Knowing where you stand in a competitive market is an integral part of managing a business. In this episode, Tersh Blissett turns the mic over to co-host Josh Crouch and his company, Relentless Digital, to discuss just how you can monitor your digital marketing business. Josh discusses different tools to help you keep track of your metrics that you can use on your business or spy on your competition. They also share information on how to optimize your strategies to increase conversion and attract more customers. Tune into this impactful conversation where they answer some of your questions and share essential business advice to help you on the road to success!
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Tools To Help You Keep Track Of Your Digital Marketing Company And Spy On The Competition
I hope everyone’s having a wonderful day out there in the world. I have another lovely co-host, Joshua Crouch. Josh is presenting us with some information with Relentless Digital. Josh has a business. That is what he does full-time. He has Relentless Digital. You may think this is what I do full-time but that’s not what I do. I have an HVAC company.
Josh has a digital marketing company and he is going to give us a little insight on how to spy on the competition and your own digital marketing company. Before, I was like, “How did they do what they’re doing?” That was my question and then I would listen to some shows but that doesn’t tell me anything other than like, “I have to buy this expensive platform and this expensive program to figure this out.” I’m super excited and I wished that I had this conversation years ago. Welcome to the show, Josh.
I’m happy that you called me lovely. I don’t know if anyone’s ever called me lovely. We had a different guest and we got stood up. We’re sitting at the table, having coffee and we got stood up. We have to change the tunes a little bit. I just happened to put out a video that got some solid traction. I don’t think most contractors want to check in on their competition.
They’re more interested in checking in on their digital marketing company. I’ve heard it called so many different things like black magic. It seems nobody knows what it is. I came from the contractor side, so I tried to level the playing field a little bit. That video went out to all my clients too and so far, nobody’s said anything back. I’m sure someone’s going to drop a comment.
It’s one of those things where you want to trust them. I’m not the only person that’s guilty of doing this so I can say this freely, that is, “Our agreement is that I pay you $2,500 a month. I’m going to write you a check or you can swipe my credit card for $2,500 a month. I don’t want to deal with the rest of it. I don’t want to have to check in on you. I want to hope that you’re doing the right thing.” It’s like the ostrich sticking his head in the sand. I’ve been guilty of it. Later, you’re like, “Why did I pay thousands and thousands of dollars and I don’t have any results?”
Stuff like this on my side makes me smile and chuckle a little bit. They’ve hired and fired five companies in one year, which tells me a lot. Everybody wants results right away. If Google wasn’t the behemoth and success they were, maybe we could get results immediately. There’s a method to the madness whether you like it or hate it.
Hopefully, with some of these things that we talked about, you can at least have a better understanding of why somebody is ranking ahead of you. This isn’t going to answer all your questions but at least it will give you some insight as to some things you can change on your own or you can have an open conversation with your marketing company and ask them some questions like, “What about this? What about that? Why did you create that piece of content for me?” That’s the hope with this episode and with the video that I created. If anyone wants to check that out, it’s more of an over-the-shoulder type of video where you’re going to see my screen. There are links to the tools so you can dive in. The best part is that these tools are all free. You can upgrade all of them or at least some of them. One is Ubersuggest. It’s $29 a month. It’s like nothing so it’s worth it. Where do you want to get started?
What are those programs like?
There’s a lot and those are just my favorite. I have a ton of Chrome extensions. If you want to do some searching for different tools, go to Google Chrome Extensions and you type in one of these tools, just like everything on Google. Google’s really good at suggesting other tools that can do similar things. I found some of my best and most efficient tools and stuff like that on there.
[bctt tweet=”There’s a method to the madness, whether you like it or hate it.” username=””]
The tool that I mentioned is GMB Crush, a tool designed to understand Google Maps results. The Chrome extension ties into Google Maps so when you do the search, you have to be looking from Google.com/maps. What will happen is you press a button, it analyzes the listing itself. If you want to spy on a specific competitor or if you do like a top twenty list like the first page, it’ll give you insights for all top twenty. Do they have a physical location listed? How many posts have they made recently? How many posts in the last 90 days? Stuff like that gives you a better insight into how active their profile is.
