The Home Service Expert Podcast - Taking a Proactive Approach to SEO to Generate More Qualified Leads

Episode Date: June 14, 2019

Bradley Benner is an expert on online lead generation, business scaling, and brand building. He is a contractor, publicist, PR marketing and lead generation specialist for Contractor Media, and the co-founder of Semantic Mastery. He also owns a marketing company called Big Bamboo, and hosts weekly digital marketing Q&A sessions called Hump Day Hangouts.   In this episode, we talked about SEO, Online Lead Generation, Reputation Marketing...

there's a difference between management and marketing, right? So reputation management is making sure that your reputation stays good and that you're replying and responding to people that are reviewing you, whether it's good or bad, which is absolutely critical. You want to make sure that you're managing your reputation online so that nothing negative comes up. And if it does, it gets buried very quickly, all that kind of stuff. But reputation marketing, I think that's more of a proactive approach,

which is, I think reputation marketing has to go hand in hand with SEO now. This is the Home Service Expert podcast with Tommy Mello. Let's talk about bringing in some more money for your home service business. 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. Today, I have a guest that's an expert

in search engine optimization. His name is Bradley Benner. He does online lead generation. He's known co-founder of Semantic Mastery, which we're going to be talking a lot about today from 2013 till now. He also owns a marketing company called Big Bamboo. He does online lead generation specialist, BP marketing and consulting from 2011 to 2012. And he's also done a lot of contracting work. So he's got a lot in common with us. He's a co-founder, like I said, of the SEO training site, Semantic Mastery. And he hosts weekly digital marketing Q&A sessions called Hump Day Hangouts. Bradley, I'm excited to have you on, man. That's quite an introduction, Tommy. Thank you for having me. Yeah, you know, it's pretty cool. Tell us a little bit about where you've been and what got you into SEO and just about your home service trade background. Yeah, you know, it's pretty cool. Tell us a little bit about where you've been and what got you into SEO and just about your home service trade background. Yeah, it's kind of a funny story. I started off, you know, in high school, I was in electrical

apprenticeship program. And so as soon as I got out of high school, I got my certification or my journeyman's card as an electrician and started doing residential electrical work for a few years and in commercial and industrial work. You know, I did that for several years. I really enjoyed the electrical trade. I enjoyed working with tools and working with my hands and building things. But I wasn't making as much money as I wanted to as just a tradesman. So I ended up joining the phone company and worked as a communications, you know, basically a lineman or a cable maintenance technician. So I was still doing electrical work, but more in the communications field. So low voltage stuff.

And then around 2000, I think it was three, I got the opportunity to get into real estate, right? To start flipping houses. And the We Buy Houses ads that you see, I know, Tommy, we were just talking about it. So you're real familiar. I got introduced to that quick turn real estate business. And I saw the opportunity to make some money. And if anybody remembers that those years, 2003 to 2007, that timeframe, if you touched real estate, you made money, period. So I ended up getting involved in that and did really well really quickly. I was young too. I was only 23 when I got into doing flipping houses And I started off wholesaling houses and then got into doing some full-on rehabs because of my construction background. But long story short, in 2007, when the bottom of the real estate market fell out,

I ended up pretty much going bankrupt because I had several rehab projects that the after-repaired value of the project fell below what I had actually paid for the properties, and I still had thousands or tens of thousands of dollars of construction work to do. So that went belly up. But that's really where I started learning marketing, to be honest with you, was in trying to find houses, motivated sellers, people that wanted to get rid of their houses so that I could buy them for less than market value. I didn't make a profit from them. That's where I really started to learn marketing. But that was

much more traditional type marketing. At the time, I was doing a lot of direct mail, postcards. I was doing bandit signs on the side of the road, like the We Buy Houses signs. That's what I was just talking about. Flyer inserts in newspapers, all that kind of stuff. And it worked well because... But it was kind of like just a numbers game. You just spent a lot of money on marketing, on that traditional marketing, and you would get some leads that would come in and obviously some would convert. So after that business ended up going belly up, I went back into electrical trade for a few years and I opened up my own contracting agents, my own contract.

I got my contractor's license. So I was doing electrical contracting work. I was really doing, I was a subcontractor for a kitchen remodeling company. So I got into just doing home remodeling and kitchen remodeling work, all the electrical work for them. So it was great. I really didn't have to do any marketing for my work at that time, but eventually they started slowing down on getting new kitchen jobs. And I had to, I started having to go out to sustain myself and find my own leads. And that's where, uh, this was around 2009. And the only thing I had known about marketing was what I had learned during my real estate business, which was traditional marketing. And it was expensive.

And I didn't have really have the money to spend a lot of money on traditional marketing. And what I did spend on traditional marketing, I found wasn't near as effective. And so I started looking around and figuring out or trying to ask what is working now to get leads. And obviously the internet was starting to be the primary source of leads. And I didn't know a damn thing about computers. Barely. I could barely turn his computer on at that point, but I didn't, and I didn't have the money at the time to hire a digital marketing expert to help me out. So I just decided I was going to have to learn it. So I started studying search engine optimization. You know, Google is obviously the big elephant in the room, always has been, seems like they always will be.

So I started learning search engine optimization and how to manipulate Google, how to get my business to show up higher in the search results so that I could generate leads for my electrical business. And, you know, it was interesting. I became fascinated with the whole process of being able to manipulate this thing called Google. And so search engine optimization was something that really I became damn near, you know, almost obsessed with and started studying it and implementing it on some test sites that I had set up, which were some lead generation sites.

Besides generating leads for my own business, I set up a couple of other lead generation websites that I was trying to rank into Google. And once I did, then I started and they were contractor sites. Then I would call contractors in that area where I got it ranked. So these are sites that I had ranked in local, like, you know, for keyword plus city, that kind of stuff. And then I would contact contractors in that city and say, look, I've got a digital asset or a web property that's producing leads. They need to be serviced. Would you be interested in leasing this property from me for a flat monthly fee? Or would you want to buy the leads on a pay-per-lead basis? And that's really how I got my start in the SEO business. And what was interesting was, you know, I got really good at it over the course of about two years.

