Doing SEO is Not The Answer To Grow This HVAC Company

If you're in an extremely competitive market and you do H Vac services, electrical, plumbing, or there's some really big players in your market. This video we're going to go through what you need to do because SEO is not going to help your business. And this was a meeting that I was on yesterday and I was talking with a business owner and I laid it out exactly for him. We actually work with a company that they're an extremely competitive market and they're up double year over year. And I'm going to share those strategies of what we do in this video. My name is Silverisher. I was recently on the Jobber podcast and we were talking about new leads, more customers, higher rankings, optimizing your website. So when it comes to SEO, I mean, I believe in SEO, but when you're in a competitive market and there's really big players in your space, it can be hard. If you're just starting SEO and they've been doing it for 10 years for you to pay a SEO company and realistically think that you're going to get results within 12 months or two years. And that's exactly what happened to this company. So met with this company Yesterday, they have 431 Google reviews, which to most people is like, wow, this is great. And I think that it is a good starting point. However, in Edmonton, they're in Canada. When I just did this search for H vac Edmonton, you can see that the big players in the area have 3,000, 3,000, 5,000 reviews. It doesn't matter if they were to, Even if they 10x the number of reviews that they have, they're still going to be competing with some of these mega players. So you could sit here and say, hey, get more reviews, you know, change your thing to H Vac contractor, be in business for longer. There's so many other things that you could tell them to do, but it's not going to help them rank here. And they're literally located in Edmonton as well. So from a Google Business Profile perspective, they're like, well, what do we do? Probably some people may feel that way as well. And we're going to talk about some of the things that you can do and it's unfortunately you're not going to be able to get into this section, the next part. So this is your off site SEO. This is your Google Business profile, getting reviews, cleaning up your citations, your name, address and phone number. Basic things that we talk about on this channel to help with the rankings here. The next thing is on site SEO and this is optimizing your website for local SEO. I share videos about auditing your site, going through your title Tag meta description H1 and how you can optimize for local SEO. But when you're in a big market like this, all these companies have optimized for local SEO and for you to come in. And his website's even optimized for local SEO. So we look at his website here, his title tag, Edmonton H Vac. His meta description, Edmonton H Vac. His H1 Edmonton H Vac contractor. So and across his site it's pretty much optimized for the most part for this keyword. He's paid SEO companies for the past three years to optimize his stuff and they've been doing it, but it hasn't turned into anything from what he can see. So the first thing that I told him was you need to come up with some type of way to track your rankings. So I've shared videos about how you can track your SEO rankings, but you could use a tool like SEMrush Bright Local Ahrefs. We use it Bright Local. We build a list of all the keywords that we want to rank for and then every week we're plotting them to see how we're ranking. Because there is an SEO strategy that I'll share with you in a second but, but you want to make sure that you're keeping track of your ranking. So that way it's not just a feeling of if you think this is working or not, but you can actually see real results. So anyways, the title tags, meta descriptions are all optimized for all these businesses. So it's going to be extremely hard to just say like, hey, you know, go through and optimize again or whatever. So what are some things that you can do? The first thing is over here I went down and scrolled down and they have cities that they serve. So these specific cities, they don't have service area pages, which we talked about on this channel and service area page. These are all the sub communities around you that are not Edmonton, that maybe these bigger companies don't go that wide or they don't want to service out here in Tofield, for example. So he has this landing page for H Vac near me. But ideally this should be H Vac service in Tofield and it should be all built out for Toefield. And these are called service area pages, which these do help. Because a lot of times bigger companies, they don't want to go out to the suburbs, they want to Stay compact. It also, if they're not doing this strategy, it gives you a leg up on them to hit a lot of these things. So Toefield Morinville, every month you should be doing one or two of these and really be pushing to get your service, your service area like around you in a map. That's one SEO strategy. I'm not saying that that's going to be the holy grail. The other two pillars that we talked about, which would be game changers for his business, especially with H Vac, plumbing, electrical, and really any other home service type of business that can cross sell services. I'm going to just pull this up. There's three real pillars over here and a lot of times people get stuck on creating visibility, which of course we want new customers coming into the funnel. But when we look at conversions, one of the things that came up on the call with him was, hey, what's your booking rate? His booking rate was 50%. He does H Vac service, his booking rate was 50%. What that tells me is that usually your booking rate, especially in H Vac, these demand trades, if you're charging a dispatch fee to go out there, it should be like 70, 80%. There's no reason why you should be at 50% booking rate. So based off my understanding is that if you're at 50%, you need to work with your CSR team to increase your booking rate to 70%. That's a 20% growth in jobs booked, which then should attribute to 20% in revenue