The most important point is what their primary category is on Google. The primary category is one of the big ranking factors on Google My Business. I was having a conversation with somebody who’s a plumber and an HVAC contractor and we’ve been focusing on plumbing and he wants to grow more on the HVAC side. If your primary category is plumber, Google is going to look at that and give more weight.
If you have multiple services or trades, you can look at the categories listed, look at the top twenty list, get an idea of how many are ranking ahead of you that have a different primary category. For you down South, air conditioning contractors may be the primary category. Up here, it’s an HVAC contractor. There are different things like that because there are probably about eight different categories just for HVAC.
Can you change that from time to time? I know it can be changed but is it bad to change it?
It’s something you definitely want to give some thought to. Don’t just go on there and start changing stuff. If you change it too often, you’ll risk suspension from Google. They do say you can change it up to three times a year for seasonality-type businesses like HVAC and landscaping. For those reading that have dual trades, electrical or roofing as a side company, you can change these things three times. What I would suggest is, when the HVAC is in the off-season, change that to a different trade. That way, you can boost your rankings for that trade. When it’s time to make hay, change it back to the air conditioning or heating contractor.
Stacy on Facebook asked a great question. I was thinking the same thing. Should we do that? Should we have a GMB by primary? Google might frown upon that but at the same time, if you’re to explain to them like, “Google, it’s the same name but it’s three different businesses.”
This is why you have to talk with someone who understands this. You don’t just want to do it. If you have a building that can be broken into different suites, you need to have a listing showing a different address. You can certainly set up. If you’re in an industrial building, a lot of contractors are generally like an industrial space. If you have a side-by-side unit, you can have one of them.
The problem is, if they have the same exact business name, you may want to get a DBA for that location. If it’s a plumbing company versus an HVAC, you have to think about branding. You have to think of all these other things that you’re doing. You may confuse some customers too. That’s why you have to think about what you want and think through that stuff. It’s a great question and it’s something that is not easily answered without asking a bunch of follow-up questions. I hope that helps.
It’s not bad to have multiple listings as long as you have multiple addresses. If you have three different locations, you can have three different listings but they’re not going to be tied together. They’re not going to have the same email address for login. They’re going to be completely different.
You can send them to the same website. You need to have different phone numbers and addresses for the website. For your primary business, what I would do is I would send that to your homepage. For the other listings, for example, I have three listings in three completely different cities. I would have a city or a location page as the primary page and make that look very similar to your homepage as far as to call to action and some of the things that a lot of home pages generally have. That’s speaking to that customer in city A, versus city B, versus city C. It’s more relevant to them, which is going to lead to more click-throughs, more calls and leads.
What if they’re in the same city, like a slightly larger city, maybe it has a South side?
You do run the risk. I have a plumbing client and he had his initial GMB listing that he moved. He kept both listings but they’re in the same city. The one listing dominates. The other one hardly shows up at all.
The oldest or the newest?
The old listing doesn’t show up at all because that’s not his primary location. That’s not where we built all of his directories and stuff. The other one does well. If it’s in the same city, Google will filter that out especially if it’s the same name. They try to make sure that you can’t dominate the three-pack results.
I have noticed that because we have some competitors in our market that have multiple locations in the same city. They’re never listed. There are never two of the same ones that go in at the same time. The only way you notice it is they might have 100 reviews, the other one might have 400 reviews and the other one might have 1,000 reviews. You’re like, “You had 1,000 reviews yesterday, why do you have 100 reviews today? What the heck is up in there?”
You just have to be careful. There’s a growing trend especially with the way Google My Business is set up right now, to add a physical location, more of a smaller office, satellite office, set up a listing. For those reading this, I would make sure you have enough market share first and then start considering this because it is a viable way to grow. The cost of what you get is very low and your ROI is going to be very good overall. Instead of trying to run pay-per-click or Facebook ads in a certain community, you’re going to get a lot more bang for your buck, opening a new listing and paying $300 a month for rent for some office space that sits there.
