that is true. But your site is the main thing that contributes to where you rank. So if you try to rank without a website, like just set up a free GMB website, for example, you are going to have a really hard time controlling where you show up, ranking for more terms. There's nothing you can

do SEO-wise on a GMB website. So you 1000% need a website if you want more traffic. And then just on the organic side, I feel like organic, people might think it's going away, but we're not seeing that at all. Especially in home services, we see a lot of traffic, more traffic coming in from organic than GMB for some industries. Now, like Locksmith, for example, we don't necessarily see that. We see more from Google My Business. But I'd say that industry is a great one where we had a Locksmith client hire us. And you can just tell that none of their competitors were investing in SEO. They're either getting it overseas really cheap or just not doing anything and like the amount that we were able to make a dent in their organic presence was like massive like their their traffic

just like skyrocketed because nobody else was investing in any of it so there's a lot of opportunity there yeah i agree the biggest spam in the world is locksmiths and garage drawers locksmiths being the highest one that's why there's advanced verification which they do a background check on me they make us go around and here's what's crazy is yext is basically the back end of every review tool out there and we'll talk a little bit about yext but it's all about citation sites and i might be speaking a different language to certain people but citation sites are yellow bot yelp angie List. They could go on and on. There's thousands of them. But the other day we switched to the back end of Service Titan. Are you familiar with Service Titan? No. It's a CRM and they have their own little reputation management

to make sure our clients are leaving reviews. And there's so many things that now you're not allowed to lead the customer in a separate direction, which we don't do. But something happened and they took down one of our sites, a couple listings of our Google My Business pages with 500 plus reviews. And my marketing team specifically told me to ask you this. We've got, literally, we've got signage on the building we've got tools we've got inventory we've got bills utility bills we've been there for three years and then someone in india or somewhere around the world just says not a good listing when this is about as more a geo it's geo tagging you as you go when you're on a google hangout and showing them you're showing your face you're showing this you're showing them the vehicleout and showing them. You're showing your face, you're showing this, you're showing them the vehicle,

you're showing them starting the car, the wrapped vehicle, the license plate, the sort of, I mean, our business cards. What could it possibly be when I've got people around me at an apartment saying they're GMBs that we can't get verified? So yeah, just remember that Google tracks everything you do, right?

So when you are using your Google account for ads, when you're using it to submit edits on Google Maps, when you're using it for Google My Business, all those things are connected to the same account. So you could do something misleading on the Google ads. And for example, and get your account suspended. You can do lots of things, break lots of policies and rules across Google that will cause them to basically label you as a spammer. So I've seen it on the map side. I've seen people have that happen because they're editing business listings and maybe the edits they're submitting look malicious in nature, which I'm sure you're probably familiar with.

It happens a lot in the garage door industry and the locksmith industry. People try and get their competitors' listings removed by submitting edits on them. So all of those things contribute to how Google measures you and if they trust you. So it's just really important to keep their policies in mind and just know that breaking one of them could technically influence your entire account. See, but the hard part is Google is collecting data. I mean, I've studied the algorithms when Panda and Penguin and all this crap came out,

like what, 10 years ago now and mobile getter and everything. And what they're doing is collecting data, but, and everybody's asking about it is the spammy. You can put up a million of them and sometimes they rank number one. Why does Google allow that to happen? And when are they going to get rid of it? Because you know, they know that these aren't real business. put up a million of them, and sometimes they rank number one, why does Google allow that to happen?

And when are they going to get rid of it? Because you know they know that these aren't real businesses. Why do they allow apartments or residential homes to compete with people that are real businesses? Yeah. So lead gen, which is what I call it, but that's kind of what you're referring to is really common in your space. So marketing companies will basically find loopholes and ways to get listings set up to sell the leads to real businesses. So marketing companies will basically find loopholes and ways to get listings set up to sell the leads to real businesses. So they'll name themselves ABC, Garage Doors, Scottsdale, and then start ranking for Garage Doors, Scottsdale because it's in their business name. So I think there's 2 problems Google needs to solve. One, they're never ahead of the spammers. They're usually 3 steps behind. So by the time Google's figured out the strategy that these companies are using to get these

listings verified, they've already found a new strategy. So that's been the case for the last decade that I've been monitoring that. The other problem is that the business name has way too much of a weight in where you rank. So if they don't fix that, people are going to continue to get these brand new listings to rank and they're going to continue to want to sell them because there was an article in the Wall Street Journal. It was last two years ago. They talked about it and they interviewed this guy that made like thirty four hundred dollars a day creating fake listings on Google Maps. And it's just kind of crazy when you think about the opportunity that the marketing companies have. So if they can make money, they're going to continue to do it.