So around 2011, I had built up a pretty good portfolio of lead generation assets. And I decided at that point that I could make more money from home working behind my computer than I could pulling wire and climbing up and down ladders all day. And because I had known a lot of contractors through my construction years, I knew that I had a pretty good base of potential lead buyers or clients. And so I really started reaching out to contractors and selling either my services or selling leads to them and providing leads for their business. So around 2012 or so, I had been doing lead generation exclusively for a couple of years. And I mean, I was still doing electrical work on the side, but I live in Virginia.

And so most of the leads that I was generating were for businesses in Virginia. I felt comfortable doing stuff in my own backyard, essentially. But we have seasonal work. So in the wintertime, everything slows down around here. So after two years now, or two seasons, really, of the winter season slowing down and my income dropping, I said, I want a secure, reliable income that I can count on. So I opened up an agency, Big Bamboo Marketing in 2012, which is where I could go out to other types of businesses or pretty much any type of business and say, look,

I can help you to get better results from Google and search engine optimization. You pay me a flat monthly fee, you know, retainer on a monthly fee, and I'll help you rank your digital assets. And so that's what I did. And I, you know I started taking on clients from various a weekly basis. We joined via Google Hangouts and just chat to talk about things that were working in our marketing businesses. So everybody that was there had their own marketing business and we would just share information, what was working, what wasn't working, different methods, that kind of stuff. And we built a little following and people that would come and really wouldn't contribute, they just start watching and listening to what we were saying.

And it was just a handful of us that were contributing on a weekly basis. And so about a year later, we had been meeting weekly for an entire year for free. They're my partners now. The group and I that were contributing on a weekly basis decided that we were on to something that we ought to start our own training business to teach other marketers what we know or other people that wanted to become digital marketers. And so that's when we created Semantic Mastery. So that was in, I think our inception was 2013, but we actually incorporated in 2014. And so now pretty much that's what I do. I've got my primary business, which is Semantic Mastery, where we teach people,

business owners or aspiring digital marketers, or even digital marketing agency owners, how to get better results from their marketing, primarily through SEO, but also through other marketing methods. And I still run my Big Bamboo marketing agency. I've got a handful of really good clients. And I still have my own lead generation business where I still generate leads for multiple industries. So it's been kind of a long road, but it's been fun. And, you know, I've got a lot of experience working with contractors. I love it. I love it. So, you know, it's really all about getting a phone on Google. And that goes together with your online reputation, which I feel like, you know, I've worked with everything from Yodel to you name what company out there, Reach Local, PPC. I know all about it. I've done a lot of my own stuff. I've got a lot of own people that work internally now.

What do you think about as far as reputation management? There's so many choices, BirdEye, UK Guru. I mean, I could go on and on. Is that something that you like to do internally and have people kind of manage their own? Or do you recommend any tool or is that something you do internally as well? Well, BirdEye is pretty good. That's one of the better ones. A lot of my contractor clients actually use that. I don't actually manage that for them. A lot of them, they do that on their own. I handle more of the SEO and the PR marketing. So for example, you mentioned reputation marketing or management. I think there's a difference between management and marketing, right? So reputation management is making sure that your reputation stays good

and that you're replying and responding to people that are reviewing you, whether it's good or bad, which is absolutely critical. You want to make sure that you're managing your reputation online so that nothing negative comes up. And if it does, it gets buried very quickly, all that kind of stuff. But reputation marketing, I think that's more of a proactive approach, which is, I think reputation marketing has to go hand in hand with SEO now. And the reason I say that is because, you know, five years ago, seven years ago, 10 years ago, it used to be enough to just get ranked in Google. Like if you were number one in Google, you got a lot of phone calls, period, as a contractor, especially, right? That was the important thing was to get ranked near the top and the top three, especially. And now today with like the Google Maps pack, you really need to be in that Maps pack, the top three,

or else you're going to miss out on a ton of calls. But it's not necessarily just being number one anymore, because as internet users, right, just the general public has become more savvy, more sophisticated. And so we've all learned and evolved as Google users, really. And so just being ranked number one isn't enough. It's typically now you want to see the high five-star, several reviews, many reviews if possible, with a four-star or more rating, or else you're going to get passed over. So for example, if you're ranked number one,

but you don't have very many reviews or you've got poor star rating, and your competitors that are ranked below you have four stars or more, and some multiple dozens, even hundreds of reviews, then it's likely that you're going to get passed over by the average Google user and they're going to call the people that have more social, more credibility because of the star rating, the reputation. And so I consider reputation marketing as part of an SEO campaign or an SEO

strategy because I think you should really, in fact, like I said, it used to be good enough to just rank. And so all I used to do was SEO. But now because of this evolution of Google users and just everybody being more sophisticated, I recommend that instead of the first primary objective is to being ranked, is to actually get your reputation up, right?

Get that review star rating. Ask your past customers to leave you a review on Google. And there's other places they can leave you reviews too, but Google is where you're going to get the bulk of your leads. So you might as well start there and ask for reviews from your previous customers and your current customers alike. Then once you start getting those reviews, proactively market with that. And that's where inbound PR marketing comes in, public relations marketing. But you could start publishing content, press releases, and things like that that are highlighting the fact

that you're getting these good reviews. And that really helps to build some credibility and brand authority. Does that make sense? Yeah, 100%. I think that's great advice. I think that I would throw in there and that nobody's a big fan, but Yelp really does well on Google search engine as far as the organic listing. And then Google Guarantee is going nationwide here in May, throwing a little stick in the mud. The Guarantee program has been amazing for us, but I know a lot of people have had serious issues with the background check, which is Pinkerton. And it's a pain in the butt because they take a month to respond. So for those of you listening, I'm sorry about Google.

