Generate Lawn Care Leads with Google Local Service Ads - Setup + Marketing Tips

If you're a lawn care company and you're looking to get leads, in this video, I'm going to show you the best way to get inexpensive leads straight from Google. And no, this is not clickbait. This is a real strategy that we use for companies that we work with. And more importantly, we have prospecting calls and we walk people through this framework. It's more about execution and actually doing this stuff that's going to get you the leads. It's not rocket science. And in this video, I'm going to show you how to do it. All right, on this channel, we talk about growing local service businesses and we use this funnel. There's really three ways to help when there's levers of growing your business. You can get more visibility. So you can do SEO, you can run ads. We're going to talk about running ads specifically. And it's not the type of ads that you think. They're called Google local service ads. And I'm going to show you how to set all this up and why it's so important for you. Social media referrals, direct mail prospect call, business to business. Obviously you can do a bunch of stuff, get visibility. You can drive traffic to your website or landing page or something and have them turn into a lead and ultimately get to a sale. The other thing you can do is retargeting so all your past prospects and customers, you can reach out to them and have them come back into your funnel. For this instance, we're only talking about generating new customers and we're looking at the most cost effective way to get leads. So if you're thinking about doing anything, start with this one because it's going to be the most cost effective way to get leads for your business. All right, so what you want to do, and this is for lawn care landscaping companies, but it really is for any business is you want to go to Google, you want to search for your service in your area, wherever you're located. So this is actually a prospect call that we had and we just ran this. They are targeting the Tulsa area, but they're located out here in one of this smaller cities outside of Tulsa. So the first thing we did is we said, okay, let's look at the service in the city that they're actually physically located in. And you can see here, these are your Google local service ads. So what this means is that TruGreen, which we all know, Trugreen, they're running Google local service ads and they are doing this thing where it's called a Cost per lead model. And we're going to look at what the cost is per lead. But really what you want to do is analyze your current market. So when you run this and for lawn care companies, every single time, it's pretty much a home run, because most lawn care companies are not doing this. And so you can see that this person is Google guaranteed. This company's not even Google guaranteed. It's another company that ranks down here on your organic pack, and Google is showing them inside of here. So if we click on this, that green, Google guaranteed, there's only one company, and that's true green, and they're trash. And so for your lawn care company, what you want to do is set up a Google business profile. And you can see this by looking at this. And get more than your competitors in reviews. Get more reviews than your competitors. So they have 39 reviews, and this company has 43 reviews. So if you don't have 40 or 50 people that would refer you to this could be friends, family, people that have user services in the past, employees, happy customers, happy prospects, have them leave you reviews and then get more reviews than the highest person. So in this specific instance in ClareMore, they have 43 reviews. So get more than that because Google wants to show really good businesses in this section and then get Google guaranteed. So what this looks like is under Google Local service ads. You can go to your cost here and you can put in your zip code and you can say for one lead for lawn care, and it's going to tell you how much a lead is going to cost you. So what this means is you could set your budget as $500 and it only is going to charge you per lead that you get. So if you set your budget at $260 and it gets you 10 leads, that's the only time you're going to pay $260 at $26 a lead, for example, but you're going to definitely get leads out of it, which is why this is the best model for getting leads. But also if you're going to benchmark yourself, like let's say you're going to run Facebook ads, or you're going to try Angie or Thumbtack or any of these other platforms. Well, is there cost per lead less than this or more than this? Right. So if you're going to pay $500 for something, this is a way that you could just pay Google to get leads if you actually do the right stuff. And so like we discussed on that before, doing the right stuff is Setting up a Google business profile, making sure it's optimized properly, and then getting reviews and responding to reviews. So, so that way Google will show you. When you set this up, these Google local service ads, and again, these are free. You just put in your budget here and then you get leads. There's one big caveat to this, is that if you have a very competitive market, like this company has 367 reviews and let's say the next company is Google guaranteed and they have 500 reviews and you're just starting out well, you have to get a good amount of reviews. Google's not going to just show you because you have a Google business profile and your Google guaranteed. They want to show the best companies that they think is the best companies. And they do that based off of building trust with Google. And the way you build trust with them is you build out your citations, your name matches and phone number matches, you get reviews, you do everything they want you to do and then they trust you. And so then they put you into this thing. Because Google only makes money if someone clicks this button. They don't make money like these by just showing the ads. So they want to make sure that whatever they're showing here is going to make most likely have you click on them. And so you can't have a bad business profile and get up here. All right, so the other parts of this is, as we looked at this map is that this company is kind of out in the fringes. And so what happens is since they're located out here on the organic side of things, they can rank in here because they're located in Claremore and so they could rank in here. Now what happens is if they're trying to rank in the big suburb which is Tulsa, we also want to look at this area because the organic rankings for Tulsa is going to look a lot different. As you see here, these companies are located in Tulsa. So this looks a lot different than this. Right? However, if you notice true green is is here. And guess what, it's also right here. And look, it's the exact same Google business profile serving Tulsa. So what these Google Local service ads allow you to do is to spread out the service area that you are serving. And so even if you're located in Claremore out here and you want leads in Tulsa over here, you don't necessarily have to have your Google, your actual business located in Tulsa. You can just add this to your service area on the Google Local service ads. And guess what, it's the same thing. You can set your budget. It's going to be the exact same thing, 17 to $26. Or you can put the numbers in here, but it doesn't skyrocket because when we look at this and again, it's different for all different providers. In Tulsa, there's only one Google guaranteed company and that's TruGreen. When we look at the second one, lawn love is Google guaranteed. And they have 40 reviews, 3.8 stars. This is not a good Google business profile. Google would love to have a company that has five stars and has like maybe 50 to 100 reviews because they're going to show them here. And guess what, you're going to get leads. And guess what? It's going to be 17 to $26. So if you're looking for a very simple way to get leads for your lawn care business and you could try this in any market where we work with lawn care companies to help set up this program. We do a lot of other things, but this is just the low hanging fruit that we've seen with so many companies that they don't know how to set this stuff up, they don't do it or it just seems like a lot. Well, that's why you hire a company, whether it's us or someone else, they can set it up for you. But when it comes to this one section here, running ads, it's a huge low hanging fruit opportunity. There's a bunch of other things that you can do and optimize, like optimizing your website for conversions, doing email marketing and text marketing to your past customers and all this kind of stuff. But if you're just trying to get leads and you're trying to set up ads, start with Google local service ads and start with your local market and audit that. Cool. If you want, we can do a free marketing audit on your business. We can hop on a call, maybe walk you through some of these strategies if you think it's the right fit for you. Typically we work with companies that have five, 10 routes or more than that. We'd be happy to talk with you and see if we might be able to help you, point you in the right direction, whatever. Also, be sure to hit like and subscribe if you like content like this and we'll see you in the next video.