Okay. So let's go through a couple of things here. I got a lot of insight that I want to ask you. Number one, are you familiar with Mattress Firm? Sounds familiar, but not super familiar. Mattress Firm is just, it's a mattress store that they actually created a way just to literally have cameras that people could go in and they could talk to you. They could see everything going on and they could lock people out and they got people

not far away. But, you know, these mattress firms, they'll have 20 of them, small locations, not a ton of mattresses. And it's like literally they're a physical location there. Now, there's two ways to do a business. Either you come into my shop because I do have a showroom or we're a service company. The problem is I have 70 trucks in Phoenix. I could out service anybody.

Now, Google won't give me the benefit of that. So what ends up happening in an area like Phoenix, literally I can be an hour and a half away. So there's people that set up multiple showrooms, which I think is fine. If you have the customers show up to the showrooms, real locations, and it's like a movie theater. If you come into my showroom or my art gallery or whatever, I think that's fine. I want to know your perspective because people have real Google My Business pages, and I do think that a lot of them should exist. Other people create a bunch of them, and now you can't do the old stuff with the storage units. You know, I guess in some industries, but garage doors and what we're using with advanced verification and stuff, they don't do the, what are those fake offices with the… Virtual offices?

The virtual offices and stuff. But I still wonder all the time, a lot of people are commenting and saying, number one, it is Black Hat to form a bunch of fake GMBs. I mean, I don't know that someone asked the question, is it Black Hat? But they have multiple per market. I don't think, as long as you got real people going in there, one of the things Google wants is a real setup with real employees that are really alive in there. And they want to make sure it's real. So what would you say about multiple GMBs? And how is that fair to a company that really trains and has 30 vehicles with all W2 employees?

So it's tough. They don't really have a good solution for it. So we've always said, Google, my business, has kind of screwed over service area businesses. It was never designed for service area businesses. So they kind of have tried to figure it out and done a really poor job of it. Franchises are one way that kind of gets around it. You see lots of franchises where they've got individual franchises kind of spread out and they're always allowed their own listings because it's clear that you can't go to franchise A and get service if you hired franchise B. So they kind of have that clear distinction. So I know Google's goal is to

really not have one company monopolize the search results. But if you have separate staff, technically you're allowed a separate listing. But it's kind of hard because it's like, how do you prove that? So I'd say if you go that route or you're trying to do like the whole franchise thing just making sure that like the pages on your site are really clear like this is the manager of this location and here's the employees and this is specifically what this location service is and this is our phone number and like trying to make it as unique as possible but it's hard to tell the difference between a legitimate one and one where it's just the same company creating you know 15 listings using their employees home addresses well there's a difference there, I think, between the home addresses and also

saying, look, I'll use Phoenix because I live in Phoenix. It's an hour and a half from the east to the west. If you go to all the way out, Sun City West, all the way to an area like Queen Creek, and you'd want an area in each of those areas that you have a place where they could come sit down for the meetings grab inventory not drive an hour and a half away but really theoretically it's strategically you want to get shown on the map too that we we service your area i mean i'm not gonna lie i'll just say it like people want to get found on google i mean every business does yesterday i went atv and with my niece and nephews. They're in town from Milwaukee. And the guy had a listing in a whole other area for a mailing address because he's way out in the national park.

And he goes, if this was my listing, I wouldn't even show up. And so we went to the wrong spot. And I'm like, I'm not mad at you. I'm like, I'm just mad that we didn't go to the right address. I'm not even mad about that. But I feel his pain. And it's not really, Google's supposed to be the best, the best. And I'm going through this going, okay, LSA ads. Let's really talk about LSA. They don't give a crap about GMB. They're letting it happen. LSA, they care a lot more. And now I'm starting to realize the faster you answer the

phone, the faster you can get out there. Google's really getting into, and they've always been, but now they're really getting into the data. How quick can you get out there google's really getting into and they've always been but now they're really getting into the data how quick can you get out there are you booking the job or not what's the answering service like they can tell the tone of your voice when you answer they're pulling in this data they can literally tell more than any other company i think pretty much alive so what i think is going to happen and i want to hear your your theory joy is i think what's going to happen. And I want to hear your, your theory joy is I think what's going to happen is very, very in the future here, the next year or two,

they're going to get away from GMBs and they're going to make very real locations. They got vehicles that are already driving themselves, verifying that stuff really exists. And I think what they're going to do is give the best possible outcome to the person calling. And just because they're not necessarily the closest company, and they're the best trained, the best reviewed, the fastest answering, the best empathy in their voice, that they're going to get the job. And I think it's going to be just like Panda and Penguin

came out. It's going to be sudden, and it's going to throw the whole industry on its butt by not doing the right thing today. And I want to hear, is there a possibility for that or am I way off? I mean, there's definitely possibilities for them to change about how to doing that, but I would say they're probably already doing that because technically on the organic side, click-through rate is a huge ranking factor. So, you know, doing whatever you can to entice people to click on you or like choose you, right? So you do that by having the best reviews and having good reviews and things like that. Like those all contribute to your click-through rate and click-through rate is definitely a ranking factor.