But what do you think about companies like Yext and stuff of that nature? Well, for somebody that is trying to manage their own marketing, like a contractor or a small business owner, then it's not bad because it's an automated way to manage your citations or business directory listings to make sure that everything is consistent, the data, your name, address, and phone number, what we call NAP. Data consistency is critical for ranking for local SEO, essentially. And so one of the problems that I see a lot through taking on new clients and such is that people will have their name spelled different ways, or they'll use different abbreviations or, you know, things like that when they're, when they create these business directory

listings, and that actually ambiguates the data. I know that sounds like, you know, but that's the actual term is it ambiguates the data for Google, makes it harder for Google to determine what to rank. So, you know, having your data consistent across every platform that it's published is incredibly important. And so those kind of things like Yext, they can be helpful because it's one thing that, you know, you essentially put your data in one place and it's one thing that, you know, you essentially put your data in one place and it goes out and manages all these listings for you. There is some limitations to it though. I think if you have, you know, a marketing professional handle that for you that you typically are going to get better results because you can get listed in more places. Plus,

I also feel like, you know, I'm not one that typically likes people to get on contracts with stuff. And I know Yext is contract-based. So that's part of the reason that I discourage that when I'm working with clients. But again, for somebody, a business owner managing their own marketing, which I really don't recommend because as a business owner, you should be running your business. Let a professional handle your marketing, just like you wouldn't represent yourself in court.

You know what I mean? You'd hire an attorney. I recommend that everybody should hire a marketing professional so they can focus on what generates them revenue. And marketing is probably not it. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things. I think as a business owner, if you love marketing, you get involved. As a small business owner, you're involved in a lot of, at least the decision-making. And there's a lot of qualifications you want to do. One of the things that we are really aware of now, Bradley, we really have figured out there's certain things you could do to be above board. And what I mean by that is not only posting pictures on your Google My Business, but getting a Google certified photographer that geotags each picture.

Certain things like, can people come into your work? Yes, have a showroom. Actually have plenty across the city if you could, because then you could have multiple GMBs in the same city and Google allows that. If you truly have a showroom with real pictures and they ask for real ads on the window, they ask for real tax bills.

I mean, they're asking for everything. So my advice just real quick would be do it right. You know, I'm sure you've seen when Google takes something down, it's almost impossible. You can't talk to anybody. I mean, they made it impossible. The left hand doesn't talk to the right for a purpose. What has been your experience as far as just little tips and tats? Because I know we're going to talk a lot about the semantic mastery, which is where they can get everything of how to do this stuff. But as far as just on here, what are some just good tips over why they're listening to the podcast? You said, you know, Google Photos, that's true. You can hire a Google photographer, but you can manipulate or, you know, help your Google My Business profile, which is your maps

profile, essentially help that to rank. There's a lot your Maps profile, essentially, help that to rank. There's a lot of things you can do to help that. And you can do it on your own as well. Or you can have, like, let's just use contractors again, for an example. Something that would be really powerful for any one of you guys listening out there that has a contracting business

is to have your technicians to go out into the field and do jobs to take photos from their phone and then upload them to your Google My Business profile. And they can install an app right on their phone and you can make them a site manager or something like that, communications manager from your Google My Business dashboard, which will allow them to upload photos directly, or they can even upload photos as customers, which is possible too. And also, you can create what's called GMB posts or Google My Business posts, which are like blog posts direct to your maps listing,

which is incredibly powerful. And here's the thing, taking photos from a phone that's GPS enabled, which pretty much all phones are, it's going to stamp that geo-tagged information like the latitude, longitude, the coordinates of where that person is at that time. Plus the phone, those images that are all original because they're taken from somebody's phone. People say, well, what kind of photos should I take? Take photos of the jobs you're working on. You know, take photos of before and after, during, like during the jobs, just snap a couple of photos. You don't have to be obsessive about it, but just snap a couple of photos and upload that stuff. And that's a prime opportunity

to what's called, you know, essentially expanding the service area of the business. Because one of the things that happened was in July of 2018, when Google had a significant shift, it's called the mobile index first. It was really, it was very, very significant in the search engine world because all of the results that you see now in Google are influenced by mobile first, right? And that's because mobile searches have surpassed desktop and laptop searches. So anytime there's a search with local intent, and typically people looking for a service like plumber near me, and you don't have to have that near me modifier in it, just sometimes, you know, like tree service, like if somebody's on a mobile device and they type in tree removal, like Google's going to display the tree removal or tree service companies that are in closest proximity to them.

And so like, what I mean by that is the Google My Business profiles, the Google Maps profiles that are within closest proximity to them, right? And so that's because of this mobile index first thing. However, we all know that service businesses, like contractor businesses, typically have a service area, and it's a very wide area in most cases. So you want to be able to have your maps listing show up for a search, even if somebody isn't in close proximity to your business. And while it takes work, it's not something that can be done overnight, you can influence that still, even with and kind of overpower the proximity issue by doing what I just mentioned. And that's what Tommy just mentioned a moment, which you mentioned,

Tommy, which was uploading photos that are geotagged. So yes, you can hire a Google photo photographer to do stuff like that, which is great. And that's going to be even more powerful. But you as a, or as a business owner, they can do this themselves or also have technicians out in the field. And that really helps because every or also have technicians out in the field. And that really helps because every time a technician is out in the field and they do a job in an adjacent town, for example, and they take photos and upload that, that's going to help Google to know that this business also serves that area. And there's the proof. The geotagged photos that Google understands, reads that geodata on those photos and says,

oh, this company does do work over here. Here's the proof. And just uploading the photos is great, by the way. But if you use those GMB posts, which is, again, it's like blog posts directly to your maps listing or your Google My Business profile, it's really powerful because now you can squeeze keywords into there, right? So, for example, take photos of, you know, let's use a plumber, for example, goes out to do a water heater repair in an adjacent town. They could take a photo of the water heater that they are replacing or the one that they, you know, put in after it's been replaced and create a quick post, a real short post that says something like, and here's how you can actually, we'll talk about near me keywords.

If you guys have ever looked inside your Google My Business dashboard, you'll see what's called GMB insights. Insights is like analytics for Google My Business dashboard, you'll see what's called GMB Insights. Insights is like analytics for Google My Business. And if you take a look at that, at the very top of that page, which is the Insights page, which shows you the reporting essentially, it's going to show you the search queries that have given your maps listing exposure in the search results. And what you're going to find, especially for contractors, is you're going to see near me type keywords like plumber near me or plumber in my area or plumber nearby, plumber service close to me, that kind of stuff. Those are what I call near me keywords, and they're really, really powerful. They generate for a lot of the contractors I work with as much as 40 to 50 percent of all the traffic comes from those near me search queries.