What happens if your current listings in BFE out there are 5,000 people who live where you’re currently in and you’re not “dominating” it but if you had your other listing in a metropolitan area that’s 45 minutes or 1 hour away, you potentially have a lot easier, low-hanging fruit as far as a client.
The small towns are great for Google My Business. Think about it from this perspective. There’s a lot less competition. If you’re in a suburb, I will pick anywhere from 5,000. It might be a little light but if you had 10,000, 15,000, maybe the town overhead another 7,000 to 10,000 and a couple of neighboring towns. Within a ten-minute drive, you have three towns and you have 30,000 to 40,000 people that it could hit. That’s what we did, completely dominating the entire area. That’s where they get a lot of their leads from.
They’re at the point where a second location or paid ads is necessary because, here’s the thing, no one marketing method is going to solve all of your problems. People think like, “If I do this, my business is going to grow.” I’m not talking about one company. I’m talking to SEO, pay-per-click, Facebook, radio, TV, direct mail or email. There’s no one method that’s going to completely grow your business by itself. It will grow it but you do have to have a mix and you have to be doing things internally too.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t just go do something. You have to talk with someone who understands. ” username=””]
I can’t pay you $2,000 and then be like, “That’s your problem. Not mine.”
There are packages that I can do all that stuff. It’s one of those things you have to understand, like SEO, PPC or Facebook ads themselves. Regardless of what anyone promises you, it’s not going to grow your business 10X or 20X by itself. You need to have other things in place. You have to be able to convert in-house.
$500 to get and then your people just don’t answer the phone or send them to voicemail or your answering service.
That’s exactly what happens. They focus on more leads. If I took my call booking rate from 70% to 75% or 80%, I just did that with my average ticket costs. What does that mean numbers-wise? Let’s say I bumped it up to 75% to 80% call booking. My conversion rate with my text goes up 5% or my average ticket goes up to $25 or $50. It is an ecosystem that has to work together. It’s almost like you hire a marketing company, you want leads but you suck at call booking, conversion or sales. Your scale is just totally tipped in one way or the other. You can’t handle what you have or you can’t sell what you get and you blame the marketing company or somebody else.
You have to convert on those. It’s a hard pill to swallow. We can blame the marketing company and say, “$12,000 over the past six months and I haven’t made $12,000 from the call tracking, even if you put in phone numbers to track these calls that are coming in from the marketing agency. I haven’t made $12,000 back.” That’s one of the things that I think that’s extremely important and take for granted.
In 2014 when I started Tristar, we didn’t have call recording and call tracking numbers. It was a lot of listening over the shoulder of the dispatcher or the CSR. Now, every single phone call that comes in is tracked and marketing is tracked. It’s so automated that I take a lot of that stuff for granted but you’ve got to listen to those conversations.
When you go back and listen to it and it’s like, “I can see why they didn’t convert.” If you’re using ServiceTitan and the CSR has the ability to mark what type of call it was if it was a non-bookable job. Go back and listen to those. As “non-bookable” when in fact, you didn’t even ask questions. They’re like, “How much do you charge to come out and take a look at the unit?” “It’s $85 to $89?” “Okay.”
I have a client who was struggling. There’s the single man owner operator and you do everything. Then there’s the next stage of growth which is getting some help. The next stage of that is having enough help so you can step back from the field. I was listening to some of his phone calls. They were saying that the service fee was X amount and that doesn’t include the cost to repair. That’s all they said.
I’m like, “God.” I was scratching my head and I facepalmed. I immediately texted them. I’m like, “We got to talk.” This was an answering service. You’re only going to get so much out of them but we need to talk. This is the customer left standing. It’s almost like an FU thing like, “Screw you, why would I hire you? I’ll just hire someone else.”
It’s cringe-worthy. I don’t even want to listen to the call if they’re going to be like this.