Like there's no question, both in the local results and the organic results. So they're already kind of trying to do that. And it's the same thing with local service ads. Like you said, the rate that you respond to your calls is a factor in how often your ads show. So what is your take on Yext? You know, before when I used to do my citation sites myself,

I'd go through and add as many pictures. They'd be geotech. I'd add a video. I'd add a description with just enough keywords that I wasn't keyword stuffing. I mean, this is back 10 years ago. And Yext was like, stay away from Yext because once you're on it, you can't get out, but you had to pay them. But it seems like Google and Yext have partnered up in some ways.

What are your thoughts? Google doesn't partner with Yext, to my knowledge. I don't think there's any relationship there. But Yext definitely has a partnership with Yahoo. So if you care about getting more traffic from Yahoo, Yext would be a good option. And that might sound funny, but there is a small amount of traffic that still comes from Yahoo. It's just nothing more similar to Yelp or another directory. I usually suggest to our clients that they get Yext if they have a high ticket sale. So if their average sale is really high and it's worthwhile to pay an annual fee of $600,

then Yext is a good idea. But if you're like a locksmith, maybe not. Because honestly, at the end of the day, it's not a huge differentiating factor. It just makes it easier to control your information online. But you could technically do it yourself manually for a one-time cost instead of $600 a year. So you're familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk? Yes. So Gary Vee was in town three days ago and I got invited.

There was about 20 of us. And he goes, you guys want me to really scare you guys? It was all huge home service companies. And he goes, what if I told you that Google is going to start buying home service companies and distributing it to the companies they own? He goes, they're going to buy the best ones, but they're going to lean on their own. He goes, does that scare you guys? And I'm curious to hear, he said that he goes, I don't know for sure, but he goes, I know for a fact they have to continue to grow. They have to continue to evolve. And this is one of the ways they plan

on doing it. They buy companies. So what are your thoughts on that? I mean, they're mostly buying technology companies from what I understand. So that would be a stretch, but I mean, anything's possible. I'd say they'd be more likely to try and control the lead space before actually controlling the delivery of a service. But we saw this in the insurance vertical. Google, a few years ago, tried to launch their own lead thing. So at the very top of the search results, it was like a quote engine. And it freaked out people in that industry because it's super visible. First thing you see, and it was a limited testing thing. So you couldn't even get in if you were a local insurance agent.

So I remember that being like really huge, but then it got, it didn't work. I think a bunch of the major insurance companies got together and decided we're going to not participate. And then by them not having us, hopefully this won't work. And I don't know if that was the reason why it didn't work or not,

but it ultimately did fail and they ended up getting rid of it. So they don't succeed at everything that they try to do, but I definitely think they're going to obviously try to make more money in whatever way they can. It's kind of scary because they got a lot of data and we've all kind of watched our own documentaries on what's going on and how they control things and control elections and could actually build a lot of stuff. I mean, just think about pixeling and retargeting at this point. It's like, and the weird thing is,

how many times have you said something with your phone just sitting there and then the ads pop up? It's terrifying. My husband was mattress shopping and I started seeing mattress ads on Facebook. And I'm like, I'm not even searching about mattresses. He is just on the same network.

Really creepy. Yeah, it's pretty scary, actually. I don't know what's going to happen, but you guys are experts. I know you A-B test. Can you give me some good, solid... Everybody wants to know. The number one thing when I say start a business is you develop a brand, you get a good logo, you get a good tagline, you get your mission, vision, core values, you determine your org chart, you come up with some manuals. But then I say, get a good logo. You get a good tagline. You get your mission, vision, core values. You determine your org chart. You come up with some manuals. But then I say, get a small location. Deck it out.

Put your logo on it. Have a real office to do work in. And get your Google site on. You can't buy time back from Google. Get that thing registered. Get a website built. Make sure it's clean. Make sure it's got a good site map.

Make sure you got great content. Make sure there's good structure. And then getting links and links are just pr and then you know what i did is i went to my bank i went every to every company i knew i said i want to write an article on how much i love you and all i ask is just just throw my link in the bottom and they're like fine so it was a real easy way to do it but But you started GMB, you got your website. What do you do to, because there's so many freaking bad companies out there. Everybody has someone else fulfilling it in China

or Japan or Russia or Philippines or wherever it might be. They got their VAs doing it. How do you get real help? And what kind of things do you do if you're a lone survivor trying to figure this stuff out? Yeah, it's hard.

