The Home Service Expert Podcast - Understanding the New Rules of SEO to Stay Top-of-Mind with Your Customers

Episode Date: November 27, 2020

Matthew Woodward has published numerous detailed tutorials and case studies focused on helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Since 2012, he has helped thousands of people reach success in increasing traffic and profits. A multi-awarded SEO expert, he has been a speaker at events all over the world including Las Vegas, New York, London, Barcelona, Bangkok, Bali, Romania, Costa Rica and many more. In this episode, we talked about SEO, digital marketing, blogging...

SEO is very confusing for a lot of businesses when they're going out to agencies and things, but all you really need to know is it boils down to three components. Having a good foundation, just like you've got underneath your house, build a good foundation, a fast site, everything should work. It should be pleasant for the visitors. You should have nice content that answers people's problems. And then you layer that up with keyword targeted content and link building. And those are the three elements to get right. And it amuses me when agencies don't take care of those elements. Many times they focus on the link building, but not on the foundation. And then they end up overspending on the link building because you need more links to get the same results as you would have done with a foundation.

So I think that's where a lot of agencies go wrong is they often just take a client's budget and they're just trying to turn it into links as quick as they can because it's take from one hand and push into the other. Whereas when you've got taking care of foundations, that's really manual, labor-intensive, nitty-gritty stuff. That's hard manual work. 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 inward, 2020, the king, the king of SEO. So Matt is, he's a badass.

I got to tell you guys, some of you guys may have followed him. I don't know. I hate to say it, like you're definitely one of the top five guys in the world at SEO. You're from the UK. We've got to know each other really well over the last few months. Yeah, that's right. And you've been on the podcast before, but you're from the UK, and now you live in Costa Rica.

And you're very, very sick today. Yeah, I feel really rough. You really didn't want to be on here. But it's not coronavirus because I got tested and I got the antibodies. So at some point I had coronavirus. I never had the symptoms. And, yeah, I'm just run down, I think. Well, listen, I really appreciate you doing this.

We'll get through it. And I'm going to just go through some of your accolades here. SEO, digital marketing, blogging. You're from Nantwich? Yeah, England originally been doing seo since seo was was a thing you know i built my first websites in notepad before google existed before youtube was a thing before you know i i was delivering newspapers to pay for a server like late 90s and uh very lucky that during that time I was kind of naturally interested in business

anyway because of my father so you know I was always knocking on doors and washing cars and all of that combined with my natural interest with the web I was lucky that we reached the point of digital convergence where all of retail and sales all started migrating online I vividly remember the headlines that if you put your credit card information into a website, you're going to lose your house and, you know, all this crazy talk, you know. So as I was coming around 14, 16 years of age, it was becoming more accepted, the web, digital commerce. I went and did the whole corporate thing, very successful there. But

anyone that's in the corporate world knows how much friction there is to get anything done, whereas the web is very dynamic. So those two worlds don't mix. And certainly my passion did not mix in between all of that. So I've been doing my own thing ever since, building sites, ranking sites, helping clients, SEO agency, link building. So you started a link building. It's called Links That Rank. Yes, Links That Rank. That's just in summer and June, right? Yeah, well, we started building it in 2017.

I originally thought it would be a much simpler business to execute and originally anticipated because there's one thing having internal systems but then taking it external to cater for lots of clients presented various challenges along the way so it's been three years in the making launch in June we're getting some great results for clients and very proud we have an 80% reorder rate so I'm very proud of that it shows that there there's a need for a service that just goes straight down the middle and does a good job and then your main company well matthewwoodward.co.uk i mean that's since 2009 but search logistics is really the seo but you really don't build websites now except for your own

you're just you make them rank, right? Actually, no. I do have an internal team that builds sites. We launch a new site every six to eight weeks, mostly affiliate sites, and we continue that churn. Oh, okay. So you're building your own sites, though. Yeah. Okay, yeah.

So you're probably like Google just probably follows the shit out of you because you i think you probably pull up 20 different types of tools you make the speed go faster you build the foundation there's so many things that you focus on that i feel like most seo companies here's what's funny is i was on the phone with a company and i really respect this company i'm not going to say who it is but the guy said i said the first thing you got to do is build a foundation on seo they do pay-per-click they do google my business and they do the lsa ads you know the local service ads and they you know what he told me he goes yeah seo doesn't work i said i've made living. I've literally made my life in lead generation and through SEO.

I will say this, though. 95% most likely, companies, they don't do anything. They build crappy links. They're charging. I always see this thing on Facebook, $199 for SEO. You get what you pay for, right? Well, I know what you do do and you actually do things that are freaking remarkable the way that you you've learned to do seo i mean look at there's very

few people in the world i think that understanding can do what you guys do so you know i'll get to that i want to interject there it's like anything right if there's a guy that'll install your ac for 200 bucks and it's a guy that'll install it for 800 bucks right the guy that installs it for 200 bucks probably isn't going to pressurize it right he's probably going to put a hole in the wall and he's not going to plaster around it so there's sunlight coming through you know and where's the 800 dude's going to do a great job and it's going to be clean and all the cables are going to be mounted nice and so that kind of applies in SEO as well. And that's why I said you kind of get what you pay for because to do SEO right requires

so many different skill sets. If it's cheap, you know it's wrong. Well, cheap is one thing, but I've seen people paying 10 grand a month and getting $500 worth of stuff. Well, unfortunately, yeah, that is the case as well. And SEO is very confusing for a lot of businesses when they're going out to agencies and things. But all you really need to know is it boils down to three components. Having a good foundation, just like you've got underneath your house.