There was no value, like “What do I get for the $89? Are you just going to show up and charge me $89? That sucks.” There’s a lot of things you can do. This is checking up on your own internal systems. I’ve had other people do my marketing in the past to varying degrees. I think everybody who reads this show knows I’m not handy. You don’t want me to fix an air conditioner. Would you trust somebody else to fix your air conditioner? That would be the question I ask you.
The answer probably would be the same. You’re the best person for that job. Marketing companies are completely the Wild West. There are no set standards. It is worse than contracting, by far. Some contracting was pretty bad because some of the guys were ripping stuff out, saying, “The unit doesn’t work.” I say a story in the Service Avengers group about that.
With my experience with marketing companies, I was on YouTube watching videos. I was in that rabbit hole. I happened to stumble across this one company and I was like, “This is a good production video.” They were a marketing company and I was like, “I’m going to hire that company to do my stuff.” I was so busy with working in the business that I went a solid eight months without realizing that the $2,500 I was spending monthly was going into PPC. The majority of it was against my own name in PPC. Nothing was going in SEO. It was horrendous. The stuff that I was promised was totally a number.
I was given an account manager. The sales guy was great. He answered all my questions, did all kinds of crazy stuff. As soon as my account manager took over, he was a nice person but he was only allotted an hour a month towards my website, design and stuff. I would ask them questions and it was stuff that I knew how to do, such as Photoshop or Premiere Pro. They were like, “For us to change that page, it’s going to be three hours to do.” He only has an hour a month so he has to get three months to build up. I’m like, “It’s fifteen minutes. Why am I paying you to do this?” I just wanted to send an email and say, “Fix this.” It was so bad.
I spent so much money and got zero results back. They’re a large marketing company and I was just so disappointed with it. I got jaded with the whole situation because prior to that, I had built the website for Tristar so I knew what was involved in building a WordPress website that ranked very well. It irritated me.
I talked to the garage door company and they have been there in the market for a marketing company. They said the same thing that the current company they’re with, they would find mistakes, send it to the company and the company would rebuild them. It’s almost like a lawyer, like .25 or .33 hours. They’re like, “I found your mistake and you’re billing me for it?” This is why I have a little different perspective because of the contracting world. We do flat rate. We make sure the customer is happy. This is our price, whatever it takes to make the customer happy with that package or service. That is essentially how I run my stuff. There are months when I’m losing money on the packages I’m doing because I’m putting in extra work to make sure clients get results.
If you’re looking at a company, I would highly recommend making sure they don’t charge by the hour. That’s an old-school way of doing it. Charge by results, charge by a package and tasks that they’re doing for you and ask them if we have problems, we want to do something extra or we want to change the plan for the content that’s coming up, will it be a problem? Will you charge me extra for that?
Marketing is flexible. It can and should change. Your business changes. I have a company that wants to get more into the commercial end of things. They asked me what it would take. I said, “We’ll just queue it up for next month. We’ll just change the plan.” It should be flexible. We made a mistake on one of GMB’s posts and we caught it. Another thing I would make sure of is that it was the name of the city that we posted.
Every marketing company makes mistakes, just like every service company but it’s one of those things that do they own up to it? Do they say, “We made a mistake. I’m going to fix it right now,” and get someone to jump on it. This is why these tools and knowing enough are important, like GMB Crush and Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is a great one for your website. It’ll tell your rankings and like, “Do I have big problems on my site?” Titles, tags, descriptions, stuff like that. That’s the thing your marketing company should be doing for you if they’re doing any sort of SEO.
[bctt tweet=”No one marketing method is going to solve all of your problems.” username=””]
Other tools out there just want to make sure that you have a way to double-check what they’re telling you and how that conversation should go when you come to your marketing companies. Let them know that, “I was checking this out. What’s going on with this?” See what they reply with and that tells you if you have a relationship that’s worthy of your trust or not.
When you have a customer that’s pissed off because you texted something wrong or they brought mod into the house. If you respond and go on the offensive, they’re probably going to write you a bad review. You have to understand the situation and be like, “I’m going to take care of that for you. I’m going to make it right.” If they try to be defensive and blame this, that or the other thing then you probably don’t have a trustworthy company that’s going to have your back.