I mean, we have a lot of resources on our blog. So sterlingsky.ca, there's tons of stuff there you can read. We try to only publish things that are strategy-related. So here's how to do this, or this works, or this doesn't work. But it's definitely tough to keep up with because there's a lot of ongoing things. But I would say if you had to invest time in anything, keeping up with just different features that show up on Google. So look to see what features your competitors have that you don't have that might entice people to click on them instead of

you. So things like photos, reviews, etc. We do a lot of basically upkeeping and actually consolidating content for our clients. So we'll often get businesses that come to us that had an SEO company that was like, you need to blog weekly. So their site now has 1000 blog posts that nobody reads, gets zero traffic, and is doing nothing for them. And that's a horrible strategy. So if you're doing that, look to see if your articles are getting any traffic. And if they're not, get rid of them, consolidate them into a page that is getting traffic. We have seen insane improvements from doing that across multiple industries. And then link building, like you said, there's some ways that you can do link building yourself

that are not easy, but anybody can do. Like what you said about giving a review or a testimonial. That's huge. Same deal would be like writing for a related company. So if there's companies that you refer people to or are somewhat related to your industry, seeing if you can just write an article for them to put on their site. We had an insurance agent and a lawyer do that.

We had a lawyer write an article for an insurance agent talking about what happens if you get into an accident and you don't have insurance on the legal side. So stuff like that is another way that you can get links from business owners. If you have friends that are business owners, obviously hit them up first. But without links, it's going to be hard to expand where you rank. So you're going to be really limited to your neighborhood. If you want to rank further and further away, that's where links really come in handy.

Yeah. I think there's really 3 main things that really SEO evolves around. That's links, content, and the structure. I mean, with those three things done correctly, you could dominate. I feel bad for small companies that just, they might not even have the know-how. I read a good book and I had Marcus Sheridan. I don't know if you're familiar with Marcus Sheridan. Have you ever heard of They Ask, You Answer? He is the best ranking website I've seen in the home service space, but he just puts out content after content, after content,

after content. And he says, if they're asking prices, what Google does is success leaves clues is Google has the, they'll have all these questions that answer your questions a lot of the time. So if you write articles on the questions that pop up, like how much is a garage door,

you'll find 10 more questions. And if you've articles on the questions that pop up, like how much is a garage door, you'll find 10 more questions. And if you've got a really, really strong site and you put beautiful pictures, really interesting content and use maybe like a site, uh, it's not like in writing with a MLA format or whatever, but like a bibliography that goes to outbound links that you're bringing in other data in. What is your take on that? I mean, I'm not a big fan of just letting people write for me and just give them a backlink. But if I'm pulling things in, it's a great piece of content. Google does really like that, don't they? Yeah. It's always good to... First of all,

you want to quote your sources, right? But if you're quoting authoritative sources and stuff, that's only going to help you. We do find normally that longer form content ranks better. So if you've got one topic, how much does a garage door cost? Instead of having pages for every single variation of that, making it into sections on the same page, I'm currently obsessed with jump links. So we do that where we add a table of contents at the top where you can click and it makes you scroll down the page and they actually show up differently in the search results

too, which is cool. I love that. Jump links. They're awesome. Jump links. So are you familiar with HubSpot? Yep. So I love HubSpot. What's your take on that? Honestly, I've never used their platform. We looked into using them like years ago at the agency I used to work for, but I've heard great things about them. So we have clients that use them, but we don't. about garage doors. My goal is that you're the most informed before you make this decision. And an amazing investment, by the way, Joy, you'll probably get 102% return on investment. The garage door is the smile of your home, which I just got my trademark. The garage is a smile of your home. But my goal would be is if you take the time, I'm going to send you a buyer's guide and it's going to go through everything about installation windows, wood versus non-wood, aluminum versus steel. It's a quick read and it'll really answer

all your questions. Now, when I send this to you, I'm going to get confirmation from you that you'll say, yes, Tommy, I'll take the time to read it before our appointment. The beautiful thing is HubSpot lets me know with a UTM tracking code, exactly what you clicked on, where you spent your time. And so when I go out there, if I've got a guy with a bunch of wood overlay samples, I want to send that guy, right? Because he's the wood guy. So it's kind of a big advantage. Plus, Margaret Sheridan explains that the conversion rate

goes up to 82% that you're going to buy from us because we gave you the education if you spend more than 10 minutes on the page. So what I love about HubSpot is that it tells me where people went and I can actually track it from the UTM code. I think it's kind of the ultimate advantage. And I think it's things like HubSpot that really allow us to know what's working on our website, like heat maps, allowing people to scroll. And you do a lot of these tests, right? What information can you give us on just things that you see obviously the code at

the top is a big no-no i love the idea of jump links yeah jump links are huge so i'm the most recent study i just did was on google posts so i'm actually presenting on it tomorrow at our local u event uh we have doing a virtual event tomorrow and we did a study on google posts where we like kind of manually analyzed over over 1000 listings for various industries and clients of ours. And how we determined what worked and what doesn't was literally that. Tracking via UTM codes. So seeing like, did the person click there? Did they go to your website? Did they then convert on your website? And then what types of posts converted better? I'm guessing a lot of people listening are probably coming tomorrow. So I guess I can spoil a bit of it. But we found that offer posts were definitely the type of posts that got the