Build a good foundation, a fast site. Everything should work. It should be pleasant for the visitors. You should have nice content that answers people's problems and then you layer that up with keyword targeted content and link building and those are the three elements to get right and it bemuses me when agencies don't take care of those elements many times they focus on the link building but not on the foundation and then they end up overspending on the link building because you need more links to get the same results as you would have done

with a foundation. So I think that's where a lot of agencies go wrong is they often just take a client's budget and they're just trying to turn it into links as quick as they can because it's take from one hand and push into the other. Whereas when you've got taking care of foundations, that's really manual, labor-intensive, nitty-gritty stuff. That's hard, manual work, and I think that's why some people are shy of that. Well, and I don't think they've got the know-how. When it comes to a good link, I've had you look at a lot of different types of links. I mean, I guess it's no secret.

The secret's out. I work with you, and it's pretty ridiculous, the results. So you used to look at links and be like, this is not the kind of links you wanted. But I did get a lot of good links. I used to be an author for Inc.com, Huffington Post. I used to get all kinds. Those are no follow now, but still I'm getting them. You know, I'm doing a lot of stuff from charity.

I'm doing a lot of stuff. So let me ask you this. How do you create a link company? guess i don't even understand you don't have to give me all the secrets but yeah that does links uh links that rank is there just somebody that's going i know there's tools that go out there and you you communicate with a thousand people a day and you find out if you could pay for play basically. Can I write an article on your website? And so is that so how do you do that? That's essentially it. You come with an order.

You tell us what keyword you want to rank for and then we'll go out and find relevant websites that are willing to place a piece of content that links to your site. That is it in a nutshell. The theory is that a link is a vote. So you're essentially manipulating Google's voting system. But that is all it boils down to is getting one website to link to you. The way we do that is finding relevant websites

that would be interested in publishing a piece of content, usually sweeten that with a bit of a publishing fee. And we manage all of that. The problem is that not every site is a good link. So you've got to know, really know, do I want a link from this site? And I actually did like a 50-minute webinar on how to answer that question step by step for anyone that's interested in it. I'm sure Tommy will link to it, but that's essentially what most link building services are doing. And it's something that you can do in house easily as well. If you're interested in doing that, the webinar will teach you exactly what to look for and how to avoid any problems in doing so.

It's too much work. Honestly, hire somebody. Specialize, specialize, specialize. It's too much work, honestly. Hire somebody. Specialize, specialize, specialize. That's what I said. Yeah, I know people that do this and I used to be like, man, I could have somebody doing this, but why not focus on grassroots? That's what I do. Yeah, well, yeah, yeah. I'm oversimplifying it, you know, for us.

But essentially that's all we're doing. We're placing relevant content on sites that you want to link to you. You know, it's a couple more things I want to talk. I haven't even asked you the questions that I'm supposed to ask. But I can do what I want. But, you know, one day you told me you changed the word on a website and just got a ridiculously badass response. I forgot exactly the story. Oh, OK.

This goes into conversion so you might have remembered in the early 2000s there was a lot of these get a free ipod get a free ipod touch get a free iphone thing and you basically had to refer people 10 people to take up an offer and then you got a free iPod. But I'd mastered that and I was making a lot of money at it. And one of the things that had the biggest difference on the bottom line was changing one word. So it used to say at the top in the headline, get your free iPod touch or get your free iPod

at different sites. So it always started at the same headline, get your free whatever it was. With split testing, we changed it from get your to claim your, and we saw a 40% increase in conversion rate. So the changing that one word had more of an impact on the bottom line than just about anything else that we did. And the reason for that is get your is very passive. You're just kind of like, well, all right, where is it? When do I get it?

Whereas claim your is, all right, I got to take it. I got to claim it, right? So it's more of an action-based headline. And that's why it worked. But simple things, simple tests like that, especially in key areas in headlines or copy on buttons is really interesting areas to test so one of the things too is i told you that in the garage industry and this is same thing for most home services when you search usually the first seo term to come up is either Home Depot, Yelp, Angie's List, Thumbtack. But you said, Tommy, that's a really good thing.

Yeah. Because you said that's because of their homepage domain authority. Yes. So if you got really strong, like we have a really, really strong domain authority, but we also could link to the inner pages and know that we could beat them. So you said it's a good thing. Can you explain that? Yeah. So from a link building perspective, if you now, we've touched a couple of times on tool, you've got this tool and that tool, the best tool for SEO is your eyeballs and your brain, right? Go and do a Google search. And

Google is literally telling you what they want. When you do any search, those search results are an output of the algorithm. That is what Google wants right now. So you can use the power of observation to kind of figure out exactly what it is that Google wants. And with link building in mind, if you find like inner pages from Amazon and Home Depot and Yelp and things. Nine times out of 10, they're going to be ranking because of the authority of the site, the strength of the brand. They're very high. If you're using Ahrefs, they've got a very high domain rating on a scale of zero to 100.

They're usually 80 plus and very high and authoritative. Now, to build that authority takes years. It doesn't just happen, right? It's something that's gradual and happens over time. So how can you possibly compete against someone like Yelp or Home Depot? Well, as well as ranking from the authority of the domain, you can also rank with the authority of the page.

And usually what you'll find if Home Depot are ranking, they're in a page is ranking with either zero links authority of the page. And usually what you'll find if Home Depot are ranking, their inner page is ranking with either zero links or just one or two links. And then you'll often find other people who are of a similar stature to you ranking with maybe five or six links, and they're winning the on-page battle in terms of link building metrics. So when we see those inner pages from big brands, we want to see are they ranking just from the authority of the site? And then are those inner pages ranking with any links? If they're not, and most of the time they're not, you've got a great opportunity. And again, in the webinar, I hope Tommy will will link to it i cover how to review that

and make a decision on can i win this battle and if i can win this battle how many links do i need to win it you know there's an interesting question here it says do you recommend google guarantee for a junk removal business with an average ticket at 275 and i want to ask you it goes into this that right now we've got google guarantee up top then we have seo or two pay-per-click ads then we have the gmbs which now they're adding a sponsored ad in the google my business pages and now then they'll have more three more pay-per-click ads and then already and by the way i recommend google guarantee for everything it's the cheapest by the way, I recommend Google Guarantee for everything. It's the cheapest by far, way cheaper than BBC. So absolutely, if you're doing pay-per-click, do Google Guarantee first.