If they try to go on defense immediately, start passing the book off to somebody else. I’m throwing up red flags for sure. Previously, we were talking about the conversation of your CSR or call center. Whenever they’re talking about the diagnostic fee or consultation fee. Mike mentioned a good point and he said that the service call is free with the recommended repair but be careful with the verbiage.
I’ve seen people advertise that the service call is free and then in small print, it says with the recommended repair. That got him into some hot water. Nothing’s free in life so hopefully, people realize that somebody is covering that expense somewhere. For me, the service technician or the service expert, sometimes they see the $89 or $95 and they’re like, “At least we got $95.” They don’t realize the fact that it might cost $250 to pull in that driveway. If you only collected the diagnostic, you’re losing money.
You’re paying that person to come to pull up in their driveway. For a lot of technicians, unless you share a lot of detail with them and educate them, they may think, “I’m getting paid $20, $30, $40 an hour and you’re collecting $95. We’re coming out fat on this end.” Once they have actually done the exercise and see how much it actually costs to roll that truck to that driveway, they changed their mind for sure.
Brigham Dickinson has been on the show a couple of times and a couple of his people have been on our show. They are Power Selling Pros. We use them personally. This book here, I don’t know what it costs on Amazon. It costs me about $2,500, though. They train your CSR on that conversation, showing empathy and everything. I highly recommend them if you do have any questions or concerns about your CSR answering the phone.
This might seem off-topic but this is a great topic as well. When I told that contractor about the fee, he called me because it was slowing down. I said, “It doesn’t have to be the same. That’s a lever. If you can’t book a call or you guys are almost dead, no fee service call with the repair.” Fill in the schedule. It doesn’t need to be the same every day. If you’re slammed busy, it’s $89, $150 or whatever it is. You need to have these levers in your business to manage the expectation.
People will wait for you once you get big enough and have a big customer list. Once they know that you’re a good company, they’ll wait for you a little bit longer than they will if you’re small and they don’t know you. If you have these levers in your business then it’s one of the things that you’re going to struggle with because you’re not going to be able to adjust accordingly or plan ahead.
A few years ago, I never even thought about doing this. I didn’t really think of the fact that just because your diagnostic fee, consultation fee or trip fee has been a certain amount for ten years, doesn’t mean it can’t change. I hate hearing, “That’s what I’ve always charged,” or “That’s what the competitors are charging.” If you’re not getting calls, if your call board is not booked for the next day or two, don’t charge anything for getting out there. Get your services in the home house. That’s the whole job. It’s to get them in the house. Why would you let that become a barrier for entry, like a resistance to the homeowner if you’re struggling for calls? No service call fee or a $20 service call fee.
I understand having skin in the game because that’s something you have to be careful about. If you advertise that you have no service call fee, you may get people who are worthless people and they’re going to use your time up. If your technicians understand, “You can’t leave this house without a lead, your ticket’s going to be $250 because that’s what it costs us to get in the door.” Just because it’s free doesn’t mean you can be free on every single call.
If you see a trend of, “There was nothing wrong,” I would be doing it right along with that technician soon because there’s a slight chance that either they’re doing a bad diagnostic or they’re taking cash from the people who get another. For those who are not using Josh, you’re seriously missing the boat. He said that his GMB has skyrocketed, something that he wasn’t even aware of. A lot of contractors aren’t aware of GMB.
I have some ideas for new video stuff, like an ultimate guide to GMB for contractors. A lot of times, you see this thing and there are videos out there about that but it’s general. Contractors have some specific things that need to be focused on. If you want to set it up by yourself, that’s great. It’s okay for people to set this up themselves. I’m self-taught. I’ve been teaching myself for years now. I didn’t go to school for it. You can teach yourself. Be aware that you’re going to get down some rabbit holes.
If you want to do that and you have time to do it or you get your interest in it, I can absolutely point out some great resources. Neil Patel is one of the best resources. What’s great about his show is that they’re five minutes long with one topic a piece. They hit the topic and then they move on to the next show. He has that tool, Ubersuggest. You get one website for free. You can put your website in there and then you’ll understand, “Is my company doing these things? Is this content ranking? Where do I rank?” It’s a great tool.
