Why 99% of Home Service Businesses FAIL at SEO

One of our partner companies was spending $2,500 per month on SEO and they had no idea if it was actually helping them grow their business. After eight months of working with us, they had back to back all time high months in revenue and an SEO game plan that was working to help grow their business. In this video, I'm going to cut through all the SEO BS and give you the blueprint to help you start using SEO to grow your business. Here are four ways to know if your SEO is actually good. The first one is keyword tracking. This is the tool that we use called Bright Local. Basically what you want to do is take all of your keywords that you would want to rank and put them into a system that's going to track your rankings on a weekly basis. So in this example, this company was ranking at 20 keywords in position 1 and 9 and 2 through 5. These keywords would be like H Vac Repair in this city, or gutter cleaning in this city or whatever the services in the city that you want to offer. So as you can see, they weren't ranking too well in the beginning. Slowly over time, we're starting to track their progress. Progress. And now you can see this was back in September, this So about like 6 to 7 months later they have 109 keywords in position 1, where before they had 20. So they 5x the number of position 1 keywords and 5x on 2 through 5. The most important part of tracking your keywords is that you will know if you're actually ranking for more keywords and higher over time so that your SEO is actually working. Now just because you rank higher, the whole goal is that if you rank higher on keywords, people are going to go to your website and actually convert into leads. But here's how you want to track that exact thing. The second thing you want to do is in Google Analytics they give you this tool which allows you to see the demographics based on region. So you can see who's coming to your website, the number of active users, and then you can see the exact region or state that they're coming from. So this company in particular serves Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia. And you can see that their top three states are this area. Just because you do SEO doesn't mean that it's going to be traffic from your local area. It could be from all over the country or the world, but who cares? You want people that's in your local area that's actually going to convert into real leads, which is why you need to track your local traffic. The third way to know if this is actually working is another Google Analytics tool, which this is an events tool on your website. You want to actually convert the traffic that's coming to your site into real leads. So you rank higher. Number one, you get local traffic number two, and then you convert that traffic number three into actual leads. This is what you would want if you're paying for SEO is this full transparency into it. So you can see in this example they had 376 total users. 16 of those people filled out a contact form. 15 of those people turned filled out an estimate request form. Nine of them clicked on the phone numbers and eight did a chat widget on their website. And the goal is to get 10% of your website traffic into leads. That's how you know that the traffic is good and it's ready to convert and you have the right call to actions on your website. The fourth piece of SEO is actually off site SEO, which is your Google Business profile. So the things that we've talked about in those first three is your website SEO rankings and performance. Now this part here, if you go to your Google Business profile, you can click on performance and in performance you can select the time period up here and not the most robust reporting from Google, but usually we just pick the month prior and we can select January. January 25th. Now the first thing you want to see is your overview. Here you can see how many calls that you've gotten and you can see, you can see year over year. Same thing with website clicks, directions don't really matter. Bookings, if you have bookings set up, you can see your number of bookings year over year. The most important thing here is that you're getting more activity on your Google Business profile. Now if you scroll down, this is where the actual SEO juice is. So the first thing you can see here is the people that viewed your business profile. Naturally, if you're doing SEO, more people should be seeing your business profile year over year. That shows that you're being shown more to people. And you can see here, this obviously is a good example and you can see the breakdown of where people are seeing you from. The other thing which is very important is that you can see the search breakdown. So you can go in here and literally see all the different keywords that people are searching for to find your business. This will help you know if you're actually ranking for the correct keywords that you want to be shown for. And it will also show you you your performance as far as how many searches that you've showed up on and the type of searches. Very good way to benchmark if what you're doing is working and the keywords are here. Sometimes you might see like a branded keyword here, which is okay, but that's people searching for you by your name, where you want people to find you based off the service that you're offering. Okay. At this point, a lot of people are asking, well, what does Google even care about when it comes to SEO? I see these reports and how to track this stuff, but how do I get to that level? So what does Google even care about when it comes to SEO? If you're paying for SEO, here is what a company should be doing to help you rank higher and and get more leads from your SEO. The first thing is called off site SEO. And Google actually has this help doc where it will tell you exactly what they want you to do to rank higher. So here you can see how Google determines local ranking. There's three main things that they put in here. The first one is relevance. Relevance basically means the person that's searching for a service. Your business does that service. A lot of times companies that don't have the service in their name, it's going to be harder to rank. For example, if you do H Vac but you don't have H Vac in your name, it might be harder to rank because Google doesn't directly say, oh, this company definitely does H Vac. What relevance is? The second one they have here is distance. Now you can see with distance, basically, if you're not in the target area that you're trying to rank, it's going to be hard to be shown. A lot of times companies are not located in big cities, but they're located in suburbs. And it's harder to rank in the big city if you don't have a physical location there. Because Google takes your proximity to the searcher and it uses that when it's saying, hey, call this company or use this company. And the last one is prominence. Prominence is how prominent you are that Google says you are the number one company. And the best way that you can get this is by having the most amount of reviews, reviews in your local area. So if you were to do a search in your area for the service that you offer, see who has the most Google reviews, then go get more Google reviews than them. Make sure that your name has a service that you offer and you're located in the target area that you want to rank. From a marketing agency perspective, what can companies be doing to help you with your off site SEO. First, there are platforms that can help you manage your name, address and phone number. This is important to make sure