But it's like they own the whole first page now. And it's almost illegal that it almost seems like disingenuous and their whole morals were to do no evil in the world. And I just feel like maybe all those people retired when they realized that Google is not that anymore. But what are your thoughts when it comes to they own the whole fricking first page with paid? They're trying to own now the listings, the ABC. I just want to hear from your perspective. Okay. So dying or what's the deal? So what we're seeing here obviously is, is Google's main purpose is to serve Google. And that is to make profit. And the increase of ad space and a reduction of organic results is something that's just

happened over the years. Now, there's two ways to get around it. First of all, consumers are savvy, right? They know what's an ad and what's there organically, right? Let's not get confused. Organic results are very rarely organic. They're usually manipulated by people like myself. So the consumer is much more savvy and likes to look at the organic results.

But there are keywords like you describe in terms where the organic results are so far pushed down that you're never going to attract any level of traffic. And if you do, it's not going to make any noticeable difference. So in these cases, what we like to do is we like to attract customers earlier in the buying cycle. Instead of trying to rank for air conditioning repair, we try and rank for how to fix my air conditioner. And creating that problem-solving content is great because it's usually easy to rank. It doesn't have the competition of all these crazy PPC results and local listings and all that crazy stuff. It allows you to establish your expertise as a business because you're demonstrating, number one, we understand what your problem is,

and number two, we know how to fix it, and we're so confident in how to fix it, we can teach other people how to fix it, right? And that kind of content just creates almost a student-teacher relationship psychologically, which just converts, you know. Most people are going to look at that tutorial and think, oh, well, I don't want to do that, but these guys know what they're doing, so I'm going to call them. Right. So I often find businesses, especially in home service, struggle with creating content or writing text-based content. Usually if you're in home service, you're good with these, right? So again, creating that problem based content is great because it lends itself to video. If you're out on a job and you see a common problem, it doesn't take more than two or three minutes to have someone hold a phone and

record you talking through, okay, if you've got this problem, this is what it looks like, this is how you fix it, and just a short video like that. That kind of content you can then repurpose into text and image-based content. So that is how to combat these crazy search results that are just filled with ads. They're essentially trying to, excuse my French, fuck on the first date whereas if you create this problem-based solving content it really creates relationships with people and makes it so much easier to engage people not just in

google but if you do anything on youtube if you're publishing videos on facebook or whatever the social media medium you're using it allows for a much more comprehensive strategy while circumventing the issues of PPC. Yeah. And you know, I'll tell you what, I've noticed that there's some terms that people, that doesn't even pull up the three pack. It doesn't pull up a lot of people to click either. So most terms that start with how or can or when or should those kinds of terms very rarely have any kind of search competition because it requires that someone makes some content that's engaging rather just sending them to a landing page that's looking to convert someone as quick as possible. I noticed, too, there's a little they'll come up with like six common questions with a drop. Yeah. What is that all about? Well, I like to use those to plan out content, whatever it is, whether it's written or video,

Google are literally saying, these are the questions people are asking. So you want to make sure you're answering those in your content. Really the best source in the business to find problem-based content is with your sales staff or the people that are doing the actual hands-on manual labor, the installs. Those guys know the most common questions. They're out there every day on the front line answering those questions. So you can survey those guys and also use that. People also ask for guidance on creating the best kind of content to help you in all of your strategy, not just SEO. You know, right now, tell me a little bit about what you've been up to and what's going on.

And I know I want to hear what COVID's done and your philosophy because I think a lot of people, they lowered their budgets and they really wussied out on that CEO. Last thing you cut when a bad thing happens is your marketing. Yeah. And what actually happened is the first thing to go. Look, COVID was tough on many businesses. Let's not deny it. And there's some businesses that haven't recovered and don't have a path to recovery at the moment. But a lot of the businesses that have an online element, in my opinion, made a mistake when they cut back on

their marketing spend. Originally, when this hit and it first started breaking end of March time, everyone reacted with fear, right? We all did. And how businesses reacted was they cut back marketing spend in fear that people would cut back their actual spend, which isn't what happened in general. From an agency, an SEO agency level, we saw many clients cut back on spend and go on pause. On the flip side, we saw some double down. Now, in fact, I published a case study about two weeks ago showing how a e-commerce site in the sports niche tripled their e-commerce revenue in the sports niche during COVID. And these are one of the businesses that doubled down. Now, why doubling down on SEO in particular was smart is if you're competing in the search results, you have to match or outpace their link building spend or budget or pace, right? So for every

dollar your competitor spends, you've got to spend $1.10. That's a very simple way of looking at it. Let me be clear, right? But it's like that, you know? So when businesses cut back their spend entirely and you double down now, time you spend two dollars you're getting two dollars of benefit whereas before you were only seeing negligible benefits because your competitors are trying to outspend you so those that double down saw significant benefit on top of that covid changed the buying and working behavior of so many people around the globe that we saw a big shift in spending to online. So that meant those that doubled down on SEO were now in the right positions and rankings to take advantage of the people coming flooding into those online sales. Whereas

a lot of businesses that when they were looking at marketing spend, there's PPC spend, which brings generally near instant results, right? SEO is more of a long-term play. So SEO got the initial cut heavier than anything else. But those that stayed solid and doubled down saw the opportunity and benefited greatly, in my opinion. You know, there's so many non-believers in seo that especially in the home service space this is the home service expert podcast i literally think the foundation there's nothing better roi that i could think of other than referrals those really are just asking customers to give you referrals but i just think it's a mistake.

