How Much To Spend On Google Ads | Hidden Lead Channel Worth $3M | Tracking SEO Performance | Q & A

This episode we have a question and answer episode where business owners, just like you have submitted questions. We have three really good ones about marketing and how to grow their business. And if you do want to submit a question for an episode, you can drop a comment on any video. Our team will see it and we'll put it into the queue and you might end up on the episode. So let's get right into this video. So the first question that we have is coming from a business owner. He owns a multi seven figure business and he asked, my digital marketing company says that they do SEO, but how do I know if it's working? So we all know, you know blackmagic, voodoo SEO. I used to be in the trades as the director of business development trying to grow my business and there was companies that were doing SEO. What does that even mean? How do I know if it's working? So in this video, specifically this part, I'm going to show you how to track the performance. A great question to ask them, which is what I told him was ask them this question. How are you going to track your performance and benchmark your performance over the next three to six months? If they don't have an answer for that, it's probably not working because as you know, anything that is not measured cannot be managed and you can't even hold anything accountable. So I'm going to show you what we do and I'm going to show you how you can track it for your business. And so let's get right into this. All right, so the first thing is we use a tool called Bright Local, but there are other ones out there like Ahrefs, Semrush. And basically what allows us to do is to plot on this chart specific keywords like fire damage restoration in this zip code, Smoke damage restoration in Fairfax. And then you can see it will plot out Organic desktop, Organic mobile Local pack where we rank on all these different keywords. So if we were to go just on organic desktop, which is on your desktop here you can see fire damage restoration. In February 4th they were 51. And then each week you can see the progress that it's making over time. The it's good to look at granular stuff like this of course because you want to see specific keywords. But really the premise is, is February 4th they had 18 keywords in position 1, 67, 2 through 5. And right now they're at 57, 135. So really, really great results. Regardless of how great the results are, it's more about having the visibility because let's say someone's like, hey, I'm really slow right now, and you don't know, are your rankings actually tanking or is it just the market or whatever it is? This is one checks and balance to say, hey, it's working your SEO, because you're ranking higher on in the past six months, but also you're not tanking. Like, your rankings haven't fallen off. And it's not that people are not finding you. So if you don't have a tool like this, I'll show you two kind of free ways that you can just look at your stuff. And even if you're doing this on your own, this is something that you should be doing. So it's really important. The first thing is on your pages, on your website, there's this free plugin. It's called Detailed. And we have no affiliation with them. We just use it because it's quick. You can see your title tag, your meta Description, and your H1. And we talked about this before on our channel, but basically what you're looking at is in your title tag, you want to have the service and also the service area, like the target service and service area. Same thing with the meta description, you want to have the target service area. And same thing with the H1, you want to have something in here that says fire and smoke damage restoration. And you could put in here your geographical target as well. So if you don't, if you don't know how to download this, whatever, here's another very simple way. You go to Google, you put site and then colon, and then you put in your website. What this is going to allow you to do is to see all the pages that are indexed on your website. And this right here is your title tag and this is your meta description. So you'll be able to see, okay, is this company, the SEO company that I'm working with, are they building out the pages correctly? So in my title tag, does it have a geographical target in here? This is what we look at when we do audits for, for people. Then what you want to do is you want to go and you want to see, okay, are there other cities in here? Because that doesn't mean. That means that we're not just targeting Fairfax county, but we're also targeting Herndon, Vienna, Tysons, Alexandria, Chantilly. So we are building out what are called service area pages. This is doing the right stuff with SEO. So to answer his question, this is what I told him was like, ask them how they're going to track your Performance. And if they, if they don't have an answer, it's probably, and not working. All right, second question is, how much should I spend on Google Ads monthly? So this was a company that we, that we had a prospect meeting with. Maybe we'll work with them, maybe not. But they're about a million dollars. Duct cleaning and dryer, vent cleaning, molder mediation company. And they ask, how much do we spend on Google Ads? We get this question a lot, to be honest. So how do we answer this question? So the first thing is we tell people your marketing budget should be 3 to 10% of your revenue. So if you do a million dollars in revenue, you should be spending 30,000 to a hundred thousand dollars on marketing on an annual basis. So what that will allow you to do is then to benchmark yourself to say, hey, all right, so 10,000 of that we're