most activity, hands down, across the other post types. So if you're doing Google posts, make sure you take advantage of offer posts. People like to have incentives. And anything you can throw at them is a special.'t even have to be like a massive discount. It's a good thing to do. So those are definitely the types that got the most activity. Spoiler alert to posts do not impact ranking. So if you're doing posts expecting it's going to impact where you're going to rank on Google, it has no impact. So it's another piece from my study. When you're posting on Google My Business, so there's, you could add services and I actually add, if you were to look at my GMBs, we added a lot of products too. The garage doors, the openers, everything. This is a three-in-one that you can kind of go through,

but adding products, responding to reviews, and just posting normal things about garage doors in the summer, getting ready for summer. How do those affect it? And what are those going to do for me? So posts are a good thing, a good way to get up specials and coupons and things, right? So use posts as a way to get a message out. People sometimes use them for like blog articles and those types get almost no activity. So if you're like, here's all this information you can learn about garage doors, like people aren't going to click on that or read it or care. But if you're like, here's a coupon where you can save 10% off this service, that's something that people would care about. So use posts as a promotional thing. Services and products are really the same thing.

Google calls them different things, but you can use them both if you just do services. If you're like, I don't have products that I offer. I'm a locksmith. You can still use the product section to highlight the services you offer. It just shows up in a separate section on Google. So products are really visible on computers, on desktop. So if you go and you search your business name, products are really visual in what we call the knowledge panel. So that big blurb about your business. Services, on the other hand, are visible on desktop and they have their own tab on mobile. Products don't have a tab at all on mobile. They're pretty much invisible on mobile.

So like one's really mobile and one's kind of desktop. I'd say fill them both out, but neither of them impact where you rank. So only if, what if I put Chamberlain 8550 as a product, and then I put who works on an 8550 into the search engine and my, I would come up as a local person before Chamberlain would come up, right? It shouldn't impact where you rank at all. That's more your website content. Yeah, it wouldn't impact that. So products and services both don't influence where you rank. That being said, if you already rank because of content on your website, sometimes there's this little thing that we call justifications where it's like it pulls a little

blurb from your services section saying like this business offers this, but that's not the reason why you rank. So that's where a lot of people get confused. Ranking is really based on content on your site and how your internal linking is done. And if Google can figure out what locations associated with what product, that's really on-site SEO. GMB has very little to do with ranking. Okay. So the last two years, more millennials bought houses than baby boomers. And I can tell you that the decision-making is changing. We've got a thing called schedule engine that we use that actually goes right directly into our capacity planning. So we know they can just simply, you know, Joy wants a job tomorrow. She simply clicks on this link, finds the time that works

for her, books it. It's done. We're coming out there. There's no words that need to be exchanged. How important do you think that's going to play? And what do you think it's going to do with Google as far as, is that a good or bad thing? I think it's a great thing, but Google might say, how do I know the actions? Because it didn't happen within my platform. They lose them outside of there, right? I mean, Google wants to keep people on Google, but at the end of the day, they're not going to penalize you for having a good site. So I don't think there's any risk there.

Google's kind of own solution to that would be their messaging feature, right? So they really are trying to push that to business owners to activate the Google My Business messaging feature. And I would say like before, like last year, it was kind of crappy because you had to have the GMB app on your phone and you could only respond to messages through there. But they're starting to bring it back to the GMB dashboard now.

So you can access it through the Google My Business dashboard on your computer. So it has a little bit more of a draw now. But that feature, although it's great, has its own set of challenges. So I don't know if you're a fan of it or if you have it activated on your listings but we we've definitely seen it's got its pros and cons we've tried so many different things the mail just started back up again for verification i i just don't understand that like so last month i we scheduled darn near 11 000 clients and when a gmb goes down there's stupid things that go on and i I'm like, you can't sue Google. That doesn't work.

I just am a little bit nervous. What I'm trying to do right now, and I got to tell you, Google's been good to me, but what I'm trying to do is build systems that I can control. I can control my podcast. I can also control referrals, and I can create the biggest referral network that's ever happened in a home service, which I'm doing.