And the weird thing is the people that are listening to this podcast, there's a lot of people now, 25,000 downloads a month. I want that to be 100,000, maybe with your help. But they're listening because they want to better their business. And you know what? They're probably investing in SEO now that they've been listening to this long enough. But what do you say to someone? You know what's funny is when you told me how to kind of there's a lot of checkers out there I've used probably a hundred different ones but you said go to that refs one I can't find anybody that's even a fourth of what we are in any industry in the home service spot and I'm talking about some of them are 500 million dollars that's what's crazy to me and it just is like it's gonna be easy because

they don't they don't realize they spend all this money on tv radio billboards and i've always talked about that they spend a fortune on certain things but they don't they never concentrate and maybe they got the wrong agency maybe they got the wrong person doing it maybe they're spending more money just not getting the right results and. And it's the long game, though. That's the one thing. It's not something that's going to happen overnight. No, no. And you saw that success.

You had a reasonable foundation in place, but you were making a lot of errors as well. And I tend to find that a lot of home service businesses haven't put the foundation work into their site. And their site isn't always representative of the quality of service they provide. Yeah, true. You know, yeah. And a lot of the reason why people fail to see traction with SEO, because you've got to have that foundation, right? You've got to have a foundation that humans love,

that serves your customers, allows them to learn about you you discover who you are and build that relationship with you but you've also got to have it right from a google perspective and the most common issue that we see now anyone listening right you can go on webpagetest.org right now put your home page in let it run after maybe a minute or so it's going to give you results. If on the right hand side, your fully loaded time is more than five seconds, you are leaving money on the table every single day because the knockoff that creates in conversion, most people aren't even going to stay around for five seconds and wait for your site to load. But those that do, the conversion rate is abysmal. And that's one of the things when I say many home service business owners haven't got those foundations right,

even though it would only take a couple of hours, a bit of elbow grease, and next to zero investment to go and fix that. So I think fundamental issues like that are why many businesses fail to get traction. And a lot of agencies just don't pay attention to that kind of thing. Just like there's not many agencies going down the middle and just doing a good job, there's not many home service-based businesses going down the middle and doing a good job of their site either. And I'll tell you this, the ROI in SEO, once it starts to hit, is the best ROI. But people are afraid to spend $2,500 a month.

I think that's your base starting point. And I'm like, that's our entry point. Yeah. That's a fricking fart in the wind. I'm sorry, but that's not a lot of money. You look at an air conditioning company on one unit,

they make three times that literally profit. I mean, that's not a profit if they're making 20% of a $13,000 unit and make it 26 or 26 hundred bucks. But you know, I mean, that's not a profit if they're making 20% of a $13,000 unit. They're making $2,600. But, you know, I just really think $2,500, and I'm a little bit, you know, I'm spoiled now. Because when I started the business, $2,500 would have broke me. But we're talking 2007 here. But I think it's a shame that people look at that and they go,

but they're very testy. I want to tell you that the people with SEO want overnight results. I look at websites. How many websites do you think I've sent you? And I'm like, is this company worth even buying? And then once they had never been touched and I'm like, this isn't even an asset. Like, what would be nice? 15 calls a day from your website. Those are free leads. Now you've got a reason for me to buy you. Now you've got an asset that I want to buy. I want your website because it gives me 15 leads.

I want those 500 reviews. I've talked to a lot of private equity companies. And they're like the one thing we look at as the Google rating when we're looking at a home service company. How many reviews, average reviews, how many free phone calls? All these things matter. I want to shift a little bit here because COVID-19, they did a massive update on Google's core algorithm. And you're very familiar with all the updates,

and you watch rankings, and you have all your own test sites. You've got a million things. What I love is i'm a garage door guy that can fix garage doors now my managers can't but i can i don't know what i'm talking about you know what a lot of advertising agencies that they'll sell you anything they want tv radio billboards google they'll do uh you know banner ads they'll do all this crap the facebook they're not any good at any of them. So I was like, you're a technician to an entrepreneur like me.

So you understand this stuff. And that's what I love so much. And that's why it's an honor to have you on the podcast. So let me ask you, there are updates. Sometimes they go down, but you told me under your guidance, most of the time, your sites go off because you do things the right way. down, but you told me under your guidance, most of the time your sites go off because you do things the right way. What are

your thoughts about when Google, I've seen people literally lose their business. What did they do? They took JC Penny off when like this was like, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they were doing bad things, right? They were. So we touched on it on a few points there. Now, a lot of businesses are hesitant to spend on SEO because it is a long-term game, but also many have been burned before, right? So it's hesitant to commit that kind of budget when you've been burned. Also, many SEO agencies are going to lock

you into a 12-month contract. So that means whether you're happy or not, you're screwed. And I swear to God, right? That is the business model of most SEO agencies to lock you into a 12 month contract. And that's it do that is they don't need us anymore. Because once you've got the foundation right, once you're creating content and you're building links, eventually we make ourselves irrelevant because you've built that foundation, you've built that authority, and you're there for the long term. We build ourselves to irrelevance, right? So for me, that's a major warning sign. If you, if you consider in any SEO agency, if they're locking you into a 12 month contract, it's an issue. We have a minimum four month contract. Why? Because in the first three months we take care of all of that foundation stuff. It's manual labor intensive stuff, right? And after those three months, we've then got a month for Google to digest everything

and start showing that traction. Honestly, if after four months, you're not seeing positive traction from your SEO agency or freelance or whoever it is, it's time to go, right? So that's why our contract's four months. If we don't perform, we get chopped. So we have no option but to deliver. In terms of Google updates, look, nobody is invincible. No one knows what Google's going to do. But what we have seen in general over the years is Google now wants to see more accountability. They want to know that the sites that they are ranking are real businesses, real people. It's all very much about trust, right? Google wants a searcher to find solutions to their problems, not scams.