And so if you actually start targeting those types of queries and people say, well, how do you target a near me keyword in your content? It would sound spammy. Well, what I do is for our clients and what we teach people to do is to actually, when they take a photo of like, like I said, a water heater and in an adjacent town, they could say, did you just search water heater repair near me? Question mark. Well, look no further. Call Joe's Plumbing. You know, we provide water heater repair services and other plumbing services in and in, say, the town name. And then use your call to action, phone number and a link back to the website. And so now you've got that geotagged image. You've got the plumber near me or water heater repair near me keyword. You've got the location keyword, the mention of where it was. And you've got the geotagged image that reinforces that location and the call to action. So you can actually help to

generate a lead that way in an adjacent town. It's very, very powerful. I really like that. One of the things that I do is there's keyword density on the page. So I'm sure you're familiar with that. But one of the things we talk about is I was at this customer's house and he called for a garage door repair in Levine, Arizona, and we were able to get out there within an hour. So I just hit that perfect search term, but I've never heard the people say the ones near me. So that's actually news to me as well. So that's great. You know, I think that a lot of people have misconceptions and I have to say this because this is true. I spend well over 300,000 a month in marketing and there was a time last year where over 50% of my leads were free from search engine optimization and my

GMB Google. So Google my businesses. I'm not quite there right now, but my point is there's a lot of misconceptions out there about SEO. And I'd like to debunk those with you today for the listeners. So tell me a little bit about the misconceptions and what you've learned over time with your clients. Well, I think with SEO, it's evolved a bit in that, you know, it used to be, I used to not do pay-per-click marketing at all, like Google Ads, search marketing, and that kind of stuff. I used to just do SEO. But SEO has become harder. There's no doubt. It's become more complex. And so, what I try to explain to, like, new clients, for example, or people that are marketers that are trying to learn how to do this kind of stuff for clients, is that one of the quickest ways to find out what keywords to target for SEO, because SEO takes work and takes consistent

effort and a little bit of time, sometimes more time than others, to get traction and get results from it. But as you said, no leads are free, right? Because SEO doesn't produce free leads because you had to invest time and or money to get to the point where it's generating leads. So it does still cost money, but it's a hell of a lot nicer to get 40 calls in a month and not have to pay per call or per click to get those calls. That's the ultimate goal, right? But what I found is in the past where I used to just go find keywords and try to think

logically, what are the kinds of keywords people would use to try to find this business? Or you could use keyword tools to try to determine what keywords people are searching for, for particular industry, for products and services, that kind of stuff. And then I'd start an SEO campaign. But what I found is that it's, I think it's better to actually spend some money up front initially on an ads campaign and collect data. Consider it an investment, like research and discovery. And with a well-planned out or even throwing money at a Google Ads campaign to identify which keywords are going to produce not just traffic, but produce traffic that converts into leads.

Then you have hard data that you know that you can use to build an SEO campaign around. What I see too many people do is they assume that they know which keywords are going to generate the leads. And they start putting all this effort and time and energy and sometimes money into developing an SEO campaign for those keywords that end up not being the keywords that generate them. In other words, they don't generate as many leads as they had planned or assumed that they would. And so it's a lot of wasted time and effort. And in my opinion, you can kind of shortcut that process by first determining which keywords are the ones that, again, don't just produce traffic,

but also convert into leads. Then you build your SEO campaign around that. So that's something that I have a lot of people reach out to me asking about SEO. What can I do for them for SEO? And the first thing I say is, well, what data do you have? Well, I don't, but I think people search. And then I say, well, I think the first month or two, really, I'd say 60 days minimum, that you should spend money on an AdWords or now Google Ads campaign first to determine which keywords to build the SEO campaign around. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I agree 100%. And the tools that used to be available on Google four or five years ago

are not. They used to give us all kinds of insights and know what search terms, how many search terms. Now, it's not quite what it used to be on the back end of Google. They've really kind of hit it unless you're doing paid. And if you're tracking it right, but a misconception that I see a lot of the time is I see people with thousands of traffic, good traffic, but their site stinks. It's not built for conversion. So, A-B testing is important. Call tracking numbers is important. I mean, my PPC is set up in a way and we do it in house, but it's set up to the point where I know what the person searched for when they call, which is pretty freaking amazing. And a lot of people don't have that, but we take it to the 10th degree. You know, I love talking about this stuff. I mean,

marketing is my passion and I just think it's important. But then I go in and I listen to the phone calls and I'm like, you're not answering the phone call. And I got to be honest, we still don't answer the phone call fast enough. I mean, it's crazy, but just getting to that in the 10 seconds is so important. So we do all this work on marketing, but then we don't answer our phones or we're not good on the phone. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing is, even from what you were just mentioning, like something else that I see a lot of people not doing is they focus on SEO, but then they don't, they don't utilize remarketing now, which is crazy to me because remarketing is incredibly

easy to set up and it's super, super effective. And it's so much less expensive than search marketing, like cold traffic clicks type stuff. Yeah. Retargeting. Yeah. Yeah. We're retargeting on strictly the Google network, you know, it's called remarketing. Retargeting is more for Facebook and such. But, you know, my point is remarketing, retargeting, whatever you want to call it, is super, super effective because visitors that visit your site, let's face it, guys, there's only a small percentage of visitors that visit the site actually convert into a lead at that time. So if you can cookie them by them landing on your site and they get tagged with a remarketing cookie, then you can follow them around the web. Everywhere they go with banner ads reminding them

that you're there. YouTube ads, for example. Facebook ads. And it's not to be intrusive, but it's to just remind them. And it's a great branding tool so that when they are ready to make the purchasing decision, when they finally need to make that decision to have the tree removed from their backyard or something, they're going to see who's going to be top of mind. And so that kind of leads back into what we were talking about earlier with reputation marketing. Like, remarketing, retargeting is a great way to help build authority and brand recognition

with somebody that may have only seen your site, like only come in contact with one of your digital assets one time. But now you get to stay in front of them all the time and they start to think that you're the best in the area because they see you all the time. See what I'm saying? Yeah, no, it makes a ton of sense.