going to allocate towards Google Ads. The other 20,000 we're going to allocate towards hiring a marketing company or SEO or whatever it might be. And that's a good start for allocating your funds from a marketing perspective. The second thing is over here, Google local service ads. We talk a lot about that on this channel. But one of the unique ways of using this is if you go ads@google.com, local service ads on this page, it's kind of like their local service ads landing page. Scroll down, you can see how much a lead will cost in your area for a local service ad. This is a really good way to benchmark your Google search ads performance because this is really what a lead should cost you if you do everything right for Google Ads, Search ads specifically. So basically what I'm getting at is let's say that you wanted to designate $1,000 towards Google Ads. Well, in this scenario, let's say that this was 50 bucks and you spend $1,000. Well, presumably you should get 20 leads from that thousand dollars. If it's $50 a lead. So you can figure out, well, how many leaders do I need to grow? And is this going to make a dent? Right, If I give you 20 leads and you close 10 of them and then your average ticket was $1,000, you can do the math and figure it out from there. So that's, that's the first part to this equation. And I think it's pretty straightforward for most people. When they hear that, they're like, okay, that makes sense. The second part is figuring out what your return on ad spend is, because let's say that you set your budget at $1,000. But you don't know that that thousand dollars made you $10,000. If that is the case, then you're going to say, hey, well I can always increase my budget. But if you don't know that that thousand dollars didn't make you any money, then it's hard for me or any other company to recommend increasing your, your budget or even giving you a budget because we don't know what your actual numbers are. So if you, if you don't track your numbers, it's really hard. That's what I told this guy as well, is like you have to have some way to track your return on ad spend, which we made videos about that before of like setting up landing pages, setting up your tracking information and really pulling out a return on ad spend. Pretty tight. So that is how we would recommend from a Google Ads perspective. And then the third one is what's the best lead channel that most people don't talk about? So this was a podcast that I was on and he said, you know, obviously the Google gods, you have the different sections of Google which we talk about. But what is that lead channel that most people don't talk about? That's really, really good. And the answer is B2B relationships. Business to business. This is going to be the quickest way to get leads for any business. More importantly, you don't have to fight hand to hand combat. Basically what this means is when you do SEO, when you run ads, you get leads, your CSRs or you are calling them and fighting for that job and you might get the job, you might not get a job. It's very transactional. With B2B, you're going out and doing B2B relationships. You're building relationships with referral partners, H vac contractors, electricians, roofers, gutter cleaning companies, lawn care companies, so on and so forth. And you're building a relationship with them and hopefully they're going to be referring you business in which, as we all know, referrals, it's much easier to close referrals and you can really scale your business very quickly without having to spend a ton on ads and also fight for every single deal. You just build a relationship. B2B. So, so what I told him was whatever business that you're in, think of a complimentary business that people ask you, do you do the service or do you know someone that does a service, Find those referral partners, build a relationship and have them send you referrals. There's a company that I, when I first got into the trades, they were duck cleaning company. They were literally a $3 million business. They had 36 Google reviews, a $3 million business. All they did was B2B relationships and referrals. That's their whole business. So it can be done. You can build a multimillion dollar business just off B2B. And the beauty of it is that it's extremely scalable. With that example before that I gave, with Google Ads, you're just throwing money out there and hopefully you're going to get a return. With B2B, you could say, hey, every lead that, that you send me or every referral that I close, I'm going to give you 50 bucks. So it's more of a pay per lead or even pay per close model, which allows you to scale up and down without allocating a bunch of capital up front to try to get deals. And on top of that, when you get all these leads and you're trying to fight for every single one, it can be very cumbersome and hard to do because you need a bunch of people to fight for these leads, where with B2B, they can literally just submit referrals and you can easily even just schedule online sometimes if you have set prices or something like that. So it's very, very scalable and a lot less money allocated. So hope that this episode was pretty helpful. If you, if you have a comment or you want to post a question, comment down below. If you're looking to help grow your business and you have some questions like this and you want more of a deeper dive, we actually do free marketing audits. So we can hop on a call with you, go through some of your numbers, some of your stats, and give you kind of like a playbook. Whether we work together or not, it's completely free. It's something that we like to do. So I'll drop a comment, I'll put that in the link down below and we'll see you in the next video.