They don't want them to find places to get ripped off or misguided or misled or missold, right? So trust is a much bigger part of the algorithm now than it was five years ago. You see a lot less kind of anonymous spammy sites or affiliate sites and things ranking now. Very popular in the local SEO was rank and rent strategy. You'd build a site to the top and then rent out the spots to services and stuff. You see a lot less of those sites in the search results right now. Most people that get hit by Google updates, though, they've been driving with the check engine light on for a while. You know what I mean?

Like check engine light has been on for six months and then the car breaks down and you're surprised about it right one of the check engine lights to look for right now we already touched on site speed web page test org put your home page in if after the it loads a fully loaded time at the ends more than 20 seconds your check engine light is on if it's more than five seconds your check engine light is on you need to pay attention to that why site speed is already a ranking factor for google we know that it's also a ranking factor for customers it has a direct impact on your bottom line on conversion on average order value but most importantly google

quite kindly let us know that in May, there's going to be another update based on site speed and a new set of metrics called Core Web Vitals. Now, any of the more savvy listeners will have Google Search Console set up for their site. If you have, log into Google Search Console. On the left side, you'll see the Core Web Vitals report. If your URLs are rated as poor, especially on mobile, your check engine light is smoking, right? So most of the time, sites get penalized because they've got lazy, because they've taken shortcuts. And that's because once you're enjoying the benefits of growing search traffic, it's easy to become ignorant of that check engine light, right?

So it is very important that you pay attention to SEO and you make sure that whoever's doing it and the agency that's doing it are taking care of those basic fundamental things. And site speed is one of the biggest issues we see. I don't think I've ever seen a site that didn't have that issue when it came to us. So that's an easy check. Yeah, you told me we shit the bed pretty bad. It was hard. It took a while to beat it up.

But hey, it's getting there. What are some of the ways entrepreneurs can get their online business back on track? I mean, without spending a bunch of money, and you gave us a guide, the Quick Win SEO guide, and we're going to go into it. But what do you teach us in the Quick Win SEO guide? What is do you teach us in the quick win SEO guide? What is that domain, by the way? Okay, look, there's two ways that you can get back on track. If you have zero budget, you can use what I call a quick win SEO process. It's the process we teach to our new junior SEOs. And we like it because anyone can pick it up and learn it. Anyone can integrate it. It costs absolutely nothing and you tend to see results

within a few weeks of integrating it. So we like to give it to our junior SEOs because it allows them to own a win early on, which is great for morale and bringing them into the team. But also for small business owners, you can just pick this up run through it apply it in an afternoon and it costs nothing you will see benefits from that if you've got a bit more budget I have a course called 90dayseo.com here at 90dayseo.com and that's something that anyone can pick up again regardless of experience and run through so depending where you are as a in the business I wouldn't ever recommend you as a business owner doing that unless you're really bootstrapping things and

you're running hardcore but you can pull any young junior anyone fresh out of college any student there's so many people out of work right now that you could just enroll them to the course, have them drive your SEO for you step by step, and that would take care of everything, foundation content, links, step by step. So they're the two things, if you're struggling with budget right now, if you've got nothing and you've got nothing but elbow grease, hit the quick win SEO process, that will see you right.

Otherwise, signing up to the course and having a junior run through it will get you on track with your SEO. You know, I think a lot of people are probably thinking, what does $2,500 do? And I want to take a stab at this one real quick, and then you could elaborate. But without knowing the industry, the competition, I like to look at pay-per-click and understand that if

people are bidding $100 per keyword for the top searches, it's probably going to be a little bit more competitive in that market. But also, I don't think you say, I'm going to get you 25 leads a day with $2,500 within four months. Now, you will say, I will improve things, but you're not Nostradamus over here. So what is your answer to that? If they say, look, I'm in a pretty competitive market, for example, we've got a junk hauler, you know, he's asking himself, look, $2,500 at four months, you say that's 10 grand. What does that look like? And it depends on the market too. And I understand that, but what is your answer when people ask? And I'm sure they ask you all the time.

Well, the starting point, and you might tell you're going to need $3,400. I mean, you definitely tell them what you think is going to move the needle, right? Yeah, of course. Now, it's near on impossible to give hard numbers. There's no one on the planet that can do that. And if you're engaged with an SEO agency or thinking about engaging with an SEO agency that makes specific promises and makes we're going to be here with your search traffic and things like that, they can't make those promises. There's not a person on this planet that can ethically or morally make those promises. They're outright lies but what you can do is you can gauge what the competition are doing

where they are right now how much traffic they're getting and estimate a conversion rate and then see where you are in comparison to them and design a strategy that bridges that gap that either brings you in line with them or exceeding them and And from there, you can make some rough estimations about anticipated amounts of traffic and leads. But that's all they are. They're anticipations at best. You can't get into specific guarantees and promises with SEO because there isn't. All you can do is follow all of the best principles, make sure that you're giving Google everything it wants and you're exceeding the competition. And that is just about monthly budget. Obviously, the higher the monthly budget

allows you to get more done in any one month, right? Now, different niches have different levels of competitiveness and also different levels of value per lead, right? Now, different niches have different levels of competitiveness and also different levels of value per lead, right? So that also affects the competitiveness of the search result and then also the budget required to compete. So all of these things are very much dependent on niche and where you are in your journey and where your competitors are in their journey. So what we're noticing now is a lot of people are spending more time online with COVID.