I mean, this is a really, really old statistic, but the conversion rate when you get seen twice goes up 300%. The conversion rate when you're on there three times, meaning your PPC ad, then you've got your local Google ad, which is your Google guarantee now. And then you've got your Google listing and then you've got your organic

and then you've got a Yelp. I mean, they're like, this company must own that. They can see the five stars on both places, your Yelp. And then if you've got the, what's it called where it shows the five stars in the organic listing? Rich snippets. Rich snippets. I heard it called something else, but. Structured data, but yeah. Yeah, so it grabs different things from the internet and it basically says, not metadata, I can't think of the darn word, but it starts with an S.

But anyways, there's so many changes going on right now. Schemally, you're talking about schema. Yeah, structure data, schema, same thing. But yeah, absolutely. This guy knows what he's talking about. This is not what I live and breathe. I live and breathe garage doors, but I love, it's just so important. Like when you could get, and it's not free, but it's the best bang for the buck for sure.

It's setting up the process, making sure there's nothing broken in your citation sites. There's just getting it all filled out correctly and getting the customers and your technicians involved. I mean, you get this built, guys. You do it right. It's the gift that keeps giving. You know, it's killer. And I like that you said that. Let me just really quickly because I like the fact that, you know, that's one of the things is it does take a little bit of work up front.

But once you get it, it becomes routine. And once it's routine, it's easy. It's just there's always inertia for everything, right? It's like there's always resistance to change, it becomes routine. It's, and it's, once it's routine, it's easy. It's just, there's always inertia for everything, right? It's like, there's always resistance to change, to new things. But once you kind of build that into your, just your processes, your, you know, standard operating procedure, it becomes routine and becomes easy to do, and you will reap the rewards. And here's the thing, your competitors aren't doing it. So if you do it, you'll reap the rewards for it. You know what I told you before the podcast, if you could do a little write-up for me, possibly,

and it'll rank good because it's new content and it's gonna be cool for the audience to listen and get all the resources that you're gonna give us. So I just think it's powerful to get that from customers too. Hey, look, if you do a write-up, take a couple of pictures. I've got something called the A1 Applause Program where my customers could get $50 back. Literally on any new install,

they post a sign out in their front yard that we'll give them. There's certain things that next door is a big thing for us. Google and Yelp are huge. Like us and follow us on Facebook, but better yet, post it on Facebook so your friends and family see A1. So many cool things going on,

and I know it's overbearing, but guys, I will say this. There's about 7,000 people that listen to the podcast a month. This is probably the number one thing to get going on today. And I know I say there's all these things you need to do all the time, but at least get this stuff going. This is your Google. Google is the animal. 70% of all services are found online. 70% of that's Google. That's an old stat. But half of your energy time towards marketing should be spent on Google. So, you know, I got another question here. What are the changes in SEO that you anticipate will impact contractors?

Obviously, the Google Guarantee Program is one of them. Is there any, you know, obviously, mobile's getting huge. Make sure your website works good on mobile. That's huge. Is there any other things that we should be anticipating this year? Yeah, I mean, and as we've been talking about it, I think the Google My Business is huge too. And here's the reason why I think

every business should be focusing, like you just mentioned on Google and Google My Business especially, because Google's given us all these tools in the GMB platform that are free. They're free to use, okay? And the reason why is they're all developed specifically for, or more specifically, for mobile devices, for mobile searchers, right? So, for example, the GMB posts, we were talking about that earlier, super, super powerful to post regularly and consistently. That's how you can get

serious traction with your GMB. But those posts, if you look at them on a desktop, they're not the same as what they look like on a phone, right? And also, for example, in your GMB dashboard, a lot, not all businesses, but most businesses have what's called a services option. Like you can actually go in and it's like a service menu. You can go in and add different services and the price points. By the way, if your price points vary, you can put call for estimate, like for example, garage door installation, call for estimate and in the price field put zero, zero.

So it doesn't cost anything because your price varies. But then those are things like if you look on a desktop, if you search for a company name, for example, and what appears on the right side of the screen from a desktop or a laptop is called a knowledge panel, right? So that's what comes up that shows that company and their profile or presence on Google. You won't see the services menu on a desktop, but on a mobile device, it's there. It's like a navigation menu in the knowledge panel. You can scroll left or scroll right and you'll see a services menu. So that's just another example.

You said just a moment ago, Tommy, that, you know, make sure your website is optimized for mobile. That's absolutely true. But the Google My Business stuff is all optimized for mobile. And that's what's great about it is it's already done. And here's the thing. Now, I don't know how much your audience knows about Facebook marketing. I'm not much of a Facebook marketer. I'm going to be 100% honest. I'm a Google guy. But one of the things that Facebook's done for years is if you have an audience, like you've got a page and you've got, let's say, a thousand likes to your page. Okay. So essentially a thousand followers to your page and you post a image-based post or a video with no external link, no link that takes people off of Facebook to another website, it's going to get significant reach. It could be 20%, 30%, not so much anymore because they want you to pay for advertising. But my point was you could get significant reach. A lot of those people

are going to see that post. But the moment that you would put an external link to take people off of Facebook in your post, then all of a sudden now they really restrict who actually sees that. And that's because Facebook doesn't want people to leave Facebook, right? Because then they can't serve them more ads and make more money from them. So same thing, Google, like think about what Google has always been. Google has always been a search engine that would display an index of external links that would take people, they type a search query in, the results would come up, and it would be an index of results that were external links that people would click and it would take them off of Google.