I don't control social media, really. Facebook does, but there's certain platforms that allow me to control it more. So, I mean, in your take in things is I tell people Google is God. I do. When they say home services. And Gary disagrees because it's interesting. The conversation said, billboards, TV, radio. And he goes, guys, you're wasting your money. And they said, no, no, no,

we make a lot of money. He goes, yeah, but you got to pay the toll booth every time. And they go, what do you mean toll booth? They go, TV, radio, billboards, you're paying Google every time because you're paying the toll booth to Google. Where do you think they're going when they remember your name? They're going to Google, then you're paying for it. And if you're paying the toll booth to google where do you think they're going when they remember your name they're going to google then you're paying for it and if you're lucky maybe you'll click a gmb or an organic but most of the time you're not you want to rank for your own keywords you want to pay for your own keywords but although it's way cheaper but he said if i were you guys i would build 400 videos pay for each one of them find out which one does best and pull people in i think the biggest thing, he said, social media could act as a

billboard for branding, but ultimately Google's what I go to if I can't get in my house or I can't get out of the garage or I got a leaky faucet. What is your take on the evolution of what's going on with leads and home service? Yeah. I mean, that's, it's, it's accurate. I'd say email lists are a thing that I would invest in that you own, right? So we've done that ourselves. Growing your own email list is huge because you do own that unlike your Facebook followers or your Twitter followers.

So that's another huge thing. And you can use that email list to target your ads better, right? So you can kind of mix that a bit. But you're right. Everybody Googles everything. So I mean, as much as I want to say, like diversify and put some of your money

towards maybe Yelp ads or some other place, there isn't quite anything out there that will deliver the traffic or volume that Google does. So it's kind of hard to compete with. All right. I'm going to pop up a question. This one is interesting. What's a good price for an SEO service? I was going to go with a $200 service, but they don't have what you and your guests know. I don't think I could buy a milkshake for 200 bucks these days. I know there's companies all the time for $200. I think what they do is they say, we'll get you to the first page. They'll pick the search term and they'll get something on the bottom of the first page, which means nothing.

That's one search terms out of a thousand you should be ranking for. So a thousand times 200 is 200 000 is what it would cost if you wanted all those terms what's your take on it anything under a thousand i'd be super super skeptical of a thousand a month just to be clarified but i mean you're probably getting someone outsourced overseas possibly paying for nothing right there's a lot of that uh where they set you up with like Yext and charge you as if they're doing something monthly. So there's just a lot of, unfortunately, really bad SEO companies, really cheap SEO companies out there. So it's like used car dealers. I don't know. There's

more bad than good. I would say I'll be transparent. Our minimum is $2,500 a month. I don't think we can get results for less than that. So that's our minimum when we work with businesses. So I think in order to get an ROI, than that. So that's our minimum when we work with businesses. So I think in order to get an ROI, if you want someone that knows what they're doing and someone that's got lots of experience, you have to pay for that. But there should be no issue getting an ROI. You get what you pay for.

You know, what's crazy is I met Matt before you. And I think we have a conflict of interest. You told me at some point, which I don't know, but it is what it is. But I always ask Matt, I said, I don't want to know the minimum. I want to know the maximum. And I'm always pushing him to spend more money. And he goes, dude, more. And he's like, all right, I'll go back and look. And it's not in the, it's in the tens and tens of thousands a month. And I have no problem with it. We're putting out of expert content. They're interviewing our people or we're getting video. We're doing the best of the best.

And I think, you know, I was in Matt Diggity. He puts out a convention, you know, Matt Diggity. I totally know where he is, but I am blanking on where he's from as well. But it's amazing. But a lot of these people are spammers. I love the real deal. And what I love about what Google shows us is they show us their algorithm. If you study who's on top with all the tools we have,

with Moz and all these other things, you could almost see what Google's thinking about why they ranked this page. And if you look at, for example, Garage Door Springs, Home Depot ranks number one, but they don't have any links built into that inner page it's their domain has so much authority so what the nice thing is if you build links to that page it could outrank the authority of the whole website because it it's interesting stuff but i'll tell you what this stuff bores the hell out of a lot of home

service business owners but it shouldn't this should be fascinating this should be like the thing that keeps you up at night. I think one of the ultimate advantages is I love, I eat, breathe and live this every day. And I'm going, what can we do to make sure that Google knows that we're the best company? And that's why we have brand new trucks because we don't break down anything we could do to separate ourselves. Apples to apples, we sell oranges. And I think that it's very very interesting and very important i know that what google's learning how to do right now along with anything going to turn on right now alexa and um siri and everything they're learning how to answer questions so i think i don't think we're very far joy for being able to tell one of these things

around here look at they're everywhere i mean i got them they're just i don't think we're there very far where we'll just tell them i want the best company to come out between two and four tomorrow to fix this i mean i would say that's probably far away but i i think it depends on the industry right so we see some variants across the board on this. Like locksmiths, you're right. People don't really research their locksmith like crazy, but like hiring a lawyer, people do. So it depends on, I think, the industry and how much they're spending and how much research they want to do on a company. I wouldn't just call a lawyer based off of Google telling me they're the best lawyer. I'd want to check out some things myself. But we're definitely seeing a shift on that

in some industries where it seems like people are just quickly looking for something, especially if it's an emergency service. That's where people often aren't, you know, don't have time to research. Yeah, you know, I work a lot with Amazon on some stuff and Amazon works with LiftMaster and there's a thing called MyQ on yourself

when you could open up your garage door. Well, now it works with Amazon Key on yourself when you could open up your garage door well now it works with amazon key so now amazon could open up your garage for one-time use to leave a prime package right and this is happening now in portland and la now they've got the amazon freezer that they're leaving frozen goods directly in your garage soon they're going to have a huge refrigerator with a little thing on the pad that you just type in and say, beer, dog treats. They're going to know when you're running low on something.