Is that a Chrome extension?
It has a Chrome extension. If you go to Ubersuggest.com, he’ll probably want to get your email. He’s really good at email marketing too. He’s got some beginner SEO and more advanced stuff out there. You can actually understand what some of this terminology is. It’s not like your eyes are crossed and you’re like, “What the hell is he talking about?”
There’s nothing worse than getting a report from your SEO company and it’s like, “That’s a great report but I don’t understand what any of it means. You literally could be fluffing all the numbers because you’re telling me the cost per click, cost per impression, ROI this, impression over here and bounce rate.” I have used CEO Warrior for several years now. One of the biggest things I have taken away from them is you don’t have to be the one who does the work but you need to be able to understand what’s going on whenever you’re talking to the people who are doing the work.
You can hold your marketing company accountable if you know what they’re talking about or if you can tell that they’re trying to blow smoke on you. That’s one of the biggest things for me. My time is extremely valuable. I definitely would pay someone to do work. If I could pay somebody $100 whenever I charge $250 an hour, it makes sense to pay someone else to do that. Granted that whenever you see that bill is like, “That’s a lot of money per hour,” but if you’re sitting there learning it, how many hours a year are you spending doing that? It’s one of the things that you have to pay close attention to.
We’ve talked about your call booking, making sure that’s right, your conversion on the text, training the text and marketing. This is just in 40 minutes. We could go on and on about all the things. That’s why it is important. You don’t know what to believe. Trying to hire a marketing company, an answering service, or people internally.
There are companies that are good at marketing themselves but then they are horrible at the follow-up process.
[bctt tweet=”Marketing is completely the Wild West. There are no set standards.” username=””]
It’s one of those things that you should be able to get a feel for within the first 2 to 3 months. Your gut should be telling you like, “What the hell are they doing? I haven’t heard from them after I signed the contract” It’s different for everybody, some people like to have calls and some people just want updates.
I got quite a few marketing contexts. If you guys are looking to make your reports better, make it geared with the contractor in mind. They don’t give a shit about impressions. Have it on the report but don’t highlight it. They don’t care. There are probably a few things they want to see. They love the Google Map. If you have not found a tool yet, find one because they love seeing their Google Maps and rankings, they love seeing calls.
If you’re not doing call tracking, you should be doing call tracking or at least integrating with that company’s call tracking solution because this is what people want to see. That delivers such valuable insights to their business. It helps them grow. It helps them get better. You should buzz talk about like an extension or an arm of that company. If you’re like a plugin that can be replaced easily then you’re going to get replaced easily.
That’s what I think whenever I had Stephen Christopher on the show. That’s one of the things that we’ve talked about constantly. They need to be an employee of your business, not necessarily a W-2 employee but they need to be so intricate in the relationship. When you’re thinking about doing a new marketing thing, you instantly think, “Let me reach out to a Relentless Digital and see what makes sense.” You could be spending a lot of time and spinning your wheels on something that just doesn’t make sense because they’ve done it or they’re actively doing it and they can show you results on how it’s just working for other people. You need constant communication with them.
This goes for contracting too and I know there’s a lot of really great sales coaches out there and the best sales coaches are the ones that teach you not to hard sell. It’s to educate. Whoever you’re talking to about marketing, they should be trying to educate you on some basics like, “I did this thing because of this thing.” If you’re talking to someone and you’re deciding who to choose, they should be giving you helpful insights on your website, on your GMB listing, or your overall presence online. In case you want to do it yourself or you want to go back to the company that you worked with because you like your rep or the owner, they should be giving you some advice first.
They should be giving you something before you write a check. If they’re not giving you anything and they’re like, “Sign up here. We’ll take care of it,” you should probably be a little leery of that and make sure that you have someone that’s got your back. I know it’s a difficult thing to find but have someone that has your back. It doesn’t have to be me. If you want opinions from the companies that I know are good, message me anytime. Even if it’s not me, I’ll probably try to earn your business but there are other good contractors out there.