Well, Google got smart and decided that, hey, Facebook is onto something. Let's give all of our business owners these tools that will keep our Google users in Google, in the Google ecosystem. So if you use the Google My Business tools, use them all, then Google is going to reward you because now you can satisfy the searcher's search query, especially with local intent, right there in the Google ecosystem and keep them on Google so that Google can continue to capture more of their data and serve them more ads, if that makes sense. So I think, you know, having an external website is still important. I get that. But I think that especially for local-based businesses,

contractors, that type of thing, you should really be focusing on decking out and using all those tools within Google My Business. Have you ever heard of a theory of building a map, a custom map to a neighboring city of how to get to your building? Yeah, like driving directions maps. Yeah. Yeah. So what do you have to say? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, that can work. There's some tools out there that can automate that stuff. There's some services out there that will build those types of maps for you. It can work. There's some tools out there that can automate that stuff. There's some services out there that will build those types of maps for you. It can work. Here's the thing with, like, for example, if you're a storefront business where people come to you, then if you want to try to get your business to show up and say adjacent areas, because remember, proximity is a big issue. Like,

it's a big thing. So, where the searcher is in relation to your physical location makes a big deal or a big difference in how you're displayed in Google. So if you want to get people like from an adjacent area, for example, that maybe the searcher is not so close to your business, then if you have content on your website, for example, with driving directions from that area to your storefront, that's something that can help. I mean, that adds that location relevancy. If you're a service area business, you would want kind of the opposite. You

would want from your business going to the locations that you service. So like, in other words, the driving directions would be inversed. They would be going from your location. However, remember, with service area businesses, you don't actually display your physical address. In fact, that's against Google's terms of service now. So if you're a service area business, you're supposed to clear the address before you put in the service areas. If you don't have a showroom, that is. That's right. If you don't have a showroom.

And there are a few exceptions. You mentioned that earlier. I deal a lot with remodeling contractors, and kitchen remodeling contractors will often have a showroom. And so that is one of the exceptions. However, that said, a lot of the times if you have your, if you show your physical address and you go to add service areas, your, your GMB will automatically get suspended and you have to contact GMB support to get it reinstated and prove that you do have a storefront and you're a service area business.

And that's, that's happened to me on a number of occasions. So that's a pain in the ass, but it's just one of those things. But yeah, so for example, with the service area business, unless you have a showroom, you're supposed to have your business address hidden. So you clear that before you add your service areas. So how do you do the driving directions then? Well, in that case, what I do is just do driving directions from the city. So you just type in, like, for example, I live in Culpeper, Virginia. I would say Culpeper VA would be your starting point. And not a specific address, just Culpeper VA. And then Google is going to start the driving directions from what it determines is city center for Culpeper VA, right?

And then to the adjacent areas or whatever areas. That does work. It's not just as easy as creating a driving directions map, though. You have to do some other stuff with it. If you've got a website, you create what we call geoposts or geopages. You can add some other relevancy about the locations that you want to rank for. And it does require some consistent effort, including those GMB posts that I was talking about with geotagged images. I love it. I love this stuff. I want to start wrapping it up. Not quite yet, but how can home service contractors leverage reputation marketing? You know, I mean, really, we've talked about getting started, but you know, I know your company, you teach this stuff.

And one of the things you mentioned is you want to say, make Google your bitch, right? So tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, well, our store, we have a done-for-you services store where the methods that we teach, one of the things we found is, you know, we produce training products on these methods. These are all real-world tested methods because I run my own agency and I've got four partners. They all each run their own agencies. So that's what, you know, how we came together to begin with. And we just started teaching people our methods. And so we've got several training products under our Semantic

Mastery brand that teach people how to do these things. But invariably, what always happens and what happens most of the time is eight out of 10 people that take our training products come back to us and say, oh man, that sounds awesome, but it's too much work. Can you do it for us? And so we realized a couple of years ago that we needed to open up a store and we've trained a lot of virtual assistants and such to do our methods. I certainly don't actually do a lot of the work anymore myself because I've trained people to do it. So we opened up a store, we call it MGYB. It's at MGYB.co. Yeah, it stands for makegooglyourbitch.co. And I thought it was great. It was kind of funny, but it's just great and catchy and our students love it. But yeah, we've got done for you services over there that things that we found to be very

effective over the years. So as far as leveraging reputation, again, I think that should be part of an SEO strategy. I think they're one in the same now. I don't think you should do one without the other. You mentioned it, Tommy, you've got a great system for asking your clients and customers to send you a review or to post photos or do a little write-up. Those are incentivized. You got to be careful about incentivizing reviews. You got to check your local laws, your state laws, that kind of stuff, because in some states you can't do that. But you can incentivize reviews, but not positive reviews. Like in other words, you can ask people to give you a review, good, bad, or ugly, but you can't just incentivize good reviews, if that makes sense. And again, check with your

local laws. Something I would mention though is reputation marketing, be proactive about it. You know, ask people, like for example, if you, if you provide invoices to your customers, have a, an easy link for them to go to, to leave you a review, right? So it could be your website.com slash Google, right? And just have a redirect that takes them directly to the Google maps listing with the review pop-up already there. Like in other words, like when you click, you know, that's what you want to do. You want, and again, we talked about you could have people leave your reviews on Yelp, which are probably going to get filtered out anyways, or Facebook,

your Facebook page, you know, all of the big ones you should have people do leave your reviews on. You could even set up like a rotating redirect so that it could be yourdomain.com slash review. And it could just automatically rotate between your top three or five pages that you want to collect reviews on so that each time, you know, somebody visits that URL, it takes them to the next review site. And things like that are really important. Put them on your business cards. Hand that to your customers after, you know, especially when you know that they're satisfied with what you've just done for them and you're

talking to them and they're like, oh, thank you. You know, you did a great job. Oh, you think so? Well, would you mind taking a moment to leave me a review? It would really help me out. Hand them a business card with your review URL in the back. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, it's great advice. And those are what some of those things like BirdEye kind of help you to, they've built APIs into some pretty sophisticated software. Like I use ServiceTitan that automatically syncs into that. So the more automated I could get, I got to tell you, people are like, well, I could hire another person to do this and I could do this. Well, use the right tools, like use a Hootsuite or something similar to post on your GMB and your

social. I mean, it just makes sense. Like, don't make it harder. And you can manage it all under one roof. And that's what's nice is, obviously, you cannot manage every single thing under Service Titan, your CRM. But what I would advise is get a HootSuite, get a Bird's Eye, get a Service Titan, and just, you can have somebody run this stuff so easily. And I would like to interject and just say one thing I would recommend is, you know, it's overwhelming to try to do all of this stuff. You've heard a lot of good ideas today on this podcast, but what I would suggest is to just select one thing to start with and implement it and get it running smoothly and