It's all going to be delivered right in your garage. I mean, look, the growth right now is exponential. The problem is human beings can't handle the growth of technology. At this point, the curve is too far for even the latest in technology to move to. So when you said no, I believe you because we're not ready for that. But as a technology, yes, I think we're almost there.

Yeah. Their voice search also sucks. Honestly, as someone that has a million Google Homes in my house, I feel like people give it way too much credit because it gets a lot of my queries wrong. So I think they need to improve that quite a bit as well. So I got a question from Raquel Wilkinson. What questions can you ask an SEO marketer or a specialist to be able to tell that they know what they're doing? I mean, ask them for examples of other clients they've worked on. Ask them where they've spoken, where they've written. Those are usually big things. Are they on any of the top seo lists stuff like that

but usually like asking for referrals is like kind of the easy thing you can ask any company for that so i got a new gmb i'm a brand new guy i don't have a lot of business i've got my own theory on this are you familiar with mlm multi-level, yes, yes. What do they tell you at MLM? They tell you friends and family, right? So I'm a big fan of doing the real work on a garage, on a chimney, on a lock, and really helping everybody out that you know, the neighbors, the friends, the family. Saying, hey, Joy, do me a favor. Listen, we're friends.

If I do a great job for you, I want you to let me know on Google, Nextdoor, Yelp, Kudzu, Merchant Circle, Facebook, we can keep going on and on. But I feel like you got to get going somewhere. You might as well get the practice on people you know. But that's just a quick little tip that I give out is I don't want you to do fake reviews. I don't want you to pay for them. Google knows. It's coming from Cambodia. Okay. And not to mention when you see reviews from the same person that are reviewing five roster companies in the same week i mean it's like so i i have a whole team that's dedicated in my cities if something ranks we'll drive by there we'll take it down if it's not a real listing right that's the we're cleaning up i think we're cleaning up the industry

and i advise all of you guys that if you see something that's at an apartment, there's ways to report that it's not real. The problem is too, is they know everything you're doing. And if you're, you, you want to make sure that you're dead accurate on this stuff. You don't want to report real listings, but what is your take? Because what can we do to spike ourselves? Geotag, I know there's a lot of easy little things to do, but kind of something that somebody might not know. Yeah. I don't know. Geotagging doesn't work, just so you know. So that's something that I would, if you're doing or spending time in, I would knock that off your list. Reporting competitors or lead gen listings. I agree. You want to make sure a thousand percent that you understand Google's guidelines and you're not reporting a listing that is actually real. And the safer way to do it is not to go

and do a suggested edit. It's to send it through the redressal form. That way you're not actually kind of responsible for the edit yourself. Because sometimes you can edit a listing that publishes. And if you're wrong, that's kind of bad. Sending it through the redressal form, you're not actually publishing anything. You're just sending information to Google. So I would submit through the business redressal complaint form. That's what it's called. If there's a listing that violates Google's guidelines. But I feel like what people have to miss is they don't even see these listings because one, they're searching the same keyword over and over again, and they're not searching all the variations.

So for example, for my lawn care client, we first started talking, he's like, all he cares about is lawn care. But when we're searching and looking to see what's actually getting traffic, we've got lawn service, lawn maintenance, lawn repair, weed removal, weed repair, all these different variations that he wasn't even looking at. And every single one of those variations lists a different set of businesses. So I've got a different set of competitors to look at and make sure that they're all legit. So searching more keyword variations and then searching for more locations. So if you move a couple miles away or even less than that, you're going to get a different set of business listings. So often spam lives in those areas. Maybe you don't see it from your office,

but the moment you move 1000 feet away, it might show up. Maybe not that close, a little further. So there's tools to do that like bright local has a tool you can do that you can search for different zip codes we use places scout so it's places scout does it on a grid so you can say like here's my office location i want to see ranking within 20 miles give me a 10 by 10 grid that's what we usually use i use local biking very similar yeah so i'm going to teach my guys i'd like to teach my guys how to report false listings when they're doing that. Just be careful. That's all I got to say with reporting. You are technically submitting information to Google about competitors.