They're not leaving their houses as much. Yeah. Tell me what, are the buying decisions changing now? And will it be permanent? What have you seen with that? Well, before COVID, we were moving more towards an online world, right? When's the last time anyone picked up a physical copy of the yellow pages to find help, right?

Especially if you're under 50. Do they even still deliver those things? I don't know. They do. They do. In Albuquerque. Right? So before COVID, we've always seen this transition into the digital world.

And more and more, we're seeing devices becoming easier to access, right? The latest developments in smartphones and tablets and everything the last few years. And also voice search is having an impact. So before COVID, we were already going in a very specific direction. No one's watching TV ads. They're looking at their phone, right? No one's looking at billboards when they're driving. They're looking at their phone, right? So all of this for me is we're seeing a transition that was now accelerated by COVID. Before, there were people specifically in older generations that might have relied on making in-person appointments or phone calls and things like that, that now through various other

means, whether it be medical requirements, making appointments, or other areas of their life, have been trained to use online means. It's unlikely those people are going to go back. Once you pop that cherry, right? Once you know how easy it is to do things online you don't go back so covid has very much been gasoline on the fire in that change in not just buying behavior but also working culture it's completely changed i don't see that we're gonna go back certainly if businesses have been working with their workforce remotely and seen the benefits of the savings and everything else we're just not going to go back so in the new normal whatever that is is rooted in online you know what it's

something interesting I hope I listen to this in like 10 years but interestingly enough I was on the phone with one of my consultants that helps me a lot with investments, trusts. We're working on a Delaware corporation, shell company for intellectual property, all kinds of stuff, new tax regulation laws. We did a cost segregation study on three of my buildings. I love learning. Anyway, we were talking about bitcoin cryptocurrency and it's running because guess who's now accepting it who it's a paypal called paypal yeah yeah yeah when we're talking about these changes the writing was on the wall for me to get invested in zoom when covet happened you knew the number one face-to-face broadcast software

was going to go through the roof. I was watching Kramer the other day, and his number one pick was Zoom. And I'm like, I knew it. So I'm sitting here going, they're coming up with ATM machines for crypto, specifically Bitcoin. They're coming out.

Yeah, I've got a photo of a Bitcoin ATM in a London Underground station from like 2016. See, this is funny because I'm telling you, some people are like crypto, it's crazy, that's never going to happen. And I'm like, if I want

to come visit you in Costa Rica and I want to bring 100 grand, I'm not carrying cash. I'm just using my crypto. And guess what? It comes out like cash and it just using my crypto i mean it's good and guess what it comes out like cash and it's untraceable and it's secure still you know we're talking about technology and everything that's happening right now and i've got a few different wallets for it and i've got a lot of money put into it but not not anything that if it went away it would hurt necessarily but it's kind of fun to watch because it's at 18 000 it ran from 12. i love watching it

and i think it's going to continue to run but do not take investing advice from me nobody both tesla and etsy have been very kind to me this year i miss zoom i also failed to make the observation that you made, but Etsy, I got in front of that one. Yeah. You know what? It's a Warren Buffett model of you don't need a lot of stock. You need to understand the stock. You need to understand the leadership. And as long as you understand it, and I understand one thing, I couldn't tell you how to write the algorithm for crypto. Of course not. But I do understand the theory behind it. I couldn't tell you how to write the algorithm for crypto. Of course not. But I do understand the theory behind it. I understand that it's untraceable. I understand that people

are transferring money through it. And I don't think it's going to go away. And they're saying big governments. Well, right now there's something going on. And this is the last thing I'm going to say about crypto is the banks, they're starting to invest in these. And when you get the investments that are starting to happen, you're going to see runs. It's called institutional buying. Yeah, I think that high-ranking government officials and such have all the motivation they need for high-value anonymous transactions. Now you're thinking. You want all your backdoor payments and you dodgy backdoor deals and

everything that you're all up to. Well, welcome to Bitcoin. You know, it's interesting too, I was talking to him and my CPA the other day that a couple of guys, I was on the phone with it in January. I'm headed out to Puerto Rico and I might locate there for half the year.

Nice. Or for the next five, six years. And the thing is, is the dollar goes a long way. It's not a bad place to live. There's more Walmarts per capita than anywhere in the US. And I pay zero taxes when I live there. Zero taxes. As long as I set it up correctly, it's the best tax move you could ever make. So I just want to go visit, see what I think of it. You're in Costa Rica. And the reason why you told me

you were in Costa Rica, as you said, you wake up in England and no one smiles. No one's nice. People here are nice. It's a really weird concept, but people are just nice.

They're happy. Simple things like you go by the groceries when you're checking out. Hey, how you doing? And just that simple human conversation. You go do that in England. People look at you like, what? Why are you talking to me? Go away.

It's just a very open and friendly people here i haven't found it anywhere else in the world so didn't you guys just have a big hurricane you said two two yeah yeah we didn't get hit very hard yeah eater and eater got us harder and we had iota this week which was a little tickling comparison. So a lot of people go, it's so funny because you see the guys that are super digitally advanced like yourself. And I remember going to a convention with Matt Diggity in Thailand two years ago, really. But it's just interesting.