growth as well. So when we look at this conversion funnel, what are some ways that you can use digital marketing and automation to streamline this process? Anybody that calls your business should go into some type of a lead nurture sequence. Anyone that fills out a form should go into a lead nurture sequence. A lot of times people don't have a lead problem, they have a lead management problem. Same thing with your estimates. So one of the strategies that I discussed, I shared at the beginning of this video. We have a H Vac contractor that we work with is up literally double year over year. And they're an extremely competitive market. One of their competitors has 10,000 Google reviews. Literally one of the big things that they started doing was when their technicians went out for service calls. They incentivize them to do a whole home inspection. So check out their tankless water heater or their hot water heater and ask if they're interested in tankless. See if they have any hot or cold rooms in their house and give them an estimate for ductless units, service contracts, any other big generators, any other bigger ticket items, just give them an estimate. Say, hey, I'm not saying you have to do this by any means, but I wanted to give you this estimate so that way you have it in your hand because this will solve your problem, or this would help with X, Y and Z. Then you can put them into an estimate follow up process. You don't want to be annoying, but you also want to be like, hey, did you get a chance to look at this estimate? Do you have any questions? And you can also have one of your CSRs responsible for calling these people and just touching based on the estimates to see if they wanted to move forward or if they had any questions that you could have, someone give them a call to discuss this estimate. What happens is you increase your estimate volume before your service guys are going out there, maybe have comfort consultants that are coming in for new systems and hopefully they're passing leads back and forth. Now when you go in for a service call, you're going to get like, you know, five proposals out of this that then now they can follow up and talk and communicate without having to go on site necessarily. So it increases your estimate volume, which would just naturally increase the number of estimates that you close, which would get you to a sale. So basically the gist of it here is to have automation sequence built out so that way when you get a lead, you can follow up on it. When you do an estimate, you can follow up on it and then get to a sale. And also when you are looking at your booking rate, this should be like 70, 80% the next one, which is an absolute home run. I talked to this business again. They weren't doing any retargeting for their past customers. I don't know how long they've been in business, but if you've been in business for 5, 10, 20, 30 years, you probably have about 10, 15, 20,000 people sitting here that are ready to work with you. And what you need to do is to retarget them to bring them back into your funnel via email, newsletters, text message, marketing. You can't get a lifetime value without a lifetime relationship is the saying that we have. And that's why it's so important to stay top of mind with your customers, cross sell other services. You know, you get the gist of it. If it's fall, fall inspections, spring, spring inspections, even they don't have service contracts, they should be doing this as well. So this is a basic funnel. And here's the beauty of it. This right here, this circle, especially if you have service contracts or if it's like routine maintenance type of things, this right here will continue to spin. This can support a $500,000 business, million dollar business, $2 million business, $10 million, $20 million. And this right here is fuel on the fire. A lot of times people get so caught up in this section here that they forget about this whole thing. Spinning and maintaining the business and then adding new things on. And so, yes, we want more visibility. Is SEO going to be the answer in this situation? Probably not. You do want to do it, but it's not going to be the thing that moves the needle. Is running ads going to help? Google local service ads, Google search ads, competing on cost per click. Is it going to help? Sure. Is it the answer? Probably not. Because all these competitors are doing the same exact stuff. And people might say, here's a really important one. People might say, okay, well, I'm just starting out, like, what do I do? Because I don't have any customers to retarget. I don't have any leads coming in to go through this funnel. And this is where you have to beat these people at what they can't do, which is something that's not scalable, which is being boots on the ground, going to B2B networking or business to business networking groups, building B2B relationships, doing BNIs, doing chambers of commerce, going to where the people are and building relationships so that you can get referrals. That's very hard to scale for a lot of these businesses. So you have to beat them at the unscalable processes. And it's very hard for a lot of people because they watch videos or they hear you got to do SEO, you got to do ads, and they're in these competitive markets, and that's not going to work for them because there's these huge Goliath companies that are competing against them. Now, if you're in a sub market and there's areas of opportunity for this, then of course, you know, you should be doing all this stuff. This is what we do. We help companies with this, but we also do all this other stuff to help companies that are, you know, 1 million get to 3 million, 2 million get to 5 million, 5 million get to 7 million, and all this stuff has to happen. But a lot of times people get stuck over here, especially when they're starting out, because you're competing against people that have been doing this for 10, 20 years and you feel stuck. So you got to do the things that are not scalable. Hopefully this video was helpful. If you like content like this, be sure to hit like and subscribe. We'll see you in the next video.