You just want to make sure that you're accurate with that stuff. Well, the thing is, if it's in the middle of an apartment, is that really fair? Your apartment building is your business for a garage door company? Is that something that we... that's allowed? If it's the only listing that you have, there's nothing wrong with it. So there's lots of home-based businesses, right? Like Bob, the plumber might work from his home. That's totally fine. You're supposed to have your address hidden technically speaking, but that's not the same type of violation as like a lead gem listing. Well, technically I think advanced verification for pay-per-click is way different than GMB. So I don't want to get them confused and scare people here.

Let me ask you a question. So you're awesome at what you do. Everybody knows that. Someone wants to reach out to you. There's two people here. There's you and then there's the company. How do we get a hold of each? Yeah. So sterlingsling sky.ca the contact forms don't go directly to me they go to our vp um but like he and i talk so i can see those if you need something from me specifically put my name on that i'm all huge on twitter so anything on twitter is for me i don't have anybody tweet for me so at joanne hawkins on twitter the social platform where i'm the most active like i'm on there all the time. Okay. And then I was just, is there a few books that you might recommend? It doesn't need to be about business, but I always ask everybody on the podcast, readers are leaders. You're a part

of a big company that's doing amazing things. So interested in what you're reading and how it's impacted you. So to be honest, like there's not a lot of books in my space, in local SEO. There's very few. And I want to say, even if they were written, they would get outdated so fast. That's probably why nobody does it. In the general SEO community,

the one that I probably found the most fascinating was the one that was written by Rand Fishkin, who started Moz. And I think it's called Lost and Founder. But it was really interesting to hear someone who started a technology company and how he did it and stuff and then sold it. It was, it was sort of not sold it, but he kind of moved out of it. That one's probably the one that's, I think the most interesting book I've read by someone who's in SEO.

Okay. Is there anything else to just read? Maybe not the Bible, but yeah. Um, no, you know what? Weirdly, I'm not was just saying like yeah um no you know what weirdly i'm not a huge reader other than like you know personal books that have nothing to do with work yeah okay so i'll wrap it up here i uh i'll tell you i i just people were like calling me and they were like dude you know a lot and i i don't know how much more credit i could give you. But if you guys are out there, you're looking for a great company of really somebody that gets the work done and they care and they're A-B testing and they're working on getting Google going, you need to reach out to Joy because she'll hook you up. And then the last thing I say is, Joy, I want to give you a few minutes to just maybe go do this now or a little bit. Maybe we didn't hit something on the podcast or just maybe some final thoughts for the listeners.

I'll let you kind of take the floor. Sure. Yeah. So if you're looking to learn more about this stuff, I would check out the local search forum. So full disclosure, we own that forum, but it's 100% free. There is a paid option, but like the main forum is free.

You can ask whatever questions you want. You want somebody to look at your listings, give you advice, whatever, post there. We have a Facebook group called the Google My Business Insiders. It's another place. Our newsletter is also free. We send it out weekly.

So that's at sterlingsky.ca slash newsletter. And our newsletter, I actually put that together myself. I'm obsessive about it. But it's all articles and things that are things that either we've written or are new as of that week. And then also LocalU is our conference. So we put on conferences 3 times a year, all about local SEO. We have one tomorrow, but I have sales I think are going to close in a few hours. But those are great if you want to learn more.

But I'd say that they're for people that have a basic understanding of SEO. So if you've never even heard of Google My Business, you might be a bit lost. You know, like I said earlier, I went to your sales rep. Then I went to another sales rep. Then I text you. I have a hard time taking no for an answer. But you know what? I understand. One of the things I worked out with Matt is he can't take on any garage door competitors at all because, you know, we're in 15 states going to be in 22 by the end of the year. And there's a conflict. Certain times there is conflict. But Joy, I really, really, really, really, truly appreciate you coming on. I'm sure we're 100 or 200 people because the listeners are, they listen to this

podcast and a lot of them go take action. And I'm hoping they take action with you because the real people that know Google that are testing and know it are few and far between. So I truly appreciate you coming on and have a wonderful week. Yes. Thank you for the kind words. All right. Take it easy. Thank you guys. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast from the bottom of my heart means a lot to me. And I hope you're getting as much as I am out of this podcast.

Our goal is to enrich your lives and enrich your businesses and your internal customers, which is your staff. And if you get a chance, please, please, please subscribe. You're going to find out all the new podcasts. You're going to be able to ask me questions to ask the next guest coming on. And do me a quick favor, leave a quick review. It really helps us out when you like the podcast and you leave a review, make it four or five sentences, tell us how we're doing. And I just wanted to mention real quick, we started a membership. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. You get a ton of inside look at what we're

going to do to become a billion dollar company. And we're telling everybody our secrets basically. And people say, why do you give your secrets away all the time? And I'm like, the hardest part about giving away my secrets is actually trying to get people to do them. So we also create a lot of accountability within this program. So check it out. It's homeservicemillionaire.com forward slash club. It's cheap. It's a monthly payment. I'm not making any money on it to be completely frank with you guys, but I think it will enrich your lives even further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.