You mentioned two tools. What’s that third tool?
Do you do SEMrush? That was one of my choices back in the day. I felt like they always up-sold me.
SEMrush is publicly traded now. They have to make money for investors so they have a lot of upsells. However, I think they only offer a free trial and it’s very limited. You can only do 5 or 10 different searches a day. That’s why I didn’t include them in the video. I use them for more of my internal insights. The other one was an SEO Minion. It’s a cool tool. It tells you if they’re doing this stuff. I just found a website where every single service page you have, the title tag and description. It’s those same exact things. They’re targeting the same keyword on different pages.
Think about that from Google’s perspective. How do you think they’re going to rank your page? This is a tool that really helps you understand, like, “If this is an air conditioning repair page or a drain cleaning page, are they targeting the right keywords and filling out these other things that Google needs to see?” That’s what it’s for. SEO Minion, that’s a Chrome extension and it’s also free. Then GMBspy is another one that’s really good and does a lot of the same things GMB Crush does. There’s a lot more but those are the ones that I use pretty regularly.
Have you ever used or heard SEOquake?
I’ve heard of it.
I used it a long time ago. I haven’t used it recently because it can be very annoying. It’s a plugin as well, a Chrome Extension. Every time you go on a page, it tells you the strengths and gives you all the stats at the top of the page. It slows down your loading of pages and it also kicks the page down a little bit more. You can’t see as much of the page.
It reminded me of something else, which is GTMetrics.com. You could go to Google Page Speed Insights. The problem is, Google Page Speed Insights only give you speed. It doesn’t give you performance and it’s a little bit easier to understand how to fix it. For the readers that has a scheduling engine, it’s going to slow your site down. It’s a great tool. It’s a great add-on but you can change the code on there.
I had that issue with mine and then we were like, “We got to fix this because we’re moving from an A to a B only because of these things that are slowing down this page.”
I have a paid subscription because we have a number of clients on it but we run weekly reports for performance. If we get alerts if anyone drops below a certain grade, we automatically start looking into it. I was helping this client out and he’s like, “My site’s slow.” I looked at it and it brought his score from a 70 to an 85. I don’t remember the exact numbers but just that one little change.
There are other things we can do to enhance that. That way, you’re giving Google what they want and it’s a free tool. You can scan your competitor’s websites on there too. It gives you a nice PDF report that you can send to your marketing company. You can send it to your internal marketing person or whoever does that for you and be like, “What can we do to fix this?” It helps you be on top of your game so that way you don’t get taken advantage of.
This is a lot of good stuff. It’s one of those things where we can dive deep into the weeds on this and I have no problem doing that because there are people with us that are also very interested in learning that information. If you want to learn more about this stuff, Josh is obviously the guy to go to. What’s the best way for them to reach out to you?
Most people reach out to me initially through Facebook. Most of the readers should probably be on the Service Business Mastery Podcast page but if you’re not, plugin, add that page because we talk about different topics like this. I put a post about eCommerce for the trades. We talk about some different things that go into little different dives and some of the best practice groups. We’re talking about more operations.
[bctt tweet=”Charge by results.” username=””]
We’re talking about things outside of that, things to consider and stuff like that. We talked about COVID and whether that should be something that you talk about with your people, not talk about, should you mandate, should you not? There are just some topics that need to be answered and need to be considered because there are entire cities and states mandating stuff. It’s something to think about.
There’s always great stuff on in the group. If you’re not in the Facebook group, join that group. Do you want to address Pete?
He’s worried that when I grow, the results will crash but that won’t happen.
That’s really my concern. We’ve seen that before. We’ve seen different CRMs. As they grew, they would struggle in certain areas and then they recognized it, turned around and got it fixed. It’s definitely a legitimate concern. The fact that you recognize that beforehand is great.