I think you guys know each other pretty well, probably. Yeah, Diggity's great, yeah. It's just funny, and all these guys know each other, and it's just a small world but you know you you told us you three times your e-commerce revenue in the sports niche so you just you just focused on high-end link building is that it uh no in that particular case study and we published the case study i'm sure you'll link to it fact, if you hit matthewwoodward.co.uk homepage, you can find it probably listed on the homepage right now. But that was mostly achieved by, first of all,

getting the fundamentals right, getting site speed right, making sure everything's working, the basics. We consider it basics, but so many people skip over the basics in pursuit of link building. But that was mostly just by getting the three fundamentals right, getting the foundation built that humans love and Google loves, then building that problem solving content that attracts leads and converts them. And then on top of that, the link building. That is how we approach just about everything that we do and in that case that's what we did there's so many questions I haven't got to yet so I'm just gonna go through it you can jump in putting this together I got to say Gianni and Anna they work

hard to make this super successful so you said there's three things the foundation which nobody really does link building building, which we've talked a lot about. But I'm telling you, I'm such a big fan of content. In fact, I have way too much content of the same. We shrunk down the site to let the homepage get more link juice. But I also want to build. Tell me that this is a good idea. And I thought it was a good idea. But the manufacturing sites, their distribution,

they don't really focus on SEO because, like, I don't think that Sony necessarily – they sell through Best Buy and other places, so they don't need to rank as much because they're not going to the end user. Maybe they will soon. But as far as SEO goes, so the main distribution of garage doors, they don't do a lot of SEO. So I think I can outrank if someone searches for a Classica Aymar garage door.

We can rank number one, but we could also, when any other garage door company leaves a quote for that, and we rank when the customer goes to look at the images, and we have something that's clever. So there's the blue section, and then there's the subsection i forget that hyper what is that called hyper texture you know when you do a search into the title of it oh yeah just a title link title tag or whatever yeah so if we put something really good there we rank there's a lot of content i'm just saying is there really ever a time that you're like we're out of content we can't write any more content eventually you will run out of topics to cover even in seo which is an ever-changing niche i've run out of topics to cover on my own

seo blog so now i'm just tearing people's sights apart doing audits and putting together strategies so people can kind of learn over my shoulder the implementation. But in general, I find home service sites are weak on content. You're not. You have the opposite problem, but you recognize a value in creating content and you do it very well at scale. For most small businesses, we touched on it earlier that really the easiest way to create content is just record a video of you solving customers' problems and then have someone turn that into a text and image-based tutorial. You can use a video across YouTube, Facebook, and so many different areas. And that circumvents all of these problems when you're trying to rank for head terms like air conditioning repair right whereas if you rank for how to repair an air conditioner you don't have all of these this

crazy competition so content you know is the digital salesman if you ever walked into an apple store that annoying person that greets you and connects your problems to a solution. That is the content, right, in your digital website. And many home services sites are lacking that connecting people's problems to the service. You know, I used to, and it still works, but the tool doesn't. You've got to have the tool still, and there's a Fiverr gig. But I used to take videos, and there was video syndication tools. One of them was called Traffic Dizer. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And I used to rank this video for every search term. You go down to YouTube and you scroll and it's all the same. And it still works. And it's syndicating. It goes on Vimeo and like 10 other sites. And the thing is, they all point back to YouTube. So they're building links through video syndication tools. And I think video, and we've talked a lot about YouTube as well,

because YouTube, they're called the FAQs. Give your customers 10 FAQs with videos. Make sure the keywords are right, the tagging's right, the title's right. Make sure you do some searches on the right title to use and what people are really searching and it's amazing how much traffic you get from youtube to your website yeah and what are people searching for go ask your sales staff go ask the installers they know or you could go on google um yeah you can do research with google keyword research but that only tells you a search volume you want to

know from the customer point of view what the problem is what the pain point is what the stresses are what the real specifics are that you need to cover when that you wouldn't learn just looking at keyword research and anyone listening right now if you haven't got a content strategy you can literally create one in five minutes just send an email to your sales staff and your installers asking them, what are the most common questions and problems you see? And those replies are your content strategy for social and for SEO. You know, in 2008, 2009, my old partner said, dude, I said,

do you know how many questions I get a day? I wish I knew how to do my own Springs, but I went online and it just looked dangerous. After the 25th time, I said, I think I should start an e-commerce garage spring website. And everybody thought I was crazy. And you're doing some work on that for me. But I mean, there was a time where I was paying myself six figures. I've kind of not had time to focus on that but six figures and it was a set it and forget it type thing because i was fulfilling a need

well i think we'll get back up there by a few months from now i think i get back to that but it's crazy because the smartest thing you could do is be the industry leader the reason you're you told us your strategy earlier and then you're doing it to us. It's going, hey, I'm the teacher. Come get taught. And then maybe because I'm the master. It's a demonstration of expertise, which is the ultimate sales tool. Because there's people that can talk and there's people that can show. And when you're creating videos and you're demonstrating expertise, you're showing.

You're not talking. And people listen to actions, especially in this world right now. Actions speak louder than words, more than you ever have done in all of human history right now. And like you say, you are answering the same question 25 times. Once you've created a video, you can answer the same question 1,000 times. And it's just done automatically.

So there's a thing called the Home Link on your car.'s got a little house and it's it's hard to program and i got sick of it so i made a video about it my technician called me up he's like dude let me tell you something crazy i was having problems programming the home link so i looked it up on youtube and there you were freaking eight years ago programming it and it's got 700,000 views. And I'm like, it's 700,000. It is, you know,

some people might say that's good. Some people not, I mean, I've got videos with 2 million. Yeah. I'm like, it's just funny to me that, cause I realized that a long time ago.