that you have cohesive information across the board. It builds trust with Google so that it ranks you higher. So that way if you have different phone numbers all over the place, Google doesn't know is this the right number? That's the right number. Same thing with different names, same thing with different addresses. The other thing that Google does say is very important is to respond to reviews, managing response reviews, add photos, make sure that all of your information is complete. These are things that someone should be doing on a monthly basis. Adding photos to your Google profile, adding posts, making sure that the services that you offer are there. Just even going in once a month and cleaning things up shows Google that you're active and you care about your profile, which means that they're going to show you because they could say, hey, this information is accurate and, and we're confident in what we're showing. The next thing is when it comes to on site SEO, which is your website rankings. And let's go into what matters for Google when it comes to on site SEO. So if we go back to this keyword tracker here, you can see this keyword. Custom Home Builder, Port Stanley, Ontario, Canada this company wasn't ranking at all. And then after October they popped up to number four and then they popped up to number one and they've been pretty consistent there for the last couple of weeks. Now this keyword we can go to the search engine results page and we can see how are they ranking. So Custom Home Builder, Port Stanley, Ontario, Canada and then you can see this page here ranks number one. Let's go to this page and dissect it. So on this page there are three things that Google wants from a technical SEO perspective. They want a title tag that mentions the service and the city. So custom homes and renovations serving Port Stanley, Ontario, Canada. The meta description, they want something in there that mentions the actual service area. And then the H1, they want something in there as well that matches the actual service area. So title Tag, meta description, H1 all need to have the service that you offer and the city that you're targeting. The other four principles that Google wants is the EAT algorithm, which is E for expertise, E for experience, A for authority, and T for trust. How do you demonstrate these things? Expertise you can share before and after gallery stories of things that you've actually done and how you are an expert in this specific field. You could talk about we're certified in this, we've done service at this, whatever that sounds like. You want to demonstrate your expertise when it comes to your experience. This is where you want to talk a lot about. We've been in business for 10 or 20 years, we have 50 technicians. All the different things that would build up your experience on a page or your website is going to Google that you are experienced in what you do. Then authority, authority goes back to that prominence piece. You want to demonstrate that you have the authority in this space and you're an expert. And the way that you do that is by getting reviews and sharing those testimonials on your website. And the last one is trust. How do you build trust? With Google, you do the things that they want over and over again every single month and they start to trust you. Just like with this example here, you can see they weren't ranking. They popped up to number four. Number four, number four. They popped down to seven and then slowly Google is trusting them over time. Right? The page might have gone live October 20th, but on the Google business profile, we're posting about Port Stanley. On the blog content that we're creating, we're posting about Port Stanley. And you have this revolving SEO game plan. It's not just Port Stanley, right? There's a bunch of other cities that you want to target as well. But you need to have a cohesive game plan. So that way you're ranking on all these different cities that you want to target. All right, so we talked about what is good SEO. How do you track your performance and make sure that it's actually working. But what are things that you should avoid? So here are three things that you need to stay away from that actually don't help with SEO that people think does help. Number one is one time random SEO things that you might do. This is going to be like, hey, someone's going to come in and build out a bunch of these service area pages using ChatGPT and just blast them onto my website. Google knows if it's spam and junkie, which is why you don't want to just blast your website with a hundred of these service area pages. The second one that we see a lot is these PR write ups that, hey, I'm going to get featured over here and then that's going to help give me, you know, a backlink over here and it's going to rank me higher and it's going to turn into X, Y and Z. That stuff is nice and well, but it's really hard to correlate to real performance, which is why it's just kind of a waste of money. And number three, we see this one a lot right now, which is adding some code or something to your website that's going to track all of your projects and magically SEO and Google is going to say, hey, this is going to be a great thing, because now you have this pinpointed map all over your site. It looks cool. It's really good for conversions because people think, hey, I've done work over here. And you can see all the projects around you that you've done. But there's no triggers back to Google that actually shows an improvement in SEO rankings. Number two is buying backlinks. About 10 or 15 years ago, there's this thing that Google has, which is called domain authority. Domain authority is, how credible is this website and how high should I rank them based off their credibility? One way to get credibility is to get backlinks from other authoritative sites. So think about, like Forbes, cnbc, Yahoo Finance, these big behemoths. Google trusts them. They have a lot of authority. So if you were to get a link from those places, Google would say, okay, well, this company trusts them, so we must trust them too. So let's push them up in their rankings. This is not bad, but it's also not what local SEO is, because local SEO is so much more that goes into it than just backlinks that are going to build your authority up. Could it help you in the long run if you do it over and over again? Sure. But Google cares way more about the number of reviews that you have, the algorithm, the principles that they have. They don't really care much about domain authority when it comes to local SEO. And the last one is keyword stuffing all over your site. The main thing here is you don't want to go to ChatGPT and just pump out a bunch of content that's junk, that's just riddled with all of your keywords to try to play the system. Now, of course, you should use AI and ChatGPT and all these other tools to streamline your process, but it shouldn't be the end of the process. It should be a starting point to create content. There are so many websites that would just throw a bunch of spammy stuff on there and their rankings will actually tank because Google knows this is not true authoritative content that's going to actually help with rankings. So if you're paying for SEO and you're getting traffic to your website, but you're not getting any leads, a lot of times companies don't have the right call to actions on their website, and they don't have a company that's proactive about tracking that number. So I made this video about how to convert more website traffic into leads, and if that one's not out yet, check this one out.