I take a lot of stuff especially if it’s something that we’re not doing well personally. It’s who I am. If something’s bugging me like we’re not getting results on something, it will be my sole focus. It’s not a sales pitch. It was the same way in the HVAC industry or companies that I was with and that’s why whenever we had problems, we fixed them, we grew and we figured out ways to sustain that.
There are different challenges along the way, like when you get out of the field and have enough people in the field who can take care of your customers and keep the level of quality. It’s the same concept. It’s a little different unique because you have to find people that care. That’s the biggest thing. You may not find the absolute greatest PPC guy but if they care and they’re willing to learn, it’s more important. It’s like a technician. They don’t need to know everything necessarily but they have to care and want to learn.
What do you think about the thought of one person or one company being able to do GMB, PPC, SEO and billboards like an all-in-one stop? One person to do it all.
I know that’s what contractors want. That’s probably every marketing company’s dream, to be able to do that and do it well. My problem with that is it has to be slow. If you try to bite off more than you can chew and you spread yourself too thin, it can hurt different areas of your business that you’re actually strong in. As with anything, before you add plumbing to HVAC, you should be damn good at HVAC and have good sales to be able to focus solely on your plumbing department. It’s something I’ve struggled with.
I have had a lot of people ask me for a lot of different things and I want to help everybody with all of these things. I’ve gotten better at saying no because I don’t want them to spend money with me that is wasted or is on a test. If I test it, they’re probably not going to pay me anything for it until I make sure they get results.
I don’t want to be liable to be like, “I spent another $1,000 a month with you and you didn’t get me anything.” The jack of all trades thing, I would try to find somebody that’s really good at certain things that you want to grow with first. Once you trust them, see if they want to add something on or maybe a recommendation based on someone because marketing companies all know each other.
[bctt tweet=”Always be ready to pivot.” username=””]
I talked to all the people you know and they know people who are killing it in certain areas that maybe they’re not. I don’t touch Facebook ads. I know people who are doing okay on Facebook. It’s a different animal but I know people that are doing okay and I can give you a recommendation so you can weed out some of the crap. That way, you can save some time.
We have some good friends of ours who kill it with Facebook.
During your website build, this has to be something that you share here. Your marketing company should be asking you for your reasons to be in business. What makes you different? If you don’t have answers to that, they should at least have some idea of some things working for other people that maybe you should consider. You should have some sort of brand and message especially on the homepage. For some of the service pages and others, most people aren’t going to read that entire page. That’s more for SEO and to get leads.
Your homepage is where they’re going to land most of the time. That’s where you need to have branded images. Don’t use stock photos on your homepage. It drives me crazy. I see all the stock photos. I see hero images, the hero images of two non-branded AC units. This tells that person nothing, be the hero of your story. If you go to StoryBrand.com, they’re going to send you three videos and tell you what should be on your website. Their information is gold. It’s really good. We’re taking a course with them, a paid course for a deeper dive because it’s such good information. It’s stuff you should think about before you hire someone to build a website for you.
That Grunt test is crazy after listening to Donald Miller’s entire thought process. It’s like, “There’s a lot of bad websites out there.”
There’s some kind of a lead funnel that they have. They’ll send you a series of videos that are there, specifically about five things that you should have on your website. Those are good. I would highly recommend watching those.
There is tons of information in this. Thank you so much for sharing again.
I’m glad we figured something out to do for the show.
If anybody reading this has questions and is not in the Facebook group, join the Facebook group. We answer your questions there. Thank you again for reading this episode. This is a show focused on service, business owners, managers and technicians who are considering becoming business owners themselves. Our target is to help answer some unasked questions. I hope that we did that. Until we talk again.
Important Links:
- Relentless Digital
- Ubersuggest
- GMB Crush
- Google.com/maps
- ServiceTitan
- Brigham Dickinson – past episode
- Power Selling Pros
- Neil Patel
- show – Neil Patel podcast
- CEO Warrior
- Stephen Christopher – past episode
- SEMrush
- SEO Minion
- GMBspy
- SEOquake
- GTMetrics.com
- Service Business Mastery Podcast – Facebook
- StoryBrand.com