And this is when I made these videos way before camera falls. This is when I had a little card in the camera yeah like a little handheld like oh yeah yeah weight 30 kilos so i'm just i'm going to ask you a couple last questions here and i know you don't feel good so once again i thank you so much for doing this we'll probably end up building some type of other page that maybe you could help these guys out. We can post it on the page of something extra for our listeners. But do you have any tips in creating an effective marketing strategy on a limited budget? Yeah. Now, all of everything I do in marketing

is rooted in helping people. The content strategy that we've talked about is rooted in identifying people's problems and helping them solve that if you have a limited budget there's no better way to go and start building business by helping people and even if you don't make much money on on it initially the referrals will come and it'll build from there and i'm a big believer in good karma coming back round helping people can just mean that depending what service you're in you just go knock on doors and offer some kind of free inspection or it can mean creating a videos like we've spoken when there's common problems that you hear from your niche those common

complaints in whatever your service is, you know? So if you're on that limited budget, just think about how can I use the tools I have right now to help people solve the problems. And over time, the money will just come. And that's how you find a niche. If you find a problem, like my buddy, oh, man, you're going to help him out soon, too. But he's building a separate websites. They suck. And I'm like, you found a problem, though. And it's a good one. He found out that pools, when they leak, he created special tools to find the leaks and save people a ton of money on their water bill.

I know a buddy that paid for his pool to be like the water, like three times he went through it and it still leaked. And in the end they have to rip the whole thing out and rebuild it from scratch. It's interesting. It's great stuff. It's so fun to learn this stuff. This has been one of the podcasts that I think I will refer to everybody

because it's so educational. I think there's so many things. We talk a lot about strategy and marketing and booking phone calls, but this is like your website, your calling card. Everybody goes from anything and they say, let's look at the website. Let's see what these guys are all about.

Let's see what their story is. Let's see if there's reviews online. So, you know, we're going to be given a bonus downloadable summary of the key takeaways. You go to homeserviceexpert.com forward slash podcast forward slash Matthew dash Woodward dash 2020. What I'm going to probably do is have Gianni go to

homeserviceexpert.com forward slash Matthew, and that'll be it because I think that'd be a lot easier to make a quicker one. But anyways, I always want to do a couple of things. First of all, if someone wants to get a hold of you, how do they reach out first of all? The best way is through my blog, matthewwoodward.co.uk. On there, you can find the contact page and you can grab me through there the easiest way. Okay.

And secondly, what are some good books maybe that we need to be reading? It could be, you seem like you're pretty philosophical. I don't know why I think that, but you live in Costa Rica. So is there anything good that you recommend? It could be just a good reader, something good for the soul, or maybe something that'll get us smart overnight. What is a good couple of books that you recommend? Yeah, I'm not philosophical, but I am pragmatic. You know, I like dogs and algorithms. So in terms of a good read, it's a classic. And it's one that I've, the only book I've ever read more than once.

And that is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. And it's something I first read early teens, maybe when I was 12 or something. And I've read it several times since. And each time I take something new from it. And it's also a point of reflection where I'm like, oh, yeah, I'm doing that now. That happened. Right. So each time it's something I get something from. It's a kind of a cliche recommendation.

It's offered me so much value i don't care it's cliche good book i just read it probably not less than a year ago and it was talking about men's sex appetite it's funny in the book they mentioned this saying that it starts to go away in your 40s. Not go away completely, but that's when you start to make money because you're so distracted in your 20s and 30s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it teaches you a very positive mind and everything that you think about, everything that you can conceive in your mind you can achieve, right? And really removing the limits and teaching you that

whatever you want to achieve in life is a decision like i'm going to do that whatever it is like i'm going to build a 10 million dollar business it's just a decision and that book is very empowering in that respect i wanted to show you i got a couple of these made so it's kind of like an affirmation thing, but I have fun with it. It's just to see it every day. And it helps to read it and believe it and know it. And the last thing I'll do is this is fun. We might've not covered something.

Maybe there's something we left out. Maybe there's just a message you want to tell everybody, but I asked a lot of questions that kind of just asked everything I wanted. I'll give you a few minutes to kind of have one last final thought and close this out. Okay. We touched on it earlier, actually, and might have even closed the last podcast review with this. But the power of observation, highly underutilized in SEO, highly underutilized in general life. You can learn so much just by shutting your mouth and

sitting back and observing. Once you've made the decision where you want to be in life, whatever you want to achieve, find those people that have achieved it and observe them. Don't listen to the idiots that have sold their dreams away for $15 an hour. Observe the people that have seen success. Observe the people that have been down the roads that you intend to travel down, learn from their mistakes, right? There's no better way to learn than making mistakes, right? But if you can also learn from other people's mistakes, that means you don't have to take the same hard path. And all of that for me is just sitting back, power of observation, and watching. A lot of what I've learned about sales and marketing is just sit back, power of observation and watching. You know, a lot of what I've learned about sales and marketing is just sit in a restaurant and just look around.

Like, just watch people. Why did they sit there? Why did they go there? Like, just observe. And you can learn so much from that. I think it's very undervalued. And for sure, when I walk down the street, I see a completely different world

than when anyone else walks down the street just because I'm so attuned to observation. And I think that will be my closing thought. The power of observation underutilized in general life, in business, and really underutilized in SEO. Well, Matt, I appreciate you very much. I really think there's so many people that do SEO and you're by far. I mean, I first was into your blog and I get the updates all the time and then I got to meet you and I'm fortunate that we crossed paths because I think it's my goal. So I appreciate you coming on. This has been super valuable and I'll probably be talking to you sometime next week. Thank you for everything you do, brother. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me on. And thanks to everyone listening. Again, you need any help, reach out and ask me a question. I'm here to help the stupid questions are the ones you don't ask. Right. So thank you very much. Feel better. I really appreciate it. Yeah. I feel a bit better now we got into it, you know, so

thanks for coming on and hopefully you feel better tonight. Thank you. Bye-bye. Hey guys, I just wanted to thank you real quick for listening to the podcast. From the bottom of my heart, it 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 life season further. So thank you once again for listening to the podcast. I really appreciate it.