have it become part of your standard operating procedure. It becomes routine. And once that's done, then you start implementing something else. If you do it like the chunker method, right? One at a time, things like that, you'll get it done. It's just a matter of time instead of trying to do it all at once. Because that's what I see too many people do is they hear all these great ideas and they're like, oh, I'm going to implement all this stuff. It's just like somebody says, I'm going to go on a diet and I'm going to lose 50 pounds. Like it's too hard. It's overwhelming. So, you know, make smaller goals instead. Say I'm going to lose five pounds. Right. So same thing goes with this. Say I'm going to implement Google My Business posts with geotagged images from my technicians over the next two weeks. And once that's done and it

becomes routine, then you can say, okay, now I'm going to implement review management, you know, that kind of stuff. And that way you'll get it done over time as opposed to trying to do it all at once and giving up too early. Yeah. You know, I've seen guys make money with home warranty companies. They just do home warranty companies and they make a killing. I've seen people take a Home Depot account, but they take 10 of them and they kill it. Costco account. I've seen people take, it's taking one thing and owning it. And this is one thing that I'd say that if you're going to own anything with the tools that we're going to talk about here in a minute, it would be your GMB. It would be getting going on this, getting some reviews started to get going because

it's something where while I was on this podcast, I had a buddy text me, good friend of mine. He said, Hey, I'm finally on Yelp. Is there any more advice that you need to give me? I said, yeah, I'll call you soon. But the difference is, you know, he still lives, he doesn't have a house. He lives in an apartment. And I just feel like you got to do things right. And the more time you do, I'm doing them right above board. Cause I spent a lot of time thinking, what can I do? Cause Google's not fair. I don't think. I'm bigger. I have more employees. We do better things for our customers. But Google doesn't take that into consideration. So I do what's called creative justification. And I say, well, I should have 10 Google my businesses for the size I am. But Google will

slap you and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't sue them because no one ever wins. I guess you could, but it's very rare that you get anything back. Try to sue one of the most successful companies in the world. See where you go with that. But you've got all this training. Tell me a little bit about what the listeners have to do to really start getting into the semantic mastery stuff you got going. Well, the easiest thing is we'll have a page available. You guys can come so that you can find out about what we are and what we do. It's at semanticmastery.com slash homeserviceexpert, all one word. So semanticmastery.com slash homeserviceexpert. It'll be a page that'll just have some information about some off with anybody that has any digital presence, period, should start off with our battle plan, which is very inexpensive. And it's a PDF that it's not just like a one-page guide. It's a PDF with step-by-step processes for how to get results from your digital assets, whether it's a new asset or an older asset. So I'm talking about

your web properties. So it's basically step-by-step procedure on how to get results. And obviously, we link to many of our done-for-you services in our store at mgyb.co. But we also have our weekly hangout series. It's a weekly webinar series. It's digital marketing Q&A. It's free, 100% free. We actually just did, yesterday was our 233rd episode. So we've been doing it for four and a half years now. And it's one hour, we call it hump day hangouts from four to 5pm Eastern, every single Wednesday. And it's great because you can come to our page. And again, all of this is on that welcome page for you guys. But it's semanticmastery.com slash hump day. That'll take you to you can sign up or register for that. And it's free, 100% free. You can come post your questions about anything marketing related. And we answer them during the webinar for every week. And then you can catch it on the replay if you can't make it live.

So we would recommend you do that. The last thing I would say is that specifically because we talked about MGYB, excuse me, GMB stuff today, that we've got a training course called Local GMB Pro. And that's really how to do all of this stuff. But like I said before, you know, unless you guys are doing your marketing in-house, then, you know, you're a lot of times better off hiring that kind of stuff out. And I do recommend that because it can be overwhelming trying to do it on your own and implementing all of this stuff. But if you wanted to learn how to do it, that's what Local GMB Pro is. What did you say the local PDF was?

It's called the battle plan. Again, if they go to the welcome page, they'll be able to see that. But it's battleplan.semanticmastery.com. It's very inexpensive. And it's just kind of a step by step procedure on how to get results from digital assets. And it's done for you stuff. Like in other words, it'll point you over to our store where you can buy the services that'll help you to get the results so that you don't have to learn all of the things yourself. I love this stuff. I absolutely love it. So what if they want to get a hold of you, Bradley?

What's the best way to get a hold of you? Probably on Hump Day Hangouts. Honestly, that would probably be the best thing to do. Now, again, that's semanticmastery.com slash humpday. You can just opt in for that, and then you can come to our weekly webinar series and ask questions over there. That's a direct access to me on a weekly basis. So I would highly recommend if you guys have any questions about anything, period, reach out to me over there. If you need something specifically private, then, you know, you can reach me at bbenner at SemanticMastery.com. Again, that's bbenner, B-E-N-N-E-R at SemanticMastery.com. Again, that's B-E-N-N-E-R at SemanticMastery.com. Perfect. And I always ask the same question to every person I have on the podcast. Is there some books that you recommend? It doesn't have to be about home service or marketing or business, but I usually find that most people provide more insight into the business books. Is there three books that you recommend? You don't need to do three. It could be one that really stands out for you. Yeah. You know, there's, I think there's

three that have been transformative for me that I can point out. The first one would be more of kind of a mindset thing. It's called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. It's a fabulous book. Very, it's an easy read. It's not very thick, but it's, it's just about how to, how to get results in anything that you do in life. Not just necessarily business, but it's just about how to get results in anything that you do in life, not just necessarily business, but it's by just taking small incremental steps and consistently over time. And again, that's what I was talking about earlier about just implementing one thing at a time. And instead of trying to do 10 things all at once and becoming frustrated and quitting, it's better to focus on one thing. And that's going to be another book here in a moment. But so again, Jeff Olson, The Slight Edge, it's great.

Then something else specifically about business that really transformed my business. In 2013, when I was running my own agency and my own lead generation business, I was 100% solo. It was a one-man show. And I was making really good money, but I was working seven days a week, 12, 14 hours a day, no kidding. And I couldn't actually grow anymore at that point because I was completely overwhelmed with work. And I read this book on, it was funny, I was on my way to Phoenix for a marketing seminar for the weekend, an SEO seminar, real high level, it was a $20,000 seminar. And I bought this $9 Kindle book that I read half of it on the way to the seminar,

on the flight to the seminar and half the other half on the way back. And that $9 Kindle book changed my business way more than the $20,000 seminar did. And it was, that's by Sam Carpenter. It's called work the system. And that's a great book because it taught me about how to delegate work and how to start building processes in my business so I could systematize everything and then delegate it to others, which would free my time up so that I could work on my business instead of in my business. I know that sounds cliche, but that $9 book was transformative for me. Lastly, I would recommend, there's a book by Gary Keller and Jay Papasan, I think their

names are, from Keller One Realty. But it's called The One Thing. The One Thing, yeah. The One Thing. And that's what I was talking about earlier also was, again, focus on one thing at a time. The One Thing is about really finding what the one thing is that you can do in your business now that, once done, is going to make everything else easier or unnecessary. And so really focus, like, as I know, as entrepreneurs, we're all very ambitious. We've always got so many irons

and different fires type, so to speak. But if you can really focus on the one thing that's going to move the needle the most, and work on that until it's completed, you get much better results than trying to spread your attention and energy out across 10 different things. All of those things don't get done as well as if you did one thing at a time and then move to the next. So again, The Slight Edge, Work the System, and The One Thing. Those three books have been absolutely transformative. Work the System was by who? I can't find it. I think Sam Carpenter. Sam Carpenter. Yeah, Work the System. And is it a book or is it an audio? It's a book. I mean, they might have it work to see. And is it a book or is it an audio? It's a book.

I mean, they might have it in audio too, but it's a book. Okay, so you gave me three more. I've got the one out of the three. So now I only have to read two more. I'm up to, this is ridiculous. I just, I gotta have that one thing, the one book I read.

But you know, we started a book club here at A1 that all my managers are reading. And right now we're reading Five Dysfunctions of a team which is really really great for a team so anybody out there has co-workers that they find tough to communicate and have good meetings and actually move the whole team in the same direction it's a book i'm reading right now on my my team and uh it's really working some miracles out as far as communication. But yeah, one of the last things I do, Brad, and this is the very last thing I do is if there's something you want to leave the audience with something for them to think about some,

some actions to take or just some food for thought. I want to give you the mic for a couple of minutes here just to talk about something that you want to leave them with. Well, again, I would go back to being consistent is one of the things that's absolutely critical with anything really. But when it comes to marketing your business and trying to get results is to being consistent. And so that's why I do recommend a lot of the times when business owners come to us to learn how to do their marketing. It's not that we don't want you to learn how to do the marketing. I mean, we still encourage you to do that, but it's to either hire somebody in-house

that's going to actually manage it for you or to hire an external vendor essentially to do it for you because then it gets done consistently. As a business owner, I understand you being the decision maker, that's absolutely critical and you should be involved. You should know what's going on. And it's good to know how everything operates. But at the same time, because, again, in that book we were just talking about, Work the System, fires pop up. It's like you play whack-a-mole as a business owner. Things are always popping up that are going to pull your attention away from your primary task at hand. And so if you're working on marketing, but other business-related issues, things come up, then what gets put aside? The marketing, right? And so my point is, being consistent is absolutely critical to get traction. And that's why I recommend that you either hire somebody in-house

to do it or you hire an outside source to do it for you. That said, if you're going to hire an outside source to do it, I do recommend going with a local consultant instead of a big box agency. And I say that as a local consulting guy, I'm not a big box agency. I specifically have kept my business smaller where I deal directly with my clients. In other words, with my clients,

and I don't do all the work. I've trained a lot of people to do work for me, but I'm still direct contact with my clients. I still develop customized marketing plans for all of my clients because every client is different. Every business owner has different needs. They might have all similar needs, but at some point, they diverge, right? And there's going to be differences. And I want to make sure that those needs are met. And what I've found over the years is that using the big box agencies, you're just a commodity, you're just another number. And they're going to give you some one size fits all plan

that isn't necessarily going to help your business. It might marginally help your business, but it won't give you that specific result that you're looking for. And so I always recommend, you know, you see all those bumper And so I always recommend, you know, you see all those bumper stickers that say buy local, stay local, that kind of stuff. And they're usually talking about groceries. Well, I think that should apply to marketing as well. Find somebody that's in your local town, a guy like me, so to speak, or a gal like me that is, you know, obviously has a, an interest in your business performing well, And somebody that you can look in the eye, you know what I'm saying? And I think there's something to be said about that

because they're gonna treat you a lot better than a big box agency and probably get you much better results too. That was amazing. That's great stuff. And I've got so many notes. I was just writing more notes down, but hey, this has been great, Bradley.

I appreciate you coming on today. I've got a whole insight of so many things. I try to buy at least something from the guests, you know, show them the appreciation for coming on. Check out the battle plan. It's simple and it's great because it really does have step-by-step stuff and it'll introduce you to some of our services at MGYB as well. Cool, man. Well, I appreciate it. And I'll definitely, I'm going to send you an email here and I appreciate you coming on. I think that there's nobody that I was listening today that can't get a lot out of this.

So I appreciate everything. Well, thank you for having me, Tommy. I really appreciate it. It was fun talking with you, man. You too, brother. Thanks again. Hey guys, I really appreciate you tuning into the podcast. I wanted to let you know that my book is available right now on Amazon.

It's called The Home Service Millionaire. That's homeservicemillionaire.com. Just go to the website. It'll show you exactly where and how to buy the book. I poured two years of knowledge into this book and I had 12 contributors. Everybody from the COO at HomeAdvisor to the CEO of Alpac and of course, Ara, the CEO of ServiceTitan. It tells you how to have the right mindset and become a millionaire and think like a millionaire. It goes into exactly how to turn on lead generation.

Have those phones ringing off the hook for the customers that you want to be calling where you can make money and get great reviews. It also goes into simple things like how to attract A players. Listen, if you want a great apple pie, you need to buy good apples, and you need to know where to buy those apples. And it also talks about simple things like knowing how to keep the score. You should have your financial check every week. You should know exactly what's coming in and out of your account. You should know when to cut advertising that's not working.

And more than anything, you should know how to cut employees that aren't making it for you. Listen, you might have a big heart, but this book is going to show you how to make decisions built on numbers. I hope you pick up the book, and I really appreciate everything. I hope you're having a great day. Tune in next week. Thank you.